The Department of Justice is remaining vigilant in detecting, investigating, and prosecuting wrongdoing related to the crisis. In a memo to U.S. Attorneys, Attorney General Barr said, “The pandemic is dangerous enough without wrongdoers seeking to profit from public panic and this sort of conduct cannot be tolerated.”
Be aware that criminals are attempting to exploit COVID-19 worldwide through a variety of scams. There have been reports of:
• Individuals and businesses selling fake cures for COVID-19 online and engaging in other forms of fraud. • Phishing emails from entities posing as the World Health Organization or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. • Malicious websites and apps that appear to share virus-related information to gain and lock access to your devices until payment is received. • Seeking donations fraudulently for illegitimate or non-existent charitable organizations.
Criminals will likely continue to use new methods to exploit COVID-19 worldwide.
If you think you are a victim of a scam or attempted fraud involving COVID-19, you can report it without leaving your home though a number of platforms. Go to:
The Department is also committed to preventing hoarding and price gouging for critical supplies during this crisis. To combat this misconduct, the President issued an Executive Order pursuant to section 102 of the Defense Production Act, which prohibits hoarding of designated items, and Attorney General Barr has now created the COVID-19 Hoarding and Price Gouging Task Force. In a memo to U.S. Attorneys, Attorney General Barr said, “we will aggressively pursue bad actors who amass critical supplies either far beyond what they could use or for the purpose of profiteering. Scarce medical supplies need to be going to hospitals for immediate use in care, not to warehouses for later overcharging.” The Secretary of HHS has issued a Notice designating categories of health and medical supplies that must not be hoarded or sold for exorbitant prices.
If you have information on hoarding or price gouging of critical supplies, you can report it without leaving your home to the National Center for Disaster Fraud by calling the National Hotline at (866) 720-5721 or by e-mailing disaster@leo.gov
Editor’s Note: We interviewed Mikaela Bernhardt, a Bay Area college graduate who, in addition to her position as a landscape designer, has been making Challah for hospital workers attending to CoronaVirus patients.
Could you give us a background for your ‘personal style’ Challah Loaves project?
Mikaela: “Challah has an extremely long and evolving history. Jewish people all around the world have been eating this bread since the 15th century (and probably before then). It is Jewish braided bread eaten on the Sabbath and has many religious and spiritual meanings. It is a time to reflect on the week, relax as a community while enjoying a meal together, and slow down to appreciate the world and our lives. Challah is covered with a special cloth and a prayer is said about how we are thankful to have made it through another week and how special it is to have foods to eat.”
“Challah is usually made with three strands braided together into a long loaf. But they may have anywhere from 2 to 6 strands braided to symbolize love appearing to look like intertwined arms. On High Holidays, the bread is made into a circular shape which holds several meanings: continuity and interconnected upward progress. I felt these meanings were appropriate for this challenging time … and let’s be honest, this round style is a lot faster to make compared to the longer braided style.”
Have you made personal contact with any of the recipients and received a reaction to your gift?
Mikaela: I have only heard from two contacts I have with these hospitals. They are so grateful and think that it’s a great contribution. It was noted how appreciated my note about using tongs and how each of them are individually wrapped, making people more comfortable about taking and eating.
Mikaela’s note, above, attached to the bread reads: “Thank you for coming to work today; You are a true hero. Once this came out of the oven, it was handled only with tongs as it went into the bag.”) Photo with permission of Mikaela Bernhardt …
Are you delivering the challah to the hospital yourself?
Mikaela: No, I have a friend whose parents work at a few different hospitals throughout the Bay Area and a neighbor who works at another Bay Area hospital. I have coordinated with them to deliver the loaves to their doorstep for staff rooms of ICU and ER units. As I continue this work, others are starting to reach about connecting me to other health care workers to donate to.
When did you start baking … and do you have any others helping you with this effort?
