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Single COVID case in Western Australia leads to 5-day lockdown for 2 million WNEP Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Article From & Read More ( Single COVID case in Western Australia leads to 5-day lockdown for 2 million - WNEP Scranton/Wilkes-Barre )
The pending Supreme Court case on the fate of the Affordable Care Act could give the Biden administration its first opportunity to chart a new course in front of the justices.
The healthcare case, argued a week after the election in November, is one of several matters, along with immigration and a separate case on Medicaid work requirements, where the new administration could take a different position from the Trump administration at the high court.
While a shift would be in line with President Joe Biden's political preferences, it could prompt consternation at the court. Justices and former officials in Democratic and Republican administrations routinely caution that new administrations should generally be reluctant to change positions before the court.
Justice Elena Kagan, who as solicitor general was the top Supreme Court lawyer for President Barack Obama before he appointed her to the court, said in a 2018 forum that the bar should be high.
"I think changing positions is a really big deal that people should hesitate a long time over, which is not to say that it never happens," Kagan said at the time. Indeed, Trump's Justice Department made a switch four times in the first full high court term of the administration.
Still, the healthcare case is a good candidate for when a rare change of position may be warranted, said Paul Clement, who was solicitor general under President George W. Bush.
The Justice Department defends federal laws at the Supreme Court "whenever reasonable arguments can be made," Clement said at an online Georgetown University forum.
The Trump administration called on the justices to strike down the entire Obama-era law under which some 23 million people get health insurance and millions more with preexisting health conditions are protected from discrimination.
Biden was vice president when the law was enacted, famously calling it a "big (expletive) deal" the day Obama signed it into law in 2010.
As president, Biden has called for strengthening the law, and he already has reopened sign-ups for people who might have lost their jobs and the health insurance that goes with them because of the coronavirus pandemic.
In the healthcare case, the court could rule that the now-toothless requirement that people obtain insurance or pay a penalty is unconstitutional and leave the rest of the law alone. That outcome, rather than taking down the whole law, seemed a likely one based on the justices' questions and comments in November.
The Justice Department could simply file a new legal brief saying that its views have changed, former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal, also an Obama administration veteran, said at the same Georgetown event. A second court hearing is unlikely.
Clement agreed. "I think the justices would welcome it," he said. "I also think it's an incredibly strong position."
But Clement cautioned that the new acting solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, will have to pick her spots before the justices, three of whom were appointed by President Donald Trump. "The Biden administration is going to have to realize they're making arguments to a reasonably conservative court," he said.
Orders issued by Biden in the first week of his presidency also may affect two cases scheduled for argument next month over controversial Trump administration policies involving immigrants.
In one case, Trump was unhappy with the money Congress allotted for construction of a wall along the Mexican border. Trump declared a national emergency and identified nearly $7 billion appropriated for other purposes to use instead to build sections of the wall.
The case before the Supreme Court involves $2.5 billion in Defense Department funds. Lower courts have ruled that what Trump did probably is illegal, but the Supreme Court allowed work on the wall to continue while the case made its way through the legal system.
Much of the money has already been spent and Biden rescinded the emergency on his first day in office. The Justice Department could tell the court that there is nothing left for it to decide.
The same might be true of the legal challenge to the Trump policy that forced asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico for U.S. court hearings. Biden has suspended the policy for new arrivals.
"It does look like the case could be moot, but we're waiting to hear from the acting solicitor general about what they want to do. Obviously, it's a welcome change in policy," said Judy Rabinovitz, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, which is challenging the policy.
A dispute over waivers the Trump administration granted states to impose work requirements on people who receive their healthcare through the Medicaid program also could be affected.
Biden on Thursday directed HHS to review the waivers, but it's not clear how quickly the administration could act to undo them and whether changes could derail the Supreme Court case.
The waivers were struck down in lower courts, and the states appealed. By early December, the justices knew a new administration would be in place by the time they heard the case, but they decided to take it on anyway.
Article From & Read More ( Biden could change course in high court ACA case - Modern Healthcare )
RICHMOND, Va. (WDBJ) - The Virginia Department of Health is reporting 504,779 total cases of COVID-19 across the commonwealth as of Sunday, January 31, 2021, dating to the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020. That’s up 2,558 from the 502,221 reported Saturday, a smaller increase than the 4,309 new cases reported from Friday to Saturday.
Click here for vaccination phases and who is eligible under each phase.
[VACCINE INFO: How to find timelines and locations in Virginia health districts]
Per the latest update from the state’s vaccine dashboard, 805,695 doses of vaccine have been administered in Virginia as of Sunday, up from Saturday’s 758,477.
5,234,155 PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests have been conducted in Virginia as of Sunday, with an 11.8% positivity rate from those tests over the last week, down from the 12.1% reported Saturday.
As of Sunday, there are 6,494 recorded coronavirus-related deaths in the commonwealth since the pandemic’s beginning, up from Saturday’s 6,449.
2,516 people across Virginia are hospitalized as of Sunday with confirmed or test-pending cases of COVID-19, from Saturday’s count of 2,632.
40,322 COVID patients have been released from hospitals in Virginia since the beginning of the pandemic. That’s according to the Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association, which gets a daily report from hospitals around the commonwealth.
Click here for the latest statewide rules regarding curfew, masks and public gatherings.
These hospital numbers are different from those reported by VDH, which only gathers hospitalization status at the time each case is investigated by VDH and is an under-representation of Virginia hospitalizations.
Any new confirmed cases from health departments throughout the state the rest of the day won’t show up until at least the following day on the state list, as the official numbers are only updated once a day, with a 5 p.m. cutoff each day for new cases to be reflected on the next day’s list.
