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Two McDonald's employees in Florida have filed a $500m class action lawsuit, accusing the fast food giant of fostering "systemic sexual harassment". Jamelia Fairley and Ashley Reddick are named on behalf of some 5,000 women from over 100 US McDonald's outlets. It is backed by Time's Up, a high-profile legal charity set up as part of the #MeToo movement. McDonald's said it is "committed" to addressing all harassment claims. "McDonald's has always been committed to ensuring that our employees are able to work in an environment that is free from all forms of discrimination and harassment," the company said in...

Comcast Corp. said most of the original shows that were to headline the launch of its Peacock streaming service likely won’t be ready until 2021 - another setback for a platform already coping with the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics to next year. “The majority of our original productions, like virtually all productions across the world, have been paused,” said Matt Strauss, chairman of Peacock, in a call to the press on Tuesday during which he discussed the challenges created by the global coronavirus pandemic. Mr. Strauss said the service would have a “materially limited slate and launch in 2020.”...

As our national lockdown drags on, Americans seem less and less inclined to move swiftly toward societal reopening. Perhaps that's due to the consistent media focus on the risks of reopening. Perhaps that's also due to the psychological comfort of the status quo: When we've been made to feel safe in our home, it's difficult to leave it. Or perhaps we, as a society, have so fundamentally altered our own perception of risk aversion that we aren't willing to leave our houses unless the risk is close to zero. Whatever the reason, it is simply untenable to lock Americans down...

PING LIST Some of you have asked to be placed on the COVID-19 Update Ping List. Those who give me a request, will be placed on the list before the next Update is posted. If a person has expressed an appreciation for the data I'm presenting, I may add that person to the Ping List. Some folks don't like to be on ping lists, and I won't mind if you would rather I remove your name from the list. COVID-19 Update As of 04/14/2020 22:35 PDST (taken at 23:59) Good morning everyone. Thank you for stopping by to check out...

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The Briarcliff Skilled Nursing Center in Carthage is now reporting two deaths related to COVID-19, as well as seven residents and five staff members who have tested positive, in an update Tuesday on their website. The facility has had 28 people tested for coronavirus. Five residents tested negative. The facility said eight residents and one employee had pending tests.

Professor Yitzhak Ben Israel of Tel Aviv University, who also serves on the research and development advisory board for Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, plotted the rates of new coronavirus infections of the U.S., U.K., Sweden, Italy, Israel, Switzerland, France, Germany, and Spain. The numbers told a shocking story: irrespective of whether the country quarantined like Israel, or went about business as usual like Sweden, coronavirus peaked and subsided in the exact same way. In the exact, same, way. His graphs show that all countries experienced seemingly identical coronavirus infection patterns, with the number of infected peaking in the sixth week...

Visits to an upscale Chicago gay bathhouse may prove that embattled “Empire” star Jussie Smollett was more than friends with his alleged attacker Ambimbola “Abel” Osundairo. “They used to party together and he had a sexual relationship with [Abel]. They went to this affluent Chicago bathhouse multiple times and they had to show ID. It’s known as a bathhouse where a lot of affluent black gay men hang out. There should be a record [of their visits],” an insider told Page Six, adding that the bathhouse records may be subpoenaed in Smollett’s upcoming trial on charges of disorderly conduct. Abel...

East London's ExCeL exhibition centre, which normally plays host to lifestyle shows, expos and conferences, has been converted into the temporary NHS Nightingale hospital, with space for 4,000 beds. In nine days, the 87,328 square metres of double exhibition halls have been fitted out with the framework for about 80 wards, each with 42 beds. Some 500 fully-equipped beds, with oxygen and ventilators, are already in place and there is space for another 3,500.If it did reach capacity, it would be one of the largest hospitals in the world. Each ward is named after a different British doctor, nurse...

New York City, the hardest hit U.S. city in the coronavirus pandemic, revised its official COVID-19 death toll sharply higher to more than 10,000 on Tuesday to include victims presumed to have perished from the disease but never tested. The new cumulative figure for "confirmed and probable COVID-19 deaths" released by the New York City Health Department marked a staggering increase of over 3,700 deaths formally attributed to the highly contagious illness since March 11. The 60 percent spike in reported deaths underscored the enormous losses endured in the nation's most populous city, where the sounds of wailing sirens have...

