Harry and Meghan repay Frogmore Cottage renovations – but will it stop criticism?

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle confirmed they have repaid the renovation costs of their British home after signing a lucrative deal with Netflix.

The couple were given Frogmore Cottage in the grounds of Windsor Castle as a wedding present from the Queen in May 2018.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex spent £2.4m from the Sovereign Grant, which is taxpayer money, on renovation work, but promised to pay it back when they decided to step back from senior royal duties and live in the US.

They had previously been paying back the sum over a number of years, paying rent plus a repayment each month.

However, their deal with streaming giant Netflix gave them the ability to pay back the costs in one lump sum.

The cost of the renovation work had raised eyebrows, even before the couple left their royal roles, which led to them offering to make the repayment as part of their plan to step back.

Making the payment and ending their reliance on Prince Charles’s funding means the couple are closer to their goal of financial independence – but does that mean they can expect a lower level of scrutiny, as they hoped for when they stepped back?

Journalist and royal commentator Afua Adom told Yahoo UK she was pleased the couple made the payment, but felt they “can’t do right for doing wrong”.

“Harry was insistent they would pay back the money and now [some people] are furious that they had the money to do it,” she said.

“It feels like whatever they do will never be enough for certain sections of society.”

Adom said the quick repayment was probably a symbol of how seriously the couple took the commitment they made.

“It shows the depth of feeling from the British public,” she added.

“[Harry and Meghan] felt a sense of duty on some level, or guilt, they probably thought people will be thinking ‘you have got the six figures from Netflix’.

“There was a need to silence certain quarters, by saying ‘we were always going to pay our own way and pay it back’ and now they have.

Queen applauds photographers who captured lockdown Britain

Special exhibition celebrating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Queen Victoria marks this year's Summer Opening of Buckingham Palace

Hold Still, National Portrait Gallery: heart-wrenching accounts of ordinary lives in the time of Covid
Kate Middleton Shares Final 100 Portraits Chosen for Her Powerful Pandemic Photo Project

The idea came from the gallery’s patron, the Duchess of Cambridge, who knows a thing or two about photography. Back in May, she invited the public to contribute to an open-call “community project”, recording everyday life amid the pandemic: hold still, Britain, while we take a photographic portrait of the nation. Of course, this came at a time when all of us, at the government’s behest, were “holding still”.

Though Kate did offer some guidance, suggesting a few themes, the ambition was to be inclusive, not prescriptive – and, over six weeks, more than 31,000 photographs were submitted. These were whittled down to the final hundred by a panel of judges (including the duchess). Since the gallery remains closed for refurbishment until 2023, the photographs are, for now, available digitally. But there are plans eventually to show them across the country.

While works by professional photographers did make the final cut (frankly, they stand out), this isn’t a conventional fine-art exhibition. Indeed, dozens of images are – in a technical sense – weak or flawed. Few, though, are forgettable. The judges weren’t bothered about aesthetic issues such as composition or lighting. Instead, they wanted emotion – often heart-wrenching, sometimes uplifting – and a sense of real lives being experienced by real people.

Scrolling through brings back all-too-raw memories: the daily privations and lurches of despair; the worry, grief, but also flashes of joy. And that strange, topsy-turvy sense we’d all slipped into a parallel universe. Specific textures and details are recorded, as well as defining moments. Empty supermarket shelves. NHS workers in makeshift PPE. Rainbows decorating windows. Tears, laughter, Black Lives Matter, VE Day. And, of course, Captain Tom Moore, medals glinting on his gold-buttoned blazer, giving a thumb’s up.

Certain tropes recur. Elderly people celebrate milestone birthdays in care homes, surrounded by masked staff rather than smiling offspring. Architectural elements – blurry fence posts in the foreground, say, like out-of-focus prison bars – convey a sense of confinement and isolation. And it is astonishing to note how expressive a set of eyes can be, even when a face is masked.

Strangely, there are very few pictures of people actually sick with the virus, while only a handful (and I write this as a father of three small children) capture the stressful rough-and-tumble of cooped-up family life.

But there are surprises: moments that, described a year ago, would have seemed improbable, bizarre. And harrowing. A man wearing a suit and black tie “attends” a funeral via Zoom. A gran hugs a kid through a homemade “cuddle blanket”, aka a thick plastic sheet with floppy green appendages, like gigantic washing-up gloves, for her hands. These are distressing reminders of how remote and alienated life has become. Surrounded by protective barriers, we attempt to forge vital emotional connections with loved ones through masks, windowpanes, computer screens.

Is there a single image that sums up Britain’s lockdown in the way that, say, documentary photographs by Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange captured the Great Depression? I’m not sure there is – in part, because lockdown, initially understood as a great leveller, turned out to affect people in profoundly different, and unequal, ways. Consider the myriad characters we encounter in Hold Still. A bright-eyed girl claps enthusiastically on a Thursday night. An exhausted nightshift worker in Wales seems on the brink of collapse. What do they have in common with the 17-year-old twins afflicted with ennui, trapped behind a window’s mottled glass?

That said, there is one image I can’t shake which hints at universality: Hayley Evans's Forever Holding Hands shows a close-up of the interlaced hands of an elderly couple, married for more than seven decades, clutching each other tight from adjoining hospital beds. Here is devotion – and solace: after contracting the virus, they died five days apart. It’s a simple thing, touch – but a primal one, too, denied in recent months. “What will survive of us is love,” wrote Larkin, at the end of “An Arundel Tomb”. I so hope he’s right.

The movements that betray who you are

By Leo Benedictus14th September 2020

The accents that creep into the way we speak can reveal a lot about where we are from, but there are also subtle clues visible in our faces and the way we move.

