Category: third

Major League Baseball and its players’ union began formal talks Tuesday over the most contentious issue facing the sport in its desperate, last-ditch effort to get back on the field amid an ongoing global pandemic: how to compensate players for a shortened season that will almost certainly be played without fans.

And those talks, at least from the union’s perspective, did not go well.

In a virtual meeting that lasted for about two hours, MLB’s negotiating team presented its union counterparts with its opening economic proposal ― which, notably, called for further reductions in salaries for players, with the largest cuts going to the highest-paid.

The guidelines are simple: Stay home. Avoid seeing anyone outside of your household. If you have to go out, wear a mask and stay six feet apart from others.

But over the past few months, as much of the world has adjusted to an unprecedented, stringent new set of norms, several prominent leaders centrally involved in their country’s coronavirus responses have been caught breaking the rules.

Last Friday, Dominic Cummings, top adviser to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, came under fire after British media revealed that in late March, when Britain was under lockdown, he drove 260 miles from London to Durham with his ill wife and their young son. Many have expressed outrage at his decision to travel at a time when the British government was calling on people to stay home, especially if they had coronavirus symptoms.

LONDON — Britain’s Housing Minister Robert Jenrick said Wednesday it was time to “move on” from the scandal of a top government adviser flouting coronavirus restrictions with a road trip, but so far it seems as though much of the public is not ready to.

Since news broke last weekend that Dominic Cummings, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s top aide, made a 260-mile trip to Durham with his family while infected with coronavirus, there has been increasing pressure to dismiss him.

So far Johnson has stuck by Cummings, fueling an outcry from those who say he must be held accountable for flouting rules he helped draw up.

On Wednesday morning, the BBC’s Emily Maitlis was widely hailed on Twitter for her opening speech on Tuesday’s Newsnight program, in which she raised some of the many questions that continue to swirl despite Cummings defense of his actions during a news conference on Monday.

“It is still unclear why Cummings tested his eyesight by going for a 60-mile drive with a small child,” she said, referring to his defense of a side trip to Barnard Castle with his family, ostensibly to check that his vision was functioning.

“Still unclear why the government would stake its moral authority on the insistence that what happened was fine,” Maitlis said, in an apparent summary of many people’s thoughts.

For Britons abiding by the strict lockdown rules, the actions of Cummings have been interpreted as a grave betrayal. Cummings maintains he has no regrets and did not do anything wrong.

On Tuesday, top Cabinet official Michael Gove also urged people to “move on” from the scandal and focus on more important issues, but the topic has continued to dominate the news cycle and even angered several members of Johnson’s own Conservative Party.

On Monday, Trump reinforced his own role in subtly seeding that culture war.

In perhaps his most overt effort to shun the wearing of masks, Trump retweeted a tweet from Fox News analyst Brit Hume ridiculing Joe Biden for appearing with a face mask during a Memorial Day ceremony in Delaware.

Trump’s motivation for the retweet is to suggest people don’t need to actually take this precaution — and to lift it up as a symbol of health officials’ overzealous efforts to prevent the country from returning to business as usual.

With bigoted incidents against Asian Americans on the rise across the country, New York says it will devote $100,000 to combat discrimination during the coronavirus pandemic.

The two-month, multilingual effort from the city’s Commission on Human Rights will place ads in local media, online and in retail stores to educate the public and encourage victims to report discrimination and harassment.

“This type of discrimination and harassment is not something that happens out of nowhere in a pandemic,” Carmelyn Malalis, chair of the New York City Commission on Human Rights, told ABC News. “This is based in deep-seated miseducation and racism.”

Fears of the coronavirus have fueled rising anti-Asian sentiment, both online and in person. An increase in terms such as “Chinese virus” and “kung flu,” including their use by President Trump, have conflated the pandemic with ethnic and national identity.

Since the outbreak’s early days, reports of anti-Asian discrimination and harassment to the city’s commission have soared. More than 130 such complaints were made from Feb. 1 to May 15 of this year, compared to just 11 for the same time period last year.

Still, people continue to doubt the existence of anti-Asian discrimination, Malalis said, even to her face.

“They think that signaling out an entire people for a pandemic — that’s not discrimination or racism,” she told ABC. “People have to understand that this is not something that we are making up.”

The campaign, which will include ads in Chinese, Korean, and other languages, marks the first time the commission will use WeChat, a messaging platform popular in east Asia and its diaspora in the United States.

Members of Congress representing the capital region urged the secretaries of the Defense and Interior departments May 26 to suspend plans for President Trump’s second annual July 4 military parade, which lawmakers called a “vanity project.”

They said holding the parade in the District, which has experienced one of the nation’s worst coronavirus outbreaks, contradicts public health professionals’ guidance about social distancing. Although D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) is inching closer to reopening parts of the nation’s capital and Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) and Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) have relaxed some policies, all three jurisdictions maintain stay-at-home orders, the federal lawmakers noted.

