Trump Willing To Sacrifice ‘Greatest Generation’ To COVID-19 In GOP Group Ad

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Trump Willing To Sacrifice ‘Greatest Generation’ To COVID-19 In GOP Group Ad

A writer on the “Band of Brothers” wartime miniseries is behind a new political ad accusing the Trump White House of being willing to sacrifice the generation of Americans who fought in WWII to the coronavirus for the sake of the economy.

“Haven’t we asked enough of the Greatest Generation?” the narrator asks at the end of screenwriter John Orloff’s 60-second spot for the anti-Trump Lincoln Project that it released at the weekend.

“I watched the Trump administration — and its enablers — argue that they were quite willing to sacrifice the health and lives of our senior citizens, I was — and still am — shocked that this was an actual, real rationalization they were making,” Orloff told Mediaite.

“It seemed to me that we needed to be reminded exactly who these ‘old people’ are that some of us are so quick to sacrifice,” he said.

A HuffPost Guide To Coronavirus



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‘Athlete A’ exposes the ‘cruelty’ of the elite gymnastics machine – The Mail & Guardian

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‘Athlete A’ exposes the ‘cruelty’ of the elite gymnastics machine – The Mail & Guardian

It’s been two years since a group of American gymnasts faced down the person who tried to break them. In 2018, Larry Nassar was finally sentenced to 40 to 125 years in federal prison for sexual assault.

Nassar’s sentencing followed a series of articles exposing his crimes — some of them going as far back as the 1990s — that tore through the lives of his 500 accusers.

But in the Netflix documentary, Athlete A, Nassar isn’t the only evil. There is still the corrupt system that fed those athletes to Nassar and to others — the world of elite gymnastics.

Athlete A’s take on the USA Gymnastics scandal asks: what goes into making an institution that sacrifices its young?

In the documentary, Jamie Dantzscher recalls the abuse she endured in her journey to the Olympics. For most of her teens, she was subjected to a gruelling training regime, being told by her trainers she was too fat and competing with broken toes and a fractured back. Her injuries, she says, were rarely acknowledged; her pain ignored.

“Anything they said it would take to get to the Olympics, I was going to do … Back then I didn’t think of it as abuse,” Dantzscher says.

These conditions made Nassar, the USA Gymnastics national team doctor at the time, seem kind by comparison. For Dantzsher, he was “the only nice adult”.

As a competitive sport that relies on absolute perfection, gymnastics asks its athletes not only to fight through their pain, but to grin through it too. And this culture of silence is beaten into elite gymnasts when they are still young.

Jennifer Sey, the USA Gymnastics 1986 national champion, delivers the most searing assessment of the elite gymnastics system in the United States: “We love winners in this country. This is a competitive country … But this notion that we would sacrifice our young to win, I think disgusts us a little.”

She says “the standard methodology of coaching in elite gymnastics was cruelty”.

“That was the accepted methodology. You could be as cruel as you needed to be to get what you needed out of your athlete.”

This approach was shaped by a history that required the US to compete on the same level as its strongest competitors in the Soviet Bloc.

Márta and Béla Károlyi, the husband and wife duo who went on to coach numerous US Olympic teams, rose professionally under the repressive regime of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu.

In Romania, gymnasts were subjected to strict training from as young as six years old. At the time, this system was new. The Károlyis coached Nadia Comăneci who won gold at the Olympics in 1976 at only 14 years old.

Geza Pozsar, a choreographer for the Károlyis, says that, in the context of the Cold War, “Nadia was Romania’s best product.”

When Comăneci won, the face of elite gymnastics changed forever. The bodies of the grown women who had previously competed in the sport were suddenly deemed inadequate.

This, Sey says, created a “really dangerous environment”, in which disordered eating was the norm. “I think people really believed that, for the more difficult skills to be performed, you had to be tiny. There’s also the benefit of the coaches having more control when the girls are younger.”

The image of the youthful gymnast, fearlessly flinging herself through the air and achieving the impossible before she can vote, became central to the marketing strategy deployed by USA Gymnastics — which raked in millions of dollars a year.

Here enters Steve Penny, initially hired as vice-president of marketing for the entity and who climbed all the way to the top of USA Gymnastics.

