The coronavirus pandemic is proving to be one of the toughest challenges of our generation. Visit our special coronavirus homepage to find important news updates, a link to our coronavirus newsletter, clear, useful information and tips for your wellbeing through this emergency. Visit our coronavirus data centre to see the latest data from your local area, across Australia and around the world.
Tap below to follow our daily live blog.
BEIJING (AP) — China’s ceremonial parliament will consider a bill that could limit opposition activity in Hong Kong, a spokesperson said Thursday, appearing to confirm speculation that China will sidestep the territory’s own lawmaking body in enacting legislation to crack down on activity Beijing considers subversive.
Zhang Yesui said the National People’s Congress will deliberate a bill on “establishing and improving the legal system and enforcement mechanisms for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to safeguard national security.â€
Such a move has long been under consideration but was hastened by months of anti-government protests last year in the former British colony that was handed over to Chinese rule in 1997. Such legislation was last proposed in 2003 under Article 23 of the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, bringing hundreds of thousands of the territory’s citizens out in protest.
The proposal was withdrawn by the government but Beijing has increasingly pushed for measures such as punishment for disrespecting the Chinese national flag and anthem and increased pro-China patriotic-themed education in schools. Opposition in Hong Kong’s Legislative Council, however, made it unlikely such a bill could pass at the local level.
The new measures are required by the “new situation and demands†and action at the national level is “entirely necessary,†Zhang said.
Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post newspaper said a draft resolution would be brought before the National People’s Congress on Friday afternoon and voted on at the end of its session on May 28. The congress’ standing committee that handles most actual legislation will then consider the details of the measure, the newspaper said.
A vote at the NPC will add to concerns in Hong Kong’s pro-democracy camp that Beijing is chipping away at the semi-autonomous territory’s rights to assembly and free speech that greatly exceed those permitted by the ruling Communist Party in mainland China.
Zhang’s comments at a news conference came on the eve of the opening of the congress’s annual session after a two-month delay because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Thursday saw the opening session of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, an advisory body. That will be followed Friday by the start of the 3,000-member NPC at which Premier Li Keqiang will deliver a keynote speech outlining economic and social goals for the year.
The holding of the “two sessions,†as the annual meetings are known, is a further sign of what the party says is its success in bringing the outbreak under control, although clusters of cases are still popping up in some parts of the country.
Members of the Consultative Conference will “tell the world about how China, as a responsible major country, has taken firm action and contributed to international cooperation in the fight against the COVID-19 epidemic,†Wang Yang, the chairman of the body, said in a report to the opening session.
Wang’s comments were in the prepared text distributed to journalists, although he skipped over them in his delivery, apparently to save time.
Rank-and-file members wore masks in the vast auditorium inside the Great Hall of the People in the heart of Beijing. Other top officials, including Wang, Li and President Xi Jinping, did not.
It remains unclear whether the premier will issue the usual economic growth target for the world’s second-largest economy. Given the economic devastation caused so far this year by the pandemic, any target would likely be considerably lower than last year’s 6.0% to 6.5%.
Tens of millions of Chinese have been thrown out of work and it’s unclear how many jobs will return. Not only have domestic production and demand been hammered, but key export markets such as the United States and Europe have collapsed as the outbreak spreads worldwide.
This year’s meeting of the two bodies is being shortened to one week from the usual two as part of virus-control measures. Media access has been largely reduced and only a limited number of reporters, diplomats and observers were permitted into the meeting hall.
Backed by massive state propaganda support, Xi has received plaudits at home for having contained the virus, even while the U.S. and others question China’s handling of the initial outbreak.
The Chinese public is also largely seen as backing Xi’s tough approach to foreign policy challenges, including criticism from the U.S., Australia and others.
Abroad, however, that policy has further bolstered concerns about China’s intentions. The Trump administration issued a 20-page report Wednesday attacking what it called Beijing’s predatory economic policies, military buildup, disinformation campaigns and human rights violations.
That may ultimately add to Xi’s difficulties in reviving economic growth and jobs at a time when global markets are partly shut and skepticism toward China runs high.
Calling all HuffPost superfans!
Sign up for membership to become a founding member and help shape HuffPost’s next chapter
Wide swathes of the coasts of India and Bangladesh have been flooded and millions of people remain without power, after the most powerful cyclone to hit the region in more than decade left dozens dead and a trail of destruction.
In the Indian city of Kolkata, home to more than 14 million people, large portions of the metropolis and its suburbs were underwater, including the city’s main airport. Roads were littered with uprooted trees and lamp posts and electricity and and communication lines were down.
Cyclone Amphan also badly damaged many centuries-old buildings when it tore through the city on Wednesday.
