The White House’s confirmation that US President Donald Trump has been taking hydroxychloroquine every day for the past two weeks, with his doctor’s blessing, has reignited the controversy over the drug. It has long been used against malaria but has not been approved for COVID-19.

A 5-year-old boy left a police officer shocked after he found him driving his parents' car during a traffic stop. 

Trooper Rick Morgan noticed a driver inside an SUV driving erratically and switching between lanes on a freeway in Ogden, Utah just before noon on Monday.  When he pulled the car over, Morgan said he was shocked to find a young boy behind the wheel. 

'My speedometer showed 32 miles-per-hour,' Morgan told Fox 13. 'It amazed me that when he heard my siren, he did pull over and stop.' 

'When I got to the window and the window came down, I wasn't quite sure what to think. It was pretty clear when the window came down, it was a young, very underage driver.' 

When asked where he had been driving to, the boy replied 'California.'

The 5-year-old reportedly told troopers that he left the house following an argument with his mother after she told him she wouldn't buy him a Lamborghini.  

Police say he had been trying to reach his sister's house in California and had planned to buy a Lamborghini when he got there, with the three dollars in his purse. 

'It likely would have been much worse had he gone much further,' Morgan told the publication. 'He was sitting on the front edge of his seat so he could reach the brake pedal.'  

The boy has since been reunited with his parents.

Watch the video below. 

Lisa Cohen, McGill University

As financial markets tumble, investors are pulling funding from startups. Sales for anything but bare essentials have evaporated, while progress on product development and market testing has halted for work that requires in-person collaboration.

Many existing bailout plans are targeted for larger enterprises in industries like aviation and tourism. While limited resources are explicitly earmarked for startups and other small enterprises, they come with stringent criteria and complex and slow application processes.

Many startups already function without cash reserves and lines of credits. Unlike larger resource-rich companies, startups are unable to make pledges to avoid layoffs. This confluence of events means that startups and the jobs within them are vanishing and at a pace that likely exceeds job dissolution in larger, more established firms.

An abrupt ending

The CEO of a startup I’ve been studying for more than two years was forced to cut costs by 50 per cent at the request of a cash-strapped investor. He accomplished this by slashing his own salary to nothing, eliminating positions in the management and sales teams, closing a physical office and severing outsourcing arrangements.

Days later, his major investor said these cuts were inadequate. The CEO explored alternatives, including cutting back to a skeletal staff and seeking government funding to help get through this time. His company fell through the cracks of any bailout schemes. Cutting back staff would halt any progress in product development and the ability to complete desperately needed sales.

He shuttered the company 10 days after making his first round of cuts, leaving more than 30 employees without jobs. He’s working with investors to offer former employees up to a month’s severance. He and another member of the management team are on WhatsApp and email offering support to former employees as they work through the end of the organization and formulate plans to help them enter an extremely challenging labour market.

For months before the coronavirus hit, many of the employees were already concerned about whether the company would ever find the right market fit. Yet, the investors remained prepared to keep investing to bring a fully developed product to market until the pandemic.

Hastening the demise

Versions of this story are unfolding in startups and small enterprises globally. Some are limping by with pay cuts, furloughs, layoffs and other cost-cutting measures. For many others, the coronavirus has brought about their demise.

The specific circumstances vary. Acquisitions fall through. Startups fail to find product market fit. Their technologies never reach their full potential.

Funding for some startups may have been drying up already. Other startups may have been on the road to closure for some time with the coronavirus simply accelerating the inevitable. We’ll never know if the startups that failed might have made it through in other circumstances.

Working for startups is a risky proposition for employees in the best of times. Over the past four years, my team and I have conducted more than 200 interviews with people seeking jobs and working in startups and those doing the hiring.

The tradeoffs of working for startups

Most of them recognize the tradeoffs inherent to working for a startup. They accept lower levels of stability, salary, career opportunities and resources in exchange for being able to have a larger effect on the direction of the business and greater flexibility in their roles.

When asked what they would do if their organization failed, many said that they would seek a similar role in another startup.

This risk-taking made sense in a thriving ecosystem where startups were scrambling to find talent and a new job was often just days away. Yet it’s not clear how well startup experience transfers to more established companies. In tight labour markets, it may be valued. When millions are newly unemployed, it is less clear what the prospects of former startup employees will be.

Not the same for everyone

This is just one of the many ways that the effects of the coronavirus are unequal. The disease itself has not hit jurisdictions, countries, continents or demographic groups at an even pace. The economic costs of coping with the disease are not equal for already impoverished communities and those with deeper resources.

Jobs are also vanishing for those working in brick-and-mortar retail and restaurants, and for many gig workers who were rarely in the best paying, most secure jobs to begin with. Nor are the lingering after-effects of this crisis likely to be felt in the same way by all.

