Latest news with #Ricardo
GMA Network
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- GMA Network
Ricardo Cepeda, Marina Benipayo share what his 11-month detention taught them
Ricardo Cepeda and his partner Marina Benipayo shared the lessons they learned after the former was detained for 11 months due to an alleged syndicated estafa case filed against him in 2023. In Friday's "Fast Talk with Boy Abunda," Ricardo and Marina said that the experience made their already-strong relationship even stronger and them, more patient. "I think more patient, more patient with other people. I saw so many people who were in jail for simple things eh, but there were also so many who were in there because of some very frivolous charges made by somebody else and it's so easy to get arrested pala," shared Ricardo. The couple also that they have become better people because of the experience, with Marina noting that they were already pretty solid even before. Per Marina, the things she did for him and their family were things she would do for the people she loves. "Mabigat lang 'di ba we've gone through in our separate lives, we've gone through so much already na akala mo ay okay na 'to papahinga na 'ko, 'yun pala may mangyayari pa 'di ba? Which is much heavier, so sabi ko nga you know it's challenge after challenge but it's easier to accept the challenge rather than keep questioning, keep avoiding," she said. Ricardo added, "Wala na 'yung mga 'Sana ganito, dapat ganito.'" Marina visited Ricardo frequently when he was detained for nine months in Tuguegarao City in Cagayan and for two months in Quezon City, telling Tito Boy, "I want to be there with him." The couple also shared their message to each other, with Ricardo apologizing to Marina for what happened. "I would say sorry I mean talagang we discussed it na that there was no one to blame among us. Still I just feel sorry that it happened, that we went through that, that the family went through that and salamat for being there as always and more than ever," he told her. Meanwhile, Marina said that she wishes she could have done more. "Sorry, I wish I could've done more, pero salamat kasi God really, I think, God intended for us to meet talaga after dun sa nangyari sa atin as individuals parang feeling ko ginantimpalaaan tayo with each other tsaka ang bait-bait mo kasi, I dont think I'd be able to find anybody but him," she said. During their guesting, Ricardo also opened up about the circumstances that led to his detention and the profound impact the experience had on him and his family. He said that he worked with a direct selling company as a brand ambassador of its products, attending meetings and presentations and giving testimonials onstage. Per the actor, operations like backdoor meetings and offering investments happened without his knowledge. Ricardo had also previously said he was not connected to the company involved in the estafa complaint, saying he was only an endorser of its products. The actor was released from detention and reunited with Marina last September. —CDC, GMA Integrated News
GMA Network
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- GMA Network
Ricardo Cepeda reflects on 11-month detention: ‘Honestly, it's hard'
Ricardo Cepeda opened up about his experience being detained for 11 months due to an alleged syndicated estafa case filed against him in 2023. In Friday's 'Fast Talk with Boy Abunda,' Ricardo, accompanied by his partner Marina Benipayo, detailed the circumstances that led to his detention and the profound impact the experience had on him and his family. 'I was working with this company, sa isang direct selling company, and 'yung role ko in the company is a brand ambassador, a product ambassador. Which is I simply talk about my experiences using products that they distribute,' Ricardo said. The actor said that he attended meetings and presentations, and he would give testimonials on stage. 'Nalaman namin na there were backdoor meetings, which he and the other speakers didn't know about,' Marina said. Per Ricardo, operations like backdoor meetings and offering investments happened without his knowledge. 'Habang we're doing this presentation, merong ibang meeting in a private area,' he said. Ricardo had previously said he was not connected to the company involved in the complaint, saying he was only an endorser of its products. He was detained for 11 months, nine months of which were spent in Tuguegarao City in Cagayan and another two months in Quezon City. 'Honestly, it's hard. It's hard,' he told Tito Boy. Ricardo, however, said that the experience did not break him. He added that he was grateful for the Philippine Military Academy training his dad put him through before as it felt like he was just doing beast barracks training all over again. 'We've always felt that there was, you know, it sounds cliche, pero everything happens for a reason. There's a plan,' he said. He was able to continue communicating with his family, which provided some comfort. 'My biggest worry, Boy, was how this will affect them outside,' he said. Marina said that she always made sure to visit Ricardo, even when he was detained in Tuguegarao. 'If I'm having a hard time, lalo na siya, 'di ba?' she said. 'I want to be there with him.' The actor was released from detention and reunited with Marina last September. —Carby Rose Basina/CDC, GMA Integrated News
