First he had brain cancer. Then the coronavirus struck his city. One patient’s perilous journey.

When Ronnie Krensel went in for his most recent checkup following chemotherapy on March 21, it wasn’t anything like the ones he’d had before. Upon his arrival at the Southhampton Stony Brook Hospital in Long Island, N.Y., a doctor met Krensel in a hazmat suit in a large tent outside the facility, where he was asked “a series of rapid-fire questions” and then sent to a negative-pressure room, which prevents cross-contamination, for his visit. 

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CNN’s Jim Acosta: ‘This Was a Different Trump’ at Coronavirus Briefing

CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta, known for his rough-and-tumble verbal battles with President Donald Trump, likely raised eyebrows among CNN viewers on Tuesday night when he praised the president’s new tone at the latest White House press briefing, claiming “this was a different Trump.” Just days after pushing for coronavirus restrictions to be loosened by Easter so as to reopen the economy, the president admitted on Tuesday that at least 100,000 Americans would likely die from COVID-19 and Americans had a “very tough two weeks” ahead of them.During the briefing, Acosta asked whether projections of up to 200,000 deaths would be lower if Trump had acted sooner, prompting the president to insist that he did act early. Though Acosta would continue to press him on whether he waited too long to take the pandemic seriously, Trump did not spar with his longtime nemesis, even noting at one point that Acosta’s question was “fair.”Appearing on CNN later in the evening, Acosta told anchor Anderson Cooper that the president and the rest of the White House coronavirus task force delivered a sober message to the public that they’ll need to be prepared for a heavy death toll. Saying this was the “most stunning briefing” he ever sat through, calling it “downright chilling,” Acosta said he had “never seen President Trump like this” and insisted he believes that the president is “scared right now” and everyone in that room could feel it.After noting that he tried to ask Trump and the coronavirus task force members if a lack of preparedness resulted in the grim casualty projections, only to get mixed answers, Acosta then credited the president for seemingly understanding how dire the situation now is.“The stark message we got in the briefing room this evening is unmistakable,” the CNN reporter said. “This country is about to go through a horrendous terrible experience, and I have to tell you, people may not believe the president when he says any of this, and I have been—you and I have been, you know, pretty critical of him from time to time.”“Yeah,” Cooper replied.“This was a different Donald Trump tonight,” Acosta concluded. “I think he gets it, Anderson.”“We'll see,” a skeptical Cooper reacted.The CNN correspondent wasn’t the only political reporter to come away impressed by the president’s perceived change in tone. “Trump sounding different today,” The New York Times’ Eric Lipton tweeted during the briefing. “Scale of death appears to have changed his tone, at least.”Acosta saying Trump finally “gets it” comes after fellow White House reporter, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl, blasted Acosta over his pugnacious and combative style, saying that while he’d defend Acosta’s “right to report” he doesn’t think “we should act like we are part of the resistance.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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China is bracing for a second wave of coronavirus

A Chinese county that was largely unscathed by the novel COVID-19 coronavirus went into lockdown Wednesday, signaling fears of a possible second wave in the country where the virus originated, The South China Morning Post reports.The county of Jia in Henan province, home to 600,000 people, is now in lockdown after infections reportedly spread at a local hospital. There were previously only 12 confirmed cases in Henan, despite it being situated just north of Hubei province, where China's epicenter, Wuhan, is located. However, U.S. intelligence reportedly believes China under-reported the actual number of cases.Either way, the new lockdown, which shuts down all non-essential business and requires people to carry special permits to leave their homes, and wear face masks and have their temperature taken when out and about, comes at a time when the country clearly wants to get its economy up and running again. It's unclear if such measures will be limited to the county or if it's a sign of things to come for the rest of the world's most populous country, but President Xi Jinping has warned that China must return to normal gradually in the hopes of preventing a full-scale COVID-19 return. Read more at The South China Morning Post.More stories from theweek.com The Secret Service signed an 'emergency order' this week — for 30 golf carts Engineer arrested after allegedly trying to run train into Los Angeles hospital ship Experts warn as many as 1 in 3 coronavirus test results may be incorrectly negative

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How coronavirus has halted Central American migration to the US