Copyright 2021 WDBJ. All rights reserved.
Article From & Read More ( Positive percentage of COVID tests drops below 12%, new-case increase down - WDBJ )
Sunday’s case count comes after several weeks of lower daily case numbers. Alaska saw a peak of cases in November and early December that caused concern for hospital capacity and ultimately led to a month-long hunker down order throughout Anchorage. Case numbers began declining in December.
As infections continue at steadily lower numbers, Acting Anchorage Mayor Austin Quinn-Davidson announced last week that the city will relax COVID-19 restrictions. A new emergency order will go into effect Monday and will allow more people inside bars and restaurants and ease gathering size limits.
Despite the lower case numbers throughout January, Alaska is in the highest alert category based on the current per capita rate of infection. In Western Alaska, case counts remain high and are even increasing in some rural villages that are experiencing significant COVID-19 outbreaks.
The seafood industry has again been hit with multiple outbreaks among vessels and processing facilities in the Aleutian Islands. Some of the facilities have temporarily closed just as winter fishing season began.
Hospitalizations have fallen simultaneously with infection numbers, and are now less than a third of where they were during the peak in November and December. By Sunday, there were 38 people with COVID-19 in hospitals throughout the state. Another four patients were believed to have the virus.
Health officials are urging Alaskans to continue taking the pandemic seriously, even as case numbers have dropped. Scientists at the state’s public health labs confirmed last week that a highly contagious variant of the virus reached Alaska last month.
The vaccine reached Alaska in mid-December. By Friday, when the state had released the most recent data, 90,777 people — about 12% of Alaska’s population — had been vaccinated, according to the state’s vaccine monitoring dashboard. That’s nearly twice the national average of 6.9%.
Health care workers and nursing home staff and residents were the first people prioritized to receive the vaccine. In early January, the state said Alaskans older than 65 were now eligible, although appointment slots are limited and have filled quickly.
Thousands of new vaccine appointments went live on the state’s website this week. Seniors and other eligible health care workers can call 907-646-3322 for assistance making a February appointment.
Of the 130 cases announced in Alaska residents Sunday, 41 were in Anchorage, one in Chugiak and two in Eagle River; one was in Homer, one in Nikiski, one in Seward and one in Soldotna; two were in Kodiak; 12 were in Fairbanks and two in North Pole; one was in Palmer and six in Wasilla; one was in Nome; one was in Kotzebue; three were in Douglas and two in Juneau; one was in Ketchikan; one was in Sitka; one was in Wrangell; four were in Unalaska; and eight were in Bethel.
Among communities with populations under 1,000 people not named to protect privacy, one was in the Kodiak Island Borough; four were in the Copper River area of the Valdez-Cordova Census Area; two were in the Southeast Fairbanks Census Area; two were in the Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area; one was in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough; two were in the Northwest Arctic Borough; 16 were in the Bethel Census Area; and nine were in the Kusilvak Census Area.
Seven infections were identified in nonresidents, including one in Anchorage, one in the Aleutians East Borough and two in Unalaska. T54he state health department was still investigating the location in three of the cases.
While people might get tested more than once, each case reported by the state health department represents only one person.
The state’s data doesn’t specify whether people testing positive for COVID-19 have symptoms. More than half of the nation’s infections are transmitted from asymptomatic people, according to CDC estimates.
Over the past week, 2.39% of all tests completed statewide came back positive.
- Tess Williams
Doctors in Italy reported what is believed to be the first known case of psoriatic arthritis triggered by coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).
Although the mechanisms triggering autoimmune/autoinflammatory attacks remain unknown, SARS-CoV-2 —the virus which causes COVID-19 —has been shown to result in a wide variety of these disorders, including cytokine storm/macrophage activation syndrome (MAS), diseases affecting the blood vessels, anemia, clotting issues, skin conditions, and demyelination syndromes including Guillan–Barrè syndrome, according to the report published in Rheumatology.
A small number of arthritis cases reportedly tied to SARS-CoV-2 infections fall into 3 groups possibly associated with viral infections: viral arthritis, reactive arthritis, or chronic arthritis triggered by viral infections, according to researchers.
However, doctors from Humanitas Clinical and Research Center in Milan believe they have diagnosed the apparent first case of psoriatic spondyloarthritis. The patient, a 27-year-old woman, had a genetic predisposition due a family of history of psoriasis, although no family members showed skin or nail lesions or joint-related issues.
In February 2020, the woman developed acute arthritis in her left ankle, followed 7 days later by loss of taste and smell without fever or cough, the authors noted. She was never tested for COVID-19 and symptoms resolved on their own within 2 weeks.
In May, however, she developed left knee arthritis and a skin lesion on her lower back resembling psoriasis, the authors said. Her inflammatory markers were slightly elevated, although other indicators of arthritis or inflammatory disease, such as rheumatoid factor, anticitrullinated peptides, and anti-nucleus antibodies, were negative.
Two months later in July, the woman was admitted to the hospital for diarrhea, low back pain, and arthritis in the left knee and the metatarsophalangeal joints, according to the report. At that point, she was tested for SARS-CoV-2 via a nasal swab, which turned up negative, but did test positive for antibodies. Synovial fluid collected in May also tested negative for COVID-19 but positive for antibodies. She had no fever or respiratory symptoms, and a chest computerized tomography (CT) scan was negative for COVID-19 pneumonia.
