As the United States copes with the aftermath of the horrific killing of George Floyd by police in Minnesota and the massive protests that came after, we must not forget our previous crisis – the COVID-19 pandemic.
It is clear that the blatant lies, destruction of samples, and silencing of doctors orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the coronavirus pandemic amplified the devastation and tragedy the world has endured throughout the past few months.
Read More
Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley called for an investigation into free speech double-standards, saying that state officials have favored protests while targeting religious freedom.
He asked Attorney General William Barr and the Department of Justice to launch a “full civil rights investigation” into violations of “free exercise and free speech rights of religious Americans” in a Tuesday letter.
Read More
Every major city—and probably every community for that matter—has some form of a police commission. Police commissions are entrusted to monitor the activities of the police department as a whole, and in most cases determine appropriate discipline for individual officers who break the public trust. These commissions have existed for decades. Most major cities also have some form of an office or department for civil rights or civil liberties or human rights. Police review boards are often housed within those offices, as in Minneapolis.
So let’s talk about Minneapolis, where a police officer who was identified for nearly 20 years as a problem had 18 complaints since 2001. Officer Chauvin faced multiple complaints and formal reviews for his actions but he was left on the street, with a badge, harassing people of all races, and ultimately killing a black man.
Read More
Former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign poured more than $1 million into Facebook ads in one day skewering President Donald Trump for fanning the flames of hatred amid protests over police brutality, an archive of ad spending showed.
The presumptive Democratic nominee spent roughly the same amount of money in less than a week on Facebook as he did throughout the past year of his campaign, The New York Times reported Monday.
Read More
The Minneapolis Police Department will withdraw from police union contract negotiations, Chief Medaria Arradondo said Wednesday, as he announced initial steps in what he said would be transformational reforms to the agency in the wake of George Floyd’s death.
Faced with calls from activists and a majority of City Council members to dismantle or defund the department, Arradondo also said he would use a new system to identify problem officers and intervene if there are early warning signs of trouble.
Read More
Confronted with an economy gripped by recession and high unemployment, the Federal Reserve signaled Wednesday that it expects to keep its key short-term interest rate near zero through 2022.
At the same time, the Fed said it will keep buying about $120 billion in Treasury and mortgage bonds each month to maintain low longer-term borrowing rates in an effort to spur spending and growth.
Read More
The coronavirus pandemic has led to the largest drop in small business ownership in the United States, hurting black business owners the most, according to a June study from an economic research organization.
3.3 million business owners are not actively working, and 22% of the closures came during the February-to-April window of coronavirus restrictions, reported Axios, citing a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper. In the whole Great Recession of 2008, small business owners shrank by 730,000 at 5% reduction, the study noted.
Read More
The U.S. national debt has just reached 120.5% of the nation’s annual economic output, breaking a record set in 1946 for the highest debt level in the history of the United States. The previous extreme of 118.4% stemmed from World War II, the deadliest and most widespread conflict in world history.
Today’s unprecedented debt-to-economy ratio—which is economists’ primary measure of government debt—includes $2.5 trillion in new debt since the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, it doesn’t account for the vast bulk of economic damage inflicted by government-mandated business shutdowns, which will soon make the debt ratio significantly larger by decreasing its denominator. Although this decline has already begun, most of it is not yet reflected in the official data on the size of the U.S. economy.
Read More
Protesters attacked Christopher Columbus statues in Richmond, Virginia and Boston Tuesday night.
The Columbus statue in Richmond’s Byrd Park was toppled, set on fire, and thrown into a nearby lake, ABC affiliate WRIC News reported. The Boston statue, located in Christopher Columbus Park, was discovered decapitated Wednesday morning, according to Boston 25 News.
Read More
Two members of the Hennepin County Board of Commissioners voted Tuesday in favor of removing the county’s medical examiner because they didn’t like the results of his autopsy in the case of George Floyd.
