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Initial jobless claims surged to more 6.6 million last week, the Labor Department said Thursday. That brings the two-week total to about 10 million due to the coronavirus-induced economic shutdown. The torrent of Americans filing for unemployment insurance skyrocketed last week as more than 6.6 million new claims were filed, the Labor Department reported Thursday. That brings to 10 million the total Americans who filed over the past two weeks. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had expected 3.1 million for last week, one week after 3.3 million filings in the first wave of what has been a record-shattering swelling of...

Conspiracy theories and inshallah-fatalism brought to you by the Religion of Peace. Many examples of conspiracy theories, inshallah-fatalism, and sheer craziness have been on display in the Muslim Middle East, as it tries to make sense of the coronavirus. A recent roundup of voices from Turkey at Memri.org offers views often contradicting one another. Here is Memri’s summary of what the Turkish press and public have been saying: Members of the Turkish press and public have reacted to the global spread of COVID-19, colloquially known as the Coronavirus, blaming it on Jews and other unspecified political actors and saying that the...

Dallas County Health and Human Services reports another 100 positive cases of COVID-19 Wednesday, including the county's 14th and 15th deaths. The latest victims of the virus include a man in his 50s who was a resident of Mesquite and a woman in her 80s who was a resident of Garland. They were both critically ill in area hospitals before they passed, but it's not clear if they had any ongoing, chronic health conditions prior to being infected with COVID-19. The latest number of confirmed cases bring the county's total number of infected people to 731. "We’re beginning to see...

Very informative thread. Explains why NY's Covid 19 fatality numbers are inflated. They don't distinguish between those who die with the disease and those who die from it.

The numbers: The number of Americans who applied for unemployment benefits last week soared by a record 6.6 million, bringing the increase in new jobless claims in the last two weeks of March to 10 million as the all-out effort to slow the coronavirus slammed the economy. Countless businesses across the country have been forced to close or scale back hours, throwing masses of people out of work and triggering an unprecedented back-to-back surge in initial jobless claims. New claims are likely keep climbing in the next few weeks as the damage unfolds.

The White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) has announced that it is expelling One America News network (OAN) from the briefing room following a report that its correspondent Chanel Rion gained access by circumventing the process and attending as a “guest” of White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham. In a statement, the WHCA explained that it has limited access to the room in order to comply with social distancing guidelines, and that the available seats are rotated between various outlets. But the WHCA says OAN’s correspondent twice showed up despite it not being their turn. “We did this because a reporter...

Tens of thousands of years ago, two gigantic ice sheets smothered the northernmost parts of what has since been named North America. They towered more than two kilometers high and contained 1.5 times as much water as Antarctica does today. They were daunting, impassable barriers to the early humans who had started moving east from Asia, walking across a land bridge that once connected the regions now known as Russia and Alaska. But once the ice started to melt, these peoples—the ancestors of the Americas’ Indigenous groups—spread southward into new lands. What happened next? Genetic studies, based on ancient remains,...

Sermo Reports on Hydroxychloroquine Efficacy, Rise in Prophylaxis Use; Over 80% Expect 2nd Outbreak April 02, 2020 09:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Widespread confusion, conflicting reports, inconsistent testing, and off-indication use of existing and experimental drugs has resulted in no single source of information from the frontlines. To create a centralized and dynamic knowledge base, Sermo, the largest global healthcare polling company and social platform for physicians, leveraged its capabilities to publish results of a COVID-19 study with more than 6,200 physicians in 30 countries. The study was completed in three days. Data covers current treatment and...

The murder conviction of a British Pakistani man found guilty of the 2002 kidnapping and killing of journalist Daniel Pearl was overturned by a court in Pakistan on Thursday. The sentence of Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh was reduced to seven years in prison for the charge of kidnapping. His lawyer, Khwaja Naveed, says it was expected those years would count as time served. Saeed had spent 18 years in prison in southern Hyderabad on death row. The court also acquitted three others -- Fahad Naseem, Sheikh Adil, and Salman Saqib -- who were accused in the case and had been...

headline only, this is breaking financial news

New Yorkers have a reputation for being tough and resilient – and Raeburn Fairweather is a shining example of that. The respiratory therapist at Brooklyn’s Maimonides Medical Center is now back at work trying to save the lives of coronavirus patients after catching and recovering from the sickness himself. “I love my job, and I was very bored at home,” he told the New York Post this week, describing how his fever once reached 104 degrees while he was fighting COVID-19.