In 2018, Penny was arrested on a felony charge of evidence tampering in the investigation into Nassar. He is alleged to have known about and covered up the sexual abuse by Nassar, which would have shattered the wholesome image of USA Gymnastics that advertisers bought into.

As the custodian of young girls’ dreams, Penny wielded the ultimate power over them.

After Maggie Nichols complained about Nassar, the athlete that was already being set up for Olympic glory was mysteriously left off the 2016 team. Nichols was long identified only as “Athlete A”.

The last scene of Athlete A shows Nichols now, having rekindled her love for the sport, and still competing at college level. She celebrates her wins, free from the joyless system she once endured.



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Thom Tillis Grew Up In A Mobile Home, Then He Hiked Taxes On Them

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Thom Tillis Grew Up In A Mobile Home, Then He Hiked Taxes On Them

Republican Sen. Thom Tillis’s first ad of the general election struck familiar tones for a politician aiming to reintroduce himself to the electorate. The ad, which depicts a young family moving into a mobile home, is meant to play up Tillis’s working-class roots as unemployment skyrockets due to the coronavirus pandemic. 

“Rental houses in Louisiana, trailer parks in Florida and Tennessee. We moved seven times before I was 16, living paycheck to paycheck,” Tillis says in the 30-second ad, which ran for most of June. “We will build this economy back, and I’ll remember who needs it the most.” 

In the ad, titled “Humble,” Tillis says he grew up with “strong parents and humble people in humble places.” 

But a new digital ad from Cal Cunningham, the former military prosecutor and state senator who won the Democratic nomination to challenge Tillis, notes the Republican, when he was serving as speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives in 2013, voted to hike taxes on mobile home buyers like the ones he grew up with. 

That year, as part of a tax reform law that cut corporate and income taxes that passed mostly along party lines, Tillis voted to scrap a $600 cap on the sales tax a mobile home buyer would need to pay, and to double the sales tax rate on mobile homes from 2% to 4.75%.

At the time, mobile home sellers in North Carolina said that a typical four-bedroom, double-wide home would cost about $80,000. Before the Tillis-supported law, a buyer would pay $600 in taxes. After the law went into effect, they would pay $3,800. At the time, mobile home dealers told local media outlets, the law would hurt their mostly low-income customers.

“When Thom Tillis got elected, he hiked taxes on mobile homes and gave billions in tax breaks to his corporate donors,” a male narrator says in Cunningham’s ad. “So when he says he’s one of us, remember Tillis works for them now.” 

Later in 2014, Tillis also supported a law to exempt 50% of a mobile home’s purchase price from sales taxes. But the net effect still caused taxes on most new mobile homes to increase. 

In a statement, Tillis spokesman Andrew Romeo said the Republican would be happy to compare his record on taxes to Cunningham’s.

“Senator Tillis cut taxes both as Speaker and in the Senate, while Cal Cunningham voted to raise taxes when he was in the state Senate and would do so again in Washington,” Romeo said. “There’s only one candidate in this race that’s consistently fought for pro-jobs policies that put more money into the pockets of hardworking North Carolinians and that’s Senator Tillis.” 

The issue isn’t academic in North Carolina. At the time of the law’s passage, census data indicated the state had nearly 600,000 mobile homes, which made up 13.5% of available housing, the fifth-highest percentage of any state in the country. 

Public surveys indicate Cunningham and Tillis are in a tight race. Republicans hold a 53-47 edge in the Senate, and a win for Cunningham is considered a necessity if Democrats hope to overtake the upper chamber’s Republican majority. 



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Universities and Tech Giants Back National Cloud Computing Project

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Universities and Tech Giants Back National Cloud Computing Project

Leading universities and major technology companies agreed on Tuesday to back a new project intended to give academics and other scientists access to the computing resources now available mainly to a few tech giants.

The initiative, the National Research Cloud, has received bipartisan support in both the House and the Senate. Lawmakers in both houses have proposed bills that would create a task force of government science leaders, academics and industry representatives to outline a plan to create and fund a national research cloud.

This program would give academic scientists access to the cloud data centers of the tech giants, and to public data sets for research.

Several universities, including Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and Ohio State, and tech companies including Google, Amazon and IBM backed the idea as well on Tuesday. The organizations declared their support for the creation of a research cloud and their willingness to participate in the project.

