It’s Okay to Be a Different Kind of Parent During the Pandemic. By MARY KATHARINE HAM

What if you woke up one day, and had to be an entirely different parent from the one you were the day before? For much of America, that day arrived last month.

With the spread of COVID-19, millions of moms and dads have started spending a lot more time with their kids, in new roles. I’ve noticed a recurring semi-desperate refrain in memes as well as Facebook posts and Instagram Stories: “But I’m not a stay-at-home mom”; “I’m not a homeschooling dad”; “I’m not a Pinterest mom.” Along with the markets, the coronavirus has wreaked havoc on our mental health and parenting strategies.

What we’re all being called to do now is learn how to parent in a crisis. This is familiar territory for me, and the good news is that the parent you are today is not the parent you have to be tomorrow. Your parenting identity is not nearly as intransigent as your pantsless, potty-training toddler.

In September 2015, I was raising a 2-year-old with my husband, Jake, while I was 7 months pregnant with our second child. My toddler was easy on me—she was laid-back, sociable, and slept through the night. Aside from a Kate Middletonian amount of morning sickness, motherhood had been relatively smooth. I had an established parenting identity: I was a chill mom who took her kid on morning runs and road trips, a working mom, a mom with a partner with whom I could share some duties.

And then one Saturday, I became something else. My husband died in a cycling accident in a race to benefit cancer research. I lost my partner, I lost his contribution to our household income, and I lost my idea of what kind of parent I was.

“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant,” Joan Didion wrote in The Year of Magical Thinking, her memoir about the loss of her husband and daughter. “You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” You’re probably feeling like you’re seated at that table now. The coronavirus is serving up a rare and tragic mix of grief, drastic life changes, and economic stress to a huge swath of the country.

It sucks. Acknowledging, and accepting, this is key. Grief has several stages, and contrary to popular belief, they don’t occur in any specific order. One can experience anger and bargaining and depression all at once. Right now, many of us find that we work our way through those stages before lunch. But these are the cards you have been dealt. How will you play them?

“The quality of parenting is what … differentiates those [children] who do well versus those who don’t do well,” the psychologist Irwin Sandler says of the body of research on families in transition due to divorce or loss. “In a sense, that’s a very optimistic message. Because it indicates the power of parenting.” In other words, when something outside your control changes your life, it’s what you do with what you can control that really shapes your children.

Sandler, who studies the resilience of children and families at Arizona State University’s Resilient Parenting for Bereaved Families Program, encourages parents to create traditions and family time that take into account the new normal. Family bonding is one of five building blocks of resilient parenting, established by the Family Bereavement Program. The others are self-care, active listening, and the maintenance of some structure and rules, all of which culminate in helping children cope, the final building block.

I did this in various ways. Breakfast became a ritual. It was my favorite meal of the day and the time when my daughter was sunniest. The time was quality, the smell of bacon and eggs was comforting, and a hot meal was the clearest symbol that I could keep providing for my kids.

As the months went by, I knew that Christmas would look different. We bought a tree early—the weekend the new baby was born in November—to get a jump start on the holiday season and our rebirth as a family. My brother, who had moved in with us to help out, picked up the tree. Close friends, family, and neighbors who were our lifeline in those days gathered to trim it. We’ve done the same thing every year since, only now my girls go with me to pick out the tree and help me haul it into the house. My kids saw me walk through pain, pray, and provide, and for us, our tree is a reminder of how we made life and memories happen even in a time of crisis.

But before those new traditions came a new mindset. Jake died on a Saturday. I spoke at a memorial gathering for him on Tuesday. That night, I told people I wanted two things for my family: I didn’t want to live mired in grief, entering every room to the sound of a sad trombone. My life felt like a Lifetime-movie plot; even though an irreparably sad thing had happened to us, we were not irreparably sad people. I also made clear that we would live unafraid. I feared sheltering my children too much, keeping them from experiencing life because I was worried about one thing that happened on one day. An event would not dictate our identity. These were my greatest concerns.

