Judge Amy Coney Barrett is a wife, mother of seven and a devout Catholic — but how that may affect the presumptive nominee’s potential rulings on the Supreme Court remains to be seen.
Reportedly tapped by President Trump to replace the late US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Ginsburg, the 48-year-old jurist has only sat on the federal bench for three years, after being successfully nominated by Trump to the Chicago-based 7th Circuit Court of Appeals.
She’s written more than 100 decisions and dissents, according to the Chicago Tribune. And while she maintains that her faith does not enter into her rulings on the law, Barrett twice joined with a minority of judges in dissenting opinions that favored reconsidering rulings that struck down state restrictions on abortion rights.
One case involved an Indiana law that would have required that the parents be notified when minors seek consent for the procedure from the courts, while the other — also passed in Indiana, her home state — banned abortions for reasons related to gender, race or disability, and also required that fetal remains be buried or cremated.
Although the Hoosier State only appealed the decision regarding fetal remains, Barrett and the other dissenters addressed the law’s other provisions, noting that “there is a difference between ‘I don’t want a child’ and ‘I want a child, but only a male,’ or ‘I want only children whose genes predict success in life.'”
“Using abortion to promote eugenic goals is morally and prudentially debatable,” the dissenters argued.
Both of those cases later wound up before the Supreme Court, which reinstated Indiana’s regulation of fetal remains and ordered a reconsideration of its parental-notification law.
Three members of the city’s Orthodox Jewish communities died from the coronavirus over the last four days — all within hours of arriving at the hospital too sick to be saved, The Post has learned.
All three men were fatally ill with the disease by the time they sought treatment at the Maimonides Medical Center in Borough Park, one of the neighborhoods at the center of the Big Apple’s latest COVID-19 outbreak.
“There’s rampant COVID denialism and misinformation abound in the community,” one person familiar with the situation said. “People are not getting tested and are refusing care even when sick. This is deeply distressing.”
Not all of the deaths were elderly men, the sources added, though more specific information was not immediately available.
Maimonides is not the only hospital seeing an uptick, the sources said.
Mount Sinai’s hospital system — which includes Mount Sinai Brooklyn in nearby Midwood — has also seen the number of new patients admitted with COVID-19 jump to 40 over the last week, up from an average 20 to 25, the sources said.
“As has been reported, there has recently been an increase in the number of patients with COVID-19,” a spokeswoman for Maimonides said in a statement.
“The hospital otherwise declined to comment on the specifics of the story.”
Representatives for Mount Sinai declined to comment.
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The Israeli government slapped restrictions on outgoing flights on Friday as part of a slew of measures to bolster a second virus lockdown imposed last week.
"The arrangement agreed upon enables leaving the country for whoever bought an airplane ticket prior to the beginning of the lockdown, i.e. today, the 25th, at 2:00 p.m.," Transport Minister Miri Regev said in a statement.
"People who buy a ticket beyond then won't be able to use it," she said, noting Israelis would be able to return to the country "without limitations".
From 2:00 p.m. local time, Israel will tighten its second virus lockdown, after the first week failed to bring down the world's highest coronavirus infection rate.
The new rules, which will close workplaces, shutter markets and further limit prayers and demonstrations, had yet to be finalized in parliament just hours before they were due to come into force.
The lockdown already closed schools and imposed restrictions on work and leisure.
Israel has recorded more than 215,000 coronavirus infections and 1,378 deaths, out of a population of nine million, with more than 7,500 new cases on Thursday.
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| Yochanan in Italy |
Yochanan grew up in a haredi home in Jerusalem, but was kicked out of the yeshivah system at a young age. As a result of the violence and abuse he was subjected to by family members, he decided to leave home and live on the streets.
When, not surprisingly, the street failed to provide him with the care and support he was looking for, he took an unusual step: He obtained a passport, put together a little money and with just the clothes on his back left the country forever.
But he abandoned more than his country. In an attempt to "get back" at those who'd hurt him, he decided to leave Judaism and convert to Christianity.
With that in mind, he headed for Italy. After touring the country and taking in the sights, Yochanan wound up at a monastery in the south, on the island of Sicily. The monk in charge welcomed him with open arms, and Yochanan took the following year to immerse himself in Christian teachings. At the end of the year, he decided to return to Israel to be baptized at the Jordan River.
In an act that was part defiance and part wanting to reconnect to his family, Yochanan sent a message to his mother announcing his planned arrival and its purpose. The mother was beside herself with anguish and called Yad L'Achim for help.
The organization understood that Yochanan couldn't be won over in a straightforward conversation on theology, and thought of another way to reach him, with his guard down.
In coordination with his mother, Yad L'Achim sent one of its people to the airport to pick Yochanan up and drive him home to Jerusalem. The driver, who grew up in a Christian family in Europe, trained to become a priest and became a senior missionary in charge of targeting Jews, started an "innocent" conversation with Yochanan.
Where was the young man coming from? Italy. And the purpose of his visit? To be baptized in the Jordan River.
In the casual conversation that ensued, Yad L'Achim's expert succeeded in opening Yochanan's eyes to a series of contradictions in Christian teaching that shook the foundations of what he'd learned over the past year.
By the time they'd reached their destination, the two had developed a relationship and were exchanging phone numbers. Yochanan asked if he could call later that night to continue their talk.
The conversation, which lasted until 5 a.m., probed theological questions and those relating to the meaning of life. By the time it was over, Yochanan had changed his mind about baptism, but still refused to hear anything about reconnecting to Judaism.