Border closures and strict lockdowns have led to a steep decline in the number of migrants coming from Central AmericaWhen Angelica turned 30, she realized there was no future for her in Honduras.Although she had a college degree, she was still living paycheck to paycheck and was stuck in a neighborhood of the capital Tegucigalpa ruled by violent gangs.So, after years contemplating migration to the US where she has relatives, she finally made arrangements to depart.“I didn’t want to stay in a neighborhood where there are massacres or where the people lock themselves in their homes at six at night because the gangs impose a curfew,” she said. “I realized I was more surviving than living.”But by the time she was due to start her journey north, Honduras had closed its borders and declared a state of emergency. She could no longer leave her city – much less take a bus to northern Guatemala, to meet a coyote who would guide her through Mexico.“I had thought that only a hurricane could stop me,” she said. “But I hadn’t thought of a pandemic.”Border closures and strict lockdowns prompted by the Covid-19 crisis have disrupted the migrant trail through Central America and Mexico, forcing some would-be migrants to postpone their journeys – and stopping many others in their tracks.The result has been a deterrent more effective than any wall Donald Trump could build.Activists across the region have reported a steep decline in the number of migrants coming from Central America since the restrictions were implemented. One Mexican shelter near the Guatemalan border said it hadn’t received a new arrival in a week.“The crisis has facilitated Trump’s policies because [Central American] migrants can’t even leave their countries,” said Sister Nyzella Juliana Dondé, coordinator of a Catholic migrant aid organization in Honduras.El Salvador closed its borders on 11 March, and the governments of Guatemala and Honduras quickly followed suit. All three countries in the so-called northern triangle have since announced internal lockdowns of differing strictness.The three nations had recently signed “safe third country agreements” with the US government under which they agreed to increase enforcement on their borders, and receive migrants who had transited their country on the way to the US.Only Guatemala had begun to implement the new measures, but it announced on 17 March that it would suspend the deportations of Hondurans and Salvadorans from the US to its territory.But Guatemala and Honduras continued to receive deportation flights bringing their own citizens from the US – despite concerns that the practice could accelerate the spread of the virus. In the past week, a migrant who was deported from the US to Guatemala was diagnosed with Covid-19 and a group of deportees to Honduras escaped from the shelter where they were to be quarantined. Guatemala has now requested that the US suspend deportation flights.Meanwhile, migrants who were already en route have been left exposed by the closure of shelters and the difficulties facing humanitarian organizations which would normally attend to them.“They are in a vulnerable situation because the guidance is to stay at home – but the migrants don’t have homes,” said Dondé, who mentioned a case of a large group of Haitian and African migrants who were detained after crossing into Guatemala from Honduras amid the lockdown. “Neither Honduras or Guatemala wanted to offer them a place to stay.”Migrants who already had arrived to Mexico have been left in limbo by the US government’s decision to immediately return all migrants from Mexico and Central America who cross into the country irregularly along the south-west border.When restrictions are eventually eased, a fresh surge in migration seems likely: multiple would-be migrants who spoke with the Guardian said it was only a question of when, not if, they would set out for the US.And the economic impact of the crisis may in turn cause others to migrate.. “Before many people migrated because they lacked work and a dignified life,” said Silva de Souza. “Now there will be many more.”Migrants who have come from even farther afield, have no choice but to try to push on. Mohamed left Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, in 2018, following the well-trodden migrant path via Ecuador, Colombia and the jungles of Panama. He was burning through his savings and racking up debt, but making steady progress north.But he reached Guatemala just before the government announced a state of emergency which has made moving on impossible.“Travel has become very difficult,” he said in a brief exchange via Facebook Messenger. But he was still determined to reach the US – even if he now has to move more carefully – traveling at night and avoiding large caravans. “With God’s will, I’ll get there. I will build a life of opportunity.” * Additional reporting by Joe Parkin Daniels

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‘We Didn’t Know That Until the Last 24 Hours’: Georgia Gov. Says He Just Found Out People without Symptoms Can Spread Coronavirus