While leafing through some old research papers, Hillary Elfenbein noticed something strange about the photographs in one famous study. The research from the late 1980s had asked volunteers if they were able to identify emotions in the faces of Japanese and Caucasian people. Some of the “Japanese” faces were posed by Japanese-Americans, the rest by Japanese nationals.
When Elfenbein herself looked at photographs, she realised that she could tell which were which. Her collaborator, Abby Marsh, found that she could too. So they ran an experiment.

They found that the Americans they tested were also strangely good at spotting who was Japanese and who was Japanese-American, even though they were all ethnically the same. The subjects wore the same clothes, and were lit in the same way. When the two groups held neutral expressions, people could barely differentiate between them. But when they showed their feelings, especially sadness, something from Japan or America seemed to emerge.

You may have had this experience yourself, if you’ve ever been abroad and felt suddenly convinced that a passing stranger is one of your fellow countrymen. At times the signal may be obvious.

Australians wave apparently have a distinctive wave that means Americans in one study were able to correctly identify them (Credit: Alamy)
If you’ve seen the film Inglourious Basterds, you will know that German and British people indicate the number three with their fingers in different ways. (Germans raise their thumb and first two fingers; Britons pin the little finger with their thumb and raise the rest.) Most never realise that this difference exists until they see the alternative, which, to them, looks strange.

Some signals may be random quirks that happened to catch on. Others may have served a purpose. Vladimir Putin is said to display his KGB weapons training in the way he walks, with his “gun arm” hanging motionless by his side.

Since their initial discovery, Marsh and Elfenbein have detected more of these “non-verbal accents” – physical ways in which we show where we come from without realising. Americans, for example, can spot Australians from the way they smile, wave or walk.
Even facial expressions during orgasm carry different “cultural accents”

“It was so easy to find,” says Marsh. “We ran those two studies, and we found the same effect in both studies. In the behaviours that we looked at, it was all right there.”

More recent research supports their findings. A team at the University of Glasgow has now trained a computer to recognise and then generate more than 60 different non-verbal accents on a simulated face. Subtle, almost indecipherable differences in the way a nose wrinkles and a lip is raised were often all that differentiated them. But when East Asians were shown these artificial “East Asian” expressions, they recognised them much more easily than “Western” ones. “It’s harder than it sounds,” says Rachael Jack, whose lab conducted the research. Before they could even begin, for instance, Jack and her team had to establish which words in English and Chinese referred to roughly corresponding feelings.
Although in principle, Jack says a robot should eventually be able to simulate the tiny nuances for any culture, and any occasion, in the world. In a study last year, Jack and others found that even facial expressions during orgasm carry different “cultural accents”.

The fact that non-verbal accents exist shouldn’t be that surprising. People recognise individual voices and faces, and even walking or running styles, without knowing exactly what makes them recognisable.

We learn far more from the body position of tennis players after they have played a point than from their faces (Credit: Alamy)
The Chinese technology company Watrix claims that their software can identify a person from footage of them walking, with accuracy of up to 94%. If an individual’s movements can be so distinctive, then it is not unreasonable to think that groups might share a few in common, and that this might be noticeable to outsiders.

There is already evidence that we read more from body posture than we realise. In a 2012 study, people who were shown photographs of tennis players taken immediately after an important point were much better at knowing whether the player had won or lost from images of their bodies than of their faces. When losing faces were placed on winning bodies, or vice versa, it was the bodies that overwhelmingly guided people’s judgements. A later version of the study produced the same findings, along with the fact that Hong Kong college students did better overall when the athletes were East Asian, which again suggests that we are better at spotting those postural accents that we are most familiar with because we see them in the people around us.

In his recent book, The Human Swarm, biologist and photographer Mark Moffett speculates that non-verbal accents serve as social markers, which help people to tell “us” from “them”. Sometimes they seem to carry more detailed information, not all of it reliable.

In a classic study, psychologists at Princeton University found that participants were good at picking election winners just by choosing who looked more “capable” from a pair of photographs. Even children became good political pundits when they were shown the same pictures and asked to choose an imaginary “captain” for a video game. Still, there appears to be no connection between looking reliable, and being it.
The way we walk can be distinctive and can often betray information about ourselves, such as with Vladimir Putin's "gunslinger" gait (Credit: Alamy)

On the other hand, some faces do seem to record information about the life they’ve lived. When shown a selection of neutral expressions taken from dating apps, participants in a 2017 study were able to tell rich people from poor more accurately than if they were just guessing. Indeed they could still do it with pictures of only the person’s eyes or, in particular, their mouth. After further investigation, the researchers came to the conclusion that rich people just look a little more attractive or more positive (a mixture of happy and likeable) than poor people do. When shown photographs in which everybody was smiling and looking deliberately positive, participants lost their ability to tell rich and poor apart.
The presence of these subtle cues might help to explain the bias that can creep into our thinking about people from different backgrounds. As we’ve seen, non-verbal accents often have the effect of making outsiders more difficult to understand.

When people want to be understood, however, they do have ways to make their feelings clear.

One ingenious but speculative recent study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggests that this might even have given an upbeat accent to modern Americans. The theory is that the residents of a place experiencing high immigration will often struggle to understand each other, but in order to cope in ordinary life they have to try. As a result, the authors guessed that a lot of smiling and pantomiming of emotions would have been required.

When they checked the available data, they found that people in countries with “high ancestral diversity", including the US, reported smiling more often. Even looking state-by-state within the US, the same pattern emerged. If outsiders seem cold and snooty to Americans, and Americans seem inanely cheerful to everyone else, then perhaps their diverging histories might explain why these stereotypes evolved.
At the very least, when people really want to understand each other, non-verbal accents show us that it’s good to talk.