Expressing my intentions out loud, to friends and family and myself, changed the way I lived. It changed the way people reacted to me. We climbed mountains before Jake died, and we would do so again. We went on giant road trips with Jake; a couple of summers after his death, my girls and I covered more than 2,000 miles in the American West (great for the soul, not so good for the car seats, which never fully recovered). I declared myself the mom of a happy family. Even in the saddest and scariest times, that is what people believed about me, and more important, that’s what I woke up believing about myself.

That shift was more about my identity than about my actions. Last year, I read James Clear’s self-help guide, Atomic Habits. Clear contends that you’re more likely to stick to something if it’s identity-based—if you believe it is in you to do it, not merely an item on a to-do list. “Your current behaviors are simply a reflection of your current identity,” Clear writes. “To change your behavior for good, you need to start believing new things about yourself.”

This was true for me. In the fog after Jake’s death, I did my best to focus on the strength I wanted, not the weakness I feared. I wasn’t a broken single mom. I was a mother guiding a family. In doing that, I stumbled into one of the more effective kinds of habit-forming: I’m the mom of a happy family, so I get up and make my kids bacon; I’m the mom of a family with a full life, so I let my kids climb the jungle gym even when I’m nervous. This mindset doesn’t keep me from crying or drinking too much wine or struggling with anxiety, but it puts me on a path to managing those things.

So, what do you need to believe about yourself right now? There was power in writing my own story. As more states declare schools closed for the remainder of the year, and the direct and cascading effects of the pandemic pile up, you’ll have to write yours. It may sound like a luxury. You’ve got other things to worry about. You’re right. But naysaying your own ability to shift gears is a sure way to put yourself at a disadvantage.

Believing in one’s own abilities makes parenting during a crisis easier, which bolsters a sense of self-worth and strength—suddenly, your other problems feel lighter. If you’ve been a parent for any length of time, no doubt you’ve proved yourself able to change in ways you never thought possible before you had kids. You’ve lived with less sleep than ever before. You swore you’d never let your kid wear a princess dress or Spider-Man mask out of the house, and we all know how that ended. You’ve already sharpened this skill, and it is a crucial tool for this new season.

Before Jake died, if you had asked me whether I was capable of labor without my partner, or bringing home a newborn without him there, I might have told you no, not possible. But crises can teach you a lot about your capabilities.

Practice makes slightly better over time. It’s no “practice makes perfect,” but perfect is not what you’re after. You’re not instantly going to be an expert homeschooling mom who also works a full-time job, nor should you try. Once you’ve decided what kind of mom or dad you are, do something small every day to put that identity into practice. Clear puts it this way: “Prove it to yourself with small wins.”

For me, in 2015, that meant getting out of bed (grief is physically exhausting, but grief plus third trimester is a doozy), keeping a job, taking my kids outside, and wrestling my toddler into a Mogwai costume for Halloween, by God. Every day, I got a little better at doing the things that make a home happy. Many days, my small win was a hot breakfast, and that was all I had in me. Some days, I had a hangover and it was Cheerios in my bed for the toddler until I could Skype with my therapist. On those days, I was the kind of parent I wanted to be only for a couple of hours—and that was fine too.

In the midst of a crisis, you’re just getting through an hour at a time. Later, you advance to a day at a time. The idea of forever is crushing. So give yourself a shorter timeline. Get through this morning, get through Monday, get through this week, and watch Tiger King with a glass of wine when you're done.

In her best-selling book on resilience, Option B, Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg recounts how she trained herself to see the possibility of light in the darkness after her husband’s death: “I … tried a cognitive behavioral therapy technique where you write down a belief that's causing you anguish and then disprove it. I wrote, ‘I will never feel okay again.’ Seeing those words forced me to realize that just that morning, someone had told a joke and I had laughed.”

You’ll have to make the same progression with your family now. Write your story, start small, get a tiny bit better every day, and give yourself a break.

Finally, remember how cool your kids are. My daughters got me through my crisis. Parenting is not easy, even in ideal conditions. But my responsibility to my children saved me from a worse fate. Standing in my kitchen in sweatpants, in a life that no longer felt familiar, I listened to the sound of sizzling bacon and my girls’ laughter, and knew that I was getting up every day to give them what they needed.

