people: 柯文哲 韓國瑜 蔡壁如

title: TPP lawmaker says election not behind move

content_text:
Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Legislator Tsai Pi-ju (蔡壁如)yesterday said that her move to Kaoshiung was for personal reasons, not because she is eyeing a possible mayoral by-election.

The Chinese-language Up Media on Wednesday reported that her move to former TPP caucus assistant Tsai Yi-fang’s (蔡宜芳) previous home in Kaohsiung was in preparation for a possible by-election for Kaohsiung mayor, should a recall vote oust Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).

The Kaohsiung City Election Commission on Tuesday said that the second stage of a petition to recall Han passed the signature threshold to initiate a recall vote.

Taiwan People’s Party Legislator Tsai Pi-ju speaks at the Legislative Yuan Research Building in Taipei yesterday.
 Photo: CNA

The Central Election Commission on Wednesday said it had received the assessment, but added that an ongoing verification process needs to be completed before it could make a decision regarding the recall vote.

Tsai Pi-ju said she had relocated to Kaohsiung in January or February and the decision was personal and unrelated to electoral concerns.

“I have just now turned my thoughts to the issue of running for Kaohsiung mayor,” she said, adding that she could not formulate a substantial response to a hypothetical question.

Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), the TPP’s chairman, was aware of her decision and had not reacted beyond acknowledging it, she said.

Discussions must be held within the party over electoral issues, but it would not overlook any election that moves it closer to its goal of winning a presidential election, she said.

TPP spokesman Tsai Chun-wei (蔡峻維) said that Tsai Pi-ju’s move was a personal decision and should not be overinterpreted.

The TPP is focused on COVID-19 prevention efforts, but should there be a recall vote and by-election, the party would fully respect local opinions, he said.

Tsai Pi-ju’s duties often take her to central and southern Taiwan to promote parity of political influence between the north and the rest of the nation, Tsai Chun-wei said.

Tsai Pi-ju is leading by example and would fully support TPP Legislator Chang Chi-lu (張齊祿) in representing the public interest of southern Taiwan in the Legislative Yuan, Tsai Chun-wei said.

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Adoor (阿多) and Doz Lin (林庭歆) are the winners of this year’s Taiwanese artists-in-residency program at La Maison des Auteurs of La Cite Internationale de la Bande Dessinee et de L’image in Angouleme, France, the Ministry of Culture said on Wednesday.

Taipei-born Adoor is a comic and visual design artist whose work has appeared in magazines such as Wallpaper and Wonderland, and she founded her own studio — Side Door — in 2010.

The residency, which is to start in December, will not be the first time that Adoor has been to Angouleme: She represented Taiwan at the Angouleme International Comics Festival in 2017, the ministry said.

Lin is an animator, comic artist and illustrator.

She was still a student at Taipei National University of the Arts in Beitou District (北投) when she made her first foray into independent publishing with the comic anthology Really Really Really (真的真的真的) with her classmates, the ministry said.

Last year she released The Tail Light (車尾燈), a collection of comics from her Facebook page of the same name, it said.

At La Cite, Adoor and Lin would work on the projects they proposed to the institution’s selection committee, the ministry said.

Adoor’s project is a medium-length fantasy comic titled B’bu-maqaw after the Atayal word for Cilan Mountain (棲蘭山) in Yilan County, while Lin is to create a short comic book, tentatively titled About Being Busy (關於忙碌), it said.

“Europe and Taiwan are very different,” Lin said. “I look forward to the three-month residency bringing a different perspective to my works.”

Since signing a cooperative pact with La Cite in 2014, the ministry has sent two Taiwanese artists to Angouleme annually for a residency program.

The ministry subsidizes the artists’ airfare, living expenses and insurance fees, while La Maison des Auteurs provides them with accommodation and studio space, the ministry said.

Previous residency winners include Ao Yu-hsiang (敖幼祥), Chen Pei-hsiu (陳沛珛), Weng Hung-yu (翁鴻瑜) and Elainee Fang (房瑞儀), it said.

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title: Ministry announces Angouleme artist in residency winners


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On March 27, the Chinese-language Beijing News reported that Jiangxi Province police officers, whose duties include enforcing measures to contain the spread of COVID-19, clashed with police from Hubei Province on a bridge at the border between the two provinces.

The incident arose because the Jiangxi police were blocking people from Hubei from entering Jiangxi, including a large number of migrant workers who wanted to return to work.

The crowd started shouting “keep going, Hubei,” attacked the Jiangxi police and overturned police vehicles.

The clash highlights points raised in a March 24 opinion piece in the People’s Daily, headlined: “Respect science: Drop the preoccupation with ‘zero increase’” — meaning the target of reaching zero new COVID-19 cases.

The writer asked: “Might some localities make false reports about the epidemic situation to give the appearance of having achieved ‘zero increase,’ in order to restart work and production or just for the sake of ‘political correctness?’”

The dispute on the bridge reflects three underlying problems:

First, there is a lack of trust between local authorities. The people from Hubei who wanted to enter Jiangxi Province were carrying “health green QR codes” issued by Hubei authorities, as required by the Notice Concerning Strict Implementation of Regulations Concerning the Entry of Persons into Jiujiang City.

However, Jiangxi evidently did not recognize this certification.

Second, local authorities lack trust in the national government. China’s central government had declared that Hubei had achieved zero new COVID-19 cases, and the government had officially lifted the lockdown on Hubei Province and its capital, Wuhan.

Nevertheless, Jiangxi did not believe the figures released by the central authorities. Jiangxi officials felt that letting people from Hubei enter their province would make it more difficult for them to achieve the political goal of a “zero increase” in cases.

The third problem is China’s culture of falsification, of which its concealment of the outbreak is just the tip of the iceberg.

The deep-seated reason for this incident is not just that Jiangxi Province knows full well that the figures announced by the central authorities and Hubei Province are likely not true.

Jiangxi is not the only local government that distrusts the official figures. At the time of writing this article, even the Beijing municipal government is still imposing entry controls on people from Hubei, which effectively refutes the central authorities’ declaration of zero new cases. Few people believe China’s dubious claims about zero new cases.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus seems to take China at its word. Sadly, so do the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) fellow travelers in Taiwan — people such as former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators Wu Sz-huai (吳斯懷) and Sandy Yeh (葉毓蘭).

These fellow travelers have been citing China’s suspect assertions and waving the banner of “human rights” as they criticize Taiwan’s government for taking the precaution of banning Hubei-based Taiwanese businesspeople from returning home.

They are so keen to suck up to the CCP that they even neglect the health and security of 23 million Taiwanese.

When officials and ordinary people in Jiangxi and Beijing see these fellow travelers’ antics, they probably think: “How pathetic those Taiwanese bumpkins are. They do not know what deep water they can get into when dealing with the CCP.”

Yu Kung is a Taiwanese businessman operating in China.

Translated by Julian Clegg

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title: Doubts over virus data exist even inside PRC

people: 葉毓蘭 吳斯懷 馬英九


content_text:
ILL EFFECTS:
 The nation’s leading camera lens maker said that order visibility for June is nil, but it could easily ramp up production if market conditions change

Largan Precision Co (大立光), the nation’s leading camera lens manufacturer, yesterday gave a bleak outlook for this quarter due to the uncertainty engendered by the COVID-19 pandemic, after posting its strongest-ever first-quarter net profit, which surged 32.97 percent year-on-year to NT$6.72 billion (US$222.87 million).

This figure translated into earnings per share of NT$50.1, up from NT$37.68 a year earlier.

Revenue last quarter increased 34.52 percent to NT$13.21 billion.

Gross margin climbed to 69.8 percent from 64.24 percent, thanks to an improved product mix, as well as higher average selling prices (ASP), the company said.

A shipment breakdown showed that 10 to 20-megapixel lenses accounted for 40 to 50 percent of the total, 20-megapixel lenses and above made up 20 to 30 percent, and 8-megapixel lenses constituted about 10 to 20 percent.

Despite a strong first quarter, the company said that uncertainty created by the pandemic would take a toll on its revenue this quarter.

“We expect April [revenue] to disappoint [compared with March sales], with May [sales] even worse,” Largan CEO Adam Lin (林恩平) told investors at an earnings conference, adding that the firm has no order visibility for June.

This would lead to a drop in capacity utilization rates, Lin said, but added that the projections are based on current client orders, which could change rapidly depending on market conditions.

Asked whether Largan could meet rush orders when the pandemic subsides, Lin said it could ramp up production within one to two weeks time as long as the necessary modules are already available.

“Our employees are still working full time,” he added.

As to market speculation about potential delays in customers’ product launches, Lin declined to comment, but said that some of Largan’s projects would indeed be affected by laboratory closures.

Lin said Largan might shift more production to low to mid-range lenses, but said this might undermine margins given a lower ASP.

Largan is developing free-form lenses, which reduce spherical aberrations that occur in conventional camera lenses, Lin said, adding that it would be available by the end of the year.

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title: Virus Outbreak: Largan says outlook bleak


title: Bundesliga train, but with social distancing

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Wearing gloves for hygienic reasons and observing social distancing on the pitch are among the challenges facing Bundesliga soccer players back in training this week, amid hopes that the league might resume next month.