The research cloud, though a conceptual blueprint at this stage, is another sign of the largely effective campaign by universities and tech companies to persuade the American government to increase government backing for research into artificial intelligence. The Trump administration, while cutting research elsewhere, has proposed doubling federal spending on A.I. research by 2022.

Fueling the increased government backing is the recognition that A.I. technology is essential to national security and economic competitiveness. The national cloud legislation will be proposed as an amendment to this year’s defense budget authorization.

“We have a real challenge in our country from China in terms of what they are doing with A.I.,” said Representative Anna G. Eshoo, Democrat of California, a sponsor of the bill.

Funding for the project, the terms for paying the cloud providers and what data might be available would be up to the task force and Congress.

“This is a logical first step,” said Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, another sponsor of the proposed law. “The task force is going to have to grapple with how you pay for it and how you govern it. But you shouldn’t have to work at Google to have access to this technology.”

The national research cloud would address a problem that is a byproduct of impressive progress in recent years. The striking gains made in tasks like language understanding, computer vision, game playing and common-sense reasoning have been attained thanks to a branch of A.I. called deep learning.

That technology increasingly requires immense computing firepower. A report last year from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, working with data from OpenAI, another artificial intelligence lab, observed that the volume of calculations needed to be a leader in advanced A.I. had soared an estimated 300,000 times in the previous six years. The cost of training deep learning models, cycling endlessly through troves of data, can be millions of dollars.

The cost and need for vast computing resources are putting some cutting-edge A.I. research beyond the reach of academics. Only the tech giants like Google, Amazon and Microsoft can spend billions a year on data centers that are often the size of a football field, housing rack upon rack with hundreds of thousands of computers.

So there has been a brain drain of computer scientists from universities to the big tech companies, lured by access to their cloud data centers as well as lucrative pay packages. The worry is that academic research — the seed corn of future breakthroughs — is being shortchanged.

Academic work can be crucial particularly in areas where profits are not on the immediate horizon. That was the story with deep learning, which dates to the 1980s. A small band of academics nurtured the field for years. Only since 2012, with enough computing power and data, did deep learning really take off.

There have been smaller efforts for university research to tap into the big tech clouds. But the current concept of an ambitious public-private partnership for a National Research Cloud came in March from John Etchemendy and Fei-Fei Li, co-directors of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

They posted their idea online and sought support from other universities. The academics then promoted the idea to their political representatives and industry contacts.

The federal government has long backed major research projects like particle accelerators for high-energy physics in the 1960s and supercomputing centers in the 1980s.

But in the past, the government built the labs and facilities. The research cloud would use the cloud factories of the tech companies. Academic scientists would be government-subsidized customers of the tech giants, perhaps at rates below those charged to their business customers.

Many university researchers say that buying rather than building is the only sensible path, given the daunting cost of hyper-scale data centers.

“We need to get scientific research on the public cloud,” said Ed Lazowska, a professor at the University of Washington. “We have to hitch ourselves to that wagon. It’s the only way to keep up.”

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Here’s what we’ve learned in six months of COVID-19 — and what we still don’t know

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Here’s what we’ve learned in six months of COVID-19 — and what we still don’t know

Just six months ago, the World Health Organization got a troubling report from Chinese health officials. A mystery pneumonia had sickened dozens of people in Wuhan. That virus, which had crossed from an unknown animal host to humans, has now upended lives worldwide with head-spinning speed.

Although virologists had long warned of the pandemic potential of some coronaviruses circulating in bats in China, the virus launched a shock-and-awe attack that researchers and public health workers are still scrambling to understand and control (SN: 11/30/17). That attack has upset everything from day-to-day life to entire economies, and turned the routine — going to school, popping into a restaurant, hanging out with friends — risky. The world today is a far different place than when the first reports of an odd pneumonia in Wuhan, China, made the news.

Now countries have begun to reopen, with fingers crossed that they have a handle on the virus, called SARS-CoV-2. Many are quickly learning that they can’t let down their guard. Officials in Beijing, for instance, reinstated a limited lockdown June 13 in the area around Xinfandi market in response to a cluster of COVID-19 cases. And after New Zealand eradicated the virus and lifted restrictions on June 8, officials confirmed two new cases on June 15 in infected travelers from the United Kingdom.

Other countries never got their outbreaks under enough control in the first place. For instance, while the increase in COVID-19 cases in parts of the United States has ebbed, the number of infections in other places largely spared in the spring, including Texas, Florida and Arizona, is now spiking.

