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Employees need masks even for at-home Zoom calls, Wisconsin agency says. Here’s why

In an email to employees sent out on July 31, the head of Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources not only reminded employees of Gov. Tony Evers’ mask order going into effect on Aug. 1, he also said that every DNR employee must wear a mask … even while on a teleconference.

“Also, wear your mask, even if you are home, to participate in a virtual meeting that involves being seen — such as on Zoom or another video-conferencing platform — by non-DNR staff,” Preston Cole said, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “Set the safety example which shows you as a DNR public service employee care about the safety and health of others.”

Evers’ executive order said that face coverings are required to be worn whenever a person is in an enclosed space — other than a private residence.

DNR spokeswoman Megan Sheridan spoke with McClatchy News and said that employees wearing masks while video conferencing with external partners sets a good example during the pandemic.

“By wearing a mask while video conferencing with the general public, we visually remind folks that masking is an important part of navigating the business of natural resources during this tumultuous time,” Sheridan said.

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AS SAN FRANCISCO DISTRICT ATTORNEY, KAMALA HARRIS’S OFFICE STOPPED COOPERATING WITH VICTIMS OF CATHOLIC CHURCH CHILD ABUSE

Fighting on behalf of victims of sexual abuse, particularly children, has been central to Harris’s political identity for the better part of three decades. Harris specialized in prosecuting sex crimes and child exploitation as a young prosecutor just out of law school. She later touted her record on child sexual abuse cases and prosecuting pedophiles in television advertisements, splashy profiles, and on the trail as she campaigned for public office.

But when it came to taking on the Catholic Church, survivors of clergy sexual abuse say that Harris turned a blind eye, refusing to take action against clergy members accused of sexually abusing children when it meant confronting one of the city’s most powerful political institutions.

When Harris became San Francisco district attorney in 2004, she took over an office that had been working closely with survivors of sexual abuse to pursue cases against the Catholic Church. The office and the survivors were in the middle of a legal battle to hold predatory priests accountable, and Harris inherited a collection of personnel files involving allegations of sexual abuse by priests and employees of the San Francisco Archdiocese, which oversees church operations in San Francisco, and Marin and San Mateo counties

The files had been compiled by investigators working under the direction of Terence Hallinan, the radical district attorney who Harris ousted in a contentious election campaign. Hallinan’s team had prosecuted cases of abuse that had occurred decades earlier and had gathered evidence as part of a probe into widespread clergy sexual misconduct.

Just six months before Harris took office, a U.S. Supreme Court decision overturned a California law that had retroactively eliminated the statute of limitations for criminal prosecution of child molestation cases. That shifted the focus to holding predators among the clergy accountable through civil cases and through a broader effort to bring attention to predators who had been shielded by the church.

Hallinan believed that the clergy abuse files were a matter of public record; Harris refused to release them to the public.

In her seven years as district attorney, Harris’s office did not proactively assist in civil cases against clergy sex abuse and ignored requests by activists and survivors to access the cache of investigative files that could have helped them secure justice, according to several victims of clergy sex abuse living in California who spoke to The Intercept.

“It went from Terence Hallinan going hundred miles an hour, full speed ahead, after the Catholic Church to Kamala Harris doing absolutely nothing and taking it backwards hundred miles an hour,” said Joey Piscitelli, a sexual assault survivor, who a jury found had been molested as a student while attending Salesian College Preparatory, a Catholic high school in Richmond, California.

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Business is booming for NYC psychics amid COVID-19 pandemic

While storefronts are going bust across the Big Apple due to the coronavirus pandemic, New York’s psychics and fortune-tellers say they are seeing more clients — and making more money — than ever before.

Unlike most businesses, they thrive in times of uncertainty and despair.

“When there’s a big change in the world, or more uncertainty in the world, that is when people look for more certainty,” psychic Betsy LeFae told The Post. “Everyone now wants more certainty, and yes – that is when people tend to turn to psychics.

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Mississippi Coroner Says State’s Coronavirus Death Tally Is Misleading, Causing ‘Unnecessary Fear In The Public’

AMississippi county coroner said his state’s death count from coronavirus could be incorrect, telling residents that possible misreporting has led to “unnecessary fear in the public.”

Joshua Pounder, the coroner for DeSoto County in northwest Mississippi, wrote on his Facebook page Thursday night a breakdown of all causes of death in the county in July. He said he felt compelled to act because of the “many facebook google experts and politicians with politically driven agendas driven by money reporting information that is twisted and false to the public.”

The post, which has since garnered nearly 3,000 shares, described what Pounder called an “average month in Desoto county,” despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The coroner’s office recently completed reports for 144 deaths in July, Pounder wrote.

Pounder attributed the highest number of deaths to heart conditions, lung or vascular diseases and strokes, with 67 reported deaths. Pounder wrote that cancer was the second-highest, causing 30 reported deaths in the county.

Of the 11 causes of death Pounder listed, coronavirus was not among them. Instead, the 24 DeSoto County residents who had a positive COVID-19 test at the time of their death were included in the count of total deaths and attributed to causes other than the novel coronavirus, Pounder said.

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Hasbro Recalls Toy With Secret Button on ‘Private Area’ That Makes Doll ‘Gasp and Giggle’

A “Troll” doll made by Hasbro was revealed to carry a secret button on its “private parts” that made the children’s doll “gasp and giggle” when pressed. The revelation of the button and its inappropriate sexual connotations sparked a social media firestorm and a Change.org petition that has amassed nearly half a million e-signatures.

The “Trolls World Tour Giggle and Sing Poppy” doll was exposed across social media, accumulating tens of thousands of engagements. The question “Is @Hasbro normalizing grooming & facilitating child abuse?” was asked in one tweet that showed a video of a disgruntled mother showcasing the doll.

The narrator to the video exposing the doll’s button began by saying: “I wanted to do a quick video because I find this disturbing, and I find it something that needs to be shared.

“As you all know, stuff that has been going on in the world about the sex trafficking in kids and the stuff that is thrown in our kids’ faces to kinda groom them, and make them kind of a little bit more oblivious to things that are really happening.”

The narrator goes onto explain: “It was my daughter’s birthday a couple of days ago and she turned two. And she was given this gift: a little Poppy doll–it is adorable.”

She then goes onto outline the features of the doll, including the 10 phrases and sounds that the doll makes when a button on its belly is pressed, but no mention of the button in the doll’s intimate parts under her skirt.

The woman filming touches the doll’s belly to demonstrate the promised feature on the box, causing the doll to sing. She then reveals a button on the doll’s “private” area that makes a “gasping sound” when pressed, before reiterating the lack of any mention of the “private” button on the box.

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Without ‘Much More Aggressive Shutdowns,’ The New York Times Warns, COVID-19 Could Kill ‘Well Over a Million’ Americans

Without “much more aggressive shutdowns,” a New York Times editorial warns, “well over a million” Americans “may ultimately die” from COVID-19. The paper does not cite a source for that estimate, which seems highly implausible based on the death toll so far, projections for the next few months, the gap between total infections and confirmed cases, and a crude case fatality rate that continues to fall.

Independent data scientist Youyang Gu, who has a good track record of predicting COVID-19 fatalities, is currently projecting about 231,000 deaths in the United States by November 1. The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation projects 295,000 deaths by December 1. Assuming those projections prove to be about right, the Times is predicting that the death toll will quadruple during the months before an effective vaccine can be deployed, which might happen early next year.

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