‘Clyde’s Spot,’ a new storm on Jupiter, discovered by amateur astronomer (photos)

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‘Clyde’s Spot,’ a new storm on Jupiter, discovered by amateur astronomer (photos)

‘Clyde’s Spot,’ a new storm on Jupiter, is visible in this image in the center as a white maelstrom, just below and to right of the Great Red Spot. Citizen scientist Kevin Gill created this image using data gathered by the JunoCam instrument aboard NASA’s Juno Jupiter orbiter on June 2, 2020. (Image credit: Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS; image processing by Kevin M. Gill © CC BY)

NASA’s Jupiter-orbiting Juno probe has captured gorgeous imagery of a storm that recently cropped up on the giant planet and was spotted by an amateur astronomer.

Juno snapped a series of photos of the feature, dubbed “Clyde’s Spot” — named after its discoverer Clyde Foster of South Africa — on the morning of June 2, 2020. At the time, the probe was flying between 28,000 miles and 59,000 miles (45,000 to 95,000 kilometers) above Jupiter’s cloud tops, at latitudes ranging from 48 degrees south to 67 degrees south, NASA officials said.

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Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro Tests Positive For Coronavirus

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Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro Tests Positive For Coronavirus

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has repeatedly doubted the severity of the virus since it first found a foothold in Brazil, reportedly in late February.

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Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has repeatedly doubted the severity of the virus since it first found a foothold in Brazil, reportedly in late February.

Andressa Anholete/Getty Images

Updated at 4:54 p.m. ET

Jair Bolsonaro has tested positive for the coronavirus.

The Brazilian president, who has consistently downplayed the dangers of the virus, revealed his positive test result during nationally televised remarks Tuesday. “It came back positive,” he told reporters from behind a mask.

He is just the second major world leader, after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, to confirm he contracted the virus.

With more than 1.6 million confirmed cases as of Tuesday, Brazil is in the throes of the world’s second-largest outbreak, behind only the U.S. More than 65,000 people there have died of complications linked to COVID-19 — a towering death toll that again stands second only to that of the U.S. And because of a significant lag in testing, Brazilian researchers believe the real numbers are much, much higher than the official tallies.

Yet Bolsonaro, 65, has repeatedly doubted the severity of the virus since it first found a foothold in Brazil, reportedly in late February. A key ally of President Trump, the right-wing Brazilian leader has called the coronavirus “a little flu,” accused the media of hysteria and campaigned against the shutdowns implemented by local leaders.

“I’m sorry,” Bolsonaro said in April, after the country’s death toll reached 5,000, “but what do you want me to do about it?”

Tens of thousands of deaths later, Bolsonaro has remained firmly supportive of reopening and skeptical of social distancing, both for others and himself.

Last week, he vetoed legislation that would have mandated the use of face masks in schools, churches and businesses. During a luncheon hosted last Saturday by the U.S. ambassador in Brazil, Bolsonaro was photographed embracing his foreign affairs minister, flashing a smile and a thumbs-up.

The American ambassador, Todd Chapman, was seated on the other side of the president. Bolsonaro, Chapman and all of the other men in the image weren’t wearing masks. The embassy said Tuesday that the ambassador had tested negative but is staying at home in quarantine.

It’s not the first personal run-in with the virus for Bolsonaro, who took office in early 2019.

The Brazilian leader says he has taken several tests, all of which came back negative before Tuesday’s result. During one such scare — in March, after a trip to Florida to visit Trump — several members of Bolsonaro’s delegation tested positive.

On Sunday, Bolsonaro says, he began experiencing symptoms such as fatigue, muscle pain and fever. He revealed to reporters Monday night that he had taken a coronavirus test and was awaiting results, adding that doctors had also taken a scan of his lungs that had come back “clean.”

On Tuesday, he said his medical team is now treating him, among other things, with hydroxychloroquine, the controversial anti-malaria drug that both he and Trump have touted as a means to prevent and treat COVID-19. Trump himself even declared that he had taken the drug to ward off the virus, despite the Food and Drug Administration’s warnings against its use for that purpose.

And once more, Bolsonaro urged Brazilians not to worry about the public health crisis that has been surging across the country in recent weeks. Now suffering from the early stages of the virus himself, he maintained that there is nothing to worry about.