Still some are predicting a renaissance boom following this pandemic with a wave of innovations leading to the founding of new startups.

Read more: The coronavirus crisis: A catalyst for entrepreneurship

After all, the original Renaissance followed the Black Death. Crises of many varieties may plant the seeds of innovation.

But little is known about what a new renaissance would look like — and who will reap its benefits.

Lisa Cohen, Associate Professor, Business Administration, McGill University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Pamela E. Klassen, University of Toronto

Religious freedom, cherished as an American ideal, has been frequently invoked in the United States during protests against COVID-19 public health measures.

In Canada, forms of protests — including by churches — are more likely to focus on the systemic underfunding of long-term care and homeless shelters or the lack of sufficient medical and water infrastructure in Indigenous communities.

Why the difference?

Across the U.S., conservative Christians flouted state and municipal social distancing orders as late as March 31, sometimes by overtly breaking the law, claiming that God, not the state, will protect the people.

During the Christian Holy Week, evangelical and Pentecostal church leaders, often backed by Republican politicians, brought lawsuits against state and municipal governments, arguing that curtailing religious gatherings for the sake of limiting the spread of COVID-19 was a breach of religious freedom.

With lightning speed, federal and state lawyers weighed in on the balance between public health measures and religious liberty.

By contrast, the story in Canada is largely one of religious organizations of all varieties co-operating with public health measures. To date, there is no equivalent in Canada of these high-profile COVID-19 legal battles in which churches reject both public health directives and state legislation.

Suspicion of science, government

Religiously based suspicion of scientific and government authority is not unique to conservative Christians; Hasidic Jewish communities share these suspicions and constitute a significant number of those infected with COVID-19 in New York state.

Even in the case of Hasidic Jews, however, the border might make a difference: Hasidic communities in Québec have been praised for their diligence in adhering to social distancing, in contrast to those in New York, where some rabbis have mocked public health recommendations.

The contrasting responses to COVID-19 in Canada and the United States are rooted in very different national attitudes about individual and collective responsibility for public health.

In the United States, Democratic front-runner Joe Biden may come to embrace Bernie Sander’s plan for “Medicare for All,” but even the devastating reality of being the country hardest hit so far by COVID-19 has not seemed to turn the tide of public opinion on the need for universal medicare.

In Canada, by contrast, leaders across the political spectrum are throwing their support behind public health care, with even some conservative politicians calling for more funding, especially for long-term care. While Donald Trump tweeted a call to anti-public health protesters to “liberate” their states, in Ontario, Conservative Premier Doug Ford dismissed a scattering of such protesters in Toronto as selfish “yahoos.”

Invoking religious freedom in an attempt to opt out of health-care legislation is much more common in the U.S. than Canada. Both countries protect religious freedom, dating back to 1791 in the United States with the First Amendment of the constitution guaranteeing the “free exercise” of religion, while in Canada, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has protected the “freedom of conscience and religion” since 1982.

Religious freedom as a rallying cry

These parallel guarantees, however, stem from very different histories of using religious freedom as a rallying cry, including to resist public health care. I’ve discussed this in my research, especially in relation to women’s reproductive health.

In the wake of former U.S. president Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, for example, Catholics and evangelical groups used a religious freedom argument to contest the new mandate that their health insurance plans provide access to contraception for women employees.

In Canada, the less frequent citing of religious freedom rights in the courts to curtail health-care access may be related to a wider acceptance of health care as a public good and a basic human right.

In both Canada and the U.S., the struggle for publicly funded health care in the mid-20th century depended on coalitions of politicians, medical professionals and religious leaders. In Canada, a Baptist minister-turned-politician, Tommy Douglas, galvanized the country with a vision that public health care for all was a human right and, for some, also a religious obligation.

Similarly, in the U.S., when Dr. Montague Cobb, leader of the National Medical Association, successfully argued for Medicare before Congress in 1965, he concluded his testimony with a Christian hymn.

The Canadian version of public health care, however, now serves a much wider range of the population than Medicare does in the U.S., and has become a cornerstone of Canada’s national identity, with minimal overt connections to religion.

But in the United States, public health care remains a source of profound national and religious division. The current Republican administration regularly uses religious freedom legislation, including conscientious objection rules for health-care providers, to chip away at Medicare, limiting access to health care for women, LGBTQ, poor and rural people.

A time of reckoning is coming when public health measures and public and private health-care delivery will be assessed for their effectiveness during the COVID-19 pandemic. The role of religious communities and the ideals of religious freedom in supporting or impeding public health must be included in this reckoning, especially in the United States.

Pamela E. Klassen, Professor of the Study of Religion, University of Toronto

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.