Mikaela: I have always loved baking since a very young age. I started baking challah in college wanting to make friends while doing something of good for the world and learned about the organization Challah for Hunger. I was active with Challah for Hunger’s UC Davis chapter from the first day of college to the last day of my college career. Challah for Hunger‘s mission is to fight hunger globally and locally. There are chapters all across the world who bake bread every week. Each chapter sells the bread and donates half of their proceeds to a globally based organization called Mazon, a Jewish response to hunger and a local organization of their choice. The Davis chapter continues to donate to the Yolo County Food bank. Loaves are sold for $5 each.
I learned so many and and valuable lessons during my time with Challah For Hunger Davis. When I was involved we would bake and sell 50-100 loaves a week; multiply that by four years of my participation. Each week it was a deed accomplished with my community and it added up to thousands of dollars of donations to important causes.
When this global pandemic started ramping up I was happy to donate money to causes while working from home, but I truly wanted to do something more. These health care workers need to have a moment of acknowledgment and being honored; what better way to do this than through a delicious and filling snack made with love? This effort is something I look forward to doing every weekend. It has also turned into a family bonding activity during this time. I am leading the effort but without my parents help this would not be possible!
I hope this email finds you safe and healthy at home. Since we announced our decision to close the Museum a mere three weeks ago, the world around us has become unrecognizable. Protecting our staff, volunteers, and visitors remains our first priority, and keeping the Museum closed and our staff at home is crucial to fighting the coronavirus pandemic. These are unprecedented and challenging times for all of us, still The Met is not just a place that you can visit, but has many other ways to engage its audience. Despite the uncertainty we all face, I want to share with you some of the remarkable stories of how The Met community, like everyone around the world, has been thinking about how we can meaningfully contribute to the effort to stem the spread of COVID-19, aid those in distress, remain an active, vibrant, and accessible institution, and continue to plan thoughtfully for the future.
Our robust emergency plan is reliant on the dedication of a group of essential staff who are still reporting to work onsite, maintaining our infrastructure and checking on the condition of the art. One of the privileges of being Director is that I have been able to come to the Museum periodically, and I have personally witnessed the heroic work of teams from Security, Buildings, Custodial, Pest Management, Construction, and the Collections Care group, among others. Please join me in thanking them for their dedication and outstanding efforts.
The mornings that I walk through the empty Great Hall, where even the famous flowers are gone for now (although Kent Monkman’s majestic paintings are there to keep me company), I think about how we cannot wait to welcome visitors and staff back to the Museum — once it is safe again. But I am heartened that even though our physical spaces are closed, The Met’s mission in our new shared reality remains the same, and that we have many ways to engage our audiences even during this time of closure. We know that art has the power to provide joy and comfort, foster understanding and compassion, and enlighten our lives, especially in the most difficult circumstances.
After we ensured that our people and our collections were safe, we began working creatively to bring The Met collection, our digital content, and our staff expertise into people’s homes around the world. The Digital, Social Media, and Education teams have led these efforts, which we are calling #MetAnywhere, and we invite you to experience all that The Met has to offer, no matter where you are right now. Let me highlight a few of those activities:
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Visitors can explore our completely remodeled website metmuseum.org to find a broad range of engaging resources, including Primers on many of our exhibitions (e.g. the recently opened British Galleries), the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, educational materials for teachers, students, and families, and much more. I spent some time the other night in the section on early histories of photography in West Africa (1860–1910), which I encourage you to read.
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We are using our website, Facebook, and YouTube to share live streams and exclusive videos. Tonight, Friday, April 3, at 7 p.m., you can watch a recording of The Mother of Us All, a groundbreaking American opera that was performed at The Met earlier this year. Next Saturday, we will also have the exclusive digital premiere of the full-length documentary Gerhard Richter Painting, which is featured in the exhibition Gerhard Richter: Painting After All at The Met Breuer.
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Also make sure to follow our yearlong Met Stories project. It shares unexpected and compelling stories gathered from the many people who visit The Met, whether artists, teachers, curators, actors, Museum staff, designers, thought-leaders, or public figures.