“The fact I’ve been infected shows I’m a human like anyone else,” he told reporters. There’s no need to panic, he added. It’s time to get back to work.

NPR’s Philip Reeves contributed to this report.



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The WHO Says Airborne Coronavirus Transmission Isn’t a Big Risk. Scientists Are Pushing Back

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The WHO Says Airborne Coronavirus Transmission Isn’t a Big Risk. Scientists Are Pushing Back

For months, the World Health Organization (WHO) has said COVID-19 spreads mainly via direct contact with large respiratory droplets, like those expelled in a sick person’s cough or sneeze. In a letter published this week in Clinical Infectious Diseases, 239 scientists say the agency may be wrong.

It’s only the latest chapter in an ongoing tug of war between the WHO and the rest of the public-health world. “This is one in a series of many miscues,” says Dr. Eric Topol, director and founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute. “It’s really unfortunate how the WHO has led to all sorts of confusion.”

The new letter, which was co-written by a WHO consultant and reviewed by experts from more than 30 countries, argues the WHO and other health authorities are not paying enough attention to airborne COVID-19 transmission—that is, infection via inhaling tiny respiratory droplets that can linger in the air.

WHO officials acknowledged that possible route of transmission at a press conference Tuesday, after the letter was published, but said it continues to collect evidence. “We have been talking about the possibility of airborne transmission and aerosol transmission as one of the modes of transmission of COVID-19,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead for COVID-19, said.

Studies of other viruses completed before the pandemic have “demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt” that droplets expelled by sick individuals can “remain aloft in air and pose a risk of exposure at distances beyond 1 to 2 [meters] from an infected individual,” the letter says. More recent research suggests the same is true of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. In some reported cases, people have gotten sick after being in the same room as an infected individual, even if they didn’t have close or sustained contact.

Think of it like cigarette smoke, says Linsey Marr, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech and one of the letter’s signatories. The cloud is most concentrated around the person smoking, but it also disperses and drifts throughout the room. Viral aerosol functions much the same way, she says.

The WHO’s COVID-19 guidance has addressed airborne spread in health care environments, since some procedures can aerosolize the virus, but stopped short of calling it a threat to the general public. A WHO spokesperson told TIME “the topic is presently being reviewed by our technical experts.”

The letter’s 239 signatories say that’s not good enough. “There’s been a lot of emphasis on hand-washing and on social distancing, but if they [the WHO] acknowledge that aerosol transmission is happening, we can have additional guidance” about things like ventilation techniques and wearing masks whenever people congregate indoors, Marr says. Even very simple guidance, like keeping doors and windows open when possible, could help, she adds.

There’s nothing to stop cities or countries from codifying these sorts of precautions on their own. But as the world’s preeminent global health authority, the WHO’s words—and silence—carry weight. If the WHO doesn’t publicly recognize risks like airborne transmission, “it just gives naysayers more fodder to deny the truth,” Topol says.

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The letter is only the latest example of the roiling tension between the WHO and the wider scientific community.

The fast-moving COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the WHO’s weak spots. For one thing, the underfunded and overburdened global health agency cannot enter countries to do fieldwork without permission, and relies on its member states to provide much of the data used in its analyses.

The WHO also moves with the slow pace and risk aversion of a bureaucratic organization, even when the world is demanding new and better information about the coronavirus every day. “The evidence for aerosol transmission is there; it’s just maybe not as compelling as they would like,” Topol says. “I call it a purist view.”

That institutional caution helps explain why it took the WHO until June 5 to recommend that people in high-transmission areas wear fabric face masks in public—a recommendation that was, by then, already standard in many countries and cities. “Every recommendation that we put out needs to be applicable for every type of situation. That’s a blessing and a curse,” Van Kerkhove told TIME when the mask guidance came out.

Topol says that bar is sometimes too high. “What do you have to lose” by recommending extra precautions, he asks. “Go with the best evidence and the best expert opinion. Maybe it’s not perfect evidence. But it’s good enough.”

Despite holding press briefings almost every day, the WHO has also stumbled when communicating with the general public. In an oft-criticized tweet from January, for example, the WHO declared that, “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus.”