Halloween and COVID-19: Clever inventions put new spin on trick-or-treating

Halloween is in the air and like many traditions in the age of COVID-19, things are going to look a little different this year.

In September, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released recommendations for celebrating holidays this fall and warned that trick-or-treating was a high-risk activity for coronavirus transmission. Some cities in the U.S. are advising against going door-to-door in costume. Still, there are many ways to keep Halloween festivities alive.

Events like zombie drive-throughs, Halloween hunts for candy and reverse Halloween parades, where residents can either drive or walk through to receive treats, are scheduled to take place in several cities. Some places will host trunk-or-treats, where treats are handed out from the trunks of cars as people drive through designated areas. While considered high risk by the CDC, some towns are establishing additional safety measures, such as requiring participants to wear gloves and masks to pass out candy and creating a no-contact candy delivery system.

Spooky season devotees are also hard at work creating unique ways to ensure there’s still ghoulish fun to be had. Here are ways people planning to celebrate Halloween during the pandemic.

Candy sticking

Wendy Reeves Winter of Denver, Colo., went viral for sharing a clever idea she called “the 2020 version of trick-or-treating” on Facebook. Winter’s “candy sticking” — which involves taping skewers to the backs of candy packages and sticking them into her front yard for kids to grab — is one method to welcome Halloween revelers from a social distance.

“Yes, I still want to hang out on my porch and see everyone’s cute costumes,” she wrote in her post. “But no, I don’t want a bunch of kids ringing my doorbell and fishing in my bowl for candy. So, I’ll be decorating my yard with candy - Willy Wonka style. Kids can come by and get candy from a safe distance and I’ll get to smile and wave from my front porch. Win. Win.”

Halloween is in the air and like many traditions in the age of COVID-19, things are going to look a little different this year.

Candy zipline

Matt Thompson, of Garden City, Mich., devised a candy zipline to welcome trick-or-treaters without getting too close. In a Facebook video, Thompson demonstrates how his contraption works, as a ghost delivers candy in a wooden box to his neighbors waiting at the front of his lawn.

“I spent a weekend stringing a cable from my porch to a post I set near the sidewalk 30 feet away,” Thompson tells Yahoo Life. “I then built a beer caddy and attached pulleys for the caddy roll on. I used a fishing reel attached to a drill to retrieve the caddy.”

The carpenter has gotten positive feedback for his creation, including from his three adult children, as well as interest from people looking to replicate the device at their own homes. He’s since shared an instructional video on his YouTube channel on how to recreate the zipline.

“I think we all need to have some normalcy right about now, including our kids,” he says. “We’ve found safer ways to do things in our lives, so why not for trick-or-treating too? It’s my hope that my idea will inspire even better ideas.”

Chris Minor of Ashland, Va., who is an engineer, took to Facebook on Sept. 27 to share pictures of his candy slide that he fashioned out of PVC pipe, commonly found in hardware stores around the country.

“The candy shoots out of the end of the slide into the kid’s baggies. No-contact, no-touching trick or treating,” he captioned the post, which has since gone viral.

Minor tells Yahoo Lifestyle that his love for Halloween inspired his invention.

“With coronavirus and everything going on nowadays, I was looking for a way to add some excitement to Halloween this year,” he says. “There are gonna be a lot of kids, parents who are going to be uncomfortable with them going trick-or-treating...I wanted to just kind of find a way to create a socially distant trick-or-treating experience.”

Minor’s post has been shared more than 300,000 times and the interest in his slide led him to create a manual, which he’s made available on Etsy, for people who want to build one themselves.

“I’ve had a lot of fantastic people out there who have messaged me and said that they are inspired and that they love it and that they can’t wait to build one themselves ... Coronavirus is bringing out the engineer in all of us,” he says.

Jay Grenier and Jaimie Nakae, known for their YouTube channel Wicked Makers, also got rave reviews for their spooky candy slide. The couple, who lives in Austin, Texas, began working on their contraption in mid-August after a fan left a comment under one of their Halloween videos requesting they use their DIY talents to come up with a way to encourage social distancing for trick-or-treaters.

“For us and for a lot of other people, we look forward to Halloween all year long, it’s not just because of the candy, but because it’s such a creative outlet,” Grenier tells Yahoo Life. “We get to build all these props and have fun decorating. It’s obviously going to be different this year, but that doesn’t mean we have to not do anything. We really wanted to find a way where we can responsibly celebrate and still kind of be creative and have fun.”

The couple says their 3-year-old son, as well as other children in their neighborhood, are enjoying the slide even before Halloween.

“Kids look forward to it and adults look forward to it...it’s all about friends and having fun. And COVID is such a bummer,” Nakae says. “We’ve been in such a rough time right now and so it’s great to not have Halloween canceled, and have a reason to celebrate.”

: Americans on financial brink plead with politicians to pass bill for 2nd stimulus checks

Marquise FrancisNational Reporter & Producer
,Yahoo News•October 13, 2020

For many Americans across the country, the prospect of getting a second stimulus check from the government is a matter of life or death. With millions of people out of work due to layoffs and cuts caused by the coronavirus pandemic, many households have been forced to depend on government aid to help pay for basic needs, including food, housing and essential bills.

But instead of elected officials helping those in need, many critics say, politicians are playing games with their lives.

Last week in a series of tweets, President Trump called on Congress to pass additional coronavirus relief measures. It was a stunning reversal after he’d announced just hours earlier that he was calling off negotiations until after the November election.

“The House & Senate should IMMEDIATELY Approve 25 Billion Dollars for Airline Payroll Support, & 135 Billion Dollars for Paycheck Protection Program for Small Business,” Trump tweeted on Oct. 6. “Both of these will be fully paid for with unused funds from the Cares Act. Have this money. I will sign now!”

