#sye event live

[siren-amung-the-mermaids]

Chapter 1

The Syren

The dawning sun shimmers across the surface of the beach waves. The city of Volkar just beyond the sand is preparing for nightfall, freshening up the garlic above their doors. A group of teenagers abandon care in their activities, just far enough off the shoreline to tiptoe while the water meets their chin.

“Which direction did you throw it?” Called one of them in frustration to another.

He responded with a shrewd general point, “Over here somewhere!”

A typical game of ‘find the sinker’ is a popular children’s game, but these teens were competitive and upped the steaks with their friends for rewards. They didn’t notice the setting sun, or if they did, disregarded it, and as fate would have it, they began to fear something in the water.

“Something touched my leg!” A smaller teen called in fear.

“Sure it wasn’t me?” Another joked. Not another moment passed until he was pulled under by a force unknown to the others, spiking fear and panic.

This was short lived when he resurfaced again, holding the sinker with a wide grin, and a humanoid sea creature beside him with a similar expression.

Sye was one of their friends, the last siren as far as he is aware. He had never met another siren, and because no other humans were becoming mermaids, he could only find friends of his age near the surface. He and the blonde teenager had set up the prank together, and they all had a good hard laugh.

One of them did not laugh, because they were only invited to this kind of gathering with the siren recently, and were not aware of the siren in the first place. Her fear subsided after they returned to shore and hung out way after the sunset.

“How do you know you’re the last one?”

The question seemed to bother him. “I’m the only one I've ever met.”

At the ends of his fins were bulbs that could glow on command, and this is the light they relied on for now at the beach. The girl watched in fascination. Sye made them glitter and flicker, which got some more attention, because it was quite stunning. Every so often he would slide back into the water to take a breath and get wet again, keeping his scales hydrated.

The later it got, the more anxious they were to return home, lest a roaming vampire or two ambush them. They each said their goodbyes and returned to Volkar just beyond the beach.

Sye swam across the shoreline to the docks, awaiting his father’s return. Well, not his real father of course. He was old enough to know how it wasn’t possible.

“See you tomorrow, professor!” Said a woman, who was a friend of the professor called Abigail Williams.

Professor Ramond waved back and turned again to the sea, taking a stone from a pouch around his neck and holding it to the moonlight. The magic appeared to flow into the stone and coat his skin, which reflected the anticipation of scales. When he was completely coated he leapt off the dock into the water. It was as if the line separating the air and the water erased what was before and he became what was new. The brilliant transformation never fails to put the siren in awe, almost jealous.

“Great to be back in the waters again.” Said the professor to the siren, returning the stone to his pouch.

“It’s been long enough. Thought you got eaten by a land siren or something.” He said in a sarcastic yawn.

The professor shrugged and said, “Well with the sun-blessed Saraphamn warriors around, vampires became wise enough to avoid their attention. Just today I met one, and their powers are astonishing. I can’t quite describe it.”

Many of these terms are thrown around. Sun-blessed, sea-chosen, moon-cursed, and so on. The sea-chosen most often refer to the merfolk whom the sea gifted tails in a brilliant event before the war. At first they could not return to land, but the moon gifted them all with a footstone at the moment of their transformation. Without it they would be trapped on one side or the other.

Most of the merfolk were sailors, fishermen, people who already spend time on or in the water. Raymond had a fascination with sea life and was studying to be a marine biologist. Their tails were all unique, different colors and shapes, some having long eel-like tails, some generic scaled fish tails, others having stronger shark-like tails, and a few having octopus tentacles. Raymond’s looks like an orca, sleek black and white without all the blubber.

Our water underwater was a type of coral the sirens grew originally to build their homes. When the merfolk began to appear, they taught them how to utilize it, to grow it slowly by tying the roots in the water together. Over time it would strengthen and form the shell of our home. It requires daily maintenance, but it’s very sturdy and reliable.

Many of the merfolk sleep on land, very few still remain in the water after dark. I think Raymond only stays under to take care of me, and I wonder if and when he might stay up top now that I’m getting older.

At the end of the day I let myself sink into the anemone and dream my cares away.

[peppermintstarsonamintyway]

Im starting to think that it would be more possible (and more chaotic) to make this little paralel universe have a chance from the idea I say yesterday because of timeline reassons

Why? Simple

Grape Ade probably has been working with the CoD before the BTS event. Since I made her an actual costume for the B.A.D.4, it makes canon she was part of the squad and probably living, or, soon to live with them when this hapened. Meaning that when Eclair hired her for the stealling objects, she was already formal member and probably did it as a question since sye had some free days and wanted some extra money.

Why?

Because maybe Pomegranate find out about her little plan. Maybe she told Dark Enchantress. And maybe they told her that well... The was something the CoD also wanted from those ruins.

Yes, she is going for the artifacts. Abd also the CoD told her to search for golden cheese soul-jam. Thinking it could be lost somewhere in the sand.

Oooo! Yeah that does make sense!

[systemtek]

LG Presents Its Vision to Become Media and Entertainment Platform Company

LG Electronics (LG) today shared its first step to become a media and entertainment platform company, a business transformation that will enrich customers’ lives by delivering valuable services and a unique collection of curated contents in products, including LG OLED and LG QNED TVs. LG shared its new direction and strategy at the webOS Partner Summit 2023, held at the LG Sciencepark in Seoul, South Korea, and attended by content producers, providers, developers and industry figures from over 30 countries. The first event of its kind, webOS Partner Summit 2023 provides the perfect forum for LG to share its new vision – and the immense value of the ever-evolving and expanding webOS smart TV platform ecosystem – with its trusted global partners. Since its launch on LG Smart TVs in 2014, webOS has been one of the most widely used smart TV platforms in the world. Powering more than 200 million LG TVs worldwide, webOS also supports several third-party TV brands in multiple markets. Moving forward, LG plans to extend webOS to more third-party TV companies and expand the platform to other product categories. Within 3 years, LG expects to have over 300 million webOS-powered devices. To deliver the unmatched convenience and expansive ecosystem of webOS to a broader customer base, LG has already applied its platform webOS to a range of categories, including projectors, digital signage and in-vehicle infotainment systems. Moreover, the number of third-party partner brands that have embraced webOS Hub, the webOS solution for third-party brands, has grown substantially, increasing from 20 just two years ago to over 300 today. During that time, webOS Hub has undergone meaningful upgrades with the variety of content on offer expanding to include cloud gaming and OTT services and new features arriving to enhance convenience and the overall user experience. Additionally, some of LG’s partner TV brands have now introduced their own OLED TVs powered by webOS Hub. The webOS smart TV platform is continuously evolving, providing seamless upgrades that add support for new services and bringing constant refinement to the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design based on LG’s deep understanding of customers. To allow as many users as possible to enjoy the latest version of webOS on their home TVs, LG is offering seamless support for TV operating system upgrades and updates via platform upgrades even for earlier TV models. As part of its strategy to expand the webOS platform ecosystem, LG acquired a majority stake of the U.S. advertising and content data analysis specialist, Alphonso, in 2021. Alphonso established subsidiaries in the U.K. and Greece last year, accelerating the global growth of its content service. LG is set to make a substantial investment of KRW 1 trillion in its webOS business over the next five years in order to provide more content and services that cater to the diverse lifestyles and preferences of consumers. By boosting its competitiveness in content and services, LG believes it will further elevate the webOS user experience. LG’s strategic investment will be focused on broadening the range of content available via the webOS platform, boosting usability by innovating the UI and UX, and strengthening partnerships with content production companies on a global scale. To date, LG has worked with its partners to bring new technologies to the platform for gamers, sports fans or Gen Z users. An example is the integration of Sye, a Prime Video proprietary, which provides a low latency technology that will benefit LG customers who are fans of live-streaming sports like Thursday Night Football. LG TVs deliver Netflix HDR streaming and have just opened the beta release for Netflix Games on TV and with the launch of the lifestyle screens for Gen Z, the company worked with YouTube to make a Native Touch UX available for the app on models such as StanbyME. LG is also strengthening innovation in the area of AI-based search and recommendations. The company plans to incorporate a voice user interface (VUI) feature into partner companies’ apps, which will let webOS users easily control and navigate third-party content services with their voice, and enable swift and seamless content discovery. Service usability will likewise be enhanced. LG Channels 3.0, LG’s premium, free streaming service, boasts a growing selection of TV series and has a revamped UI that allows users to view more content options, including live channels and movies, on the screen, reducing the need to scroll. And thanks to the new UI, users can now easily explore what’s on other channels without having to pause or navigate away from what they’re watching. Available in 27 countries worldwide, LG Channels currently offers over 3,000 channels and has over 50 million subscribers as of March 2023. In 2022 alone, the number of unique devices on which LG Channels was used increased by 75 percent, while viewing time rose by 57 percent and usage frequency surged to make the service one of the top-five most-accessed apps on the webOS platform. LG is actively investing in its smart TV platform development capabilities by partnering with academic institutions in South Korea to nurture the next generation of software talent, and by reinforcing its efforts to secure top-notch software professionals all around the globe. LG is driving change with a genuine customer-centric approach, as represented by its TV business’s Sync to You, Open to All vision. The vision expresses the company’s aim to provide personalized experiences that cater to each customer’s preferences and lifestyle, and to create products that are accessible to all. “LG is poised to transform into a media and entertainment platform company that delivers distinctive content and services that will enhance the lives of its customers,” said Park Hyoung-sei, president of the LG Home Entertainment Company, at webOS Partner Summit 2023. “This transformation would not have been possible without LG’s decade of OLED TV leadership and the technological innovation of the webOS smart TV platform.” Read the full article

[syerraffxiv]

“Oh no. Nononono... Curse you, Swift! Reliving this nightmare is not what I signed up for!”

I love the event for The Rising this year! It has given me a chance to really feel what the end of 1.0 was like for legacy players (and gives me straight chills in the intro cutscene).

Syerra, however, isn’t quite as impressed...

[thatboomerkid]

FIRST TEAM: LAST CHANCERS

Pentex is up to something.

... and it’s something BIG. 

This is a pitch & solicitation for a game, which I will run online for interested players. This text will serve as a living & public-facing reference-document, designed for use by my players, to be regularly updated over the course of our Chronicle.

Brought to you absolutely free to enjoy, to dick-around with, & to share – as always – by the fine folks of my Patreon.

Hugest of all possible special thanks to Daemon R. Allwardt, Matt Banach, Phil Brucato, Sye Cole, Nick Esposito, Dylan Hanny, Christopher Hazlett, Josh Heath, Derek Reeverts, Rich Rittenhouse, Amul Tevar, Joey Wallace, Joe Weinberg, and Owen Westcot.

And whatever kind of hot, nasty, oozing new extinction-level bug-fuckery Pentex has got brewing in the back offices, one thing is for damn sure: it ain’t good.

... which, incidentally, brings us to you & your new pack.

You’ve just been sworn-in to a most-sacred mission, and stride now to war for the literal continued existence of Gaia herself: your righteous vow commands you strike fast, move in shadow, conceal your strength, sow great confusion among your innumerable enemies, leave neither a single stone unturned nor a single witness standing, and -- above all -- puzzle-out precisely what the fuck these smug, devious, buttoned-down little corporate-psychopath shitheads are trying to pull for the foul “glory” of their grotesque master, the Wyrm.

And then to kill every mother-fucking last one of ‘em.

Or die trying.

Introduction

[Table of Contents, which you are reading right now]

Chronicle Themes

Suggested Media

Player Requirements

Character Requirements

[A Storyteller Solemnly Swears]

Setting Notes

Rules Notes

New Backgrounds

- Board-Certified Seal-of-Approval

- Infrequency

Celebrity Guest-Stars! ... or “Important NPCs of this Chronicle”

Because this is no ordinary black-ops monkeywrench operation, friend.

Whatever horrifying, nightmarish new “Special Project” the grinning bastards on the Board of Directors at Pentex are cooking-up, those schemes are bound in bane & balefire, sealed with silver & sorcery, wrapped skintight in unutterably-ancient-yet-somehow-still-shrieking White Howler flesh: a full-ass six-hundred-&-sixty-six levels above top-secret, locked-away so snug that even the most leet hackers, data-pirates, info-sec operators, and dumpster-diving ninja-assassins in service to Gaia haven’t been able to pry-loose more than the barest echoes of whispers from the churning belly of the great beast.

Not that we haven’t tried, obviously.

Problem is, Earth Mother’s chosen have very recently lost three full packs of our best & brightest cyber-warfare specialists: proud champions reppin’ the Random Interrupts, the Rat Finks, and the Corporate Wolves (alongside their Kin, their allies, their Fetishes, their Caerns, and their tech) ... all taken-out with extreme prejudice, military-grade ordinance, and unholy, blinding-fast surgical precision by rapid-response First Teams that -- if one were properly paranoid -- might lead one to suspect that Pentex has themselves an “inside man”. 

