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Managing Your Work, Your Child's Work Online

The coronavirus pandemic has changed many things about everyday life. One big change is childcare – or the lack of it.

As many childcare providers closed as part of public safety measures, so did schools, offices and businesses. Social restrictions also tightened. This meant many older adults were unable to help watch or care for their grandchildren.

This left working parents with a sudden, unexpected problem -- working from home with children who also had schoolwork to do.

Many parents struggled to meet work demands while watching over their child's online studies at the same time. Even companies whose job it is to prepare for a pandemic were caught off guard – or unprepared.

The British drug-maker AstraZeneca spent years preparing for a health crisis. However, when it happened, the company was not prepared to help its employees work effectively at home with their children. The company asked its 8,300 employees about childcare and found that at least 1,100 needed help.

Fiona Cicconi heads the company's human resources office. She noted that some employees said they were feeling worried about the work they had to do and about not getting it done.

Several of those working parents are also responsible for trying to produce a vaccine for the disease COVID-19.

So, AstraZeneca did many things to help its employees by helping their children. The company found about 80 teachers and paid them to organize classes online. It developed a computer software program to make planning the lessons easy. And it also found tutors for children needing one-on-one instruction.

新闻来源：Reuter’s

How to Be Alone

So, back in early April, when we were still only a few weeks into lockdown in New York, a friend of mine asked me what things were like on Planet Bim. It was a joke, but it was one of those accurate jokes. Because living alone right now is probably not that dissimilar to being a far away, solitary planet.

New York was one of the first places to lock down. And in a way, I'm still living like it's March. I work from home. I leave for groceries. I attend almost no social functions.

And it's not that I don't know how to be alone. Being alone, even in a crowd, is not new to me. We moved continents when I was very young, living between the UK and Nigeria. I went off to boarding school when I was 10 years old. I left home for university when I was 19, and I never really moved back home again.

I've lived in London, Lagos, Berlin, and now New York. I chose to live in those last two places, to move far away from family and home. But there's something different about the aloneness of right now.

COVID-19 has taken away that element of choice. Like a 9-year-old being sent up to her room as punishment, versus sitting in her room, quietly reading anyway. The activities are the same, but the issue is control. So many of us have been dealing with this enforced aloneness a lot more since the pandemic began.

Sometimes I feel like I'm floating through space, a sort of dwarf planet in a galaxy that seems to be populated by planets with people attached-- children, a partner, other family members, maybe even housemates or a pet. I have none of those things at the moment. My family, my parents, my siblings, their partners, they're all in London, about three and a half thousand miles and a full ocean away.

NASA to Launch Newest Mars Explorer to Seek Signs of Life

The United States is preparing to return to the planet Mars. The U.S. space agency NASA plans to have a spacecraft, called Perseverance, deploy a rover on the planet's surface. The vehicle has been called the brainiest Martian rover yet. NASA officials say its mission will be to search for signs of life on the Red Planet.

This will be the space agency's fifth rover to explore Mars. The first, named Sojourner, was sent in 1997. Then came Spirit and Opportunity, which landed in 2004. The fourth rover, Curiosity, has been exploring the planet since 2012.

The missions have resulted in valuable information. The vehicles helped gather data showing Mars was not always the cold and empty place it is today. Experiments provided evidence that at one time, the planet held several chemical elements that may have supported life. These included running water, organic molecules, and a more favorable climate.

新闻来源：VOA

 Three Countries Send Spacecraft to Mars

China, the United Arab Emirates and the United States plan to launch unpiloted spaceships in the next few weeks to fly to Mars. The operations are aimed at searching for signs of ancient, microscopic life. Each country hopes the research will help them learn if astronauts could someday visit the red planet.

The spaceships are expected to reach Mars in February after traveling about 485 million kilometers. Scientists want to find out what Mars was like billions of years ago, when it had rivers, lakes, and oceans.

Ken Farley is a professor at California Institute of Technology and a project scientist for Perseverance, the U.S. rover that will go to Mars. He noted how hard it is to confirm that life existed on another planet. There is "a very big burden of proof," he said.

It is not by chance that the three launches are taking place soon. Mars and Earth are currently in positions that favor such travel, permitting shorter travel time and less fuel use. The positioning happens about every two years.

新闻来源：AP

More Colleges, States Back Legal Action over Foreign Student Rule

More colleges and state officials are taking legal action against the Trump administration's new restrictions on international students. They say the new policy harms students' safety and forces schools to reconsider their plans for the fall.

Sixteen states and Washington, D.C. joined Massachusetts in a legal action brought last week in federal court in Boston against the rule.

Lawsuits were also brought by Johns Hopkins University and the state of California. The University of California system has said it also plans to take legal action.

The efforts support Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the legal case against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). More than 200 universities have signed legal briefs supporting the case against ICE.

Under the new ICE rule, international students must take at least some of their college classes in person, transfer to U.S-based schools with in-person classes or leave the country. They will have to leave the U.S. even if a health emergency forces their classes online later in the school year. And the government will reject visa requests from international students at colleges or universities that only offer classes online.

A judge is set to begin hearing arguments in the case Tuesday. If the judge does not suspend the rule, colleges across the U.S. will have until Wednesday to notify ICE if they plan to be fully online this fall.

新闻来源：AP

Harvard, MIT Test New US Visa Rule for International Students

Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) took legal action Wednesday against the United States government. The schools are seeking to overturn the Trump administration's new rule on international student visas.

Under the rule, international students must take at least some of their college classes in person, transfer to U.S-based schools with in-person classes or leave the country. They will have to leave even if a health emergency forces their classes online later in the school year.

FILE - In this Aug. 13, 2019, file photo, pedestrians walk through the gates of Harvard Yard at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology filed a federal lawsuit challenging the new international visa rule. 

The government will reject visa requests from international students at colleges or universities that only offer classes online.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the federal law enforcement agency, announced the rule on Monday. The same day, many colleges, including Harvard, said all their classes later this year would be online.

MIT joined Harvard to file the legal challenge Wednesday morning in Boston. They asked a federal court to bar ICE from enforcing the new rule. They called for the return of the March 13, 2020 "exemption," which permitted international students to attend classes online while retaining their visa during the health emergency.

新闻来源：China Daily

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202007/06/WS5f02c87ca3108348172577cd.html

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