Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's biggest domestic political asset is on the ballot on Nov. 3 — his relationship with President Trump.
Why it matters: The outcome of America's election could help determine whether Israel soon faces yet another election of its own.
Well, here’s some amazing news. On Tuesday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a press release of the Trump Administration’s science and technology accomplishments from President Donald Trump’s first term. The release accompanied the unveiling of a longer document from the Office and listed five highlights. Guess what the first one on the list was. “Ending the Covid-19 pandemic.”
The press release included a quote from Ivanka Trump, listed as an Advisor to the President. Because, after all, when you think of science and technology, you think of Ivanka Trump, right? This was the statement from Trump’s daughter: “Over the past four years, President Trump’s policies and investments in science and technology ensure America stands ready to solve today’s most pressing challenges and that our workforce is prepared for tomorrow’s innovations. For years to come, these achievements will guarantee the United States remains the world’s leader in research, discovery and the advancement of industries that will shape our future.”
The deluge of early votes for Tuesday’s US presidential election has topped 70m – the equivalent of more than half of all votes cast in 2016 – as Donald Trump brazenly listed one of the highlights of his presidency as “ending the Covid-19 pandemic”.
Trump’s claim, delivered in a White House press release, came in a week that has seen days of record new infections, daily deaths running at almost 1,000 a day, and a 23% increase in cases.
But it was the coronavirus pandemic that continued to dominate the agenda. Asked about Trump’s claim to have “ended it”, even the White House communications director, Alyssa Farah, struggled to defend the assertion.
“I think that was poorly worded,” Farah told Fox news. “The intent was to say that it is our goal to end the virus. But what I would say is this, because of the president’s leadership, we are rounding the corner on the virus.”
Antibodies appear to decrease rapidly after SARS-CoV-2 infection, a recent study found
Asymptomatic individuals involved in the study were also found to quickly lose antibodies
The results stress the need for everyone to continue following preventative measures
https://gizmodo.com/covid-19-may-cause-significant-declines-in-cognitive-fu-1845499990
A study of more than 84,500 people backs
prior indications that surviving the novel coronavirus may be associated
with potentially serious cognitive deficits, Reuters reported on Tuesday.
While the new study, which is based on an online survey, has some major
limitations, other research has found that covid-19 can cause
neurological issues even in people with mild cases.
The research team, led by Imperial College London’s Adam Hampshire, reviewed data from the Great British Intelligence Test—a collaborative project with BBC2 Horizon that collects a broad array of cognitive test and questionnaire data. It was expanded to include questions about covid-19 infection in May; in the dataset of about 84,500 people, 9,201 reported infections without respiratory symptoms; 3,466 had respiratory difficulties but did not obtain medical assistance; 176 required medical attention at home; 147 were hospitalized; and another 60 had to go on a ventilator.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/27/health/covid-antibodies-autoimmunity.html
Some survivors of Covid-19 carry worrying signs that their immune system has turned on the body, reminiscent of potentially debilitating diseases like lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, a new study has found.
At some point, the body’s defense system in these patients shifted into attacking itself, rather than the virus, the study suggests. The patients are producing molecules called “autoantibodies” that target genetic material from human cells, instead of from the virus.
This misguided immune response may exacerbate severe Covid-19. It may also explain why so-called “long haulers” have lingering problems months after their initial illness has resolved and the virus is gone from their bodies.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/is-netanyahu-dumping-trump-opinion-647287
Netanyahu, who is more fluent in many more languages than Trump, including English, has no doubt seen the writing on the wall, and in both directions it says Joe Biden has a good chance of becoming the next US president.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/28/politics/woodward-kushner-coronavirus-doctors/index.html
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/28/europe/coronavirus-death-rate-second-wave-lower-intl/index.html
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/27126/quick-10-10-leaders-who-stuttered
10. Joe Biden. Vice President Joe Biden came out
very publicly a few years ago and said that he overcame a stutter after
years of childhood teasing, including taunts from his seventh-grade
teacher who mocked him in front of the whole class.
Jared Kushner is a privileged white man whose greatest
accomplishments include being born into a privileged family and then
marrying into an even more privileged one. Somehow, this makes him think
he’s qualified to lecture Black people about how to make it in America.
So much so that he effectively implied that Black Americans don't want to be successful on Fox News this morning.
https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-appears-confuse-trump-george-bush-campaign-gaffe-2020-10
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-george-lopez-social-media-27e0006230358f0d0d98bf0e4c5959ca
CLAIM: In an interview, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden confused President Donald Trump with former President George W. Bush.
AP’S ASSESSMENT: Missing context. Biden and his wife, Jill, were being interviewed by actor and comedian George Lopez during the virtual “I Will Vote” concert Sunday.
THE FACTS: Social media users are sharing a 27-second clip of Joe and Jill Biden to suggest that Biden is not mentally fit to run for office ahead of Election Day. But the clips being widely shared lack context.
https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/oct/26/context-did-joe-biden-confuse-donald-trump-george-/
In the clip, Biden says "George" while discussing the significance of the upcoming election, which some viewers took as an allusion to former President George W. Bush.
