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President Donald Trump stops a CNN reporter in his tracks and calls him out for taking his quote out of context. Trump waits while the reporter reads Trump's full quote, which places it back in full context, making the...

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio warned the Jewish community, again, not to hold services in the synagogues. Failing cooperation, he said, permanent closure would be the next step. Although many shuls have closed in deference to the city’s COVID-19 coronavirus restrictions, some have not and instead continued to hold minyanim despite the city’s orders to close in order to prevent the spread of the virus. “We’ve had extraordinary, across the board rabbinical support from all the different elements of the Jewish community and the same is true of other faiths as well, de Blasio said at his daily...

People still struggle to find food at grocery stores during this pandemic, but Jameson Altott is not as worried. He grows more than half the food for his family from his large garden at home, outside Pittsburgh. "We are lucky to have preserved a lot of food and we still have canned fruits and vegetables and jams and berries in the freezer and meat in the freezer," Altott says. There has been a surge of people interested in growing their own food. Oregon State University's Master Gardener program noticed this, and made their online vegetable gardening course free through the...

Looks as if even the bad guys are practising social distancing. In one of the rare upsides to the coronavirus pandemic, Toronto Police reported Sunday that some crime statistics have fallen since stringent social distancing rules were put in place. Although there has been no decrease in the volume of non-emergency phone calls, there has been a drop in certain types of criminal behaviour, such as property crime, personal assaults and car theft.

Prelates fail to answer if coronavirus is a divine punishmentMADRID (ChurchMilitant.com) - Reflecting on the global pandemic, a Spanish priest has charged that some bishops in the United States and Europe have ceased to address whether divine punishment exists, while they instead accommodate any sin, however severe. Fr. José Antonio Fortea Cucurull, a famed exorcist and an expert on the subject of the occult and demonic possession, said that many people have asked him whether the spread of the deadly virus is a divine punishment, a question he sought to answer in an online video. "You already know that I...

Following up on yesterday’s news that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was closed for at least one week as part of state measures closing all places of worship, the Jerusalem Patriarchate and the other churches that serve in the Holy Sepulchre have clarified that services will continue. However, the time and number of visitations will be severely limited. In a statement published on the Church’s website,, the Jerusalem Patriarchate, together with the Custody of the Holy Land of the Franciscans and the Armenian Patriarchate in Jerusalem, “inform that the celebrations of the Communities … will continue regularly, even though...

Another video from South Korea's most famous Scottish Fold cat family and their 'staff', the "Butlers." Suri, the matriarch of the cat family, has been putting on weight and now is plumper than her "big bear" of a son, Iz. She's been ordered on a diet for her health, but isn't too happy about it and is raiding the other food of her children and cat-husband, Noel. Video: 6 minutes, 47 seconds

There is a shortage of the drug after Donald Trump said over the weekend that it could be used to treat COVID-19. Kaiser Permanente will temporarily stop filling prescriptions for hydroxychloroquine for some patients in order to preserve the drug for “severely sick patients,” including those who have contracted the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Hydroxychloroquine, which is sold under the brand name Plaquenil, is an anti-malaria drug that is also used to treat lupus. Over the weekend, it was touted as a possible treatment for COVID-19 by Donald Trump. “HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE & AZITHROMYCIN, taken together, have a real chance to be one...

we can do this. But we are on our own. USA 20,000 new cases. Italy case fatality rate >10% Germany is underreporting coronavirus deaths. Abiltiy to test is not keeping up with cases will give the impression of a slow down in cases. Masks are helpful to keep asymptomatic spread down. New studies on infectiousness of the virus. Capable of putting someone of any age into ICU. China study, asymptomic cases were the source of most cases. Source of 79% of cases. WHO wrongly still says not airborne. New study by MIT says 2 meter distance may needs to...

"But what might authorities learn if people were tested randomly instead? Some early clues may be found in the tiny country of Iceland. So far, the country has tested 11,727 people—about 3.2% of its population of 364,000.... By screening healthy as well as sick people, say scientists, Iceland and deCODE have assembled a far more accurate picture of COVID-19. And the results are sobering. “The virus had a much, much wider spread in the community than we would have assumed, based on the screening of high-risk people,” deCODE’s founder and CEO Kári Stefánsson told Fortune by phone from his office...

