Monday, July 13, 2020
French Bus Driver Beaten to Death After Asking Passengers to Wear Face Masks
https://time.com/5866326/french-bus-driver-beaten-masks/
The wife of a French bus driver who was beaten to death after he asked four passengers to wear face masks aboard his vehicle called Saturday for “exemplary punishment” for his killers.
The assault on Philippe Monguillot has scandalized
France. President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday dispatched the interior
minister to meet the driver’s widow after his death was announced
Friday. He had been hospitalized in critical condition after the July 5
attack.
Coronavirus unlikely to be spread by children, research suggests
https://www.pe.com/2020/07/10/coronavirus-why-kids-arent-the-germbags-and-grownups-are/
For months, we’ve kept children carefully isolated, pleading with
them to behave, wear masks, wipe their boogers and not hug Gram and
Grandpa. We’ve assumed this new virus acts just like the flu and common
cold — so classrooms full of kids would create one giant cootie colony.
But a growing body of research suggests young children aren’t responsible for most viral transmission. Adults are.
Based on these findings, school-based transmission could be a
manageable problem, particularly for elementary school aged-childrenwho
appear to be at the lowest risk of infection, according to a recent commentary in the journal Pediatrics.
AP FACT CHECK: Trump team's false comfort on schools, virus
https://www.startribune.com/ap-fact-check-trump-team-s-false-comfort-on-schools-virus/571737892/
President Donald Trump's aides are misrepresenting the record on kids and the coronavirus as they push for schools to reopen.
White House
press secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Monday inaccurately characterized
what the chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has
said on the matter. A day earlier, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos also
was wrong in stating that the research shows there is no danger "in any
way" if kids are in school.
No such conclusion has been reached.
McENANY: "Just last week you heard Dr.
Redfield say that children are not spreading this." — Monday on Fox News
Channel's "Fox and Friends"
THE FACTS: No,
Dr. Robert Redfield, the CDC director, did not say that. He said
officials don't have evidence that children are "driving" infections at
this point. But they have not ruled out that children spread the virus
to adults.
Dr. Deborah
Birx, the White House coronavirus coordinator, said last week the
government doesn't have enough data to show whether and to what degree
kids can infect others.
The bulk of data
has been collected from adults and particularly from those who were
sick, leaving questions about children still unanswered, Birx said. She
said children under 10 are the least tested age group.
The officials did not reach a conclusion that "children are not spreading this." Nor does the evidence prove that they are.
The government has counted tens of thousands
of children who have been infected with the virus and in some cases
hospitalized. Overall, public health officials believe the virus is less
dangerous to children than adults.
Lockdowns go into effect in neighborhoods of 5 cities, as virus hits new high
https://www.timesofisrael.com/lockdowns-go-into-effect-in-neighborhoods-of-5-cities-as-virus-surges/
Lockdowns came into effect at 1 p.m. on Friday in neighborhoods in
five towns and cities hit hard by the coronavirus outbreak, a day after
cabinet ministers approved the measure as the number of new cases in
Israel continued to surge.
Parts of Jerusalem, Beit Shemesh, Lod, Ramle and Kiryat Malachi
became “restricted zones” for seven days. The restrictions will be
lifted at 8 a.m. on July 17.
In Jerusalem, the neighborhoods of Romema, Kiryat Sanz and Matersdorf
— all majority ultra-Orthodox areas — have been closed; in Beit
Shemesh, the areas of Nahala and K’ne Habosem; in Lod, Ganei Ya’ar and
Sach; in Ramle, Amidar Beilav; and in Kiryat Malachi, the Rotner area
and Chabad neighborhood.
Other parts of Lod will be closed for five days.
An Indefensible Commutation
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/an-indefensible-commutation/
Trump has commuted the sentence of
Roger Stone. The timing, late on Friday, suggests internal embarrassment
over the move, and we wish there were more.
The commutation is a move fully within the president’s powers and in
keeping with the long-established pattern of presidents’ pardoning or
commuting the sentences of associates caught up in special-counsel
probes, although usually the associates aren’t as sleazy as Stone. We’re
a long way from George H. W. Bush’s pardoning Cap Weinberger, the great
Reagan-era defense official, who had been indicted for perjury and
obstruction of justice in the Lawrence Walsh investigation.
No one would think of letting Roger Stone anywhere near any serious
responsibility, and even the Trump campaign in 2016 had the sense to
keep him at arm’s length.
There is no doubt, though, that Stone was guilty of perjury and a
laughably ham-handed attempt at witness tampering. He was justly
convicted of these charges and deserved to go to jail; in our system of
justice, self-parody is no defense.
Attorney General Bill Barr reportedly opposed the commutation and was
right to do so. The act of clemency is made worse by the fact that
Stone repeatedly argued that he was owed it for his loyalty to the
president.
Terms of Michael Cohen's return to prison under scrutiny
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/10/politics/michael-cohen-prison-paperwork-dispute/index.html
After spending the past several weeks on New York's tony Upper East Side,
Michael Cohen has found himself back in federal prison after a dispute
with the government over what his lawyers say were restrictions in
paperwork designed to prevent him from finishing a book about the
president.
The form
in question, a two-page document titled "Federal Location Monitoring
Program Participant Agreement," had called for Cohen to abstain from
communicating with members of the media — a provision that he had balked
at given the pending release of his tell-all book, and one which his
legal team has claimed is unusual.
Defense
attorneys and legal experts that CNN spoke with Friday said that the
form appeared to be tailored to Cohen, the flamboyant former fixer to
President Donald Trump, whose affinity for the press is well known. Some
called it unfair.
A spokesman for the Administrative
Office of the US Courts, the judiciary agency that oversees the federal
probation system, declined to comment on the specifics of Cohen's case,
but added that no standard probation forms include language related to
media contacts.
Shlach: Repairing the Sin of the Spies
http://www.ravkooktorah.org/SHLACH_65.htm
Rav Kook wrote that even today we still suffer
the consequences of this catastrophic error. The root
cause for the exiles and humiliations of the
Jewish people, throughout the generations, is due to
our failure to correct the sin of the
spies.
To repair this national failure, a teshuvat hamishkal is needed,
a penance commensurate with the sin which
will “balance the scales.” The spies defamed the
Land of Israel, as it says, “They despised
the desirable land” (Psalms 106:24). We must do
the opposite and show our unwavering love for
the Land.
The Sin of the "Spies"
https://www.etzion.org.il/en/sin-spies
According to the
Ramban (13:1 and 13:27) and the Akeidat Yitzchak (77) it appears that
the sin of the spies lay in overstepping the bounds of their authority,
in their transition from being faithful reporters – which was the
mandate given to them - to becoming advisors with their own independent
views and evaluations – which lay outside the bounds of their mission.
Indeed, such a distinction exists in modern intelligence bodies, where
the function of the information gatherers is to report on what they have
seen or heard, and that of the intelligence evaluators is to evaluate
the situation or even to provide advice, on the basis of that
information. In the transition from one function to the other they did
indeed overstep their authority, but ultimately this was no more than a
formal sin. Is this really what constituted the true sin of the spies?
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