A Yad L'Achim staffer who'd heard about Yochanan's painful personal story rallied to the cause, arranging for him to see top psychologists and social workers. After a long process, during which he slowly began to feel acceptance and support, he decided to return to his family and his people.
Yad L'Achim helped him find a respectable job and, as of this past Rosh Chodesh Elul, he began coming nightly to a yeshiva study hall in the Old City of Jerusalem, where he engages in regular Torah study.
A leading Yad L'Achim official observed: "While the story of Yochanan isn't typical, not even for us, it is just one of hundreds of cases of precious Jews we save every year from the clutches of missionary cults operating in Israel. Every instance in which we bring a Jew back to his Father in Heaven moves us and instills in us renewed determination to continue this difficult work against a missionary operation that is extremely well-funded by Christian churches. Every success like this is a literal expression of 'Shuva banim shovavim.' "
These days, Yad L'Achim continues its efforts to save more and more Jewish souls. "These precious souls who have returned to their core, are the best defenders a person can acquire for himself on the Day of Judgment," the official continues.
A new COVID-19 mutation appears to be even more contagious, according to a study — and experts say it could be a response by the virus to defeat masks and other social-distancing efforts.
Scientists in a paper published Wednesday identified a new strain of the virus, which accounted for 99.9 percent of cases during the second wave in the Houston, Texas, area, the Washington Post reported.
The paper, which has not been peer-reviewed, said people with the strain, known as the D614G mutation, had higher loads of virus — suggesting it is more contagious.
Though the strain isn’t more deadly, researchers said it appeared to have adapted better to spread among humans.
David Morens, a virologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the findings suggest that the virus may become more contagious and that this “may have implications for our ability to control it.”
He said it’s possible that the virus had evolved to resist efforts such as hand-washing and social distancing.
“Wearing masks, washing our hands, all those things are barriers to transmissibility, or contagion, but as the virus becomes more contagious, it statistically is better at getting around those barriers,” Morens told the newspaper.
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El Al is trying to prevent the airline’s transfer of control to Eli Rozenberg, who acquired 42.89% of El Al with a $150 million offering at the company’s public offering last week, Globes reported.
El Al is claiming that Eli Rozenberg is a “straw man” acting on behalf of his father, New York-based businessman Kenny Rozenberg, who is not an Israeli citizen. “We will ask you to consider the request for a permit to control El Al,” a lawyer representing El Al’s board of directors wrote in a letter to Defense Minister Benny Gantz, Transportation Minister Miri Regev, and Cyber and National Digital Matters Minister David Amsalem.
Rozenberg has not yet gained official control of El Al as the approval of three government ministers is first required to be transferred to Israel’s Government Companies Authority, as outlined in the Finance Ministry’s bailout plan.
Tami Mozes-Borovitz, the current controlling shareholder of El Al through her family company Knafaim Holdings Ltd., is behind the attempt to prevent the transfer of the beleaguered airline to Rozenberg.
El Al’s new owner Eli Rozenberg “remains shrouded in mystery,” according to Globes. He has not granted any interviews to the media and has reportedly not even met some of the advisors he hired for his newly formed company Kanfei Nesharim Aviation.
“According to the law and El Al’s regulations, control of El Al must always be in the hands of a citizen and resident of Israel,” the letter from El Al to the government ministers states.
“According to the information obtained by El Al, Kanfei Nesharim is a company controlled by American businessman Kenny Rozenberg, who is not a citizen or resident of Israel. In order to circumvent the legislative restrictions, the shares of Kanfei Nesharim are registered in the name of his son, Mr. Eli Rozenberg, a young man of 26 who lacks independent means and business experience, to create the false appearance as if the controlling shareholder is a resident of Israel – so to speak.”
El Al (or more specifically Tami Mozes-Borovitz) clearly would have preferred if the Finance Ministry had allowed for a private placement, which would have enabled the more “friendly” bids of businessmen Meir Gurvitz and David Sapir.
In the letter, El Al requested an urgent meeting with government ministers.
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With less than one day before the hermetic closure of Israel, the number of Corona cases still continues to spike. On Thursday 6,883 new Covid-19 cases were confirmed, and the total number of people to have contracted the virus since March rose significantly to 209,635.
With between 50-60,000 people a day being tested for the disease, the percentage of positive cases still hovers at approximately 10 percent of the total. The current number of active cases in Israel is 59,842, but perhaps more shocking is the breakdown of that number into population centers.
According to the IDF Intelligence’s bureau of information, the capital of Jerusalem has 6,336 sick patients with the virus, while other cities with a large Chareidi population, have a similarly high number of people per capita sick with the disease. In Bnei Brak, there are currently 3,332 people with the disease in a city that has less than a quarter of the population of the capital. Over the last week alone, 1,787 people were confirmed to have contracted the virus in Bnei Brak. Jerusalem’s statistic is equally worrisome, as of the 6,336 some 3,469 of them contracted the virus within the least week.
Beitar Illit has 796 people who currently have the virus, with 571 of them contracting the disease in the last seven days. Modi’in Illit has 1,335 confirmed cases and 818 of them are from the last week. Ashdod, which also has a large Charedi population, has 2,369 confirmed cases, and 1,427 of them came in the last week. As the numbers in the Charedi population and the Muslim population continue to rise, local leaders are struggling to cope.
While the number of active cases is rising across the entire country, and not just in Chareidi or Muslim population centers, the numbers in other locales are far lower for the most part.