To the WHO, that mean the threat of widespread human-to-human transmission—though possible—was still under investigation. To the average person, it meant human-to-human transmission wasn’t a big threat. So when it became clear that COVID-19 does pass from person to person, many people lost faith in the WHO.

For many, that feeling was compounded last month when Van Kerkhove called asymptomatic coronavirus transmission “very rare” during a press conference, despite several studies and months of expert warnings to the contrary. She later walked back the comment.

These incidents are more than communication slip-ups. Topol fears they’ll erode trust in the WHO—and in science more broadly—at the exact moment that confidence is critically important.

“WHO is a venerable institution, something that we need, that we rely on,” Topol says. “Each time one of these things happens, where there’s a serious misalignment with the truth and the science and the evidence, you wind up with another credibility titer reduction. We need to go the other direction.”

Write to Jamie Ducharme at jamie.ducharme@time.com.

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Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro tests positive for COVID-19

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Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro tests positive for COVID-19

The 65-year-old President has repeatedly played down the impact of the virus, even as Brazil has suffered one of the world’s worst outbreaks.

More than 65,000 Brazilians have so far died from COVID-19 and more than 1.5 million have been infected. Both numbers are the world’s second-highest totals, and are considered to be undercounts due to the lack of widespread testing.

The President has often appeared in public to shake hands with supporters and mingle with crowds, at times without a mask. He has said that his history as an athlete would protect him from the virus, and that it would be nothing more than a “little flu” were he to contract it.

Late on Monday, however, a video posted on YouTube showed a masked Bolsonaro trying not to get too close to supporters who awaited him in front of the presidential palace. He told them he was following social distancing orders from a doctor after showing symptoms of the virus, and added that an exam had shown his lungs were “clean.”

“I came from the hospital,” Bolsonaro said on Monday evening in comments broadcast by a pro-government YouTube channel. “But all is good,” he added.

Over the weekend, Bolsonaro attended several events and was in close contact with the US ambassador to Brazil during July 4 celebrations. Pictures of the event showed neither wearing a mask.

The US Embassy said on Twitter on Monday that Ambassador Todd Chapman was not showing any COVID-19 symptoms but would be tested.

Bolsonaro could be seen coughing during a broadcast on Thursday on his social networks, when he sat next to six other people, none of whom wore a mask. Officials who were present included Regional Development Minister Rogerio Marinho and the chief executive officer of state-owned bank Caixa Economica Federal, Pedro Guimaraes. Since then, he has also mingled with members of his administration and the general public.

Bolsonaro has repeatedly said that there is no way to prevent 70 per cent of the population falling ill with COVID-19, and that local authorities’ measures to shut down economic activity would ultimately cause more hardship than allowing the virus to run its course.

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Brazilian cities and states last month began lifting restrictions that had been imposed to control the spread of the virus, as their statistical curves of deaths began to decline along with the occupation rate of its intensive-care units.

Brazil, the world’s sixth most populous nation, with more than 210 million people, is one of the global hotspots of the pandemic.

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In the Twin Cities’ Robust Dining Scene, Few Black-Owned Businesses

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In the Twin Cities’ Robust Dining Scene, Few Black-Owned Businesses

In the wake of George Floyd’s killing, chefs and restaurateurs are looking for ways to fix the racial imbalance.

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Travel Restrictions on Americans Erode a Sense of Passport Privilege

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Travel Restrictions on Americans Erode a Sense of Passport Privilege

LONDON — Five American travelers who set out for a getaway on Sardinia were turned away last week after their private jet landed on the Mediterranean island. In Canada, two Americans were fined for flouting tougher entry restrictions imposed by their northern neighbor.

And in Mexico, governors are pleading with the central government to introduce tighter restrictions on travelers from the United States to help prevent the spread of the virus.

While coronavirus travel restrictions may vary from country to country, much of the world is united in one aspect of their current response: Travelers from the United States are not welcome.

A U.S. passport, long seen as a golden ticket to visa-free travel in much of the world, has long provided its holders with the ability to trot around the globe with ease. Now, that sense of passport privilege Americans are used to is fading.

“This is shocking, to see one of the most advanced countries in the world be put in the slow lane of the global reopening,” said Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House, the London research institution for international affairs.

