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.

No lockdown, but ministers ban bonfires, close off Meron ahead of Lag B’Omer

https://www.timesofisrael.com/no-lockdown-but-ministers-ban-bonfires-close-off-meron-ahead-of-lag-bomer/

 Ministers on Wednesday night reportedly gave the green light to a ban on lighting bonfires and to seal off the Meron pilgrimage site in northern Israel ahead of next week’s Lag B’Omer festival, to prevent gatherings amid fears of a fresh outbreak of the coronavirus.

Coronavirus Task Force Gets Its ‘Mission Accomplished’ Moment

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/opinion/coronavirus-trump-taskforce.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

 By Wednesday morning, Mr. Trump had changed the contours, though not the essence, of his plan. In a tweet thread, he said the coronavirus task force would, in fact, “continue on indefinitely” but shift its efforts — and most likely some of its members — to “focus on SAFETY & OPENING UP OUR COUNTRY AGAIN.” He closed with, “The Task Force will also be very focused on Vaccines & Therapeutics. Thank you!”

Whether dissolved or repurposed, the White House Task Force focused on coordinating the administration’s public-health response to the pandemic is soon to be no more. To which we can only say: No big loss.

 

In theory, bringing together a collection of experts to oversee a coordinated federal response to a national emergency makes perfect sense. In practice, the first phase of Mr. Trump’s coronavirus task force was its own form of disaster.

For starters, the president made clear early on that he wasn’t interested in marshaling a coordinated response. Time and again, he ducked responsibility, pushing it off on the governors. On challenges ranging from acquiring critical medical supplies to coordinating and expanding testing (which remains a problem) to managing social-distancing restrictions, the task force has provided consistently uneven guidance and insufficient assistance.

 Mr. Trump often has undermined the recommendations it has made. Whether pushing dangerous treatments of unproven efficacy or urging his supporters to protest the basic social distancing guidelines put forward by the task force, the president has repeatedly scrambled the public-health message.

President Trump vetoes Iran war powers resolution

https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/president-trump-vetoes-iran-war-powers-resolution-627170

 US President Donald Trump on Wednesday vetoed legislation that intends to limit his ability to wage war against Iran. The bill passed both chambers of Congress with the support of a few Republican members but lacked enough votes to get a veto-proof majority.

 The resolution, which passed the House of Representatives in March and the Senate in April, was the latest effort by Congress to wrest back from the White House its constitutionally guaranteed authority to declare war.

The Wuhan lab at the center of the US-China blame game: What we know and what we don't

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/06/asia/coronavirus-china-wuhan-lab-origins-explainer-intl-hnk/index.html

The laboratory at the heart of the Trump administration's allegations belongs to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, an affiliate of the central government-run Chinese Academy of Sciences. It is the only lab on the Chinese mainland equipped for the highest level of biocontainment, known as Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4). .

 

The Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory was designed and built with help from France. Construction wasn't finished until the end of 2014, and the lab went into full operation in January 2018 -- an event celebrated in the media as worthy of national pride

A third source, also from a Five Eyes nation, told CNN that there remains a possibility that the virus originated from a laboratory, but cautioned there is nothing to make that a legitimate theory yet. The source added that "clearly the market is where it exploded from," but how the virus got to the market remains unclear.

Late Night Storytime: The Perfect President

Mourning In America’ Ad Sets Off Trump Rage Tweeting | The Last Word | MSNBC

Trump lashes out at attack ad by George Conway’s Lincoln Project: ‘Disgrace to Honest Abe’

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-lashes-out-at-attack-ad-by-george-conways-lincoln-project-disgrace-to-honest-abe

President Trump lashed out overnight after a group led by Kellyanne Conway’s husband released an ad criticizing his administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The grim ad, titled “Mourning in America,” was a riff on former President Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” and accused the president of ignoring the crisis early on. It was released by The Lincoln Project, a group of anti-Trump Republicans.

“A group of RINO Republicans who failed badly 12 years ago, then again 8 years ago, and then got BADLY beaten by me, a political first timer, 4 years ago, have copied (no imagination) the concept of an ad from Ronald Reagan, 'Morning in America’, doing everything possible to get even for all of their many failures,” Trump tweeted early Tuesday morning.