Or two. 

... or three.

Well, guess what?

Gaians can play at this game too, assholes.

Pentex likes to think that their treacherous, conniving, lily-white Ivy-League asses invented double-double secret-reverse counter-counterintelligence state-military-industrial espionage-operations? 

Lol. 

Your boy Cockroach, just as a ONE example, came-up hard on the mean streets of the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event, which aced-out 95% of the life on the planet, and was over two hundred million years old at the time of the Eocene epoch – a 22-million-year period of flaming radioactive planet-wide upheaval that included a particularly unpleasant winter (which just so happened to last somewhere in the range of 100,000 years) – a solid-ass thirty-five million years ago, back when the world, no bullshit, had mo’fucking rings around it.

It was metal as shit.

Note that his ugly little ass survived -- thrived -- up to the release of Morbius on Blueray at Blockbuster (and beyond!) without the benefit of thumbs.

Cockroach don’t fuck around, is the point.

Sneaky & clever though he may be, however, he’s just a Totem of Wisdom ... meaning that even his most intricate, complex, wheels-within-wheels, man-behind-the-man nine-part-harmony Xanatos Gambit plots are nothing against the dizzying designs of Coyote, Cuckoo, and/or Fox.

SO, THIS JUST IN: Pentex has won the coin-toss & chosen to receive; according to this note I was just handed by my producer, they also wanna ... wat. omg lazers, does that say, “we trash the rulebook & play dirty lmfao”?

Well ... alright, alright, alright. So mote it motherfuckin’ be, motherfuckers.

We’re doing this shit olde-skool now: deep-cover, deniable ops. No records, no receipts, no witnesses. No paper-trail, no chain-of-command, no back-up, no plan B. No limit, no quarter, no exit-strategy; no brakes on the Apocalypse-train. 

Underground, radio-silent, safeties-off; going full dark: inner circle only. 

Your handler has pulled-in every favor, ringer, expendable, has-been, old dog, youngblood, wash-out, dirty dealer, troublemaker, loose cannon, burned asset, low bastard, basket-case, wandering drifter, retired killer, and rainy-day BREAK GLASS ONLY IN THE EVENT OF EMERGENCY secret hold-out weapon she’s been quietly collecting-up over the last three & half decades.

Calling all freaks, as they say. ‘Cuz that’s the name of the game.

If you or any member of your pack is caught or killed, the Garou Nation will disavow all knowledge of your existence.

Hope you enjoyed getting to watch your own funeral from the nosebleed seats, kid. Might wanna strap-in & kiss your sweet ass goodbye. Because it’s about to get bumpy ... and real, real ugly.

Welcome to your new job at Pentex.

image by jim pinto

Chronicle Themes:

SMALL WORLD: y’know all those old borders & ancient rivalries? Like, say ... the ones dividing the Western Cordordiat of the Garou Nation from the Beast Courts of the Emerald Mother for, like, untold millennia? Well, thing is, they shatter into utter, insignificant meaninglessness before the sheer awful, global scale of Wyrm & Weaver locked in final battle.

BIG BUSINESS: the legions of Pentex are endless, outnumbering the champions of Gaia not by two, not ten, but by UNCOUNTABLE orders of magnitude; they can outspend us a thousand-to-one without even trying. ‘Course, the nice people over at Dynamic Technology International, the Mikoshi Conglomerate, Star-Mart, and Shinzui Industries are no slouches, either ... and they, interestingly enough, also want you dead!

PAST IS PROLOGUE: anyone who tells you the War of Rage was, quote, “a long-ass time ago” didn’t learn a goddamn thing: the unforgivable sins of our tragic, blood-streaked history shall not be forgotten ... or, I guess, we could just go ahead & round-off the next million years to yet another “particularly vivid, gore-drenched grind of ceaseless, ever-escalating, and infinitely-recursive fun-house-mirror horror-shows”.

FUTURE-SHOCK: ... but those internal memos outlining Pentex’s plans & operational schematics for the next century of their uncontested control over Earth? Yeah. Uh, they’re actually quite a bit worse: hyper-detailed, high-definition, vivid, full-color, glossy, and sickening in the extreme (with pie-charts!). We’re up against an all-star assemblage of clever & detail-oriented motherfuckers with an agenda-most-obscene... and, one financial quarter at a time, very increasingly with the means to make it happen.

Suggested Media:

6 Underground

Angel (Season 5)

Archer

The Boys

Bunraku

The Defenders

Inglourious Basterds

The IT Crowd

Mayhem

Shaolin Soccer

Sneakers

Player Requirements:

bi-weekly (every other week) availability for a 4-6 hour online game.

basic-to-intermediate experience with tabletop roleplaying games.

basic-to-intermediate experience with Werewolf: The Apocalypse and/or the greater olde-skool World of Darkness setting.

willingness to help every player at the table, as an active participant in shared-world storycraft, to create a fun, memorable, and above-all-mutually-satisfying tale: a high-octane, heartfelt, hilarious thrill-ride of action-packed international espionage in which super-powered warriors of Gaia rip monsters & finance-bro into festive intestine-confetti.

Character Requirements

each player will create a new, unique character using the Werewolf: The Apocalypse 20th Anniversary Edition Core Rulebook and Changing Breeds texts, building a PC of any Breed, Auspice, Tribe, and background the player desires, subject to the Infrequency Background (below).

characters may begin play with extra Renown, up to an amount required for the character to reach Rank 2.

characters may begin play with up to 50 Experience Points.

a character created for play in this Chronicle must be both willing & able to “go deep-cover” as a member of a Pentex First Team.

a character created for this Chronicle is, by default, legally dead ... and is counted among the honored (or, I guess, dishonored?) dead by the Garou Nation / Beast Courts, depending on which way the player wants to go with it: any PC who wishes to maintain Allies, Contacts, Kinfolk, or a Mentor within the greater worldwide society of Gaian-aligned Fera will need the Lying-Ass Liar Social Merit (detailed below).

As an aside, the spirit-world is -- on the other hand -- very much aware that the PCs are still alive & kicking: long story short, the PCs do not lose access to the cool benefits of their Rank or their Renown. 

“So ... uh? How precisely are they ‘secretly faking their deaths,’ then? If the whole spirit-world knows they’re alive?”

Lol. You mean the same spirit-world that’s casually kept Gaia’s Breath (W20 Changing Breeds, pg. 116) and Veil of the Wani (W20 Changing Breeds, pg. 160) out of the hands of the Garou Nation for literally ever, possibly just for shits & giggles at this point? The shadow-universe of dreams uncoupled from thought, populated entirely by unreliable narrators & constructed entirely of unreliable narration? Where use of the term “veracity” in a sentence has a non-zero-chance of causing the actual floor to scream “IT’S PRONOUNCED VORACITY” at you & then try to eat you?

That spirit-world?

Yeah, the PCs & their secrets will be fine.

Note that neither players nor characters will be forced to do evil or icky crap to “prove their loyalty to Pentex or the Wyrm”: while the characters may have to work hard & be clever to preserve their dirty secrets, I’m very not interested in running a game where the players are forced to do evil in ANY capacity

In fact ...

===

A STORYTELLER SOLEMNLY SWEARS

I, Clinton J. Boomer, do hereby promise & avow to never present my players with a “If you’re so evil, eat this kitten” scene or conflict within the context of this, our Chronicle.

Sincerely. Do not worry that it’ll happen. It won’t.

... that said, players are allowed to incorporate such moments into their own backstories & preludes (with Storyteller approval), if they so desire:

For Example: Kyle is playing a cunning Garou who has infiltrated Pentex in the guise of a Ferectoi; he & I decide, together, that -- during his character’s prelude -- he was given a sadistic “loyalty test” by a superior: handed a pistol & told to execute a captured Kinfolk wolf. Through incredible, awesome cleverness on Kyle’s part, his PC was able to prove his loyalty to Pentex beyond a shadow of a doubt ... while also keeping the wolf from being harmed!

Similarly -- and mostly only because it’s literally the focus of the Chronicle -- players will very often be presented with observably evil assignments by their superiors, which they (as a pack) will have to be clever & creative about completing ... or not completing, as they decide.

Por Ejemplo: The PCs are assigned by Pentex to rendezvous with a First Team operating out of Dakar and to thereafter provide material assistance with the unit’s mission:

infiltrate a local cell of the Ahadi (via exploitation of a Kerasi who doesn’t “ping” as Wyrm-tainted)

locate the cell’s hidden Caern

exterminate all members of the Ahadi, including Kinfolk

claim the Caern for the Wyrm

generate evidence pinning the attack on a well-known Silver Fang

The PCs decide, instead, to kill all the members of the First Team & pin the whole fiasco on a “particularly rascally Nuwisha”.

Can they get away with it? Let’s find out!

===

Setting Notes

This is a Werewolf: The Apocalypse Chronicle -- not a more-general World of Darkness Chronicle, nor a “crossover” Chronicle -- which means that a couple of very important things about the setting need to be addressed & clarified pretty much right away.

Among them:

The grand history & cosmology of the universe, as understood by the Garou, is -- essentially -- correct.

Now, sure ... there are a few fiddly little fine-grained details about the true secret history of reality (like, say, the Insect War mentioned in Ananasi: Changing Breed Book 7, on pages 25-26) known only to non-Garou Fera; these are also true, even if the Garou -- who are only about a million years old, after all -- don’t know about ‘em.

All other supernatural entities, on the other hand, are -- at best -- ignorant about the true shape & meaning of the universe; at worst, they’re tools of Wyrm, of Weaver, or of both: dangerously deluded and/or outright liars.

More specifically: leeches within the context of this Werewolf Chronicle lack things like a “generation,” a “clan,” a “Humanity score,” or even “Disciplines”; they do have what might be referred-to as bloodlines -- the foul undead that, in ancient days, forced the Silent Striders from their homeland in Egypt are said to have been spawned from the cursed, night-black veins of Sutekh, for example -- but anything you think you know about vampires that isn’t on pages 453-455 of the W20 Core Rulebook is pure conjecture (and also probably bullshit).

The same goes double for wizards, ghosts, fair folk, and monster-hunters.

If you really, really wanna be an expert on all the various horrible & mysterious creatures that go bump-in-the-night, be sure to buy up some dots in the Occult Knowledge (and also the Secrets Background).

===

Rules Notes

So. 

Remember how I said, above, that any supernatural entity who isn’t one of the Fera is, and I quote: “at best, ignorant about the true shape & meaning of the universe; at worst, they’re tools of Wyrm, of Weaver, or of both: dangerously deluded and/or outright liars”?

Okay, so that’s all true: the Traditions & the Technocracy are both wrong, as is -- to a lesser degree -- any Nephandus who think he’s a servitor of anything but Malfeas: any “Infernal” entity encountered within the context of this Chronicle is, in all probability, just a member of the Maeljin Incarna randomly cosplaying-as-Satan for cheap shits & giggles.

Furthermore, any supernatural entity (who isn’t one of the Fera) is also at least slightly down-powered & sidelined: this is a W20 Chronicle, which means that the Technocratic Union is small-scale, underfunded, hopelessly corrupted from within, and mostly made up of Extraordinary Citizens. 

The odds of a HIT Mark out-of-nowhere gunning-down the Perfect Metis at the last possible second to avert the Apocalypse, in other words, are approximately zero-point-zero-zero-null-&-fuckkin’-not-gonna-happen.

... that said, tho, the Mage: The Ascension 20th Anniversary books are really excellently written, and -- as such -- the M20 texts will serve as this Chronicle’s default “canon reference-documents” in such instances as a W20 book is silent on a particular rules-issue:

you want to play a Martial Artist? M20 pg. 424-426 has got you covered!

your character wants to shoot the gas tank? M20 pg. 459 it is!

you want a weird Merit or Flaw that’s not in the Corebook? Yo, check out the M20 Book of Secrets, friend-o.

===

New Backgrounds:

Board-Certified Seal-of-Approval

The massive, multiheaded hydra of Pentex trusts no one.

... and that’s not, like, hyperbole, by the way: the PCs, over the course of this Chronicle, will be taking orders from people who all goddamn HATE each other (see below), the majority of whom are actively trying to get one another killed.

It’s a squirming pit of monsters, my friend.

You & your pack are gonna be the one group of people that every member of the Board of Directors trusts to have their back ... and then you will betray the shit out that trust, for great justice, in the sacred name of Gaia.

zero dots (default): an outsider to the dark inner-workings of Pentex, you are – at best – a cog in the machine that it would be mildly inconvenient to Pentex to murder outright; this level of clearance covers everyone from a minimum-wage overnight counter-clerk at your local EndRun 24-hour gas-&-food convenience mart to an average lab-tech who works at Magadon, watches RED Network, and eats at O’Tolley’s three times a week.