The authors diagnosed psoriatic spondyloarthritis triggered by SARS-CoV-2 infection in this genetically predisposed individual after excluding viral arthritis, which has an acute phase, typically resolves on its own, and was not evidenced in the synovial fluid. A diagnosis of reactive arthritis was also considered unlikely because the onset of arthritis occurred before clinical manifestation of viral infection, while reactive arthritis generally develops 1 to 24 weeks from the infection.
A virus-induced hyperinflammatory environment has been suspected as a mechanism for MAS, while a shift in Th17 cells has been hypothesized to trigger reactive arthritis. The authors wrote that previously documented cases of rheumatoid arthritis and the new case of spondyloarthritis suggest alternative mechanisms such as immune-surveillance escaping.
References
Novelli L, Motta F, Ceribelli A, et al. A case of psoriatic arthritis triggered by SARS-CoV-2 infection. Rheumatology (Oxford). Published online November 19, 2020. doi:10.1093/rheumatology/keaa691
Australian officials abruptly locked down the city of Perth in Western Australia for five days, after one person tested positive there for the coronavirus — a security guard at a quarantine hotel. The state of Western Australia had gone nearly ten months without any sign of community transmission.
Under the new restrictions, about two million people in the city and surrounding areas can leave home only for essential reasons like exercise, medical needs and shopping for groceries until Friday evening. Restaurants, bars and gyms will shut and mask-wearing will be compulsory in public. Schools, which were scheduled to reopen this week, will remain closed.
“I know for many Western Australians, this is going to come as a shock,” Mark McGowan, the state’s premier, said at a news conference announcing the measures on Sunday. The state had “crushed” the outbreak before, he said, but “we cannot forget how quickly this virus can spread, nor the devastation it can cause.”
The security guard developed symptoms on Thursday after working that week at a hotel where travelers are quarantined, Mr. McGowan said. One traveler there had tested positive for the more contagious virus variant that was first spotted in Britain.
Australia has been praised for its comparative success in handling the pandemic, reporting a total of 28,810 cases and 909 deaths, far fewer relative to its size than most other developed countries. It has moved aggressively to clamp down on new outbreaks, and has largely banned its citizens from leaving the country. New cases have mainly been discovered in returning travelers, who are strictly quarantined in hotels.
The city of Brisbane quickly imposed a three-day lockdown earlier this month after a cleaner who worked at a quarantine hotel there tested positive.
The country has reopened a travel bubble with neighboring New Zealand and has begun to allow domestic travel from state to state, though officials have not hesitated to close state borders against emerging outbreaks.
A Connecticut man was arrested by police and held on a $2 million bond Saturday in connection with the cold case murder of a teenage girl nearly 17 years ago.
Willie Robinson, 52, is accused of strangling Jessica Keyworth, 16, and leaving her in a basement stairwell of an apartment building just blocks from his known residence after Memorial Day Weekend 2004, according to the Republican American newspaper in Waterbury, Conn.
Keyworth took a train into Waterbury that arrived just before midnight on Memorial Day to meet up with a friend but she was found murdered in a stairwell the next morning.
"We’re so happy that we can bring some closure and justice for the girl’s family," Waterbury Police Chief Fernando Spagnolo said, according to the newspaper. "A lot of it had to do with a lot of perseverance by the detectives involved in the case."
KILLER OF AMBER HAGERMAN, WHO INSPIRED AMBER ALERT SYSTEM, STILL BEING SOUGHT 25 YEARS LATER
Spagnolo praised the detectives as "peerless."
The chief didn’t specify what led investigators to Robinson but said they were aided by DNA evidence and forensic science, FOX 61 in Hartford reported. It wasn't clear how she ended up in the stairwell.
Willie Robinson. (Waterbury Police)
Investigators scoured the city after Keyworth’s murder, even traveling as far as Las Vegas in 2007 to interview someone about the case, but there were never any arrests.
KILLER CHARGED IN 1988 MURDER OF 9-YEAR-OLD GIRL CALIFORNIA GIRL
Robinson was arrested on an unrelated offense for interfering with a police officer just months after Keyworth’s murder, but it’s not clear if he was interviewed about her death at the time. Officers didn’t say if there was any known prior connection between Robinson and Keyworth.
Robinson has an arrest record that includes sexual assault and risk of injury, the newspaper reported, but there was no record of any convictions.
He faces one count of murder.
Police put Keyworth’s unsolved case in a specially designed deck of cards sold to prison inmates that features cold cases on different cards. Keyworth was the three of hearts. The cards have led to hundreds of tips in cases, but police didn’t say if her card helped lead to Robinson’s arrest.
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The investigation is ongoing and police said the $50,000 reward for information helping lead to an arrest and conviction in the case is still available, the newspaper reported.
Article From & Read More ( Connecticut cold case murder of teen girl solved via DNA evidence, authorities say - Fox News )
WASHINGTON -- The pending Supreme Court case on the fate of the Affordable Care Act could give the Biden administration its first opportunity to chart a new course in front of the justices.
The health care case, argued a week after the election in November, is one of several matters, along with immigration and a separate case on Medicaid work requirements, where the new administration could take a different position from the Trump administration at the high court.
While a shift would be in line with President Joe Biden's political preferences, it could prompt consternation at the court. Justices and former officials in Democratic and Republican administrations routinely caution that new administrations should generally be reluctant to change positions before the court.
Justice Elena Kagan, who as solicitor general was the top Supreme Court lawyer for President Barack Obama before he appointed her to the court, said in a 2018 forum that the bar should be high.
“I think changing positions is a really big deal that people should hesitate a long time over, which is not to say that it never happens,” Kagan said at the time. Indeed, Trump’s Justice Department made a switch four times in the first full high court term of the administration.