Less than 30 minutes later, Trump added: “If I am sent a Stand Alone Bill for Stimulus Checks ($1,200), they will go out to our great people IMMEDIATELY. I am ready to sign right now. Are you listening Nancy?”

Top Democrats, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, have largely rejected efforts to pass piecemeal legislation.
Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, said no "standalone" relief for U.S. airlines would pass Congress without guarantees that the White House and Republicans would back a broader Covid-19 stimulus package on October 8, 2020. (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Oct. 8 that no "standalone" relief for U.S. airlines would pass Congress without guarantees that the White House and Republicans would back a broader COVID-19 stimulus package. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)

“This is a package,” Pelosi said in July. “We cannot piecemeal this.”

Schumer added that lawmakers would not “take care of one portion of suffering people and leave everyone else hanging.”

Trump’s initial proclamation that negotiations would be off the table until after the election sent Wall Street stocks into a downward spiral. They have since recovered with the news that he wants a stimulus deal.

And the majority of Americans want a second stimulus, particularly before Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed. Two-thirds of voters say Congress should focus on passing more COVID-19 relief for struggling workers and businesses before considering Barrett, according to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll.

The survey, which was conducted from Oct. 9 to 11, found that large majorities of the public think Congress has its priorities backward. Not only do more than three-quarters (77 percent) of registered voters want legislators to approve another major pandemic relief package, 66 percent want the Senate to vote on it before voting on Barrett’s nomination. A full third of Republicans (33 percent) agree.

Overall, both Democrats and Republicans agree that the country needs a stimulus bill for the economy. But the two sides differ on the scope and size of the bill. Just last week, House Democrats passed a $2.2 trillion aid package, which was down from the initial $3.4 trillion proposal. The Trump administration countered with a $1.6 trillion plan, which Pelosi rejected.

In response, Trump fired off another flurry of tweets.

“Nancy Pelosi is asking for $2.4 Trillion Dollars to bailout poorly run, high crime, Democrat States, money that is in no way related to COVID-19,” he tweeted. “We made a very generous offer of $1.6 Trillion Dollars and, as usual, she is not negotiating in good faith. I am rejecting their request, and looking to the future of our Country.”
President Donald Trump gestures during a campaign rally in Sanford, Florida, U.S., on Monday, Oct. 12, 2020. (Photographer: Zack Wittman/Bloomberg)
President Trump at a campaign rally in Sanford, Fla., on Monday. (Zack Wittman/Bloomberg)

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., slammed the president’s initial plan, calling it an “anti-agenda.”

“The President & GOP are walking away from getting ANY COVID stimulus relief done, effectively endangering millions, after *they* themselves got COVID & enjoyed free socialized healthcare, so they can push through an anti-ACA SCOTUS pick,” she tweeted.

A point of contention between the political parties is relief for states and local governments. Democratic House leadership insists that any legislation needs to contain $500 billion in aid for states. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell dismissed the idea of allowing states to use federal funds to help them make up for budget shortfalls.

The Trump administration and allies have called it a “blue state bailout.” But individuals in states with Republican governors received the largest stimulus checks during the first round.

Caught in the middle of the back-and-forth are individuals and businesses in dire straits, such as the airline industry. Without a stimulus plan, 50,000 airline workers will be without jobs.

Meanwhile, American citizens are having a tough time making ends meet, and the lives of millions of Americans hang in the balance. And if there is no stimulus deal by the election and Trump loses, there may be no government relief until 2021.
An example of a guide to how to handle financial crisis using the stimulus package. (Getty Images)
An example of a guide to how to handle a financial crisis using the stimulus package. (Getty Images)

Jake Schwartz, one of the co-founders of General Assembly, an education company, said the second stimulus bill is critical to the overall economy.

“People sometimes misunderstand that the economy is not a bunch of discrete activities,” Schwartz told Yahoo News. “It’s a sort of very intricately intertwined, sometimes very complex ecosystem. And when you start messing around with the ecosystem, just like we know in nature, that ecosystem can start to collapse.”

Schwartz said it seems as if both Republicans and Democrats are to blame for the protracted negotiations. “Who knows what the negotiations look like on the inside?” he said. “But in the absence of real clarity on that, you’re going to see this game of who can blame the other side for it not happening. And sadly, that game comes at the expense of so many people.”

Lisa Schutt, 54, a seasonal theme park worker from New York’s Long Island, said she’s been banking on a second stimulus check.

“It’s been hard,” said Schutt, who’s been out of work since the pandemic began. “We feel like the president is playing politics with this. … I have bills to pay.”

A lifelong Democrat, Schutt jumped ship to vote for Trump in 2016 and plans to do so again later this year, though she’s also angry at the president. “I’m a Trump supporter however this is pissing me off,” she tweeted Oct. 6, in reaction to the initial news of no second stimulus until after the presidential election.

Yet she blames Democrats more. She says that President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden “destroyed” health care, and she no longer has confidence in the Democratic Party.
Vice President Joe R. Biden (L) listens as President Barack Obama speaks in the Oval Office of the White House on May 21, 2016. (BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
Vice President Joe Biden listens to President Barack Obama in the Oval Office in 2016. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)

“I don’t feel confident in Biden and Kamala [Harris],” Schutt said. “The Democratic Party is not what it used to be … [but] this president is keeping his word. He supports the values I do. … I feel like Trump really does love this country.”

For Christopher Linton, a 25-year-old nursing home administrator from Louisville, Ky., a second stimulus check won’t directly affect his life one way or another very much, but it will affect those he serves. He believes that Congress needs to pass a second stimulus with “no strings attached.”