1 dot: you’re a bottom-ranking peon who is (nonetheless) initiated into the foul, dark inner workings of Pentex: a First Team private, an associate executive, or a white-level scientist with Special Projects Division. You are cleared to know that “fomori” and “lupines” exist; you are also expected to die (or go to prison) at the whim of a superior.

2 dots: you’re a low-ranking, expendable cog: second-in-command of a First Team, a junior executive, or a green-level scientist with SPD.

3 dots: you’re a middle-ranking, slightly-more-expensive & slightly-less-expendable cog: leader of your own First Team, a supervising executive, or a blue-level scientist with SPD.

4 dots: you’re a high-ranking power-player: a chess-master directing the actions of multiple First Teams, a managing executive at a powerful (and lucrative) Pentex subsidiary, or a yellow-level scientist with SPD.

5 dots: you’re just one step down from the Board of Directors: overseeing multiple elite First Teams, an executive with your own subsidiary, or a red-level scientist with SPD.

6 dots: you’re at the level of the Chief Executive Officer of Global Pentex Security: not technically a member of the Board of Directors, sure ... but you’re on the short-list for membership (and you answer only to them)

7 dots: you’re at the level of a Subdivision Director -- someone like Kiro Yamazaki, Francesco, or Mr. Pochard -- and are a full-fledged member of the Board of Directors

8 dots: you’re at the level of a Division Director -- someone like Adrian Newberry, Chase Lamont, or Harold Zettler -- and are a ranking goddamn member of the Pentex Board

9 dots: you’re at, no shit, the level of actual motherfucking Peter Culliford, Executive Vice President of Pentex

10 dots: you are -- dear, sweet, hot, buttery Jesus -- at the real & actual level of Benjamin Rushing, Executive Director of Pentex

The difficulty of any Investigation, Streetwise, or similar check made to dig-up dirt or secrets on a character who possesses this Background is increased by +1 for each dot in this Background the target possesses over-and-above the investigator.

For Example: The PCs decide that they want to find out the actual, specific address of Adrian Newberry’s vacation home in Nantucket so that they can give him a shotgun enema I mean no, it’s so that they can have, like, flowers & candies delivered. For, uh ... Mother’s Day.

Anyway: since the Director of Operations has 8 dots in this Background and the highest score any PC has in this Background is 3, rolls to get any useful information are at a minimum of +5 difficulty.

This special Background may not be bought above 1 dot at character creation.

This special Background cannot be pooled, and PCs are expected to have different levels in this Background: the acting field-commander of a First Team will have higher “clearance” than her newest recruit, after all.

That said, the total level of trust placed in the PCs (as a team) will always be equal to the lowest Board-Certified Seal-of-Approval rating possessed by any member of the First Team.

This special Background can be used in-place-of & in the same-way-as any one of the following Backgrounds from M20 (pg. 303-328) at any given time: Backup, Influence, Requisitions, Resources, or Secret Weapons.

... of course, actually using your Board-Certified Seal-of-Approval to do shit like crush stories in the media, borrow sports cars & jets, or order a black-ops, attack helicopter extraction from a bad first date is the ABSOLUTE NUMBER ONE way to make your rating in the Background drop like a fucking stone.

Other than, like, fucking up a mission real bad, obvi.

Also, just to be as absolutely clear as possible: the literal, very specific goal of the Chronicle is to get your pack’s Board-Certified Seal-of-Approval rating as high as you can, so that -- just for example -- you can be placed in charge of security during an event where, if anything goes wrong, the entire Board of Directors will die in a horrible series of hilarious toilet-explosions.

===

News Merits & Flaws

Lying-Ass Liar (5 pt. Social Merit)

You have established (or have had established for you) a full alternate identity – complete with documentation – that passes with ease, drawing no suspicion, as a member of another community of supernatural entities. This very well might be the Western Concordiat of the Garou Nation or the Beast Courts of the Emerald Mother ... or it could be another organization altogether (like an international society of leeches, wizards, or even demon-hunters).

Regardless of who -- precisely -- you’ve infiltrated, you command the respect & trust of your “peers” within this organization, alongside a healthy measure of faith in your abilities from more-powerful members of the group.

To clarify, this is some next-level bullshit: a secret identity on top of all the secret identities you already have.

For example: you are Batman, currently operating in Gotham’s underworld as Matches Malone, after faking Batman’s death ... but you can also use the cash & connections associated with Bruce Wayne, if you want.

If you’re a Hakken (who everyone knows is dead) pretending to be a Ferectoi (while serving on your First Team), use of this Merit might mean that you’re also known to be a Child of Gaia Kinfolk: a disguise that involves slapping on some patchouli & a tie-dyed t-shirt, donning hemp sandles, and saying “whoa” a lot.

Or you might be known as the “blood-doll” or “familiar” of a powerful leech.

Or you & your Storyteller might decide that you’re an employee of a corporation like Shinzui International, or an agent of an organization like Strike Force Zero.

And yes, this is totally the sort of thing that a clever Ragabash, Corax, or Nuwisha could set up once the Chronicle has started, if given the time & materials to do so ... but this Merit is useful because it doesn’t involve any rolls (and thus it presents absolutely no risk of failure).

Note that this shit is also not bulletproof: if you’re ever “outed” as a member of a Pentex First Team (or, far worse, as your known-to-be-dead self), the reactions of those who know you only as the-identity-granted-by-this-Merit will be:

disbelief

followed by confusion 

followed very rapidly by outright hostility toward your accuser

followed immediately thereafter by you being restrained, detained, and very thoroughly investigated -- just in case! -- by the paranoid people you’ve infiltrated

which may very well wind-up with you dead, and/or with your cover blown (and then also very dead)

You’ll need to work with your Storyteller to determine what specific supernatural group or community – such as the Garou Nation, the Beast Courts, a cabal of wizards (such as the Five Metal Dragons or the Akashayana), or even a night-lit masquerade of leeches – you’ve successfully infiltrated, and in what capacity: while it’s pretty unlikely that you’re able to pass for a high-ranking undead blood-wizard, for example, you might very reasonably adopt the disguise of “a highly trusted servant to an eccentric, paranoid, and agoraphobic elder vampire”.

You’ll also work with your Storyteller to decide whether Pentex knows about your secret identity or not: they’d love to have an asset that can infiltrate a werewolf moot while disguised as a Kinfolk, obviously ... but, y’know, maybe you don’t feel like showing your hand & revealing all your little tricks just yet.

Note that your alternate identity can use your Backgrounds – like Resources (W20 pg. 138) – but that you can also purchase Backgrounds separately: your fake identity might have points in Allies (W20 pg. 135) or Contacts (W20 pg. 136), for example, totally separate from those possessed by any other identities.

===

Celebrity Guest-Stars!

... or “Important NPCs of this Chronicle”

Any NPC listed below, alongside any information presented herein about the NPC in question, is automatically known -- with no roll, check, or expenditure-of-resources required -- to ALL player-characters.

In other words: you - as a player - don’t have to memorize any of this crap, because your character has it memorized for you (and you can look it up, right here, any time you want).

Some characters, of course, will have extra information: you’ll want to talk with me (your friendly, helpful Storyteller!) about the very, very special dark & secret shit that only you know.

Your Handler (and her packmates, Sept of the Epic Quest):

Eva Hedwig “Bunny Foo-Foo” Hare, Metis Glass Walker Ahroun

---

John “John-Boy” J. Jonhson, Lupus Glass Walker Ragabash

---

Philo “File-[zero]” Taylor-Swift Farnsworth Jr., Homid Boli Zouhisze Theurge

---

Ignacia Rosa “Iggy” Leon, Homid Glass Walker Philodox

---

Very Online Larry, Homid Glass Walker Ragabash

---

Sister Kasmira, Homid Glass Walker Galliard

---

... vs. the forces of Pentex:

Benjamin Rushing, Executive Director

---

Peter Culliford, Executive Vice President

---

Adrian Newberry, Director of Operations

---

Chase Lamont, Joint Division Director of Acquisitions / Information-Collection

---

Harold Zettler, Director of Special Projects Division

---

Franklin Rubin, Director of Project Coordination Division

---

Francesco, Subdivision Director of Project Iliad

---

Kiro Yamazaki, Joint Subdivision Director of Project Odessey / Project Aeneid

---

Kathryn Mollett, Subdivision Director of Human Resources Development

---

Andre Baptiste, Subdivision Director of Public Relations

---

Ursula Crane, Subdivision Director of Finance

---

Ian Robertson, Subdivision Director of Process and Integration

---

Sir Frederick Appleton, Subdivision Director of Project Lycaon / Neuro-Dynamic Laboratories International

---

Frédéri Pochard, Subdivision Director without Portfolio

---

Michael Dragons-Wrath, Chief Executive Officer of Global Pentex Security

---

Ash Pyralis, North American Chief of Pentex Security

[raatnam-media-blog]

అక్టోబర్ 2న సైరా బాక్సాఫీస్ బద్దలైపోతుంది Sye Raa Pre Release Event Hung...

[kalarikendram]

Kalari kendram delhi is performed live at LB stadium , Hyderabad for the thumping pre-relase event, a high- octane action sequence packed period movie of @megastar_chiranjeevi in and as SYE RA NARASIMHA REDDY . The team extends its heartiest congratulations to the whole movie crew. #sayra #kalaripayattu #chiranjeevi #amitabhbachchan #kichasudeep #vijaysethupathy #syeraanarasimhareddy #nayanthara #ramcharan #event @kalaripayattu (at Lb Stadium) https://www.instagram.com/p/B2wj0V9lZlT/?igshid=qwgctd9srybv

[athibanenglish]

Count Of Savoy lives up to the billing

Count Of Savoy lives up to the billing

Trainer S.K. Sunderji’s Count Of Savoy (C.S. Jodha up) claimed the Laknavaram Cup, the feature event of Monday’s (Jan. 3) races. The winner is owned by Mrs. M.B. Dubash & Ms. Farida B. Dubash. 1. THUNDER LIGHT PLATE (Div. II) (1,400m), 4-y-o & upward, rated upto 25 (Cat. III): MISS LITTLE ANGEL (Antony Raj) 1, Sye Ra (Ajeeth Kumar) 2, My Master (Gaurav Singh) 3 and New Hustle (Surya Prakash) 4.…

[latinboxsports]

Anabel Ortiz 105.2 vs. Seniesa Estrada 104.4 (WBA female strawweight title) Ortiz Jr. vs Hooker is a 12-round fight for the WBO International Welterweight Championship presented by Golden Boy. The event is sponsored by Hennessy "Never Stop. Never Settle” and “BetOnline - Your Online Sportsbook Experts.” The fight will take place on Saturday, March 20 at Dickies Arena in Fort Worth, Texas and will be streamed live exclusively on DAZN worldwide, including the U.S. and Mexico. Photo Credit: Sye Williams/Golden Boy (at Fort Worth, Texas) https://www.instagram.com/p/CMoXJg2l71P/?igshid=56rzkoib9p3o

[techcrunchappcom]

New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/the-latest-emperors-new-year-greeting-cancelled-in-japan-national-news/

The Latest: Emperor's New Year greeting cancelled in Japan | National News

TOKYO — Japanese Emperor Naruhito and his family will not offer their New Year greetings from the palace balcony due to concerns over the country’s struggles with a resurgence of coronavirus infections.

The Imperial Household Agency said in a statement Friday that the annual greetings on Jan. 2 will not be held. The event traditionally draws tens of thousands of well-wishers to the palace garden. The greeting was last canceled in 1990 following the death of Naruhito’s grandfather.

Emperor Naruhito and his family have rarely made public appearances since the pandemic began, due to cancelation of palace events.

Experts have urged the government to reduce social and business activity before the holiday season because of a rise in serious coronavirus cases.

———

HERE’S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE VIRUS OUTBREAK:

— Americans risk traveling over Thanksgiving despite warnings

— Congress braces for Biden’s national coronavirus strategy

— Pandemic gave locals fleeting taste of a tourist-free Hawaii

— To avoid any traces of the coronavirus that might be lurking on surfaces, Americans have been wiping down groceries, wearing surgical gloves in public and leaving mail packages out for an extra day or two. But experts say the national fixation on scrubbing can sometimes be overkill.

— California has reported a record number of coronavirus cases on the eve of Thanksgiving. More than 18,000 COVID-19 infections were reported Wednesday.

— Though the first real snow has yet to fall across much of Europe, ski buffs are imagining with dread a bizarre scene: Skiing in Zermatt in Switzerland while lifts idle across the border in Italy’s Aosta valley.

———

Follow AP’s coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak

———

HERE’S WHAT ELSE IS HAPPENING:

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s daily coronavirus tally is above 500 for a second straight day and the country’s prime minister is urging the public to stay at home this weekend to contain a viral resurgence.

Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun said Friday that people should avoid social gatherings and refrain from going out in public this weekend. South Korea has seen a spike in fresh infections since it eased tough social distancing rules last month.

Authorities reported 569 newly confirmed infections over the past 24 hours, raising the country’s total to 32,887 for the pandemic, with 516 deaths. The 583 new cases reported Thursday was the first time that South Korea’s daily tally had exceeded 500 since March.

———

ST. LOUIS — More Missouri counties in the region around St. Louis are imposing mandates requiring the use of face masks as coronavirus cases and hospitalizations surge.

The move comes amid an unsuccessful campaign by health officials in that area to get Gov. Mike Parson to require masks statewide.

Jefferson County, just south of St. Louis, is the latest to adopt a mask mandate. Neighboring Franklin County passed a mask order last week, and Boone County adopted a similar requirement earlier this week. Also this week, St. Charles County officials ordered an 11 p.m. closing time for bars and restaurants.

On Thursday, state officials reported 4,471 new confirmed cases, bringing the total to 287,263. Since the pandemic started, 3,808 people have died of COVID-19.

———

NEW YORK — New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo says officials are working on a winter plan for the coronavirus that will add metrics for how the state designates virus hot zones.

On Thursday, Cuomo said the state will continue homing in on small geographic areas where virus cases are a particular problem to avoid imposing broad statewide restrictions, considering factors such as the hospitalization rate and the availability of ICU beds.

The new plan will add factors like the hospitalization rate and the availability of ICU beds to determine the location of the hot spots.

Cuomo said the winter plan will also look at ways to keep schools open, evaluating a safe positivity rate as well as determining the levels of testing needed at schools over the winter months. The plan will also outline how vaccines will be distributed as they become available.

———

DES MOINES, Iowa — Iowa added 41 COVID-19 deaths Thursday as three more long-term care facilities reported virus outbreaks.

KCCI reports that the Iowa Department of Public Health reported 3,331 new positive COVID-19 cases as of 10 a.m. to bring the total to 222,278. The latest deaths raised the pandemic total to 2,312.

Long-term care facilities have been particularly hard hit, with cases in them accounting for 1,038 of the state’s 2,312 deaths. The three new facilities reporting outbreaks brings the total that have been hit to 152.

Health department data also shows fewer Iowa counties are reporting a 14-day positivity rate greater than 15%. There are now 88 counties with a rate at 15% or higher, down from 91 the day before. Schools in those counties can apply for a waiver to provide 100% distance instruction.

———

LAWRENCE, Kan. — The number of Kansas counties that require face coverings has risen sharply as fewer opted out of Gov. Laura Kelly’s latest mask mandate.

Sixty-two Kansas counties now have orders in place, with many coming as Kelly’s new statewide mask order went into effect Wednesday, according to a list compiled by the Kansas Association of Counties. The remaining 43 of the counties have opted out, but most are encouraging or recommending people wear masks, The Kansas City Star reports.

It’s a stark contrast to the response Kelly received to her first mask order in July, when the majority of counties opted out.

Meanwhile, a Lawrence hotel will serve as a shelter for individuals who need to quarantine or isolate after a positive COVID-19 test or exposure to a positive case, a press release from Douglas County and its Unified Command partners said.

The Kansas Division of Emergency Management is providing funding for shelter services at the Baymont Inn and Suites, the Lawrence Journal-World reports. It’s available to homeless individuals, those who cannot safely isolate or quarantine at home due to numerous people living in the same home and first responders and those who work in high-risk professions.

———

PIERRE, S.D. — One group of South Dakotans marked the Thanksgiving holiday by setting up a makeshift memorial near the state Capitol in Pierre for those who have died from COVID-19.

A group called Stop the Spread set up over 800 empty chairs on the Capitol grounds, representing each person who has died. The state has tallied 849 COVID-19 deaths, with 424 of those deaths coming in November.

That death count is the 41st highest in the country overall, but the 11th highest per capita, according to Johns Hopkins researchers.

While the state maintained one of the nation’s lowest death rates per capita throughout the summer and into the fall, a wave of cases has led to a skyrocketing rate of deaths in recent weeks.

———

MADRID — Spain’s infection and fatality figures in the resurgence of COVID-19 are continuing to edge down, with the country posting 12,289 new cases and 337 deaths.

The 14-day cumulative number of COVID-19 cases per 100,000 of population, a recognized measure of the pandemic’s spread, also fell Thursday, to 325.

That is far off the Nov. 9 peak during the resurgence, when it stood at 529, and comes amid nationwide measures restricting movement and social gatherings.

The government admits the trend is favorable but wants to maintain caution until its target rate of 25 cases per 100,000 of population is reached.

Spain’s total number of new confirmed coronavirus cases stands at 1.6 million, with more than 44,000 deaths.

———

OTTAWA, Ontario — The chief medical adviser at Health Canada says Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine candidate could be approved in Canada next month.

Dr. Supriya Sharma says the Health Canada review is most advanced for the vaccine being developed by Pfizer and BioNTech. She says Canada is reviewing it alongside the United States and Europe, and expects it will be approved here at the same time it is given emergency authorization in the U.S.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is meeting Dec. 10 to consider whether to give the go-ahead to Pfizer. Canada has a purchase deal to buy at least 20 million doses of Pfizer’s vaccine, with the first four million of those on track to arrive before the end of March.

Sharma says she expects the first shipments of the Pfizer vaccine in January but it is possible Canada could begin receiving the first doses before the end of the year.

———

SANDPOINT, Idaho — A county commissioner in northern Idaho has proposed defunding the local health district after the district instituted a mask mandate to slow the spread of the coronavirus as it surges in the area.

The Bonner County Dailey reports that Bonner County Commissioner Steven Bradshaw proposed the resolution this week to pull about $250,000 from the Panhandle Health District.

Commission Chairman Dan McDonald said the resolution will have to be placed on the agenda before it can be considered at next week’s meeting.

The health district ordered the mask mandate on Nov. 19.

Bonner County Sheriff Daryl Wheeler says his agency won’t enforce it.

———

BETHEL, Alaska — The Alaska Native Medical Center, which specializes in health care for Alaska Native and American Indian people in the state, says it is now over capacity with coronavirus patients.

The center says it had to open an alternate care site to handle overflow.

The hospital’s Acting Administrator Dr. Robert Onders said during a virtual town hall on Monday that the critical care unit is so flooded that it cannot hold all the hospital’s most seriously ill patients.

About 20% of coronavirus patients at the hospital require critical care. Onders said he expects the hospital’s situation to worsen.

The Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta region had the highest coronavirus case rate in the state as of Tuesday with about 273 cases per 100,000 people across the region on Tuesday.

———

RENO, Nev. — The coroner in Reno fears the recent explosion of coronavirus cases in Nevada could soon overtake not only the ability to treat the sick, but also store the dead.

COVID-19 is now spreading so fast statewide that someone is confirmed to have contracted it every minute and someone else is dying from it about every two hours.

The Reno-Sparks area has recorded 59 COVID-19 deaths the last 30 days — half of those this past week.

If the current trend continues, Washoe County Medical Examiner Laura Knight says the death rate could potentially double over the next two to three weeks, and double again by early January.

Statewide hospitalizations set another record Wednesday with 1,414 COVID-19 patients.

———

PARIS — France’s health minister says his country is readying to start administering COVID-19 vaccines in late December. But Olivier Veran is warning Thursday that people will still have to wear masks and keep their distance even after vaccines are widely available.

Veran said he can’t say yet whether mass vaccination “will allow us to get rid of this virus and totally return to our past lives,” because it’s not clear exactly how long protection from the eventual vaccines will last.

Noting broad skepticism in France about vaccine safety, he promised transparency about vaccination policy and to release plans soon on who will get the vaccine first and how.

President Emmanuel Macron has said France will not make COVID vaccines mandatory.

France leads Europe in numbers of confirmed virus infections, and has reported 50,618 virus-related deaths.

———

ROME — Italian health officials say the number of coronavirus patients both in intensive care and regular care beds has dropped. It’s an encouraging sign for Italy’s overtaxed hospitals during the surge in cases.

According to Health Ministry figures, 34,038 people in the country of more than 60 million were hospitalized in non-ICU beds Thursday, down 275 from Wednesday.

There were 3,846 ICU patients, two fewer than on the previous day.

On Thursday, 822 deaths were registered, raising the total to 52,850.

Although some 2,700 more swab tests were performed compared to the previous 24-hour period, the number of persons testing positive jumped by more than 3,000 Thursday.

With 29,003 new confirmed cases, Italy surpassed the 1.5 million mark in the pandemic Thursday, reaching 1,509,875.

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[ladystylestores]

India’s coronavirus death toll overtakes China’s: Live updates | News

India’s coronavirus death and case tolls have passed China’s, after the country recorded 175 new fatalities and 7,466 new cases.

The English Premier League and Italy’s Serie A are set to resume in June after a near-three month suspension over coronavirus fears.

China again reported no new cases as US President Donald Trump renewed attacks on Beijing over the coronavirus pandemic. He called the virus “a very bad gift from China”.

European governments moved to halt the use of anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 patients.

More than 5.8 million cases of coronavirus have been confirmed around the world, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. Some 359,000 people have died, while more than 2.4 million have recovered.

Here are the latest updates:

Friday, May 29

06:00 GMT – Thailand reports 11 new coronavirus cases

Thailand confirmed 11 new coronavirus cases and no new deaths, taking the number of infections to 3,076.

The new cases were all patients who had arrived from Kuwait and were in quarantine, said Taweesin Wisanuyothin, a spokesman for the government’s Centre for COVID-19 Situation Administration.

The coronavirus has killed 57 people in Thailand since it was first detected in January.

Hello, this is Umut Uras in Doha taking over this blog from my colleague Zaheena Rasheed.

05:41 GMT – South Korea plans to limit number of students returning to class 

South Korea’s education ministry has announced plans to limit the number of students attending classes in schools in the Seoul metropolitan area amid a spike in new coronavirus infections. 

The move comes just days after in-person classes resumed as part of a phased reopening of schools. 

The Yonhap news agency quoted Park Baeg-beom, the vice education minister, as saying elementary and middle schools can only allow one-third of students to return to class while high schools can only take in two-thirds of their students. 

Students sit behind protective screens as a preventative measure against the COVID-19 novel coronavirus as they eat lunch at a high school in Daejeon, South Korea, on May 20, 2020 [Yonhap / AFP]

05:05 GMT – Surge in cases as India prepares to lift lockdown

India has registered another record daily increase with 7,466 new coronavirus cases.

The Health Ministry’s new figures on Friday show India now has 165,799 cases with 4,706 deaths, which both now exceed China.

India’s two-month lockdown is set to end on Sunday. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is expected to issue new guidelines this weekend, possibly extending the lockdown in worst-hit areas as it promotes economic activity.

04:49 GMT – Brazil reports record cases, 1,000 deaths in 24 hours

Brazil registered a new record in COVID-19 cases and more than 1,000 deaths in a 24-hour period, according to official figures out Thursday.

The South American country has the world’s second-highest number of confirmed novel coronavirus cases – 438,238 – after the US. According to Health Ministry data, 26,417 new cases were confirmed in a 24 hour-period ending late on Thursday.

In that same period, Brazil experienced its third-highest number of virus deaths since the start of the pandemic: 1,156. That brought the total death toll to 26,754, the sixth highest in the world.

04:23 GMT – Colombia extends national quarantine until July

Colombia has extended a nationwide quarantine to contain the spread of the coronavirus until July 1, while allowing more freedom of movement in some parts of the country.

Thousands of businesses have begun to reopen in the Andean country, with new safety protocols and reduced staff, as a lockdown in place since late March was due to lift at the end of May.

Under the government-mandated extension that business restart will continue. Hairdressers and barbers are among the businesses allowed to reopen, along with museums and libraries, at the discretion of local mayors.

However, other broad restrictions will remain in place. Public transit between municipalities and domestic flights will remain barred and in many areas people are required to stay indoors.

04:13 GMT – WHO to reconsider role of China-based ambassador

The World Health Organization is reviewing the position of its goodwill ambassador, James Chau, who was involved in the airing of an alleged forced confession on Chinese state television, according to the Financial Times.

Chau, a television anchor with China’s state broadcaster, presented a programme that in 2013 aired a confession by British businessman Peter Humphrey, who claims he was filmed under duress.

“The matter is taken seriously, as any such complaint would be. It is currently under internal review, and therefore cannot be commented on,” the WHO said in a statement to The Financial Times.

03:38 GMT – Algeria extends partial lockdown until June 13

Abdelaziz Djerad, the prime minister of Algeria, has extended a partial lockdown in the majority of the country’s provinces for another 15 days.

Djerad lifted quarantine measures only in four provinces – Saida, Tindouf, Illizi and Tamanrasset – “following the favourable results” recorded there, according to Algeria Presse Service.

