Q. WFH boundaries: My husband and I are both working from home due to COVID. Things have been rocky at best. My husband works in a room that is his dedicated office. We don’t have the space for a dedicated office for me as well, so I usually work throughout the house and oftentimes in our bedroom. My husband just does not seem to understand that I am working during the day and will often walk into a room and start asking me questions or make small talk. He also will open the door if I have it closed, without knocking or announcing himself. I have tried talking to him about this many times and I have asked him repeatedly that if he needs something or if he wants to take a break to talk, to send me a text message before just barging in. He feels that it is insulting that I don’t want to talk to him and that he “has to ask permission” to talk to me.

Am I being unreasonable? Is it too much to ask that I have space to work without being interrupted? I understand that working from home means many people have fewer social interactions outside of the household, but I can’t just be available to my husband at all times during the work day. If I am not being completely crazy in asking for this, how can I get my husband to actually respect my boundaries? Please help!

Religious orders are supposed to provide spiritual guidance to those who join. But some of the women who entered Sisters Minor of Mary Immaculate (SMMI) say they faced physical and emotional abuse.

Patricia Budd, one of the former nuns of SMMI, first entered in 1995 in hopes of connecting with her Catholicism. It was at her first retreat where she met the order’s U.S. delegate, Sister Theresa Kovacs.

“It was a lot of hugs. There was a lot of encouragement,” Budd told HuffPost. “They would listen to you, and you felt really important, and you felt like you’re valued.” But soon after she joined, Budd and the other nuns realized things were not as they seemed.

“I witnessed other girls just being yelled at on a constant basis by Theresa Kovacs,” said Rose, who joined SMMI in 1995. (Three interviewees asked to only be identified by their first names.) According to Rose, a sister named Georgiana often got the brunt of Kovacs’ anger.

“It would be a torrent of the nastiest stuff you could ever say to a human being, she would say to me,” said Georgiana. “It was meant to keep people in line.”

The nuns faced strict rules. They weren’t allowed to speak to each other. They weren’t allowed to go for walks outside the convent doors.

“Basically your food is pretty much less and less,” she said. “And so, that’s pretty much like what a cult is — and break you down. That’s the whole thing. Always to break you down.”

China will overtake the US as the world’s biggest economy before the end of the decade after outperforming its rival during the global Covid-19 pandemic, according to a report.

The Centre for Economics and Business Research said that it nowexpected the value of China’s economy when measured in dollars to exceed that of the US by 2028, half a decade sooner than it expected a year ago.

In its annual league table of the growth prospects of 193 countries, the UK-based consultancy group said China had bounced back quickly from the effects of Covid-19 and would grow by 2% in 2020, as the one major global economy to expand.

With the US expected to contract by 5% this year, China will narrow the gap with its biggest rival, the CEBR said. Overall, global gross domestic product is forecast to decline by 4.4% this year, in the biggest one-year fall since the second world war.

In October, as the pandemic’s winter surge was beginning to take shape across the U.S., California’s public-health researchers and officials expressed measured optimism that the nation’s most populous state could avoid a disastrous rise in cases. During a press conference on October 19, Governor Gavin Newsom pointed to declining hospitalization rates as a sign of the state’s success, but also warned that the decline was slowing. “We’re beginning to flatten out, plateau, as relates to hospitalizations,” he said.

For a moment, such a plateau seemed like the most likely outcome. A week after Newsom’s press conference, the state had 2,991 people hospitalized with COVID-19, its lowest number since April 10. But the trend quickly reversed, and by November 23, the state’s hospitalizations had doubled to more than 6,000.

What’s happened since is a worst-case scenario. While California’s per capita hospitalization rate is nowhere near New York at its worst—with 39.5 million people, the Golden State is about twice as populous as New York—the sheer number of patients in the hospital is still a sign of how badly California is doing right now.

Worse yet is how quickly the state reached nearly 18,000 hospitalizations during its current surge. When New York reached its record, it represented a 12 percent increase over the week prior. In California, by contrast, hospitalizations are up 27 percent over last week. With cases in California continuing to rise, more hospitalizations will follow.

Things are much worse in some parts of the state than others. Southern and central California are driving the current surge: 34 percent of the state’s hospitalized patients are in Los Angeles County, the nation’s most populous by far. Yesterday, 620 people per million were hospitalized with confirmed COVID-19 there, the fifth-highest rate among California counties.

Andrew Cuomo on Sunday slammed the 'reprehensible' inaction as the United States 'continues to let in six flights a day' from Britain, where a new coronavirus strain is spreading - as more countries, including Canada, ban flights from the UK.

The New York governor told reporters: 'Right now, this variant in the UK is getting on a plane and flying to JFK. Right now. Today. Literally six flights a day. And all it takes is one person.'

Authorities had earlier said they were looking 'very carefully' into the virus variant spreading in the United Kingdom, while indicating that a ban on travel from there was not currently in the cards.

Orange County continued its streak of daily records for COVID-19 hospitalizations on Thursday with 1,519 patients, including 343 in ICU beds.

The county’s adjusted ICU bed capacity remains at zero.

The state created the adjusted metric to reflect the difference in beds available for COVID-19 patients and non-coronavirus patients. The county’s unadjusted ICU bed capacity is also dropping, and it currently stands at 9.5%.


The 11-county Southern California region’s adjusted percentage of available ICU beds dropped from 0.5% to zero as well.

Another 13 people died from virus-related complications, the county reported Thursday. The death toll is now at 1,731.

Deadly "brain-eating amoeba" infections have historically occurred in the Southern United States. But cases have been appearing farther north in recent years, likely because of climate change, a new study finds.

The study researchers, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), examined cases of this brain-eating amoeba, known as Naegleria fowleri, over a four-decade period in the US.