Still, the health care case is a good candidate for when a rare change of position may be warranted, said Paul Clement, who was solicitor general under President George W. Bush.
The Justice Department defends federal laws at the Supreme Court “whenever reasonable arguments can be made,” Clement said at an online Georgetown University forum.
The Trump administration called on the justices to strike down the entire Obama-era law under which some 23 million people get health insurance and millions more with preexisting health conditions are protected from discrimination.
Biden was vice president when the law was enacted, famously calling it a “big (expletive) deal” the day Obama signed it into law in 2010.
As president, Biden has called for strengthening the law, and he already has reopened sign-ups for people who might have lost their jobs and the health insurance that goes with them because of the coronavirus pandemic.
In the health care case, the court could rule that the now-toothless requirement that people obtain insurance or pay a penalty is unconstitutional and leave the rest of the law alone. That outcome, rather than taking down the whole law, seemed a likely one based on the justices’ questions and comments in November.
The Justice Department could simply file a new legal brief saying that its views have changed, former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal, also an Obama administration veteran, said at the same Georgetown event. A second court hearing is unlikely.
Clement agreed. “I think the justices would welcome it,” he said. “I also think it’s an incredibly strong position.”
But Clement cautioned that the new acting solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, will have to pick her spots before the justices, three of whom were appointed by President Donald Trump. “The Biden administration is going to have to realize they’re making arguments to a reasonably conservative court,” he said.
Orders issued by Biden in the first week of his presidency also may affect two cases scheduled for argument next month over controversial Trump administration policies involving immigrants.
In one case, Trump was unhappy with the money Congress allotted for construction of a wall along the Mexican border. Trump declared a national emergency and identified nearly $7 billion appropriated for other purposes to use instead to build sections of the wall.
The case before the Supreme Court involves $2.5 billion in Defense Department funds. Lower courts have ruled that what Trump did probably is illegal, but the Supreme Court allowed work on the wall to continue while the case made its way through the legal system.
Much of the money has already been spent and Biden rescinded the emergency on his first day in office. The Justice Department could tell the court that there is nothing left for it to decide.
The same might be true of the legal challenge to the Trump policy that forced asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico for U.S. court hearings. Biden has suspended the policy for new arrivals.
“It does look like the case could be moot, but we’re waiting to hear from the acting solicitor general about what they want to do. Obviously, it’s a welcome change in policy,” said Judy Rabinovitz, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, which is challenging the policy.
A dispute over waivers the Trump administration granted states to impose work requirements on people who receive their health care through the Medicaid program also could be affected.
Biden on Thursday directed the Health and Human Services Department to review the waivers, but it’s not clear how quickly the administration could act to undo them and whether changes could derail the Supreme Court case.
The waivers were struck down in lower courts, and the states appealed. By early December, the justices knew a new administration would be in place by the time they heard the case, but they decided to take it on anyway.
Article From & Read More ( Biden could change course in high court health care case - ABC News )
Maryland has reported a case of the new, highly transmissible Covid-19 variant first found in South Africa, marking the third case to be detected in the U.S., Gov. Larry Hogan announced on Saturday.
The case involves an adult resident living in the Baltimore region with no history of international travel, Maryland health officials and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have confirmed.
"We strongly encourage Marylanders to practice extra caution to limit the additional risk of transmission associated with this variant," Hogan said. "Please continue to practice standard public health and safety measures, including mask wearing, regular hand washing and physical distancing."
The first two U.S. cases of the South African variant, known as B.1.351, were identified in South Carolina on Jan. 28. Other variants found in the U.S. have originated from Britain and Brazil.
The variants don't appear to cause more significant illness or increased risk of death, but are believed to be highly contagious. Health officials are particularly concerned about the B.1.351 variant because preliminary research suggests vaccines may be less effective to fight it.
President Joe Biden signed a travel ban last week on most non-U.S. citizens entering the country who were recently in South Africa and reinstated travel restrictions on the entry of non-U.S. citizens from the U.K. and Brazil.
The virus has infected more than 25.9 million people and killed at least 436,000 people in the U.S. since the pandemic began, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
A potentially more transmissible variant of Covid-19 first identified in South Africa has now been confirmed to be in Maryland, Gov. Larry Hogan announced Saturday.
The case involves an adult residing in the "Baltimore metro region" who hadn't left the country, indicating that there is "likely" community transmission of the variant, a release from Hogan's office said. Contact tracing is now ongoing, according to the release.
The news comes after South Carolina announced the first two U.S. cases of the variant Thursday.
Vaccine makers Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and Novavax have all said their vaccines have been less effective against the strain. Variants of more transmissible strains of the virus from the U.K. and Brazil have also reached the United States, upping pressure on President Joe Biden’s administration to roll out vaccinations quicker.
“State health officials are closely monitoring the B.1.351 variant of SARS-CoV-2 in the state,” Hogan said in the release. “We strongly encourage Marylanders to practice extra caution to limit the additional risk of transmission associated with this variant. Please continue to practice standard public health and safety measures, including mask wearing, regular hand washing, and physical distancing.”
The Biden administration is attempting to speed up genetic sequencing efforts to identify the new variants and is stressing public health guidance to wear masks and limit gathering. President Joe Biden has announced travel bans from South Africa, Brazil, the United Kingdom and other European nations.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has predicted the U.K. strain will become dominant in the U.S. as soon as March. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci has also said the U.K. variant is likely more deadly. Several cases of the U.K. variant have been confirmed in the U.S.
