US lawmakers weighed the costs of reopening the American economy Tuesday, asking the nation’s top health experts if the country has the resources to battle the coronavirus while lifting stay at home restrictions. More than two months into stay-at -home orders,  lawmakers are considering yet another massive aid package to address the economic and public health crises and to get the country running again. VOA’s Congressional correspondent Katherine Gypson has more.
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There is another stunning development in the case of President Donald Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.  The federal judge overseeing the case has put the Justice Department’s move to drop the criminal charges against Flynn on hold to give outside legal experts a chance to argue against the department’s decision.  Judge Emmet Sullivan said late Tuesday that “friends of the court” will be able to file briefs and that he will set up a time to hear those arguments “at the appropriate time.”  Sullivan could decide to call witnesses to testify and answer questions about the Justice Department’s extraordinary move last week to drop the charges against Flynn, and possibly reopen the entire case months before a presidential election.  Flynn pleaded guilty to charges of lying to the FBI about his talks with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. about easing U.S. sanctions during the transition period between the Obama and Trump administrations – a crime that carries a maximum five-year prison sentence.  The charges against Flynn were part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.Former special counsel Robert Mueller, checks pages in the report as he testifies before the House Judiciary Committee hearing on his report on Russian election interference, on Capitol Hill, July 24, 2019 in Washington.Sullivan told Flynn at his 2018 sentencing that lying to the FBI was a “very serious offense.”  Flynn initially said he was guilty, that no one had talked him into admitting his crime and that he had no intention of taking back his plea. But as his sentencing day approached, Flynn appealed to the court for a postponement, claiming that prosecutors set him up.  The Justice Department, led by Attorney General William Barr, shocked and angered the legal community last week when it said the case against Flynn should be dropped. Barr said the lies that Flynn told investigators were immaterial to Mueller’s overall probe.  Others in the Justice Department contended that Flynn never should have been investigated in the first place. The decision opened the floodgates of criticism of Barr and the Justice Department that it is politically motivated and carrying out Trump’s wishes. Barr told CBS that politics had nothing to do with it, saying “A crime cannot be established here. They (the FBI) did not have a basis for a counterintelligence investigation against Flynn at that stage.” There has been no reaction to Sullivan’s decision so far from Barr or the White House. 
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American Jews were targets of more anti-Semitic incidents in 2019 than any other year over the past four decades, a surge marked by deadly attacks on a California synagogue, a Jewish grocery store in New Jersey and a rabbi’s New York home, the Anti-Defamation League reported Tuesday.
The Jewish civil rights group counted 2,107 anti-Semitic incidents in 2019, finding 61 physical assault cases, 1,127 instances of harassment and 919 acts of vandalism. That’s the highest annual tally since the New York City-based group began tracking anti-Semitic incidents in 1979. It also marked a 12% increase over the 1,879 incidents it counted in 2018.
Jonathan Greenblatt, the group’s CEO, attributes last year’s record high to a “normalization of anti-Semitic tropes,” the “charged politics of the day” and social media. This year, he said, the COVID-19 pandemic is fueling  anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
“Anti-Semitism is a virus. It is like a disease, and it persists,” Greenblatt said. “It’s sometimes known as the oldest hatred. It never seems to go away. There truly is no single antidote or cure.”
The ADL’s count of anti-Semitic assaults involved 95 victims. More than half of the assaults occurred in New York City, including 25 in Brooklyn. Eight of those  Brooklyn assaults happened during a span of eight days in December, primarily in neighborhoods where many Orthodox Jews live.
 
“Objects were thrown at victims, antisemitic slurs were shouted, and at least three victims were hit or punched in their heads or faces,” says the report first given exclusively to The Associated Press.
The ADL defines an anti-Semitic assault as “an attempt to inflict physical harm on one or more people who are Jewish or perceived to be Jewish, accompanied by evidence of antisemitic animus.” Three of those 2019 assaults were deadly.
A 20-year-old former nursing student, John T. Earnest, awaits trial on charges he killed a woman and wounded three other people during an attack on Chabad of Poway synagogue near San Diego in April 2019. The gunman told a 911 dispatcher that he shot up the synagogue on the last day of Passover because Jews were trying to “destroy all white people,” according to prosecutors.
Attacks in Jersey City, New Jersey, killed a police detective in a cemetery and three people at a kosher market  in December. Authorities said the attackers, David Anderson and Francine Graham, were motivated by a hatred of Jewish people and law enforcement.
A 37-year-old man, Grafton Thomas, was charged with stabbing five people with a machete at a Hanukkah celebration at a rabbi’s home in Monsey, an Orthodox Jewish community north of New York City. One of the five victims died three months after the Dec. 28 attack. Federal prosecutors said Thomas had handwritten journals containing anti-Semitic comments and a swastika.
The ADL’s report attributed 270 anti-Semitic incidents to extremist groups or individuals. A separate ADL report, released in February, found that 2019 was the sixth deadliest year for violence by all domestic extremists since 1970.
The ADL counted 919 vandalism incidents in 2019, a 19% increase from 774 incidents in 2018.
Two men described by authorities as members of a white supremacist group called The Base were charged with conspiring last year to vandalize synagogues, including Beth Israel Sinai Congregation in Racine, Wisconsin. Even before his synagogue was defaced with swastikas, Rabbi Martyn Adelberg sensed that anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. have been increasing as extremist rhetoric migrates from the internet’s fringes to mainstream platforms.
“It provokes something else, too: an undying outpouring of love,” he said, noting that a crowd of 150 people — at least five times the normal size and consisting mostly of gentiles — attended the first service at the temple after the vandalism. “The support was overwhelming.”
The ADL says it helped authorities identify a suspect accused of plastering white supremacist and anti-Semitic stickers on a display case at Chabad Jewish Center in Ocean City,  Maryland. Rabbi Noam Cohen, the center’s director, said anti-Semitism has ebbed and flowed for centuries. He views the vandalism of his center as an isolated incident, not a sign of growing anti-Semitism.
“Maybe I’m naive, but I hope not,” he said.
The ADL tallied 1,127 harassment incidents last year, a 6% increase over 2018. The group defined these incidents as cases in which at least one Jewish person reported feeling harassed by the perceived anti-Semitic words or actions of another person or group.
The ADL report doesn’t try to fully assess online anti-Semitism, but it does include incidents in which individuals or groups received anti-Semitic content in direct messages, on listservs or in social media settings “where they would have the reasonable expectation to not be subjected to anti-Semitism.”
The ADL counted 171 anti-Semitic incidents last year referencing Israel or Zionism, including five instances in which members of a white supremacist group, Patriot Front, protested outside Israel-aligned organizations to oppose “Zionist influence” over the U.S. government.  
“Although it is not antisemitic to protest Israeli policies, these protests must be considered within the context of this group’s well-documented antisemitic agenda,” the report says.
The ADL says it tries to avoid conflating general criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. “However, Israel-related harassment of groups or individuals may be included when the harassment incorporates established anti-Jewish references, accusations and/or conspiracy theories, or when they demonize American Jews for their support of Israel,” the report says.
 