“It feels like a dystopian Jurassic Park of sorts,” said Shuli Ghosh, who runs a cafe in Kolkata.
“The roofs of many homes have flown away and the streets are waterlogged.”
When the storm made landfall on Wednesday it lashed coastal areas in both India and Bangladesh with heavy rain, a battering storm surge and sustained winds of 170 kilometres per hour and gusts up to 190 km/h.
It devastated coastal villages in both countries, knocking down mud houses, ripping out electricity poles and uprooting trees.
In Bangladesh, television stations reported 13 deaths, while 72 deaths were reported in India’s West Bengal state. Officials said two people were killed in India’s Odisha state.
Hundreds of villages in Bangladesh were flooded by tidal surges and more than a million people were without electricity.
Officials in both countries said the full extent of the damage remained to be seen as communication lines to many places remained down.
India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, said authorities were working on the ground to ensure all possible assistance to the those affected.
“No stone will be left unturned in helping the affected,” Modi tweeted on Thursday.
The ongoing coronavirus pandemic and social-distancing measures had made mass evacuations ahead of the storm difficult. Shelters were unable to run at full capacity in many places and some people were too scared of the risk of infection to mass there.
Likewise the pandemic will have and impact on relief efforts and the recovery. The damage caused by the storm is likely to have lasting repercussions for poor families already stretched to the limit by the economic impact of the pandemic.
In India’s Odisha state, the cyclone destroyed crops of Betel, a leaf used as a wrapper for chewing areca nut or tobacco. In Bangladesh’s southwestern district of Bagerhat, more than 500 fish farms were flooded.
Debashish Shyamal, who lives in a fishing village along the coast of West Bengal took shelter with his family in a government clinic. He said the wind blew open the windows and doors and for hours they sat huddled inside, drenched by the torrential rain.
On Thursday, he woke up to dangling electricity wires, waterlogged streets and an entirely uprooted forest next to his village.
“There is nothing left,” he said.
“Full House†actor Lori Loughlin and her husband, the fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, have agreed to plead guilty in connection with the college admissions bribery scandal.
Both will serve prison time and pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines under their plea deals for “securing the fraudulent admission†of their two daughters, Olivia Jade and Isabella Rose, to the University of Southern California crew team “as purported athletic recruits,†the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts said in a statement Thursday.
Both daughters had never participated in the sport, according to court documents. The couple were accused of paying $500,000 to snag their places on the team so the girls would be admitted to the school.
Loughlin, 55, agreed to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud, according to the deal she signed on Wednesday, and will be sentenced to two months in prison, a $150,000 fine and two years of supervised release with 100 hours of community service.
Giannulli, 56, will plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud and honest services wire and mail fraud, prosecutors said. He agreed to a sentence of five months in prison, a $250,000 fine and two years of supervised release with 250 hours of community service.
The couple will formally plead guilty and be sentenced at a hearing before U.S. District Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton that hasn’t yet been scheduled, the statement added.
Loughlin and Giannulli are among dozens of prominent public figures charged in the scandal that erupted in March 2019. The FBI called it a nationwide conspiracy that exposed how well-heeled parents bribed their children’s way into the nation’s most elite colleges.
Former “Desperate Housewives†star Felicity Huffman served 11 days in a low-security prison after she was found to have paid $15,000 to boost her daughter Sophia Macy’s SAT score so that she could secure a spot at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Calling all HuffPost superfans!
Sign up for membership to become a founding member and help shape HuffPost’s next chapter
MyLife pulls together vast amounts of public data to create background reports and “reputation scores” on millions of people in the US, all available to those willing to pay for a monthly membership. On it, I found a sometimes inaccurate but eerie amount of personal information about, well, my life: my birthday and home city; my previous job title (though curiously not my current one); a list of people “Seth maintains relationships with,” including the names of both my parents, each linked to their own profile pages with still more data. All there in one place waiting to be discovered.
When I called the site, a customer service representative stressed that the information doesn’t come from MyLife, but rather from across the “interwebs.” Following some back and forth, the representative agreed to delete my profile page. I felt victorious — until two hours later when I received the first of many promotional emails from the company, one encouraging me to sign up for a membership, another talking about raising my credit score.
As I would learn through my brief, manic campaign in December to scrub as much of my personal data as possible and start the new year with a clean digital slate, it’s hard not to feel like you’re just scratching the surface of an impossibly large data industrial complex. By the end of my experiment, I felt even worse off about my ability to wrestle back control of my data than when I started.
In recent years, it’s become a truism in certain tech-savvy Twitter threads that much of our personal information is already out there somewhere thanks to an ever-growing list of hacks.
