THE CATAMBAYS OF TANAY AND THE DEL PILAR'S OF BULACAN

Tuesday, March 17, 2020

‘We are at WAR’: President Macron orders full lock down in France telling everyone they MUST stay at home (and will face a fine if they go out without filling in online form)

Zayda@zaydabermudez

@EmmanuelMacron must declare the curfew in and around Paris, for the good of all! #CORONAVIRUSENFRANCE #COVID19fr #StayHome
https://

twitter.com/sahouraxo/stat
us/1238835138257174528

…

Sarah Abdallah@sahouraxo

Holy moly.

Massive anti-government protests in #Paris, #France today, defying #coronavirus lockdown.

But barely a peep from the corporate media. #YellowVests #GiletsJaunes

1

7:56 AM - Mar 15, 2020

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In an address to the nation, Macron said the French had to ‘severely restrict movements for the next 15 days’
Authorities will enforce the new restrictions, with so-far unspecified ‘punishments’ for those who break them
Hotels and private businesses will be requisitioned by the state in order to help sufferers of the lethal virus
After thousands crowded into parks in Paris yesterday the capital city appeared near-deserted this morning

President Emmanuel Macron tonight said ‘we are at war’ with coronavirus as he ordered a full lockdown in France and told the public to stay at home.

In a solemn live TV address on Monday evening, the head of state said that people would have to stay at home unless shopping for food or going to a pharmacy, heading for absolutely essential work, or exercising alone. In French:

China has been known to be the source of several virus vectors like the swine flu, avian flu, SARS, the black plague during the middle ages, and now their audacity to blame the USA of the Corona virus outbreak. The misinformation made by the Chinese to lay blame on the Americans is an effort to dilute the truth, made by their leaders well known to bent the facts. China coronavirus outbreak: All the latest updates

Their leaders do not take into account, about the custom of people eating bats infected by this virus. The Chinese consider bats as a delicacy, and thus the transfer of the virus from animal to man. Infected blood from the bats can transfer to man easily during the preparation for cooking, no matter how much intense heat during boiling or frying. This is why the fish market in Wuhan, where freshly cut bats were sold, mixed with the fish, is the start of this pandemic, and as common custom with the Chinese Communist leaders to lay blame on others. All these to avoid the accountability of another Chinese super virus.

French troops are also being deployed to transport patients to a field hospital which is being set up in the east of the country and today, in scenes reminiscent of China’s lockdown, army trucks rolled through the streets of Paris.

Macron also announced that the second round of local elections due to be held on March 22 would be postponed and hotels and other private businesses will meanwhile be requisitioned by the state in order to help treat sufferers of the lethal virus.

The country’s Interior Minister, Christophe Castaner, later clarified that anyone leaving the house in France ‘for any reason’ will have to download a form or risk a minimum £34.60 fine enforced by 100,000 police and gendarmes.

Protée @nadedge

· Mar 15, 2020

Replying to @ThreeDailey

I live in the Netherlands, they closed schools and restaurants. There is only 1000 beds for intensive care in The Netherlands. No way they can manage! Same goes for all countries, not enough beds to care for the sick. It's happening, brace yourself America!

Protée @nadedge

I am French but live in the Netherlands, France is on lockdown and the military is approaching Paris and big cities. There is a rumor of curfew. In The Netherlands the approach is more relax but supermarkets are empty of essentials.

4:44 AM - Mar 16, 2020

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He said ‘essential professions’ who can still enjoy easy travel include medical and postal workers, but few others.

They will instead have to write ‘going out to buy a baguette’ or ‘walking the dog’ on an individual printed form every single time.

‘We can always practice a physical activity or take our dog out, but everyone should do it sparingly, without meeting in a group,’ Mr Castaner said.

‘We can get some fresh air yes, but certainly not play a football match. A control system will be set up by 100,000 police and gendarmes,’ he added.

Mr Castaner said the minimum fine would be €38 (£34.60) and that this would ‘rapidly rise’ to €130 (£118) if it remained unpaid.

The forms will be downloadable online from the website of the French Ministry of the Interior each night during a minimum lockdown of two weeks, starting at midday on Tuesday.

‘It will be up to everyone to fill it out to specify the nature of their trip,’ said Mr Castaner. ‘Those who have business cards will be invited to present them.’

Mr Macron also announced that Borders with other European countries will also be closed, although French nationals will be allowed to ‘return home’. The measures will start at 12 midday on Tuesday, and go on for ‘at least two weeks’, said Mr Macron.