It seems rather inappropriate for a teacher to use social media in order to offer money to a potential bioterrorist to kill the President. But when it’s mainstream for people to literally believe that Donald Trump is the modern-day equivalent to Hitler, can we really act surprised when people see nothing wrong with openly encouraging people to give him a deadly disease? Amy Bednarz, an ELL teacher at Villa Nova Middle School in Woonsocket made the headlines for all the wrong reasons. When Bednarz is not teaching English as a Second Language to middle schoolers, or offering to hire people...

The choice we face as a nation in this crisis is not between protecting our citizens or protecting the economy. Our ability to take care of each other with food, clothing, housing, security, health care, and basic government services is dependent on the capacity of the private sector to produce the goods and services that support every aspect of our lives. If our economy collapses, our heroic health care workers and their patients will be stuck behind in the Middle Ages, without the essentials of modern medicine. The debate about the response to the coronavirus has polarized us in an...

The spectre of one's mortality that a global pandemic raises can be a needed and sobering opportunity to reconsider and reorder our lives, if we're granted them longer. The spectre of one’s mortality that a global health and economic crisis raises can be a needed and sobering opportunity to reconsider and reorder our lives, if we’re granted them longer.The coronavirus pandemic is a social stress test exposing many Americans’ lack of responsibility for our lives, our willingness to hold other people’s lives hostage to our own, and our national unpreparedness to manage danger. What are some long-term positive steps this...

Yes, pity those poor Americans who don't get their news from such sterling exemplars of objectivity and fairness like MSNBC, CNN, and the New York Times . . . On today's Morning Joe, Axios.com CEO Jim VandeHei (who also co-founded Politico) addressed the relatively late issuance of lockdown orders by the governors of Florida and Georgia, and denounced the "news pollution" of President Trump, Fox News, and Rush Limbaugh [whose name he pronounced "Limbo"]. Get the rest of the story and view the video here.

Norm is cooped up in quarantine. Claims he switched to Impossible Bat He may have created this song when still eating real bat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrhux_CZGRE

First case of Covid-19 on Skid Row has been confirmed: Fears the virus will spread like wildfire through LA's 5,000-strong homeless community who live cramped together on sidewalks with little access to washing facilities

Last year, Glacier National Park in Montana began removing signs that warned visitors the park’s gigantic glaciers would start melting away by 2020 due to global warming. Park officials altered other climate change flair such as brochures and displays to postpone the threat to sometime in “future generations.” Like so many claims about the catastrophic consequences of anthropogenic global warming, predictions about disappearing glaciers were quickly memory-holed. And, as usual, the experts behind the flawed science that misled millions of people to believe their actions would cause the destruction of one of nature’s most awesome sights didn’t apologize. No scientist...

The Attack on Pearl Harbor Webinar Part One With educators from The National WWII Museum and the Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum Thursday, April 2 1:00 p.m. (CST) We invite students and families to learn how the "Day of Infamy" changed the lives of Americans as student reporters explore important historical sites all around Oahu. Participate in a live Q&A with The National WWII Museum and Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum educators. Part Two of this webinar series will take place tomorrow, Friday, April 3, at 1:00 p.m. (CST).

For eight years, Puerto Rico has painted a picture of itself as a welcome refuge in the United States for residents of the 50 states to come do business. Acts 20 and 22 have brilliantly painted that picture and have helped to drive more business, spending, and jobs into the Puerto Rican economy. The only downside to the Acts 20 and 22 is that not all residents of Puerto Rico are included. To lift the burden of income tax for all who reside in and do business in Puerto Rico, would drive even more prosperity to the island. The experiment...