Beijing, Jun 15: China is locking now ten more neighbourhoods in Beijing to try and contain the spread of a new coronavirus outbreak linked to a food market, authorities announced Monday.
City official Li Junjie said at a press conference that fresh cases had been found in a second wholesale market in northwestern Haidian district, and as a result, the market and nearby schools would be closed, and people living in ten communities around it placed under lockdown.
Washington, Jul 14: Florida on Sunday reported a record 15,300 new coronavirus cases, the most by any state in a single day even as the coronavirus cases in the country have surged to 3,363,056.
The Washington Post reported that the huge number was result of both increased testing and widespread community transmission. The numbers shattered previous highs of 11,694 reported by California last week and 11,571 reported by New York on April 15.
Natalie E. Dean, an assistant professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida wrote that with Florida largely open for business, he doesn't expect this surge to slow.
Nationally, the conversation over reopening has become increasingly fraught amid the newly soaring case numbers, with much of the debate centering on whether schools should open their doors in the fall, reported the Post.
The Health workers in California and Texas too are facing an influx of COVID-19 patients where officials reported seven day averages for new cases - 8,664 and 9060 respectively.
According to the report, Florida has reported nearly 70,000 cases in last week alone, the most of any state.
Even though the COVID-19 cases are surging, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has stuck to an aggressive reopening plan with state officials recently ordering schools to reopen five days a week in the new academic year.
The state is also set to hold the Republican National Convention next month in Jacksonville's VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena, an indoor facility that seats about 15,000, reported Washington Post.
Seven-day averages for new cases -- considered a more reliable indicator of the virus's impact than single-day totals -- hit new highs in Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Puerto Rico.
Washington, Aug 4: US President Donald Trump gave popular Chinese-owned video app TikTok six weeks to sell its US operations to an American company, saying Monday it would be "out of business" otherwise, and that the government wanted a financial benefit from the deal.
"It's got to be an American company... it's got to be owned here," Trump said. "We don't want to have any problem with security."
Trump said that Microsoft was in talks to buy TikTok, which has as many as one billion worldwide users who make quirky 60-second videos with its smartphone app.
But US officials say the app constitutes a national security risk because it could share millions of Americans' personal data with Chinese intelligence.
Trump gave the company's Chinese parent ByteDance until mid-September to strike a deal.
"I set a date of around September 15, at which point it's going to be out of business in the United States," he said.
Whatever the price is, he said, "the United States should get a very large percentage of that price because we're making it possible."
Trump compared the demand for a piece of the pie to a landlord demanding under-the-table "key money" from a new tenant, a practice widely illegal including in New York, where the billionaire president built his real estate empire.
"TikTok is a big success, but a big portion of it is in the country," he said. "I think it's very fair."
But Trump also threw a surprise new condition in any deal, saying the sale of TikTok's US business would have to result in a significant payout to the US Treasury for initiating it.
"A very substantial portion of that price is going to have to come into the Treasury of the United States, because we're making it possible for this deal to happen," Trump told reporters.
"They don't have any rights unless we give it to them," he said.
Sell or shut down
The pressure for a sale of TikTok's US and international business, based in Los Angeles, left the company and ByteDance facing tough decisions.
Trump has made TikTok the latest front in the ongoing political and trade battles between Washington and Beijing.
The app has been under formal investigation on US national security grounds because it collects large amounts of personal data on all its users and is legally bound to share that with authorities in Beijing if they demand it.
Both its huge user base and its algorithm for collecting data make it hugely valuable.
But being forced by the US government to sell at least its US business or be shut down -- and to then split the sale price with the US Treasury as Trump is demanding -- was an almost unheard-of tactic.
Shutting down could force users to switch to competitors, and many content creators are already encouraging followers to follow them on other social media platforms.
"The most obvious beneficiaries are Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter, with Snapchat likely being the biggest beneficiary," said investment analysts at Lightshed Partners.
Earlier Monday, ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming acknowledged the hefty pressure and said in a letter to staff, reported by Chinese media, that they were working around-the-clock "for the best outcome."
"We have always been committed to ensuring user data security, as well as the platform neutrality and transparency," Zhang said.
However, he said, the company faces "mounting complexities across the geopolitical landscape and significant external pressure."
He said the company must confront the challenge from the United States, though "without giving up exploring any possibilities."
According to Britain's The Sun newspaper Monday, as a possible consequence of the pressure, ByteDance is planning to relocate TikTok's global operations to Britain.
Pushing back
China's foreign ministry pushed back Monday, calling Washington hypocritical for demanding TikTok be sold.
"The US is using an abused concept of national security and, without providing any evidence, is making presumptions of guilt and issuing threats to relevant companies," said spokesman Wang Wenbin.
"This goes against the principle of market economy and exposes the hypocrisy and typical double standards of the US in upholding so-called fairness and freedom," he added.
London, May 3: The British government had a contingency plan for prime minister Boris Johnson’s death as his condition deteriorated while he battled COVID-19 last month in intensive care, Johnson said in an interview with The Sun newspaper.
Johnson returned to work on Monday, a month after testing positive for COVID-19. Johnson, 55, spent 10 days in isolation in Downing Street from late March, but was then was taken to London’s St Thomas’ Hospital where he received oxygen treatment and spent three nights in intensive care.
“They had a strategy to deal with a ‘death of Stalin’-type scenario,” Johnson, 55, was quoted as saying by The Sun. “It was a tough old moment, I won’t deny it.”
After Johnson was discharged, St Thomas’ said it was glad to have cared for the prime minister, but the hospital has given no details about the gravity of his illness beyond stating that he was treated in intensive care.
Johnson and his fiancée, Carrie Symonds, on Saturday announced the name of their newly born son as Wilfred Lawrie Nicholas, partly as a tribute to two of the intensive care doctors who they said had saved Johnson’s life.
“The doctors had all sorts of arrangements for what to do if things went badly wrong,” Johnson said of his COVID-19 battle. “The bloody indicators kept going in the wrong direction.”
He said doctors discussed invasive ventilation.
“The bad moment came when it was 50-50 whether they were going to have to put a tube down my windpipe,” he said. “That was when it got a bit . . . they were starting to think about how to handle it presentationally.”
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