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On our social media, you will find great ways to engage with our collection, mission, and staff. Two of my favorite hashtags are #MetSketch, which invites our talented followers to share their drawings, and #MuseumCrushMonday, which we use to recognize the contributions of our museum colleagues around the world. I’m also excited for a new initiative that will share selfies of our essential staff inside the Museum and invite our followers to send digital greetings to them.
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If you have young kids at home, you should tune in to the weekly “Storytime with The Met,” as of this week presented online by our amazing library and education staff on YouTube and Facebook. My kids— well, teenagers — may be too old for storytime, but you can guarantee that our family will be checking out the rest of these digital offerings.
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With everyone at home now is the time for some extended reading, and for you to brush up your knowledge on topics like Fencing Illustrations between 1500–1800, American Sportswear in the 1970s, or Pyrotechnics in Prints & Drawings. All of these as well as 1,697 other publications are available online for free on MetPublications.
The UC Berkeley freshman and sophomore seminar was wildly popular, just like the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City (Met) exhibit it explored. Taught in fall 2019, Professor Maureen Miller’s students analyzed “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” a Met blockbuster that in 2018 drew a record crowd of nearly 1.7 million to see opulent haute couture inspired by the Catholic tradition.
When the course ended, sophomore Dorian Cole thought her final paper — on how a metallic Joan of Arc gown by Donatella Versace, worn at the 2018 Met Gala by Hollywood star Zendaya, engages with Catholicism — would simply become a grade.
Instead, Cole and former classmate Emily Su were invited by Miller to create poster sessions on their papers — Su’s was on an Alexander McQueen creation inspired by the 1440s Altarpiece of the Patron Saints of Cologne by Stefan Lochner — for the 95th annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America. The conference was to be hosted last week (March 27-28) on campus by Berkeley’s Program in Medieval Studies.
Then came COVID-19, and the meeting turned virtual. No poster sessions needed. The papers, lectures and discussions would take place via Zoom.
“I was bummed,” said Su, a sophomore majoring in economics and history. (She’d gotten more bad news: The 2020 National Collegiate Table Tennis championships were off, due to the pandemic; Su plays on Berkeley’s top-ranked women’s club team).
Dorian Cole, here with her dog, Angel, in Oxnard, California, came up with the idea for turning her semester paper on Versace’s Joan of Arc dress into a video when COVID-19 forced the Medieval Academy of America’s 95th conference online. (Photo by Paula Nelson)
But Cole, who’s double-majoring in history and English and said she likes to make “little video essays” as a hobby, approached Miller.
From Statista: Environmental Rollbacks Under the Trump Administration Jan 24, 2020
On Thursday, the Trump administration announced that it was rolling back Obama-era regulations for the protections of rivers and wetlands. This is not the first time the current government has done such a thing. In fact, it has successfully repealed or begun to rollback 95 environmental regulations since coming into power in 2017. The administration has throughout branded its initiative as a way to remove obstacles for business, especially the fossil fuel industry.
By Ari Peskoe, Caitlin McCoy, Hana Vizcarra, Laura Bloomer*, Harvard Law
Ongoing litigation challenging The Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles Rule Part One: One National Program which blocks California from setting its own greenhouse gas standards for vehicles and blocks Zero Emission Vehicle programs in all states.
One case challenging the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s actions pending in the D.C. District Court. Another case challenging EPA’s actions in the D.C. Circuit.
The final fuel economy and greenhouse gas standards are expected in early 2020 and there will likely be litigation challenging those rules as well.
The release of the final rule revising the definition of Waters of the U.S. under the Clean Water Act as well as any litigation challenging the new rule. The definition determines which wetlands and waterways receive Clean Water Act protections.
The Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA) requires all electric utilities to buy energy from certain types of renewable energy generators. FERC administers rules that are largely unchanged since 1980. In November, FERC proposed significant changes that would have the effect of reducing investment in renewable energy under the PURPA development model. We will follow finalization of the new regulations in 2020 and related litigation.
The release and implementation of any supplemental or final proposals to see how EPA incorporates the comments received from scientists and other stakeholders.
