Name: Will Virus Force Baseball To Use Robot Umpires? | April 9, 2020
Uploaded: 2020-04-20T21:01:30.000Z
Duration: 10 min
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Welcome everyone, I'm Carl Azuz for CNN 10.

After more than two months, the lockdown has been lifted in the first Chinese city to see coronavirus cases.

Is this something we can expect to happen in other places in the months ahead?

Wuhan, China was where the outbreak was first reported last December though there are indications it was spreading before that.

The city of 11 million people was put on lockdown on January 23, two-and-a-half-months later on Wednesday Wuhan's borders were reopened.

People in good health could leave the city.

Flights resumed, though there are no direct routes to the Chinese capital, Beijing.

There are still some restrictions in place in Wuhan and the coronavirus threat isn't over in China or elsewhere.

There are indications that some European countries are planning to follow China's example in terms of when to lift their lockdowns and the timing of that is tricky.

It's better for economies if restrictions are lifted.

But health officials say if that's done too soon the virus could surge again leading to more problems.

The disease continues to spread and claim lives in the United States.

Officials are hoping that after this week things will start to get better with the number of deaths decreasing and the spread slowing down in some hard-hit areas.

But this doesn't mean that businesses and schools will reopen soon.

Companies are still laying off employees or suspending their hours and pay.

And a top U.S. health official says he's optimistic that schools will be open nationwide by the fall, though communities will have to be more proactive in identifying and isolating the virus.

Before many schools closed and shifted to online learning.

Professional sporting events were cancelled across America.

When might game clocks start ticking again?

A computer helping call the balls and strikes to keep umpires at a distance.

Players not in crowded dugouts but spread out in the empty stands and every team, every game in Arizona.

That's how it may look if Major League Baseball says play ball next month according to multiple reports.

Baseball's official stance remains unchanged.

We're going to resume playing when it's safe for our fans, our players and the public for us to resume playing.

The plan under discussion would attempt to create a safe zone with teams operating in isolation for months amid rigorous virus testing at their hotels, on buses, in stadiums, closed to all fans.

Other pro sports are nibbling at resuming with similar plans to limit exposure but only tentatively.

At least for the month of April, we won't be in a position to make any decisions.

And I don't think that necessarily means on May 1 we will be.

Hockey's Stanley Cup playoffs should have started this week.

Instead ideas are being floated for returning to the ice maybe this summer in North Dakota.

And the biggest game around, football, the NFL's draft is this month with teams planning virtual parties to celebrate.

In a conference call to sports officials days ago, the president said he hopes the league can kickoff on time in September.

But many state and local officials are questioning all this talk of sports coming back soon.

That's not something I anticipate happening in the next few months.

With billions of dollars and thousands of jobs at stake, of course everybody would like to see sports up and running again.

But for now, the teams and the towns that host them seem to be saying they will let health officials make that call.

What is the term for a part of the ocean that's beyond a nation's control?

High seas, off-shore territory, contiguous zone or limited enforcement zone.

According to the United Nations Law of the Sea, the high seas are outside territorial claims.

Last week a Vietnamese fishing boat was sunk in the South China Sea.

It was sailing near a group of islands claimed by both Vietnam and China and the two countries blame each other for sinking the boat who's crew was rescued by the Chinese coast guard.

The South China Sea is an important part of the ocean.

Since 2014, China has come under international scrutiny for building artificial islands there.

It sees this body of water as its territory.

Other nations in the region and the United States say China's claims are illegal.

The islands and reefs of the South China Sea are variously claimed by six different governments.

And sovereignty over these islands is significant because of something called the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, or UNCLOS.

UNCLOS states that every coastal nation has the rights within a 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone off its coastal waters.

Ownership of the islands, therefore, dictates who has the rights to the resource-rich South China Sea.

Who owns the seas has always been a difficult concept.

In the 18th century, Dutch legal theorist Cornelis van Bynkershoek stated that a nation owned the amount of sea it could defend from the land.

At the time, that was the distance of cannon fire around 3 nautical miles.

The cannon shot rule is still used by several countries to this day including Jordan and Singapore.

In 1945, President Truman extended U.S. jurisdiction to the end of its continental shelf.

The continuation of the land mass underwater until it drops down to the ocean floor.

Then the U.S. built the world's first offshore oil platform out of sight of land in the Gulf of Mexico in 1947, 10 and a half miles off the Louisiana coast.

That started a race to claim oceanic resources far beyond the cannon shot distance from the shoreline.

This lead to a lot of countries clashing over their perceived rights.

For example, the UK and Iceland had no less than three disputes known as "Cod Wars" over the fish in what are now Icelandic waters.

We will feel ourselves obliged to several diplomatic nations.

To mediate these disputes, UNCLOS was drawn up and came into force in 1994.

It carved up maritime territory into four main sections, typically measured from the low water line on a nation's shores.

Within the territorial waters, a state can regulate use and has ownership over any resources found within.

Foreign states can sail through but they have to abide by the nation's laws.

Within the contiguous zone, a state can continue to enforce laws in four specific areas, customs, taxation, immigration and pollution.

Within the EEZ, the state has the sole rights over natural resources.

But foreign states may sail through, lay underwater cables and even pass through for military reasons.

And on the continental shelf, a state has the rights to resources in the subsoil of the continental shelf but not the water column above if it is beyond the EEZ.

Although 168 parties have ratified UNCLOS, it has far from resolved maritime territory disputes.

For example, France went up against Canada outside the Gulf of Saint Lawrence over its overseas territory at Saint Pierre and Miquelon.

Even sending in navy frigate and seismic ship to test for oil in disputed waters before the two came to an agreement in 1992.

Based on it's claim over the Spratly Islands, China states its EEZ covers pretty much the whole of the South China Sea violating the EEZ's of several countries.

Despite the wording of UNCLOS, China believes it can control military activity in the EEZ too, leading to numerous clashes with the U.S. which regularly holds frequent navigation patrols in the South China Sea.

Leading to the question, if one country can ignore UNCLOS, what's stopping the rest?

Pennsylvania is burying it's graffiti highway once and for all.

The 3/4 mile stretch of road has been closed since 1993 because the coal that runs beneath it had been burning for decades.

But after the road was covered with graffiti, it became an unofficial tourist attraction despite being extremely dangerous.

With crowds gathering there during the coronavirus pandemic, the highway's private owner decided to cover the highway with dirt and the company doing that says it will probably be planted with trees and grass.

If covering it was a crime that will now be covered up.

Officials have plenty of dirt on the vandals and while they've all hit road by now thinking their "gra-free-ti."

It's still sad when art gets "buried and burned," it seems a low way for a highway to go.