Most of the 18 clubs in Germany’s top flight returned to their clubs on Monday — albeit in small groups and with limited contact to meet health guidelines due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

League matches in Germany were suspended on March 13.

The German Football League is in talks with club management and authorities about the Bundesliga resuming on May 2, but with matches played with no fans as public events remain banned in the country.

A decision about when competition might resume is expected on Friday next week, which could make it the first of Europe’s top leagues to return.

The players are adjusting to training in the era of social distancing.

Defending champions Bayern Munich, who were four points clear when the league was halted, were typical of sides in holding sessions in small groups.

Contact is kept to a minimum with handshakes banned, and players staying 1.5m apart, even on the training pitch.

“It was a very unusual feeling to train in small groups,” Bayern captain Manuel Neuer said.

Up to five players were permitted per group at Bayern’s state-of-the-art training complex.

Like most other clubs, Bayern’s squad members were told to shower elsewhere and handed post-training snacks in a box to eat at home.

At VfL Wolfsburg, the players trained wearing gloves, despite warm spring temperatures.

“For hygienic reasons, we have to wear gloves, even though it’s 22°C,” forward Maximilian Arnold said. “Of course it’s necessary, but also a bit funny.”

Tackling and close-quarter challenges for the ball are frowned upon at all outfits.

“I would love to tackle, but I can’t do that now,” TSG 1899 Hoffenheim defender Havard Nordtveit said.

Previous weeks at home — in many cases filled by hours on gaming consoles — left a toll.

“My ball control was never perfect, but you can tell that a few teammates have not trained with the ball for three weeks,” Nordtveit added. “The most important thing is to keep working on our fitness now and be ready.”

At Union Berlin, defender Christopher Lenz was happy once again to have teammates to pass to and “have a real ball” at his feet.

“I missed the boys,” Lenz said. “PlayStation was my best friend.”

After weeks of training alone, or in online groups as Bayern did, most players were pleased to be back on a pitch, despite the new hygiene measures.

“It’s a nice feeling to play a bit of football and see the colleagues again,” Fortuna Duesseldorf forward Rouwen Hennings said. “Of course you can’t put in hard tackles or challenges, but I think it’s quite well regulated for the here and now.”

At Schalke 04, coach David Wagner said that his squad were happy to be put through their paces.

“The fitness coaches can really let off steam and the boys are up for it,” the former Huddersfield Town boss said. “Anything is better than running alone through the forest.”

However, players training in small groups offers an extra advantage for eagle-eyed coaches.

“Nobody can hide,” Duesseldorf coach Uwe Roesler said, explaining that any lack of fitness quickly shows up.

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title: Woods, caddie sued over shove

content_text:
SEEKING WITNESSES:
 The complaint, seeking about US$30,000 in damages, said that caddie Joe LaCava shoved Brian Borruso into other spectators causing injuries

A Florida man is suing Tiger Woods and caddie Joe LaCava over an alleged shove at the 2018 Valspar Championship, with his lawyer on Wednesday asking all witnesses to come forward.

Brian Borruso’s attorney, Josh Dreschel, issued a statement seeking the public’s help in identifying voices on a video that appears to capture portions of the incident.

“We’re asking anyone who was there to contact us and let us know if you saw the incident, if you know whose voices are on the video, and if you may have video or pictures of the incident,” Dreschel of the St Petersburg, Florida-based Josh Firm said. “Unfortunately, the PGA has refused to cooperate, even though we are confident they have the incident on video.”

Tiger Woods, right, prepares to play the fifth hole alongside caddie Joe LaCava during the final round of the Masters at Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia on April 14 last year.
 Photo: AFP

The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday in the state’s Pinellas County, said that the incident took place on the 13th hole in the third round of the tournament at the Innisbrook Resort near Tampa, Florida.

Woods hit his tee shot over the green and near spectators, including Borruso — who tried to take a selfie with Woods in the background of the shot as the superstar approached the ball.

The complaint, seeking about US$30,000 in damages, said that LaCava shoved Borruso into other spectators causing injuries.

Borusso’s injuries were not specified, but the complaint said that he needed treatment at a hospital and suffered a loss of income, and that the incident aggravated an existing health condition.

Woods was named in the lawsuit because he is the caddie’s boss and, as the suit said, the rules of golf stipulate that a player is responsible for his caddie’s actions during a round.

Woods’ appearance at the championship was just his fourth start in a PGA Tour event since undergoing spinal fusion surgery the previous April.

Woods finished tied for second, behind England’s Paul Casey. He drained a 45-foot putt at the penultimate hole, but was unable to get a 37-footer that would have forced a playoff to drop.

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title: James hopes Lakers can rekindle revival season

content_text:
LeBron James on Wednesday said that the abrupt shutdown of the NBA season due to the COVID-19 pandemic has left the Los Angeles Lakers feeling like they still have something to prove.

The Lakers were in the midst of a revival season, having made the playoffs for the first time in seven years, when the league suspended the 2019-2020 season on March 11 after Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID-19.

At the time of the postponement, the Lakers were in first place in the Western Conference and had the second-best record in the league behind Milwaukee.

Los Angeles Lakers forward LeBron James, left, shoots as Los Angeles Clippers forward Marcus Morris Sr defends in their NBA game in Los Angeles on March 8. The Lakers won 112-103.
 Photo: AP

If the season does not resume, there would be a void, James said.

“Closure? No. But to be proud of what we were able to accomplish to this point, I’ll be able to look back and say we did something special in that small period of time,” James said during a conference call with reporters. “Just the ups and downs, not only on the floor, but off the floor — everything that we’ve had to endure as Laker faithful.”

James said that he is having trouble coming to grips with the scale of the pandemic.

“How do you assess what’s going on over the last three weeks or however long this pandemic has been going on? It’s unnatural,” James said. “It’s something that’s never happened before. You just kind of take all the information you have on a day-to-day basis.”

He has been spending his self-isolating time practicing basketball with his son Bronny, and talking on the telephone with teammates and Lakers coach Frank Vogel.

James wants to return to basketball, but said that it would be up to the experts to decide when.

NBA commissioner Adam Silver this week said that he does not expect a decision on whether they can salvage the season until at least next month.

“Once they allow us to resume some type of activity, I would love to get things back going,” James said. “If it’s Las Vegas or somewhere else that can hold us and keep us in the best possible chance to be safe — not only on the floor, but off the floor as well. Those conversations will be had.”

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title: Alan Yang’s ‘Tigertail’ was personal for all involved

content_text:
Four years ago, when Master of None co-creator Alan Yang (楊維榕) started writing a film loosely based on his Taiwanese father, Hollywood was not exactly clamoring for Asian American stories.

Crazy Rich Asians had not made more than US$200 million, The Farewell was only a This American Life episode and Parasite had not yet swept the Oscars.

It was a long shot that Tigertail would even get made, let alone with a partner like Netflix, where it is available to stream as of today.

“This was a crazy, crazy choice on my part to write a movie with no white people in it,” Yang said from his home in Los Angeles. “This is the only movie I know that starts in Taiwan, segues into Mandarin and ends in English.”

However, he carried on, winnowing down the 250-page odyssey to something more focused: A story about a Taiwanese man named Pin-jui who leaves his great love for an arranged marriage and a new life in the US.

It splits between his life as a young man in the 1960s and the present day with his now-grown daughter.

Yang has described it as his “fever dream of my dad’s stories melded with some Wong Kar-wai (王家衛) and some Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢).”

Thanks to Master of None, Yang had a pre-existing relationship with Ted Sarandos, the streaming giant’s chief content officer.

So while it was easy to get the script to him, anything beyond a read was hardly a guarantee.

“It’s an art house-inflected movie that’s almost entirely in Mandarin and Taiwanese and it features no Marvel stars,” Yang said with a laugh about its marketability.

However, Sarandos did not need convincing: He loved the script and that was that.

The movie was a go.

“I’m incredibly grateful to Netflix for taking a chance and allowing us to make the movie in the way we saw fit,” Yang said.

That included shooting the past on 16mm film to give it a dreamier feel and the present on digital.

Yang cast Chinese-American actor Tzi Ma (馬泰) to play Pin-jui (also called Grover) in the present day.

Ma, who recently played a version of filmmaker Lulu Wang’s (王子逸) father in The Farewell, knew that his character was inspired by Yang’s father, but said that is where the similarities end.

“The first thing Alan told me was his dad was a doctor,” Ma said. “Already I know this is a huge departure. [Pin-jui] is common man. This is a common man’s journey.”

Ma knew just who this character was regardless.

“This character is modeled after my brother,” Ma said.

His brother was an architect in Hong Kong before their family immigrated to the US, where his degree was not recognized.

“Basically, in the 60s there were two businesses we could get into as Asian Americans, Chinese Americans in particular: Restaurants and laundry,” Ma said. “So we bought a restaurant on Staten Island and he became the cook.”

When they moved, Ma remembers a distinct change in his brother, who was once so vibrant and full of life.

Taiwanese-American actress Christine Ko (葛曉潔), who plays his grown daughter Angela in the present-day scenes, had a similarly personal connection to the material.