03:21 GMT – AIIB approves $750m loan for Philippines’ virus response

China-backed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) has said it had approved a $750m loan to the Philippines to help the country cope with the coronavirus pandemic.

The project, which will be co-financed by the Asian Development Bank, is intended to increase testing capacity, support vulnerable sectors like agriculture, and provide emergency assistance to poor households, according to a statement.

02:07 GMT – South Korea reports 58 cases

South Korea reported 58 new cases of the coronavirus for May 28, all in the densely populated Seoul metropolitan area, as officials scrambled to stem transmissions linked to a massive e-commerce warehouse near the capital.

Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun called for officials to examine working conditions at warehouses of online shopping companies, which have seen orders surge during the pandemic, and other congested workplaces where infection risks may be high.

South Korea has reported 177 new COVID-19 cases over the past three days, a resurgence that threatens to erase some of its hard-won gains against the virus and worsen a massive shock to the country’s trade-dependent economy.

01:55 GMT – India: Under Lockdown

Social distancing and good hygiene are essential weapons in the fight against COVID-19.

But how can you maintain social distancing in one of the world’s largest slums? How can you wash your hands regularly when there is no running water? And what happens when millions of people who survive on meagre wages are suddenly without work and struggling to feed themselves?

Check out this investigation from 101 East on how India’s poor fared under the world’s biggest lockdown.

01:40 GMT – Cricket-Twenty20 World Cup schedule under ‘very high risk’

Cricket Australia boss Kevin Roberts has downplayed the prospect of the Twenty20 World Cup going ahead in 2020, saying the October-November schedule was under “very high risk” due to the coronavirus pandemic.

“Obviously, we’ve been hopeful all along that it could be staged in October-November but you would have to say there is a very high risk about the prospect of that happening,” Roberts told reporters in a video call.

“In the event that doesn’t happen, there are potential windows in the February-March period, October-November the following year.”

00:46 GMT – China reports no new coronavirus cases

Health authorities in China have reported no new confirmed coronavirus cases in the mainland as of the end of May 28.

The National Health Commission, however, did confirm five new asymptomatic coronavirus cases on May 28, down from 23 a day earlier.

Surveillance amid coronavirus outbreak (3:39)

00:28 GMT – Australia’s New South Wales state warns of COVID-19 budget toll

The Australian state of New South Wales has said the coronavirus pandemic could cost it as much 20 billion Australian dollars ($13.3bn) in lost revenues over the next four years, underscoring the urgency to revive the country’s stuttering economy.

Releasing its first estimate of the economic effect of coronavirus, NSW said budget deficits totalling 10-20 billion Australian dollars are expected over the next four years, a far cry from its previous estimate in December 2019 of an average budget surplus of 1.9 billion Australian dollars ($1.3bn) over four years.

“We are facing the type of economic challenge not seen in generations, perhaps not since people were hammering the last rivet into the Sydney Harbour Bridge in the 1930s,” said NSW state Treasurer Dominic Perrottet.

00:16 GMT – 14 million additional people could go hungry in Latin America

The World Food Programme has said some 14 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean could experience severe food insecurity this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It is vital and urgent that we provide food assistance to the growing number of vulnerable people in the region, as well as those who depend on informal work,” said Miguel Barreto, WFP regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean.

“We still have time to prevent the COVID-19 pandemic from becoming a hunger pandemic.”

Hello and welcome to Al Jazeera’s continuing coverage of the coronavirus pandemic. I’m Zaheena Rasheed in Male, Maldives. 

You can find all the updates from yesterday, May 28 here.

Hello, this is Usaid Siddiqui in Doha taking over from my colleague Kate Mayberry.

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[bountyofbeads]

Coronavirus Live Updates: Italy Locks Down Region After Spike in Infections https://nyti.ms/2VbjqGt

Coronavirus Live Updates: Xi Acknowledges ‘Shortcomings’ in Fight Against Outbreak

In nearby South Korea, which has more than 600 confirmed cases, President Moon Jae-in empowered his government to lock down cities and restrict travel.( A DAY LATE AND A DOLLAR SHORT!!! THE HORSE IS OUT OF THE BARN AND IT'S NOW A PANDEMIC!!!)

RIGHT NOW

Pakistan and Turkey close their borders with Iran as cases there increase.

Here’s what you need to know:

READ UPDATES IN CHINESE: 新冠病毒疫情最新消息汇总

China’s leader calls the outbreak a ‘crisis and a big test.’

China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, told officials at a Communist Party meeting on Sunday that the coronavirus epidemic was “a crisis and a big test” for the country.

Mr. Xi acknowledged “obvious shortcomings in the response to the epidemic,” but did not give details, adding that officials should “learn lessons” and improve the country’s ability to respond to public health emergencies.

He said the outbreak in China presented “the fastest spread, the widest scope of infections and the greatest degree of difficulty in controlling infections” of any public health emergency since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.

Mr. Xi called situation “severely complex” and warned that prevention and control measures were at their “most crucial stage.”

He acknowledged that the outbreak would have social and economic effects and pledged to take measures to ease the burdens on the country’s workers and businesses. He called for an orderly return to work in places with low and medium risk, and said that areas with high risk of spreading the virus must focus on prevention and control measures.

Mr. Xi said the government would look to fiscal policies including tax cuts to help small and medium-size businesses, and work to reduce barriers to the flow of people and goods.

But, saying that the government’s response reflected well upon the party’s leadership, he said that its judgment on the epidemic was “accurate, all work deployments are timely and the measures adopted have been forceful and effective.”

“The results achieved by the prevention and control work again display the outstanding superiority of the leadership of the Communist Party of China and socialism with Chinese characteristics,” Mr. Xi said.

The meeting was attended by members of the Communist Party and government leadership, and was broadcast to about 170,000 officials across the country, the state media said.

The Chinese authorities recently acknowledged that Mr. Xi had been aware of the outbreak nearly two weeks before he first spoke about it, a revised timeline that put him at the center of efforts to control the outbreak.

That declaration was seen as a risk because it left Mr. Xi, China’s most powerful leader since the Mao era, open to questions over whether the government moved quickly enough.

South Korea’s leader urges an ‘all-out, concerted response.’

President Moon Jae-in on Sunday put South Korea on the highest possible alert in its fight against the coronavirus, a move that empowers the government to lock down cities and take other sweeping measures to contain the outbreak.

“The coming few days will be a critical time for us,” he said at an emergency meeting of government officials to discuss the outbreak, which in just days has spiraled to 602 confirmed infections and six deaths. “The central government, local governments, health officials and medical personnel and the entire people must wage an all-out, concerted response to the problem.”

By raising the alert to Level 4, or “serious,” Mr. Moon authorized the government to take steps like barring visitors from specific countries and restricting public transportation, as well as locking down cities, as China has done.

Many of South Korea’s coronavirus cases are in the southeastern city of Daegu, which has essentially been placed under a state of emergency, though people are still free to enter and leave the city. A 59-year-old man on Sunday was the sixth person to die in the country after contracting the virus.

More than half of the people confirmed to have been infected are either members of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, a secretive religious sect with a strong presence in Daegu, or their relatives or other contacts.

Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun had urged people on Saturday to comply with a ban on large protests in Seoul, the capital, where large political demonstrations are commonplace. But thousands of Christian activists defied the ban that day, gathering for their weekly protest against Mr. Moon, whom they accuse of coddling North Korea and mismanaging the economy.

The spike of cases in South Korea, along with rising numbers in Iran and Italy, has added to fears that the window to avert a global pandemic is narrowing. The World Health Organization has warned African leaders of the urgent need to prepare for the virus; it identified 13 African countries as priorities because of their direct links to China, which accounts for the vast majority of confirmed infections and deaths.

On Sunday, China raised its official numbers to 76,936 cases and 2,442 deaths.

IRAN, SAYING EIGHT HAVE DIED, CLOSES SCHOOLS ACROSS 14 PROVINCES.

Pakistan and Turkey temporarily closed their borders with Iran on Sunday, as Tehran announced that it would close schools, universities and cultural centers across 14 provinces in an effort to curb the coronavirus. The outbreak has killed at least eight people in Iran, state television said.

Although the origin of the outbreak in Iran is unclear, the Fars news agency on Sunday quoted the country’s health minister as saying that Chinese carriers of the virus were a source of the outbreak in Iran.

Just days ago, Iran said it was untouched by the virus, and the sudden increase in cases has raised concerns that it may be experiencing a significant outbreak. Iran’s health ministry said Saturday that 43 people had tested positive, with eight deaths, state-run Press TV reported.

Experts have said that based on the number of dead, the total number of cases is probably much higher, as Covid-19 appears to kill about one out of 50 people infected.

Pakistan’s 596-mile border with Iran is mostly porous, and controlling a potential spread of the coronavirus poses a major challenge.

“Due to the very serious nature of coronavirus outbreak in Iran, we have to take stringent precautionary measures,” Mir Zia Ullah, the home minister of Baluchistan Province, which borders Iran, said by telephone. “All kind of movement has been suspended.”

He said officials planned to meet on Monday to assess how long to keep the border closed.

Turkey’s health minister, Fahrettin Koca, said in a news conference, “Because of the fact that the picture in Iran is getting worse, we decided to temporarily shut down our border with our neighbor.”

“Land and rail crossings from Iran to our country will be stopped as of 5 p.m.,” he added. “All international flights will be temporarily and one-sidedly stopped as of 8 p.m.”

Turkey has four border gates to Iran, and all of them were shut down.

Eight Iranians who were showing signs of cold, such as fever and coughing were denied entry to Turkey over the last two days, Mr. Koca said.

In Iran, eight of the 10 new cases were in the city of Qom, Press TV reported, citing a health ministry spokesman, Kianush Jahanpur. Qom has been the epicenter of the outbreak in Iran, and mosques and schools were closed there on Thursday.

Mehr, an Iranian news agency, reported that the government had begun mass distribution of masks in cities affected by the outbreak.

The closing of schools, universities and cultural centers will last a week.

The authorities have also said that concerts and cultural events would be canceled for a week and movie theaters closed, while sports competitions will be held without spectators, state television reported.

CASES IN ITALY RISE, AND THE VENICE CARNIVAL IS CANCELED.

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Italy has risen by 89, officials said on Sunday, bringing the country’s total to 132.

Officials also announced two cases in Venice for the first time, as the number of cases in Veneto, where Venice is the capital, rose to 25.

On Sunday, officials also canceled the last two days of the Venice carnival, which draws thousands of people from around the world.

The announcement was made after an estimate 20,000 people attended a carnival event in St. Mark’s Square on Sunday morning. Carnival activities, which began on Feb. 8 with tens of thousands of people gathering in St. Mark’s, were to end on Tuesday.

Ten towns in the Lombardy region have been placed on lockdown, a decision affecting more than 50,000 people, after 88 coronavirus infections emerged there. And as new cases arose in other cities, Italy’s cabinet passed emergency measures late Saturday night that apply throughout the country.

Those national guidelines oblige local officials to “take all appropriate containment measures” if someone tests positive for the virus. Quarantine measures will be applied to anyone who has close contact with someone who has contracted the virus, and areas where positive cases are confirmed will be placed on lockdown.

“We are trying to contain a phenomenon, but it’s not a pandemic,” Giulio Gallera, the councilor responsible for health in Lombardy, said in a news conference on Saturday.

The lockdown in that region, announced late Friday, has closed schools, businesses, and bus and train stations. Officials have banned all public events, including sporting activities and religious ceremonies. Other Lombardy towns not affected by the lockdown have decided on their own restrictive measures.

Soccer matches on Sunday were canceled in Lombardy and Veneto. Two trade fairs scheduled for this month in Milan were postponed, and the mayor of Milan on Sunday asked that schools in the city be closed for a week.

Of the country’s coronavirus patients, 26 are in intensive care and two people have died, including a 77-year-old woman and a 78-year-old man, officials said.

THIRD DEATH LINKED TO THE DIAMOND PRINCESS IS REPORTED.

A third person connected with the Diamond Princess cruise ship at the center of a coronavirus outbreak has died of pneumonia, according to Japan’s health ministry. A Japanese man in his 80s, who was taken off the ship to a hospital on Feb. 5, died on Sunday.

At the request of the man’s family, the ministry did not specify whether he had tested positive for the coronavirus or whether he had been a passenger on the ship.

The ministry said on Sunday that an additional 55 crew members and two passengers had tested positive for the coronavirus, bringing the total number of confirmed cases associated with the ship to 634.

Fifty of the new confirmed cases currently showed no symptoms, the ministry said. It did not indicate whether those who had tested positive were being quarantined on board the ship or had been taken to hospitals.