“Given the current COVID-19 crisis, we believe such an event would needlessly risk the health and safety of thousands of Americans,” they wrote in the letter. “Further, this event would come at the cost of millions of taxpayer dollars while we are facing an unprecedented economic downturn due to the pandemic.”

Last year’s “Salute to America” event attracted thousands of out-of-town visitors, and a similar event this year would compromise the safety of not only “those that live in the National Capital Region, but all those who travel in from other areas of the country to attend,” lawmakers wrote.

In response to questions about the lawmakers’ letter, White House spokesman Judd Deere wrote in an email that planning is continuing for a July 4th celebration.

“As President Trump has said, there will be an Independence Day celebration this year and it will have a different look than 2019 to ensure the health and safety of those attending,” Deere wrote. “The American people have shown tremendous courage and spirit in the fight against this global pandemic just as our forefathers did in the fight to secure our independence, and both deserve celebration on America’s birthday this year.”

SEOUL — South Korea added 40 new cases of the coronavirus on Wednesday, its highest daily caseload in nearly 50 days, as an infection cluster emerged at a logistics facility run by South Korea’s biggest e-commerce company.

At least 36 cases have been traced to an outbreak at Coupang’s logistics center in city of Bucheon near the capital, the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Wednesday.

Infection numbers from the new outbreak could grow as some 3,600 people work at the center, said Vice Health Minister Kim Gang-lip. The facility has been shuttered since Monday and workers there are being tested.

Kim said the logistics center could have failed to comply with “basic quarantine principles,” such as letting sick employees rest at home.

South Korea appeared to have contained a recent outbreak among clubgoers in Seoul’s trendy Itaewon district earlier this month as new infections from the outbreak slowed down over the recent days. The country lifted some social distancing advisories and schools started reopening in a phased manner from last week.

South Korea’s national tally of the virus is at 11,265 with a death toll of 269.

It’s not just President Trump who’s been taking it.

Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s 38-year-old head of state, said Tuesday that he, too, has been under a regimen for hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial drug controversially promoted by his U.S. counterpart as a way to ward off the coronavirus.

“I use it as a prophylaxis, President Trump uses it as a prophylaxis, most of the world’s leaders use it as a prophylaxis,” Bukele said, according to Reuters.

But as The Washington Post has reported, there is a lack of evidence that the drug can prevent infections, and physicians have warned that it can have deadly side effects.

Trump said over the weekend that he had ended his “two-week course” of the drug, though he continued to say hydroxychloroquine has received “tremendous, rave reviews.”

“I believe in it enough that I took a program because I had two people in the White House that tested positive,” he said. “And by the way, I’m still here … To the best of my knowledge, here I am.”

Earlier this week, the World Health Organization temporarily halted its global trial of the anti-malarial. A new study, the body said, found a significantly higher risk of death among those taking the drug or a closely related compound.

El Salvador has stopped promoting the anti-malarial as a treatment. But Bukele said Salvadorans could still choose to take it for preventive reasons.

First elected about a year ago, Bukele has responded to the pandemic with forceful actions that many say have shown authoritarian tendencies.

After ordering an early and aggressive quarantine, his administration released photos of mask-less inmates jammed together on prison floors. Last week, he moved to extend a national state of emergency without congressional approval.

A Pentagon watchdog who was removed last month from his position overseeing the government’s coronavirus response amid a purge of inspectors general has resigned from the Defense Department, a spokeswoman said Tuesday.

President Trump had dismissed Glenn Fine as the Defense Department’s senior inspector general and as chairman of a committee overseeing the Trump administration’s management of a massive economic stimulus package designed to blunt the impact of the coronavirus crisis.

Fine, who had returned to his prior job as the Pentagon’s principal deputy inspector general, said in a statement that “the time has come for me to step down and allow others” to step into the position. “The role of inspectors general is a strength of our system of government,” he said.

When Joe Biden emerged from his home on Monday to lay a wreath at a veterans memorial in Delaware, he was wearing a plain black face mask. A lot of people saw a dignified expression of leadership and compassion. Critics of the former vice president saw a muzzle.

No one looks particularly handsome or comely wearing a face mask. But aesthetics are not simply about whether something looks good; they aren’t defined using only a single, isolated metric. Aesthetics are a complicated mixture of context and intent, timing and personage. And by those measures, Biden looked magnificent.

North Carolina officials this week demanded a written safety plan from the organizers of the Republican National Convention, as the state’s Democratic leaders continue to clash with President Trump over the massive gathering slated for August in Charlotte.

“We’re talking about something that’s going to happen three months from now, and we don’t know what our situation is going to be,” Gov. Roy Cooper (D) said at a news conference Tuesday. “We have to have options regarding how this convention is going to be run.”

New cases of the novel coronavirus have been surging in Mecklenburg County, which includes Charlotte. Before the pandemic, Republicans estimated the convention would attract 50,000 visitors.