“It felt like therapy for me, two years of therapy,” Ko said. “I grew up in a home that was a little more strict and wasn’t as emotionally forthcoming with discussions of feelings and all that so I felt like I could really relate to the distance that Angela has with her father.”

Netflix had planned on having a premiere and a simultaneous theatrical release for Tigertail before theaters shuttered due to coronavirus.

Yang said that he was a little disappointed that he would not be able to celebrate with everyone who worked on it, but that there are discussions to hold some select screenings down the line and maybe even a makeup premiere.

It also means he is not going to even be able to watch it with his family either.

“I just told my family this movie is a love letter to you guys and please don’t take offense at anything,” Yang said.

“Fingers crossed that they don’t all hate me,” he added.

However, even though things are strange right now for everyone, all are excited to be working in this moment where Asian American films are having such mainstream success.

“For the first time it feels like we have solid footing whereas in the past it always felt like we’re the flavor of the month,” Ma said.

“The talent has always been there, they’ve just not had the opportunity to show the world how wonderful they are,” he said.

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title: South Sudan athletes in Japan keep dreams alive

content_text:
The postponement of the Tokyo Olympic Games was a heavy blow for many athletes, but a team of South Sudan sprinters training at a Japanese town are hoping to turn the delay into an advantage.

The four athletes and their coach have since November last year been in Maebashi, north of Tokyo, to take advantage of training facilities that are not available in their home country.

After the news that the Games had been postponed over the COVID-19 pandemic, they decided to stay until at least July, hoping to beef up their skills.

South Sudan 1500m runner Abraham Majok Matet Guem, right, takes part in a training session at a public track in Maebashi, Japan, on Friday last week.
 Photo: AFP

“The Tokyo Olympics have been postponed, but it’s not a problem,” team coach Joseph Rensio Tobia Omirok, 59, said. “I’m happy because I’m still training. In other countries, they have no training. They’re sitting in their house, but here we are OK. Training now is going OK.”

The decision to postpone the Games for a year until July 2021 came after athletes and sports associations heaped pressure on organizers and Olympic officials, pointing to scrapped qualifying events and restrictions on training.

Japan has so far avoided the sort of major outbreak seen in Europe and the US, and even a state of emergency declared on Tuesday only applies to some parts of the country. It does not include Gunma Prefecture, where Maebashi is located.

The city of 340,000 has pledged to continue helping the athletes by providing them with accommodation, meals and the use of a public track, along with an army of volunteer coaches and translators.

Maebashi decided to host the team — the coach, one female and two male Olympic sprinters, and one male Paralympic sprinter — as part of its efforts to promote peace through sports.

The athletes have visited local schools and community events to talk about their homeland, which won independence in 2011 and has been battling to recover from a civil war.

They regularly practice with local children and have learned to speak simple Japanese.

The athletes said that they have come to enjoy life in the city, abloom with cherry blossoms after a bitter winter, despite being more than 10,000km from home, where they had to practice on simple empty fields.

“Before I reached Japan, I didn’t know what kind of people the Japanese are,” said Abraham Majok Matet Guem, 20, who runs the 1,500m. “The love I got here ... is more than even what I expected, so I have not missed home so much because I am staying in a very peaceful environment with very loving people. So I was very surprised at that.”

The city has raised more than ￥14 million (US$128,600) from across Japan through a special taxation scheme and is continuing to raise funds to secure the ￥20 million needed to keep the team on through July.

Officials were quick to reassure the team after the Olympic delay was announced that they would be welcome to stay until at least July.

“We are eager to give them our continued support,” Maebashi City Government sports official Shinichi Hagiwara said.

The athletes’ fate after that is to be decided after the city consults with the South Sudanese National Olympic Committee, the Japanese government, the track team and others, Hagiwara said.

The athletes said that their warm reception left them hoping that they might one day be able to welcome their hosts to South Sudan.

“Right now, people are scared to go to South Sudan, but we believe that in the near future, it will be a very peaceful country and everyone will be free to travel there,” Guem said. “We will be happy to see people from Maebashi there also.”

Guem left his mother and seven siblings at home to train in the city for the Games and said that the delay was no more than a minor bump on his Olympic journey.

“My dream has always been that before I retire from athletics, I would become an Olympic medalist,” he said. “I will continue training and it is my hope to one day be a champion — I still have time.”

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title: EDITORIAL CARTOON


title: Virus Outbreak: Calls to UK domestic abuse hotlines surge

content_text:
A helpline for perpetrators of domestic abuse who are seeking help to change their behavior has received 25 percent more calls as a lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic continues.

The Respect hotline, which provides confidential advice to perpetrators about violence and domestic abuse, had a 26.86 percent increase in calls in the week starting on Monday last week, compared with the week prior.

The hotline’s Web site recorded a 125 percent increase in hits in the same period.

The Men’s Advice Line for male victims of domestic abuse, which is also run by the charity Respect, had an increase in calls of 16.6 percent in the same week, while its Web site registered an increase in traffic of 42 percent.

The figures come as Refuge, the UK’s largest domestic abuse charity, reported a 120 percent increase in calls to its helpline, which provides advice and facilitates referrals to refuge accommodation, in the 24 hours following a fresh round of publicity on Monday.

Recently appointed British Shadow Home Secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds has called on the government to provide an emergency financial package to organizations providing domestic abuse support services during the pandemic.

Experts in the field have warned that abusers and their partners having to self-isolate together at home might lead to an increase in abusive behavior and violence due to the pressure-cooker effect of being trapped indoors.

The Respect hotline offers advice to individuals who have been violent toward their partners or are fearful that conditions of the lockdown would lead to them losing control of their behavior.

There was an initial dip in calls at the start of the lockdown, but an increase was recorded last week.

“At the moment, what we’re doing, the Respect phone line and our members, we’re looking at de-escalation and self-management techniques. Those ideas about helping someone maintain non-harmful, non-abusive behaviors,” former Respect services, research and development manager Sara Kirkpatrick said.

“We’re opening up to respond to a broader range of issues,” said Kirkpatrick, who left Respect at the end of last week to take up the role of chief executive of Welsh Women’s Aid.

“Usually, there are some things we would move someone on to a different source of support — issues relating to mental health and relationship issues that under normal circumstances aren’t actually perpetrating domestic abuse, and are just people feeling stress and anxiety,” she said.

“We will be offering support to those people, because actually in difficult times we don’t want situations to escalate. A lot of the resources we have available will be about helping people to de-escalate difficult situations and manage themselves in a crisis,” she added.

“Callers are more concerned about being indoors more and worried about not being able to control their own behavior, and feeling quite hopeless and helpless as there are more limitations on the other services they can get to, which increases anxiety even more,” Kirkpatrick said.

The charity’s member organizations that work with perpetrators have had to move to non-face-to-face work, she said.

Some domestic violence perpetrator programs are based on a model similar to Alcoholics Anonymous. Men who have been abusive in variety of ways, physical and emotional, get together under supervision, discuss their experiences and use a variety of interactive exercises to help them understand the effects of their behavior.

At the start of lockdown procedures being announced, Refuge undertook a huge technological operation and moved its helpline — usually located in a cybersecure office environment — to an entirely remote system.

On Monday, the charity revealed that calls to the helpline had increased 25 percent in the previous week.

Following significant media coverage of the statistics, calls and contacts logged on the following day were up by 120 percent from the previous day.

“This is an enormous increase, which underscores what we already know — domestic abuse is a scourge on society and must be addressed,” Refuge chief executive Sandra Horley said.

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content_text:
LEFT BEHIND:
 Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden asked Sanders supporters to join his campaign, while US President Donald Trump also made an appeal to the ‘Bernie people’

US Senator Bernie Sanders on Wednesday suspended his presidential campaign, clearing the way for his rival, former US vice president Joe Biden, to secure the Democratic nomination and challenge US President Donald Trump in November.

The feisty 78-year-old democratic socialist shook up this year’s race with his relentless pursuit of “economic justice” for all Americans and a demand for universal healthcare.

He acknowledged that his campaign had fallen short, as party voters determined Biden would be a stronger candidate to go up against Trump in the presidential election.

Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders, left, and Joe Biden, right, stand on stage during the 10th Democratic presidential debate at the Gaillard Center in Charleston, South Carolina, on Feb. 25.
 Photo: EPA-EFE

“I have concluded that this battle for the Democratic nomination will not be successful,” Sanders told supporters in a livestream from his home, where he has remained for the bulk of the coronavirus pandemic that put all in-person campaigning on hold.

“Vice president Biden will be the nominee,” he said, adding that he congratulated his rival, a “very decent man, who I will work with to move our progressive ideas forward.”

Sanders, who challenged former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton for the party’s nomination in 2016, mounted a formidable bid.

He raised astonishing amounts of money from record numbers of donors, becoming the frontrunner early this year and earning the most votes in the first three statewide contests.

However, he was eclipsed by a surging Biden, who won the vast majority of remaining primaries and now holds a commanding lead in the all-important race for delegates who choose the nominee.

Sanders brought his liberal ideological platform — including a call for universal healthcare and a US$15 hourly minimum wage — into the mainstream.

“Together we have transformed American consciousness as to what kind of nation we can become, and have taken this country a major step forward in the never-ending struggle for economic justice,” Sanders said.