“People took a pay cut and took on extra expenses that they didn’t realize they needed [like child care],” he said. “Twelve hundred dollars would do a lot for a lot of different people in a lot of different industries. … The country is a hard place to live in as it is, and this puts people in a worse position than they were in.”

Linton said Trump is using a second stimulus as leverage in this year’s election. And too often, Linton believes, Trump puts money before the American people.

“I don’t think you should use stimulus as leverage in an election,” said Linton. Trump “is using the stock market as an indicator for his actions, but it’s not indicative of everyday Americans. … I don’t think President Trump understands the life of an everyday American. He’s never had to worry. He’s in that bubble, and that’s not the case to most Americans.”

Jordyn Hall, who lives in Florence, Ore., represents a large part of society — young adults — who depend on a second government stimulus. Hall, 19, has been out of work for months due to a major surgery, and she does not qualify for disability. She says people like her need a second stimulus for survival. Until then, she can’t pay her bills.

“We are all drowning, and I can’t even pay my car insurance,” she said. “Other people can’t afford the basics for their children. … Meanwhile, politicians are playing. We’re stuck.”

It’s on Democrats, Hall said, to act, since Trump says he is on board.

“Since Trump is now willing to pass the stimulus ... Pelosi needs to see that Americans are starving and need this,” said Hall. “When it comes down to kids who are hungry, we need it. I empathize with all the families who are struggling to put food on the table. Remove the politics.”

Given the down-to-the-wire delay of a second stimulus rollout, Hall plans to vote for Biden in November. She believes that a great deal would have to change for Trump to be a good candidate, and there have been no signs of it. She’s willing to bet on Biden.

Biden “is not the best candidate … but we have to take our chances,” said Hall, who acknowledges that Trump has done what he set out to do.

Under Trump, she said, “the rich just get richer and the poor get poorer.”

Jeffrey J. of North Las Vegas spent 20 years in the Air Force. (He asked to be identified only by his first name and last initial.) For him, the stimulus checks are nice to have, though he says he doesn’t particularly need them. But his family does, and he says his son and mother are the ones who benefit most from them.

“[My wife and I] received stimulus checks back in the spring, and it was good to have to build a cushion, but we weren’t struggling,” said Jeffrey. “We are government workers. … Our personal finances didn’t change, but our oldest son, a 24-year-old archaeologist, has only gotten seasonal work with forestry and could really use this stimulus. … For my 80-year-old mother, it would also help.”

As a lifelong Republican, Jeffrey now feels like a “person without a party.” He decided not to vote for Trump in 2016 and doesn’t plan to vote for him again in 2020.

“I didn’t think he was the right person, and I felt his policies were dangerous,” said Jeffrey. “In 2016, it was my responsibility to do what was right. In 2020, it’s my responsibility to tell others.”

Jeffrey had voted Republican almost his entire life until 2016. In the past, for him, even when he was not totally on board with a presidential nominee, his party was most important, and he went with the conservative in the race. Things have since changed.

“It’s not about putting your party first anymore,” said Jeffrey. “Rich people are the only ones that have benefited from Trump’s last four years. … We need a stimulus [as a result]. ... As we try to turn the corner on the virus, that requires people to have money to invest in the economy.”

Debra DeFilippo believes that only the most vulnerable Americans deserve a stimulus check.

“The stimulus should only be for people who need it, and not for anything else,” DeFilippo, 56, said. “Everything is going up. Bills, food and rent [have] to be paid. And you’re being asked to stay home. … It shouldn’t be for anything outside the spectrum of schools, states and businesses.”

DeFilippo says the deciding factor of whether she can pay her bills depends on a second stimulus.

“We the people need a stimulus check,” she tweeted Oct. 6.

As a lifelong Democrat from Long Island, DeFilippo says she voted for Obama twice and then Hillary Clinton in 2016. But in 2020, she plans on voting for Trump. She believes that Democrats are to blame for a lot of what’s wrong in the country, including recent violence.

“Democrats are causing all these riots in the streets,” she said. “We are going back to the Stone Age.”

DeFilippo also blames Democrats for the second stimulus bill not getting through. Trump, she says, seems to “want to make a deal.”

“Pelosi is the one knocking it down,” she says.

_____

This is the #1 Way You'll Get COVID, According to Doctors
Alek Korab
Tue, October 20, 2020

As your city reopens, you're washing your hands frequently and using hand sanitizer after touching every ATM button—but you may be making one major mistake. The Wall Street Journal studied the common consensus among scientists and reports: "It's not common to contract COVID-19 from a contaminated surface, scientists say. And fleeting encounters with people outdoors are unlikely to spread the coronavirus. Instead, the major culprit is close-up, person-to-person interactions for extended periods."

Making things worse: "Crowded events, poorly ventilated areas and places where people are talking loudly—or singing, in one famous case—maximize the risk."
It Enters Through Your Face, Doctor Confirms

"Here's the problem: COVID-19 is spread by close physical contact," says Dr. Deborah Lee, a medical writer with Dr. Fox Online. "This includes holding hands, hugging and kissing, but also standing close to one another. The virus is transmitted in exhaled respiratory droplets and is also present in nasopharyngeal secretions. It also lives in the skin—for example on fingertips and under fingernails. It can enter the body through the eyes, nose or mouth."

She says in order to get back to "normal," we must keep the "R number" down. "The risk of transmission of the virus, whether due to the average day-to-day risk or to the close physical contact during a sexual encounter, is governed by the R number," she says. "The R number is the number of people each person infects before they know they have the virus."

Keeping the R number down means the exponential spread of the infection within the community is halted and the infection is under control. "So, your risk of encountering the virus is much lower," says Dr. Lee. "We can only help keep the R number down by following the government's advice of staying at home where possible, frequent hand-washing, social distancing and self-isolation."

