Justice Department Warns Los Angeles Stay-at-Home Extension Could be Illegal

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The U.S. Department of Justice on Friday warned the mayor of Los Angeles and the county’s top health officer that an extension of the coronavirus stay-at-home order may be unlawful.

The vague letter sent to Mayor Eric Garcetti and LA County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer did not spell out any specific violations, but noted concern about statements both had made publicly that restrictions may be prolonged without a vaccine.

“Reports of your recent public statements indicate that you suggested the possibility of long-term lockdown of the residents in the city and county of Los Angeles, regardless of the legal justification for such restrictions,” Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband wrote. “We remain concerned about what may be an arbitrary and heavy-handed approach to continuing stay-at-home requirements.”

Dreiband acknowledged that Garcetti had broad authority to protect residents during the pandemic.

Garcetti said the city would be guided by science and data rather than politics. He said the city’s 7-day average of deaths is holding and he feels confident about measures the city is taking.

“We are not guided by politics,” Garcetti said at a briefing. “There’s no games, there’s nothing else going on, and that’s the way we’re going to continue to safely open.”

“There’s no city in the world that right now doesn’t have some sort of orders and restrictions because we know this virus kills,” Garcetti added.

Even as more of California reopens restaurants and shops, Los Angeles is among a small number of California’s 58 counties that either have not sufficiently contained the virus to reopen more activities and commerce or, in the case of several San Francisco Bay Area counties, have chosen to move more slowly.

The letter came the same day the White House coronavirus response coordinator named the LA region as an area where spread of the virus is a concern. Los Angeles County, with a quarter of the state’s nearly 40 million residents, accounts for nearly half of its COVID-19 cases and about 55% of the state’s more than 3,600 deaths.

Dr. Deborah Birx asked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help look into the source of new cases to help prevent future outbreaks.

For most people, the new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia, and death.

The Justice Department has recently sided with churches that want to resume services in the face of policies in many states that forbid such gatherings until the spread of the virus is under control. The department has intervened in several court cases challenging stay-at-home orders as a violation of the constitutional right to freedom of religion.

President Donald Trump on Friday said churches and other houses of worship are “essential” and called on governors across the country to allow them to reopen this weekend.

https://www.breitbart.com/news/us-warns-los-angeles-stay-at-home-extension-could-be-illegal/

Adam Schiff Asks DNI to Declassify Flynn’s Phone Calls With Russians

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Cal), the House Intelligence Committee chairman sent a letter to Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell asking him to declassify transcripts of Michael Flynn’s phone calls with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and any reports summarizing their calls.

Full text of Adam Schiff letter to Acting DNI Grenell:

The Intelligence Community (“IC”) protects the identities of Americans who are referenced in intelligence obtained from lawful collection against authorized foreign targets that it disseminates to its customers through intelligence reports. IC elements do so by “masking” the U.S. person information in the intelligence report in a manner that protects those U.S. persons’ privacy. U.S. officials who are authorized recipients of these intelligence reports and who are charged with protecting national security may request, through a standardized process and with an appropriate and validated justification, the underlying U.S. person information that has been replaced by a generic descriptor (such as “U.S. person 1 “). The IC elements review those requests to validate the requester’s need to know this sensitive information before releasing that U.S. person information to the requester.

As you must now be aware, authorized U.S. officials make these requests so they can better understand specific intelligence reports and properly evaluate threats to our national security. The established procedures for doing so safeguard the privacy of Americans, while at the same time enabling U.S. officials to protect national security by requesting the U.S. person information that reveals who may be in harm’s way, who may be engaged in acts that threaten the country, or who, wittingly or unwittingly, may be acting to further the interests of foreign adversaries and, therefore, pose a counterintelligence risk or threat.