Mr Macron said: ‘Walking, meeting friends in the park or in the street will no longer be possible. It is a question of limiting as much as possible all contact beyond the home. All over French territory, in mainland France as well as overseas, only necessary journeys must remain necessary.’

‘We’re at war’: Macron imposes restrictions to contain coronavirus

The Chateau de Versailles has shut its doors due to the coronavirus outbreak (pictured today). In a solemn live TV address on Monday evening, President Macron said that people would have to stay at home unless shopping for food or going to a pharmacy, heading for absolutely essential work, or exercising alone

Admitting that the economic cost would be enormous, Mr Macron said: ‘All businesses must organise to facilitate remote work. And when that is not possible, they will have to adapt their organization to enforce these new measures.’

Government grants will be made available to those facing bankruptcy, while tax demands will be frozen.

There are currently 5400 people infected by Coronavirus in France, while 127 are dead and 400 in intensive care in hospitals which are struggling to cope.

Despite measures brought in over the weekend including a ban on crowds of more than 100, and the closure of non-essential shops, people were still breaking the new rules.

Mr Macron said: ‘We are at war and the Nation will support its children who, there, medical staff in town, at the hospital, are on the front line in a fight that will ask them for determination, solidarity.

‘They have rights over us. We obviously owe them the means, the protection. We will be there. We owe them masks, gel, all the necessary equipment, and we will make sure of it.

‘We also owe caregivers custody of their children. A minimum daycare service has been in place since that day in nurseries and schools. We also owe them serenity, movement and rest. ‘This is why I decided that from taxis and hotels can be mobilized for their benefit. The state will pay.

People watch French President Emmanuel Macron on TV as he speaks during a televised address to the nation about the coronavirus outbreak

The Gare de Lyon station was left practically deserted during rush hour in Paris today. The scenes are a stark constrast to yesterday where thousands crowded into parks and streets in the capital

I therefore decided that a field hospital of the army service would be deployed in the days to come in Alsace (the eastern region close to Germany). The army will also help to move the sick from the most affected regions and thus reduce congestion in hospitals.’

Hours earlier, Mr Macron had attending an emergency meeting in Paris, where the country’s Scientific Council recommended an ‘Italian-style confinement’

Mr Macron continued: ‘The government has taken firm decisions to curb the spread of the virus. On Saturday evening, restaurants and non-essential businesses closed their doors. France had never had to make such decisions in peacetime. They were taken for good reasons, with one goal: to protect us.

‘This is why, after having consulted, listened to the experts in the field and in good conscience, I decided to further strengthen the measures to reduce our travel.

‘To protect ourselves and contain the spread of the virus, but also to preserve our healthcare systems, we have taken a joint decision between Europeans. From noon tomorrow, the borders at the entrance to the European Union and the Schengen area will be closed. All travel between European countries and the European Union will be suspended.

French women who are currently abroad and wish to return can of course join their country.

Thursday, January 30, 2020

SCOTUS approves immediate Trump crackdown

The Supreme Court said Monday it will allow the Trump administration to begin enforcing a controversial new policy making it harder for low-income legal immigrants to obtain green cards or visas.

The administration's new, expanded “public charge” rule, which makes it easier for officials to bar immigrants who use, or are deemed likely to use, non-cash government benefits such as Medicaid or food stamps, is one of the most consequential policy changes by the Trump administration to date in its efforts to curtail legal immigration. (Under previous practice, the public charge rule was only applied to immigrants who were considered likely to receive cash welfare payments.)

Like a number of controversial rules, it has been challenged in federal court by immigration advocates and several states. The lawsuits are still making their way through the judicial system, but a stay on enforcing the change imposed by a federal judge in the Southern District of New York was lifted by the high court Monday in a 5-4 decision that broke along familiar ideological lines. Other rules that have also been allowed to take effect pending a final resolution in the courts — a process that can take years — include the travel ban for nationals of several majority-Muslim countries, a change in asylum rules affecting Central American migrants who arrive at the southern border and the diversion of military appropriations for border wall construction.

The Trump administration’s approach of imposing its hard-line views by presidential proclamation, executive orders and regulatory changes rather than through Congress, has been met with lawsuits across the country — and resulted in a much larger role for the courts in shaping immigration policy.

Judges in federal district courts in Washington State, California, Hawaii and elsewhere have granted emergency requests for nationwide injunctions to block the government from implementing the policies in question while the case plays out in court. The administration has responded by asking higher courts to overturn the injunctions, and in cases that have reached the Supreme Court has generally prevailed.