With unprecedented efforts to study the virus and its impacts, scientists have learned an extraordinary amount in an extraordinarily short period of time and overturned some early assumptions. In the beginning, public health officials made recommendations on how the virus might behave and how best to protect oneself from it based on past experiences with two of the pathogen’s close relatives — severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus, or SARS-CoV, and Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome coronavirus, or MERS-CoV. But some of those initial assumptions turned out to be wrong, and there’s still much that researchers need to figure out. 

What a difference six months makes

Here is a look at how scientists’ understanding of the virus has evolved in the six months since its discovery. 

Then

In the first days of the pandemic, Chinese officials reported that the new coronavirus doesn’t easily transmit from person to person. 

Then

Coronaviruses like SARS and MERS tend to infect deep in the lungs, so the new coronavirus is probably spread mainly by people with symptoms, such as a cough, or during such medical procedures as being intubated.

Now

In addition to lung cells, SARS-CoV-2 can also infect cells in the nose, which may explain how people can transmit it to others before feeling sick. Talking or breathing may be enough to spread the virus.

Then

The earliest signs of illness include fever, shortness of breath or cough, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention listed in January.

Now

A wider range of symptoms, including fatigue, diarrhea and body aches, can suggest a person has COVID-19. One of the clearest signs may be loss of smell and taste.

Then

Older people above age 65 are at highest risk for developing severe disease.

Now

Age is still a risk factor for severe symptoms, but underlying conditions like high blood pressure, obesity and diabetes also boost risk. Racial disparities have also come to light. In the United States, Black, Indigenous and Hispanic people are getting infected or dying at higher rates than white people.

Then

Children are largely spared from the disease.

Now

This is still true relative to other age groups, though researchers aren’t sure why. But low risk doesn’t mean no risk. Some children can develop a dangerous inflammatory condition linked to COVID-19.

Now

With social distancing and contact tracing, many places, including China, South Korea and New Zealand, have brought the infection rate from two to three down to below one. But in certain regions, including India, Latin America and parts of the United States, people may still be passing the virus on to more than one other person. And without stringent public health measures in place, large gatherings have led to clusters of infections.

Then

Of people who test positive for the virus, around 4 percent die. 

Now

Death rates vary due to in part to differences in testing among countries. (For example, if only people with severe disease get tested that might inflate the case fatality rate.) Pinpointing a global rate won’t be clear until the end of the pandemic. But antibody testing has allowed scientists to estimate that the infection fatality rate — a measure that includes people who were not tested, perhaps because they had mild or no symptoms — may be around 0.6 percent in some places.

Then

Only sick people should wear masks, according to guidance from WHO and the CDC.

Now

With data showing asymptomatic people can spread the virus, both agencies now recommend that all people wear masks in public. The effectiveness of fabric masks was in question early on, but studies now suggest that these masks can help curb transmission of the virus — if most people wear them.

Then

There are no treatments for infected people and no vaccines to curb the virus’ spread. 

Now

After a rapid push to test existing drugs against the new coronavirus, some have shown promise, while others fell out of the running. Remdesivir may speed recovery in sick patients. Dexamethasone may reduce the risk of death. The malaria drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine have shown no benefit for infected people. More than 150 coronavirus vaccines are in development, with 20 in clinical trials in people. 

So what don’t we know yet?

Six months is an incredibly short time to have learned as much as researchers have about a new virus. But there’s still much to learn. Some questions simply take time to answer. 

For example, it’s still unclear why the new virus is so much more contagious than its SARS and MERS relatives — each of which have infected fewer than 1,000 people. It’s also unknown how often asymptomatic people spread the virus (SN: 6/9/20).

Some scientists continue to probe how the virus gets in and out of cells and what types of cells it can infect, from lung cells to those in the intestine. Others are on the hunt for what animal the virus jumped into people from, which can help scientists understand how the virus made the jump and guide policies to monitor those animals for related coronaviruses.

In terms of the disease itself, researchers still don’t know how many virus particles a person must be exposed to in order to get sick, or why some people become severely ill and others don’t. Some patients — even those with milder symptoms — may still have long-term health problems after they recover (SN: 4/27/20). And although people who recover appear to make antibodies that protect against a reinfection with the virus, only time will tell how long that immune protection might last. Answers to these and other questions are crucial to those planning how to safely reopen businesses and schools.