Several lawmakers have come out in support of his policies, and Biden has shifted leftward to incorporate some Sanders positions, although he does not support Sanders’ Medicare for All plan.

Biden immediately hailed Sanders as “a good man, a great leader, and one of the most powerful voices for change in our country.”

He urged Sanders supporters to join his campaign, which already has the backing of nearly all other ex-rivals in the race, including US senators Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar, and former Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg.

“I see you, I hear you, and I understand the urgency of what it is we have to get done in this country,” Biden said in a statement to Sanders and his supporters.

“I hope you will join us. You are more than welcome. You’re needed,” he added.

Trump made his own pitch for Sanders’ supporters, though in a more abrasive tone.

“Bernie Sanders is OUT!” the president posted on Twitter. “The Bernie people should come to the Republican Party, TRADE!”

Trump won the 2016 election with help from disaffected working-class voters who believed they were being left behind by politicians in Washington.

Sanders also appeals to those voters.

He said he would not remain in an unwinnable campaign that would “interfere” with important anti-coronavirus work while the country is gripped by crisis.

Biden said that his focus is on ending the pandemic, but promised to continue campaigning, despite the logistical challenges.

“First things first: how we’re going to keep America safe, and get this crisis under control and provide economic assistance,” he said during a virtual fundraiser.

He repeated a pledge to choose a woman as his running mate — a topic on which he said he has asked former US president Barack Obama for advice. At a second virtual fundraiser later in the day, he seemed to imply he had an eye on former rival Harris, who had hoped to become the first black woman president.

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title: Sanders ends US presidential bid


content_text:
HOMICIDE PROBE:
 Hundreds of passengers who were allowed to disembark later tested positive for COVID-19, making the ship the nation’s deadliest infection source

Australian police yesterday said that they have taken the “black box” of a cruise ship that disembarked hundreds of passengers infected with the novel coronavirus in Sydney, as part of a homicide investigation into the country’s deadliest infection source.

The investigation got under way as Australian authorities said that the rate of COVID-19 infections hit its lowest number in three weeks and began arranging more flights to bring home citizens stranded abroad.

The Ruby Princess cruise ship, owned by Carnival Corp, has become a flash point of public anger in Australia after authorities granted the ship permission to disembark its passengers last month without health checks.

Investigators don protective gear before boarding the Ruby Princess cruise ship in Wollongong, Australia, on Wednesday night.
 Photo: AP / New South Wales Police Force

Hundreds of the passengers later tested positive for the coronavirus and 15 have died, out of Australia’s about 6,000 confirmed cases and 51 deaths.

Investigators boarded the ship at an industrial port south of Sydney, interviewed the captain and took electronic logs as evidence, New South Wales Police Force Commissioner Mick Fuller said.

“They spoke to the captain of the ship, who was extremely helpful,” Fuller said in a televised news conference yesterday.

“Ships have a black box very similar to that of international planes, and that and other evidence has been seized for further investigation,” he said.

About 1,000 crew members of various nationalities remain on board the cruise ship.

In the past day, Australia recorded 96 new coronavirus infections, its first increase of less than 100 cases in three weeks, Australian Minister for Health Greg Hunt told reporters in Canberra.

“The curve continues to flatten, we are consolidating the gains,” Hunt said in a televised news conference.

“While we have been cautious over the last two weeks as we have seen the early data, what we’re seeing now is a genuine consolidation,” he added.

Authorities are imploring people to stay home and cancel trips to traditional vacation spots over the long Easter holiday weekend, and have said that tight restrictions on movement could stay in place for at least six months.

The restrictions include a broad order for people to stay at home, except for essential work or to exercise and buy food, and police have said that they would use the threat of on-the-spot fines to stop people traveling or socializing over Easter.

“We can’t lift our foot off the pedal, we need to stay vigilant, make sure we clamp down on the community-to-community transmission,” New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian told reporters.

Berejiklian ordered a senior state lawmaker back to his Sydney home after he was photographed by local media at his beach house outside the city.

Tasmania Premier Peter Gutwein said that he would use helicopters and inspections of suspected vacation homes to monitor people’s movements.

“The gloves come off, we are going to police this, the period of education is over,” he said.

Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs Marise Payne said that she had arranged with Qantas Airways to run special flights to repatriate Australians stuck overseas.

The flights would carry people in Peru, Argentina and South Africa home in the next week, with flights also being planned from India and the Philippines.

Late on Wednesday, the federal government approved a package to subsidize the wages of 6 million people, or one-fourth of the population, at a cost of A$130 billion (US$81 billion).

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title: Virus Outbreak: Australian authorities raid cruise ship


title: World Business Quick Take

content_text:
APPAREL

Uniqlo cuts profits forecast

Uniqlo owner Fast Retailing Co lowered its full-year operating profit outlook by 41 percent, joining a string of global retailers caught up in shutdowns aimed at slowing the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Asia’s largest apparel company yesterday said it now expects profit of ￥145 billion (US$1.3 billion) for the fiscal year ending August. That compares with its prior forecast of ￥245 billion and analysts’ average projection of ￥198 billion, according to estimates compiled by Bloomberg. It also marks the second guidance cut; the retailer reduced its forecast in January, citing geopolitical turmoil in South Korea and Hong Kong that hurt sales. For the quarter that ended in February, operating profit was ￥45 billion. Net sales fell 6.1 percent to ￥585 billion, compared with analysts’ average prediction of ￥573 billion.

FOREIGN EXCHANGE

Reserves fall highlights risk

The decade-long surge in foreign-exchange reserves among emerging markets is coming to an end, highlighting the danger posed by future currency depreciation. China’s holdings fell by US$46.1 billion last month, the most since late 2016, official data showed late on Tuesday. The drawdown accounted for the largest share of the US$110 billion that 11 emerging-market central banks, including those in Turkey, India, Brazil and Egypt, yanked from their reserves last month to stem currency losses. The declines underscore the clamor for US dollars that rocked foreign-exchange markets around the world last month, driving the MSCI Emerging Markets Currency Index to its biggest retreat since May 2012. With commodity prices and export earnings in the doldrums as the COVID-19 crisis deepens, the outlook for the currencies of many emerging markets is not much better.

AIRLINES

EU firm extends suspension

Air France-KLM yesterday said it expects more than 90 percent of its capacity to remain suspended through the end of next month as the coronavirus pandemic paralyzes the travel industry worldwide. For the next two months, the airline aims to continue serving only some key city pairs with a “skeleton operation,” it said in a statement, adding that projections beyond that time are too difficult to provide. Traffic last month was “strongly impacted” by the spread of COVID-19 across the globe and subsequent reductions in capacity, it said. Group passenger traffic plunged 51 percent, while the load factor dropped 20 percentage points to 67 percent. The French government, which along with the Netherlands owns a stake in Air France-KLM, has vowed to prop up the former flag carrier.

AUTOMAKERS

Toyota cutting 5,000 jobs

Toyota Motor Corp is laying off about 5,000 temporary staff employed by partner agencies as it extends the shutdown of its North American auto plants a third time, citing the pandemic and weak demand. The Japanese automaker will continue to provide benefits for what it refers to as its variable workforce, and they might be eligible for unemployment, it said in an e-mailed statement. Toyota’s North American unit now intends to reopen factories in the US, Canada and Mexico on May 4, two weeks later than planned. Toyota initially announced plans to resume operations as early as March 25, but has pushed back its planned restart date three times. It is joining Japanese peers Honda Motor Co and Nissan Motor Co, and German automaker BMW AG in cutting off pay to thousands of US workers as social distancing measures force companies to stay shut.

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title: Being productive from at home

content_text:
The COVID-19 pandemic has hit businesses hard globally. Almost all of Western Europe is enforcing mandatory rules for people to work from home unless there are valid reasons for them to do otherwise, such as essential services.

In Taiwan, major manufacturing companies such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp and Hon Hai Precision Industry Co are putting their non-production employees in remote work mode to contain the viral spread.

Home office might last for several months and this could become a permanent trend after the virus outbreak.

While this change of work style is an immediate relief from unnecessary exposure to the viral risk, it might also inherit productivity cost especially over the long term.

While one bright side of having to work from home is that it saves time previously spent commuting, it could be a burden to many people.

For example, many find it hard to unplug after work; many find it easier to get distracted by children; many struggle with communication among coworkers; and most of them find it hard to concentrate due to the layout at home, which is not meant to be conducive for work.

To improve productivity for those who are adjusting to this newfound flexibility of working from home, it is important to find ways to put that productivity back on track while working at home.

For working parents, it is a good idea to work out a roster with each other for managing their children, as childcare might not be available in these challenging days.

This enables the other person to engage in uninterrupted work.

Short chunks of focus are key. Working at home does not entitle you to the luxury of having eight solid continuous hours a day to work on your craft.

Neither is eight hours healthy nor necessary, as research on the basic rest-activity cycle as proposed by the “Father of sleep medicine,” Nathaniel Kleitman, who has strongly pointed out that people work best in 90-minute intervals before they need to recharge for the next bout of productivity.

To enhance productivity at work, innovative technologies can help, such as the use of cloud-based apps to schedule your e-mails and for virtual meetings.