But there had to be something more to be done, I thought. The fact of the matter is, the internet is already littered with information that could be used against us, much of it collected through entirely legal means. Mothers’ maiden names. Birthdays. Home addresses. I might not be able to prevent my favorite stores from getting hacked, or sweet talk a bunch of hackers after the fact, but I could make it just a little bit harder for a bad actor to find my personal information online — and in the process, regain some sense of control of my data and my life.
Deciding to delete your information online is the easy part. The hard part is figuring out where to start.
By offering a quick and easy guide for deleting a range of popular services. Venkatesan hopes to “simplify” the process of scrubbing our data. As he put it to CNN Business companies “make it so easy” for people to have their data collected, but much harder “for them to get out.” About 40,000 people now come to the site each month, he said. By comparison, Facebook has four platforms with more than 1 billion users each.
These included data brokers, who buy and sell our personal data, as well as “people search” services like Spokeo and Radaris and background check platforms like Infotracer and MyLife. They may not be household names, but these sites know an awful lot about many households. You might turn to these services if you were looking for information on a new neighbor, hire, client or, according to Spokeo CEO Harrison Tang, “long lost family members or friends.” You might also stumble across a link to these sites when Googling yourself, if you’re into that kind of thing.
“Different people have different feelings about privacy,” Tang said. In his telling of it, the pressing issue isn’t so much that data gets collected, but rather the need for greater transparency around how and why. “I don’t think consumers should be surprised.”
Unlike the data breaches that get far more attention for exposing our personal information, this data is aggregated legally. Spokeo, which says it does roughly $70 million a year in sales mostly from everyday users as well as some enterprise customers including law enforcement agencies, pulls data from dating websites, social networks, criminal records and “marketing databases” from retailers, Tang said.
Jenna Raymond, COO of Accucom Corporation, an information services company that counts Infotracer as one of its brands, told CNN Business in December that criminal records are also a “big” source of data for these sites, along with property records. “The minute you buy a house, that’s public information,” she said.
“You can opt out of Infotracer,” she said, “but it’s still out there.”
Over the course of a few days, I did opt out of Infotracer — and many others.
Some, including Infotracer and Spokeo, I was able to delete almost immediately; others said it could take up to 72 hours before the information was pulled. A number of services required some new data in order to scrub the old, ranging from a phone number to confirm the removal to the email address MyLife asked for and later spammed me on.
Representatives for Radaris and MyLife did not respond to requests for comment for this story. The USPTO did not immediately respond to questions.
“Unfortunately there is no centralized service to remove your information from all resources by a single request,” according to the Radaris page.
By the time I finally took control of my Radaris page, I felt more lost than before.
In 2012, the American College of Rheumatology issued recommendations for using pharmacologic and nonpharmacologic approaches for osteoarthritis (OA) of the hand, hip, and knee. The guidelines conditionally recommend tai chi, along with other non-drug approaches such as manual therapy, walking aids, and self-management programs, for managing knee OA. Acupuncture is also conditionally recommended for those who have chronic moderate-to-severe knee pain and are candidates for total knee replacement but are unwilling or unable to undergo surgical repair.
Current clinical practice guidelines from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommend psychological and behavioral interventions, such as stimulus control therapy or relaxation therapy, or cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), in the treatment of chronic primary and secondary insomnia for adults of all ages, including older adults.Â
Overall, research suggests that some mind and body approaches, such as yoga, tai chi, and meditation-based programs may provide some benefit in reducing common menopausal symptoms.
There have only been a few studies on the effects of tai chi on cell-mediated immunity to varicella zoster virus following vaccination, but the results of these studies have shown some benefit.
There is evidence that tai chi may reduce the risk of falling in older adults. There is also some evidence that tai chi may improve balance and stability with normal aging and in people with neuro-degenerative conditions, including mild-to-moderate Parkinson’s disease and stroke.
There is some evidence that suggests mind-and-body exercise programs such as tai chi and yoga may have the potential to provide modest enhancements of cognitive function in older adults without cognitive impairment.
MONTREAL ― Japjot Gill has dreamt of becoming a pilot since he first attended ground school as a teenager and the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) promised to put him through flight school if he enlisted. It’s been a long journey for the now-21-year-old, who first needed to get Lasik eye surgery and become a Canadian citizen. And just as his dream was within reach, the COVID-19 pandemic snatched it away. His citizenship ceremony, scheduled for late March, was cancelled.. But he has a glimmer of hope, as the government now says some new Canadians will soon be able to take their oath online.