Chief Medical Examiner Andrew Baker released a 20-page autopsy report last week with the permission of Floyd’s family and concluded that Floyd’s heart stopped while being restrained by officers. The report revealed that Floyd tested positive for the coronavirus, had fentanyl and meth in his blood, and had a number of underlying health conditions.
Read More
One of Minnesota’s most influential pro-life organizations has called on Department of Health Commissioner Jan Malcolm to resign for failing to address the crisis in the state’s long-term care facilities.
As of Tuesday, COVID-19 fatalities among nursing-home residents accounted for 79 percent of Minnesota’s 1,217 total deaths. Under the threat of a legislative subpoena, Malcolm revealed in a 74-page letter to lawmakers that dozens of long-term care facilities have allowed COVID-19 patients to return to a congregate-care setting after being discharged from the hospital.
Read More
Project Veritas on Tuesday released a third installment of the #ExposeAntifa series, in which members of the militia wing talk about abolishing everything, including the police. The video is available here. The series debuted last week. In addition to secretive meetings and violent combat training, the footage shows members…
Read More
The U.S. economy created over 3.8 million jobs in May in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ household survey, and 2.5 million in its establishment survey, heralding the bottom of labor markets in April.
How do we know April was the bottom? Unless we’re anticipating losing 3.8 million jobs in June when America is reopening, barring a resurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the momentum is moving precisely in the opposite direction, the likelihood is that June, July and August will only add to what has already been gained.
Read More
Good people still make bad mistakes.
One example is the Cato Institute’s attacks upon the Jones Act. The libertarian think tank should be appreciated for some other efforts, but not for its strident campaign to let foreign interests take over water transportation within the United States.
Read More
A judge in Richmond has issued an injunction preventing Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s administration from removing an iconic statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee for 10 days.
The temporary injunction order issued Monday says the state is a party to a deed recorded in March 1890 in which it accepted the statue, pedestal and ground they sit on and agreed to “faithfully guard” and “affectionately protect” them.
Read More
One of China’s main propaganda outlets has paid American newspapers nearly $19 million for advertising and printing expenses over the past four years, according to documents filed with the Justice Department.
China Daily, an English-language newspaper controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, has paid more than $4.6 million to The Washington Post and nearly $6 million to The Wall Street Journal since November 2016, the records show.
Read More
As tensions remain high between Iran and the U.S., the Islamic Republic appears to have constructed a new mock-up of an aircraft carrier off its southern coast for potential live-fire drills.
The faux foe, seen in satellite photographs obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press, resembles the Nimitz-class carriers that the U.S. Navy routinely sails into the Persian Gulf from the Strait of Hormuz, its narrow mouth where 20% of all the world’s oil passes through.
Read More
An Air Force sergeant and leader in an elite military security force was armed with homemade bombs, an AR-15 rifle and other weapons and had a desire to harm police when he launched a deadly attack on unsuspecting officers, a Northern California sheriff said Monday.
Gunfire and explosives rained down from a hillside Saturday afternoon as Staff Sgt. Steven Carrillo fired from the high ground onto police who scrambled to find cover and defend themselves, Santa Cruz County Sheriff Jim Hart said.
Read More
The man charged with killing former St. Louis Police Capt. David Dorn was convicted of a felony, but he never served a single day behind bars, court records show.
Stephan Cannon, 24, was supposed to be locked up for seven years following a 2014 robbery conviction, but he received a suspended execution of sentence and was let loose. He also violated his parole after his release on two separate occasions and was still not sent to jail, according to a Fox 2 report, which cited court records.
Read More
The History Channel’s recent series about Ulysses S. Grant was produced by Leonardo DiCaprio and based on the best-selling biography by Ron Chernow. It concluded on Wednesday and was just about what one would expect from a film created by some of academia’s and entertainment’s biggest leftists.
Although the series did fairly well in rehabilitating and humanizing Grant’s better characteristics, it could not resist hammering home trite narratives about Reconstruction, going so far as to omit well-documented history about Grant and his administration to accomplish the task. He who controls how we speak about the past and what we know about the past controls the future. This show, like much of what is created in academia and entertainment, advances that project.
