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ELK GROVE, Calif. - Kiyana Esco needs free school lunches and breakfasts to feed her six children. But with schools shutting down over coronavirus concerns, she’s scrambling to pick up the meals, care for her kids and keep her job. Esco, a single mother, manager at a Dollar Tree, fears she’ll be fired because she can’t work following school closures in Elk Grove, the fifth-largest district in California. She’s among the parents who are relying on school leaders as they look for ways to keep millions of America’s poorest children from going hungry. While schools across the U.S. close their...

It took 56 minutes to find the ringNearly a month after Ann DeVries got her wedding ring back, she still treats the band with extreme caution. You might, too, if you had to dig through the garbage dump to get it. In January, Ann DeVries was doing the dishes when she set her ring on the counter. When she finished, she noticed some smudges on a glass door in her home. After cleaning it, she placed the dirty paper towels over top the ring without realizing it, and since it was trash day, Wednesday, she scooped the whole pile up...

People are beginning to hoard toilet paper. I went on a normal shopping trip to buy toilet paper last week and could not find any because of all the panic-buying. Social media is full of people storming grocery stores and fighting over two-ply. Hand sanitizer is extremely difficult to find. The Clorox plant up the road from me is running 24 hours to keep up with demands. But the toilet paper? The run on toilet paper should be the biggest signal that an economic stimulus plan is not going to work right now. People are being driven by fear, and...

The coronavirus is not as bad as the seasonal flu. President Donald Trump is not worried about having had a direct exposure to the virus. The United States is in far better shape than other countries. Those are some of the messages from Trump to the American public in recent days. They are textbook examples of disastrous communication during disease outbreaks, according to some researchers into the psychology of pandemics and how leaders can most effectively communicate to keep the public safe during them. Trump is known for his informal style in attempts to, for instance, calm markets amid trade...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday ordered most schools in the country to close as a precaution against coronavirus, and called for the formation of an emergency national unity government. Primary and secondary schools, with some exceptions such as special education programs, would be shut, he said. “We are altering our internal routine in order to handle an outside threat, the threat of the virus,” Netanyahu, 70, said in remarks broadcast live. The right-wing leader’s tenure is in doubt after three inconclusive elections in less than a year. Calling for a unity government, he said: “It will be an...

Gov. Tim Walz moved Friday to limit gatherings in Minnesota to fewer than 250 people and declared a “peacetime emergency” to heighten the state’s readiness to respond to COVID-19. The event-size cap isn’t the kind of strict ban being ordered in some other states. Rather, it is being couched as recommended guidelines from the Minnesota Department of Health. It applies to things such as church services, youth sports events, business conferences and other gatherings. The moves come as 14 Minnesotans have now tested positive for COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the new coronavirus. Anoka, Carver, Dakota, Hennepin, Olmsted, Ramsey,...

Live thread...Prez Trump Presser 3/13/20 Link: https://www.whitehouse.gov/live/

China's Wuhan bio-tech lab has been trying for years to develop the world's most effective weapon in the form of a 100% deadly virus capable of wiping out all its enemies without firing a shot. This war machine should be immediately hit with our most powerful missiles and destroyed because of all the damage done to the world with its deadly viruses.

(at 2:30 mark in video) Potential Impact: - 18-22 months long - 1.6 Billion Infected (23% of world's population) - 21 million killed (1.6c% death rate) ...

Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) – Research and Statistics Look, we know China created it, and thus once it got released they got hit the hardest. Iran got hit hard because the Islamic rulers think their spit is all you need. Many reports from inside both China and Iran say the problem is 10 times worse. We have no clue about NK, but then dead men tell no tales. Italy is so bad because they refused to do anything to prevent the spread into their country, and still are lacking miserably. In America, Trump jumped on this quickly. Thus the vast...

No country can afford to rely on its greatest adversaries for survival.In case Americans were not already convinced Communist China constituted such a foe, since the Chinese coronavirus spread across the globe, the country threatened by way of its leading propaganda publication to impose pharmaceutical export controls that “plunge[] [America] into the mighty sea of coronavirus,” and now its senior propagandists are pinning the pandemic on the U.S. military. 2/2 CDC was caught on the spot. When did patient zero begin in US? How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be US...