A final rule limiting the science EPA can consider would significantly impact EPA’s decision-making and rulemaking process, potentially leading the agency to ignore significant scientific findings that should inform its regulatory programs.
EPA has proposed revising the 2015 wastewater guidelines and standards for power plants, including certain exemptions for “high flow” facilities, low utilization boilers, and boilers retiring by 2028. It is possible we will see a final rule in 2020 after a proposed rule was published on Nov. 22, 2019.
The release of a final rule rescinding emissions limits for methane on oil and gas production and processing.
The proposed rule was published on Sept. 24, 2019 and proposed several changes to the standards like removing transmission and storage from regulation altogether.
Finalization of the July 2019 proposed rule, which loosens some requirements from the 2015 rule, and the Nov. 2019 proposed rule, which seeks to comply with the D.C. Circuit’s ruling in Utility Solid Waste Activities Group v. EPA.
Latest proposed rule from Dec. 2019 creating the federal program.
Potential litigation related to the finalization of any of the three proposed rules.
This bunch of tree trunks huddling together reminds me of my younger days when I was a tree climber. I remember looking over the rooftops of the houses on my block in Brooklyn, watching the world go by. There was something so peaceful about being so high in the air. I could feel the breeze blowing gently through my hair and I smiled as I sniffed the scent of the flowers that the gentle wind lifted into the air. But there is more to this picture than my memories.
I can imagine each seedling starting its life, reaching up as it grew and finding others like itself nearby. They all matured and found themselves so close that each became more than an individual, all of them connecting like a family that bonded together.
It has me wondering why we humans have so much trouble connecting with other humans. We may experience differences but we are still of the same branch, so to speak. We are all people. I hope we can embrace our connection and climb up and away from whatever keeps our family at odds.
I learned from reading this book at school that novels can work through recurrent phrases and enigmatic images. Here, on the very first page, is the wych elm. I had no idea then what a wych elm might be, but I knew that this strange tree, with the pig’s teeth embedded in its trunk, somehow possessed qualities that were beyond the reach of the car-owning colonialists who thought they owned it.
3. The Dead by James Joyce This short story, with more distilled in its rich pages than many a lengthy novel, mostly takes place indoors, at a family Christmas party in Dublin, which makes the later evocation of a young man waiting through a cold night beneath a tree all the more haunting. Michael Furey stands for all lost lovers, yearning for what’s out of reach under the shade of a tree.
As numerous theatrical institutions across the world have opened up their archives in response to increasing lockdown restrictions, all eyes have remained on one organisation: the National Theatre in London, which has the greatest archive of cinema-quality recordings of stage plays of any theatre on the planet, thanks to its formidable NT Live programme. It’s designed to beam productions from the NT into cinemas across the country, but there are of course no cinemas in operation at present. So the NT is switching to its YouTube channel. From April 2, under the banner of National Theatre at Home, every Thursday (7pm GMT/2pm EST) will see a new National Theatre play released – free to watch for one week – along with bonus content including cast and creative Q&As and post-stream talks.
There’s a definite emphasis on family-friendly good cheer for the line-up so far, which kicks off with a big hitter: Richard Bean’s beloved farce ‘One Man, Two Guvnors’, starring a pre-chat-show-days James Corden. Over the next few weeks you can expect a string of family-friendly titles, though naturally there will be those hoping for some of the real NT Live blockbusters, notably ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Frankenstein’ starring Benedict Cumberbatch and ‘Coriolanus’ starring Tom Hiddleston.
The initial programme is:
April 2 ‘One Man, Two Guvnors’ by Richard Bean, starring James Corden. Read our review.
April 9 ‘Jane Eyre’, adapted by Sally Cookson. Read our review.
April 16 ‘Treasure Island’, adapted by Bryony Lavery. Read our review.
April 23 ‘Twelfth Night’ by William Shakespeare, starring Tamsin Greig. Read our review.
Additionally, the National Theatre will be rolling out National Theatre Collection study resources to pupils now learning at home.