While announcing a statewide shelter-in-place order on Wednesday, Georgia governor Brian Kemp, a Republican, said that he had just been informed that asymptomatic individuals could spread the coronavirus.The illness "is now transmitting before people see signs….Those individuals could have been infecting people before they ever felt [symptoms]," Kemp said at a press conference. "We didn’t know that until the last 24 hours."It has been widely known for months that the coronavirus can spread through asymptomatic transmission. However, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently updated its guidelines for outbreak mitigation regarding asymptomatic transmission, leading Georgia health officials to change their projections for an outbreak in the state."It’s a combination of recognizing there’s a large number of people out there who are infected and who are infected, who are asymptomatic, who never would have been recognized under our old models, but also seeing the community transmission that we’re seeing," said Dr. Kathleen Toomey, head of Georgia's Department of Public Health.Governor Kemp had initially resisted signing a shelter-in-place order due to the effect it would have on the state's economy. However, in recent days the governors of Florida, Texas, and South Carolina all introduced limitations on residents' mobility to combat coronavirus spread. Georgia has 4,748 confirmed cases, with Florida at 7,773, Texas at 4,607, and South Carolina at 1,293, according to Johns Hopkins University's coronavirus tracker.With the extent of coronavirus spread across the U.S. becoming clearer, Vice President Mike Pence on Tuesday said the outbreak in the U.S. was increasingly comparable to that of Italy, one of the worst outbreaks in the western hemisphere.

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Coronavirus latest news: Number of cases worldwide tops 1 million as UK death toll surges by another 569

Exclusive: The systematic failures in the Government's pandemic strategy laid bare Exclusive: 10m tests a day needed to end lockdown and avert economic disaster Comedian Eddie Large dies aged 78 after contracting Covid-19 Follow coronavirus cases in the UK and across the world with our Live Tracker Subscribe to The Telegraph, free for one month Telegraph Coronavirus Appeal: Join us in helping those hit hardest Global coronavirus cases surpassed 1 million on Thursday with more than 51,000 deaths as the pandemic further exploded in the United States and the death toll climbed in Spain and Italy. Italy had the most deaths, more than 13,900, followed by Spain. The United States had the most confirmed cases of any country, more than 235,000, said researchers at Johns Hopkins University. In the UK, the number of coronavirus-related fatalities has risen by 569 in the last 24 hours, taking the total toll to 2,921. This is the biggest jump the UK has seen to date - just. On Wednesday 563 new fatalities were reported. Meanwhile, Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, said he was "setting the goal" of reaching 100,000 tests for coronavirus per day by the end of April.

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Chinese government rejects allegations that its face masks were defective, tells countries to 'double check' instructions

The Chinese government told other countries to "double-check" the instructions for using the defective face masks.

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Managing High Blood Pressure During the Coronavirus Pandemic

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Trump Uses Coronavirus Briefing to Warn About Drug Cartels

A day after finally appearing to acknowledge the gravity of the coronavirus pandemic and the massive loss of American lives, President Donald Trump began his latest White House briefing on Wednesday by shifting the focus to drug cartels and at one point boasting about being “number one” on Facebook. “As governments and nations focus on the coronavirus, there's a growing threat that cartels, criminals, terrorists and other malign actors will try to exploit the situation for their own gain, and we must not let that happen," Trump said. “We will never let that happen.” Trump then announced that the United States was starting “enhanced counter narcotics operations in the western hemisphere,” in an effort to “protect the American people from the deadly scourge of illegal narcotics.”“We must not let the drug cartels exploit the pandemic to threaten American lives,” Trump said. The president also used the briefing to return to some earlier themes that have proven popular among his base: the border wall and “all the caravans” of undocumented immigrants he recalled had tried to travel to the U.S. At one point, when asked about reports of a surge in domestic violence amid the pandemic, he appeared to mishear the question as instead being about “Mexican violence.” When asked at one point during the briefing about tweeting, Trump couldn’t keep from patting himself on the back over his social media following. “It's social media, it gets out. I have hundreds of millions of people,” Trump said. “Number one on Facebook. Did you know I was number one on Facebook? I just found out I'm number one on Facebook. I thought that was very nice, for whatever it means. ”White House Trots Out Grim Death Models to Drive Home Social DistancingIt was left uncertain in what category the president believed he was number one. During Wednesday’s briefing, Trump continued to back away from comparing the novel coronavirus to the flu, despite having continued to make the association last week while he fretted about the American economy. When asked what changed his thinking, Trump said it was the severity of the virus and “the violence of it.” “I think also in looking at the way the contagion, it is contagious, nobodies ever seen anything like this where large groups of people all of a sudden just by being in the presence of somebody have it,” Trump said. "The flu has never been like that. Flu is contagious but nothing like we've ever seen here.”  “If it hits the right person, that person's in deep trouble,” Trump said. Both Republican and Democratic state leaders across the country have issued stay-at-home orders, but the president was unwilling Wednesday to force that on state leaders, despite some governors avoiding taking the statewide action until outcry built in their states.  "There are some states that are different," Trump said. "There are some states that don't have much of a problem. Well, they don't have (the) problem. They don't have thousands of people that are positive...thousands of people that even think they might have it, or hundreds of people in some cases." So instead Trump called for "a little bit of flexibility." “A state in the Midwest, or if Alaska, as an example, doesn't have a problem, it's awfully tough to say “close it down,” Trump said.  He also continued to complain about inheriting “a very broken system” when officials were asked about issues with testing. “We inherited bad tests,” Trump said. “We really inherited bad tests. These are horrible tests and it was all broken and we fixed it. And we're doing millions of tests.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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Pakistan court overturns conviction in death of Daniel Pearl

