Free Republic

A pastor at All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills has tested positive for novel coronavirus and has been hospitalized after attending a conference in Kentucky, the church confirmed Wednesday. All Saints Episcopal Church has notified congregants after Rev. Janet Broderick tested positive for the virus. The reverend and parishioners also confirmed that the pastor is the sister of actor Matthew Broderick.

The Defense Department (DOD) will implement a 60-day travel ban for service members, DOD civilians and their families to and from countries whose populations have been the most stricken by coronavirus, the Pentagon announced Wednesday night. The restrictions, which go into effect Friday, ban all travel to, throughout and from locations designated as Level 3 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), including China, South Korea, Iran and Italy. In addition, DOD civilians and service members’ families are banned from traveling to Level 2 countries, which currently include Japan, for 60 days. “The Department of Defense's top priority...

The statewide death toll from the coronavirus climbed to 30 on Wednesday, after a third Snohomish County man died along with three others in King County, health officials said. The Snohomish County man, who is in his 80s, was one of three residents of the Josephine Caring Community in Stanwood who previously were confirmed to have the virus and were taken to a local hospital. No further details were available about the three additional King County deaths. So far, 26 people have died from COVID-19 in King County, three in Snohomish County and one in Grant County. The number of...

Giving birth to a child is “the worst thing you can do” to the climate, says philosophy professor Patricia MacCormack of Anglia Ruskin University. The professor, author of The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene who describes herself as an “old school goth,” says that the only way to save the planet is to stop having children and allow humans to become extinct. According to the official description of the book, MacCormack “actively embraces issues like human extinction, vegan abolition, atheist occultism, death studies, a refusal of identity politics, deep ecology, and the apocalypse as an optimistic...

Both chambers of the US Congress on Wednesday gave final approval to a resolution to restrain President Donald Trump from attacking Iran. The vote comes after months of soaring tensions between the US and Iran. The House of Representatives voted 227-186 to join the Senate in support of the resolution. The measure would prevent any military action against Iran without Congress voting for it explicitly. However, the resolution is likely to be vetoed by Trump, due to the lack of a majority within the Democratic Party and divergent Republicans. […] The resolution “sends a clear message that American people don’t...

The German Cabinet met on Wednesday to discuss the removal of terms like “mentally perverted” and “weak in the mind” from the criminal code, where they are used to refer to disabled people The government’s commissioner for people with disabilities, Jürgen Dusel, welcomed the possible change, saying such terms were “stigmatizing, discriminatory and dehumanizing.” “Terms like ‘mental perversion’ [seelische Abartigkeit] and ‘mentally weak’ [schwachsinnig] are simply crude,” he told DW. “People outside of legal and political circles often don’t know that these terms exist in the criminal code,” he added. Since his appointment to the office in May 2018, he...

As Placer County’s health officer, Dr. Aimee Sisson, did the math, she realized that quarantining those exposed to the new coronavirus was not going to contain the spread of the disease. This realization hit Sisson as she and her team investigated a case of COVID-19 in a Placer County resident who had returned home Feb. 21 from a cruise to Mexico aboard the Grand Princess. The respiratory illness wasn’t diagnosed until March 3, however, so for 11 days, other local people could have been infected. While researchers have put the maximum incubation period for COVID-19 at 14 days, Sisson said,...

Public health leaders in Placer, Sacramento and Yolo counties say their departments will no longer recommend isolation or quarantine for people exposed to someone with COVID-19, as they now will focus on reducing the risk to populations at the greatest risk of dying from the respiratory illness. In an interview Monday, Dr. Peter Beilenson, head of Sacramento County’s Department of Health Services, said public health officials quarantined the sick and those who came into close contact with them as a way to slow spread of the disease, but as the number of cases increase statewide, public health has to acknowledge...

March 12 2020 Thursday of the Second Week of Lent Reading 1 Jer 17:5-10 Thus says the LORD: Cursed is the man who trusts in human beings, who seeks his strength in flesh, whose heart turns away from the LORD. He is like a barren bush in the desert that enjoys no change of season, But stands in a lava waste, a salt and empty earth. Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, whose hope is the LORD. He is like a tree planted beside the waters that stretches out its roots to the stream: It fears...