They found that, although the number of cases that occur each year has remained about the same, the geographic range of these cases has been shifting northward, with more cases popping up in Midwestern states than before.

Early in the coronavirus pandemic, California was celebrated as a beacon of common sense in a country on the brink.

By early summer, however, the pressure to open back up rose. Officials discovered the state wasn’t immune to the national fatigue with social distancing and mask-wearing. Amid a patchwork of haphazard rules and guidelines, cases crept up.

Los Angeles county last week passed the disturbing milestone of 10,000 new Covid-19 cases a day, and officials there fear a spike in infections resulting from the Thanksgiving holiday could send hospitalizations surging further. LA officials said that one person is now dying of Covid every 20 minutes, and the county’s public health director, Barbara Ferrer, broke down crying at a briefing while talking about the “incalculable loss” of more than 8,000 deaths.

“I am not feeling this vaccine, and I’m certainly not feeling like being in the guinea pig phase,” Rev. Emmett Price shared with me on our podcast All Rev’d Up. Like many Black ministers across the country, Price is not confident in telling his congregation to be the first in line for the vaccine.

On November 26, Walker conducted a webinar, “Where do we go from here? Coping in the next season of the COVID-19 pandemic,” where Dr. Fauci spoke to the Roxbury community. Fauci recognized our distrust in the medical system but assured the audience that the speed of the vaccine does not compromise its safety nor scientific integrity.

However, Fauci mentioned the lack of diversity in the clinical trials for the vaccine and wished more minorities were in them, stating “what’s safe and effective should not be only for whites.”

The presidents of Xavier University and Dillard University, both historically Black universities in Louisiana, volunteered for COVID-19 trials with the hopes of recruiting their students as a way to bridge the chasm between the Black community and its distrust with the medical system. Students at both schools would have access to free COVID-19 tests and a lab equipment company made a donation worth $15 million to the schools.

Conservationists have made a very tiny, but highly heartening discovery on a South Australian island that was ravaged by bushfires last summer — a lone, surviving pygmy possum.

The miniature mammals — smaller than an adult’s thumb — had been feared to have been wiped out in bushfires that had ravaged Kangaroo Island, The Guardian reported on Monday.

“This capture is the first documented record of the species surviving post-fire,” ecologist Pat Hodgens told the paper.

“The fire did burn through 88 percent of the species’ predicted range,” he said.

As Covid-19 has spread around the world, it’s challenged preconceptions about which places would best tackle the worst public health crisis in a generation.

Advanced economies like the U.S. and U.K., ranked by various pre-2020 measures as being the most prepared for a pandemic, have been repeatedly overwhelmed by infections and face a return to costly lockdowns. Meanwhile, other countries—even developing nations—have defied expectations, some all but eliminating the pathogen within their borders.

Bloomberg crunched the numbers to determine the best places to be in the coronavirus era: where has the virus been handled most effectively with the least amount of disruption to business and society?

The three Nordic nations in the top 10 reflect how border control has been used effectively in Europe. Finland and Norway have blocked entry to most outsiders since mid-March, though they’re part of Europe’s passport-free Schengen area. The top-ranked European nations managed to avoid the resurgence now engulfing countries like France, the U.K. and Italy caused in part by summer vacation travel.

A seven-month-old girl has a rare genetic condition that means she only sleeps for four hours a day, never cries and is almost always smiling.

Fiadh Baird was born three weeks early at Melbourne Women's Hospital on April 18 this year.

Like most premature babies, she slept for the first week of her life, until she suddenly woke and screamed - non-stop, for 24 hours a day.

Her mother Galatea Young told Daily Mail Australia the crying finally ended when Fiadh was put on medication for colic and reflux.

But when the wailing was replaced with smiles and laughter at two weeks old, the 28-year-old mother sensed something was wrong.

Remember, if you want to be respected, you have to show respect.

We know that women make less than men during the best of times—in 2018 women’s weekly wages were 81.1% that of men, according to a report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. During this recession not only were sectors with higher proportions of female employees disproportionately affected, but female employees have been disproportionately more likely to be laid off than their male counterparts. Women-owned businesses are also more likely to be in the healthcare, education, or retail sectors that have been so hard hit during COVID-19. Partially due to lower income overall, women also tend to have less buffer to weather financial storms.

This paints a dire picture for women’s mental health. We can readily empathize with financial strain, the fear that accompanies it and the catastrophic negative impact it can have on mental health. We may also appreciate that despite the reluctance we might frequently feel to get out of bed and go to work on a Monday morning, there is a well-established link between employment and mental health. We know that becoming unemployed is associated with depression and suicidality, and that gaining employment is associated with an improvement in mental health. Furthermore, in a socially distanced world in which women are substantially less able to receive household help or have contact with females outside their immediate household, there is a greater burden on the support that partners provide. Unfortunately, we know that within relationships, financial concerns are a major driver of conflict between partners, jeopardizing the support available to struggling mothers.

The cases topped Friday’s record of 13,005 infections, bringing the total to almost 1.1 million. The number of deaths increased by 86 to 18,643, state data showed. The increased patient load left California’s hospitals with just 1,921 intensive-case unit beds available, near the low in July.

A 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew will be imposed in most counties for a month to ease the rate of infection, affecting areas that encompass 37 million people, or 94% of the population.

Only 10 countries globally have more cases than California, where the number of cases now exceeds those in Mexico and Germany, which have been hot spots for the pandemic.

Governor Gavin Newsom said earlier in the week that the curfew will stop nonessential work and gatherings to “flatten the curve again,” reflecting growing alarm among state officials as the third wave of coronavirus infections to hit the state gathers momentum.