Zaosong Zheng, who worked in research at Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, pleaded guilty to lying to customs officials about his attempt to take biomaterial to China.
According to a Department of Justice press release, Zheng was arrested in December 2019 at Boston’s Logan International Airport, where he had attempted to board a flight to China. Federal officers found 21 vials of biological research material stuffed into a sock in one of his bags.
Read More
Few people realize that the Moderna vaccine against COVID-19—which the FDA has finally declared “highly effective,” and which is now being distributed to Americans—has actually been available for nearly a year.
But the government wouldn’t let you take it.
Read More
Planned Parenthood is preparing its wish list for former Vice President Joe Biden’s prospective administration, but pro-life forces are gearing up for a fight.
In a Roll Call interview, Planned Parenthood Action Fund President and CEO Alexis McGill Johnson said her organization’s top goal in 2021 is abolishing the Hyde Amendment, which for 40 years has prohibited federal funding for most abortions.
Read More
A seven-state coalition announced a $2 million settlement with online retailer Cafepress.
The settlement resolves a 2019 data breach that compromised 22 million consumers, Attorney General Dana Nessel announced Monday.
Read More
The two coronavirus vaccines that have been approved for emergency use authorization in the U.S. will be able to combat a new, more contagious strain of the virus in the U.K., experts said Monday.
Vaccines made by pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Moderna will be effective against the new strain, which is “very similar” to previous strains at the genetic level, University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation affiliate assistant professor Vin Gupta told CNBC. The Food and Drug Administration has approved both vaccines for emergency use authorization after large-scale human trials showed efficacy of more than 90%.
Read More
New Mexico Rep. Deb Haaland — a Native American through her mother’s lineage — is the newest addition to Biden’s identity politics bingo card. Haaland was tapped for Secretary of the Interior, a position with control over conservation and oil and gas drilling on public lands, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and a swath of other agencies like the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Indian Education.
Environmentalists were titillated to see a Native American nominated to take charge of land conservation and Native affairs, especially after President Trump authorized oil drilling, pipelines, and the border wall on land considered by some Native activists to be sacred.
Read More
Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said Monday that “faith-oriented” people in Congress have told her they “don’t believe in science.”
The California Democrat spoke Monday on the house floor where she discussed coronavirus relief and the recently approved vaccines, accusing the White House of spreading “quackery” notions of herd immunity.
Read More
Students across America are taught an origin of life story that goes a little something like this: billions of years ago, energy from the sun, lightning, and Earth’s heat combined with the planet’s early atmosphere of hydrogen, methane and other gases, creating chemical reactions that formed molecules in a primordial soup that eventually produced a cell, in other words, life.
But one prominent professor argues that that simplistic explanation is not only unproven, it’s highly improbable.
Read More
Activist members of the student government at Cornell University are waging an ideological war against fellow Cornell Student Assembly members who recently voted against disarming campus police.
From launching recall petitions and rallying against their fellow representatives in November, to earlier this month ousting some of them from subcommittees or the entire assembly, these activist student government members say they are motivated to set right what a “white-cis-het” group of their peers did in voting down the disarmament resolution.
Read More
The nurse who appeared to faint after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine in a viral video has recovered, according to a statement issued by her employer. Tiffany Dover, a nurse at CHI Memorial Hospital, reportedly came close to passing out due to a medical condition unrelated to the vaccination.
The hospital also cited information from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) website, which stated that fainting sometimes occurs after all types of vaccinations.
Read More
Since March, the Left has proclaimed itself the guardian of science in dealing with the COVID-19 epidemic. Its champions are the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Dr. Fauci. All in the past have rendered valuable service to the public, and often life-saving aid.
Yet the mixture of COVID-19, the first national quarantine, and Trump Derangement Syndrome have combined to give us reason to question their judgment. These authorities variously have issued conflicting recommendations to wear, then not to wear, and finally to wear masks. Or they have both criticized and then advised travel bans.
Read More
A student at Mercer University in Macon has been ordered to spend four months in jail in Cayman Islands for breaking the British territory’s COVID-19 lockdown rules, according to several reports.
“Skylar Mack and her boyfriend, Cayman Islands-based competitive Jet Skier Vanjae Ramgeet were jailed immediately after their sentences were handed down on Tuesday,” Fox News said last week.
Read More
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN-05) has introduced a “bold resolution” asking President-elect Joe Biden to federally remove $50,000 of student loan debt per person.
The congress member introduced the resolution alongside Reps. Ayanna Pressley, Maxine Waters, and Alma Adams. The resolution outlines a path for Biden to use “excessive authority” to remove student loan debt while simultaneously ensuring there are no tax liabilities for federal student loan borrowers.