The Irish Sun
05-05-2025
- Health
- The Irish Sun
Apple Fitness trainer reveals workout tips after man uses app's 30 min plan to shed almost 6 stone in less than a year
AN Apple Fitness trainer has revealed top tips to help people get in shape this summer using the tech giant's 21p-a-day workout platform. Apple Fitness+ added new programs for strength, pickleball, yoga, and breath meditation earlier this year as the service continues to expand. 2 Pickleball was one of several new types of workout added to Apple Fitness+ this year Credit: Apple 2 Scotland-native Brian Cochrane is one of the Apple Fitness trainers "Pickleball is one of the fastest growing sports in the world," Apple Fitness trainer Brian Cochrane told The Sun. "So we've designed a conditioning program to help people improve their strength and conditioning for pickleball, which is going to be huge." New workouts for more common activities such as rowing, treadmill running, strength and And workout time lengths range from as little as five minutes to 45 minutes. Read more about Apple Brain says that the variety is ideal as people get caught up in doing too much too soon when a balanced approach to fitness is best. "For the longest time, fitness was about 'how much can I do, how much can I crush myself, I'm not going to think about recovery, I'm just going to go all out every day'," he explained. "But we're actually realising that a balanced fitness regime is better overall. "So even if you're only training 10, 20 minutes, two or three times a week, that's enough. Most read in Tech "It might not be enough forever, but it's enough for now. "And building consistency now is going to build adherence longer term. Apple employee reveals huge upgrades on cheapest iPhone model "So you might find that after two months or three months, you want to build up to three or four workouts or go from a 10 minute to a 20 minute or a 30 minute." The Scotland-native also revealed there are plenty of workouts on the app that require no equipment and can be done in smaller home spaces, which tend to be popular. At £79.99 for the year, Apple Fitness+ works out to about 21p per day. However, you can maximise the value further with the ability to share with five members of your family at no extra cost. And some users are getting positive weight loss results too. "One that I've had recently is a gentleman called Ricardo from Portugal," Brian reveals. "He was 105 kilos and he's now 68. So he lost 37 kilos in less than a year just by doing HIIT workouts on Fitness+, which is insane. "But we have so many stories like that every single day." TOP TELLY TIP Check if your TV supports AirPlay. If it does, you can cast the workout onto your TV screen for a bigger, better experience. Your TV and iPhone will need to be connected to the same Then just hit play on a video via your iPhone, then tap the AirPlay cast icon along the bottom (which looks like the icon here).
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
How Hispanic Texans embraced vaccines and flipped the script on COVID deaths
In the summer of 2020, death engulfed Texas' Rio Grande Valley. Delia Ramos recalls the eerie prevalence of freezer trucks lining hospital parking lots to store the bodies, as a novel virus battered the mostly Hispanic region. When her husband Ricardo eventually fell ill, he entered the hospital alone, and she never got to see him again. The demand for services for the dead was so high, she had to place her name on a waiting list to have him cremated. 'People were passing away left and right,' said Ramos, 45, of Brownsville. By that summer's end, it was clear: Texas Hispanics were dying at a rate faster than any other ethnic group. In 2020, Hispanics made up nearly half of all COVID deaths in Texas. White Texans — whose share of the state's population is the same as Hispanics — made up only 38% of all deaths that year. In the Valley and in several Hispanic communities, many Texans like Ramos' husband, who was a driver for a transportation contractor, worked in jobs outside the home, exposing them to the deadly virus. They often lived under the same roof with children and grandparents, increasing the risk of spreading the infection. 'What we're seeing really is historic decimation among the Hispanic community by this virus,' said Dr. Peter Hotez, Texas' reigning infectious disease expert and physician, to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus on Sept. 30, 2020. It has been five years since Gov. Greg Abbott issued a series of orders reopening the state for business in May 2020 — a move that accelerated a disproportionate amount of deaths for Texas Hispanics in the immediate months that followed. Today, COVID deaths have fallen dramatically. An analysis of COVID mortality data by The Texas Tribune reveals the trends have flipped since the beginning of the pandemic: White Texans are the most likely to die of COVID compared to other race and ethnic groups, while the proportion of Hispanics dying of the disease has plummeted. In 2024, Hispanics made up 23% of COVID deaths in Texas, while white Texans made up 63%. That staggering reversal comes as Hispanic Texans were among the most likely to get immunized when the COVID vaccine became available. By 2023, Texas' border counties had some of the highest levels of vaccination rates against the virus in the state. Experts who reviewed the Tribune's findings said that the frontline devastation that Hispanic Texans endured and witnessed in early 2020 pushed them to seek out vaccines at rates 10 percentage points higher than their white counterparts three years later. 