One thing scientists do know is that the coronavirus isn’t going away any time soon, if ever. It will take herd immunity, when at least two-thirds of a population has immunity against the virus either because they have been infected or there is a vaccine, to finally begin to curb the pandemic. Both of those goalposts are still far off for now, though some have said there could be a vaccine by the end of the year. As we head into the next six months, researchers will keep learning new things about the virus as quickly as possible. And so the sprint becomes a marathon.

Tina Hesman Saey contributed to this story.

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Cyber security funding splash needs to cover more ground, industry says

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Cyber security funding splash needs to cover more ground, industry says

Susie Jones, founder of cyber security startup Cynch Security, questioned how the government’s cash splash would prevent small businesses from clicking on a malicious link.

“This is all about very technical solutions and the government needs to invest in a broad campaign to help people understand how they put their own business and person at risk by not taking security seriously.”

Susie Jones, founder of Cynch Security, said the government needs to include small businesses. Credit:Justin McManus

Meanwhile, Pieter Danhieux, co-founder and CEO of cyber security startup Secure Code Warrior, said there was an opportunity for private companies and government to work together on the cyber threat-sharing platform and startups needed to be included in Australia’s cyber security response.

“I am hoping that money won’t all go to the foreign multinationals and will flow to the Australian startup community and Australian companies.” “It is an opportunity for startups to start building technology.”

He added that Australia’s response needed to include upskilling and training people in cyber security. Growth network AustCyber has indicated Australia needs an extra 17,600 cyber security professionals by 2026.

Professor Matt Warren, director of the RMIT University Centre for Cyber Security Research and Innovation said the announced funding doesn’t do enough to address skill shortages.

“The problem is that government is in competition with Australian industry to recruit these professionals. Australia needs to develop its cyber security workforce from a sovereignty perspective in order to safeguard and protect Australia into the future,” he said.

“In order to promote cyber security as a profession, the Commonwealth should either make scholarships available for students to study cyber security, or reduce the cost of cyber security courses.”

Cyber security startups have reported an increase in online attacks during the coronavirus pandemic with high profile businesses hit including beverage giant Lion and miner Bluescope.

“The reality is cyber criminals take advantage of a crisis,” Ms Jones said.

Research published on Tuesday by IBM and the Ponemon Institute shows businesses are struggling to implement effective cyber security plans amid fast-moving attacks and a proliferation of complex security tools.

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The annual Cyber Resilient Organisation Report indicates there has been a 44 per cent growth since 2015 in the number of organisations with incident response plans, but that over those same five years organisations’ ability to contain an attack has declined by 13 per cent.

“Complexity is slowing them down,” IBM Security’s Australian CTO Chris Hockings said. “With the continued adoption of cloud environments, and just the proliferation of security products. They have up to 45 different security tools, on average.”

On the contrary, adversaries were only getting more agile.

“Attackers are not constrained by existing IT solutions that they need to remain available for business continuity,” Mr Hockings said. “They’re uninhibited in terms of their ability to consume new innovation more quickly.”

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Global markets post best quarter in a decade as China’s factories strengthen – business live

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Global markets post best quarter in a decade as China’s factories strengthen – business live






An employee works on production line for wind turbines at a plant of China Construction Equipment and Engineering in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province of China. Photograph: VCG/Getty Images

Good morning, and welcome to our rolling coverage of the world economy, the financial markets, the eurozone and business.

Some upbeat economic news from China is cheering investors on the final day of June, boosting optimism that the world economy is turning the corner.

China’s factories grew at a slightly faster pace this month, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics. Its Purchasing Manager’s Index has risen to 50.9 from 50.4 in May (anything over 50 indicates growth).

It’s the fourth month of (modest) growth in a row, as China emerged from the lockdown imposed to curb the spread of Covid-19 in January and February.

Chinese manufacturers reported that supply and demand are starting to pick up, leading to more new orders. However, new export orders are still down, meaning factories are still shedding jobs.

In a statement, NBS official Zhao Qinghe said there was still much uncertainty about the economic outlook, with small Chinese companies finding conditions particularly tough.

Tom Orlik
(@TomOrlik)

China PMI comes in at 50.9 in June.

That’s a positive reading, but only just.