The Diamond Princess was subject to a government-mandated quarantine for two weeks in Yokohama, Japan. The government’s handling of the outbreak on the ship — the largest concentration of cases outside China — has been the subject of stinging criticism.

Others who worked on the ship will return to work but will be tested for infection, Health Minister Katsunobu Kato said on Saturday, adding that 41 officials would be tested for now.

The U.S. State Department had raised its travel advisories for Japan and South Korea on Saturday to Level 2, the second-lowest out of four grades, recommending that travelers “exercise increased caution” because of the coronavirus outbreak.

TWO MORE DOCTORS IN AND NEAR WUHAN DIE AFTER CONTRACTING THE CORONAVIRUS.

A 29-year-old doctor in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the coronavirus emerged, died from the virus on Sunday, according to the hospital where she worked. It was at least the third death in a week among doctors fighting the outbreak in Wuhan.

The death of Dr. Xia Sisi, a 29-year-old gastroenterologist, was announced by Xiehe Jiangbei Hospital. In a statement, it said that she had become sick after treating coronavirus patients and that she had begun receiving treatment at the hospital on Jan. 19. She had been transferred to another hospital in the city after her condition worsened.

Wang Wenjun, a 42-year-old doctor, also died of the coronavirus on Sunday night in Hubei, the province of which Wuhan is the capital. His death was announced by Xiaogan Central Hospital, where he was deputy director of the respiratory diseases department. “He was a party member and an excellent warrior in a white coat,” the hospital said in a statement.

The deaths came three days after another 29-year-old doctor in Wuhan, Peng Yinhua, died after contracting the coronavirus. Dr. Peng, a specialist in respiratory diseases, had postponed his wedding to fight the virus, according to local news reports.

The director of a Wuhan hospital, Liu Zhiming, a 51-year-old neurosurgeon, died on Tuesday after contracting the virus, according to the Wuhan health commission.

The death this month of Li Wenliang, a Wuhan ophthalmologist who had been reprimanded by the authorities for warning medical school classmates about the outbreak in its early days, stirred an outpouring of grief and anger across China.

ISRAEL WILL BLOCK NONRESIDENTS WHO RECENTLY VISITED JAPAN AND SOUTH KOREA.

Starting on Monday, Israel will block entry to all nonresidents who have visited Japan and South Korea in the 14 days before their arrival, officials said on Sunday.

Israeli health officials instructed anyone who has visited South Korea or Japan during the previous two weeks to quarantine themselves at home. It had previously issued that warning to anyone visiting China, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore or Thailand.

The decisions came after at least nine South Korean pilgrims were found to be infected with the coronavirus upon returning home from a visit to the Holy Land.

The South Korean group toured the country from Feb. 8-15, visiting crowded churches and religious sites in Israel and the West Bank, and staying in five hotels. Scores of Israeli schoolchildren who came into contact with the group were subsequently told to stay home.

Israel’s military said that two soldiers and several border police officers were in quarantine after coming into contact with the group, and the military’s attaché to China was staying in isolation with his family after returning to Israel.

The Magen David Adom ambulance service said on Sunday that it had received about 5,000 calls related to the coronavirus, with about 1,000 of those redirected to a hotline dedicated to inquiries about possible infection.

Relative of a Hong Kong subway worker is infected.

The relative of a Hong Kong subway employee has contracted the coronavirus, the MTR Corporation, which operates the city’s train services, said on Sunday.

The employee is a station manager in Mongkok East, a bustling district in the semi- autonomous Chinese territory. The station manager has not gone to work since Friday and is being quarantined.

The company said it would increase disinfection at the station and has asked other employees who may have come in close contact with the manager to stay home.

After the virus began spreading within Hong Kong during the Lunar New Year holiday last month, several businesses asked employees to work from home for about 14 days, the incubation period of the disease, in an effort to contain the outbreak during a peak travel season.

But as more people have returned to the office in recent weeks, subways and buses have filled with commuters wearing masks and some wearing protective goggles and gloves.

A police officer in the city tested positive for the virus on Thursday, raising alarm that residents could have become infected as he patrolled the streets. Fifty-nine other officers, including those who had attended a gathering with him, have been placed under quarantine.

Hong Kong’s civil servants have been asked to work from home for another week, and schools remain closed until March.

The city has 74 confirmed cases of the coronavirus. Among them, two have died and 12 have recovered.

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Reporting was contributed by Choe Sang-Hun, Elisabetta Povoledo, Austin Ramzy, Motoko Rich, Makiko Inoue, Salman Masood, Mujib Mashal, Isabel Kershner, Tiffany May, Derrick Bryson Taylor, Tess Felder, Amy Harmon, Farah Stockman, Edward Wong, Vivian Wang and Mihir Zaveri.

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Trump Was Furious That Passengers With Coronavirus Were Brought Back to U.S.

Among the passengers from the Diamond Princess cruise ship who were flown back were 14 American citizens who tested positive for the virus. The move took Mr. Trump by surprise.

By Edward Wong and Katie Roger's | Published Feb. 22, 2020 | New York Times | Posted February 23, 2020 |

WASHINGTON — President Trump was infuriated that 14 American citizens who had tested positive for coronavirus were permitted to return this week to the United States, said two senior administration officials. The decision had taken the president, a self-declared “germophobe,” by surprise.

Officials at the State Department decided to bring back the citizens, who had been quarantined on the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan, after consulting with a senior official at the Department of Health and Human Services. But officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention  objected, concerned that the passengers, among hundreds of Americans being evacuated from the ship, could spread the virus. News organizations reported on the decision on Monday, and the passengers arrived in the United States that day.

Mr. Trump, furious at not having been briefed on the Americans who had tested positive, relayed his anger to Alex M. Azar II, the health and human services secretary, and other top officials. They then alerted the White House interagency task force on the coronavirus, which Mr. Azar oversees. One official said Mr. Trump views shutting the borders to infected people as critical to keeping the country safe and wants to be seen as managing a proper response.

The top State Department official on the task force is Stephen E. Biegun, the deputy secretary of state.

During the early legs of a four-day trip this week to the West Coast meant to bolster his re-election effort, Mr. Trump paid close attention to Fox News’s coverage of the Diamond Princess that played aboard Air Force One.

Word of Mr. Trump’s reaction had already begun circulating among officials on Tuesday morning. The Washington Post and Politico first reported on it on Friday.

In 2014, during an Ebola crisis in Africa, Mr. Trump, who was then a private citizen, demanded that the Obama administration cancel flights and bar anyone infected with the virus from entering the country — including American medical workers who had gone to Africa to help. “KEEP THEM OUT OF HERE!” he wrote in a July 31 tweet after learning that one American medical worker would be evacuated to Atlanta from Liberia.

“The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter the next day, adding: “People that go to far away places to help out are great — but must suffer the consequences!”

There have been at least 634 infections and two deaths from the Diamond Princess, which Japanese officials kept in isolation for two weeks at a port in Yokohama. That effort at a quarantine contributed to the virus’s rapid spread among passengers. The cluster from the ship is the largest concentration of coronavirus cases outside China, warranting its own category in data compiled by the World Health Organization.

American officials began a complex evacuation procedure on Sunday night for 328 passengers aboard the Diamond Princess. All had been examined by American medical experts and showed no symptoms of the coronavirus, Dr. William Walters, managing director of operational medicine at the State Department, and Dr. Robert Kadlec, assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services, said on Monday during a conference call with reporters.

But as those passengers were bused to Haneda Airport in Tokyo early Monday morning, Japanese officials told American counterparts that laboratory tests for 14 passengers had come back positive, Dr. Walters said. The tests had been conducted two to three days earlier, but American officials, believing the timing of the results would be “unpredictable” because of the volume of testing being done in Japan, began the evacuation without having all results in hand.

American passengers who had already tested positive or who had displayed symptoms had been sent to hospitals in Japan, Dr. Walters said.

After they learned that 14 passengers had tested positive, American officials decided that the entire group set to leave Japan should be treated according to protocols the officials had developed for evacuees, Dr. Walters said. That meant continuing to transport those who had tested positive but putting them in isolation — behind sheets of plastic about 10-feet tall — at the rear of the two planes flying them back to the United States.

Dr. Walters said on Monday that he and Dr. Kadlec reviewed the possible options after learning of the test results.

“Then the question was simply this: Are these evacuees?” Dr. Walters said. “And do we follow our protocol? And the answer to that was yes on both accounts.”

Dr. Kadlec added, “We had additional expertise and experienced eyes on these people and monitoring through the flight.”

The planes landed at Travis Air Force Base in California and Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. Most of the 14 passengers who had tested positive were then flown to Omaha for treatment and monitoring by experts at the University of Nebraska.

Since then, Japanese officials have informed American officials that several other passengers among the 328 brought back had also tested positive for coronavirus. On Friday, American officials said at least 34 people inside the United States have the virus — 18 of them from the Diamond Princess. All of the 34 cases have been linked to overseas travel. There has been no sign yet of the virus spreading among communities in the United States.

The State Department is closely monitoring American citizens on board the Westerdam cruise ship in Cambodia, as well as Americans who have disembarked and are in hotels in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. Those Americans are expected to travel onward at some point. One 83-year-old American woman from the ship traveled to Malaysia and tested positive for coronavirus.

Dr. Walters said Monday that 92 American citizens were still on board the Westerdam, while another 260 were in hotels in the Cambodian capital. About 300 American citizens had left the country, but “only after testing by the government of Cambodia’s ministry of health,” he said.

When asked whether the United States was thinking about arranging evacuation flights for the hundreds of Americans in Cambodia or elsewhere, Dr. Walters did not offer a direct answer. He said the State Department was “following very closely” the situation of American citizens in places where coronavirus is prevalent and of citizens who are “having difficulty in returning to the United States because of the disruptions in the international airline industry, and flights, and so forth.”

Separately, State Department officials say that thousands of Russia-linked social media accounts are spreading disinformation about the coronavirus, including a conspiracy theory that the United States is behind the outbreak.

American monitors first identified the campaign in mid-January. Agence France-Presse reported the assessment on Saturday.

“Russia’s intent is to sow discord and undermine U.S. institutions and alliances from within, including through covert and coercive malign influence campaigns,” said Philip T. Reeker, the acting assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia. “By spreading disinformation about coronavirus, Russian malign actors are once again choosing to threaten public safety by distracting from the global health response.”

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‘We’re in a Petri Dish’: How a Coronavirus Ravaged a Cruise Ship

More than three days passed before Japan imposed a quarantine. That delay and other missteps helped produce the largest outbreak of the virus beyond China.

By Motoko Rich | Published Feb. 22, 2020 Updated Feb. 23, 2020, 5:37 a.m. ET | New York Times | Posted February 23, 2020 |

YOKOHAMA, Japan — The captain came over the intercom early in the evening: A passenger who had left the ship nine days earlier had tested positive for the new coronavirus sweeping through China.

While the guests on board were unnerved, it was the final night of their two-week luxury cruise aboard the Diamond Princess. The revelry continued as the ship headed toward the port in Yokohama, Japan’s second-largest city.

Passengers dined on filet mignon, attended shows in the 700-seat theater and crowded the bars and dance floors into the night. Cruise directors hastily distributed a slate of activities, including Ping-Pong, karaoke and Bollywood dance lessons, to occupy guests who would have to remain on the ship another day while public health officials screened them for symptoms.

Hoping to soak up the final hours of their romantic voyage, Tyler and Rachel Torres, newlyweds from Irving, Texas, took in a performance by a torch singer that evening. “We didn’t really consider the danger of leaving the room,” said Ms. Torres, 24, an occupational therapist. “And since we were on our honeymoon, we refused to waste our last moments on the cruise.”

As the music played on, passengers were potentially exposed to the virus. In all, it took Japanese officials more than 72 hours to impose a lockdown after they were first notified about the case connected to the ship.

The delay by the Japanese government, along with slapdash and ineffective containment measures during the two-week isolation period, would help turn the Diamond Princess into a floating epidemiological disaster.

Feverish passengers were left in their rooms for days without being tested for the virus. Health officials and even some medical professionals worked on board without full protective gear. Sick crew members slept in cabins with roommates who continued their duties across the ship, undercutting the quarantine.

With 634 infections and two deaths, the cruise ship represents the largest concentration of coronavirus cases outside China, meriting its own category in the data compiled by the World Health Organization.

The U.S. government this past week allowed 14 Americans who were infected to board evacuation flights with hundreds of passengers who weren’t. Japanese officials have since let close to 1,000 passengers who tested negative walk free, even though experts fear some of them have been exposed and could later develop symptoms. Crew members were expected to start leaving this weekend.

On Saturday, the health minister admitted that 23 passengers had been released from the ship without taking a valid recent test and had traveled by public transit after disembarking this past week.

Now that the quarantine has ended and most of the passengers have left, the concern is that they could start spreading the virus on shore.

