High Court upholds near one million shekel fine for failure to divorce

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/high-court-upholds-near-one-million-shekel-fine-for-failure-to-divorce-627117

 The High Court of Justice has upheld a fine of NIS 5,000 a day issued by the Tel Aviv Rabbinical Court against the father of a recalcitrant husband who has refused to give his wife a divorce for over seven years.

The father has been found by the rabbinical court to be the direct cause behind the son’s refusal to grant his wife a divorce leading to the unprecedented fine against someone who is not a litigant in the divorce suit by the court.

Two men involved in fatal shooting of Ahmaud Arbery face murder charges, GBI says

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/07/us/ahmaud-arbery-arrests-mcmichaels/index.html

Gregory McMichael told Glynn County police that Arbery was suspected in "several break-ins," but no such string of crimes was reported in the weeks before the shooting. Police have yet to clarify whether Arbery is accused of any crime at a home that was being built.

In the more than seven weeks preceding the shooting, there was only one burglary report in the neighborhood, said Glynn County police Lt. Cheri Bashlor. A 9 mm pistol was stolen January 1 from an unlocked truck outside the McMichaels' home, she said.

Hydroxychloroquine Fails to Help Coronavirus Patients in Largest Study of the Drug to Date

https://time.com/5833945/hydroxychloroquine-coronavirus-study/

“We don’t think at this point, given the totality of evidence, that it is reasonable to routinely give this drug to patients,” says Schluger. “We don’t see the rationale for doing that.” While the study did not randomly assign people to receive the drug or placebo and compare their outcomes, the large number of patients involved suggests the findings are solid.

 

Observational Study of Hydroxychloroquine in Hospitalized Patients with Covid-19

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2012410

Conclusions

In this observational study involving patients with Covid-19 who had been admitted to the hospital, hydroxychloroquine administration was not associated with either a greatly lowered or an increased risk of the composite end point of intubation or death. Randomized, controlled trials of hydroxychloroquine in patients with Covid-19 are needed. (Funded by the National Institutes of Health.)

 

Justice Department drops criminal case against Michael Flynn

Trump puts political goals above facts in CDC and Flynn dramas

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/07/politics/donald-trump-coronavirus-cdc-michael-flynn-william-barr-russia-investigation/index.html

 President Donald Trump has spent three years discrediting and sidelining institutional sources of facts, truth and trust that threaten his political and personal goals.

Rarely has that mission combined in a single day to such a grave result as it did this week. The White House rejected new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance on safely reopening the country -- with US deaths from the coronavirus surpassing 75,000 -- and the handpicked officials leading the Justice Department dropped charges against former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Both cases show how Trump disdains government structures meant to dispense independent and fact-based policymaking, science and justice free from corrupting political influences.

Silent hypoxia: Covid-19 patients who should be gasping for air but aren't

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/06/health/happy-hypoxia-pulse-oximeter-trnd-wellness/index.html

 In hospitals around the world, doctors are shaking their heads in disbelief as they watch Covid-19 patients who should be comatose or "seizing" from hypoxia -- a lack of oxygen in the body's tissues -- check social media, chat with nurses and barely complain of discomfort while breathing.

 

Some have dubbed them "happy hypoxics," a terrible misnomer for what could be a long, slow recovery -- or worse.

The proper medical term is "silent hypoxia." It happens when people are unaware they are being deprived of oxygen and are therefore showing up to the hospital in much worse health than they realize.

Typically, these patients have experienced some Covid-19 symptoms for two to seven days before they show up at the hospital complaining of sudden chest tightness or an inability to breathe deeply, said Dr. Richard Levitan, who's been an emergency room physician for some 30 years.

 

There he watched patients come into the emergency room with blood oxygen levels as low as 50%, so low they should have been incoherent, even unconscious. Normal blood oxygen saturation is between 95% and 100%, and anything below 90% is considered abnormal.

 

 

"We found two out of three patients can avoid a ventilator during the first 24 hours by putting them on oxygen and doing these positioning maneuvers, such as laying them prone on their stomach," he said.

Republicans praise Trump's pandemic response with Senate majority at risk

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/06/senate-republicans-trump-coronavirus-response-240454

Senate Republicans are settling on their pandemic message as they fight to save their majority: President Donald Trump did a tremendous job.

The coronavirus has killed more than 70,000 Americans, tanked the once-soaring U.S. economy and shows no signs of abating. And Trump’s ineffective leadership is largely to blame, say Democrats who are growing optimistic they can seize the Senate after being relegated to the minority for six years.

After POLITICO reported that candidates received a memo instructing them to blame China and not defend Trump on the coronavirus, the Senate GOP campaign arm publicly rejected the strategy and made clear that Republicans are sticking with the president.