Just days after the media was busy blasting President Donald Trump for not implementing a federal lockdown and instead leaving those decisions up to the states, the media is now busy blasting President Trump for stating that he could end all lockdowns before the states decide to. It’s nice to see the media rally to defend state rights for once, though unfortunately it’s in the context of them being total hypocrites. The states will ultimately decide when to re-open, and most actually do already have at timeline in place that span from April 15th to June 10th. Only six states...

In this time when everything about K-12 education is up in the air and up for grabs, we should consider that the default educational context in the period before 1880 was one room schools controlled by working parents and local boards, which rewarded diligence and merit in the educational enterprise, was oriented toward biblical and civic literacy, and inculcated high regard for the Christian acceptance of the classics and good, modest literature (the good vs. the great books) among children of families of modest means, children who had time-limitations on their school career because of the need to go to...

Bill Gates has said Donald Trump's decision to stop US funding of the World Health Organisation "during a world health crisis" is as "dangerous as it sounds". The Microsoft founder tweeted:"Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and if that work is stopped no other organization can replace them. The world needs @WHO now more than ever."

It’s never good for a sitting president heading into reelection to be compared to Jimmy Carter. In 1980, with the country in an economic and diplomatic crisis, the beleaguered former president took on Ronald Reagan, then considered a weak challenger, and won only six states. Now as 2020 nears, President Trump is finding himself constantly behind Democrats in reelection polls and the latest has compared the Republican to Carter. “Perhaps the closest analogy to Trump in terms of approval ratings is Jimmy Carter, whose average approval rating for his term was 45 percent,” said a survey from the Wason Center...

On the first Sunday in February, as the San Francisco 49ers were in the middle of blowing a lead in the Super Bowl, a small group of doctors in the Bay Area was too busy to care about a football game. They were dealing with the region’s first cases of coronavirus. They had no time to waste as they raced to bring the University of California San Francisco’s Covid-19 command center into operation. They worked overnight and had it running by the next morning—when two patients confirmed with the virus were transferred to UCSF’s hospital. There could have been hundreds...

It shouldn't take a global pandemic shutting down schools to end school shootings. https://t.co/H9Xwn6Mhkd— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) April 13, 2020

CNN is under fire for allegedly publishing "Chinese propaganda" in a report that cites a media outlet controlled by the Chinese government. On Monday, CNN.com ran an article about China People's Liberation Army (PLA) supposedly having a foothold in the spread of the coronavirus in a branch of its military, running the headline, "China's PLA Navy is controlling coronavirus and aircraft carrier's deployment proves it, report says." "A Chinese naval flotilla headed into the Pacific over the weekend, evidence that the People's Liberation Army Navy has done a much better job controlling coronavirus than the US Navy, according to a...

The state Supreme Court in New Mexico on Tuesday evening rejected a proposal to convert the state’s planned June 2 primary election into a vote-by-mail poll. The decision followed a hearing of more than two-and-a-half hours that was conducted via video because of coronavirus precautions, the Albuquerque Journal reported. More than two dozen of the state’s elected officials had proposed the mail-in plan, citing concern for public health, the newspaper reported.

After making a brief comeback on school lunch menus, white bread and other refined grains may be vanishing again when schools reopen after a federal court threw out the Trump administration’s rollback of school nutrition standards. The U.S. district court in Maryland this week said the administration did not give adequate public notice of the change, which had gone into effect for this past school year. The ruling was in response to a lawsuit brought by the Center for Science in the Public Interest and Healthy School Food Maryland. The U.S. Department of Agriculture said it does not comment on...

April 14, 2020 (Everyday for Life Canada) – If there is one thing that the coronavirus crisis might make parents realize about their children's education, it's this: How useless and dangerous is the propaganda in public school about the need for radical sex-"education" programs. Sex lessons that include teaching children that boys can be girls and girls can be boys. Give "consent" for sex and everything will be fine. Children are just too young to deal with these kinds of explicit content. Topics such as anal sex and gender identity cannot be properly processed by a young mind that has...