Read More
U.S. consumers were on track for a record year of debt repayment before the coronavirus shutdown, according to a new 2020 Credit Card Debt Study published by the personal-finance website WalletHub.
Consumers entered 2020 owing more than $1 trillion in credit card debt after a $76.7 billion net increase during 2019. By the end of March, however, they posted the largest first-quarter credit card debt paydown – $60 billion – since at least 1986.
Read More
After falsely accusing the U.S. Park Police of tear-gassing peaceful protesters on behalf of President Trump, many media outlets and politicians are claiming that he called on governors to forcibly “dominate protestors.” Quite the opposite, Trump explicitly stated he is an “ally of all peaceful protesters” and that it is the “professional anarchists, violent mobs, arsonists, looters” and other lawbreakers who should be stopped.
Beyond their failure to draw a distinction between peaceful demonstrators and violent lawbreakers, the same cadre of media outlets are stirring racial strife by using anecdotes and half-truths to paint a false picture of systemic police violence against African Americans.
Read More
Aldermen begged, cried and cursed at Democratic Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot over the city’s response to protests during a heated conference call May 31, according to a recording obtained by WTTW News.
Lightfoot received criticism from members of Chicago City Council’s Black Caucus who accused her during the call of deploying 375 members of the Illinois National Guard to block off the central business district, PBS affiliate WTTW News reported.
Read More
The impact of the coronavirus resulted in a surge in demand for personal protective equipment (PPE). U.S. manufacturers were able to quickly transition to produce PPE and other supplies necessary in the fight aganst COVID-19, according to a new report.
“The PPE manufacturing industry has become one of the most important industries in the United States nearly overnight,” the report by IBISWorld says.
Read More
Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender made several appearances on cable news programs Monday and was unable to articulate who would respond to violent crimes if her city’s police department is actually abolished.
Read More
A judge on Monday kept bail at $1 million for a former Minneapolis police officer charged with second-degree murder in George Floyd’s death.
Derek Chauvin, 44, said almost nothing during an 11-minute hearing in which he appeared before Hennepin County Judge Denise Reilly on closed-circuit television from the state’s maximum security prison in Oak Park Heights.
Read More
Florida has the largest percentage of seniors 65-years-old and older in its population most vulnerable to the Chinese coronavirus among larger states and second nationwide, at 20.5 percent, or 4.3 million. Yet it has a relatively low mortality rate for a large state for the China-originated COVID-19 pandemic, at just 2,660, according to data from the Florida Department of Health and the U.S. Census Bureau.
Read More
President Donald Trump announced on Twitter Monday that he recruited McLaughin & Associates, a “highly respected pollster,” to explain why two recent polls from CNN and NBC are “fake.”
A Monday CNN poll had President Trump trailing Democratic nominee Joe Biden by 14 points, while an NBC poll claimed Trump was down by seven.
Read More
Workers for the state of Virginia inspected Richmond’s huge statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee on Monday before its planned removal. While protesters have toppled some other Confederate statues and some cities have moved swiftly to remove what critics see as symbols of white supremacy, this monument won’t be so easy to take down.
Virginia’s Department of General Services said in a statement that it plans to remove the statue of the Confederate general on a date to be determined, as soon as possible. But officials said it must be done safely, given the memorial’s weight and height.
Read More
Wall Street’s rally is spilling into a new week as most stocks continue to ride the high supplied by Friday’s surprisingly encouraging report on the U.S. jobs market.
The S&P 500 was up 0.5% in midday trading on Monday, bringing it back within 5.3% of its record set in February, as optimism strengthens that the worst of the coronavirus-induced recession may have already passed. Stocks that would benefit most from an economy that’s growing again were rising the most, but pullbacks for a handful of big tech stalwarts were keeping the market’s overall gains in check.