They did the same for me, even though they didn't have to. My oldest is an extroverted supernova who could command a room before she could talk. I needed her energy, and the fun she attracted. My youngest daughter is sweet, contented, and rarely stops smiling. She used to thank me for doing mundane chores around the house even though there’s no way she could have possibly known how much I needed to hear it.

Perspective is one of the paradoxical gifts of tragedy. The things that seemed like crises in 2014 snapped into proper focus for me in 2015, just as the minor things I worried about before COVID-19 seem less significant with every passing day. I’m thankful for every tomorrow I get to try again, especially for my kids, having learned how easily tomorrow can disappear.

My grandmother was a member of the U.S. Women’s Naval Reserve during World War II. After the war, she married her childhood sweetheart and had three kids, moving across the country and world when he was deployed. She too was eventually widowed, and she too went on to raise a happy family. After Jake died, I wore the Army Air Corps locket my grandfather had given her, as a reminder that I could do the same.

What Happens When a Joke Is Followed by Silence Usually, that’s bad. The pandemic makes it normal. By HELEN LEWIS

Imagine sitting down at a grand piano to play, I don’t know, a Chopin ballade—something that requires technical skill and emotional engagement, an understanding of rhythm, stress, and volume. Now imagine that when you press the keys, you hear absolutely nothing.

That’s what performing comedy without an audience is like.

Over the past month, comedians have been relearning how to generate laughs when no one is there to laugh back. Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, they are recording remotely, over the internet, usually sitting safely in their own homes. On The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon began the social-distancing era trying to make his crew and house band crack up; now he’s filming from home, and his two young daughters are redefining the phrase tough crowd.

Britain doesn’t have the same tradition of late-night chat shows with opening monologues. Instead, it has “panel shows,” on which guests answer questions from a host about a given topic; politics and sports are the favorites. Lols, hopefully, ensue. For the past few years, I’ve been a regular panelist on the grand duchess of these, The News Quiz—a BBC Radio comedy show that is older than I am. And in November, I got my first stab at its BBC Television equivalent, Have I Got News for You (a relative youngster, having broadcast its first program two days before my seventh birthday).

Like The Tonight Show, both are so well established that they have become national institutions, and both are usually recorded in front of a live studio audience. Until now, of course. I was on the first remote episode of Have I Got News for You, broadcast last Friday, and recorded a remote test run of The News Quiz before appearing on the series itself later this month.

Now, I’m not the funniest person in the world. (Maybe the fourth, or fifth? I try to stay humble.) But when I started doing live comedy, I was even worse than I am now. Nothing teaches you how to generate a laugh—or makes you more keen to get one—than ending a sentence and being greeted with the howling sound of absolute silence. I would imagine that only tightrope walkers and bomb-disposal experts have more incentive to get good fast.

As you perform, you begin to understand the underlying grammar of comedy—the order in which to reveal information, for example, or the shameful ease of getting a cheap laugh by swearing, or by mentioning someone’s appearance. You discover all the registers that you, personally, cannot access: I would love to do long flights of fancy, building up the hyperbole until the audience is nearly hysterical, but I can’t. In the words of Flight of the Conchords, “Sometimes when I freestyle … I lose confidence.”

Generating a healthy fear of failure is only the most obvious way that audiences make comedians better. As comedians are fond of saying: The audience is a genius. It knows what’s funny. Good stand-ups will use the audience as an editor, which helps them refine their material, and take established routines into new areas, prospecting for laughs as they go. For a television or radio producer, the audience also provides an instant judgment on each joke.

Audiences provide rhythm too, which the best comics know how to surf. Like that Chopin ballade, a good routine has light and shade, fast sections and longueurs. When I first started doing panel shows, I was wary of emphasizing the punch line, in case the audience disagreed with me that it was a punch line. Instead, I would gabble on and hope that I would be stopped by gales of uncontrollable laughter. This is a bad idea. (I also learned that the professionals are tough enough to accept that a certain percentage of jokes simply don’t catch fire, for whatever reason. And, of course, these misfires do not appear in the finished product of recorded programs such as Have I Got News for You.)