The NT has also confirmed that live performances won’t restart until at least July.
For more information on National Theatre at Home, click here.
For other ways you can watch plays while London’s in lockdown, clickhere.
Editor’s Note: We‘ve taken to reading British Vogue lately and subscribing to its daily dish of articles. Here are five articles we thought you might be interested in: during these stay-at-home imposed days.
(Editor’s Note: We’ve never colored (or coloured) our hair so we can’t comment on this … )
Today’s reassuring beauty advice? Your hair doesn’t have to suffer in a pandemic. In lieu of being able to attend our normal salon appointments, there’s a wealth of different ways to keep hair colour looking rich, bright, and free of greys during this period of isolation. If a 2019 survey by Living Proof – which found that one in 20 of British women spends at least £100 every six and a half weeks on in-salon hair colour – is anything to go by, mastering the art of at-home hair colouring might be a means of passing that time that will also save us money down the line.
(Editor’s Note: When a young teenager with a short haircut, I would trim it repeatedly … today I don’t but if you can order a good pair of scissors, it’s worth a try …)
“Give yourself a break from online social pressures,” says Vogue hairstylist Sam McKnight. “Everyone is in the same boat, this is the great equaliser.”
As the spread of coronavirus forces numerous office-workers to work from home, former British staffer Lisa Niven-Phillips shares how she swapped the office for the sofa – and made her working day all the more productive.
Abstract fromNature Magazine: Empirical and anecdotal evidence has associated stress with accelerated hair greying (formation of unpigmented hairs) 1,2, but so far there has been little scientific validation of this link. Here we report that, in mice, acute stress leads to hair greying through the fast depletion of melanocyte stem cells.
Grey hair used to be something women avoided. Now – thanks to the likes of Kristen McMenamy and British Vogue‘s own Sarah Harris – it’s a look they aspire to. But it’s important to do your research before jumping on this particular trend. Which shade of silver will suit you best? Can you avoid using bleach? And how intensive will the upkeep be? Vogue answers all of these questions and more in its ultimate guide to grey hair.
Researchers from University of Geneva (UNIGE) and University Hospitals of Geneva (HUG) demonstrate how the fears we experience in our dreams prepare us to tackle anxiety-provoking situations once we’re awake.
Do bad dreams serve a real purpose? To answer this question, researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and University Hospitals of Geneva (HUG), Switzerland, working in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin (USA), analyzed the dreams of a number of people and identified which areas of the brain were activated when they experienced fear in their dreams. They found that once the individuals woke up, the brain areas responsible for controlling emotions responded to fear-inducing situations much more effectively. These results, which are published in the journal Human Brain Mapping, demonstrate that dreams help us react better to frightening situations, thereby paving the way for new dream-based therapeutic methods for combating anxiety.
Neuroscience has been taking an interest in dreams for a number of years, focusing on the areas of the brain that are active when we dream. The scientists employed high-density electroencephalography (EEG), which uses several electrodes positioned on the skull to measure brain activity. They recently discovered that certain regions of the brain are responsible for the formation of dreams, and that certain other regions are activated depending on the specific content within a dream (such as perceptions, thoughts and emotions). “We were particularly interested in fear: what areas of our brain are activated when we’re having bad dreams?» states Lampros Perogamvros, a researcher in the Sleep and Cognition Laboratory headed by professor Sophie Schwartz in the Department of Basic Neurosciences, Faculty of Medicine, UNIGE, and senior clinical lecturer at HUG’s Sleep Laboratory.
Brain areas active during frightening dreams
The scientists from Geneva placed 256 EEG electrodes on 18 subjects whom they woke several times during the night. Each time the participants were woken up, they had to answer a series of questions such as: ‘Did you dream? And, if so, did you feel scared?’
“By analysing the brain activity based on participants’ responses, we identified two brain regions implicated in the induction of fear experienced during the dream: the insula and the cingulate cortex”, explains Perogamvros. The insula is also involved in evaluating emotions when awake, and is automatically activated when someone feels afraid. The cingulate cortex, for its part, plays a role in preparing motor and behavioural reactions in the event of a threat. “For the first time, we’ve identified the neural correlates of fear when we dream and have observed that similar regions are activated when experiencing fear in both sleep and wakeful states”, continues the Geneva-based researcher.