Japanese officials said they did the best they could in a fast-moving situation, as they tried to keep the virus from spreading within the country. After confirming the first cases among those on board, the authorities said, they moved to isolate passengers to reduce transmission. The government has said the quarantine was largely effective.

The ship operator, Princess Cruises, said Japanese authorities took the lead in testing and protocols. It added that the “focus has been and remains the safety, health and well-being of our guests and crew.”

In the early hours of Feb. 2, before the ship had even docked in Yokohama, Hong Kong officials informed the Japanese health ministry about the initial infected passenger.

A spokeswoman for Princess Cruises said the company received “formal verification” of the infection from Hong Kong on Feb. 3, and announced it to passengers on the ship that evening.

Only as the parties and shows ended around 11 that night were guests advised to stick to their rooms. After the boat docked in Yokohama, medical officers boarded the ship and went door to door taking temperatures, checking for coughs and testing some passengers for the virus.

The cruise directors scratched the planned activities the next day, while the screening continued. People still mingled on board, lining up at large buffets for meals. They used communal ladles and tongs, and shared salt and pepper shakers on tables.

Passengers figured their departure would be delayed by only a day or so. Many were walking up to breakfast when the captain came over the intercom again on the morning of Feb. 5.

The Japanese health ministry had now confirmed 10 cases of the coronavirus on the ship, he told them.

Guests needed to return to their rooms immediately, where they would have to stay, isolated, for the next 14 days.

TAINTED MEMORIES

Trapped in their cabins, the 2,666 passengers now had time to recall every encounter that might have exposed them to the virus in the days before the ship’s lockdown.

There was the buffet on Deck 14, where guests were urged to wash their hands before joining the line, though hygiene habits varied widely, some passengers recalled. Now they wondered why the buffet had remained open even after the ship’s officers learned about the infected guest.

Memories of art auctions, afternoon high teas, quiz nights and mahjong games all took on a sinister hue.

“Everything looks tainted in retrospect,” said Sarah Arana, 52, a medical social worker from Paso Robles, Calif., who left on an American evacuation flight.

A Princess spokeswoman said that the crew had carried out “routine environmental cleaning and sanitizing” using disinfectant that is “known to quickly kill coronaviruses in 30 seconds.”

Passengers worried about their excursions on shore. The infected passenger had taken a bus tour in Kagoshima, a city in southern Japan.

Gay Courter, 75, an American novelist from Crystal River, Fla., who once set a murder mystery on a cruise, dwelled on the ship’s last stop, in Naha, the capital of Okinawa. As people disembarked, public health officials took their temperatures — a measure that was becoming more commonplace as the virus spiraled in China.

Looking back, Ms. Courter wondered if the coronavirus had already started to spread. With her husband, Philip, and a group of friends, she ate noodles and fried sweet potatoes at an outdoor stall.

“In my heart, I regret doing that,” she said, “because it was such a crowded place and there were people from the ship crawling around the town.”

Each day, more cases emerged: 10, another 10, then a spike of 41.

What distressed passengers most was a sense that information was being withheld. Hours would pass between when the health ministry leaked new cases to the media and the people on board were notified.

Passengers took to counting ambulances lined up on the pier to guess how many new infections would be announced that day. Japanese guests hung banners off balconies, with one reading, “Serious lack of medicine, lack of information.”

‘NO ROAD MAPS’

Policies and protocols shifted as the quarantine wore on.

On the second day, health officials began letting those in windowless cabins out for fresh air breaks. It wasn’t until the next day that passengers were warned to keep more than six feet away from anyone else. Mr. Torres, a nurse who has since evacuated with his wife, noticed that others were not always vigilant about wearing masks on deck.

On the fifth day, passengers were issued heavy-duty N95 masks and advised to wear them when they opened their doors to accept deliveries of meals and amenities from the crew.

Halfway into the quarantine, the Japanese government announced that some people would be eligible to continue their confinement onshore — those 80 or older with underlying medical conditions or windowless cabins.

The changes didn’t inspire confidence. Passengers were waiting days for prescriptions to be filled for chronic conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure. People were running out of toothpaste and clean underwear.

Tadashi Chida, a passenger in his 70s, sent a handwritten letter to Japan’s health ministry complaining that the crew seemed overwhelmed and that quarantine officers were not attending to those with symptoms.

“The ship is out of control,” Mr. Chida said, adding that his wife had waited nearly a week for medication.

“An outbreak is happening,” he said. “We have no road maps.”

Yoshihide Suga, the chief cabinet secretary to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, said this past week that the country’s authorities had “made the maximum consideration to secure the health of passengers and crew.”

At first, health officials didn’t test everyone, saying they lacked the resources. Instead, they focused on high-risk individuals: those who had direct contact with the infected passenger, and later older and symptomatic people.

Some passengers had trouble getting medical attention, even when they started to show possible symptoms. On the first full day of the quarantine, Carol Montgomery, 67, a retired administrative assistant from San Clemente, Calif., called the infirmary, saying she had a fever and wanted to be tested.

She was told that it was up to the Japanese health ministry, and that no tests were available on board. After a day passed, her husband, John, called the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo and tried to convince an official that everybody needed to be tested.

“We’re in a petri dish,” Mr. Montgomery said. “It’s an experiment. We’re their guinea pigs.”

Ms. Montgomery eventually persuaded the ship’s medical office to let the couple leave their cabin for an exam. A doctor gave them flu tests, which came back negative. The doctor prescribed an antibiotic for Ms. Montgomery’s urinary tract infection.

They still did not get tested for the coronavirus. The couple later evacuated with the Americans.

John Haering, a retired railway operations manager from Tooele, Utah, called the medical office when his temperature rose sharply. He was told that if it wasn’t an emergency, he would have to wait.

At one point, someone came to the door with a clipboard, he said, asked for his temperature and left. Inside the cabin he shared with his wife, Mr. Haering, 63, sweated it out, taking cold showers and swallowing the last of their Tylenol supply as his temperature climbed to 104 degrees Fahrenheit.

Four days later, after his fever had broken, officials in hazmat suits showed up at the couple’s door, ordered Mr. Haering to pack a bag, and loaded him into an ambulance, leaving his wife on the ship.

The next day, a doctor at a hospital about 40 miles from the port told him he had tested positive for the virus. He remains in the hospital, while his wife, Melanie, is now in quarantine on a U.S. military base.

Shared bathrooms and buffets

Through it all, crew members were working overtime, sometimes as long as 13-hour shifts. They prepared and delivered meals three times a day to 1,500 staterooms. They dropped off towels, bedsheets and extra treats for guests: Sudoku puzzles, origami papers, beauty masks and, on Valentine’s Day, chocolates.

The crew members, who numbered 1,045, had to remain on the job even as they faced the greatest risk of infection. All told, 85 crew members have tested positive for the virus.

Below deck, they shared close quarters, with as many as four to a bathroom. They ate their own meals buffet-style.

They manned phone lines as frantic guests called looking for answers to endless questions. They swabbed the decks and guardrails after each fresh air break for passengers. They did guests’ laundry. For certain tasks, they did not wear gloves, and they reused face masks for more than the recommended day.

There were also new duties: guarding the hallways at night to ensure that passengers didn’t leave their rooms. When infected passengers were sent to hospitals, crew members had to carry their luggage.

“The emotional, psychological and physical stress that we are going through now is really hard,” said a woman who worked in the kitchens, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing her job. She has since tested positive for the virus.

Even after some crew members came down with a fever, they continued to share rooms with other workers. “My cabin mate is staying with me,” said one person on the housekeeping staff who was consigned to his room when he developed a fever. “But he is working.”

“What’s the point of isolation?” he asked. “We are stuck in a box which is already contaminated.”

The virus has also ravaged public health officials who knew they were walking onto a contaminated ship. Hundreds of these officials, many of them bureaucrats with little experience in managing infectious diseases, helped with screenings and administrative tasks. Some did not wear full protective gear, and six contracted the virus.

Health ministry officials reluctantly allowed Kentaro Iwata, an infectious disease specialist, onto the ship late in the quarantine. Dr. Iwata was alarmed by the lack of control measures, even among the medical staff. In videos he posted on YouTube, he said he had observed a nurse at the ship’s medical center receiving ill crew members without wearing a mask.

“She said she was already infected, and so she was completely giving up,” he said in the videos. He took down his YouTube posts after coming under criticism for violating the chain of command on the ship.

Plastic sheeting and tape

To pass the time in captivity, passengers spent long hours streaming movies or posting on social media. They did calisthenics and watched the onboard magician perform tricks on closed-circuit television.

As the infections continued to mount, boredom turned to fear. On private Facebook groups, passengers said they were desperate to leave, with their families using the hashtag #getthemoffthatboat. They questioned the effectiveness of the quarantine, fretting that the virus could pass between rooms through the ventilation system.

After American passengers raised concerns with the embassy, an official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wrote that there was “no current evidence to suggest that the virus spreads between rooms on a ship through the air-handling system.” The best course, the official said, was for passengers to wait out the quarantine in their rooms.

A week and a half later, American officials reversed their position. The U.S. government announced that it was evacuating them before the end of the quarantine and would confine them for an additional 14 days on bases in California and Texas. A letter to American passengers said that “the Department of Health and Human Services made an assessment that passengers and crew members onboard are at high risk of exposure.”

The evacuation turned problematic. While the 328 passengers and crew members were on their way to the airport in Tokyo, American officials learned from Japanese health authorities that 14 of them had tested positive for the coronavirus.

They waited for hours on the tarmac as C.D.C. experts debated with officials  from the State Department and the Department of Health and Human Services about what to do. It took so long that some passengers had to get off and urinate against the side of the buses.

Officials from the State Department and the Department of Health and Human Services ultimately decided to take them all. They put the infected at the back, separating them on two planes with only 10-foot plastic sheeting and tape.

As the passengers boarded, Ms. Courter was standing next to a woman as she was being told she had tested positive. “We were less than three feet away,” Ms. Courter said. “And I remember thinking, ‘I just spent two weeks to avoid anyone who is positive, and now here is one breathing right in front of me.’”

Other countries followed the lead of the United States in organizing charter flights for their citizens and new 14-day quarantines. Still, that left many to just walk off the ship at the end of the quarantine in Yokohama, including a large number of Japanese passengers, who made up half of those on board.

The night of Feb. 18, the health ministry began clearing passengers to leave, giving all certificates saying they had tested negative for the coronavirus and posed “no risk of infection.” Nearly 1,000 walked free over the next three days, some boarding city buses, others climbing into taxis.

Experts have questioned whether those passengers truly pose no risk to the general public. Some could develop symptoms later after having tested negative.

Just two days after leaving the ship on Wednesday with a negative test result, a woman in her 60s developed a fever and tested positive for coronavirus on Saturday.

The day after news emerged that the 14 passengers who had tested positive were being flown to the United States, President Trump was furious, said two American officials. The decision to fly them into the country had taken him by surprise.

On Thursday, Linda Tsukamoto, 63, a retired retail manager from Marina del Rey, Calif., who decided not to take one of the American flights, was released from the ship. She will not be allowed back into the United States for at least another two weeks, so she checked into a hotel in Tokyo.

She said that hotel staff members were wearing masks, and that there were signs warning guests of the risk of the coronavirus.

“I will stay in most of the time,” she said, “to stay safe after this long journey.”

_____

Reporting was contributed by Eimi Yamamitsu, Makiko Inoue and Hisako Ueno from Tokyo; Ben Dooley and Edward Wong from Washington; and Elaine Yu from Hong Kong.