Dear Rabbis, STOP SAYING THIS IS GOD'S PUNISHMENT

Triggered Trump Rages Over Ad Blasting His Coronavirus Response | The 11th Hour | MSNBC

Is there any evidence for lab release theory?

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52318539

 What kinds of security failures were the cables describing?

The short answer is we don't know from the information provided in the Washington Post. But, generally speaking, there are multiple ways that safety measures can be breached at labs dealing with biological agents.

According to Dr Lentzos, these include: "Who has access to the lab, the training and refresher-training of scientists and technicians, procedures for record-keeping, signage, inventory lists of pathogens, accident notification practices, emergency procedures."

Dr Lentzos said the issue of the virus' origin was a "very difficult question", and added that "there have been quiet, behind-the-scene discussions... in the biosecurity expert community, questioning the seafood market origin that has come out very strongly from China".

Amid this war of words between the countries, the painstaking - and largely unseen - scientific work to trace the origin of the virus will continue.

Mike Pompeo Defends U.S. Funding For Wuhan Virology Lab

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/coronavirus/mike-pompeo-defends-us-funding-wuhan-virology-lab-149436

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo defended U.S. funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a program “to protect American people from labs that aren’t up to standard” in a Fox and Friends interview on Wednesday.

Pompeo then addressed a Tuesday report in the New York Post pointing the finger at NIH infectious disease chief Dr. Anthony Fauci for $7.4 million in U.S. government grants to the now-controversial coronavirus research.

“I don’t know the details of the NIH grants,” Pompeo told Fox News. “Look, the United States, for a long time and continuing today, tries to help countries around the world who are conducting research on highly contagious pathogens.”

The research involved both collecting bat coronaviruses from the wild and running “gain-of-function” experiments aimed at determining whether the viruses could jump between species.

The NIH has defended its research as necessary for public health.

“Most emerging human viruses come from wildlife, and these represent a significant threat to public health and biosecurity in the US and globally, as demonstrated by the SARS epidemic of 2002-03, and the current COVID-19 pandemic,” the organization told Newsweek.

Potential Risks and Benefits of Gain-of-Function Research: Summary of a Workshop.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK285579/

The field of virology, and to some extent the broader field of microbiology, widely relies on studies that involve gain or loss of function. In order to understand the role of such studies in virology, Dr. Kanta Subbarao from the Laboratory of Infectious Disease at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) gave an overview of the current scientific and technical approaches to the research on pandemic strains of influenza and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) coronaviruses (CoV). As discussed in greater detail later in this chapter, many participants argued that the word choice of “gain-of-function” to describe the limited type of experiments covered by the U.S. deliberative process, particularly when coupled with a pause on even a smaller number of research projects, had generated concern that the policy would affect much broader areas of virology research

ALTERNATIVES TO GOF RESEARCH

The essence of the debate around the risks and benefits of GoF research and the concerns it raises have naturally encouraged virologists on both sides of the debate to consider alternative methodological approaches. During his talk, Kawaoka discussed alternatives to GoF research mostly applicable to influenza research, such as loss-of-function research, use of low pathogenicity viruses, and phenotypic analyses. He further cited a review paper in which Lipsitch and Galvani (2014) stated that “alternative scientific approaches are not only less risky, but also more likely to generate results that can be readily translated into public health benefits.” However, Kawaoka argued through specific examples that alternatives do not always provide the full answer to key questions. For instance, he cited work by Tumpey et al. (2007) and Imai et al. (2012) on mutations responsible for the loss of transmission capabilities of the 1918 influenza strain between ferrets and noted that this work required GoF research because a loss-of-function approach did not provide the complete picture. In addition, although working with low pathogenic avian influenza viruses provides a safer approach, Kawaoka explained that “highly pathogenic avian influenza differ from low pathogenic viruses in their kinetics of virus replication and tropism” and therefore the data can be misleading. Other alternatives discussed by Kawaoka and Dr. Robert Lamb, Northwestern University, in Session 8 of the symposium were cited from the recent review paper by Lipsitch and Galvani (Box 3.3). Kawaoka concluded that even if these approaches offer safer alternatives to GoF research of concern, for some questions researchers cannot rely solely on them because the phenotype of and the molecular basis for these new traits have been identified by GoF research but not by alternative approaches.

Coronavirus Whistleblower Complaint Suggests Trump Admin. Putting Politics Above Science | MSNBC

Dr. Anthony Fauci addresses China lab theory