Archiv rubriky: Zahranicne

Spring has come and Opening Day baseball is nowhere to be seen. Spring Training was canceled and Major League Baseball postponed the start of the season as the United States battles the coronavirus pandemic.

But there’s new hope for fans sorely missing America’s past-time. They merely need to look across the world to Taiwan, where the island’s Chinese Professional Baseball League played the first Opening Day ballgame of the 2020 season on April 11.

In an attempt to raise the profile of Taiwanese baseball, Eleven Sports network is streaming home games for one Taiwanese team, the Rakuten Monkeys, live on Twitter with English commentary—for free. Simply visit the Eleven Sports on Twitter.

⚾| 2020/4/16 The only #LIVE Pro-baseball game on EARTH on ELEVEN SPORTS. Watch here for the 2020 #CPBL season #UniLions vs #RakutenMonkeys#ForTheFans #ELEVENSPORTS in ENGLISH!!! https://t.co/Rgm5VbPfVU

— ELEVEN SPORTS TW (@ElevenSportsTW) April 15, 2020

Fans in the U.S. may need to set their alarms…

Not long ago, I asked a TIME 100 honoree if he had enjoyed the TIME 100 gala. Jennifer Lopez had performed, and members of Congress mingled with Oscar winners, astronauts with activists, CEOs with artists. “I had a great time,” he said. “But you have all these influential people. That’s an extraordinary opportunity. What are you going to do with it?”

The answer to that question became one of the most important initiatives we’ve launched over the past year, expanding the TIME 100 franchise from an annual list of the world’s most influential people into a global leadership community. We reached out to hundreds of TIME 100 alumni from across the years and around the world, inviting them to find ways to collaborate. Last fall, for the first-ever TIME 100 Health Summit, we gathered a group—ranging from former President Bill Clinton to the three highest-ranking health officials in the Trump Administration to the leaders of major health systems—to focus deeply on the search, as we put it the..

Jay has been locked in his apartment in the southern Chinese megacity of Guangzhou since April 9—when a doctor, local official and a translator delivered a mandatory quarantine order due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The order came despite the fact that he hasn’t traveled in three months, is showing no symptoms of the disease and hasn’t come into contact with anyone who has tested positive.

The English teacher, who comes from South Africa, checks his temperature every day and sends the readings to his landlord. A camera installed in the hallway of his building points straight at his door to make sure he doesn’t leave.

“When I asked my landlord why me specifically, she said, ‘That’s what the government wanted. All Africans must be isolated at home,’” says Jay, who asked to go by a pseudonym because of fears he could be deported.

It’s just one way that Jay and other African immigrants say they have been discriminated against by local authorities after a spike in imported COVID-19 cases..

(LONDON) — The head of the World Health Organization says it regrets the U.S. decision to halt funding.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says the U.S. has been “a longstanding and generous friend to WHO and we hope it will continue to be so.”

He made the comments after President Donald Trump announced a halt to U.S. funding, temporarily suspending millions of dollars from the U.N health agency’s biggest funder.

Tedros says WHO remained committed to slowing the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and it would work with its partners to ensure that any funding shortfall could be met.

“COVID-19 does not discriminate between rich nations and poor, large nations and small,” Tedros said. “This is a time for all of us to be united in our common struggle against a common threat, a dangerous enemy. When we’re divided, the virus exploits the cracks between us.”

Tedros says WHO’s member countries and independent organizations will assess the U.N. health agency’s performance at a later day. But the focu..

(LONDON) — A 99-year-old British army veteran who started walking laps in his garden as part of a humble fundraiser for the National Health Service has surprised himself by generating millions of pounds within days.

Tom Moore’s family used social media to help him get donations to support health care workers during the coronavirus pandemic as a way to thank the doctors and nurses who took care of him when he broke his hip.

Read more: Front Line Workers Tell Their Own Stories in the New Issue of TIME

Moore, who uses a walker while putting in his paces, is well on his way to completing 100 laps of his 25-meter garden before he turns 100 on April 30.

His family thought it would be a stretch to reach the 1,000-pound fundraising goal initially set for Moore’s campaign last week. But the drive clearly captured the public mood at a time of national crisis. By Wednesday, the cause had attracted more than 250,000 supporters pledging close to 8 million pounds ($10 million.)

Celebrities, fel..

(BERLIN) — German authorities say police have arrested four suspected members of the Islamic State group alleged to be planning an attack on American military facilities.

Federal prosecutors said the suspects were arrested early Wednesday at various locations in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

They identified the men as Azizjon B., Muhammadali G., Farhodshoh K. and Sunatullokh K. — all citizens of Tajikistan. The suspects’ surnames weren’t released for privacy reasons.

German weekly Der Spiegel reports that the men’s alleged leader, a 30-year-old Tajik man identified only as Ravsan B., has been in jail since last year on firearms charges.

Prosecutors said the men swore allegiance to IS in early 2019 and had contacts with high-ranking figures in the group. They reportedly first planned to carry out an attack in Tajikistan but later shifted their target to Germany, including U.S. Air Force bases in the country and persons deemed critical of Islam.