Based on the PMI’s, China’s recovery is steady but unspectacular. pic.twitter.com/tGU4t8PQfV


June 30, 2020

Services companies also strengthened, with the official non-manufacturing PMI rising to 54.4 in June from 53.6 in May. That’s the best reading of the year.

Julian Evans-Pritchard, senior China economist at Capital Economics, explain:


“The latest survey data suggest that economic growth accelerated in June thanks to a faster recovery in manufacturing and services, alongside continued strength in construction activity,

The recovery should remain robust in the coming months as strong infrastructure spending offsets external weakness.”

MacroMarketsDaily
(@macro_daily)

ICYMI: There were further modest signs of recovery in China this month, with the official NBS non-manufacturing PMI rising to a 7-month high of 54.4 in June, while the manufacturing PMI edged higher to 50.9 pic.twitter.com/MZoBNNUd3Q


June 30, 2020

Following an unexpected surge in US home sales on Monday, this may bolster hopes that the world economy may be gingerly emerging from the coronavirus slump.

European stock markets are expected to rise a little this morning, at the end of one of the strongest quarters in decades.

By my reckoning, the FTSE 100 has gained almost 10% since the start of April – its best quarter since 2010. Europe’s Stoxx 600 has rallied by over 12% during the quarter – the best since 2015, while Wall Street has enjoyed its strongest gains since 1998.

Astonishing, really, given the world is still gripped by the Covid-19 pandemic. Clearly the unprecedented stimulus from central banks has reassured investors, even though a V-shaped recovery looks rather unlikely.

And most markets are still deep in the red for the year, due to the crash in February and March.

IGSquawk
(@IGSquawk)

European Opening Calls:#FTSE 6235 +0.15%#DAX 12271 +0.32%#CAC 4959 +0.26%#AEX 562 +0.38%#MIB 19477 +0.15%#IBEX 7288 +0.13%#OMX 1676 +0.27%#STOXX 3238 +0.19%#IGOpeningCall


June 30, 2020

The agenda

  • 10am BST: Eurozone core inflation for June – expected to remain at 0.8%
  • 11am BST: Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane speaks about the economic impact of Covid-19
  • 1.30pm BST: Canadian GDP for April – expected to shrink by 13
  • 2pm BST: S&P/Case-Shiller index of US home prices
  • 5.30pm BST: US treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin and Fed chair Jay Powell appear before Congressional committee on financial services



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Scientists Say New Strain of Swine Flu Virus Is Spreading to Humans in China

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Scientists Say New Strain of Swine Flu Virus Is Spreading to Humans in China

HONG KONG — A new strain of the H1N1 swine flu virus is spreading silently in workers on pig farms in China and should be “urgently” controlled to avoid another pandemic, a team of scientists says in a new study.

H1N1 is highly transmissible and spread around the world in 2009, killing about 285,000 people and morphing into seasonal flu.

The newer strain, known as G4 EA H1N1, has been common on China’s pig farms since 2016 and replicates efficiently in human airways, according to the study published on Monday. So far, it has infected some people without causing disease, but health experts fear that could change without warning.

“G4 viruses have all the essential hallmarks of a candidate pandemic virus,” the study said, adding that controlling the spread in pigs and closely monitoring human populations “should be urgently implemented.”

The study, published online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is based on the surveillance of pigs in 10 Chinese provinces from 2011 to 2018. In the last three years of the study, researchers collected 338 blood samples from workers on 15 pig farms and 230 from people in nearby households.

The study found that 10.4 percent of the workers and 4.4 percent of the others tested positive for G4 EA H1N1, and that workers between the ages of 18 and 35 tested positive at a higher rate: 20.5 percent.

Predicting risk is not a precise science, but close attention to the virus would be advisable, said Ian H. Brown, the head of the virology department at Britain’s Animal and Plant Health Agency and one of two scientists who reviewed the paper before it was published.

“It may be that with further change in the virus it could become more aggressive in people much as SARS-CoV-2 has done,” Dr. Brown said in an email on Tuesday, referring to the new coronavirus.

The study was sent for review in early December, weeks before the coronavirus outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan began making global headlines.

Li-Min Huang, director of the Division of ​Pediatric Infectious Disease​s at National Taiwan University Hospital, said that a crucial next step would be finding out whether any of the infected workers at the pig farms had contracted the virus from humans, as well as whether any had spread the virus to their families.