The clip was shared on Twitter by Republican National Committee rapid response director Steve Guest, who used it to attack Biden’s mental acuity. The next day, media outlets including Fox News, Sky News, and the Today Show published stories on Biden’s comments, and Trump tweeted about it.
Some reporters, however, pointed out that Biden could have been referring to his interviewer, comedian George Lopez.
Joe Biden: "Well, first of all, the reason they should vote is that there’s a lot on the ballot this year. I mean, this is the most consequential… Not because I’m running but because of who I’m running against. This is the most consequential election in a long, long, long time. And the character of the country in my view is literally on the ballot, what kind of country are we going to be. Four more years of George uh… George, we’re going to find ourselves in a position where if Trump gets elected, we are going to be in a different world. And so… The reason I think people should be voting is out of their own self-interest right now, because look, you know, everything is at stake from the environment to our health. You heard what his, his, his chief of staff —"
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/27/obama-blasts-kushner-black-american-comments-432829
Kushner made the comments during an interview on “Fox & Friends” on Monday morning during which he also referred to raising concerns about racial inequality as “complaining” and suggested that those who protested systemic racism over the summer were more interested in “virtue signaling” than solving those issues.
"The thing we've seen in the Black community, which is mostly Democrat,” Kushner argued, “is that President Trump's policies are the policies that can help people break out of the problems that they're complaining about, but he can't want them to be successful more than they want to be successful."
President Donald Trump
launched a new attempt to mislead America over the state of the
fast-worsening pandemic Tuesday, after his prime time televised
celebration of Amy Coney Barrett's Supreme Court confirmation failed to distract from the mishandled emergency that is threatening his reelection hopes.
https://en.idi.org.il/articles/32679
Large portions of the ultra-Orthodox community and their leadership have come to the conclusion that the risk posed by the virus is not as severe as claimed by the experts and professionals. This stems from their skepticism about the authorities but also from their dismissal of scientific and medical knowledge. The fact that the ultra-Orthodox sector in Israel is among the youngest communities in the world, has intensified this feeling, especially among the younger generation, that “It won't happen to me," and encouraged them to ignore the rules.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/25/world/trump-fake-news-legacy-intl/index.html
“I look at it more as an elongated exacerbation of the original first wave,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Monday at an annual event for Yahoo Finance. “It’s kind of semantics. You want to call it the third wave or an extended first wave, no matter how you look at it, it's not good news.”
https://time.com/5903590/coronavirus-covid-19-third-wave/
But despite this rapid uptick in cases, the daily death count in the U.S. is not yet rising at the same rate, and remains at lower levels than in April. At face value, a lower case-to-fatality rate suggests that fewer people who test positive for the virus are dying from it. But the virus hasn’t necessarily become less lethal; it isn’t mutating quickly enough for that to be the case.
What’s happening now is not a result of how the virus treats humans, but rather how humans are treating the virus—that is, how we test for it, how we avoid it and how we combat it. The following five charts explain how human-driven factors are, at least for the moment, keeping deaths from spiking as high as they did early in the pandemic, even as cases rise dramatically.
The coronavirus poses a greater mortality risk to the elderly compared to younger people. Among all Americans who have tested positive for COVID-19, the CDC’s current best estimate is that 5.4% died and were 70 or older, 0.5% died and were between 50 and 69, and only 0.02% died and were 20-49 years old.
In the first weeks of the pandemic, the virus tore through assisted-living facilities and nursing homes, where lots of vulnerable elderly people lived. As a result, the death count skyrocketed. But over time, as the virus spread in places like bars and college campuses, the share of U.S. COVID-19 cases have skewed younger, meaning many of those becoming infected are less vulnerable to severe illness. The CDC reported last month that children and adults under 30 made up around 16% of COVID-19 cases in February through April, but by August, that group accounted for more than one in three cases.
The number of younger people contracting the virus
continues to grow, contributing to the rise in overall cases. Yet
because they are less vulnerable to the virus, they are not driving up
the number of deaths in tandem. (While young people are less vulnerable
to COVID-19 in general, they can and do die from the disease, and can
spread it to other people.)
https://www.newsweek.com/lagging-polls-trump-team-predicts-win-based-enthusiasm-1541073
Eric Trump told a rally crowd in Michigan the following day that he predicts a bigger win for his father than in 2016 based on "enthusiasm."
"The enthusiasm is unlike anything that we've seen before," he told a crowd of hundreds of people. "I'm telling you the polls are wrong. I am telling you they're going to get it wrong again."
"One thing we've seen in a lot of the Black community, which is mostly Democrat, is that President (Donald) Trump's policies are the policies that can help people break out of the problems that they're complaining about," senior White House adviser Jared Kushner said Monday morning on Fox News. "But he can't want them to be successful more than they want to be successful."
On Monday, Democratic National Committee National press secretary Brandon Gassaway issued a sharp rebuke of Kushner and his ilk.
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/09/factchecking-trumps-fox-news-interview-2/
Trump said, “I’m bringing many of the troops home and most of the troops home.” But the number in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria is nearly the same as it was in the last month under President Barack Obama. The overall number of overseas troops is only slightly smaller.