You can run around preaching that the sky is falling, or you can look at the numbers we already have and make intelligent forecasts.Joining their colleague John Ioannidis in throwing cold water on coronavirus conventional wisdom, professors at the Stanford University School of Medicine warn that the apocalyptic figures thrown around for COVID-19 in America “could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high.”Eran Bendavid and Jay Bhattacharya write in The Wall Street Journal that we are focused on the wrong statistic: deaths from identified cases. Because of “selection bias in testing” and limited data on the extent of that bias,...

Lonnie Franklin, the convicted serial killer known as the “Grim Sleeper” who preyed on the women of South Los Angeles for more than two decades, has died in prison. He was 67. California corrections officials said Franklin was found unresponsive in his cell at San Quentin State Prison on Saturday evening. An autopsy will determine the cause of death; however, there were no signs of trauma, corrections spokeswoman Terry Thornton said in a statement. Franklin had been on death row since August 2016 for the deaths of nine women and a teenage girl. Franklin was linked at trial to 14...

ÎLE DE NOIRMOUTIER, France — On their peaceful island off France’s Atlantic Coast, some of the locals watched, with growing dread and rage, the images from Paris. As rumors began circulating about an imminent nationwide lockdown to stem the coronavirus outbreak, hordes of Parisians jammed into trains, an odd surfboard sometimes sticking out of the crowd.There was no doubt about their destination.“Irresponsible and selfish,” thought Dr. Cyrille Vartanian, one of the six physicians on Noirmoutier. With some time to spare — Paris was roughly five hours away — a local mayor, Noël Faucher, moved to block the only bridge to...

Dr. Eran Bendavid and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professors of medicine at Stanford University, published an article in the March 24 edition of The Wall Street Journal, stating the following: “Fear of Covid-19 is based on an estimated mortality rate of 2% to 4% … We believe this estimate is deeply flawed.” Drs. Bendavid and Bhattacharya continue: “The true fatality rate is the portion of those infected who die, not the deaths from identified positive cases. The latter rate is misleading because of selection bias in testing. The degree of bias is uncertain because available data are limited … If the...

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has come under criticism for a statewide order cracking down on prescriptions of hydroxychloroquine, a drug touted by President Trump to treat the novel coronavirus. The Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs issued an order Wednesday warning physicians against writing prescriptions “without a legitimate medical purpose” and instructing pharmacists to evaluate the “legitimacy” of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine prescriptions. The department cited concerns about stockpiling amid “multiple allegations” of doctors writing prescriptions for family and friends, adding that reports of such conduct “may be further investigated for administrative action” and that other health professionals are required...

Many Churches have put out litanies and "stand-alone" prayers for their priests and faithful to use. As I said a few days ago, some of them have been quite good while others read like first drafts that escaped the barn before they were done being sheared. The below Russian text is available as a PDF here. If you'd like a good prayer to read with the family at home, I recommend the UOC-USA's PDF here. My family reads it together every morning. (ROC-Sourozh) - His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia approved texts of prayerful supplications in view...

I explore the effect of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, and how the methods employed at the time have made a recurrence in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Firstly, I apologize if my format is off. I am not a regular poster, but have been a daily reader for over 20 years. This was the only place I could think of that may help me answer a question I have. I was told a story by a friend of mine that is a nurse on a respiratory floor full of Covid-19 patients in Michigan. My friend had open heart surgery last year and feels she is at high risk. She requested a transfer to a different floor which was denied by management. She responded that due to the...

Speaking at a contentious White House coronavirus news briefing on Sunday that involved testy standoffs with multiple reporters, President Trump declared that "the peak in death rate" in the coronavirus pandemic "is likely to hit in two weeks," and said the federal government will be extending its social-distancing guidelines through April 30. "The modeling estimates that the peak in death rate is likely to hit in two weeks. I will say it again. The peak, the highest point of death rates, remember this, is likely to hit in two weeks... Therefore, we will be extending our guidelines to April 30,...