When I interviewed the television producer John Lloyd for the New Statesman in 2013, he was candid about the initial failure of one of his first projects, Blackadder. The historical comedy was co-authored by Richard Curtis, who went on to write Four Weddings and a Funeral, the Bridget Jones film adaptation and Love, Actually. It starred Rowan Atkinson—later known as Mr. Bean—with a supporting cast that was a who’s who of British comedy in the 1980s. It should have been a surefire hit. And yet the first season, set in the medieval era, was a flop; such a bad flop, in fact, that three years passed before a second season aired, after much pleading with the BBC for another chance.

“Rowan is a stage comedian, and we had no idea how to time laughs …  without an audience,” Lloyd told me. Without humans providing realtime feedback, the deliberately wince-inducing gags fell flat, and Atkinson’s physical comedy seemed bizarre. When Blackadder was recommissioned, its actors moved to indoor sets and a live audience. There, it flourished, spawning two more seasons and several special episodes. It is now regarded as one of the 20th century’s most successful British sitcoms.

All the delicate interplay between the entertainer and the entertained is lost when you perform without an audience. Timing has to be relearned, even before we get to the interruptions and overtalk that plague any Zoom call. Have I Got News for You’s team captains, Ian Hislop and Paul Merton, have been with the show from its start, in 1990. The last time a video appearance was used on the program was 20 years ago, when the British former spy David Shayler appeared from Paris because he would have been arrested if he had returned to Britain.

Even then, Merton found himself talking over Shayler. When we recorded last week, with five people all in different locations, the problem was heightened. Have I Got News for You became Have I Got Politely Aborted Interruptions for You. A joke is not improved by being prefaced with, “No, you first.” Contrasting that experience with The News Quiz pilot confirmed my suspicion that radio shows are easier to adapt for remote recording because they are more naturally discursive. (This was predictable: Four people laughing at one another’s jokes is pretty much the definition of a podcast.) Television is a fast, image-based medium, where anyone saying more than three sentences in a row sounds like they’re making a best man’s speech. To gather enough snappy material, recording the half-hour episode of Have I Got News for You took nearly three hours. Whoever edited it together is a wizard.

Comedy without an audience is, by definition, less funny. Laughter is heightened when it’s a collective experience. We laugh more in a club or an arena than we do watching the same comedian’s Netflix special from our sofa. (When the material is highbrow, laughter is also a signal to those around you that you got the joke). As a performer, being part of that communal act of creation is exciting; it feels like hundreds of minds at work at once.

Most fascinatingly, on a panel with several people, you can see everyone’s status ebb and flow: One minute they’re mocking, the next they’re the object of mockery. It’s a little like writing a play—one of those intense European dramas set over a family dinner, or maybe an Arthur Miller play but with laughs—in real time. The unspoken convention is that regulars will get the most airtime, and deserve the most respect. Sometimes, watching a younger comedian nip at an established star, a Merton or a Hislop, feels like watching one of those nature documentaries in which a baby tiger goads its father, and is indulged, until finally the big fat decisive paw reminds junior who’s in charge. Again, that subtlety is lost with the jerkiness of a remote recording; you are going to talk rudely over people, whether you mean to or not.

There is something magical about humans responding in real time, whether watching a play or a comedy gig. Comedians talk about “reading the room” and “losing the audience” for a reason. When someone crosses the invisible line—by making a joke that repulses the crowd, or by attacking someone on the panel in a way that seems mean-spirited rather than good-humored—you know it. Again, the audience is a genius. It knows what it wants.