Not to mention, wearing face masks.
Even Speaking and Breathing Can Be Dangerous

The Journal goes on to report that: "Health agencies have so far identified respiratory-droplet contact as the major mode of COVID-19 transmission. These large fluid droplets can transfer virus from one person to another if they land on the eyes, nose or mouth. But they tend to fall to the ground or on other surfaces pretty quickly," and continue: "One important factor in transmission is that seemingly benign activities like speaking and breathing produce respiratory bits of varying sizes that can disperse along air currents and potentially infect people nearby. Some researchers say the new coronavirus can also be transmitted through aerosols, or minuscule droplets that float in the air longer than large droplets. These aerosols can be directly inhaled."

So: stay more than six feet away from others, wear a face mask and follow the CDC guidelines for staying safe. And to ensure your health and the health of others, don't miss these Sure Signs You've Already Had Coronavirus.

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/1-way-y … 21160.html

Sean Connery, Filmdom's First James Bond, Dies At 90

Sir Thomas Sean Connery, the iconic Scottish actor and Hollywood legend who made a name for himself as the cinema’s first James Bond, has died at the age of 90, his publicist confirmed to HuffPost.

Connery died in his sleep on Friday night, his family said.

Before he was “Bond, James Bond,” Connery was just another kid in a working-class neighborhood in Fountainbridge, Scotland. Born on Aug. 25, 1930, to Joe and Euphamia Connery, “Tommy” ― as he was nicknamed ― spent his first years sleeping in a drawer, as his parents were unable to afford a crib.

“My background was harsh,” Connery has acknowledged. “We were poor, but I never knew how poor till years after.”

“It sounds strange to say it now,” he recalled in an interview with The Scottish Sun, “but we never realized we lacked anything!”

His father worked at a nearby mill, and Connery began working at a young age to help support himself and his family. He began delivering milk at the age of 9 (incidentally, he picked up smoking at about the same age), toting bottles from house to house via horse-drawn cart. At the age of 13, as World War II raged, Connery dropped out of school to work full time and earn his keep at home.

“From the time I started working at 13, I always paid my share of the rent, and the attitude at home was the prevalent one in Scotland ― you make your own bed and so you have to lie on it,” he said in a 1965 interview with Playboy. “I didn’t ask for advice and I didn’t get it. I had to make it on my own or not at all.”

Connery joined the Royal Navy three years later, working as an armorer. Though he signed on for a seven-year stint in the navy, he was discharged after only three, sidelined due to a persistent stomach ulcer.

Following his discharge from the navy, Connery scraped by doing random jobs, working stints as a bricklayer, lifeguard and coffin polisher. He also spent hours at the gym and posed as a nude model from time to time at the Edinburgh College of Art.

Connery’s first acting job came only after his bodybuilding pursuits led him to a Mr. Universe competition in London in 1953. He placed third at the competition, and while there, a fellow bodybuilder mentioned auditions were being held for the play “South Pacific.”

Despite having virtually no experience, Sean decided to go for it, and was awarded a small role.

“I’d no experience whatever [at acting] and hadn’t even been on a stage before, but it turned out to be one of my more intelligent moves,” he told Playboy in 1965.

In his new gig, Connery earned £12 a week playing Sergeant Waters, a member of the chorus. He’d lied about his acting abilities during the audition and immersed himself in literature to make up for his shortcomings, reading everything from George Bernard Shaw and Shakespeare to “War and Peace” and James Joyce.

“I read them all,” Connery recalled in a later interview. “I went to the libraries in every town up and down Britain.” At the same time, he began reading aloud into a tape-recorder, playing the tapes back to himself in an attempt to refine his thick Scottish accent.

“I loved him because he had this twinkle all the time … he’s a great, great character,” Millicent Martin, one of his co-stars in “South Pacific,” said. “The only thing was, nobody could understand a word Sean was saying.”

Slowly, and with much hard work, Connery overcame the hurdles ― and his indecipherable accent. Following “South Pacific,” he picked up parts in “Another Time, Another Place” in 1958 and “Anna Christie” in 1957, where he met his first wife, Australian actress Diane Cilento, whom he married in 1962.

The marriage ended in 1973, and Cilento later said he had been physically abusive. Connery once told Playboy he didn’t think “there is anything particularly wrong about hitting a woman.”

Connery remarried in 1975 to Tunisian-born French artist Micheline Roquebrune, whom he’d met during a golf tournament in Morocco in 1970.

In 1962, to the apparent surprise of both industry insiders and Connery himself, he earned the part of Secret Agent 007 in the film version of Ian Fleming’s 1958 novel, “Dr. No.” Although not the first Bond book, it was the first to be made into a movie.

Many skeptics believed Connery had been miscast in the role (including Fleming himself, who described the Scotsman as more of “an overgrown stunt-man” than Bond material), a sentiment Connery didn’t go out of his way to dispute.

“Before I got the part, I might have agreed with them,” he told Playboy. “If you had asked any casting director who would be the sort of man to cast as Bond, an Eton-bred Englishman, the last person into the box would have been me, a working-class Scotsman. And I didn’t particularly have the face for it; at 16, I looked 30.”

Most of Fleming’s choices for the role were either too expensive (in the case of Cary Grant) or turned the part down; some believed the entire “James Bond” concept would flop and wasn’t worth the risk.

But audiences said yes to “Dr. No.” Connery’s performance helped nurture a box-office hit, justifying the production of four more Bond films in quick succession, in which Connery played the suave, martini-loving British spy.