A Pakistani court on Thursday overturned the murder conviction of a British Pakistani man found guilty of the 2002 kidnapping and killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Instead, the court found Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh guilty of the lesser charge of kidnapping and sentenced him to seven years in prison. Pearl disappeared Jan. 23, 2002 in Karachi while researching links between Pakistani militants and Richard C. Reid, who became known as the “shoe-bomber” after he was arrested on a flight from Paris to Miami with explosives in his shoes.

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A Netflix series predicted a global pandemic. It was dismissed as 'a show about the flu'

Netflix's "Pandemic: How to Fight an Outbreak" debuted as the coronavirus outbreak started to grow. The makers speak out about their prescient docuseries.

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China Concealed Extent of Virus Outbreak, U.S. Intelligence Says

(Bloomberg) -- China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, under-reporting both total cases and deaths it’s suffered from the disease, the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House, according to three U.S. officials.The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret, and they declined to detail its contents. But the thrust, they said, is that China’s public reporting on cases and deaths is intentionally incomplete. Two of the officials said the report concludes that China’s numbers are fake.The report was received by the White House last week, one of the officials said.The outbreak began in China’s Hubei province in late 2019, but the country has publicly reported only about 82,000 cases and 3,300 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. That compares to more than 189,000 cases and more than 4,000 deaths in the U.S., which has the largest publicly reported outbreak in the world.U.S. President Donald Trump said Wednesday that China’s reported virus data appear to be on the “light side” but that he hadn’t received an intelligence report saying the country had concealed the extent of its outbreak.“Their numbers seem to be a little bit on the light side, and I’m being nice when I say that,” he said at a daily coronavirus briefing at the White House.Trump added that the U.S. and China were in constant communication and that Beijing would spend $250 billion to purchase American products. “We’d like to keep it, they’d like to keep it” he said of the U.S.-China trade deal.Communications staff at the White House and the Chinese embassy in Washington didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.‘More Forthcoming’“The reality is that we could have been better off if China had been more forthcoming,” Vice President Mike Pence said Wednesday on CNN. “What appears evident now is that long before the world learned in December that China was dealing with this, and maybe as much as a month earlier than that, that the outbreak was real in China.While China eventually imposed a strict lockdown beyond those of less autocratic nations, there has been considerable skepticism toward China’s reported numbers, both outside and within the country. The Chinese government has repeatedly revised its methodology for counting cases, for weeks excluding people without symptoms entirely, and only on Tuesday added more than 1,500 asymptomatic cases to its total.Stacks of thousands of urns outside funeral homes in Hubei province have driven public doubt in Beijing’s reporting.Republican lawmakers in the U.S. have been particularly harsh about China’s role in the outbreak. Enhancing Beijing’s role in the pandemic could be politically helpful to Trump, who has sought to shift blame for the U.S. outbreak away from his administration’s delays in achieving widespread testing for the virus and mobilizing greater production of supplies such as face masks and hospital ventilators.“The claim that the United States has more coronavirus deaths than China is false,” Senator Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican, said in a statement after Bloomberg News published its report. “Without commenting on any classified information, this much is painfully obvious: The Chinese Communist Party has lied, is lying, and will continue to lie about coronavirus to protect the regime.”Deborah Birx, the State Department immunologist advising the White House on its response to the outbreak, said Tuesday that China’s public reporting influenced assumptions elsewhere in the world about the nature of the virus.“The medical community made -- interpreted the Chinese data as: This was serious, but smaller than anyone expected,” she said at a news conference on Tuesday. “Because I think probably we were missing a significant amount of the data, now that what we see happened to Italy and see what happened to Spain.”Suspect ReportingThe U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion is an attempt to divert attention from surging deaths in the U.S. and other Western countries, Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of China’s state-run Global Times, said on his account on Chinese social media platform Weibo.There was no way for serious data faking to occur in today’s China, especially for an incident that has drawn such widespread attention, Hu said. He said China managed to curtail the death toll in Hubei, the province where the virus first emerged late last year, by sending medical workers and equipment there from other parts of the country.“To fake the casualty data, which departments will be deployed? Who will implement the plan?,” Hu said. “It will involve many different departments in many places to get the total numbers. If one of them is faking once, they have to fake it all the time. The risk of screwing up could be very high.”China isn’t the only country with suspect public reporting. Western officials have pointed to Iran, Russia, Indonesia and especially North Korea, which has not reported a single case of the disease, as probable under-counts. Others including Saudi Arabia and Egypt may also be playing down their numbers.U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo has publicly urged China and other nations to be transparent about their outbreaks. He has repeatedly accused China of covering up the extent of the problem and being slow to share information, especially in the weeks after the virus first emerged, and blocking offers of help from American experts.“This data set matters,” he said at a news conference in Washington on Tuesday. The development of medical therapies and public-health measures to combat the virus “so that we can save lives depends on the ability to have confidence and information about what has actually transpired,” he said.“I would urge every nation: Do your best to collect the data. Do your best to share that information,” he said. “We’re doing that.”(Updates with Trump comments from fifth paragraph)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