Read More
The Athens-Clarke County Board of Elections struck down a challenge to remove nearly 8,000 voters from the the county’s rolls before Georgia’s January 5 U.S. Senate runoff election.
“For the reasons I will discuss, I don’t believe there is probable cause to challenge these voters,” Athens-Clarke County Attorney Judd Drake said to open deliberations.
Read More
The Michigan House on Monday approved a $465 million supplemental budget bill to provide relief to Michiganders in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Senate Bill 748 aims to provide $64 million in small business survival relief; $220 million to extend unemployment benefits through April 1, 2021; $75 million for hospitals and health care workers; $22 million for increased testing; and $57 million for vaccine distribution.
Read More
Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said Sunday he plans to make new criminal referrals to the Justice Department following the release of internal FBI messages from the account of Peter Strzok, the top FBI investigator on Crossfire Hurricane.
In an interview on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” Nunes said the messages, which the Justice Department and FBI declassified earlier this month, should have been provided to Congress years ago when Republicans began investigating whether the FBI abused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in order to surveil Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
Read More
We fight because we must fight. Because if our elections are so tainted that they would make a third world dictator the blush, the consent of the governed is thwarted and the very legitimacy of our government is questionable. That is why we fight until Inauguration Day. Because to do anything else, would be to give up on the American experiment
Read More
The National Basketball Association is remaining quiet on the issue of Chinese slave labor, despite new revelations about the nature and sizeUighur Muslim labor camps.
In 2018, three Uyghur regions alone mobilized at least 570,000 laborers into cotton-picking through the government’s forced labor training and transfer scheme, according to a new Center for Global Policy report. When BBC reporters tried to visit the region to document its “huge industrial expansion” a number of unmarked cars followed them as they filmed the perimeter of the complex when officials stopped them from filming and they were forced to leave.
Read More
Congress agreed on a $900 billion coronavirus relief package Sunday, overcoming several last-minute stalemates over the Federal Reserve’s lending powers and direct cash payments, Senate leaders announced.
“At long last, we have the bipartisan breakthrough the country has needed,” Senate Majority Leader McConnell said Sunday on the Senate floor. “I hope we can do this as promptly as possible.”
Read More
Earlier this year, President Trump’s often embattled Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, established new rules on handling sexual assaults on campus to strengthen protections for accused students, almost all of them men.
Joe Biden, who was the Obama administration’s point man for the policies DeVos upended, has made his displeasure clear.
“The Trump Administration’s Education Department … is trying to shame and silence survivors,” the Biden campaign platform declared. “Instead of protecting women,” it has “given colleges a green light to ignore sexual violence and strip survivors of their civil rights.”
Read More
Conservatives face all kinds of censorship from the private sector. Big Tech will ban your account and employers will fire you just because of your political beliefs. This free market suppression could escalate into conservatives losing their bank accounts and credit cards due to their political views. For some people, it’s already happened.
We could very well see this nightmare scenario under a President Joe Biden. That’s why it’s imperative for the Trump Administration to do something right now to protect ordinary Americans from the depredations of liberal corporations.
Read More
Democratic Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley on Friday compared Republican Georgia Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to “the Bonnie and Clyde of corruption.”
Pressley criticized “this GOP-led Senate” on MSNBC host Joy Reid’s “The ReidOut” for sticking with the Trump administration’s policies and criticized them for being distant from challenges Americans face due to COVID-19. Pressley criticized President Donald Trump and said he permitted the economic challenges.
Read More
“Crack the whip.” “Master/slave.” Even the term “picnic” has been deemed offensive, according to a lengthy list of words and phrases put out recently by the University of Michigan’s Information and Technology Services’ “Words Matter Task Force.”
“To effectively communicate with customers, it is important for ITS to evaluate the terms and language conventions that may hinder effective communication, harm morale, and deliberately or inadvertently exclude people from feeling accepted to foment a healthy and inclusive culture,” states the memorandum obtained by The College Fix.
Read More
Trump team lawyer Lin Wood on Friday filed suit against the state of Georgia, arguing that the state is violating the U.S. Constitution and Georgia law in several ways with respect to its handling of next month’s runoff elections.
Read More
Often during spring training, the Hall of Fame baseball manager of the Reds and Tigers, Sparky Anderson, was asked about how his team would fare in the upcoming season. To put off the question without appearing rude, the skipper would say, “we’ll know after the first 40 games.” Interestingly, the jury is still out on whether Sparky actually believed this, because after the first 40 games he slyly put off the question for more and more games until his team had patently proven its competitive mettle (or lack thereof) to reporters and fans.