Which brings me back to … well, me, tossing out jokes (or what I hoped were jokes) into the formless void. The audience-free Have I Got News for You received mixed reviews. “It was less like a panel show and more like an awkward family chat over Skype but Have I Got News For You (BBC One) somehow succeeded,” Michael Hogan wrote in The Telegraph. The harshest critique came from my dad, who explained to me—over FaceTime, naturally—that he missed the repartee of panelists in the studio. Almost everyone else I spoke with appreciated the effort; some even enjoyed the postapocalyptic vibe. (Parts of it reminded me of the Mitchell and Webb Look sketch about a comedy show set in the aftermath of something known only as “the event,” where the canned laughter is interrupted by frequent manic admonitions to “stay indoors!”) Afterward, I was relieved, mostly. Prime-time television might not be bomb disposal, but rewriting its rules at such short notice was certainly a high-stakes experiment.

Who knows if comedy over videoconference will endure beyond the current moment? I am glad to have tried it, and to have made the implicit case that it’s still appropriate to laugh in the face of a pandemic. Perhaps a new comic grammar will emerge from these unprecedented circumstances, and in six months’ time whole sitcoms will be filmed over Zoom. Or perhaps, like Bill Maher and his very obvious laugh track, performers will find unexpected ways to bring back the audience. Necessity breeds creativity.

Until then, though, I have a new item to add to the list of things I’m missing in lockdown. God, I’m nostalgic for a time when hundreds of people didn’t laugh at my jokes.

As the World Economy Grinds to a Halt, the U.S. War Machine Churns On Weapons manufacturers get a life raft while the rest of us drown. BY SARAH LAZARE

A U.S. Air Force F-35A Lightening II performs at the Royal International Air Tattoo at RAF Fairford on July 13, 2018 in Fairford, Gloucestershire, England.

On April 1, a U.S. Navy official told reporters that he will protect the profit margins of defense contractors by accelerating contract awards during the COVID-19 crisis.

“As individual suppliers and industrial operations deal with their local situation, they can do it knowing that they’ve got work ready to go … as soon as they’re ready to go at their capacity,” said James Geurts, Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition, via teleconference. The goal, he said, is to “ensure these companies have the work, they know the work is coming, the employees know the work is coming, the lenders know the work is coming, and the work is actually sitting there” once the outbreak ends.

These are the same CEOs who have kept their plants running, even amid reports that some workers are testing positive for COVID-19.

This ethos—that financial support should be mobilized to protect the bottom lines of companies like Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin—has undergirded much of the Department of Defense’s response to the COVID-19 crisis. Military officials, with the help of Congress and defense industry lobbying groups, have fought to ensure that tanker and missile manufacturing sites remain open, even if it means putting workers at risk of infection,and that cash keeps flowing into the coffers of CEOs and shareholders. 

This support is going to an industry that is being deemed “essential” during the COVID-19 crisis. But by the Pentagon’s own admission, the goal is to continue business as usual—i.e. maintain the U.S. military apparatus. That the weapons industry is being kept afloat at a time healthcare systems, and millions of ordinary Americans, are sinking, reveals a great deal about the militaristic bent of our government—and the political muscle of the companies that profit from it. As Shireen Al-Adeimi, a Yemeni-American anti-war activist, writer and scholar, put it to In These Times, “Even at a time of vulnerability at home, we're still thinking about ways to expand our military and to show our imperial militaristic dominance across the globe.”

The accelerated Navy contracts aren’t the only life raft the military industry has been tossed. On March 22, the Department of Defense released its Deviation on Progress Payments memo, which decrees that “once in contracts, the progress payment rate that contracts can get paid for will increase from 80% of cost to 90% for large businesses and from 90% to 95% for small businesses.” The measure is aimed at directing millions of dollars into the coffers of defense companies. Or, as DOD spokesman Lt. Col. Mike Andrews put it, it’s “an important avenue where industry cash flow can be improved.”

This change was made, in part, as a result of the advocacy of Maine’s entire congressional delegation, which sent a letter on March 19 urging the Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper—himself a former lobbyist for Raytheon—to “take any actions possible to accelerate or advance payments or new contract obligations in order to provide immediate stability to the industrial base.” The lawmakers were concerned about Bath Iron Works, a General Dynamics shipyard and manufacturing hub for the Navy, located in Maine.