In late 2016 and early 2017, as the scope of Russia’s sweeping and systemic interference in our election was coming into focus, dozens of officials from across the U.S. government were briefed on intelligence reports on foreign actors that contained masked U.S. person information. As the list you declassified shows, these officials, either directly or through their IC briefers, submitted requests to understand who the U.S. person or persons were who were referenced in these reports on foreign targets. The masked U.S. persons referenced in these reports were revealed to be Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Michael Flynn, who served as an advisor to candidate and then President-elect Donald Trump–even as Lt. Gen. Flynn was working as an unregistered agent of a foreign government seeking to influence U.S. policy through at least mid-November 2016. National Security Agency (“NSA”) Director General Paul Nakasone’s May 4, 2020 response to your request, which you declassified, confirmed that each of the U.S. officials who requested the masked U.S. person information was “an authorized recipient of the original report” and the requests to reveal the masked U.S. person information were “approved through NSA’s standard process, which includes a review of the justification for the request.”

https://saraacarter.com/adam-schiff-asks-dni-to-declassify-flynns-phone-calls-with-russian/

Human Psychology: Mass Media Defines Reality

Why do people fear sickness but not poverty or starvation?

Because the media doesn't talk about the latter.

Why media cartels need to be broken up.

It is amazing how easily people slid down the Maslow pyramid.

Freedom, dignity, even prosperity are not needed. People are ready to die of hunger, as long as they don't get sick with the Covid.

Fear has a completely interior, animal character.

In fact, this fear is even stronger than the fear of death, since death from starvation seems preferable to infection with Covid (which leads to death in a small minority of cases).

And why? Because death from starvation, like death from other diseases, is not in the media. Therefore, it does not exist. The specifics of the information age of society: that which is not in the media does not exist.

And, inversely, there is only what is in the media.

And it turns out to be a paradox: modern media technologies manipulate the ancient basic instinct - the fear of death.

Moreover, at such a level that the instinct of self-preservation is suppressed.

Why is the instinct of self-preservation suppressed? Because, having agreed to sacrifice freedom, dignity and the right to life (because one cannot live without yum-yum), mankind got on a train with a one-way ticket to hell.

For each person, the train's speed and number of stops at stations along the way can vary, but the final destination is clear.

At one time, Winston Churchill said: "Choosing between dishonor and war, we chose dishonor. In the end, we got both."

So here we have the same thing: we chose a complete waiver of rights in exchange for protection from the Covid.

Covid is not going anywhere.

But we have no more rights and never will.

Because now, in order to get the rights back, they need to be won.

It will be a long and hard war.

But not for those people who have drained all their rights at the click of a finger.

https://www.henrymakow.com/2020/05/mass-media-defines-reality.html

Protests against Netanyahu to take place across Israel

The Black Flag movement is planning on having dozens of buses and a chain of cars surround Netanyahu's official residence with the slogan “the man indicted for corruption is not my prime minister."

Demonstrations will take place all over the country on Sunday, protesting the beginning of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s corruption trial, as well as the formation of an Alternate Prime Minister’s Office for Blue and White leader Benny Gantz at Sunday morning’s cabinet meeting.

The opposition Yesh Atid party will organize protests at dozens of junctions across the country under the banner: “Corrupt and Disconnected – We are sick of you.”

The Black flag movement is planning on having dozens of busses and a chain of cars surround Netanyahu’s official residence with the slogan “The man indicted for corruption is not my prime minister.”

“It will be a sad day for the State of Israel,” Labor MK Merav Michaeli said. “The prime minister of Israel will stand trial for harsh crimes of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. Instead of quitting, Netanyahu is dragging the country down with him, destroying our legal institutions along the way and encouraging harm to anyone who dealt with his cases.”

Michaeli said she blamed the leaders of her own political camp for not doing enough to ensure that Netanyahu would be replaced, and added that she would come to court as a private citizen.

“This makes it a double tragedy,” she said.

A coalition of groups on both sides of the political map will hold demonstrations outside the Jerusalem District Court, supporting and opposing Netanyahu.

Several ministers and MKs will join Netanyahu at the court, including Likud ministers Amir Ohana, Miri Regev and Tzachi Hanegbi.

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/protests-planned-nationwide-against-netanyahu-629064