In addition to 1962′s “Dr. No,” Connery starred in “From Russia with Love” (1963), “Goldfinger” (1964), “Thunderball” (1965), and “You Only Live Twice” (1967). After a brief hiatus, he returned for a role in “Diamonds are Forever” (1971) before retiring from the Bond series with “Never Say Never Again” (1983).

“Dr. No,” 1962

Successful as the James Bond series had become, Connery was loathe to stay part of it for too long. He welcomed the paychecks, but didn’t want to become a commodity synonymous with the franchise ― especially as the series made increasingly more use of death-defying stunts.

Sean Connery and Daniela Bianchi, the stars of FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (1963)

“There are a lot of things I did before Bond ― like playing the classics on stage ― that don’t seem to get publicized. So you see,” he told Playboy, “this Bond image is a problem in a way and a bit of a bore, but one has just got to live with it.”

“I’m not into hardware, rockets and extraordinary guns that can blow 50 people away at once,” he told “Entertainment Tonight” in a 1995 interview. “I have no real interest in that, it’s what really got me out of the Bond films — they all went in the same direction. It’s a personal thing.”

He had good reason: In addition to putting him through scenes that required he swim underwater with sharks, directors once strapped Connery to a table in “Goldfinger” for a hair-raising scene in which a “laser” nearly cut him in half.

Sean Connery and Daniela Bianchi, the stars of FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (1963)

Lacking real lasers, a crew member armed with an acetylene torch crouched under the table to create a laser-like effect instead, stopping just three inches shy of cutting into the terrified actor’s groin.

Once, he actually did get hurt. During preparations for “Never Say Never Again,” Connery recruited Steven Seagal to help him train for a scene involving martial arts. “I got a little cocky because I thought I knew what I was doing,” he told Jay Leno in 1996, “and he broke my wrist.”

Following the Bond series, Connery played a master swordsman in “Highlander” and a Franciscan friar in “The Name of the Rose,” both released in 1986. A year later, Connery took on the affect of Jim Malone in the mobster thriller “The Untouchables,” for which he won both an Oscar and a Golden Globe for best supporting actor.

Connery was nominated again for a Golden Globe in 1989, this time receiving a best supporting actor nod for his role as Professor Henry Jones in the classic “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.” (Incidentally, that was the same year People Magazine deemed him the “sexiest man alive.” When he learned of the award, Connery quipped: “Well there aren’t many sexy dead men, are there?”)

Just one year after Indiana Jones, Connery played an integral part in yet another instant classic, “The Hunt For Red October.” In the movie he portrayed a Soviet submarine captain named Marko Ramius who piloted a stealth submarine in a high-stakes game of nuclear-armed, Cold War-era chess with the U.S. Navy.

His career continued with “Rising Sun” in 1993, “The Rock” in 1996, “Entrapment” in 1999, “Finding Forrester” in 2000, and “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” in 2003.

During that time, Connery was also frequently lampooned on the repeating Saturday Night Live sketch “Celebrity Jeopardy,” where he was presented as a hilariously crude prankster by actor Darrell Hammond.

Connery retired from acting after “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” a decision he stood by in a 2010 interview with the Scotsman after dealing with assorted health problems. Though directors flirted with the idea of asking Connery to play a role in the rebooted Bond movies featuring Daniel Craig, they ultimately decided against it.

Despite his numerous achievements on the screen, Connery ― always fiercely, proudly Scottish ― said his biggest honor came in 1999, when he helped open the Scottish Parliament. Connery, who attended the ceremony in Edinburgh wearing full Highland dress, called it the “most important day of his life.”

“Today is a momentous day for Scotland,” he told reporters. “We’ve waited 300 years for this, and it can’t be more momentous than that.”

Connery wears full Highland dress and his medal
after he was formally knighted by the queen in July 2000.
(Photo: David Cheskin/PA Archive)

So deep was his love for Scotland that he reportedly was passed over for knighthood in 1997 due to British concerns over his nationalism. At the time, the BBC notes he’d been donating £4,800 a month to the Scottish National Party and supported an independent Scotland.

Those concerns apparently abated. In July 2000 ― once again, wearing Highland dress ― Connery knelt before the Queen at a ceremony in Scotland and became “Sir Sean.”

“It’s one of the proudest days of my life,” Connery said after the ceremony. “It means a great deal for it to happen in Scotland.”

In April 2011, at the age of 80, Connery announced he’d decided to withdraw from making public appearances, telling The Scotsman he intended to spend more time on the golf course instead.

True to his word, following the decision, Connery ventured into the public eye far less, though he did make a regular habit of attending the U.S. Open and accompanying Roquebrune out.

Connery is survived by Roquebrune and by his sons Jason and Stephane.

In 1996, during his acceptance speech for the Golden Globe lifetime achievement award, Connery reflected on his career and told the applauding audience:

    I’ve made a lot of films, some of which I’ve forgotten, and some of which I’ve tried to forget. But in the course of this strange thing we call a career, I’ve traveled to scores of exotic places, I’ve met many interesting people, kissed dozens of beautiful women, and have actually been very well paid for it, and I am most grateful.

President Trump pays tribute to Sean Connery as actor's widow reveals he had dementia:

As tributes to Sean Connery continue to pour in following news of his death at age 90 on Oct. 31, his widow, Micheline Roquebrune, has revealed that the Scottish star suffered from dementia in his final years.

Roquebrune, who married the James Bond actor in 1975, told the Mail on Sunday that the condition, which impairs cognitive functioning, had taken “its toll” on Connery.

“It was no life for him,” she shared. “He was not able to express himself latterly.

“At least he died in his sleep and it was just so peaceful. I was with him all the time and he just slipped away. It was what he wanted.

“He had dementia and it took its toll on him. He got his final wish to slip away without any fuss.”