Moderna announced Monday that it will make a booster shot for its vaccine to help it be more effective against variants. Research has shown that while the U.K. variant didn't seem to reduce vaccine antibody production, the South African variant cut neutralizing antibody production sixfold.
"There are alternative plans if we ever have to modify the vaccine," Fauci said at a White House briefing last week.
Dr. Traxler: We Must All Remain Dedicated to Stopping the Spread – Wear a Mask, Stay Six Feet Apart
COLUMBIA, S.C. — The South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC) announced today the detection of one case associated with the SARS-CoV-2 variant that first emerged in the United Kingdom.
Viruses are constantly changing, and the new versions are called variants. Variants are closely monitored for their ability to spread faster or cause more disease. South Carolina public health officials were notified late Friday by MAKO Medical Laboratory of a South Carolina sample that was determined to be the B.1.1.7 variant first identified in the United Kingdom.
Experts agree that existing vaccines work to protect us from this variant, even if we don’t know just how effective they are. At this time, there’s no conclusive evidence to prove that the B.1.1.7 variant causes more severe illness.
“The arrival of the second SARS-CoV-2 variant in our state is a yet another important reminder to all South Carolinians that the fight against this deadly virus is far from over,” said Dr. Brannon Traxler, DHEC Interim Public Health Director. “While more COVID-19 vaccines are on the way, supplies are still very limited. We must all remain dedicated to the fight by doing the right things to slow the spread of COVID-19 in our communities.”
The case, an adult from the Lowcountry region, has an international travel history. To protect their privacy, no further information will be released.
The B.1.1.7 variant has been identified in many countries and in 30 states with 434 total cases having been reported in the US as of 7 p.m. Friday. Earlier this week, DHEC announced that two cases of a variant first discovered in South Africa had been reported in South Carolina. Both variants first detected in the United Kingdom and South Africa spread easier and quicker than most SARS-CoV-2 variants.
The three significant variants being spread in the world currently, originally from the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil, emerged independently from each other and have different characteristics. Most variants do not change how the virus behaves and many disappear.
“We know that viruses mutate to live and live to mutate,” Dr. Traxler said. “That’s why it’s critical that we vaccinate as many people as quickly as possible and each of us do our part by wearing a mask, staying six feet apart, avoiding crowds, washing our hands, getting tested often, and when it’s our time, getting vaccinated. Science tells us that these actions work to prevent the spread of the virus, no matter the strain.”
DHEC, in coordination with the CDC, will continue to watch out for COVID-19 variants. Public health officials will provide more information as it becomes available.
Safe and effective vaccines and following public health guidance are how to win the fight against COVID-19. For more information about the COVID-19 vaccine go to scdhec.gov/vaxfacts. For the latest information about COVID-19, go to scdhec.gov/COVID19.
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Religious orders have their own hierarchies, so they have their own ways of handling abuse allegations.
Thirty-odd years ago, 8-year-old Timothy Schlenz spent every Saturday being tutored on the sacraments at a Manhattan church. It was there, he said, that he was regularly abused.
Every weekend, his family would drive into the city from New Jersey so that Timothy, who is now 39, could study at St. Catherine of Siena Parish, on the Upper East Side. The priest who tutored him, the Rev. Carleton P. Jones, slowly groomed the boy and eventually molested him, telling him it was a way to check for cancer, according to Mr. Schlenz.
Only years later did Mr. Schlenz come to understand that Father Jones had abused him. He wanted to press charges, though by then the statute of limitations had passed. But the New York State Child Victims Act, which allows for victims to file civil lawsuits against their abusers regardless of how long ago the abuse occurred, has given Mr. Schlenz a chance to make his case.
In August 2019, he initiated a legal action against Father Jones and the Dominican Friars Province of Saint Joseph. But the religious order had already exonerated Father Jones following its own internal investigation just two months earlier.
A complicating factor here is that Father Jones does not report to the Archdiocese of New York, which has been part of the Roman Catholic Church’s effort to make reporting and investigating clergy abuse more transparent. He is an order priest, which means that the Dominicans — not the Archdiocese of New York — were responsible for initially investigating Father Jones in late 2018, following a tip from another Dominican priest whom Mr. Schlenz had confided in.
But orders have their own ways, often private and murky, of doing things. So, after the Dominicans cleared Father Jones, and before the Child Victims Act case was filed against him, he disappeared.
Mr. Schlenz’s case entered its discovery phase last fall. Joseph D’Avanzo, Father Jones’s lawyer, denied all of the allegations and refused to discuss the priest’s whereabouts. Multiple requests to speak with leaders of the order have been rebuffed. But in an email this month, the vicar for child protection of the Dominicans, the Rev. Albert Duggan, responded to a request from The Times. “Because this involves a matter in litigation, the province is not able to make any comment at this time,” he wrote.
“The worldwide moving around of religious order priest offenders is the biggest unknown scandal,” said Jeff Anderson, who specializes in clergy abuse cases, including several involving religious order priests that were filed under the Child Victims Act. “We have found offenders in South America and Africa.”
Close to one-third of the 464 Child Victims Act cases against priests involve religious orders, like the Dominicans, Franciscans and Redemptorists. These are autonomous organizations that have Vatican approval but that operate independently, with their own hierarchies and protocols. They nonetheless often provide priests to work at diocese churches, as was the case of Father Jones’s being stationed at St. Catherine in the 1980s.
For those not versed in Catholic vocabulary, a diocese is an ecclesiastical district within the Catholic Church. It is defined by geographic boundaries and overseen by a bishop who reports up a chain of command to the pope. A religious order, on the other hand, is not structured geographically; its members work in communities all over the world, including at diocesan churches.