The “deviation on progress payments” memo won glowing praise from industry titans, including the National Defense Industrial Association and the Aerospace Industries Association. But perhaps the strongest praise came from Lockheed Martin, which said on its official Twitter account, “We applaud @DeptofDefense for leading by example during COVID-19 crisis with enhanced progress payments targeted for small businesses. Lockheed Martin will do the same by flowing these funds to our supply chain partners vital in supporting U.S. men & women in uniform.”

Lockheed Martin is the manufacturer of the bomb that was used by the U.S.-Saudi coalition to strike a school bus in northern Yemen on August 9, 2018, killing 40 children between the ages of six and 11, and wounding a total of 79 people. Just as the cash has continued flowing to this company, the U.S-Saudi coalition has continued launching air strikes on Yemen. On March 30, the U.S.-Saudi coalition launched several air strikes in Sanaa, with residents reporting loud explosions throughout the city. This was despite the U.N.’s call days earlier for a truce in light of the global pandemic, and despite warnings that five years of air strikes targeting infrastructure and hospitals have left Yemen highly vulnerable to a potential COVID-19 outbreak.

“It’s not enough that we’ve created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” says Al-Adeimi. “If COVID-19 entered Yemen right now it would spell disaster. Everything else can shut down except for war, apparently.”

As the vast majority of people in the United States are being told to stay at home, weapons manufacturers are allowed to keep their doors open. On March 20, the Department of Defense declared the “Defense Industrial Base” to be essential work during the COVID-19 crisis after, as the DOD put it, working closely with “the Hill and the Department of Homeland Security.” According to the Under Secretary of Defense, Ellen Lord, the Defense Industrial Base is defined as “the worldwide industrial complex that enables research and development as well as design, production, delivery and maintenance of military weapons systems/software systems, subsystems, and components or parts, as well as purchased services to meet U.S. military requirements.”

This amounts to guidance, not a federal mandate, prompting weapons industry CEOs to demand even more. The Aerospace Industries Association wrote a letter to Secretary Esper, signed by the CEOs of Northrop Grunman, Raytheon and others. The letter said “the federal government should legally establish national security programs and our workforce as essential.”

These are the same CEOs who have kept their plants running, even amid reports that some workers are testing positive for COVID-19. In These Times spoke with an employee of  a company that contracts with Lockheed Martin by providing development and testing for software used on Navy ships. The worker, who requested anonymity to protect against retaliation and is not represented by a union, is continuing to show up to work even after someone in job site was recently diagnosed with COVID-19.

He says he’s worried he is at risk of becoming infected. “We are not able to maintain social distancing,” he said. “There are no dividers between desks or anything. There are three or four feet between people. They've increased the amount of cleaning they're doing. They've brought in plastic dividers. They’re trying to mitigate things, but in the environment we're in, it could spread pretty quickly.”

Khury Petersen-Smith, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, told In These Times, “To the extent that we have any health system in this country, it’s more or less immediately failing. Whole sections of the economy just failed in the matter of weeks. And yet the systems of militarization are robust.”

Union leaders of the Local S6 chapter of the Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America, representing Bath Iron Works’ workforce, put it succinctly in an open letter to the vice president of General Dynamics: “It seems as though the company is willing to use its workforce as sacrificial Lambs to meet the needs of our customer.”

According to Mandy Smithberger of the Project On Government Oversight, there is no indication that the “increased cash flow” or essential industry decree come with any conditions that companies must protect workers—and there is nothing to prevent profits gleaned during the pandemic from going straight to CEOs and shareholders. She believes the same holds true for a defense industry giveaway included in the $2 trillion CARES stimulus package that is likely earmarked for Boeing and other companies. As the Washington Post explains, “The Senate package includes a $17 billion federal loan program for businesses deemed ‘critical to maintaining national security.’ The provision does not mention Boeing by name but was crafted largely for the company’s benefit, two of the people said. Other firms could also receive a share of the money, one of the people said. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations.”

While this program fell short of Boeing’s request for a $60 billion bailout, it’s nonetheless a hefty consolation prize. It came just weeks after President Trump said at a March 17 press conference, “So, we’ll be helping Boeing.”