When I was a young man, I had a class where our teacher would start the class with a discussion on some great phrase or thought. He started one class with a discussion on an elderly man pulling weeds in his garden. Two young men came walking by and saw the elderly man pulling weeds. They thought to have some fun with him. “Sir! What would you be doing right now if you knew you were going to die tonight?” The elderly man didn’t even look up and continued pulling weeds. “I would finish weeding my garden.” Our teacher asked...

The above statistics are no doubt frightening numbers. But there are at least three major mitigating factors. First, the number of mild or asymptomatic cases is unknown and probably substantial. Second, China is still a poor country with low-quality health care and, at the epicenter of the outbreak in Hubei province, was overwhelmed by the virus. (The case-fatality rate in Chinese provinces outside Hubei, where hospitals aren’t overloaded, is much lower.) Third, smoking is much more prevalent in China than America, especially among men (52 percent in China versus 16 percent in the U.S.), and smoking is a risk factor...

The debate over the Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus (COVID-19) is remarkably devoid of hard data comparisons. With President Trump’s decision on Wednesday to expand travel restrictions to the European Union, it is time to evaluate the very different approaches to travel restrictions that the U.S. and the E.U. have taken. The end of January seems long ago. Until January 30th, the World Health Organization (WHO) explicitly declined to classify the coronavirus (COVID-19) as a global emergency. It urged countries not to restrict travel or trade.The WHO announcement on travel was partially in response to the U.S. government’s January...

There has never before come a time when I felt the need to ponder the fate of toilet paper. But here we are: the year is 2020 and the wealthy United States is running out of toilet paper. As it turns out, toilet paper was invented by the Chinese in the 1st Century. By the 6th Century, it was in widespread use. The toilet paper roll with easily detachable squares was patented in 1891. But in March of 2020, American retailers ran out of toilet paper because the Chinese coronavirus fear seized the sanity of our people. We have finally...

Question: There was a recent New York Times Magazine article about conman Paul Skalnik and how his false testimonies sent dozens to jail and 4 people to death row. In Florida, where death sentencing was/is popular, there have been 29 death-row inmates exonerated by the time of the article's publication. There was also a study that estimated 1 in 25, 4.1 percent, of inmates sentenced to death are innocent. Even if the state kills one innocent person, isn’t that too much? As Christians who talk about killing innocent babies, how can we then go and support capital punishment when there...

Will the COVID-19 outbreak burn out in the summer as happened with the SARS epidemic in 2003? That is what many hope, including U.S. President Donald Trump. Some scientists are also speculating that the coronavirus will not survive long in warmer environments. But whether this is true is still up in the air. The number of new confirmed cases has shown signs of slowing over the past several days, and more patients are being released from hospitals every day. But the point when the number of infected people declines is still not in sight. Zhong Nanshan, a leading Chinese respiratory...

Yesterday's thread is here: http://freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3823939/posts?page=1301

The state of New York is now permitting minors who self-identify as something other than their biological sex to alter their birth certificates. Officials in the Empire state announced this week that young people ages 16 and under who assert that they are transgender or nonbinary will be able to alter their sex marker on their birth certificate to reflect their "gender identity." Medical affidavits are not required to make the change. Proponents of the new policy hailed the move. “The actions announced today rid the state of a discriminatory and outdated policy and keeps New York rightly among the...

Pittsburgh City Councilors Daniel Lavelle and Ricky Burgess introduced legislation on Tuesday that asks the city to adopt 10 commitments to racial equity. The proposed resolution is part of the "All-In City" initiative, a racial-equity effort that Burgess and Lavelle embraced last year. The 10 commitments include: eliminating race-based disparities across all of city government departments and units; using training and coaching opportunities to eliminate systematic racism and white privilege; and transforming African-American communities from areas of concentrated poverty to mixed-income. The resolution also calls for a commission to monitor the city's progress toward racial equity. The 13-member body would...