Saturday, April 25, 2020

In the news, Friday, April 17, 2020


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APR 16      INDEX      APR 18
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from Church Times
Newspaper in London, United Kingdom

Nicholas Cranfield on Rome’s quincentenary tribute to Raphael
RAPHAEL was born in Urbino on Good Friday 1483; he died in the Vatican on his 37th birthday: 6 April, Good Friday (1520), causing the pope of the day to exclaim that no greater silence had fallen upon earth since the death of Jesus on the cross.

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from Conciliar Post

Opportunities for meditation on the nature of God’s being often present themselves in surprising places. For example, on Holy Wednesday, I was in a Zoom class at my progressive, mainline Protestant seminary, and were discussing accessibility for disabled people in the Church. In the course of this discussion a classmate of mine posited the idea that, because God is “super able,” our theology can easily tend to exclude people with disabilities. He then followed up with: “But Holy Week reminds us that we worship a God who is weak and who suffers. Those who are weak can see themselves in God.” While I understand and appreciate this pastoral impulse, these statements testify to just how far we have wandered from the Christian metaphysic that our fathers took for granted. While a suffering God may be more “inclusive,” such a god would never be someone who could save us. Only a God who cannot suffer could save us on the Cross. The classmate in question is intelligent and well-meaning; I bring the issue up not to disparage him, but to illustrate just how watered down our contemporary theological discourse about the divine attributes has become. My classmate is by no means the first person to make such a statement; at some point in the last five hundred years or so, many Christians have come to believe that God is merely a being that is “like us, but more.” As Barth famously and prophetically wrote, “One cannot speak of God simply by speaking of man in a loud voice.” But that is exactly what we have done. We assume that, because we suffer, God must also suffer if we are to “see ourselves” in God. 

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from Forbes

IRS Confirms That Vets Who Receive Benefits Will Automatically Get Stimulus Checks

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from The Guardian (UK)
LEFT-CENTER, HIGH, British daily newspaper published in London UK

The rightwing groups behind wave of protests against Covid-19 restrictions
Awave of planned anti-lockdown demonstrations that have broken out around the country to protest against the efforts of state governments to combat the coronavirus pandemic with business closures and stay-at-home orders have included far-right groups as well as more mainstream Republicans. While protesters in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and other states claim to speak for ordinary citizens, many are also supported by street-fighting rightwing groups like the Proud Boys, conservative armed militia groups, religious fundamentalists, anti-vaccination groups and other elements of the radical right.

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from Hoover Institution
Nonprofit Organization in Stanford, California

History: Our Own Past
When we think of history, we tend to think of the dim past before our memories. Thus, it is a knowledge acquired from history books, documents, archeology, inscriptions, and a myriad of other sources. There is, however, another history and that is our own past: the details and memories that we have picked up as we have aged over the years. Those that we have acquired from our earliest years are episodic and lack a clarity that incidents in our more recent days possess. Nevertheless, such early memories can be of use in understanding the present.

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from KIRO 7 Eyewitness News (CBS Seattle)

Breakthrough COVID-19 antibody test with nearly 100% accuracy can help reopen economy
The UW Medicine Virology Lab is one of the first in the country to get a new Abbott test that checks your blood for a special COVID-19 antibody. “This is an important, new type of testing that we haven’t had access to before,” said Keith Jerome, the director of the UW Medicine. The lab said since Abbott developed the new antibody test, UW researchers have been working 24/7 to verify the test’s effectiveness. Scientists said Friday they found the test can determine if someone had COVID with nearly 100% accuracy. ... “Within just a couple of weeks, we’ll be able to do 12,000 to 14,000 a day. And this starts to get the point where we can make a difference in the population of our area, get people back to work,” Jerome said.

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from KREM 2 News (CBS Spokane)

You could get a $2,000 per month stimulus check under proposed bill
Two House Democrats behind the proposal say the one-time, $1,200 check on its way to Americans isn't going to be enough as unemployment skyrockets amid the pandemic.
Two House Democrats have introduced legislation to give millions of Americans $2,000 per month during the coronavirus pandemic. The proposal comes as tens of millions await their one-time check from the CARES Act, which was passed last month. Many of those people have ended up in the unemployment line in the past three weeks. The new bill, named the Emergency Money for the People Act, is being introduced by Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif. Ryan said the plan provides a chance to examine programs like universal basic income.

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from POLITICO
LEAST BIASED, HIGH, news and opinion website in Arlington, Virginia

Dutch far-right leader Baudet had ties to Russia, report says
The Dutch far-right politician who led a campaign against a deal to strengthen ties between the EU and Ukraine sent WhatsApp messages that appear to show he was paid by a Russian with ties to Vladimir Putin, according to a TV investigation. Dutch investigative TV program Zembla said Thierry Baudet, leader of the anti-EU, anti-immigrant Forum for Democracy (FvD) party, sent messages to a colleague about Vladimir Kornilov — who, according to a New York Times article from 2017, has ties to the Kremlin — ahead of a 2016 referendum on a deal with Ukraine. In his messages, Baudet described Kornilov as "a Russian who works for Putin." Kornilov denies having ties to the Kremlin.

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from Smithsonian Magazine
Media/News Company in Washington, D.C.

The “lost” apples will help restore genetic, culinary diversity to a crop North America once produced in astonishing variety. A dizzying 17,000 named apple varieties once decorated orchards in North America. Most of those strains are now extinct, and today, just 15 varieties account for 90 percent of the United States’ apple production. In the Pacific Northwest, however, a team of retirees has rediscovered ten apple varieties once thought to be lost forever. The ten types of apples represent the most Washington state nonprofit the Lost Apple Project has ever found in a single season, reports Gillian Flaccus for the Associated Press. The newly revived varieties were collected last fall and identified by botanists at Oregon-based nonprofit the Temperate Orchard Conservancy (TOC).

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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

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