Boeing is just one of the companies that makes the United States the top weapons exporter in the world—by far. According to Petersen-Smith, that weapons manufacturers are still open for business is an indicator of a much larger trend. “I would argue the United States is on a more aggressive footing than a month ago. It has increased sanctions on Iran. Whereas a few months ago it had taken away its aircraft carrier stationed near Iran, now it has deployed two aircraft carriers. It has deployed ships to the caribbean to be more aggressive to Venezuela. It has cut humanitarian aid to Yemen—actively cut it.”

“The prioritizing of weapons manufacturing is part of prioritizing the military in general,” he continued, echoing the concerns of anti-war organizations that are calling for the Pentagon’s budget to be reallocated to meet immediate needs of people suffering from the outbreak and subsequent economic crash. “There is very little attention to militarism domestically in this country, but amid this crisis there is even less conversation about what the United States is doing abroad.”

While U.S. military aggression should be opposed in its own right—because of the direct harm it causes to the people facing bombings, sanctions and intimidation—it also makes the whole world more vulnerable to the COVID-19 outbreak, given the global nature of the pandemic. The same executives who profit from war when we are not going through an unprecedented epidemiological event are now lining their pockets by insisting theirs is the industry that must never cease, even as it makes many places in the world far more susceptible to COVID-19—a virus that, like America’s ongoing was, will not stop at the water’s edge. 

Chinese billionaire who criticized Xi Jinping over coronavirus under investigation By Steven Jiang, Nectar Gan and Ben Westcott.

A Chinese billionaire who criticized President Xi Jinping's handling of the coronavirus epidemic has been placed under investigation, Beijing authorities said in a brief statement Tuesday.

Ren Zhiqiang, a retired real-estate tycoon with close ties to senior Chinese officials, faces allegations of committing "serious violations" of the law and Communist Party regulations, a favored euphemism for corruption.

The statement did not give any other details about the allegations against Ren.

Born into the party's ruling elite, the 69-year-old has often been outspoken on Chinese politics, far more than is usually allowed in the authoritarian state.

His forthrightness earned him the nickname "The Cannon" on Chinese social media.

Ren, a longtime Communist Party member and former chairman of a state-owned property company, went missing in mid-March, according to friends. Wang Ying, an entrepreneur and close friend of Ren, told CNN last month that she had not been able to reach him since March 12, and feared he had been taken away by authorities.

Tuesday's announcement was the first official acknowledgment that Ren was being held by the authorities.

Ren Zhiqiang, a former real estate tycoon and outspoken government critic, 

has been placed under investigation by the Communist Party.

The tycoon's disappearance came after he allegedly penned a scathing essay in early March criticizing Xi's response to the coronavirus epidemic. In the article, he lashed out at the party's crackdown on press freedom and intolerance of dissent.

While Ren did not mention Xi by name, he obliquely referred to the top leader as a power-hungry "clown."

"I saw not an emperor standing there exhibiting his 'new clothes,' but a clown who stripped off his clothes and insisted on continuing being an emperor," Ren wrote of Xi's address to 170,000 officials across the country at a mass video conference on epidemic control measures on February 23.

The billionaire went on to accuse the Communist Party of putting its own interests above the safety of the Chinese people, to secure its rule. "Without a media representing the interests of the people by publishing the actual facts, the people's lives are being ravaged by both the virus and the major illness of the system," he said.

This is not the first time Ren has got into trouble with the party's discipline watchdog for speaking his mind.

In 2016, he was disciplined after questioning on social media Xi's demands that Chinese state media must stay absolutely loyal to the party. He was put on a year's probation for his party membership and his wildly popular account on Weibo, China's Twitter like platform, was shuttered.

From Iran's hot zone, Afghans flee home, spreading virus The massive influx of returnees, who are going back untested and unmonitored, threatens to create a greater outbreak in the war-ravaged country.

Medical workers check the temperatures of travelers arriving in Kabul, Afghanistan, on March 24. 