Mr. Niblett said the fading power of the American passport was not surprising “given that America’s health care system is decentralized, unpredictable and unequal” and given how the virus continues to spread unabated in large portions of the country.

In a world where pandemic travel restrictions are excluding people from countries with uncontrolled coronavirus outbreaks, and where the United States continues to set daily records of new cases, the long-lauded American passport, once a symbol of power and exceptionalism, is becoming stigmatized.

Last week, when the European Union formalized a plan to restart travel from certain countries, visitors from the United States were notably left off the list, a stinging blow to American prestige. American citizens who live in countries on the approved list will be allowed to enter the European Union.

Travelers from the United States, like those blocked from the Italian island of Sardinia last week, are finding themselves unwanted.

The five Americans who had flown to Sardinia had come from Colorado, traveling with several people from other nations in a private jet to the Italian island. After five in the group were barred entry, everyone eventually left.

Dimitry Kochenov, a co-creator of The Quality of Nationality Index, which explores the benefits accorded to citizens of different countries, said the pandemic restrictions put into stark relief the restrictions that people of certain nationalities faced at international borders.

“Citizenship is the main factor behind preserving global inequalities today,” he said. “So of course the U.S. passport has always symbolized the ultimate level of this privilege.”

Mr. Kochenov, a professor of European constitutional law at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, said the Sardinia incident showed that even the large sums of money needed to fly a personal plane to Europe could not “allow them to overcome the deficiency of the U.S. passport today.”

While a U.S. passport typically allows for visa-free movement in much of the world, Mr. Kochenov noted that European Union passports outrank it in quality because they grant holders the freedom to resettle anywhere in the European Union with full rights.

Until the recent restrictions, the U.S. passport had long provided its holders with an outsize sense of freedom that was the envy of others. The restrictions that Americans now face are “something that much of the rest of the world knows very well,” Mr. Kochenov said.

Some Americans say they have been surprised by the shift in perception toward American travelers during the pandemic, expressing concerns that it could be damaging, at least symbolically.

Vincent Rajkumar, a professor of medicine in Minnesota who became a U.S. citizen 15 years ago, said he has always been in awe of how the country’s passport had opened doors that were once shut to him.

During a trip to Australia in January, he was alarmed that passengers were being questioned extensively about whether they had been to China.

“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I’m so glad I have a U.S. passport, this is never going to happen to me,’” he said. “And then in the past two months, this is dawning on me — ‘This is going to happen to us. This is happening to us.’”

ShaDonna Jackson, a photographer from Maryland who has been vocal on social media about seeking dual citizenship, said she was spurred to act in part by the new restrictions on U.S. travelers.

“The perception of the U.S. right now in terms of how safe people are with the coronavirus spreading — I see how it can be scary to other countries,” she said.

Mr. Niblett of Chatham House noted the turn of events was unsurprising after the United States issued a broad travel ban for European visitors in March, which gave implicit permission for other governments to do the same against Americans.

President Trump’s abrupt decision, which was made without consultation with European leaders and without any warning, established the climate for the current travel restrictions on the United States.

“When it’s done in that incredibly indiscriminate way, then it’s not surprising you get this counterreaction from American allies,” Mr. Niblett said, adding that Mr. Trump had “set the stage very much for this. And to be honest, it’s tragic.”

The travel restrictions reflect the eroding relationship between Europe and the United States.

Since Mr. Trump became president, the trans-Atlantic relationship is “becoming more shallow” despite the decades of cooperation after World War II, Mr. Niblett said. Diplomacy has “become more transactional” and focused on the short term.

“And Europe now feels they have a right to be equally transactional in return,” Mr. Niblett said.

But the sentiment is not coming only from Europe. American travelers to Canada who have attempted to skirt border restrictions that ban all but essential journeys have found themselves equally unwelcome. They face fines or being detained for failing to comply.

Nova Scotia’s leader expressed frustration about travelers from America trying to circumvent restrictions by coming into the Canadian province.

At the Mexican border, there has also been a stark reversal. Typically on the receiving end of border restrictions, Mexico, alarmed by the spiking infection rate in the United States, has moved to stem the flow of Americans into the country.

