Month: May 2020

Enlarge / Boston Medical Center Child Life Specialist Karlie Bittrich sees to a baby while in a pediatrics tent set up outside of Boston Medical Center in Boston on April 29, 2020. (credit: Getty | Boston Globe)

Evidence is stacking up to support a link between COVID-19 and a rare, mysterious inflammatory disease in children, which can be life-threatening.

Though reports of the new disease have trickled in from several countries, many of them have been anecdotal to this point. Now, doctors in an area of Italy hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic have published detailed data on a cluster of 10 children who experienced an unusual inflammatory disease amid the outbreak, lending solid support for the link. Their report appeared Wednesday in The Lancet.

The doctors describe the condition they saw as “Kawasaki-like,” referring to a rare disease in children that causes inflammation of blood vessels. Kawasaki disease—identified in Japan in 1967 by Tomisaku Kawasaki—is typically marked by sustained fever, rash, swelling of hands and feet, and swollen lymph nodes in the neck. In the worst cases, it can lead to heart problems and aneurisms.

It all started with a well-timed cough. In 2001, a former British army major, Charles Ingram, was a contestant on the wildly popular game show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Ingram unexpectedly won the £1,000,000 jackpot but was subsequently tried and convicted for cheating, along with his wife and another accomplice. Now the Ingram story is coming to AMC in the new miniseries Quiz, adapted from the 2017 play of the same name by James Graham.

Michael Sheen (Good Omens) lights up the trailer as game-show host Chris Tarrant, so small wonder the miniseries proved to be ratings gold when it premiered last month in the UK. Directed by Stephen Frears (A Very English Scandal), the three-part TV adaptation also stars Matthew Macfadyen (Succession) and Sian Clifford (Fleabag) as Charles and his wife Diana Ingram. Michael Jibson (1917) plays the Ingrams' accomplice, Tecwen Whittock, while Helen McCrory (Peaky Blinders) plays Sonia Woodley, the Ingrams' criminal defense barrister.

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? was among the most popular shows in the UK in 1999, and Ingram's wife and her brother had both been contestants on the show when Charles decided to follow suit. Producers didn't expect him to proceed beyond the second day of taping—his performance was fairly erratic—but instead he won the top prize. Tarrant didn't suspect anything was wrong as he celebrated with the Ingrams in their dressing room after the show. But production staff became convinced that Ingram had cheated after reviewing the tapes. Diana and Whittock kept coughing noticeably right as Tarrant read the correct answer.

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  It wouldn't be a massive open-world video game without a helpful fox, right? In terms of Tsushima's gameplay, foxes and other wildlife sometimes act as guides to your next destination. [credit: Sony / Sucker Punch ]

A Thursday video from PlayStation finally cleared up some mysteries about Ghost of Tsushima, the newest PlayStation 4-exclusive game from Sucker Punch launching on July 17. What had previously been revealed as a handsome, vague samurai epic now looks like an honest-to-goodness video game, for better and for worse.

Like many recent PlayStation exclusives, Ghost of Tsushima cribs liberally from the open-world gaming playbook of the past decade. Follow a chain of "primary" quests to move the plot along. Explore more deeply to find and resolve optional missions, which let your hero pick up extra items, crafting materials, weapons, and more. Missions include "primary" and "secondary" objectives, and they can all be completed in a number of ways, depending on your preferred play style. You've seen most of those bullet points before, and today's newly revealed gameplay lands somewhere between Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Assassin's Creed Odyssey.

Tsushima's differentiation begins with the question it poses to players: will you play as a "samurai," or as a "ghost"? The former is a path of honor, and it sees your hero resolving conflict in broad daylight with an emphasis on perfectly timed sword swipes and parries. The latter is a path of secrecy, and it emphasizes stealthy maneuvers, silent assassinations, enemy misdirection, and more. Each playstyle bleeds into the other: the samurai can sneak up on foes, and the ghost will have to face some enemies directly. But only the ghost style appears to include a default sense of terror—so that when your hero storms an encampment, some enemies will cower upon seeing you, the terrifying ghost of legend who has finally become real.