The first time the Supreme Court took the unusual step of weighing in on an immigration-related case during the Trump administration was in December 2017, when the court ruled that a third version of Trump’s travel ban, which restricted entry to the U.S. for nationals of Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Somalia and Yemen could fully take effect while legal challenges continued to make their way through the courts. The decision, issued nearly six months before the Supreme Court would actually hear arguments in the travel ban case, overturned earlier orders by federal judges in Maryland and Hawaii to block parts of the updated ban while the lawsuits against it proceeded.

In June 2018 the Supreme Court ruled in the administration’s favor on the merits of the travel ban.

Trump signs a travel ban executive order as Vice President Mike Pence, left, and former Secretary of Defense James Mattis look on, Jan. 27, 2017. (Photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters)

Since then, the Supreme Court has overturned injunctions by federal judges in a number of other immigration-related cases, granting the Trump administration permission to implement other policies amid ongoing litigation, including a requirement that asylum seekers who arrive at the U.S. southern border after traveling through another country — in practice, Central American migrants by way of Mexico — must show that they requested and were denied asylum in the country they transited. In another ruling over the summer, the justices once again voted along ideological lines to allow the Trump administration to continue using military funds to build sections of the border wall.

The conservative justices of the Supreme Court aren’t the only ones ruling in Trump’s favor. Last May, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the administration could continue forcing asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while awaiting hearings in the U.S., overturning a lower court’s injunction blocking implementation of the policy formally known as the Migration Protection Protocols amid ongoing lawsuits.

Karen Tumlin is a longtime civil and immigrant rights litigator who has served as counsel in a number of high-profile legal challenges to Trump administration actions on immigration, including the effort to terminate legal protections for so-called Dreamers and the various iterations of the Muslim travel ban. She told Yahoo News that the history of the travel ban case, in which the Supreme Court overturned an injunction that had been upheld by multiple lower courts and then eventually ruled in favor of the policy, raises concerns about the future of policies like the public charge rule.

In the travel ban case, Tumlin said, “It turned out the stay result was 100 percent predictive of what the Supreme Court ultimately did.” In the public charge case, she admits it may be hard to find a justice among the five who voted to allow the rule to take effect to change his mind when the case finally reaches the court, especially if the government can show that “the sky isn’t falling.”

“It shouldn’t be that way,” she told Yahoo News. “Just because a divided court allows something to take effect, that shouldn't be the writing on wall for [the] ultimate decision.”

Demonstrators at a rally outside the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., Jan. 28, 2020. (Photo: Steve Helber/AP)

Justice Neil Gorsuch, one of the five justices in the majority, wrote in a separate concurrence explaining his vote to allow implementation of the public charge rule that “the real problem here is the increasingly common practice of trial courts ordering relief that transcends the cases before them.”

“By their nature, universal injunctions tend to force judges into making rushed, high-stakes, low-information decisions,” Gorsuch argued, writing that the “increasingly widespread” use of such orders in recent years “is not normal.”

“He’s right,” said Jesse Bless, director of the litigation department at the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “It's not normal because the administration’s policies and the way they’re issuing them are not normal.”

“I’m not a historian, I’m a trial lawyer, but I’ve never seen a period in time when courts have been asked to do so much not as a result of legislation, but as a result of executive power,” Bless told Yahoo News. He suggested that Gorsuch’s comments reflect “a growing frustration, by everyone, on the way in which [immigration policy] is being settled in the courts.”

Migrants from Honduras wait in line at the U.S.-Mexico border crossing in Tijuana, Mexico, Sept. 12, 2019. (Photo: Sandy Huffaker/AFP via Getty Images)

Ultimately, the absence of congressional action on immigration has enabled the executive branch to push the boundaries of what is legal, said Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. This trend began under President Barack Obama, whose administration faced legal challenges over a number immigration policies including the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, a work authorization extension for foreign students post-graduation, and the use of family detention. But, Pierce said, “the amount the Obama administration was entangled in the court system is laughably small compared to the Trump administration.”

Pierce suggested that the new public charge rule could be “one of the most problematic policies to go into place while legality is being questioned.” Studies predict that the proposed changes will have serious impacts on many legal immigrants as well as their U.S. citizen children and spouses, giving it the potential to dramatically reshape who is allowed to immigrate to the United States.

The White House praised the Supreme Court’s decision on Monday as a “massive win for American taxpayers, American workers and the American Constitution. This decision allows the government to implement regulations effectuating longstanding federal law that newcomers to this country must be financially self-sufficient.”

Bless argued that such victories “emboldens an administration who wants to build an invisible wall in this country” and “sets the stage for immigration to become a very big part of the November election.”