For a longer-term solution, it is worthwhile to set aside a budget for home office design. For example, a good spatial layout, high acoustic quality and biophilic design can make your home convenient and comfortable for working from home with other family members.

Flexible home office design can drastically improve productivity and maintain sustainable living that keeps everyone in peace.

COVID-19 might have been the catalyst this year, but there is no doubt the future of work is going to shift to remote options.

This inevitably means we have to become productive at home, despite the challenges.

Joo Kwang Chan is the cofounder of MediOmni, a management consultancy based in Hong Kong. Ng Ming Shan is a LEED AP, and a registered architect in the UK and Switzerland who is doing research on construction automation and digitization at the Chair of Innovative and Industrial Construction at ETH Zurich.

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title: It’s TikTok Time

content_text:
This is TikTok’s time. The social video platform which was already a favorite of teens is increasingly being used by adults looking for ways to pass the time during coronavirus lockdowns.

Users post short videos — no longer than 60 seconds but often as short as 15 — to showcase their bite-size dance skills or share relatable experiences with a humorous twist.

The application, owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance, saw 65 million worldwide downloads last month, according to analytics site SensorTower.

Youths act in front of a mobile phone camera while making a TikTok video on the terrace of their residence in Hyderabad.
 Photo: AFP

In addition to the existing 800 million reported in January by DataReportal, the app is nearing a billion users — though TikTok itself does not publish such data.

And though teens have been posting on the platform for months, it seems adults with more free time — as much of the world is encouraged to stay at home to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus — are finally catching on.

SCENERY NOT REQUIRED

Cecile, stuck at home in Paris with her six- and three-year-old children, was intrigued when a friend sent her a video. Soon, she had downloaded the app and was posting clips herself.

“I said to myself: ‘Well, this is something funny I could do with the boys to pass the time, if only for 15 minutes,’” she said. “When I say, ‘Come on, we’re making a video,’ they’re ready to go. It makes them laugh.”

Celebrities have joined the fun too, from Jennifer Lopez to Mariah Carey — even 82-year-old Jane Fonda.

Social media use is up across the board as movement is restricted around the world, but TikTok — already having a moment before the pandemic — is doing better than others.

Idyllic vacation views and perfectly framed artistic shots — long the markers of the Instagram aesthetic — are currently out of reach for most.

But the typical TikTok post does not require a beautiful background, explained Thibault Le Ouay, founder of Pentos, a company that helps brands with their marketing strategy on the platform.

“On TikTok, you do a dance in your own house,” he said, pointing to 15-year-old Charli D’Amelio, one of the app’s biggest stars with 46 million subscribers. “She is at home in leggings. It’s not a video of a beach paradise. It’s still something you can do at home.”

Plus, TikTok has levity baked into its DNA. Many videos on the platform — a descendant of the Web site Musical.ly — are amateur performances of short choreographed dances and lip syncs to song clips, repeated and riffed on over and over.

“It’s a very interesting position to be in for TikTok right now, because the videos are generally pretty light, humorous, fun and easy,” said Debra Aho Williamson, principal analyst for market research company eMarketer.

“And with all of the negative news that people are hearing on a daily basis from other media, TikTok is something different, and I think that people need that right now.”

#HAPPYATHOME

The site has also taken on the role of promoting stay-at-home content in an effort to help fight the virus, a TikTok spokeswoman said. The hashtag #happyathome has seen more than 7.9 billion views.

“We’re committed to doing our part to help the broader community get through this difficult time,” she said.

The app also has a page with information about COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, with contributions from the World Health Organization (WHO) that “dispel some of the myths” around the illness, she said.

Multiple brands have used civic responsibility as an entry point into TikTok, where advertising has been scarce until recently. US personal hygiene and cleaning product giant Proctor & Gamble has worked with Charli D’Amelio for a campaign about social distancing, for example.

Brands’ marketing ability in general — including the opportunity to monetize content on TikTok — is limited by the pandemic, experts say. But they are still interested, according to Williamson.

“The problem is for some companies (that) TikTok is an experiment for advertising,” she said. “And if they are being forced to cut their ad budgets — which many companies are right now — things that are experimental often times are the easiest to cut.”

And the app’s Chinese origins could be a concern for some brands in the US that are worried about data usage, she said.

eMarketer, which already predicted TikTok will grow this year to 45 million US users, up from 37 million, has not changed its forecast based on impact from coronavirus.

“The question I have for TikTok and all of the social media platforms that are seeing increases in engagement now is whether it will continue once things get back to normal, once older adults are back working and they have other things going on,” Williamson said.

“It’s too soon to tell right now.”

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content_text:
Virus Outbreak: Nicaragua plays down virus, but neighbors worry

TEMPTING FATE:
 The government said that it has only three cases of COVID-19, but Cuba has said that it has confirmed several cases imported from Nicaragua

International health officials are warning that the Nicaraguan government’s perplexing weeks-long refusal to take measures to control the spread of COVID-19 is heightening the risk of an epidemic in Central America even as neighboring countries take tough action.

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s government urged Nicaraguans to party during Carnival celebrations, and it has said they should keep attending sports events and cultural festivals, and pack the country’s beaches during Holy Week vacations this week.

Doctors have been told not to alarm patients by wearing masks or using sanitizing gel.

A man walks in an empty Plaza de la Fe in Managua, Nicaragua, on Tuesday. Restaurants are empty, there is little traffic in the streets and beach tourists are sparse headed into Holy Week, despite the government’s encouragement for Nicaraguans to go about their normal lives.
 Photo: AP

Before schools closed for an extended vacation on Friday last week, principals had threatened to expel students who missed class, and last month a third baseman was banned from professional baseball for three years after he asked to stop playing over virus fears.

Ortega’s administration has offered no detailed explanation for its refusal to take widely accepted measures, but the health minister has spoken of the need to support the economy, badly damaged by two years of anti-government protests and harsh crackdowns on dissent.

Some analysts say Ortega and his circle might fear that anti-virus measures would weaken their hold on power.

In the meantime, Nicaraguans are doing what they can to voluntarily stay away from one another, but Pan American Health Organization Director Carissa Etienne said that Nicaragua’s lack of official measures is increasing the risk of an epidemic.

“We have concerns for the lack of social distancing, the convening of mass gatherings. We have concerns about the testing, contact tracing, about the reporting of cases,” Etienne said on Tuesday.

Costa Rican President Carlos Alvarado has warned that an out-of-control epidemic in Nicaragua would have consequences for all of Central America. In the middle of last month, Costa Rica, El Salvador and Honduras closed their borders to foreigners and instituted social distancing measures.

There are also concerns about Ortega’s own health. The 74-year-old has not appeared in public for three weeks. Although he has been absent for long periods in the past only to reappear, his disappearance during a global pandemic is fueling rumors he might be ill, or personally terrified of the coronavirus.

“The broader problem in Nicaragua is that you have a dictatorship that is unable to take the pandemic seriously. It’s unable because they’re distracted by the health itself of its president,” said Manuel Orozco, a Nicaragua expert at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington.

The country’s economic crisis — and resulting lack of revenue — also means the state’s ability to act is very limited, he said.

As a guerrilla commander, Ortega in 1979 helped overthrow then-Nicaraguan president Anastasio Somoza and was part of the Sandinista junta that took power and began to take the nation down a path toward communism.

He was first elected president in 1984, then lost re-election in 1990, but he has held the presidency since 2006 and implemented increasingly autocratic rule. His wife, Rosario Murillo, has served as the government’s principal spokeswoman and, since 2016, as Nicaraguan vice president.

Ortega’s violent crackdown on protests, which began in 2018, caused more than 328 deaths, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights said. The political tension has had devastating effects on the country’s economy, especially in what had been a burgeoning tourism sector.

The government says that the country has only three confirmed cases of the virus, all imported, even as its borders remain open and infections steadily increase in neighboring countries.

Costa Rica has more than 400 confirmed infections, Honduras has more than 300 and El Salvador about 100. The Cuban Ministry of Public Health has said that two people arrived sick from Nicaragua and a third person tested positive this week after returning from Nicaragua.

“Nothing indicates that the problem that Spain, Italy and the United States have won’t repeat itself in Nicaragua, too,” epidemiologist Leonel Arguello said.

While the virus initially emerged in China during the winter and there is some suggestion that it might not spread as easily when both the temperature and humidity increase, scientists have said there is no good evidence yet that such weather — common in Central America — will significantly help tamp down the outbreak on its own.

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title: How scientists are tracking people to help tame COVID-19

content_text:
It was not ordered up by Washington, it does not have a catchy name and its members do not get paid, but COVID-19 Mobility Data Network could mean the difference between life and death.

The network sprang up voluntarily among universities, epidemiologists, public health departments, database providers, advertising technology companies and social media giants such as Facebook.

Their mission is to fight the pandemic’s spread by testing the effectiveness of stay-at-home and social distancing policies using a single tool: your cellphone’s physical location.

The new data-sharing relationship is just one way companies, academics and public health officials are teaming up to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus.

The network is analyzing the data and sharing insights with governments in states like Massachusetts and California; in cities such as Boston, New York and Miami; and in other countries, including India, Italy and Spain.