Read More
A Democrat Rhode Island governor who told residents to “stay home except for essential activities” was snapped in a photo at a wine and paint night.
“The picture, taken by Erica Oliveras last Friday, shows Democratic Gov. Gina Raimondo sitting at table in Barnaby’s Public House in Providence without a mask,” Fox News reported.
Read More
During a school year disrupted by pandemic-related closures, students across the U.S. will soon be absent for a scheduled reason: the annual Christmas break.
In New York City, the U.S.‘s largest school district, children will be off from Dec. 24 to Jan. 1. Officially called “winter” recess, the December hiatus coincides with Christian celebrations, adding to the number of approved days that many students take off from school on religious holidays, including Eid al-Fitr and Yom Kippur.
Read More
A fact-checking outlet for Facebook is defending its business relationship with an app company linked to the Chinese Communist Party, an arrangement that has raised some controversy in recent weeks amid elevated activity by fact-checkers across social media platforms.
Read More
Southern California has intensive care unit bed capacity reached 0% amid a surge of coronavirus cases, according to a Thursday report from the Los Angeles Times.
The area, which encompasses Los Angeles County, has begun moving patients out of intensive care units (ICU) and local hospitals are keeping certain patients in the emergency room for longer than normal, the Times reported. However, the situation is set to boil over if hospital capacity exceeds 20%, the local outlet wrote.
Read More
The deep divisions plaguing our country may find a remedy in the most unlikely of places: the Bill of Rights. Ratified 229 years ago on December 15, 1791, the first 10 amendments to the Constitution are known collectively as the Bill of Rights. There is little public commemoration of December 15, in contrast to the tradition of celebrating two famous dates in the history of the United States—the Fourth of July, the day that the Declaration of Independence was adopted in 1776, and September 17, the day that the members of the Constitutional Convention signed the Constitution in Philadelphia in 1787. Yet, of the three documents, the Bill of Rights is perhaps the one most invoked by citizens and advocates in everyday life.
Read More
Vice President Mike Pence announced on Friday that Space Force troops will be named “Guardians,” according to a White House transcript of the announcement.
Pence made the announcement during a White House ceremony that commemorated the military branch’s first birthday, according to the transcript. President Donald Trump established Space Force in a $1.4 trillion national security bill in December 2019.
Read More
Arizona’s largest county refused Friday to comply with a subpoena from the state Legislature, going to court instead to fight turning over election evidence to a Senate committee investigating alleged ballot irregularities.
Read More
Internal FBI messages declassified this month make a cryptic reference to an audio recording of a conversation between a Fox News executive and George Papadopoulos, a revelation that the former Trump campaign aide calls “disturbing.”
The message in question is from the Lync account of Peter Strzok, who was the FBI’s lead investigator on Crossfire Hurricane, the counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign.
Read More
Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller reportedly ordered a halt to cooperation with the transition team of Joe Biden on Thursday, resulting in cancelled meetings building-wide.
According to Axios, officials across the Defense Department were shocked at the directive, and unsure of what prompted it. Apparently, a top Biden official was also taken by surprise by the directive.
Read More
Atlantic City has launched an auction and the winner will get to virtually push the button that starts the long-anticipated implosion of the former Trump Plaza Hotel, according to The Hill.
The building at the center of Atlantic City’s Boardwalk was used as a casino since 1984 and shut down in 2014 and fell into a state of disrepair. The demolition work had already begun early this year but the remaining structure is set to be blown up on 29 January.
Read More
In what she claimed is her last news conference before Christmas, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer blasted President Donald Trump’s administration for what she depicted as a “slow-walked” rollout of COVID-19 vaccines in the state.
She also made several announcements regarding the “pause” implemented by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services since the middle of November.
Read More
The U.S. Supreme Court dismissed a challenge to President Donald Trump’s plan to not include illegal immigrants living in the U.S. in the count to determine congressional districts, Reuters reported Friday.
The court ruled 6-3 against a lawsuit attempting to block Trump’s plan to exclude illegal immigrants from the count, Reuters reported.
Read More
Democrats who are unhappy that Republicans are skeptical of the 2020 election results have no one to blame but themselves. Democrats cannot understand why Republicans would question the election results in spite of the fact that Democrats sought to undermine anti-voter fraud measures in the run-up to the election; that Republican observers were not allowed to observe vote counting; and that massive numbers of Biden votes were counted in the middle of the night while no Republican observers were present. Of course, in recent years, Democrats have repeatedly disputed unfavorable election results, pushed wild conspiracy theories, and lied about their opponents. A quick review of recent political history seems in order.
