New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo took to morning TV shows Tuesday to push back against President Donald Trump’s claim of “total” authority to reopen the nation’s virus-stalled economy, noting that a president is not an absolute monarch. “We don’t have a king,” Cuomo said on NBC’s “Today. “We have a president. That was a big decision. We ran away from having a king, and George Washington was president, not King Washington. So the president doesn’t have total authority.” The Democratic governor, whose state has become the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, was reacting to Trump’s assertion Monday that “when somebody is president of the United States, the authority is total.” “Nope,” Cuomo said.

Former President Barack Obama will endorse Joe Biden on Tuesday, multiple news outlets are reporting. Obama will make the endorsement of his former vice president in a video message, offering why he believes Biden is the candidate needed at this moment of crisis in America. The endorsement reunites the former running mates and positions Obama, whose endorsement of Biden was seen as a forgone conclusion once Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race last week, to be one of Biden’s most powerful surrogates in the race against President Donald Trump. It also marks the public re-emergence of Obama into the political arena. The former president kept a low public profile throughout much of the Democratic nomination fight, but he was active behind the scenes.

YWN regrets to inform you of the Petira of Morah Rochel (Felice) Blau A”H. Morah Blau, who helped found BYA elementary school, was an Ishah Chashuvah who always greeted everyone with a sever panim yafos, and שם ה’ היה שגור בפיה. In her capacity as principal, she used her talents as a songwriter (most notably of the well-known song about Sarah Schenirer), playwright, and artist. Her innovations have been implemented in schools throughout the Jewish community. Morah Blau A”H has been an icon in Chinuch Habonos in Brooklyn and beyond. There are Moros throughout the world today that have been trained by Morah Blau, widening her legacy. Generations of mothers have been taught by Morah Blau. And in BYA today, she was the much admired Principal of the current talmidos.

Mazel Dalel, 53, a Beit Shemesh mother of 9 with no preexisting medical conditions passed away from the coronavirus on Shabbos. Dalel, a resident of the Kiryah HaChareidit in Beit Shemesh was hospitalized in Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem after contracting the coronavirus. The hospital stated that “she was attached to a ventilator and sedated for over a week in serious condition. Her condition quickly deteriorated and she passed away on Shabbos. We share in the sorrow of the family.” The nifteres left behind her husband R’ Yoel Dalel and nine children. “It’s an unfathomable tragedy,” one of Dalel’s neighbors told Kikar H’Shabbos. “She left behind nine young orphans and her husband, one of the chashuve avreichim in the city, Rav Yoel.

As New York City deals with a mounting coronavirus death toll and dwindling morgue space, the city has shortened the amount of time it will hold unclaimed remains before they are buried in the city’s public cemetery. Under the new policy, the medical examiner’s office will keep bodies in storage for just 14 days before they’re buried in the city’s potter’s field on Hart Island. Normally, about 25 bodies a week are interred on the island, mostly for people whose families can’t afford a funeral, or who go unclaimed by relatives. In recent days, though, burial operations have increased from one day a week to five days a week, with around 24 burials each day, said Department of Correction spokesman Jason Kersten.

The coronavirus crisis is taxing New York City’s 911 system like never before. Operators pick up a new call every 15.5 seconds. Panicked voices tell of loved ones in declining health. There are multitudes of cardiac arrests and respiratory failures and others who call needing reassurance that a mere sneeze isn’t a sign they’ve been infected. The system is so overwhelmed, the city has started sending text and tweet alerts urging people to only call 911 “for life-threatening emergencies.” As the city staggered through its deadliest week of the pandemic, its emergency response system and army of operators, dispatchers and ambulance crews were pushed to the brink.

The worldwide death toll from the coronavirus surged past 100,000 Friday as the epidemic in the U.S. cut a widening swath through not just New York City but the entire three-state metropolitan area of 20 million people connected by a tangle of subways, trains and buses. In the bedroom communities across the Hudson River in New Jersey, to the east on Long Island and north to Connecticut, officials were recording some of the worst outbreaks in the country, even as public health authorities expressed optimism that the pace of infections appeared to be slowing. As of Friday, the New York metropolitan area accounted for more than half the nation’s over 18,500 deaths, with other hot spots in places such as Detroit, Louisiana and Washington, D.C.

On Sunday evening, both Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and President Ruvi Rivlin condemned what they called “incitement” against the Chareidi community that had been taking place over the coronavirus outbreak as of late. One anchor on Channel 12 news openly bashed the Chareidi community claiming that the majority of them are against the state and its laws. Netanyahu responded “I strongly condemn the rampant incitement against the Chareidi public, which internalized the danger and the instructions of the Health Ministry,” Netanyahu stated Sunday. “The coronavirus epidemic does not distinguish between Chareidi and secular, between Arabs and Jews. Neither do we. This war is all of ours. Together we will defeat it.

On Sunday evening Interior Minister Aryeh Deri said that a general curfew will be imposed across the entire country of Israel without exception on Seder night, which falls on Wednesday this week. The impetus behind the curfew is an effort to curb Israelis visiting family and friends as a part of the holiday and keep up the national struggle against the coronavirus. “‘The public has to prepare for this scenario,” Deri said during an interview with Channel 12 News. “Those who go out during the holiday in the evening will have to obey the police and return to their homes.” (YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)

As an emergency medicine physician in New York City, Dr. Kamini Doobay has always known that death is part of the territory when trying to care for the city’s sickest. But it hasn’t always been like this — patients hit the hardest by the coronavirus, struggling to breathe and on ventilators, with no visitors allowed […]
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