'Most people, if they have been around that level of death…it's not abstract,' said Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, the associate director of the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota who has been studying racial health inequities during the pandemic. 'The fears you might have, like having something new and unknown [such as a vaccine] might seem small compared to something you've actually seen killing people.' In Hidalgo County — where 92% of the population is Hispanic — the funeral homes were filling quickly in 2020. 'I was going into my neighborhood funeral homes and seeing three sets of people literally lying on the floor on top of each other, 100 dead people in a cooling freezer because you couldn't get them buried within three weeks,' said Dr. Ivan Melendez, a family physician and the Hidalgo County Health Authority. During the 2020 summer wave, more than a third of all COVID deaths in the state were Hispanics who were 65 years and older. Many of those who died had chronic conditions and were falling ill in multigenerational households, where one in five Hispanics live, according to Melendez. 'In our community, we had a lot of very, very frail people,' Melendez said. 'And that population was immediately wiped out.' Infections also hit younger adults, like Ramos' 45-year-old husband, who didn't have the ability to work from home and went to jobs ill-equipped with protective equipment and sanitation practices. 'Did we do anything to make those jobs safe?' Wrigley-Field said. 'It's so telling that it's line cooks and not nurses who are at the greatest risk.' Hispanics are among the most underinsured in the state, lowering their access to health care. In 2023, more than a quarter of Texas Hispanics were uninsured, according to the U.S. Census. Combined with the fact that they are at a higher risk for obesity and diabetes, factors that made people more susceptible to severe COVID illness, the population became a target for the virus, said Dr. Robert Rodriguez, a Brownsville-born emergency medicine physician who was an adviser to former President Joe Biden's COVID task force. 'It was not a level playing field,' said Rodriguez, who teaches at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. The inequity bled into the health care system that surrounds them. Hispanic communities have less access to hospitals with 'surge capacity,' or the ability to quickly add more patient beds and more personnel when an emergency occurs. Compared to San Francisco where there were some 200 intensive care doctors, only about 10 were available in the Rio Grande Valley at the time, Rodriguez said. When those units in rural hospitals got overwhelmed, more people died, Hotez said. 'One of the things we learned early on in the pandemic was mortality rates really shot up when ICUs got overwhelmed and unfortunately, the smaller rural hospitals in our state, particularly in South Texas, that's exactly what was happening,' Hotez said. After months of bearing witness to so much death, many Hispanic Texans were eager to get immunized against COVID once the first vaccines became available in December 2020. Ramos got the shot as soon as she could. She said she owed it to her husband who died before it was available. 'I felt if we didn't, it's a dishonor to him,' she said. 'I didn't want his death to be in vain.' By the end of 2021, about 47% of Hispanics in Texas were vaccinated, second only to Asian Texans at nearly 58%. By May 2023, nearly 56% of Latinos in Texas were vaccinated compared to nearly 46% of white Texans. The border counties had the highest percentages of total residents who got vaccinated. In total, seven Texas counties achieved 100% vaccination for COVID by January 2023 — all near or along the Southern border. The COVID death toll resonated so deeply within the Hispanic community that their COVID vaccination rates eclipsed the rates of white and Black Texans in 2022 and 2023. In contrast, the flu vaccine rates among Hispanic Texans has been lower than their white or Black peers for the past six seasons. Rio Grande Valley's Hispanic residents lined up for vaccines because of the need to keep working and because the shots were so readily available, Melendez said. 'There's just a general feeling that perhaps people in the Valley were not getting the same resources as other areas of the state that were more affluent,' he said. 'We did a good job explaining to them the distribution of the vaccine was not based on affluence, but it was based on the [infection and death] numbers.' Another reason the region saw such high vaccination rates, experts say, was that locals could see the vaccine working as the number of deaths and hospitalizations started to fall. 