Read More
The Minnesota National Guard may deploy indefinitely to Minneapolis while the four former police officers involved in the death of George Floyd are on trial in 2021, an ABC affiliate reported Wednesday.
The National Guard’s 12-page plan dubbed “Operation Safety Net” details a worst-case scenario plan where all available state guard forces are deployed for an indefinite amount of time during and after the trials of former Minneapolis police officers Derek Chauvin, J. Alexander Keung, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao, local outlet KSTP reported.
Read More
Almost 76,000 voters who did not vote in Georgia’s November elections have registered ahead of the state’s dual Senate runoffs on Jan. 5, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
If those new voters turn out, they could make a sizable difference in a state where the November presidential race was decided by only 12,000 votes.
Read More
San Francisco’s school district has cancelled Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln High School is going to be renamed. Why? “Lincoln, like the presidents before him and most after, did not show through policy or rhetoric that black lives ever mattered to them outside of human capital and as casualties or wealth building,” Jeremiah Jefferies, the chairman of the school district’s renaming committee and a first-grade teacher, virtuously pontificated to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Read More
NASHVILLE, Tennesse- I am often sent songs to review to see if I want to feature the song(s) and/or artist in my column. When I heard Lilly Winwood’s song “Few More Records” I knew this singer/songwriter was talented. But surely this Nashville girl wasn’t related to the Brit rocker, Steve Winwood.
It turns out, surely, she is. Lilly Winwood is the 25-year-old daughter of famed rock and roller, Steve Winwood.
Read More
As sane Americans reluctantly resign themselves to the approach of an unimaginable Joe Biden presidency, the unrelenting blitzkrieg of media Trump-hate is occasionally, but each week more frequently, punctured by glimmers of recognition of what the apparently outgoing president has achieved. There seems to be a consensus, even embracing many Democrats, that President Trump has scored a significant success with the Abraham Accords in the Middle East.
Read More
An all new LIVE STREAM of War Room: Pandemic starts at 9 a.m. Central Time on Saturday.
Former White House Chief Strategist Stephen K. Bannon began the daily War Room: Pandemic radio show and podcast on January 25, when news of the virus was just beginning to leak out of China around the Lunar New Year. Bannon and co-hosts bring listeners exclusive analysis and breaking updates from top medical, public health, economic, national security, supply chain and geopolitical experts weekdays from 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 noon ET.
Read More
President Trump on Friday leaned into Senate Majority Mitch McConnell and others fellow Republicans in the GOP-controlled chamber, telling them to “get tougher” and “fight” for the presidential election.
Read More
President-elect Joe Biden says he is “not concerned” about a federal investigation into his son, Hunter, and accused his opponents of weaponizing the probe for political points.
Biden said that Hunter, who has been involved in a string of high-profile personal and business controversies in recent years, as “the smartest man I know.”
Read More
The FDA approved Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine for emergency use Friday, making the United States the first country to have approved two safe and effective vaccines against COVID-19.
Its approval follows a key FDA panel’s overwhelming vote Thursday to endorse the vaccine’s safety and efficacy. The Moderna vaccine’s approval means that its distribution could begin within hours, providing hospitals and long-term care facilities across the country thousands of much-needed doses.
Read More
The Michigan House and Senate Oversight Committees are assuming authority to issue subpoenas, administer oaths and examine books and records related to the 2020 election.
The committees immediately proceeded to issue subpoenas to election clerks in Detroit and Livonia. Detroit Clerk Janice Winfrey and Livonia Clerk Susan Nash have until the end of business on Jan. 12 to turn over documents pertaining to their respective elections.
Read More
Dominion Voting Systems issued a warning to Georgia officials prior to the 2020 election that memory cards might need to be removed from vote tabulation machines prior to the end of the election to deal with a limitation in its system, according to records obtained by Just the News through an open-records request.
Officials acknowledged Thursday at least 36 memory cards had to be prematurely removed from vote tabulating machines in the Atlanta area that had reached counting limits. The cards were stored in a locked cabinet until polls closed, officials said.
Read More
Hunter Biden was repeatedly told by his business partner that he would begin receiving significant payments from a Chinese private equity firm starting in 2019, emails obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation show.
The business partner, Eric Schwerin, also told Hunter Biden in a December 2018 email that the Chinese private equity firm, BHR Partners, would generate income for him “over the next couple of years.”
Read More