BS”D ​ BEIT SHEMESH GIRL NEEDS HELP! Rav Chaim Kanievsky shlit”a gave his bracha for this campaign on 21 Kislev 5780 / Dec 19, 2019 “What Can WE GIVE YOU Precious Maayan? Anything up to Half the Kingdom!””If I find favor in the King’s eyes, Please Keep my Critical Care Nurse!”PLEASE OPEN YOUR HANDS GENEROUSLY ON PURIM! (“…anyone who holds out their hand, you shall give to them”-Laws of Megillah 2:16) ​ What do you do when your child is GASPING FOR AIR?Maayan is 11. She could be learning Chumash, baking cookies with her siblings and hanging out with her friends.But Maayan’s life is filled with machines, medications, seizures, and daily life or death episodes which require 24 HOUR monitoring.

Expressing alarm both about mounting infections and slow government responses, the World Health Organization declared Wednesday that the global coronavirus crisis is now a pandemic but also said it’s not too late for countries to act. By reversing course and using the charged word “pandemic” that it had previously shied away from, the U.N. health agency appeared to want to shock lethargic countries into pulling out all the stops. “We have called every day for countries to take urgent and aggressive action. We have rung the alarm bell loud and clear,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO chief. “All countries can still change the course of this pandemic. If countries detect, test, treat, isolate, trace and mobilize their people in the response,” he said.

The 2020 census is off and running for much of America now. The U.S. Census Bureau made a soft launch of the 2020 census website on Monday, making its form available online. On Thursday, the Census Bureau will begin mailing out notices far and wide. For the bureau, the once-a-decade head count is akin to running a sprint and marathon at the same time. It takes awhile, but there’s plenty of action throughout. “It is that intense … counting up to 330 million people in a very diverse, very mobile population, and over 140 million housing units,” Stephen Buckner, a senior Census Bureau executive, said during a recent visit to Miami. The bureau had an official in-person launch in January in Toksook Bay, Alaska.

The Washington Post is encouraging its staff to work at home and the Los Angeles Times is restricting air travel, two illustrations of how news organizations compelled to cover the coronavirus outbreak are balancing the need to keep employees safe. Both of those directives went out in memos to staff members on Tuesday. CNN also said that, as of now, its planned Democratic presidential debate Sunday between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders is on. Washington Post Publisher and CEO Fred Ryan said the Post was encouraging, but not mandating, telecommuting for newsroom personnel if their jobs or needs for equipment permitted it. The policy is in place at least through the end of the month.

It was supposed to be a bipartisan moment for the Senate. But now a sweeping energy package touted as a “down payment” on fighting climate change is falling apart amid a push to limit coolants used in air conditioners and refrigerators. The energy legislation would boost efficiency and authorize billions of dollars to develop a wide range of clean energy options to limit greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming. The measure also would enhance grid security and support efforts to capture and remove carbon emissions from coal and natural gas plants.

President Donald Trump’s proposed payroll tax break met with bipartisan resistance Tuesday on Capitol Hill as pressure mounts on the administration and Congress to work more vigorously to contain the coronavirus outbreak and respond to the financial fallout. Flanked by his economic team, Trump pitched his economic stimulus ideas privately to wary Senate Republicans on another grueling day in the struggle against expanding infections. Fluctuating stock markets rebounded but communities discovered new cases and the two top Democratic presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, canceled Tuesday primary night rallies in Ohio.

The Justice Department must give Congress secret grand jury testimony from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday, giving the House a significant win in a separation-of-powers clash with the Trump administration. The three-judge panel said in a 2-1 opinion that the House Judiciary Committee’s need for the material in its investigations of President Donald Trump outweighed the Justice Department’s interests in keeping the testimony secret. The opinion authorizes access to information that Democrats have sought since the conclusion of Mueller’s investigation, enabling lawmakers to review previously-undisclosed details from the two-year Russia probe.

The government has a palette of options it can use to shore up an economy imperiled by anxiety over the coronavirus outbreak. They start with the “middle-class” payroll tax cut that President Donald Trump is suggesting and include quicker, more targeted federal aid as well. But the options could come with pitfalls and may raise unrealistic expectations. The White House and Congress have started wrangling over measures to spark the wounded economy, as fear around COVID-19 has threatened to tip it into recession. The crisis of confidence over the virus, with more than 118,000 people stricken worldwide and 29 deaths in the U.S., is keeping American consumers — the spending engine of the economy — away from public places like shopping malls, grocery stores and movie theaters.

Is it the flu, a cold or the new coronavirus? Patients and doctors alike are parsing signs of illness to figure out who needs what tests or care and how worried they should be. “You have three different major viruses floating around at the same time,” causing somewhat similar symptoms — but different levels of concern, said Dr. Gary LeRoy, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians. So what’s the biggest danger? And why are we responding to them so differently? FAMILIAR FOE COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, is a flu-like illness that has killed a small fraction of the number of people that the flu kills every year. Through the first four months of the outbreak, coronavirus has killed about 4,300 people.

New York’s governor announced Tuesday he is sending the National Guard to help clean public spaces and deliver food in a New York City suburb that is at the center of the nation’s biggest known cluster of coronavirus cases, as the battle against the U.S. outbreak intensified. The move came as health authorities contended with alarming bunches of infections on both coasts and scattered cases in between. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said three schools and other gathering places will be shut down for two weeks in a containment zone in New Rochelle, the epicenter of an outbreak of more than 100 cases. The zone will extend a mile in all directions from a synagogue connected to some of the infections, officials said. The troops will help scrub public places and feed people quarantined at home.