(HARARE, Zimbabwe) — In a pre-dawn raid in food-starved Zimbabwe, police enforcing a coronavirus lockdown confiscated and destroyed 3 tons of fresh fruit and vegetables by setting fire to it. Wielding batons, they scattered a group of rural farmers who had traveled overnight, breaking restrictions on movement to bring the precious produce to one of the country’s busiest markets.

The food burned as the farmers went home empty-handed, a stupefying moment for a country and a continent where food is in critically short supply.

It was an extreme example of how lockdowns to slow the spread of the coronavirus may be choking Africa’s already-vulnerable food supply.

Lockdowns in at least 33 of Africa’s 54 countries have blocked farmers from getting food to markets and threatened deliveries of food assistance to rural populations. Many informal markets where millions buy their food are shut.

About one in every five people in Africa, nearly 250 million, already didn’t have enough food before ..

Public health experts have savaged President Donald Trump’s decision to cut U.S. funding to the World Health Organization (WHO), which he says failed in its “basic duty” during the coronavirus pandemic by promoting “disinformation” from China.

“Today I’m instructing my administration to halt funding of the World Health Organization while a review is conducted to assess [its] role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus,” Trump said at an April 14 briefing.

The move represents another stunning turnaround for Trump, who in late February praised the WHO for “working hard and very smart,” before souring on the world body in recent days as the U.S. death toll soared. Still, it remains in line with his longstanding distrust of multilateral institutions more generally.

Critics have accused the President of attempting to shift blame away from his own torpid response to the pandemic. The WHO declared a public health emergency on Jan. 30, after which Trump contin..

(GUATEMALA CITY) — Guatemala’s health minister said Tuesday that deportees from the United States were driving up the country’s COVID-19 caseload, adding that on one flight some 75% of the deportees tested positive for the virus.

Health Minister Hugo Monroy’s comments were dramatically out of line with what the government had previously said about infected deportees. Later, presidential spokesman Carlos Sandoval told reporters that Monroy was referring to a March flight on which “between 50% and 75% (of the passengers) during all their time in isolation and quarantine have come back positive.”

Before Tuesday, Guatemala had only reported three positive infections among deportees flown back by the United States.

Joaquín Samayoa, spokesman for the foreign affairs ministry, confirmed a fourth positive case for a migrant who arrived on a flight Monday. At least three of the migrants who arrived Monday were taken directly to a hospital for COVID-19 testing.

President Alejandro Giammattei..

(CANBERRA, Australia) — Australia’s highest court ruled on Wednesday that a search warrant at the center of a national storm over press freedom was invalid.

News Corp. journalist Annika Smethurst went to the High Court to overturn the warrant that was executed on her Canberra home in June last year and triggered a national campaign for greater press freedom.

The seven judges unanimously agreed that the warrant was invalid, partly because it failed to state the offense suspected with sufficient precision.

But the majority of judges rejected her application for the material seized to be destroyed, meaning police could still use it as evidence against her.

The raid followed an article written by Smethurst and published in April 2018 that was based on classified government documents. The article reported that Defense Department and Home Affairs Department bosses had canvassed giving a security agency new legal powers to spy on Australians.

A day after the Canberra raid, police execute..

(LOS ANGELES) — The U.S. has returned $300 million to Malaysia that prosecutors say was stolen in a multibillion-dollar corruption scheme, authorities announced Tuesday.

The money comes from assets forfeited last year by a financier, Jho Low, in a Los Angeles federal settlement. The settlement covered assets that included a Manhattan penthouse, a Beverly Hills mansion, a Beverly Hills boutique hotel, a luxury jet and paintings by Vincent Van Gogh and Claude Monet.

Low and his family agreed to forfeit more than $700 million in assets and to date, the U.S. has returned or assisted Malaysia in recovering more than $600 million, according to a U.S. Department of Justice statement.

Low, who is also known as Low Taek Jho, didn’t acknowledge any wrongdoing in the civil settlement. However, he remains a fugitive from criminal charges filed in New York that accuse him of bribery and money laundering.

Low was a consultant for a Malaysian state fund. Prosecutors allege that he used fund money..

(NEW DELHI) — India’s prime minister announces extension to the country’s lockdown for 1.3 billion people until May 3, but says there may be some easing in restrictions in people’s movement after one week to help the poor daily wage earners and those working in agriculture sector.

In an address to the nation on radio and television on Tuesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the lockdown will be eased only in areas which do not show any deterioration in the spread of coronavirus.

He said India has paid a big economic price by imposing the lockdown, but it was much better placed than many other countries as it had acted quickly imposing travel and quarantine restrictions even before the first death was reported in the country. He said the lockdown and social distancing among people have worked in their favor.

The first phase of India’s three-week lockdown ends Tuesday with more than 9,000 positive cases and 339 deaths so far with people restricted to their homes for all but essenti..