Mexican states set up “sanitary filters”along the border during the July 4 weekend to check visitors’ temperatures and turn away anyone whose trip was not deemed essential. Officials in Mexican border states have pushed for more aggressive steps to reduce crossings.

Mr. Kochenov pointed out that simply focusing on the erosion of freedoms for American travelers missed the bigger picture. Many countries have introduced internal travel restrictions that limit movement among regions, states or other local jurisdictions.

And most of the current restrictions are expected to be temporary. Americans may not like having their travels limited for now, but it is likely to be for the short term. Others will continue to face a tougher reality.

“The majority of the population of the world will never be able to fly to Europe no matter what,” Mr. Kochenov said, because of visa restrictions or lack of money.

“The pandemic simply demonstrates to Americans what the rest of the world has already known about the main function of nationality in the world.”

Natalie Kitroeff contributed reporting from Mexico City.

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Three Mars missions poised to launch to the Red Planet in July

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Three Mars missions poised to launch to the Red Planet in July

July is the month of Mars.

Three missions are poised to launch toward the Red Planet this month, including NASA’s car-sized Perseverance rover, which will hunt for signs of ancient Mars life and cache samples for future return to Earth.

The action will start next week, if all goes according to plan. The United Arab Emirates’ first-ever interplanetary effort, the Hope Mars mission, also known as the Emirates Mars Mission, is scheduled to launch on July 14.

Related: NASA’s Mars 2020 rover Perseverance in pictures

The Hope orbiter will reach Mars in early 2021, then use three science instruments to study the Red Planet’s atmosphere, weather and climate from above. The probe’s observations should help researchers better understand Mars’ long-ago transition from a relatively warm and wet world to the cold, desert planet we know today, mission team members have said. That transition was driven by the stripping of Mars’ once-thick atmosphere by the solar wind, the stream of charged particles flowing from the sun.

The Hope spacecraft was built by the UAE’s Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center, in partnership with the University of Colorado Boulder, Arizona State University and the University of California Berkeley. And the project is breaking ground for more than just the UAE: Hope is the first planetary science mission led by an Arab-Islamic nation.

China will follow with a landmark launch of its own a little more than a week after Hope takes flight. On July 23, China’s first-ever fully homegrown Mars mission, known as Tianwen-1, is scheduled to lift off atop a Long March 5 rocket. (China put a piggyback orbiter called Yinghuo-1 aboard Russia’s Mars mission Fobos-Grunt, which got stuck in Earth orbit shortly after its November 2011 launch.)

Tianwen-1 is an ambitious project that consists of an orbiter, a lander and a 530-lb. rover that’s the size of a small golf cart. Chinese officials have remained characteristically tight-lipped about the mission — they still haven’t publicly announced a final landing site for the lander/rover pair, for example — but these robots’ scientific gear suggests that Tianwen-1 will conduct a broad reconnaissance of the Martian environment.

The orbiter sports six instruments, including a high-resolution camera, a magnetometer and a mineral spectrometer, which will allow mission team members to determine the composition of surface rocks. The rover also has six instruments, including a weather station, a magnetic field detector and a ground-penetrating radar, which could spot subsurface water ice down to a depth of about 330 feet (100 meters).

If Tianwen-1 is successful, China will become just the third nation, after the Soviet Union and the United States, to land a spacecraft on Mars. And that epic touchdown may lead the way to even bigger things in the near future: Chinese space officials have voiced a desire to mount a Mars sample-return mission, which could perhaps launch as early as 2030.

Related: Occupy Mars: History of robotic Red Planet missions (infographic)

The United States and Europe also plan to bring pristine Red Planet material to Earth, and that project will really get up and running with Perseverance’s launch. The 2,315-lb. rover, the centerpiece of NASA’s $2.7 billion Mars 2020 mission, is scheduled to lift off atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on July 30 and land inside Mars’ Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021.

The United Launch Alliance Atlas V booster for NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover was lifted and moved into the Vertical Integration Facility at Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on May 28, 2020.Kimi Shiflett / NASA

Perseverance will use its seven onboard instruments to characterize the geology of Jezero and search for signs of ancient Mars life in the rocks of the 28-mile-wide crater, which hosted a lake and a river delta billions of years ago.