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Brazil's Bolsonaro isolated, weakened by coronavirus denial

At a tense cabinet meeting on Saturday in the Brazilian president's official residence, Jair Bolsonaro found himself isolated. The far-right leader convened the emergency meeting in Brasilia's modernist Alvorada Palace to resolve a dispute with Health Minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta, who publicly opposed the president's calls to loosen quarantine restrictions for Brazil's 210 million people. Elected two years ago on a promise to revive growth, Bolsonaro has shocked health experts around the world by persistently playing down the gravity of the epidemic, calling COVID-19 "a little cold" exaggerated by the media and his opponents - even after his political idol U.S. President Donald Trump walked back his own skepticism about the outbreak.

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Coronavirus: BA reaches deal to suspend thousands of workers

The airline will temporarily suspend more than 30,000 of its workers after reaching a deal with unions.

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"Shoot them dead": Duterte orders police to kill Filipinos who defy coronavirus lockdown

"Do not challenge the government," he warned the nation Wednesday. "You will lose."

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New Yorkers Are Right to Be Skeptical of Evangelical-Run Coronavirus Ward in Central Park

If New York City wasn’t under a strict stay-at-home order right now, protesters might be marching along Central Park. That’s where an evangelical Christian organization called Samaritan’s Purse is preparing to open a makeshift COVID-19 ward. The 60-bed emergency field hospital is composed largely of tarp-wrapped tents and will function as a respiratory unit servicing overflow patients from Mount Sinai Hospital.Some New York residents have criticized Samaritan’s Purse’s presence, citing their spotty record in the field and expressing fears that the conservative religious group’s beliefs could even open the door to substandard care or discrimination. City Mayor Bill de Blasio admitted he was “very concerned” about the operation and was sending people from his office to monitor Samaritan’s Purse.As a result, conservative Christians exploded on social media, citing the controversy as further proof that their faith is under attack by intolerant liberals and coastal elites who care little about human life.Andrew Walker, a professor at Southern Baptist Seminary, tweeted, “Cultural decadence is allowing intersectionality to determine the acceptability of emergency response.” And Peter Hasson, a Catholic editor for conservative news site The Daily Caller, tweeted, “If you’re getting mad at the people taking care of the sick during a pandemic, maybe consider the fact that you’re not the good guy in this story.”As my therapist often reminds me, the human brain is capable of understanding that two things can be true at the same time. In this case, a person can believe that the brave doctors and nurses currently deploying to Central Park to help combat this terrible virus are brave and necessary and also believe that the organization chosen to manage the work of these doctors and nurses is deeply problematic. Holding both of these ideas in your mind at the same time doesn’t make you a bad person; it demonstrates that you’re a thinking person. We’re in the midst of a public-health crisis and must take an all-hands-on-deck approach to caring for the sick.And upon closer inspection, New Yorkers have plenty of good reasons to feel uncomfortable about this new coronavirus hospital.Of chief concern is the person overseeing the Central Park ward: Samaritan’s Purse’s president and CEO Franklin Graham. He is the son of famed evangelist Billy Graham and a spiritual adviser to President Donald Trump who has a surprisingly long history of controversial comments and hate speech.Graham seems to harbor a special level of disdain for followers of Islam, which he characterizes as a “wicked and evil religion” that encourages adherents to beat their wives and murder their disobedient children. In 2015, he recommended banning all Muslims from immigrating to America and suggested our government treat them like the Japanese and German during World War II. As rationale, he argued that Muslims have “the potential to be radicalized” and participate in “killing to honor their religion and Muhammed.”That’s the man running Samaritan’s Purse’s coronavirus hospital, so yes, Muslim New Yorkers are right to be skeptical.Graham’s hate speech is also often aimed at LGBTQ people. He has called same-sex marriages “detestable” and has drummed up fear toward gays and lesbians—whom he believes should burn in hell—by claiming they want to “drag an immoral agenda into our communities.” In an article that has mysteriously disappeared from the Decision Magazine website, Graham wrote that the architect of the LGBTQ rights movement was “none other than Satan himself.” And when Vladimir Putin initiated a violent crackdown on LGBTQ rights in Russia, it sparked a wave of beatings, abduction, public humiliation and other forms of violence against sexual minorities there. Graham responded by praising Putin’s policy, lauding