Trump boosters: Don’t believe the coronavirus death toll

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/07/trump-death-toll-coronavirus-241819

 

More than 70,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus — if you believe the government.

An increasing number of conservatives are convinced the medical community and the media are inflating the coronavirus death toll for political purposes, despite nearly all evidence indicating that, if anything, the figure is an undercount. 

Young said conservatives were more likely to distrust outlets running with the death toll offered by leading researchers.

“Why would a conservative, Republican, or Trump supporter, after seeing those consistent left-leaning commentary decisions, continue to view that source as unbiased and trustworthy?” he said.

Politics aside, Lobelo said the factor driving people’s suspicion of the models “all boils down to uncertainty.”

“The scientists are used to uncertainty because that's how we operate. That's part of the scientific premise of trial and error until you have a better understanding of the complex issue,” he said. “But for regular day-to-day people, uncertainty is more difficult to tolerate.”

The doctor making Trump queasy

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/07/world-health-organization-tedros-adhanom-ghebreyesus-242030

As head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has achieved what he set out to accomplish: injecting politics into public health and casting it as “a political choice.”

With the coronavirus crisis, the former Ethiopian foreign minister who took over the WHO in 2017 has got far more than he bargained for.

 Now, as Tedros leads the global response to a worldwide pandemic in an age of rising nationalism and shifting world order, his message is: "Please don't politicize this virus.”

With the death toll mounting and the economic costs of lockdowns beginning to bite, he finds himself caught between two of the United Nations health agency’s most powerful members.

One, the United States, is the WHO’s biggest single source of cash. The other, China, is a major supplier of the medical equipment and machinery that will be needed to bring economies back online. It’s also the original epicenter of the pandemic — and thus key to understanding the virus that’s brought the globe to its knees.

Trump Won't Wear a Mask & Backpedals After Task Force Backlash | The Daily Social Distancing Show

China’s Coronavirus Vaccine Drive Empowers a Troubled Industry

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/business/coronavirus-china-vaccine.html

China wants to beat the world in the race to find a coronavirus vaccine — and, by some measures, it is doing just that.

Desperate to protect its people and to deflect growing international criticism of how it handled the outbreak, it has slashed red tape and offered resources to drug companies. Four Chinese companies have started testing their vaccine candidates on humans, more than the United States and Britain combined.

There's No Good Way to Make China 'Pay' for the Pandemic | Opinion

https://www.newsweek.com/theres-no-good-way-make-china-pay-pandemic-opinion-1501910

 President Donald Trump wants China to pay for the destruction COVID-19 has wrought. After initially praising China's approach to the now-pandemic illness, Trump has recently taken a far harsher line on Beijing. "We're doing very serious investigations," he said at a press conference last week, "and we are not happy with China."

The extent of Beijing's culpability is yet to be determined, but Trump is correct that its early mishandling of COVID-19 had dire consequences, both within China and around the world. It's also true that many of Beijing's failings here, like its suppression of inconvenient information and deliberate public deception, are characteristic of its unreformed authoritarianism.

But granting those realities leaves open the question of whether there's any meaningful, feasible and prudent way to exact reparations from China. Any policy of making China pay should go beyond political theater, be realistically achievable and not—to borrow a recent favorite phrase of Trump's—make the cure worse than the problem. Unfortunately, such an option for retribution probably doesn't exist. It's certainly not among the ideas presently on the table.

As U.S. investigations shed new light on Beijing's responsibility for COVID-19's spread, the Trump administration should consider how it can put that information to better use than retribution doomed to either futility or self-harm. The wisest course is to diplomatically leverage evidence of culpability for more transparency and information-sharing going forward. If the first COVID-19 vaccine is developed in China, as is entirely possible, we want access to it. Likewise, if another pandemic illness originates in China, we want to avoid a repetition of this one's lost time and opportunities. The proper goal of holding Beijing accountable, then, isn't payback but preventing another global catastrophe and mitigating this one.

China Criticizes Pompeo Over Coronavirus Wuhan Lab Allegation, Claims Leaked GOP Memo Discredits Trump Theory

https://www.newsweek.com/china-criticizes-pompeo-over-coronavirus-wuhan-lab-allegation-claims-leaked-gop-memo-discredits-1502426

 

Hua cited a recently leaked 57-page memo, written by a top GOP strategist and sent by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, advised the party's candidates to aggressively attack Beijing when publicly addressing the pandemic.

 

The April 17 memo, titled "Corona Big Book," details suggestions on how to link Democratic candidates to the Chinese Communist government, as well as ways to handle allegations of racism from critics. The document provides for three main talking points: Democrats do not adequately hold China to account, Beijing is responsible for the virus because they covered it up and Republicans will retaliate by pushing for sanctions.