KABUL, Afghanistan — Mahdi Noori, a young Afghan refugee in Iran, was left jobless when the factory where he’d worked cutting stone was shut down because of the coronavirus outbreak. He had no money, was afraid of contracting the virus and had no options. So he headed home.

He joined a large migration of some 200,000 Afghans and counting who have been flowing home across the border for weeks — from a country that is one of the world’s biggest epicenters of the pandemic to an impoverished homeland that is woefully unprepared to deal with it.

At the border, Noori lined up with thousands of other returning refugees earlier this month, crowded together waiting to cross. “I saw women and children on the border, and I was thinking, what if they get infected now, here?” the 20-year-old told The Associated Press.

Volunteers spray disinfectant on storefronts to help curb the spread of coronavirus in Kabul, Afghanistan, on March 29. Rahmat Gul / AP

The massive influx of returnees, who are going back untested and unmonitored to cities, towns and villages around the country, threatens to create a greater outbreak in Afghanistan that could overwhelm its health infrastructure wrecked by decades of war. So far, Afghan authorities have confirmed 273 cases of the new coronavirus, more than 210 of them in people who returned from Iran. Four deaths have been recorded.

Afghan Health Minister Ferozudin Feroz says the virus has already spread because of the returnees. “If the cases increase, then it will be out of control and we will need help,” he said.

He and other Afghan officials expressed concern that Iran would push out the more than 1 million Afghans working illegally in the country. Iran has already barred entry from Afghanistan, preventing any who left from coming back. Iran has had more than 58,000 coronavirus cases and more than 3,600 deaths.

So far, the International Organization of Migration has recorded more than 198,000 Afghans returnees from Iran this year, more than 145,000 of them in March as the outbreak in Iran accelerated. At the height of the influx, 15,000 people a day were crossing the border, according to Repatriation and Returnees Minister Sayed Hussain Alimi Balkhi, though it has gone down slightly since.

At the border, the IOM gives tents and blankets to returnees who have nowhere to go and transportation money to others. But the Afghan government and independent agencies don’t have the capacity to test, take temperatures or quarantine the returnees. Almost all go back to their home provinces using public transportation, around a quarter of them to Herat province, bordering Iran.

Noori’s experience mirrors that of many other returnees.

He quit school to go work in Iran when he was 15, bouncing between multiple jobs, most recently cutting stone in a construction materials factory in the central Iranian city of Isfahan. He earned enough to send $180 a month back to his impoverished family of eight.

When the factory shut, he lost his income. He feared that, if infected, he would get no treatment because Afghans are far down in priority. He tried to get tested in Iran but was refused, he said.

He traveled back with other workers, not knowing if any of them were infected. Once in Afghanistan, he took buses across almost the entire breadth of the country to reach the capital, Kabul.

On the buses, he was met with hostility from other Afghans who told him, “Fear of coronavirus brought you home to kill others with it,” he said.

He reached his home in Kabul on March 17 and isolated himself for two weeks from his family, fearing he could infect them. “I experienced the worst moment of my life, meeting my parents, sisters and brothers from a distance after such a long time,” he said, speaking by phone from his home.

Iran’s military, firefighters join fight against COVID-19

MARCH 4, 202000:49

The government ordered a lockdown on March 28 in Kabul and Herat province, shutting down businesses, restaurants and wedding halls, just as the traditional spring season for weddings was beginning.

But the response has been hobbled by a government crisis that has seen two candidates claiming to have won recent presidential elections and by continued violence.

On Monday, neighboring Pakistan said it would reopen its border for four days so that Afghans wishing to return home can go back. On the other side of the border, which closed nearly a month ago, the Afghan government has set up a quarantine camp for the returnees.

Pakistani nationals stranded in Afghanistan will also be allowed to go back. According to the IOM, 1,827 undocumented Afghan refugees had returned from Pakistan between Jan. 1 and mid-March.

Habibullah Zafari, who had been studying in Iran, returned to Kabul four weeks ago. The next day, he went to the testing center in the capital, where they didn’t test him but instead took his temperature and checked for symptoms. They declared him negative.