the authoritarian leader for “[protecting] his nation’s children from the damaging effects of any gay and lesbian agenda.”Given such history, it makes complete sense that Mount Sinai Hospital asked Samaritan’s Purse to “sign a written pledge to treat all patients equally.”Some conservative Christians have dismissed this as harassment, claiming that a scenario in which evangelicals discriminated against gays and lesbians is ridiculous to imagine. But our fair city has a long memory. We remember all the gay men who fled communities across America where evangelicals pastors condemned them as “abominations” and found safe harbor in New York. We remember that when masses of them contracted HIV/AIDS and filled our hospital beds, evangelical preachers on TV called it God’s judgment. We remember Jerry Falwell and the religious right lobbying against HIV research and relief in the '90s, leading to untold deaths.All this occurred in my lifetime, and I am only 37. So please pardon New Yorkers if they feel uneasy, given American evangelicals’ often-unacknowledged track record coupled with Graham’s comments, and want to take some minor precautions to ensure all citizens are protected. Gay, lesbian, and transgender New Yorkers are right to be skeptical.Even some conservative Christians who’ve acknowledged the disturbing nature of Graham’s comments have attacked Samaritan’s Purse’s critics for intolerance. Anyone should be able to help anyone in this time, the argument goes. It’s wrong to prevent people from serving the sick. I totally agree; but Samaritan’s Purse does not. The organization is requiring that all personnel serving in its pop-up hospital be Christians who agree to Samaritan’s Purse’s 11-point “Statement of Faith,” which includes the beliefs that non-Christians will burn in hell and that same-sex relationships are sinful.It’s unsurprising, if lamentable, that a Christian aid group would turn away a Buddhist doctor looking to help its efforts. But if a lung doctor shows up in Central Park with the knowledge and experience to save lives, she could be sent home if she happens to be a liberal Episcopalian who voted for Hillary Clinton and supports marriage equality.If it is wrong to quibble over who is fit to help save lives in the middle of a crisis, then we must admit that Samaritan’s Purse is no better than its critics. The group’s defenders are correct, however, that the organization has laudably worked to meet emergency needs in crisis regions since its founding. They have accomplished much good in places like Kosovo, Sudan, Somalia, and Darfur. But their record is not unblemished, and many in the humanitarian world have questioned the quality of some of Samaritan’s Purse’s work.After USAID gave Samaritan’s Purse a large grant to help victims of the earthquake in El Salvador, they were disturbed to learn that the Christian group “blurred the lines between church and state” by using funds to evangelize victims instead of just help them. An official with Samaritan’s Purse dismissed the criticism by claiming, “We are first a Christian organization and second an aid organization.”That wasn’t the first time such blurring occurred, however. During the first Gulf War, respected U.S. General Norman Schwarzkopf publicly criticized the group for trying to coerce American troops serving in Saudi Arabia to covertly distribute Arab-language Bibles under the guise of humanitarian work. And Samaritan’s Purse’s popular “Operation Christmas Child” has recently been drawn fire when people learned that the holiday shoeboxes given to poor children in non-Christian families around the world were stuffed with Christian evangelism materials.The vast majority of New Yorkers are not Christian, and if they find themselves wheezing for air due to COVID-19, they don’t want to be proselytized while receiving treatment. They too have reason to be skeptical of the organization’s makeshift hospital.“This is what Samaritan’s Purse does—we respond in the middle of crises to help people in Jesus’ Name. Please pray for our teams and for everyone around the world affected by the virus,” Graham declared in a press release announcing the ward.None of Samaritan’s Purse’s detractors have argued that the Central Park ward should be shuttered or that the organization be barred from offering care. And no one is casting aspersions on the many courageous health-care professionals who will put their lives at risk when this hospital opens. Most agree with the letter from Mount Sinai staff and doctors—at least one of whom is LGBTQ—that concerns about Samaritan’s Purse, while valid, must be set aside at the moment because “the higher mission at present is to preserve human life.”To this, I say “yes and.” New Yorkers can admit that Samaritan’s Purse should have a role to play in this vital work, and they can also acknowledge the many valid reasons that might make vulnerable and marginalized residents a little more than nervous.—Jonathan Merritt is a contributing writer for The Atlantic and author of Learning to Speak God from Scratch: Why Sacred Words are Vanishing—And How We Can Revive Them.Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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Feds: Man intentionally derailed LA train near hospital ship