This means that order priests who are stationed at such churches function essentially as independent contractors; bishops have no control over them. Only in very extreme cases will the pope intervene in religious order issues. Orders handle their own investigations, which to the outside eye can appear confusing, secretive and time-consuming.
Bridget Lyons, who says she was abused by a Redemptorist priest in New York and Florida in the 1980s, has waited over 25 years for closure. In 1994, she and her younger brother, Brendan Lyons, accused the Rev. Jack Kennington of abusing them. Only Mr. Lyons was able to pursue a case, however, because of the statute of limitations. It was settled in 2001 for an undisclosed amount, and Father Kennington never admitted guilt.
Before the settlement, however, Father Kennington admitted during a deposition to playing strip poker with both children. While Ms. Lyons is now working with Mr. Anderson to pursue a new case against Father Kennington under the Child Victims Act, he remains a priest in good standing with the order and lives in a Redemptorist residence in Brooklyn. (Calls to the residence, as well as to the communications office for the Redemptorists, were not returned.)
Mr. Anderson, the lawyer for Ms. Lyons and Mr. Schlenz, is no stranger to the frustrations of cases involving religious orders. He has built his career representing clergy abuse survivors.
One of his more high-profile Child Victims Act cases involves the Rev. Bruce Ritter, the now-deceased Franciscan founder of Covenant House, a nonprofit in Manhattan that helps homeless youth. Darryl Bassile, Mr. Anderson’s client, said that when he was living at Covenant House in the 1970s, Father Ritter sexually assaulted him. In 1990, Father Ritter was forced out of his organization because of multiple sexual abuse and financial accusations.
But he was never defrocked, nor were criminal charges ever filed against him. The most extreme action taken by the Franciscans was to demand that he undergo counseling. He refused, choosing to resign from the order in 1991 “on his own initiative and with the blessing of his Franciscan superiors in the United States and in Rome,” according to the head of the order at the time. He then joined an overseas diocese and remained a priest until his death in 1999.
“You enter into this covenant family, and they promise for life to support you,” said Patrick Wall, a former Catholic priest who works with Mr. Anderson. “Consequently, it’s like a life raft. And they don’t want to push anyone off.”
Since Father Jones was exonerated by the Dominicans, his whereabouts has been a mystery. Phone calls to the top office of the order in Rome were referred back to the prior provincial (regional leader) in New York City, the Rev. Kenneth Letoile, the same man who cleared Father Jones of any wrongdoing and who has not responded to repeated requests for an interview.
In 1988, Timothy Schlenz began his studies with Father Jones at St. Catherine between morning and evening Mass. During one of their sessions, Father Jones told him about a friend who had cancer, “and how he knew how to check for it,” he said. For the next few months, touching took place along this theme, often in the priest’s private quarters, Mr. Schlenz recalled.
In March 1989, Timothy received the Sacrament of Penance. During this first confession, overseen by Father Jones, Timothy confessed the touching sessions to the very man who had encouraged them. “In case it was a sin,” Mr. Schlenz said.
The following year, when it was time for Timothy’s younger brother Joseph to study with Father Jones, Timothy refused to leave Joseph alone with him. He never explained to his parents why, or what had happened to him.
After Joseph received his first communion in 1990, Father Jones was relocated, and Timothy, 10, began seeing a psychiatrist, who told his parents that Timothy was depressed.
By the time he was married and starting a family, Mr. Schlenz no longer understood the abstract flashbacks that still haunted him. It wasn’t until 2013, when his little brother asked if he remembered studying with Father Jones in Manhattan, that it all started to click.
Over the next several years, Mr. Schlenz committed himself to intense therapy sessions, where he also dealt with even earlier memories of being abused by a Catholic priest in Newark, the Rev. David Ernst, years before Timothy met Father Jones. The Ernst case, part of a well-publicized class-action suit that included Mr. Schlenz, was successfully settled in 2018 (the Archdiocese of Newark admitted to wrongdoing and added Father Ernst, who died in 1988, to its list of credibly accused clergy.) But Mr. Schlenz felt alone and unsupported when it came to Father Jones and the Dominicans.
In late 2018, Mr. Schlenz disclosed his memories to another Dominican priest, who reported the complaint to the order. Father Jones was placed on administrative leave, and an internal investigation was initiated, concluding in June 2019 in the form of a letter by Father Letoile exonerating Father Jones.
“There was not a semblance of truth in the allegation,” the letter said. It recommended that “Father Jones be publicly restored to ministry.” The statement was followed by a note from Father Jones. “I tried to remember to pray for my accuser,” he wrote, “and to offer up what I was being given to suffer in reparation for the sins of Christians and the purifying of the church.”
Then, Father Jones vanished. (Recent court documents from the Schlenz case list him as a New York resident.)
For several years now, the Archdiocese of New York has offered the Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program for abuse survivors. But for victims of religious order priests, compensation through funds like this is not available.
“Religious orders have their own policies and procedures for responding to allegations of abuse,” said Joseph Zwilling, director of communications for the archdiocese.
For Timothy Schlenz, as well as others alleging abuse by religious order priests, the Child Victims Act is their only recourse.
Two years ago, Patrick Pipkins, Air Force Office of Special Investigations special agent, did what his chief of the OSI Cold Case Team called, “some amazing work,” to locate an Air Force deserter who went missing in 1984.
At the time of her disappearance it was believed the Airman took off with a married man who had parentally kidnapped his 4-year-old son. Neither the Airman, the man, nor the son were heard from since 1984.