*********

[todaybharatnews]

via Today Bharat nbsp; The trailer of 'Sye Raa' shows Narasimha Reddy as a patriot of 'Bharat', but historians say that the 1846 rebellion wasnrsquo;t about nationalism. Sye Raa, Chiranjeevirsquo;s historic flick on the life of freedom fighter Uyyalawada Narasimha Reddy is all set to hit theatres on October 2. Ahead of the release, like many other biopics, the film is already mired in multiple controversies. The legal heirs of Narasimha Reddy claim that they havenrsquo;t been adequately compensated for the use of their family history, houses and other articles for the film. They have also demanded to watch a premiere show to ensure that "history isnrsquo;t distorted". Talking about history, there is very little available in the public domain about Narasimha Reddy, hailed as the 19th century hero who led the first rebellion in Andhra Pradesh against British rule in 1846. Narasimha Reddy was a descendant of a disposed polygar family, a powerful feudal class of chieftains who looked after administrative matters in villages across the south. What made a man from a prominent family in Koilkuntala taluk in AP organise an army of 5,000 villagers and rise up against the tyranny of the British? TNM talked to a couple of historians and the kin of Uyyalawada Narasimha Reddy to know more about the unsung hero and why Narasimha Reddy is still a respected figure of Renaadu. Why did Narasimha Reddy rebel? The trailer of Sye Raa shows Narasimha Reddy as a patriot of 'Bharat', but historians say that the 1846 rebellion wasnrsquo;t about nationalism. The war was a challenge that the chieftain of Koilkuntala threw at the British after the latter tried to remove the privileges accorded to the polygars and also attempted to acquire their estates. Majjera Narasimha Reddy, also known as Uyyalawada Narasimha Reddy, was the youngest of three brothers who were related to the polygar of Uyyalawada through their father's side of the family. K Venugopal Reddy, history professor at the University of Pondicherry, in his book Dominance and Resistance: A study of Narasimha Reddyrsquo;s revolt in Andhra Pradesh writes how Narasimha Reddy, though born into a poor family, was the heir of an oppressive system that was in place before the British rule. The polygars, for a long time, didnrsquo;t consider the Britishers to be a threat until the latter usurped their land and they were robbed of their ceremonial titles. Narasimha Reddy and his family lived off a paltry sum by way of pension which was provided as relief to the families of disposed rajas and polygars. ldquo;Their (polygar) faith in the goodness of the government was shaken by the new regulations pertaining to their inheritance, leaving the families in anxietyhellip;The village chieftains, who were everything for the village community, were clearly upset with the discontinuances in their ancient privileges,rdquo; Venugopal writes. nbsp; However, the makers of Sye Raa have taken the liberty to distort history by depicting Narasimha Reddy as a patriot who put his motherland in front of everything else. As Venugopal points out, nationalism wasnrsquo;t a concept in the early 19th century when the major issue among the people was agrarian distress. However, Chiranjeevi in Sye Raa comes across as an aggressive patriot, who is seen screaming "Bharat Mata ki jai" a couple of times in the trailer. As Vishnu Priya rightly points out in her article published on Feminism in India, ldquo;It was in only in 1873, the notion of Bharat Mata was put forward through a play of the same name by Kiran Chandra Bandhopadhyay. Later on, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya wrote a hymn named Vande Mataram in 1875 as a filler in his journal Bangadarshan.rdquo; Clearly, neither Bharat Mata nor patriotism was the driving force which led to the rebellion of 1846. Narasimha Reddy's capture Speaking to TNM, Andhra based historian Nagi Reddy opines that the polygars were the most suited to wage a war against the Britishers in Andhra then. While their ambition was to retain power and property, the peasants had long-standing grievances against the British. However, despite differences, people like Narasimha Reddy had close bonds with the villagers. ldquo;Motives would have been selfish but the war was majorly fought against fiscal oppression which affected all classes equally. Around 2,000 peasants were killed in the 1846 battle. Narasimha Reddy turned into a terror for the British after he killed a British forest guard and the Englishmen offered a prize money of Rs 1,000 for his head. Reddy took refuge at the Nallamalai hills for a long time until he was captured and hanged to death in 1847. Along with Reddy, his 16-year-old son was also captured, which put an end to the year-long battle,rdquo;Nagi Reddy says. Narasimha Reddy was hanged in public and over 2,000 people gathered to witness the awful event. History has it that his skeleton was displayed in Reenadu village inside a cage until 1887. How kin remembers Narasimha Reddy ldquo;Most of the folklore surrounding Narasimha Reddy in Uyyalawada is through the Suddula vallu or the traditional storytellers,rdquo; Gopala Reddy, a fifth generation heir of Narasimha Reddy tells TNM. Gopala Reddy is one among the members of the 22 families that claim to be the heirs of Narasimha Reddy. All the families are settled in and around Uyyalawada. Gopala Reddy recollects how all of them had met actor and producer Ram Charan in Hyderabad before Sye Raa was shot, and claims that the film, in most parts, is an original depiction of the happenings of 1846-47. ldquo;Narasimha Reddy was a great warrior and most of his heroic feats are popular today in Uyyalawada as folklore. Before the movie was shaped, a book was also collated by local historians on Narasimha Reddyrsquo;s life. The movie is based on these stories and snippets from the book,rdquo; Gopala Reddy shares. Uyyalawada Vishwanath remembers Narasimha Reddy as the lsquo;sun of Renaadu villagersquo;. ldquo;My forefather Budda Vengal Reddy (a famous philanthropist) and Narasimha Reddy were friends. They were known as the Sun and Moon of Renaadu,rdquo; Vishwanath says. Though the kin claims that they have not yet been paid the royalty amount of Rs 25 crore, they are happy that Narasimha Reddy is finally getting his due for leading one of the first uprisings against the British.

[telanganafacts]

Pre-release event of Sye Raa Narasimha Reddy on September 22

Pre-release event of Sye Raa Narasimha Reddy on September 22

The pre-discharge occasion of Chiranjeevi’s Sye Raa Narasimha Reddy (SRNR) will be held in Hyderabad on Sunday evening.

The uber capacity will be live-spilled on a few YouTube channels from 6.00 pm onwards.

Prior this month, Ram Charan, who is bankrolling Sye Raa under Konidela Productions, declared that he would hold a fantastic pre-discharge work for the film in Hyderabad on September…

[sustainhealthmagazine]

.@SoulCircusYoga announces inspiring line up for 2019 festival Goldie, David Sye, Norman Jay & more

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Set in the backdrop of the beautiful rural Cotswolds, yoga and wellness festival Soul Circus offers an opportunity to escape the daily grind and be treated to a few days of rejuvenation away from it all. Taking place from 16 – 18 August 2019; an expertly curated collection of talks, activities and masterclasses come together to make an exciting itinerary.

Whether you want to enjoy a health-boosting detox, or properly let your hair down with a carefree ‘retox’ – there really is something for everybody.

Now in its fourth year, the whole event is thoughtfully designed and constructed, and the team seek to ensure that every part of the event is treated with compassion, care and consideration. Wellbeing is at the very heart of the Soul Circus ethos, with the founding pillars of the event centred around yoga and wellness, delicious foods, music and arts to compliment a true festival experience.

Curated with the support of well-known Relationship Coach Keeley Dann, the Body Positive Tipi with ‘dance like Beyonce’ classes, burlesque, life drawing and inspirational talks supporting a packed itinerary.

Partnered with AcroYogaDance, the AcroYoga Tipi will support a show-stopping weekend of acro-classes and demonstrations, with energetic activities designed to really excite and engage those involved.

Wellbeing and nutrition expert Jasmine Hemsley will lead the Ayurveda Tipi in which she will support workshops, talks, demos and sound baths to offer a healing and relaxing experience for all.

If you’re after a bit of ‘mind blowing, edge pushing laugh inducing yoga type thing’ then there is also the returning YogaLike Water tipi, led by popular yogi Dan Peppiatt.

And for those seeking a real treat, an expanded Soul Circus Spa offering means that there will be more hot tubs and an impressive collection of different massages available, equating to over 200 hours in appointments across the weekend.

And food lovers listen up! An extensive array of culinary delights will be there to be devoured.

An upgraded food offering means there will be more vendors and choices than in previous years, with an on-site bakery, freshly prepared ingredients, made-to-order pizza and delicious breakfast options to satisfy all taste buds. Moroccan inspired dining experiences will run nightly, brought to life with cocktails, mocktails and an array of live entertainment and on-stage cooking demonstrations will enable foodies to build upon their own tricks in the kitchen.

Motivated by the success of the event in previous years, Roman and Ella say,

‘With more on offer than ever before, we can’t wait to open the doors for Soul Circus 2019. We look set to welcome some of the most impressive names in the industry, and are delighted to be seeing the return of some of our most popular key teachers; from Ambra Vallo, Marc Laws II , Daniela Olds to GoodYogaLife, Katarina Rayburn, Andy Nathan and Kathy Ran amongst many others.

Come and join us this August – and make Soul Circus your must-do summer festival experience’.

Prices start at £79 for a Friday OR Sunday day ticket, £99 for a Saturday day ticket and £175 for a weekend ticket.  Group tickets and tickets for teens are also available.

Visit www.soulcircus.yoga to find out more.

And it’s certain that 2019 looks set to be the festival’s most impressive offering yet, with a whole host of new headline acts, key speakers, event partners and shows. 

The biggest name for 2019 is drum ‘n’ base legend Goldie, who is set to headline on the Friday, leading an energetic set that’ll bring the whole festival to life. Accompanying Goldie will be a Live DJ yoga class and Transformational Meditation sessions led by the talented YOGANGSTER team, Stewart Gilchrist, Michael Eley and Elisa Devlin, offering a memorable experience that’ll impress even the most devout yogi. 

Music and the arts is undoubtedly key to the weekend, and festival founders Roman and Ella Wroath define this when they say, ‘Music is at the very heart of Soul Circus. By day, soothing acoustics and beautiful gongs will create a sense of peace and harmony, whilst at night, beats and bass from talented bands and DJs will be sure to get the party started. Music works in synergy with the festival mood and really makes our festival goers experience so much more special’. 

Across the weekend there will be a wide range of activities to get involved in, featuring some of the most renowned names in the health and wellness industry.

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READ NEXT

[lorrainecparker]

Careers in Film Summit is back!

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will present its 3rd annual Careers in Film Summit on Saturday, October 14. Get your FREE ticket to the event.

The invitation is clear: “come learn about careers in the motion picture industry from working Academy members and film professionals. Discover the skills, education and hard work needed to achieve your dreams.”

The annual event, now on its third edition, is back, with the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills as the place to visit to participate. Tickets for the Los Angeles event are free, but must be reserved in advance.  For more information and to obtain tickets, click here. If you are unable to attend, don’t despair. The event will be live streamed on Oscars.org.

The day-long event will provide high school and college students the opportunity to learn about careers in the motion picture industry, as well as hear from Academy members, Oscar-winning and nominated filmmakers, and other industry professionals about the skills, education and hard work required to achieve success.

In a series of panels, Academy members and filmmakers will discuss their professions, share advice and address the skills that a career in film requires. Their areas of expertise span acting, writing, directing, songwriting and composing, sound design, editing, visual effects, make-up, costume design, production design and animation and students will get firsthand knowledge of working in the industry and identify essential skills for their respective careers. Sessions will also incorporate film clips and Q&As with students.

The panels and panelists are as follows:

Working Above the Line Haifaa al-Mansour, writer-director, “Wadjda” Eva Longoria, actress, “Lowriders” Wendi McLendon-Covey, actress, “Bridesmaids” Matt Reeves, writer-director, “War for the Planet of the Apes” John Ridley, writer, “12 Years a Slave” Patricia Riggen, director, “The 33” Nina Yang Bongiovi, producer, “Fruitvale Station” Moderated by Mike Muse, My Brother’s Keeper Champion

Lights, Camera, Action! Production LaFaye Baker, stunt performer, “Baggage Claim” Erin Benach, costume designer, “Loving” Susan Benjamin, set decorator, “The Founder” Carmen Cuba, casting director, “The Martian” Xavier Grobet, cinematographer, “Brad’s Status” Beverly Jo Pryor, makeup artist, “Hidden Figures” Moderated by John Horn, KPCC’s “The Frame”

Get It in the Can! Post Production Maryann Brandon, film editor, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” Sean Faden, visual effects supervisor, “Fast & Furious 6” Michelle Jackino, ‎executive creative director, Open Road Entertainment, “The Wolf of Wall Street” Ai-Ling Lee, sound designer, “The Maze Runner” Alyson Moore, foley artist, “The Dark Knight” Moderated by John Horn, KPCC’s “The Frame”

Music in Film: Evoking Emotion Jordan Corngold, music editor, “Bridge of Spies” Germaine Franco, composer-songwriter, “Coco” Justin Hurwitz, composer-songwriter, “La La Land” Trent Reznor, composer-songwriter, “The Social Network” Morgan Rhodes, music supervisor, “Selma” Taura Stinson, songwriter, “Rio 2” Moderated by Mike Muse, My Brother’s Keeper Champion

The Reps: The Dream Team Sonya Ede-Williams, public relations consultant, SYE Publicity Scott J. Karol, Esq., attorney, KarolWilliams PC Gabriel Mena, agent, Paradigm Talent Agency Cameron Mitchell, agent, Creative Artists Agency (CAA) Jewerl Keats Ross, manager, Silent R Management

All Things Animation Dale Baer, animator, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” Neysa Bové, visual development artist, “Moana” Everett Downing Jr., animator/story artist, “Boss Baby” Jorge Gutiérrez, director-character designer, “The Book of Life” Vanessa Morrison, president, 20th Century Fox Animation Simon Otto, head of character animation, “How to Train Your Dragon” Moderated by Randy Haberkamp, the Academy’s Managing Director, Preservation and Foundation Programs

Careers in Film Summit happens October 14  from 9:00am PT – 6:00pm PT at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills.

The post Careers in Film Summit is back! appeared first on ProVideo Coalition.

First Found At: Careers in Film Summit is back!