A train engineer intentionally drove a speeding locomotive off a track at the Port of Los Angeles because he was suspicious about the presence of a Navy hospital ship docked there to help during the coronovirus crisis, federal prosecutors said Wednesday. The locomotive crashed through a series of barriers and fences before coming to rest more than 250 yards (230 meters) from the U.S. Navy Hospital Ship Mercy on Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a release. Eduardo Moreno, 44, was charged with one count of train wrecking, prosecutors said.

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Coronavirus live updates: US has its deadliest day so far; Florida to issue stay-at-home order; New York state death toll near 2,000

Florida announced a stay-at-home order, and officials weighed recommending more Americans wear masks. Here are the latest coronavirus updates.

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Netanyahu reportedly mistook a Hallmark series clip for proof of an Iranian coronavirus coverup

Everyone gets duped now and then. That goes for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well.Netanyahu recently showed his cabinet a video he claimed was evidence Iran was engineering a novel coronavirus coverup, Axios reports. Tehran has reported more than 47,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 3,000 deaths, but those figures have been eyed with suspicion by much of the rest of the world, including Israel, which, to put it gently, does not get along with Iran.The video showed people dumping bodies into garbage dumps, two cabinet ministers told Axios. They said Netanyahu's national security adviser, Meir Ben Shabbat, showed him the video, but he probably should've checked his source. Upon further review the clip turned out to be a scene from the 2007 Hallmark Channel miniseries, Pandemic. The Israeli government certainly did a bad job of vetting the clip, but the fact it made its way up the flagpole wasn't completely random. Iranians were reportedly sharing the footage on social media last week. Read more at Axios.More stories from theweek.com Washington Gov. Jay Inslee is what real coronavirus leadership looks like China is bracing for a second wave of coronavirus How the coronavirus fight might end up at the Supreme Court

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Liberty University students choose sides after fallout from coronavirus reporting

The New York Times reported this week that almost a dozen Liberty University students have come down with COVID-19 symptoms since the school reopened last week. But Liberty University officials have since pushed back on these claims, calling the Times story “fake news”. Now, students are choosing sides in who they believe is telling the truth.

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