“Recognizing that some people may have urgent reasons to finish the citizenship process, including taking the citizenship oath during a ceremony, the Ministry will soon organize virtual ceremonies for persons and families who had already communicated with IRCC to notify that they needed to obtain citizenship for urgent reasons, such as satisfying work requirements,†Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) spokesperson Shannon Ker told HuffPost in an email.
While the exceptional measure won’t be offered to applicants like Gill straight away, IRCC will offer it to a wider pool of applicants “as soon as possible,†Ker adds.
Gill arrived in Vancouver from India in 2011 when he was 11 years old. He has been eligible for citizenship for several years, but hadn’t applied for it until last year.
“I held off on it for a long time because the Lasik cost me all my savings and citizenship was also an expensive application,†he told HuffPost. It costs $630 for an adult to apply for citizenship. Now he doesn’t know when he’ll be able to take the oath, as IIRCC has cancelled all citizenship ceremonies, tests and interviews until further notice.Â
The whole ordeal might make Gill reconsider his life plans if he has to wait much longer. “As soon as I came to Canada, I fell in love with the country, so I was always happy to serve. But I’m not as keen on joining the military at this point,†he says, noting he would be “a lot older than other people in the military.†For now, his enrollment remains in the cards, but a long pandemic-induced delay might convince him otherwise.
Watch: Canada rated No. 1 country in the world for quality of life. Story continues below.Â
In April, IRCC exceptionally authorized its first virtual oath ceremony on videoconferencing platform Zoom. Adolf Ng, an academic whose research is linked to COVID-19, was allowed to take the oath online, without taking the citizenship test.Â
Many wish to see the virtual process offered to all applicants. A petition asking that tests, interviews and oath ceremonies be done remotely has gathered more than 1,700 signatures since it went live on May 9th.
“This uncertainty creates a very stressful situation for hundreds of thousands of applicants who are seeking citizenship,†writes Hadi Rezvani, author of the petition. “At present, this is an extra burden on our mental health in addition to fear of the virus itself.â€
Whoever wants to do the virtual ceremony should have a choice to do it.
Ji, citizenship applicant from Montreal
“Life doesn’t stop because of the virus,†adds Ji, a Montrealer who arrived from Vietnam as a foreign student in 2010. “Becoming a citizen has been a dream of mine for nearly 10 years.â€Â
His citizenship oath was scheduled for March 16 and he fears that delays will snowball if activities don’t resume soon. “The backlog is gonna be huge. It’ll create a bottleneck,†he says, asking to be identified only by his first name because he fears a backlash from seeming ungrateful. “Whoever wants to do the virtual ceremony should have a choice to do it.â€
But others would rather wait to take the oath in person. “I had been waiting for that ceremony and it will be a special event with my loved ones celebrating with me and taking pictures together, a memory that will be cherished forever,†applicant Carlota Wilkins told HuffPost. She hopes she won’t be forced to partake in a virtual ceremony.
Japjot Gill is torn. “Half of me does say that I just really want to get it done, but a ceremony would really put a stamp on the fact that I became a Canadian,†he says. “Accepting my citizenship in person is something I’d be really proud of.â€
Calling all HuffPost superfans!
Sign up for membership to become a founding member and help shape HuffPost’s next chapter
According to data from the 2017 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) released in November 2018, the number of American adults and children using yoga and meditation has significantly increased over previous years and the use of chiropractic has increased modestly for adults and held steady for children.
See Press Release: More adults and children are using yoga and meditation: Nationwide survey reveals significant increases
Read Summaries:
Download and share NHIS 2017 graphics:
As students in Israel return to school, CNN catches up with one mother whose frustration at homeschooling went viral.
President Donald Trump’s inaction in February as the coronavirus spread is the focus of a blistering new attack ad.
The video that Rep. Eric Swalwell’s (D-Calif.) Remedy PAC released online Wednesday features footage of Trump minimizing the threat of the virus, playing golf, holding campaign rallies and attending the Daytona 500 ― alongside an interview with Denise Jorgensen, whose father died after contracting COVID-19.
“By February, it was clear that COVID-19 would kill many Americans. It was clear to everyone ― except Donald Trump,†reads the on-screen text.
“In November, we are literally voting for our lives,†Jorgensen concludes in the clip.
It’s the latest spot to call out Trump’s halting response to the public health crisis, with anti-Trump GOP groups The Lincoln Project and Republicans for the Rule of Law also weighing in regularly.
More than 94,000 people in the U.S. have died from COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. Members of the White House coronavirus task force have suggested it could kill up to 240,000.
A HuffPost Guide To Coronavirus
Calling all HuffPost superfans!
Sign up for membership to become a founding member and help shape HuffPost’s next chapter