The six-wheeled robot will also collect and cache several dozen samples from particularly promising study sites. This material will be recovered and brought to Earth, perhaps as early as 2031, in a campaign conducted by NASA and the European Space Agency. Scientists in labs around the world will then scrutinize the Mars material in great detail, looking for signs of life and clues about the planet’s evolutionary history.

Mars 2020 also aims to lay groundwork for crewed missions to the Red Planet, the first of which NASA wants to launch in the 2030s. For instance, like the Tianwen-1 rover, Perseverance is outfitted with ice-hunting ground-penetrating radar. And another of the NASA rover’s instruments, the Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE), will generate oxygen from the thin Martian atmosphere, which is 95% carbon dioxide by volume. (“ISRU” stands for “in situ resource utilization.”)

MOXIE isn’t Mars 2020’s only technology demonstration. A 4-lb. helicopter called Ingenuity will journey to the Red Planet on Perseverance’s belly. After touchdown, Ingenuity will drop free and make a few short test flights in the Martian sky — the first-ever aerial exploration of a world beyond Earth.

If Ingenuity is successful, future Mars missions could commonly incorporate helicopters, NASA officials have said. Such rotorcraft could serve a variety of purposes, from scouting out promising study sites for rovers to exploring hard-to-reach areas such as caves or steep-walled craters.

Hope, Tianwen-1 and Mars 2020 all must get off the ground this summer or be put in storage for more than two years, because Earth and Mars align favorably for planetary missions just once every 26 months. And the current launch window isn’t open for very long; Mars 2020’s closes on Aug. 15, NASA officials have said. (The mission’s window originally opened on July 17, but several technical issues have pushed things back to July 30.)

One Mars mission hoping to launch this year has already been packed away until 2022. The life-hunting rover Rosalind Franklin, part of the European-Russian ExoMars program, encountered parachute problems and several other issues that could not be resolved in time for a 2020 liftoff.

Mike Wall is the author of “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

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Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro Tests Positive For Coronavirus

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Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro Tests Positive For Coronavirus

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has tested positive for the coronavirus after spending months flouting public health guidelines and dismissing the threat posed by a pandemic that has killed more than half a million people worldwide.

Bolsonaro, 65, said Monday that he had been tested for the virus and that an exam had showed his lungs were “clean.” Bolsonaro told reporters Tuesday that his test results came back positive, CNN Brazil reported.

The Brazilian president has long been dismissive of the virus even as hundreds of thousands of people in his country have tested positive. He has called COVID-19 a “little flu,” urged local governors to lift lockdown orders and continued to step out in public without any major precautions, venturing into crowds without a face covering and shaking hands with the public.

“We are sorry for all the dead, but that’s everyone’s destiny,” he said last month as cases rose dramatically.

Bolsonaro was tested at least three times for the virus in March after meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump, and all those tests came back negative. 

A Brazilian judge ordered the far-right president to wear a mask in public last month after he attended a spate of political rallies without one, even as cases surged throughout the country. At the time, the judge said no one was “above the law” and that Bolsonaro had a “clear intent to break the rules.”

More than 1.6 million people have tested positive for COVID-19 in Brazil, and at least 65,000 people have died there. Only the U.S. has more cases and more deaths.

In June, Brazil removed detailed numbers on coronavirus cases from the Health Ministry’s website, claiming without evidence that the figures had been inflated by local officials. The country’s Supreme Court ordered the data to be restored days later amid claims that Bolsonaro’s government had attempted to mask how severe the outbreak had grown in the country.

The government’s efforts to interfere with coronavirus data came even as positive tests spread through the top echelons of the Brazilian government. In March, Bolsonaro’s top press secretary tested positive for COVID-19.



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Expanded Blue Jays staff could allow for creative pitching usage early – Sportsnet.ca

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Expanded Blue Jays staff could allow for creative pitching usage early – Sportsnet.ca

When the 2020 season opens on July 23, the sport will look different in a number of subtle ways, from the safety measures, to intradivision-focused schedule, to the changes in media access.

Perhaps the biggest change, in the early going at least, will be the expanded rosters. Having the ability to call on 30 players on any given day theoretically opens up a wide swath of tactical options, testing the chops of managers around the game.