“It’s a very important study, and the virus looks quite dangerous,” Dr. Huang said. “We need to be worried about any disease with the potential to spread human to human.”

Eurasian variations of H1N1 have been circulating in pigs in Europe and Asia for decades, the study said, but the incidence of G4 viruses in farmed Chinese pigs with respiratory symptoms began rising sharply after 2014.

Recent evidence “indicates that G4 EA H1N1 virus is a growing problem in pig farms, and the widespread circulation of G4 viruses in pigs inevitably increases their exposure to humans,” it said.

The study was a collaboration among government agencies in China, including the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as the World Health Organization, scientists from several universities in China and the University of Nottingham in Britain. Dr. Brown teaches at the University of Nottingham but was not involved in the research.

The H1N1 virus that caused a pandemic in 2009 had a relatively low fatality rate, estimated at 0.02 percent. By contrast, the fatality rate of the 1918 flu pandemic was about 2.5 percent of its victims. But that virus killed an estimated 50 million, perhaps more, because it infected so many people and spread at a time when medical care was cruder.

Determining the fatality rate of the new coronavirus is a key question for epidemiologists, but one they may not be able to answer until the pandemic has ended.

Cao Li contributed reporting.

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Swara Bhasker comes to the defense of Karan Johar, Alia Bhatt after Sushant Singh’s death

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Swara Bhasker comes to the defense of Karan Johar, Alia Bhatt after Sushant Singh’s death

Swara Bhasker comes to the defense of Karan Johar, Alia Bhatt after Sushant Singh’s death

Swara Bhasker, one of Bollywood’s most vocal stars, is lashing out at all those who are blaming some of the industry’s bigwigs for the death of Sushant Singh Rajput.

A video of the Veere Di Wedding actor has gone viral where she can be seen defending filmmaker Karan Johar and actors Alia Bhatt and Sonam Kapoor in the midst of the entire debacle that has enveloped the industry.

“We should have difficult conversations but there is a civilised way to do it. Right now, things are being said, and people are being blamed but Karan being vilified is unnecessary. I don’t think Karan, Alia (Bhatt), Sonam (Kapoor) had anything to do with what happened with Sushant’s career. It’s not a fair accusation,” says Swara in the video.

“In the video, one can see that Karan is accepting that he might have chosen people who were right in front of him and things should change. I would like to give him credit for engaging with the issue. But the way things have happened was quite sad.

“It’s disgusting that Sushant’s death is being used for ulterior motives by some people. We must give Sushant dignity in his death and celebrate his life. He was a tremendous artiste.”

She further went on to lay emphasis on mental health saying: “One shouldn’t trivialise it by saying, people get depressed because they weren’t invited for a party or because someone gave a stupid answer about their on a chat show. If that is your understanding, then you don’t know what depression is.” 

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Sushant Singh Rajput’s Dil Bechara co-star Sanjana Sanghi records her statement with the police  : Bollywood News – Bollywood Hungama

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Sushant Singh Rajput’s Dil Bechara co-star Sanjana Sanghi records her statement with the police  : Bollywood News – Bollywood Hungama

Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput died by suicidde on June 14 in his apartment in Mumbai. His death shook the entire nation. According to reports, the actor was suffering from depression for the past six months and was being treated for the same. The case of his death is being currently investigated by the police. 

The police have been recording the statements of people who were close to the late actor including his family, friends, colleagues and house help. On Tuesday, Sushant’s co-star Sanjana Sanghi, from his last film Dil Bechara, arrived at the Bandra Police station to record her statement. Dil Bechara  directed by Mukesh Chhabra is Sanjana’s debut film. The director also gave his statement to the police. 

Sushant Singh Rajput’s close friend Rhea Chakraborty also recorded her statement with the police where she claimed that the two were planning on getting married. She also said that they were living together during the lockdown, but had moved out after they had a fight. 

Meanwhile, Dil Bechara starring Sushant Singh Rajput and Sanjana Sanghi will be released in Disney+ Hotstar in the coming months. The film will be available for free in memory of the late actor. 

ALSO READ:  Sushant Singh Rajput was paid Rs. 30 lakhs for Shuddh Desi Romance and Rs. 1 crore for Detective Byomkesh Bakshy

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