But on Monday, Trump threatened to move the event elsewhere if Cooper did not immediately agree to a full-capacity gathering. He repeated his complaint Tuesday, saying he needed certainty “within a week” and accusing the governor of “acting very, very slowly and very suspiciously.”

In a letter to RNC organizers on Monday, Mandy Cohen, North Carolina’s health and human services secretary, requested a written plan as soon as possible.

Although conversations were still ongoing, she said multiple event options were necessary because the “status of COVID-19 infections in our state and in the Charlotte area continues to rapidly evolve.”

As of Tuesday, Mecklenburg County had confirmed at least 3,400 infections — more than double any other county in North Carolina — and upward of 73 deaths, the Charlotte Observer reported. A third of the country’s cases were added in the past two weeks.

Asked about Trump’s tweets, Cooper said Tuesday he is “not surprised at anything that happens on Twitter.”

Republican governors in Georgia and Florida both said they would welcome the convention if plans for Charlotte fall through.

In recent weeks, Paul Redman has ended his workday by donning walking shoes and traversing the entire breadth of Longwood Gardens, the grand assemblage of conservatories, fountain terraces and gardens in the former du Pont estate in southeastern Pennsylvania.

For Redman, the botanical garden’s chief executive, the daily walks have brought home the two paradoxical realities of the past few weeks: the beauty of the Mid-Atlantic spring in a highly cultivated setting, and the total absence of visitors to soak it in.

“This is what we do. We share the beauty that we create,” he said. “It’s heartbreaking.” Of at least 600 public gardens across the United States, large and small, all but a handful have been closed since mid-March, when the coronavirus forced us to stay at home.

SAN FRANCISCO — Sabrina Wang, a D.C. commuter who used to take Uber or Lyft multiple times per week, says she can no longer fathom sharing a ride pool.

“I think it’s unimaginable at this point,” said Wang, who works in health policy but is enrolling in medical school this fall. “You don’t know how many rides that person accepted, you don’t know how often they cleaned the services … you don’t have control over your environment.”

But the 22-year-old does order meals from delivery services such as Uber Eats every couple weeks, taking care to transfer the food to her own containers and reheat it, in accordance with guidance for takeout orders. It’s “not a perfect system,” she said, but “it alleviates most of our worries.”

A third of Americans are showing signs of clinical anxiety or depression, Census Bureau data shows, the most definitive and alarming sign yet of the psychological toll exacted by the coronavirus pandemic.

When asked questions normally used to screen patients for mental health problems, 24 percent showed clinically significant symptoms of major depressive disorder and 30 percent showed symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder.

The findings suggest a huge jump from before the pandemic. For example, on one question about depressed mood, the percentage reporting such symptoms was double that found in a 2014 national survey.

The troubling statistics were released last week in a tranche of data from the Census Bureau. The agency launched an emergency weekly survey of U.S. households at the end of April to measure the pandemic’s effects on employment, housing, finances, education and health.

Buried within that 20-minute survey, U.S. officials included four questions taken nearly word-for-word from a form used by doctors to screen patients for depression and anxiety. Those answers are providing a real-time window into the country’s collective mental health after three months of fear, isolation, soaring unemployment and continuing uncertainty.

Twenty percent of U.S. teachers say they are not likely to return to their classrooms this fall if schools reopen — and most parents and educators believe that school buildings will open, according to polls published Tuesday.

The polls — one taken of K-12 teachers and the other of parents with school-age children — found that 73 percent of parents and 64 percent of teachers said they believe that children will eventually make up for learning lost because of the disruption of school during the coronavirus crisis. And 63 percent of parents and 65 percent of teachers said they believe school buildings in their areas will reopen this fall.

NEW DELHI — The flight attendants are wearing full protective gear, and some passengers face quarantines at their destinations. But for the first time in months, India’s skies are open.

The resumption of domestic flights this week is a clear signal that India is moving to end the world’s largest lockdown, an unprecedented experiment that affected more than 1.3 billion people. The restrictions caused massive job losses, widespread food insecurity and an exodus of workers from India’s cities.

Now India is bracing for what comes next. While the lockdown slowed the spread of the novel coronavirus, experts say, it did not succeed in flattening the curve. Instead, the number of fresh cases is rising. India ranks fourth in the world in the number of new cases a day: Only Russia, Brazil and the United States are adding more. India has more than 150,000 cases.

The chief watchdog for the Department of Health and Human Services, being replaced as part of President Trump’s purge of inspectors general, told lawmakers on Tuesday that freedom from political intrusion is “a key safeguard for the programs we oversee.”

Christi Grimm, HHS’s principal deputy inspector general, spoke out for the first time since she was excoriated by the president for a report from her office that found “severe shortages” earlier this spring of supplies to help hospitals cope with the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Grimm defended that inquiry and its findings, telling members of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform that it was warranted, though she said the department has since addressed some of the problems it identified.