Unfortunately, in practice, the day-in and day-out chess match of baseball is unlikely to be elevated to new heights. The extra players, more than anything else, will be pitchers helping teams cover innings in the first two weeks when starters aren’t stretched out and able to deliver five or six innings per night.

There will be a few specialized position players around the league who might get an early look, but the Toronto Blue Jays aren’t brimming with exciting position players on the brink of contributing at the big-league level. The unknown availability of Brandon Drury and Jonathan Davis makes it even more likely Toronto will go with a relatively normal bench and stack up on pitching.

That doesn’t mean they can’t do something fun.

What follows, to be clear, is an idea, not a prediction. The Blue Jays have a number of directions they could go in the early going, and they haven’t been forthright about what they’re planning just yet. However, based on their strengths it might be prudent for them to explore an idea that’s at least eight years old for the franchise: piggybacking.

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The concept of using two starters per day, each in smaller 2-4 inning stints, is exceedingly difficult to implement at the major-league level. Occupying 10 roster spots with pitchers that are on a fixed schedule severely limits your options and — perhaps more importantly — starters have a strong desire to be deployed traditionally in order to maximize their earning potential.

However, early in 2020 there are more roster spots available and it might be inadvisable for starters to go more than 2-4 innings per outing early on anyway. The Blue Jays are a particularly interesting test case because they are long on starting depth with guys like Shun Yamaguchi, Ryan Borucki, Anthony Kay, T.J. Zeuch, and Jacob Waguespack sitting outside their presumed top five. On the other hand, they are short on traditional relievers they can count on, even if there are a few prospects who might have something to say about that.

The Blue Jays also have pitchers with radically different styles who could represent profound changes of pace mid-game. Not only would piggybacking prevent starters from turning over the lineup too many times, it would guarantee that opponents’ next at-bat after the first starter exited would come against someone hand-picked to give them a particularly different look.

The whole enterprise would eat up four roster spots (Hyun-Jin Ryu, as the ace and a guy seemingly fixated on a particular routine, would go without) perfectly filling in the extra spots the early-season expansion calls for, while allowing the Blue Jays to carry a conventional bench and bullpen.

Before we dive into what it would look like, it’s important to note this setup is based on the possibly-cynical assumption that Nate Pearson is not on the active roster out of the gate. If he is, he could slot into the fifth spot of the rotation causing Trent Thornton to partner with Chase Anderson and T.J. Zeuch to lose the game of musical chairs.

Spot No. 1

Starter: Hyun-Jin Ryu

Partner: N/A

Rationale: As stated above, Ryu is on the particular side when it comes to his routines. That’s a feature not a bug, and one he shares with many great pitchers. As such, the Blue Jays would be wise to make his pitching environment as “normal” as possible. That means following him with a parade of traditional relievers.

On pure stylistic terms, the most exciting match for Ryu — a soft-tossing southpaw with an elite changeup — would be the fireballing righty Pearson, but that’s not a realistic scenario. Whenever the big right-hander makes his debut it will come in the first inning as the Blue Jays groom him to be a top-of-the-rotation presence.

Spot No. 2

Starter: Tanner Roark

Partner: Shun Yamaguchi

Rationale: There’s nothing particularly unusual about Roark’s arsenal or the way he deploys it. The veteran throws four-seam and two-seam fastballs at approximately 92 m.p.h. approximately 55 per cent of the time with a slider as his primary breaking ball. He mixes in a curve and changeup approximately 10 per cent of the time as well and neither is outstanding — although the curveball has potential thanks to a high spin rate. What all that means is that it’s hard to find a polar opposite for him because there’s nothing extreme about what he does.

Yamaguchi gets the nod here because he’s probably the most unusual of the Blue Jays’ depth starters. Unlike Roark he throws his 90-m.p.h. fastball significantly less than half the time (43.7 per cent in NPB action last year, according to Deltagraphs) and his go-to out pitch is a splitter instead of a breaking ball. Theoretically, Yamaguchi would be best paired with someone who throws their fastball hard and frequently, but Roark is the closest thing the Blue Jays have to that in a top-five that relies heavily on secondary offerings.