“A lot of these companies just came out of the woodwork,” said Andrew Schroeder, vice president of research and analysis for public-health nonprofit Direct Relief and one of the network’s coordinators.

“There’s a lot of location data out there,” which needs to be shaped “into something that’s not just the Wild West, but is passing through an expert filter on what this means for public health,” he said.

The data show whether people are complying with stay-at-home and social distancing orders that have spread across the US and countries around the globe.

For example, people taking trips outside their neighborhoods in San Francisco decreased 40 to 50 percent, but dropped only 20 to 30 percent in other parts of California, Shroeder said.

In New York City, residents were more mobile during the week than they were on weekends, and mobility rates were higher on Staten Island than in lower Manhattan, he said.

Facebook on Monday said that it was expanding the kinds of location data it provides to researchers tracking the pandemic, which has infected more than 1.5 million people and claimed more than 88,000 lives worldwide.

The company, which normally uses such data to help sell targeted advertising, has been sharing it with researchers in an anonymized, aggregated form since 2017 to track things like whether people evacuate disaster zones.

The data sets are now being used by dozens of organizations studying COVID-19, the disease the virus causes.

The expansion of the program means Facebook will also share more nuanced details on whether people are staying at home, or the “probability that people in one area will come in contact with people in another,” the company wrote on its blog.

The network is also working with Washington-based Camber Systems, a data analytics company, and is soon to team up with Cuebiq, a New York-based data collection company, to provide reports to “decisionmakers who are implementing social distancing interventions,” the network’s Web site said.

It is in talks with Alphabet’s Google about using data from the search giant. Google is posting “mobility reports” to show how traffic to places such as parks and transportation hubs has declined.

The mobility data project, which started early last month, is similar to work that Schroeder, along with others such as Caroline Buckee, an associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard University, had been doing to analyze mobility rates in disaster situations.

Schroeder had worked with Buckee on travel trends in Mozambique after a cyclone tore through the country last year.

He said he had taken on similar initiatives for Houston after a tropical storm hit last year and for California after wildfires ravaged the state.

Once they realized the need for data would probably be greater than in previous natural disasters, Schroeder, Buckee and Satchit Balsari, another Harvard professor and a physician, came up with the network idea.

They recruited others who had done similar work and reached out to government contacts to ask how they could help, Schroeder said.

“All of these various public health departments around the country were making these pretty big calls on shutting down big chunks of the economy and society,” Schroeder said. “Nobody had any visibility at all” into the question: “Are people listening to you when you say that everyone should stay home? Do they stay home?”

Camber Systems is processing anonymized geolocation data from millions of US cellphones and passing it to the mobility network, Schroeder said.

The company receives the data from firms in the advertising technology industry, and then strips it of any names, addresses or other personal identifying details before handing it to researchers in a digestible format.

The data are refreshed every few hours to track how devices are moving throughout a region.

Camber Systems declined to comment.

The increased ability of mobile app providers and digital advertising companies to track cellphone owners’ positions has made such projects possible — and elicited criticism from consumer advocates concerned about privacy breaches.

Some fear that an emphasis on health over privacy could undermine the protection of civil liberties, similar to what happened after Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, when the US secretly began collecting mass amounts of data on its own citizens in an effort to track down terrorists.

Facebook and the mobility network said that no one’s privacy is being jeopardized, and that no governments are receiving raw data.

“We’re not aware of any active conversations or asks with the US or other governments at this point asking for access to that data directly,” Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said on March 18.

Since May last year, Facebook has offered what it calls “disease prevention maps” to researchers and nonprofits.

It hands over anonymous user-movement data that is aggregated into 0.6km-sized grids and updated every eight hours, Schroeder said.

The researchers use that information to calculate changes in the number of trips Facebook users in a specific region take outside their homes in a day.

Facebook said it only shares data from users who have opted in to the company’s location-tracking settings.

In the coronavirus outbreak, the maps have found multiple uses.

Direct Relief has used them to help determine where to distribute medical supplies, Schroeder said.

Researchers at National Tsing-Hua University are using the data to model possible outbreaks of the disease in Taiwan, said Chang Hsiao-han (張筱涵), a professor at the university.

Harvard researchers are also using Facebook’s data sets to study the effects of government social distancing advisories.

“We have no idea what they actually do in terms of subsequent epidemiology of the disease,” Buckee said. “Policymakers want to know things like ‘which of these policies actually work, and how long are we going to have to do them?’”

“We are acting as an intermediary to help make sure that this information is processed together correctly,” Schroeder said. “We can help people make sense of it and not just dump a bunch of raw data on them.”

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content_text:
Venezuelan migrants who lost their jobs amid the coronavirus crisis were promised a warm welcome back home by the government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

Instead, they are sleeping on cement floors in sweltering quarantine camps, where they are beaten if they complain.

When Edgard Lopez on Saturday boarded a cramped bus in Bogota, he thought he was days away from seeing his family for the first time in three years. He had just lost his job at a cleaning-product factory which closed for the duration of the lockdown imposed by Colombian authorities.

Instead, Lopez is detained at an armed forces’ border checkpoint with hundreds of others, including children and expectant mothers.

“They said they would test us and if we came out negative we could keep moving toward our destinations. It was all a lie,” Lopez, 37, said in a text message.

“They turn on the water only twice a day for two hours and there are 330 of us. If I had known it’d be like this, I would have never come back,” he added.

As swathes of the Colombian economy shut down, thousands of Venezuelans are returning only to be detained by security forces.

The Venezuelan government has imposed quarantine measures on returning migrants as it tries to prevent the pandemic from overwhelming its run-down health system, but it is ill-prepared to deal with them.

The country has confirmed 166 cases of the disease and seven deaths.

“All must be received with love, warmth and all preventive measures,” Maduro said of the returning Venezuelans on state TV on Sunday. “Now, they’ll know they have a motherland, a free and supportive country, ready to greet them with open arms.”

More than 6,000 migrants have returned in the past week, said opposition lawmaker Gaby Arellano, who is assisting returning compatriots. Many more are likely to come.

Since Colombia’s 1.8 million Venezuelan migrants often live in hostels that charge rent by the night, and mostly work in the informal economy, the crisis made many of them homeless almost immediately.

The Venezuelan Ministry of Information did not respond to requests for comment.

Luis Camargo has been held at the same border post for four days since he crossed on his way back to his wife and children in the state of Zulia in western Venezuela. The only food he gets each day is a corn flour patty in the morning and a couple spoonfuls of rice for lunch, he said.

“Some tried to escape today and were taken by the guards. Their families don’t know where they are,” Camargo, 37, said on Monday in a text message. “Another who criticized the government was beaten.”

Those at the border camp have been told they would be held for at least 14 days, the normal incubation period for the virus. Yet the country’s fuel shortage, which has paralyzed much of Venezuela’s transport, could make their return home to families even longer.

“It’s very risky to keep these people with no symptoms and who test negative in refuges,” Laidy Gomez, the governor of the border state Tachira said in a Web cast. “If they’re not infected with coronavirus during this quarantine, then they could easily be the target of another disease as consequence of a total lack of public services.”

San Antonio del Tachira, where many of the migrants are being detained, “is a small town which doesn’t have the proper infrastructure,” Freddy Bernal, a Maduro ally in charge of peacekeeping on the Venezuelan border with Colombia, told state TV.

“We’re doing a superhuman effort to give these people some level of comfort,” he said.

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title: Virus Outbreak: Returning Venezuelan migrants held in camps


content_text:
A resurgent Tropical Cyclone Harold yesterday flattened tourist resorts in Tonga, extending a week-long trail of destruction across four South Pacific island nations that has claimed more than two dozen lives.

The cyclone gathered pace as it bore down on the tiny island kingdom, which declared a state of emergency, warning residents to seek shelter from destructive winds and massive sea surges.

By early yesterday it had again become a scale-topping Category 5 superstorm — surprising meteorologists after signs earlier in the week that its intensity was dropping.

Damage from Tropical Cyclone Harold to a tourist resort is shown in the Hihifo coastal area of Tonga yesterday.
 Photo: AFP / Tonga Police

Packing winds of up to 260kph, it cut power in parts of the country and police said that at least three tourist resorts north of the capital, Nuku’alofa, had been reduced to rubble.

The cyclone late last week killed 27 people in the Solomon Islands before barreling southeast to directly hit Vanuatu as a Category 5, obliterating entire towns in the northern provinces.

There have been no reports of deaths in Vanuatu, Fiji or Tonga, with emergency workers saying that residents in the hardest-hit areas took shelter early.

“It appears that many buildings and crops have been destroyed, and some people in the most-affected areas have lost everything,” Red Cross Vanuatu secretary-general Jacqueline de Gaillande said.

Harold weakened slightly to a still-formidable Category 4 as it lashed Fiji on Wednesday, but hopes that the storm was dissipating were dashed as it regathered momentum heading toward Tonga.

“It’s been a tricky one to predict,” New Zealand’s MetService meteorologist Bill Singh told reporters.

“We knew the track it was going to take, but initially everyone thought it was just going to be [Category] 3 or 4, but as it progressed over open warm waters it deepened,” he said.

The storm was late yesterday expected to head away from Tonga toward the open ocean, but WeatherWatch.co.nz head forecaster Philip Duncan said that there were no certainties.