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Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert, said Tuesday that the coronavirus death toll in the United States is “almost certainly higher” than the reported 80,000 figure and warned of serious consequences if cities and states reopen too quickly.  He told a Senate panel investigating the U.S. response to the pandemic that unaccounted numbers of coronavirus victims, especially in the New York City, have died at home without being officially counted in the national death toll, but declined to speculate how many more.Fauci warned that it is “entirely possible” that the pandemic “could become worse” in the U.S. in the fall months from September to November, but hoped that by then the country “could deal with it” better than it has so far.  President Donald Trump has been prodding businesses and state governors to reopen the world’s biggest economy and all but a few of the country’s 50 governors have issued orders in recent days to allow some stores, restaurants and offices to resume operations on a limited basis if precautions are taken.But Fauci, testifying remotely from his home outside Washington, said there “is a real risk you will trigger an outbreak that you will not be able to control” if government guidelines calling for a steady decline in the number of cases over a two-week period are ignored before there is a return to normal life in the U.S.   “The consequences could be dire,” he said.Sorry, but your browser cannot support embedded video of this type, you can
download this video to view it offline. Embed” />CopyVaccines undergoing trials
Fauci said eight coronavirus vaccines are being developed in the U.S.  “If we are successful,” he said, “we hope to know that in late fall, early winter.”But he said it was “a bit of a bridge too far” for millions of students returning to colleges and schools across the country in August and September to be vaccinated ahead of attending classes again.Trump has said there has been widespread coronavirus testing in the U.S., more than in any other country, although some reports say that the U.S. is not among the top 20 countries in the number of tests administered on a per capita basis.Navy Admiral Brett Giroir, a deputy secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, told the lawmakers that nine million tests for the COVID-19 disease have been administered in the U.S., with more than 1.3 million people testing positively.He said 240 testing sites are now open in the U.S. and that another 12.9 million people will be tested over the next four weeks. He said there will be a marked increase in the number of tests administered in the coming months, possibly 40 million to 50 million per month by September.Chairman Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., shown on a monitor, right, speaks during virtual Senate Committee for Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions hearing, May 12, 2020 on Capitol Hill in Washington.Modified quarantine
Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is in a “modified quarantine” after he came in contact last week with Vice President Mike Pence’s press secretary, Katie Miller, who has tested positive for COVID-19.Three other top U.S. health officials, Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration; Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Giroir all also testified via videoconferencing. The hearing was led by Sen. Lamar Alexander, himself quarantining from his home in Tennessee, halfway across the country from Washington.Redfield said, “We need to stay vigilant. Social distancing (staying two meters apart from other people) remains imperative.”Democrats attack Trump response
The hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee was billed as “COVID-19: Safely Getting Back to Work and Back to School.” But minority Democrats on the Republican-led panel used it as opportunity to attack the Trump administration’s failures to quickly and adequately deal with the spread of the disease as it advanced from China earlier this year.  Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat from the western state of Washington, said, “President Trump has been trying to ignore the facts and experts.”At one point early on this year, Trump assured Americans the disease would soon be gone. Now, more than 80,000 coronavirus deaths have officially been recorded in the U.S. and health experts at the University of Washington are predicting more than 137,000 Americans will die by August.
 
Fauci has often appeared at White House coronavirus briefings alongside Trump, where he has been in the awkward position of having to contradict the chief executive’s rosy projections that the pandemic was under control in the U.S. and that the country could safely resume normal life, with stores, restaurants and businesses reopening.
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Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk has announced from his Twitter account that the company has restarted its northern California factory in defiance of local coronavirus restrictions.In a tweet, Musk said he would be on the assembly line, adding “If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.”Tesla is restarting production today against Alameda County rules. I will be on the line with everyone else. If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 11, 2020The factory apparently had approval by the state to restart, but not Alameda County, where the facility is located. In an interview with the Associated Press, Alameda County Supervisor Scott Haggerty called the move to reopen “disappointing,” saying the health department is still reviewing the situation.Musk has complained about California’s COVID-19 restrictions since they went into effect weeks ago and threatened in recent days to move his plant out of the state.The plant in Fremont employs 10,000 workers and had been closed since March 23 due to orders to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.Early Monday, the parking lot was nearly full at the massive plant and semis were seen driving off loaded with vehicles that may have been produced before the shutdown.Tesla makes all-electric cars and trucks.
 
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