Do dreams prepare us for our waking lives?
The researchers then investigated a possible link between the fear experienced during a dream and the emotions experienced once awake. They gave a dream diary to 89 participants for the duration of a week. The subjects were asked that each morning upon waking, they note down whether they remembered the dreams they had during the night and to identify the emotions they felt, including fear. At the end of the week, they were placed in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine. “We showed each participant emotionally-negative images, such as assaults or distressful situations, as well as neutral images, to see which areas of the brain were more active for fear, and whether the activated area changed depending on the emotions experienced in the dreams over the previous week,” says Virginie Sterpenich, a researcher in the Department of Basic Neurosciences at UNIGE.
The researchers were particularly interested in the brain areas traditionally involved in managing emotions, such as the insula, amygdala, medial prefrontal cortex and cingulate cortex. “We found that the longer a someone had felt fear in their dreams, the less the insula, cingulate and amygdala were activated when the same person looked at the negative pictures”, says Sterpenich. “In addition, the activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, which is known to inhibit the amygdala in the event of fear, increased in proportion to the number of frightening dreams!”
These results demonstrate the very strong link between the emotions we feel in both sleep and wakefulness. They also reinforce a neuroscientific theory about dreams: we simulate frightening situations while dreaming in order to better react to them once we’re awake. “Dreams may be considered as a real training for our future reactions and may potentially prepare us to face real life dangers,” suggests Perogamvros.
Dreams: a new therapeutically?
Following the revelation of a potential function of dreams, the researchers are now planning to study a new form of dream therapy to treat anxiety disorders. They are also interested in nightmares, because — unlike bad dreams, in which the level of fear is moderate – nightmares are characterised by an excessive level of fear that disrupts sleep and has a negative impact on the individual once awake. “We believe that if a certain threshold of fear is exceeded in a dream, it loses its beneficial role as an emotional regulator,” concludes Perogamvros.
Madison Bumgarner left the San Francisco Giants for the Arizona Diamondbacks. A pandemic followed.
I can’t believe the baseball season will not start on time this year. But it won’t.
I started going to games with my father, Ernie, when I was a year or two older than kindergarten age … I have rarely missed a season that I didn’t see a game in person or on television, except when I lived in Europe for a couple of years. I’ve married two men who didn’t grow up sitting on those hard, wooden-slatted seats. But my husband today understands my state of mourning regarding what could become ‘the lost season.’
My team is the San Francisco Giants … and it always has been since its been The New York Giants in the Bronx.
My mother told me that she was thrilled that I had taken to the game; this now meant she would never have to attend another game with my father, ever, especially those games that were double-headers. Pop and I loved those games.
When I was a Fellow at Duke, on leave from my job at Time magazine, I saw the Duke team play and now its season has been cancelled. I’m looking ahead to a rescheduled professional season perhaps lasting well into at least November and seeing what was recorded of this season’s Golden Bears of Berkeley schedule.
For the last few years we have seen our granddaughter pitch high school softball games. Recently, I found myself bemoaning that we were leaving that behind on our schedule as she exited for a college in the East and now she sits at home, learning remotely.
I sit here with two books I found at a library sale by the famed author, Roger Angell: Season Ticket, A Baseball Companion, 1988 and Once More Around the Park, A Baseball Reader, 1991. I’ll read them while waiting for a shortened season to begin.
When I moved to California originally, friends said they knew the true reason I had chosen San Francisco: The Giants …
See you at Oracle park, someday. I’ll be the one with the Garlic Fries.
*A League of Their Own is a 1992 film which deals with a fictionalized account of the formation of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League during World War II, as seen through the eyes of two sisters. Directed by Penny Marshall. The quote is from the Tom Hanks character, “There’s no crying in baseball!”