“It’s almost unheard of to see a cyclone tracking south away from the equator, weakening, then suddenly returning back to [Category] 5 so far south,” he said.

The COVID-19 pandemic has complicated disaster relief efforts, with Vanuatu reluctant to open its international borders as it seeks to remain one of the few countries without any confirmed virus cases.

“No foreign personnel are being brought to Vanuatu for response efforts at the present time, this will be an internally run operation,” the Vanuatuan National Disaster Management Office said.

Vanuatu said that any supplies that enter the country would be handled with protective equipment and that the air crews delivering them would be isolated in transit areas.

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title: Monster storm destroys Tonga tourist resorts


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Virus Outbreak: Monkeys, elephants, dogs take over India’s streets

Hundreds of monkeys have taken over the streets around India’s presidential palace, leading an animal offensive taking advantage of deserted streets as the country remains under a lockdown amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

With India’s population of 1.3 billion people and tens of millions of vehicles conspicuous by their absence, stray domestic animals and wildlife has moved to fill the void, while also suffering from the pandemic fallout.

In the financial capital, Mumbai, peacocks have been seen perched on top of parked vehicles, displaying their spectacular trains.

In Delhi, troops of monkeys now scamper over the walls of the Rashtrapati Bhawan presidential compound, past military guards and into the grounds of ministries and other official buildings.

“They are stealing a lot more, but not yet threatening humans,” one officer on duty at the palace entrance said.

The Rhesus macaque monkeys — which often snatch food from shoppers’ bags — have long been a problem in the capital, but there have been reports of some getting into office buildings during the lockdown.

Other animals have also been emboldened by the restrictions, with people only allowed out for food and essential items.

A Himalayan black bear last week wandered into Gangtok, capital of the northeastern state of Sikkim, entering a telecoms office and injuring an engineer, media reported.

Indian Forest Service officers have shared videos on social media of elephants trundling past shuttered shops along deserted streets.

However, the lockdown has also been deadly for some animals.

Four horses normally employed for tourist carriage rides near Kolkata’s Victoria Memorial have died from starvation in recent days, animal rights activists said.

About 115 horses, which make their living pulling carriages bedecked with flowers and balloons, were left to fend for themselves after the government shutdown, Love and Care for Animals spokeswoman Sushmita Roy said.

“They are becoming sick. We fear many more will die in coming days if they do not get food,” Roy said.

The owners of the carriages say they have no money for the horses after being ordered off the streets.

“We are finding it difficult to feed our family,” an owner named Sunny said. “How can we feed our horses?”

India’s army of stray cows and dogs have also found new freedom to take over intersections in cities and forage in waste bins, but even those scraps have disappeared as restaurants and shops have closed.

Aditi Badam of the Posh Foundation in Noida, outside Delhi, said shelters like hers were struggling to feed its animals and other strays during the lockdown.

Her foundation has been receiving increasing numbers of calls about abandoned dogs and other pets, which she said had become a “major issue.”

“It getting tougher day by day here,” Badam told reporters, adding that strays near the office blocks of multinational companies and outsourcing firms in the city were starving, as all had closed down.

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Virus Outbreak: Chinese stay near homes even after end of lockdown

DIFFERENT RESTRICTIONS:
 Domestic travel has been complicated by movement curbs in some areas, which could result in quarantines after travelers return home

China’s first test of travel demand after its COVID-19 outbreak was the long Tomb Sweeping Day weekend, but rather than hopping on an airplane or train, Shan Mingyu and five of her family drove to a resort town close to her eastern home of Yixing, Jiangsu Province.

“We did not want to travel too far away and we did not want to take public transport,” said the 22-year-old student, who spent about a month cooped up at home during China’s lockdown to rein in the virus.

“At the resort, we booked a villa so the whole family could stay together. We even brought a bottle of ethanol to sterilize the place,” she said.

The global tourism industry is closely watching trends in China for clues to travel patterns in other major markets once the virus is under control and curbs on movement are lifted.

Shan’s family is not alone in its caution even as China, where the pandemic originated late last year, pulls the virus situation under control, data from Ctrip, run by online travel giant Trip.com Group, showed.

Almost all visitors to China’s top-10 tourist hotspots during the holiday were locals, Ctrip said, as travelers now prefer weekend getaways of two to three days and travel agents are barred from organizing cross-province trips.

Aviation experts expect domestic travel in most markets to recover before international travel, as is happening in China.

Domestic airline capacity in China fell slightly from last week as airlines try to balance available capacity against demand, data firm OAG said.

“Those green shoots of recovery [are] proving difficult to sustain, it seems,” OAG senior analyst John Grant said in a weekly update.

Tourism revenue plunged about 80 percent during the holiday from a year earlier, with the number of travelers falling more than 60 percent, China Tourism Academy data showed.

Travel within China has also been complicated by movement curbs retained in some regions, such as the capital, Beijing, to guard against a second wave of infections from aboard.

Sherry Shen, a 29-year-old finance worker in Beijing, said that she had considered taking a camping trip with her boyfriend in the mountains of northwestern Qinghai Province after her initial hopes of a surfing vacation in the Philippines were dashed.

“But now, I can’t even get out of Beijing, because once you return, you’re most likely to be quarantined for 14 days,” she said, adding that after such a trip she also ran the risk of being denied entry to restaurants, supermarkets and malls.

“It’s suffocating,” she added.

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Highways and Byways: Bovids among the bamboo: Exploring the Longmei Area
An afternoon in this scenic area leads to encounters with a Taiwan serow and a rare bird sighting

At first, I thought it was a large dog. I expected its human owner to appear right behind it, yet no one did. The dark brown animal stood there, completely still, for several seconds.

As we began taking photos, my hiking partner whispered, “A serow on the Serow Old Trail (山羊古道). How auspicious!” Good fortune, no doubt — but neither of us got a worthwhile picture of this particular creature.

The Taiwan serow (Capricornis swinhoei) is an endemic bovid categorized by the Wildlife Conservation Act as a “rare and valuable species.” It lives throughout Taiwan’s mountainous interior, but avoids humans.

After the serow turned tail and bounded up the hill in a manner that proved it wasn’t a canine, I racked my brain, trying to think where and when I’d last spotted one in the wild. Pingtung County? The late 1990s?

The serow had good reason to regard us as intruders. To get on the path, we’d stepped over a length of yellow crime-scene tape, the kind which is often used to alert people that a path, a fence or a road has fallen victim to Taiwan’s unstable topography.

Lacking up-to-date information, Richard and I had set off up the wooden stairway beside Provincial Highway 18 — the main road connecting Chiayi City with Alishan (阿里山) — expecting to have to turn back. We left our water bottles in the car, and carried nothing but our phones.

For the past several years, Richard has worked as a birdwatching and ecotourism guide. Most of what I know about birds I’ve learned from him. But like many others in his industry, he now has a great deal of free time due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The trail was steep, and somewhat overgrown in parts, but no more scary or slippery than many others which are officially and undeniably open. We pressed on, gaining altitude, crossing patches of mixed forest, and coming across small cliffs. I was ahead of Richard, pausing to catch my breath while appreciating a grove of delicate bamboo, when the serow sauntered into view.

That encounter came soon after we’d reached the highest point on the trail, which according to one Chinese-language blog starts at a bit over 900m above sea level and ascends a total of 260m. Beyond the crest, there’s a stretch where the path was recently restored using concrete.


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Rescuing the Great Barrier Reef: How much can be saved?
As coral bleaching becomes a regular event due to global heating, scientists in Australia are seeking ways to help the world’s biggest reef survive

When coral scientist Zoe Richards left the Great Barrier Reef’s Lizard Island in late January, she was feeling optimistic.

Richards is a taxonomist. Since 2011 she has recorded and monitored 245 coral species at 14 locations around the island’s research station, about 270km north of Cairns, Australia.

In 2017, Richards saw “mass destruction of the reef.” Back-to-back mass bleaching in 2016 and 2017, and cyclones in 2014 and 2015, had wreaked havoc.

However, in January she saw thousands of new colonies of fast-growing Acropora corals that had “claimed the space” left by dead and degraded corals.

In a three-year window without spiraling heat or churning cyclones, some corals were in an adolescent bloom — not mature enough to spawn, but getting close.

“It was an incredible recovery,” said Richards, a senior research fellow at Curtin University in Perth. “But I knew if it was hit again, it would be trouble — and that’s exactly what happened.”

Mass bleaching returned to Lizard Island this year — perhaps not as badly as in previous years — but enough, Richards said, to turn the clock back on the recovery she had seen.

This summer has delivered a third mass bleaching for the reef in just five years. The back-to-back bleaching of 2016 and 2017 was mostly confined to the northern and central sections.

Data from aerial surveys is still being analyzed, but the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority has said preliminary results suggest that this year’s bleaching had a much broader footprint.

When bleaching is mild, corals can and do recover, although it can make them more susceptible to disease, but severe bleaching can kill corals.

Estimates are that the 2016 bleaching killed about 29 percent of the reef’s shallow water corals and the 2017 event took another 19 percent.

Some scientists are now concerned global heating may have reached a point where tropical reefs bleach almost every year.