Read More
Tropical Storm Cristobal weakened into a depression early Monday after inundating coastal Louisiana and ginning up dangerous weather along most of the U.S. Gulf Coast, sending waves crashing over Mississippi beaches, swamping parts of an Alabama island town and spawning a tornado in Florida.
Heavy rainfall and a storm surge continued posing a threat across a wide area of the coast after Cristobal made landfall Sunday afternoon packing 50-mph (85-kph) winds between the mouth of the Mississippi River and the since-evacuated barrier island resort community of Grand Isle.
Read More
A bronze chest filled with gold, jewels, and other valuables worth more than $1 million and hidden a decade ago somewhere in the Rocky Mountain wilderness has been found, according to a famed art and antiquities collector who created the treasure hunt.
Forrest Fenn, 89, told the Santa Fe New Mexican on Sunday that a man who did not want his name released — but was from “back East” — located the chest a few days ago and the discovery was confirmed by a photograph the man sent him.
Read More
An active-duty U.S. Air Force sergeant accused of killing a Northern California sheriff’s deputy in an ambush-style attack was a leader for a military base’s elite security force, officials said Monday.
Staff Sgt. Steven Carrillo has been arrested on suspicion of fatally shooting Santa Cruz County sheriff’s Sgt. Damon Gutzwiller and wounding two other officers Saturday. He is expected to be charged with first-degree murder.
Read More
Attorney Michael Avenatti might have violated terms of his temporary release from jail again, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office for the Central District of California said in a filing made Sunday that Avenatti, who represented porn star Stormy Daniels, might have used his friend’s computer to write and file five different documents, according to CNN.
Read More
Democrats proposed a far-reaching overhaul of police procedures and accountability Monday, a sweeping legislative response to the mass protests denouncing the deaths of black Americans in the hands of law enforcement.
The political outlook is deeply uncertain for the legislation in a polarized election year. President Donald Trump is staking out a tough “law and order” approach in the face of the outpouring of demonstrations and demands to re-imagine policing in America.
Read More
Recently, President Trump tweeted two words that succinctly describe the winning coalition that will assure his November reelection: “SILENT MAJORITY.” This prompted a considerable amount of fustian mirth from the Twitter mob, a number of ostensibly serious opinion pieces in the corporate media, and contemptuous dismissal by the Democrats. The consensus was that Trump was indulging a Nixonian fantasy whereby white suburbanites frightened by an increasingly diverse electorate would save his presidency. This interpretation betrays profound ignorance about the term “silent majority,” which never had any racial connotation, and disregards what suburban voters really fear — Democratic incompetence in a time of economic uncertainty and social unrest.
Read More
During the Iraq War, the insurgency spent a lot of its resources attacking infrastructure, particularly the electrical grid. This made life miserable for ordinary Iraqis.
That outcome seems to go against the logic of insurgency, where the center of gravity is the people’s allegiance. But making life uncertain and unbearable means that even if the insurgents cannot win, they ensure the regime cannot win either. The cultivation of chaos exposes the government as ineffective and ultimately removes its legitimacy.
Read More
Anoka County Sheriff James Stuart said “many agencies” have “no appetite” for helping Minneapolis in the future if its leaders follow through on a plan to abolish the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD).
“The members of the Minneapolis City Council should be mindful that numerous other law enforcement agencies have responded to support them, to restore order, to protect their citizens and to return peace to their city during recent tragic days. We did this while joining our communities in disgust over the way in which George Floyd lost his life and in hopes of a stronger, unified future,” Stuart said in a statement released on Facebook Sunday night.
Read More
After the dust settled in the Twin Cities, it’s clear rioters ravaged many businesses owned by minorities and immigrants.
Luis Tamay is an immigrant who saved for longer than 10 years to open his restaurant in South Minneapolis, El Sabor Chuchi, which burned down Friday night as he obeyed curfew, The Star Tribune reported.
