By now the country has become accustomed to the meme about “Florida man.” A recent Google search of “Florida Man headlines” returned 71,300,000 results...

Mosques are a place of community and worship, tenets that are essential to Islam.  Despite the importance, some people are unable to fully participate simply because they cannot get through the doors. 

“I used to live in Italy. My roommate (then) is a broadcaster in Italy, and he showed me the pictures of how they are tracking in their studios now. And he had his mask on,” Gerasole said. “When I went to track that first day, we had some masks, and I said, ‘OK, let’s give it a shot,’ because I don’t know a day later if somebody else has to use the same microphone. I wanted to be as careful as possible. But now that I have this other microphone that I can use, that’s not as necessary as I thought it would be. That was sort of a learning process.”

In Chicago, back in August 2019, federal agencies conducted a mock drill to see how the nation would handle a pandemic, specifically a deadly global outbreak with no known cure. The exercise pointed to a number of national shortcomings, including an insufficient amount of medical supplies. It is called the 'Crimson Contagion 2019 Functional Exercise' and is marked not for distribution.  The New York Times was the first to report and publish it. This was an exercise about the flu, not the coronavirus, but the document points to specific problematic areas for a hypothetical outbreak that, prophetically, begins in China and lands in Chicago. On August 13, in Illinois and 11 states from Arizona to Connecticut, federal, state and local officials began the four-day exercise. The Scenario:  A large-scale outbreak of novel influenza begins in China and quickly spreads, first detected in Chicago in the U.S. and grows to pandemic proportion by human-to-human contact.   Stockpiled vaccines, per the exercise, are not a direct match to contain the virus. Involved in the national test were: 19 federal agencies74 local health departments87 hospitalsAccording to the report, officials at the National Security Council in the White House were briefed during the exercise. Among the key findings: Insufficient federal funding sources for a severe influenza pandemicConfusion on how to apply the Defense Production ActThe current medical supply chain and production capacity could not meet the demandGlobal manufacturing would be unable to meet the domestic demand for personal protective equipment and ancillary suppliesDr. Allison Arwady was intimately involved in the exercise and ratcheted up Chicago’s preparedness as a result. She had no comment on whether the feds took the same actions the city did.  Mayor Lori Lightfoot was blunt in a telephone briefing with reporters. “It is clear to me the federal government will not help us,” she said. “They are not the cavalry.” The Chicago Department of Public Health, the Office of Emergency Management and Communications, as well as the state Health Department and Emergency Management Agency, took part in the exercise. Though both the report and Dr. Arwady commend many federal agencies for working together and devising response strategies, the pandemic exercise predicted dire consequences--110 million illnesses, 7.7 million hospitalizations and 586,000 deaths, all in the U.S. in the absence of a coordinated national response.

Though Trump’s order prohibits border security officials from detaining children separate from their parents, it allows them to be detained together and it’s unclear if families who have already been separated will be reunited. Trump’s critics have been quick to point out these facts.