'The community was educated, and a lot of the Hispanic community responded to this call to get vaccinated,' said Dr. Jose Ernesto Campo Maldonado, an infectious disease physician who teaches at the UT Health Rio Grande Valley. 'Some of the changes that we saw in the mortality happened simultaneously with more access to vaccination by the Hispanic communities.' By November 2021, Hispanic Texans becoming fully vaccinated against COVID would edge out white Texans. That's also when the share of deaths among Hispanics began to decline. 'In South Texas, the deaths halted, and the deaths switched to the unvaccinated in the conservative rural areas of West Texas and East Texas,' Campo Maldonado said. By the time the federal government declared the COVID emergency over in May 2023, more than 92,000 Texans were dead. Of those, 41% were Hispanic, just one percentage point above their population share in Texas. Another contribution to the lowered death rate over time was that so many of the most vulnerable Hispanic Texans had already been killed by the virus. Those who were left and had been exposed may have developed herd immunity faster, especially as COVID mutated and became less deadly, Melendez said. Since 2021, as Hispanics' share of all deaths fell, the share of white Texans dying began to grow. Part of the reason, health experts say, is there are more older white residents in the state than any other ethnicity — 60% of Texans age 65 and older are white. In 2024, according to the latest data available, at least 1,891 people died of COVID. Of those, 1,187 were white and 439 were Hispanic. Most of them —1,676 — were over the age of 65. 'What you're seeing is actually really consistent with something that's been true throughout the whole pandemic, which is that in the periods where COVID deaths are low, they tend to be in very old populations, very sick populations,' said Wrigley-Field. 'A lot of deaths are in long term care.' In 2020, Maya Contreras of Houston and her daughter became ill with COVID while working for Walmart. Both felt as if they had been hit by a truck. 'We couldn't even move,' said Contreras, who also lost a brother-in-law to COVID during the first deadly wave in the summer of 2020. However, Contreras, who would get COVID two more times before she got the shot in 2022, recalls how some of her friends were suspicious of the vaccines, telling her, ''I'm not putting that inside my body.'' Today, many still don't think the vaccine for COVID is necessary. Earlier this year, Melendez attended a gathering of about 300 health professionals to deliver a presentation. He asked the group how many were current with their COVID vaccinations. 'About 10 raised their hands,' he said. Once the initial threat of death from COVID subsided, the urgency diminished, and interest in other vaccines dipped to dramatic lows in pockets of the state. Since 2018, the requests to the Texas Department of State Health Services for a vaccination exemption form for childhood vaccinations doubled from 45,900 to more than 93,000 in 2024. There are several bills before the Texas Legislature that would make those exemptions even easier to obtain. This year, measles, a childhood disease once virtually eliminated, is now back in Texas with an outbreak that began in Gaines County where the vaccination rate of kindergarteners is 82%, among the lowest across Texas counties. The disease has resulted in more than 660 infections statewide, dozens of hospitalizations and deaths of a 6-year-old and an 8-year-old, who were both unvaccinated. Experts blame the declining vaccination rates on the COVID-era fatigue over mandates, such as stay-at-home orders and mask requirements, and the inconsistent messaging about the effectiveness of vaccines from politicians. That resentment has transformed into the mistrust of public health experts and the exhaustive research that backs them up. As frustrating as it is to see for Melendez, he understands the decline in vaccination comes as the memories of COVID tragedies become more distant. The public believes the dangers of COVID have passed, and so have other diseases like polio, smallpox and even measles. But they forget that it was vaccines that have and will keep diseases at bay, and that worries Melendez as he reads weekly reports of measles cases rising statewide. 'They don't think that disease is impactful to them, and so people don't see it as a threat,' Melendez said. 'So they don't vaccinate.' Tickets are on sale now for the 15th annual Texas Tribune Festival, Texas' breakout ideas and politics event happening Nov. 13–15 in downtown Austin. Get tickets before May 1 and save big! TribFest 2025 is presented by JPMorganChase.
Reuters
01-05-2025
- Business
- Reuters
Science Group calls meeting of Ricardo shareholders to oust chairman
May 1 (Reuters) - Science Group (SAGS.L), opens new tab on Thursday said that it has requisitioned a general meeting of shareholders at Ricardo (RCDO.L), opens new tab to propose the removal of its Chairman Mark Clare, ramping up calls for change at the British consulting firm.