Read More
For the last couple of months, your inbox, like mine, has been awash in nauseating communiqués from every school, club, or business you had carelessly entrusted with your email address. “Stay safe,” they urged – and stay home. A great plague is upon the land, and we must all respond with displays of ritual purification and groveling obedience. Shows of obedience were critical, as was the virtue-signaling that accompanied them. People were shamed for appearing in public without a mask or for walking too close to other people. The whole thing was an extraordinary display of communal insanity.
Read More
OPEC and allied nations agreed Saturday to extend a production cut of nearly 10 million barrels of oil a day through the end of July, hoping to boost energy prices hard-hit by the coronavirus pandemic.
Ministers of the cartel and outside nations like Russia met via video conference to adopt the measure, aimed at cutting out the excess production depressing prices as global aviation remains largely grounded due to the pandemic. It represents some 10% of the world’s overall supply.
However, danger still lurks for the market. Algerian Oil Minister Mohamed Arkab, the current O
Read More
Nearly every family with kids has gotten a taste of homeschooling over the past two months. In an attempt to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, at least 124,000 schools have closed for over 55 million children in the U.S. At the same time, opponents of homeschooling launched several unfounded attacks on the practice. For example, The Washington Post ran an opinion piece claiming “homeschooling during the coronavirus will set back a generation of children,” and a Salon article said that “homeschooling as a result of the pandemic will likely worsen education for students and pose serious problems to the economy and nation’s social well-being.”
Read More
A Northern California sheriff’s deputy was killed and two law enforcement officers wounded Saturday when they were ambushed with gunfire and explosives while pursuing a suspect, authorities said.
The U.S. Air Force confirmed Sunday that the suspect was an active duty sergeant stationed at Travis Air Force Base.
Read More
A new bill looks to grant the government additional oversight on foreign access to U.S. research and intellectual property.
The legislation comes as a response to recent incidents of high-security concern which concern China’s relationship with the US, including Chinese programs that seek to recruit American scientists, and the widespread failure of U.S. universities to report foreign funding.
Read More
Sen. Lindsey Graham said Sunday that he has been denied access to interview an FBI agent and FBI analyst who met with a key source for the Steele dossier who disavowed the salacious document.
Graham has sought interviews with the FBI case agent and supervisory intelligence analyst to discuss their interview in January 2017 with the primary source for Christopher Steele, the former British spy who investigated the Trump campaign for Democrats.
Read More
The New York Times’ editorial page editor resigned Sunday after the newspaper disowned an opinion piece by U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton that advocated using federal troops against protesters, and it was later revealed he hadn’t read the piece prior to publication.
James Bennet resigned and his deputy, James Dao, is being reassigned at the newspaper, the Times said Sunday.
Read More
A small group of demonstrators toppled a statue of a Confederate general in the the former capital of the Confederacy late Saturday, following a day of largely peaceful protests in the Virginia city.
The statue of Gen. Williams Carter Wickham was pulled from its pedestal in Monroe Park, a Richmond police spokeswoman said. She said she did not know if there were any arrests or damage done to the statue.
Read More
Criminals are seizing on a surge in job losses to steal unemployment benefits from Americans nationwide. This complicates an already tough situation for millions of financially strapped Americans and overwhelmed state unemployment offices.
While there’s no exact measure of how many fraudulent claims have been made, states from Washington to Maine say they’ve seen an increase and numerous federal agencies are working to fight it.
Read More
“Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling is facing hefty backlash after she posted a series of tweets about transgender people.
Rowling drew outrage Saturday on Twitter when she criticized an opinion piece published by the website Devex, a media platform for the global development community, that used the phrase “people who menstruate.”
Read More
Amazon, Twitter, and other major tech companies are facing intense criticism on antitrust issues and censorship claims in the months since government officials reportedly began asking for help from Silicon Valley on ways to tackle the coronavirus pandemic.
The president and lawmakers have turned their sights on Twitter and Amazon, respectively, while Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and other attorneys general are reportedly ratcheting up their antitrust investigation targeting Google’s business model. The White House asked them in March to fight coronavirus disinformation while also assisting the government in its virus response.
Read More