[Catholic/Orthodox Caucus] Suspension Of Public Celebration Of The Eucharist Announced For The Archdiocese of Seattle Please watch this video for an important update regarding efforts in the Archdiocese of Seattle to slow the spread of the COVID_19 epidemic.

An elderly patient in a northern California assisted living facility has died of the novel coronavirus, sparking fears of an outbreak among other residents of the facility and renewing concerns about statewide availability of testing kits to detect the virus. Sacramento County health officials announced Tuesday that a patient in her 90s was the county’s first fatality from COVID-19.  The Sacramento Bee identified the facility as Carlton Senior Living.The woman was among about 140 patients of the facility in Elk Grove, the same suburb where all public schools were closed this week after two family members with students in multiple sites tested positive for...

The Minnesota Democrat announced on Instagram Wednesday night that she’d remarried, apparently to the political consultant she allegedly had an affair with. “From partners in politics to life partners, so blessed,” Omar captioned a black and white shot of her and her new husband canoodling with rings on their fingers.

You CAN have your favorite cheese on hand, even in an emergency, and even though no stores are open and you have no access to electricity. All you have to do is buy the hard blocks of cheese that you want now in order to have them stored for up to the next 25 years. Cheese wax prevents your cheese from developing mold or bacteria and it keeps the moisture in. Simply use a combination of dipping and brushing with a natural boar's hair brush to apply the melted cheese wax liberally to your block of cheese, let it harden,...

Federally funded tests conducted by scientists from several major institutions indicated that the novel form of coronavirus behind a worldwide outbreak can survive in the air for several hours. A study awaiting peer review from scientists at Princeton University, the University of California-Los Angeles and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) posted online Wednesday indicated that the COVID-19 virus could remain viable in the air "up to 3 hours post aerosolization," while remaining alive on plastic and other surfaces for up to three days. "Our results indicate that aerosol and fomite transmission of HCoV-19 is plausible, as the virus can...

On Wednesday, the St. Paul City Council waded into a national debate over abortion access by approving a resolution on a 7-0 vote to recognize March 10 as Abortion Providers Appreciation Day in St. Paul. “I am saddened by the St. Paul City Council’s vote to approve Abortion Providers Appreciation Day and disturbed by the insensitive nature of their resolution,” said Senator Mark Johnson (R-East Grand Forks). “Movements like this are indicative of the moral decline occurring in Minnesota and across our country. As a father of three, I understand the sanctity of life and the joy that children bring...

Terrorist organizations are "on the march" in West Africa and the Sahel with international efforts failing to curb the increase in violence, a four-star American general in charge of U.S. troops in Africa warned on Tuesday.

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) — Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has proclaimed March 10 as Abortion Provider Appreciation Day. On Tuesday, Gender Justice and the Whole Woman’s Health Alliance announced the news and applauded Frey’s proclamation. National Abortion Provider Appreciation Day first began in 1996 to honor the life of Dr. David Gunn, an abortion provider who was shot and killed on March 10, 1993. The proclamation also comes days after abortion providers and their attorneys argued before the Supreme Court in the June Medical Services v. Russo case. The result of the case could impact abortion access across the country. Frey says...

On Wednesday, Rep. Ilhan Omar announced on her Instagram account she is married. The photo attached to the post shows her and who appears to be political consultant Tim Mynett, who she has been romantically linked to.

I'm a doctor in a major hospital in Western Europe. Watching you Americans (and you, Brits) in these still-early days of the coronavirus pandemic is like watching a familiar horror movie, where the protagonists, yet again, split into pairs or decide to take a tour of a dark basement. The real-life versions of this behavior are pretending this is just a flu; keeping schools open; following through with your holiday travel plans, and going into the office daily. This is what we did in Italy. We were so complacent that even when people with coronavirus symptoms started turning up, we...

In principle, such magnets can greatly simplify the design and production of twisty fusion facilities called stellarators, according to scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald, Germany. PPPL founder Lyman Spitzer Jr. invented the stellarator in the early 1950s. Most stellarators use a set of complex twisted coils that spiral like stripes on a candy cane to produce magnetic fields that shape and control the plasma that fuels fusion reactions. Refrigerator-like permanent magnets could produce the hard part of these essential fields, the researchers...