The Air Force, the Airman’s family and the son’s mother were left with unanswered questions about the trio’s fate.
Fast forward to 2019, when Pipkins, through some innovative data mining, determined all three missing persons had assumed new identities and settled in Little Rock, Arkansas. Unfortunately, all three died of natural causes within a two year span dating back to 2007-2009.
“We also learned prior to his death, the son fathered two children,” said John Fine, OSI Cold Case Team chief. “As part of our efforts to confirm the identity of the Air Force deserter, we partnered with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to conduct DNA testing.”
One of those tests confirmed the son’s identity, so 35 years later, his mother finally had some answers. Despite the sad news, she also learned she had two new grandchildren.
“We learned from NCMEC that in the very near future the grandmother will meet two of her grandchildren for the first time,” Fine said.
According to NCMEC “The children were found in Little Rock, Arkansas, in a loving foster home.”
The team involved with the care of the grandchildren; the case workers, supervisors, doctors and therapists, met to discuss reuniting the children with their biological grandmother and their consensus was yes.
The grandmother was informed and a therapist is going to talk with the children to set a date, now that they’ve responded positively to the idea.
“A case never goes cold for the victim’s family,” Fine said in putting the case into perspective. “For the victim’s family members, solving a cold case can bring very much-needed resolution to what happened to their loved ones.”
The innovative data mining approach used by Pipkins, demonstrated how employing OSI’s Line of Effort to Drive Innovation not only closed a 35-year-old cold case, but it brought welcome closure to families searching for answers.
“This case is a prime example of what the OSI Cold Case Team does for the Air Force, its members and their families,” Pipkins said. “It shows who we are and why we exist to find the truth. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, we will never give up. Providing closure and the opportunity to reunite family members after more than 35 years, is the ultimate reward.”
Article From & Read More ( Innovation leads to OSI cold case closure > US Air Force > Article Display - Air Force Link )
NEW YORK (Reuters) - It sounds like the start of a parable: Investors stuck inside during a pandemic begin to bid up an asset until its price becomes untethered to reality. The value soars until one day the market runs out of buyers and freezes, causing prices to plummet and some unlucky few to lose fortunes more than ten times their annual incomes in the span of a few hours.
The date: February 3, 1636. On that day, the infamous Dutch tulip bubble burst during an outbreak of the bubonic plague, illustrating that asset prices can plummet just as quickly as they soar, leaving only pain behind.
Now, almost exactly 385 years and another pandemic later, Wall Street waits to see how long it will take for history to repeat itself.
Shares of video game retailer GameStop Corp have soared 1,625% since the start of January. Driving the rally are individual investors who have been stuck at home for the last ten months. Many have turned to online forums like WallStreetBets on Reddit and are buying the stock, some as a form of protest against hedge fund managers who wagered that it would fall.
These amateur investors are buoyed by savings built up over the coronavirus pandemic, two rounds of stimulus payments and near zero interest rates. Some, such as billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, have referred to the phenomenon as ‘Gamestonk’, a play on the intentional misspelling of the word ‘stock’ on social media.
The stock price rally to above $300 per share has emboldened some small investors to pour even more money into a company that Wall Street analysts tracked by Refinitiv believe is worth slightly more than $13 per share. The surge increases the risk that individuals will get caught up in the euphoria and look past the warning signs and consequences of an eventual crash.
"I dumped my savings into GME, paid my rent for this month with my credit card, and dumped my rent money into more GME (which for the people here at WSB, I would not recommend)," a Reddit user with the handle ssauron here wrote Thursday on WallStreetBets. "And I'm holding. This is personal for me, and millions of others."
A form of class warfare waged through the shares of a video game retailer is notably different than financial market manias, such as the dotcom bubble in 2000 or the U.S. real estate bubble that culminated in the 2008 financial crisis, both which were fueled by assumptions of broad economic growth.
Yet for those who buy GameStop at the wrong time, the results will likely be the same.
“The reality is that GameStop doesn’t hurt Wall Street. It might hurt a couple of hedge fund managers out there, but no one is going to cry for them. The people who will be losing their life savings are small retail investors,” said Ben Inker, head of asset allocation at GMO.
The total value of short positions in Reddit-favored stocks such as GameStop is about $40 billion, limiting the pain among professional investors to a handful of hedge funds, according to Barclays.
Overall, GameStop shorts were down about $5 billion for the year through Tuesday, according to S3 Partners. By comparison, Tesla Inc, another heavily-shorted stock among professional investors, caused short sellers $245 billion in losses in 2020, the firm noted.
“While we expect some more deleveraging, ultimately the scale of the problem appears quite limited,” Barclays said.
The likelihood that most of the losses from the rally in GameStop will come among the same group of retail investors who prodded it higher is leaving many on Wall Street baffled as the bubble continues to grow. GameStop surged 67.9% higher Friday to close at $325 per share.
“GameStop is not worth $500, not worth $400, not worth $300, not worth $200, not even worth $100, not even worth $50,” billionaire investor Leon Cooperman said on CNBC Thursday. “I’m not damning them. I’m just saying from my experience, this will end in tears,” he added.
The dotcom bubble peaked in March 2000 and over the next two years the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index slid nearly 77% as companies that were touted as can’t miss investments ran out of financing. By the time the Nasdaq bottomed in October 2002, some $6.2 trillion in household wealth had been destroyed, according to Amir Sufi, a professor at the University of Chicago.
The 2008 financial crisis, meanwhile, wiped away approximately $16.4 trillion from American households through a combination of steep stock market losses and plummeting home equity, according to the Federal Reserve.