What this means for the reef in the coming decades is an area of live research and debate among scientists.

CAN WE FIX IT?

Scientists the Guardian Australia spoke to say the reef’s fortunes hang on the answers to two questions.

The first is whether governments around the world will make deeper cuts to greenhouse gas emissions than they have already agreed and, if so, how close they will get to keeping global heating to 1.5?C.

A second is whether efforts to first identify and then deploy a swathe of potential measures that could reduce the impact of rising temperatures will be successful.

What seems clear is that without some human intervention, the magic of the world’s greatest coral reef system will be lost.

Peter Mumby, a professorial research fellow on coral reef ecology at the University of Queensland, is the chief scientist at the Great Barrier Reef Foundation — the once-small not-for-profit that was awarded a controversial AS$443 million (US$275.79 million at the current exchange rate) government grant in 2018.

He said this year’s bleaching “is giving us greater pause, given it seems we can see quite frequent coral bleaching events earlier than people had previously expected.”

Mumby said bleaching events have been “patchy,” and the fact that some areas have escaped “means there’s an opportunity for management.”

What keeps the reef functioning as a single ecosystem is the way each reef connects to another through the way corals reproduce. They all either spawn, or produce larvae, that can float in the water column and settle on nearby reefs.

Mumby and colleagues have identified about 100 reefs along the Great Barrier Reef that are well spread, well connected to other reefs by ocean currents and tend to experience cooler temperatures.

He said making sure those reefs stay as healthy as possible — in particular by managing outbreaks of the coral-eating crown of thorns starfish — could be crucial in keeping the wider reef viable.

The reef’s unrivalled size and diversity — almost 4,000 reefs, cays and islands stretching for more than 2,000km — gives it extra resilience, he said.

Climate change is still the reef’s biggest threat and society will need to focus on tackling it, “but there needs to be a way to adapt to how we manage reefs so that they can roll with the punches — we have to do both those things.”

The Australian Institute of Marine Sciences (AIMS) has produced an as-yet unpublished study, sent to the federal government, that reviews more than 160 different interventions that have been suggested for the reef, identifying about 40 that could be worth further study.

Lina Bay, a principal research scientist at AIMS in Cape Ferguson, Queensland, said one promising area of study is what is known as “assisted gene flow,” where the spawn of corals with better tolerance for heat could be captured and then dispersed.

“Not all corals are created equal,” she said. “Some have a higher stress tolerance than others. Over many years we’ve shown that the variation in bleaching tolerance is hereditable — it gets passed from parents to offspring.”

She said these differences can exist even among the same species, meaning those corals can be selectively grown in a lab setting to promote more heat tolerance.

AIMS scientist Neal Cantin has just finished a three-year experiment with one fast-growing coral species called Pocillopora acuta, which behaves like a weed by filling in the gaps when less hardy corals die off.

Starting with 90 parent specimens taken from three different parts of the Great Barrier Reef, Cantin and colleagues grew 7,500 offspring and then subjected them to rising levels of carbon dioxide and temperatures of up to 2°C warming. Even at high temperatures, some of these corals survived, and they were able to tolerate higher levels of heat as the experiment went on.

Having a street-fighting weedy coral like this is important, Cantin said.

Dead areas of coral reefs tend to get covered in algae, but a weedy coral that can compete with the algae can then make room for slower-growing corals to also grow, Cantin said.

“The whole goal of a lot of these interventions is to work with species that can be successful on their own. We won’t be able to work with 600 species of corals, but we could probably work with 20 that fill the functional roles of a healthy reef community,” he said.

“You can’t deny bleaching events are becoming more frequent and more severe and they’re impacting across a bigger area than before. We can just document that demise, or we can learn from it and have some corals for future generations,” he said.

That demise is clear and it happens at scale, and also in detail.

Richards has already seen evidence of likely local extinctions of some corals at Lizard Island. One is a spiralized plate coral — Acropora clathrate — that she has not been able to find for years.

“It’s these silent extinctions that go on,” she said.

“The entire reef is operating like one big meta population with sub-populations that are connected to each other. If you successively take out nodes in that population, sooner or later you will end up with parts that don’t connect. It will be fragmented into subsets that will continue to erode in terms of diversity. It’s degradation of the [coral] community at a very large scale,” she said.

BASICALLY NOTHING

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, a professor of marine science at the University of Queensland, has done pioneering work on the study of coral bleaching going back to the mid-1980s.

He remembers Lizard Island as a “picture perfect” place to do research on corals in the late 1980s, when his research there found rising temperatures caused corals to lose their “symbionts” — the algae that lives in the coral and gives them much of their nutrients and color.

The Great Barrier Reef’s first major mass bleaching event happened in 1998. There was another in 2002, and again in 2016, 2017 and this year.

“We knew there was a temperature effect, and we knew that temperatures were going up. At the end of the 90s, I could put those two things together,” Hoegh-Guldberg said.

The year after the reef’s first mass bleaching, Hoegh-Guldberg took climate models to forecast that if greenhouse gas emissions kept growing then, by this year, “the average bleaching event is likely to be similar or greater than the 1998 event.”

As this year approached, the models showed reefs across the northern, central and southern regions would see between eight and 10 bleaching events per decade.

“I wished I’d been wrong” he said. “I think I said at the time that I’d have egg on my face if I was wrong. But there’s no egg on my face.”

Hoegh-Guldberg said manually replanting corals is uneconomic at scale, but there is merit in helping the dispersal of coral larvae, pointing to a technique being developed by a scientist at Southern Cross University that captures millions of larvae in floating pools.

However, he said the main game is keeping global heating down.

“Let’s say we get to 1.5C and then we can stabilize — that’s really the last call for reefs. Corals will come back and there will be winners and losers, but you’ll have a functional reef that supports fisheries and tourism,” he said.

The problem is that right now, government pledges under the Paris agreement are enough to raise temperatures by 3°C — not 1.5°C.

“At 2C all the reef-building corals have plummeted and instead you are looking at the dominance of other organisms like algae. At 3C you basically have nothing,” Hoegh-Guldberg said.

“I’m fearful that in the next 10 years we will see the loss of coral across the planet at phenomenal rates,” he said. “That’s what keeps me up at night.”

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Virus Outbreak: PM Johnson ‘improving’ as Britain evaluates lockdown

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson spent a third night in intensive care with COVID-19 complications, but is improving and able to sit up as his government prepares to discuss how to review its most stringent shut down in the peacetime history.

Johnson, 55, was on Sunday evening admitted to London’s St Thomas’ Hospital with a persistent high temperature and cough, and was rushed to intensive care on Monday. He has received oxygen support, but has not been put on a ventilator.

“He has been sitting up in bed and been engaging positively with the clinical team,” British Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak said on Wednesday. “His condition is improving.”

British Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock arrives at 10 Downing Street in London on Wednesday.
 Photo: AFP

US President Donald Trump said that Johnson appeared to be improving after what he described as a “tough bout.”

“I just spoke with the representatives of the UK and I think that their great prime minister is doing much better today, or at least better,” Trump told reporters.

While Johnson is out of action, the country is entering what scientists have said is the deadliest phase of the outbreak and that the government is pondering the question of if and when to lift lockdown measures that have shut down much of the economy.

The government’s emergency response meeting was yesterday to discuss how it should deal with a review on lockdown measures. Johnson’s designated deputy, British Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Dominic Raab, was to chair the meeting.

Total UK hospital deaths from COVID-19 rose by a daily record of 938 to 7,097 as of 4pm on Tuesday, health officials said on Wednesday.

As the world’s fifth-largest economy faces the worst economic hit since World War II and the state has had to rapidly ramp up spending, the government said that it had expanded its overdraft with the Bank of England.

“Any drawings will be repaid as soon as possible before the end of the year,” the British Treasury and the Bank of England said.

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Soccer star Wang Shuang is finally to reunite with the China women’s national team after two months of being stranded at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan, China, state media reported.

The 25-year-old former Paris Saint-Germain midfielder is set to bolster a squad due to battle South Korea over two legs for Asia’s final qualifying berth for the Tokyo Olympic Games, which has been postponed for a year to July 2021.

Wuhan native Wang was in February pictured kicking a ball on a rooftop while on lockdown to keep up her fitness.

Linkopings’ Emma Lennartsson, left, tries to stop Paris Saint-Germain’s Wang Shuang from scoring in their UEFA Women’s Champions League round-of-16 first leg at the Linkoping Arena in Sweden on Oct. 17, 2018.
 Photo: EPA-EFE

Tens of thousands of people on Wednesday fled Wuhan when a 76-day travel ban was lifted.

Wang and two other players stranded in Wuhan, Yao Wei and Lu Yueyun, are to join the squad in Suzhou, China, to prepare for the playoff, Xinhua news agency reported, adding that the first leg has been tentatively scheduled for June 4 in South Korea.

However, the trio is first to undergo another 14 days of quarantine after arriving in Suzhou, Sina Sports said.

Wang, the undoubted star of the Chinese side, has won more than 100 caps.

She spent a year in Paris with PSG before returning to Chinese soccer in July last year.

Wang scored eight goals and contributed seven assists in 27 matches for PSG.

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title: China star Wang freed from Wuhan virus lockdown