Roquebrune, 91, also shared an intimate photo of her and Connery celebrating their 45th wedding anniversary in May at their home in the Bahamas, where the Oscar winner died.

“He was gorgeous and we had a wonderful life together,” she said of the marriage, which was Connery’s second, following his split from the late Australian actress Diane Cilento.

“He was a model of a man,” she added. “It is going to be very hard without him, I know that. But it could not last for ever and he went peacefully.”

Roquebrune’s comments come after Connery’s son from his marriage to Cilento, actor Jason Connery, told the BBC that his father had been “unwell.”

"We are all working at understanding this huge event as it only happened so recently, even though my dad has been unwell for some time,” the younger Connery shared upon news of his father’s death in his sleep while at home in Nassau. "A sad day for all who knew and loved my dad and a sad loss for all people around the world who enjoyed the wonderful gift he had as an actor."

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has paid his respects to the Goldfinger and Untouchables star, hailing him as a “great actor and an even greater man.” He also credited Connery with helping him to get the green light for a development project in the actor’s native Scotland. (The Mirror refutes this claim, reporting that while Connery did indeed express support for Trump’s golf course project, his endorsement wasn’t responsible for getting it approved.)

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
·
Nov 1, 2020
The legendary actor, 007 Sean Connery, has past on to even greener fairways. He was quite a guy, and a tough character. I was having a very hard time getting approvals for a big development in Scotland when Sean stepped in and shouted,“Let him build the damn thing”.

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
....all I needed, everything went swimmingly from there. He was so highly regarded & respected in Scotland and beyond that years of future turmoil was avoided. Sean was a great actor and an even greater man. Sincere condolences to his family!

USA

What we can learn from the Amish about coronavirus

WASHINGTON — As Americans prepare to gather for Thanksgiving, and as the approach of winter drives those gatherings indoors, a coronavirus outbreak in a rural Amish community offers a warning of what could lie ahead for other parts of the nation.

The outbreak was relatively confined — only 30 people were initially infected, of whom three were hospitalized and one died. They all lived in a rural part of Wayne County, in north central Ohio.

Although the pandemic began in large cities including New York and Seattle, the coronavirus ravaged rural communities throughout the summer. It now appears to be returning to cities, though hardly any part of the nation will be immune to the pandemic’s latest devastating wave.

Rural communities pose a concerning set of challenges, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which on Thursday published a study of the Amish outbreak. “Rural residents might be at higher risk for severe COVID-19–associated illness because, on average, they are older, have higher prevalences of underlying medical conditions, and have more limited access to health care services,” the researchers wrote. (COVID-19 is the disease caused by the coronavirus.)

The outbreak in Wayne County affected members of the Amish community there, who shun the trappings of modern life and live apart from others. Religious services and other social gatherings are an important aspect of Amish culture, which is rooted in traditional Anabaptist values.

The outbreak took place in May. It could have been more severe in the winter months, since some viruses, like the flu, tend to live longer in colder, drier environments. That same colder weather tends to bring people indoors, where an airborne pathogen like the coronavirus is much more likely to spread than it is in outdoor spaces.

The outbreak began with religious services on May 2 and 3, and appears to have been caused by a husband and wife who reported their symptoms a little more than a week later. The husband, who had a preexisting respiratory illness, was hospitalized. Another member of the same family, who had cancer, died from COVID-19.

After the first seven infections, the Wayne County Health Department intervened, setting up a testing clinic on May 20. Thirty people received a coronavirus test at the clinic, and 23 of them tested positive for the coronavirus, for an exceptionally high positivity rate of 77 percent.

By that time, several more social functions had been held in addition to the May 2-3 religious services: church services on two consecutive Sundays (May 10 and May 17), a wedding (May 12) and a funeral (May 16).
The Wayne County Health Department office in Wooster, Ohio. (wayne-health.org)

"Amish communities emphasize strong social connections and communal activities,” the CDC researchers wrote. “The importance of religious and social gatherings and communal fellowship among the Amish has challenged efforts to prevent infection during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

The outbreak is mostly indicative of what happens when people gather in small social situations — something millions of lockdown-weary Americans are eager to do, regardless of whether they are Amish or not. Public health officials have advised that such gatherings should be small, be held outside if possible and follow well-known precautions about masks and social distancing.

Researchers in Wayne County found that some members of the Amish community harbored “misconceptions that mask wearing might cause harm.” Such misconceptions have also found traction in communities that are not Amish.

Later, throughout the rest of May and June, 39 more people in the Amish community were tested, with 25 found to have contracted the coronavirus. That means that, several weeks after the initial cases were discovered, the rate of transmission remained high.

Researchers emphasized that public health officials need to build “trusting relationships” with Amish communities, in part because they shun modern media and may not be aware of public health campaigns disseminated in newspapers, web-based news outlets and social media networks.

Americans who are not Amish may face the exact opposite problem: an excess of information about the virus, some of it confusing and a good deal of it incorrect. Some of that information has come directly from President Trump, who has maligned masks and social distancing while touting ineffective cures and, on occasion, outright dangerous ones, including the consumption of bleach.

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USA

An Amish family riding in a traditional Amish buggy in Lancaster County,
Pennsylvania

United States (large populations in Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania; notable populations in Kentucky, Missouri, Michigan, New York, and Wisconsin; small populations in various other states)

The Amish are a group of traditionalist Christian church fellowships with Swiss German and Alsatian Anabaptist origins. They are closely related to, but a distinct branch off from, Mennonite churches. The Amish are known for simple living, plain dress, Christian pacifism, and are slower to adopt many conveniences of modern technology, with a view to not interrupt family time, nor replacing face-to-face conversations whenever possible.