Spot No. 3

Starter: Matt Shoemaker

Partner: Anthony Kay

Rationale: Shoemaker and Kay are probably the best match of this bunch starting with the simple fact that the veteran is a righty while the youngster is a southpaw. It goes far deeper, though.

Shoemaker’s fastball is low-velocity (16th percentile) and low-spin (18th percentile) and he throws it less than half the time, while Kay is above average on both counts (56th percentile and 59th percentile, respectively) — albeit by a slim margin — and he leant on it 62 per cent of time in his MLB cameo last year. Shoemaker’s best pitch is his splitter and he mixes in curveballs just two per cent of the time. As for Kay, his swing-and-miss offering is a slow curve.

There’s nothing similar about what the two are featuring, which makes them ideal partners.

Spot No. 4

Starter: Chase Anderson

Partner: T.J. Zeuch

Rationale: There’s an argument to be made that Waguespack is a better pitcher than Zeuch at this point, but the latter gets the nod here because he has a clear style that contrasts Anderson. The veteran relies on his four-seam fastball and changeup to force soft contact — specifically forcing weak flyballs and pop ups. Thanks to that approach, he’s always been excellent at handling left-handed hitters, but the lack of a top-notch breaking ball causes him to struggle against righties.

In contrast, Zeuch is a two-seam fastball and slider specialist, whose concerns have always been with opposite-handed hitters. When he’s pitching well he’s keeping the ball low in the zone — and as a result, on the ground. It would be unfair to expect a major step forward from Zeuch until he’s able to miss more bats (his K/9 at Triple-A was just 4.5) but having him follow Anderson in a shortened outing could bring the best out of him.

Spot No. 5

Starter: Trent Thornton

Partner: Ryan Borucki

Rationale: From a big-picture perspective, these two are actually rather similar. Both 26-year-olds were relatively unheralded prospects who posted solid rookie seasons with caveats. It’s still unclear if Borucki can stay healthy or miss enough bats to be a consistent starter. Thornton still hasn’t definitively proven he’s not a reliever, and his sky-high flyball rate from 2019 opens up questions about his ability to keep the ball in the yard.

In terms of repertoires, they differ significantly, though, beyond just the handedness disparity. Thornton relies on high-spin fastball and breaking ball to miss bats while Borucki’s success comes from a sinker-changeup combo that allows him to manage hard contact. Thornton’s most impressive pitch movement is vertical: the ride on his fastball and the drop on his curve. Borucki’s is horizontal as the arm-side run on his sinker and changeup are both above-average.



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For Cross-Border Couples, Plans to Reunite Are Still On Hold

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For Cross-Border Couples, Plans to Reunite Are Still On Hold

“Flights are expensive right now, but when we heard the closure got extended to July, we decided to spend the money on a ticket for L.P. to visit because we couldn’t hold out much longer,” said Ms. Pales, 37, who met Mr. Morand, 36, who she calls L.P., last year on a business trip to Montreal. They work in different cities for the same company, PPG Architectural Coatings. “We hadn’t seen each other for 107 days.”

Their visit in June, though, has not untangled the knottier issue of how they can move forward with their plan to combine their families, and their lives, in Montreal. “We’ll be a blended family of six,” Ms. Pales said; both have two children from previous marriages. In March, days before the first of the pandemic-related shutdowns, they bought a house together in Montreal. Now Ms. Pales and her children are back home in Pittsburgh, their lives on hold. “For the first couple of months, we thought the closure would be short. Now it feels like there’s no end in sight. It’s been devastating.”

They are not without hope. Whether the border reopens on July 21 or not, they plan to be married July 25. “I’m going to pack up my two kids and my dog and drive up with all my documents,” including their banns Quebec’s required public announcement of an impending marriage. “If I’m turned away at the border, we’ll find a way to get him here and get married in Pennsylvania.”

Peter Matta of Milton, Ontario, and his fiancée, Maryann Bishay of Troy, Mich., do not have a Plan B if their Nov. 1 wedding in Troy falls through, which he worries is increasingly likely.

“At this rate, with the extensions, I’m concerned the border still won’t be open,” Mr. Matta said. “We’re hoping for it, and also hoping we can reunite beforehand, since getting married without having seen each other for eight months is a terrible thought.”

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