No one expects that the GameStop bubble will cause anything close to the same levels of economic pain as the financial crisis or dotcom bust before it, in part because the company has a low share count and was not widely held by institutional or retail investors prior to the start of the year. With $6.5 billion in revenues in its last fiscal year and fewer than 53,000 employees worldwide, it does not have an outsized economic impact.
Yet a fall will be concentrated on those who helped upend Wall Street’s notion of what retail investors can do.
“There’s going to be some blood on the floor when this is all over, but that’s going to be some hedge fund blood and a lot of retail blood,” said Donald Langevoort, a professor at Georgetown Law who studies retail investors and securities regulation.
Melvin Capital and Citron Research, two prominent GameStop short-sellers, said earlier this week that they had already closed out their positions.
Securities laws that typically protect smaller investors from fraud may be of little help for investors who buy shares of GameStop at elevated levels, Langevoort said.
“I don’t know if there is an organization or orchestrator that is using deceit and trickery, especially when the motivation seems to be ‘Let’s support GameStop and show them,’” he said. “The SEC has to take a deep breath and ask itself whether it has a strong enough case to put a stop to this.”
‘LIFE OF ITS OWN’
The outsized rally in GameStop is happening at a time when valuations across financial markets appear to be stretched. The S&P 500 index trades at a forward price to earnings ratio of 23.1, near its peak during the dotcom bubble, while the cryptocurrency bitcoin jumped 14% Friday after gaining 265% over the past 12 months.
The rise of commission-free trading platforms such as Robinhood have helped inflate asset market bubbles by lowering the bar for retail investors to trade, said Ronnie Sadka, a finance professor at Boston College.
“Retail investors are becoming a systemic risk,” that the SEC is ill-prepared to handle, he said. “The challenge with regulation is that this is not a case where Wall Street is squeezing the mom and pops, this is a case where the short-sellers are getting squeezed.”
The surging value of GameStop shares is luring investors who will most likely be burned in the end, said Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities who has a $16 price target for the company.
“This is the tulip bubble all over again,” he said, adding that he received a call from a friend who bragged that he put $1,000 into Reddit favorites such as GameStop, AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc and BlackBerry Ltd and was now up $400,000 in two weeks. “He doesn’t even know what GameStop sells,” Pachter said.
How will the GameStop mania end? If it is like the original tulip bubble, it could lead to a “short-term crisis of trust” in financial markets, said Anne Goldgar, a professor at the University of Southern California.
Every jump in the price of GameStop, meanwhile, brings in more short-sellers enticed by ever-growing potential gains and more buyers looking to stick a thumb in the eye of Wall Street, causing the cycle to continue, Pachter said.
“This thing has a life of its own,” Pachter said.
Reporting by David Randall; editing by Paritosh Bansal and Edward Tobin
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New developments are arising in the mysterious disappearance of Texas State University student Jason Landry.
The 21-year-old disappeared in December as he drove home to the Houston area to visit his family ahead of the holidays. On Friday, investigators said cellphone data is providing some clues in the case.
The Caldwell County Sheriff’s Office said Landry left his apartment in San Marcos at 10:55 p.m. on Dec. 13.
Data shows at 11:24 p.m., Jason entered the city of Luling, off of Highway 80, and stopped using the Waze App and began using Snapchat.
Investigators said his digital footprint essentially stopped near Highway 183 and Austin Street. At 12:31 a.m., Landry’s vehicle was found after it was damaged.
That 67-minute window is now what authorities are focused on.
The cellphone was found in the car and despite low temperatures, Landry’s shirt, shorts, socks and underwear were found in the roadway along with a backpack with some marijuana, a ball cap, a laptop and other personal items.
Investigators said there was no evidence of blood inside the vehicle, and no evidence that Landry was traveling to meet with or had communicated intent to meet with anyone in or around Luling.
We’ll bring more details as they become available.
Article From & Read More ( New developments arise in case of missing Texas State University student - KSAT San Antonio )CLEVELAND, Ohio - Find the number of new coronavirus cases for every Ohio ZIP code for the last 14 days, 30 days and since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic with this searchable database.
Statewide, there were 883,716 cases reported by the Ohio Department of Health through Thursday, including 58,021 cases with an onset of symptoms in the last two weeks.
This database was updated with the release of new on Friday afternoon.
Some mobile users may need to use this link instead to access the searchable database.
Known COVID-19 cases with an onset of symptoms in the last 14 days, according to data released by the Ohio Department of Health on Thursday, Jan. 28.Rich Exner, cleveland.com
Within the seven-county Greater Cleveland and Akron area, the ZIP codes with the most new cases (symptoms beginning in the last two weeks) through Thursday were:
* 44035 in Elyria, 332 new cases with an onset of symptoms in the last two weeks.
* 44077 in Painesville, 322 new cases.
* 44060 in Mentor, 274 new cases.
* 44102 on the West Side of Cleveland, 268 new cases.
* 44111 on the West Side of Cleveland, 264 new cases.
However, populations vary widely by ZIP code. These are the ZIP codes with the highest rates of new cases per 100,000 residents over the last two weeks:
* 44851 in New London and covering a portion of southwest Lorain County, 961.7 cases per 100,000 over the last two weeks.
* 44270 in Rittman, including a portion of southern Medina County, 954.5.
* 44053 in Lorain, 889.1.
* 44011 in Avon, 811.9.
* 44021 in Burton, 752.7.
Rich Exner, data analysis editor for cleveland.com, writes about numbers on a variety of topics. Follow on Twitter @RichExner. See other data-related stories at cleveland.com/datacentral.
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