Free Republic

LANSING, Mich. — Protesters gathered at the Michigan State Capitol building Thursday, May 14 for a rally against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's stay at home order. The demonstration started at 9 a.m. and is expected to last until 1 p.m. Michigan State Police tweeted around the start time that protesters began to gather and the crowd was about 150 people. They had "no issues to report."

The State Department’s temporary suspension of visa processing has stopped the inflow of H-1B foreign visa workers into American white-collar jobs while the Chinese coronavirus crisis drives up United States jobless claims to more than ten million. In a given year, more than 100,000 foreign workers are brought to the U.S. on the H-1B visa and are allowed to stay for up to six years. There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off in the process and forced to train their foreign replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart News....

Amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) has issued a directive restricting the sale and distribution of "hydroxychloroquine" declaring it as an essential drug to treat the COVID-19 patients and meet the requirements of emergency arising due to the pandemic. The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare on Thursday made the announcement making it clear that the order "shall come into force on the date of its publication in the official Gazette". In the order, the government declared that the Central government is "satisfied that the drug hydroxychloroquine is essential to meet the requirements...

Shares of others in the race may lose momentum Companies working on COVID-19 treatment and prevention have seen their shares soar so far this year. Moderna (NASDAQ: MRNA) gained 44%, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: REGN) rose 15%, Gilead Sciences (NASDAQ: GILD) climbed 9%, and Inovio Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: INO) soared 102%.These stocks may lose momentum if chloroquine becomes the "go-to" drug for COVID-19. As mentioned above, there is room for additional treatments, but if chloroquine gets the first-mover advantage, others that eventually enter probably will seize a smaller share of the market than hoped. The news also would burst the bubble of...

An adviser to Iranian president Hassan Rouhani last night dropped a chilling hint of an Iranian attack on Donald Trump's property empire after the death of military commander Qassem Soleimani. Hesameddin Ashena shared a link to a Forbes article listing nine of Trump's properties in New York as well as hotels and golf courses elsewhere in America. The properties are no secret, and many of them are named after Trump, but the post by a senior Iranian adviser was a clear hint of a possible strike against Trump's real estate empire. Iran has already threatened the White House and the...

An explosive new report has asserted that deceased sex criminal Jeffery Epstein and his alleged 'madame' Ghislaine Maxwell were foreign intelligence 'assets', and that she is currently hiding in a safehouse in Israel. 'Ghislaine is protected. She and Jeffrey were assets of sorts for multiple foreign governments. They would trade information about the powerful people caught in his net — caught at Epstein's house,' a unnamed source told Page Six. Maxwell, 58, has been accused in lawsuits of procuring underage girls for Epstein to sexually traffick among his wealthy and powerful friends, and is reportedly the subject of an ongoing...

(MENAFN - Arab Times) Police in China searched house of a former mayor of Danzhou and found 268 billion yuan (37,573,600,000 USD) amount of cash as well as 13.5 tons of gold in secret basement of his home. Luxurious real estate with a total area of several thousand square meters, which the former city manager had been hiding for a long time, became the cherry on the cake for the Chinese Anti-Corruption Committee.

The Washington Post, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, who is also the CEO of Amazon, released an editorial this week blasting the enforcement of national immigration law as “cruel” and said U.S. businesses should not be deprived of employing illegal alien workers. In an editorial in the Washington Post, the editors wrote that the recent raids on seven Mississippi food processing plants by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were “cruel” and “pointless” despite arresting and identifying 680 illegal workers, including more than 200 who had previous criminal records. About 300 of the illegal workers arrested were released that same...

A Christian doctor lost his job in a [UK] government department after he refused to refer to “a six-foot-tall bearded man” as ‘madam’, a tribunal heard. Dr David Mackereth, 56, claims he was sacked as a disability benefits assessor by the Department of Work and Pensions over his religious beliefs. The father-of-four alleges he was asked in a conversation with a line manager: “If you have a man six foot tall with a beard who says he wants to be addressed as ‘she’ and ‘Mrs’, would you do that?”

An investigation into racist and insensitive Facebook posts allegedly made by active-duty and former police officers across the country has led to 72 Philadelphia cops being placed on administrative leave, Commissioner Richard Ross announced Wednesday. ... The posts in question were uncovered by a team of researchers who spent nearly two years looking at the personal Facebook accounts of police officers from Arizona to Florida. They found officers bashing immigrants and Muslims, promoting racist stereotypes, identifying with right-wing militia groups and glorifying police brutality.

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Millions of smartphone users confess their most intimate secrets to apps, including when they want to work on their belly fat or the price of the house they checked out last weekend. Other apps know users’ body weight, blood pressure, menstrual cycles or pregnancy status. Unbeknown to most people, in many cases that data is being shared with someone else: Facebook Inc. The social-media giant collects intensely personal information from many popular smartphone apps just seconds after users enter it, even if the user has no connection to Facebook, according to testing done by The Wall Street Journal. The apps...

America’s Team may still be America’s Team, but America’s Team isn’t drawing the same kind of eyeballs in their home market. Via Barry Horn, formerly of the Dallas Morning News, the Cowboys generated a Week One rating of 28.2 in the Dallas-Fort Worth area for their road game at Carolina. That’s the lowest number since the Cowboys produced a 25.2 in 2009.

Investor’s Business Daily charged in an editorial on Thursday that net neutrality advocates unintentionally “made the case” for regulating Google and Facebook. This week a coalition of large tech giants, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter, urged a U.S. appeals court to challenge the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) repeal of the agency’s 2015 net neutrality rule. The editorial board found regarding the agency’s Obama-era net neutrality, “Those 2015 rules were supposed to protect the ‘free and open’ internet by forbidding ISPs from, as the filing puts it, ‘engaging in discriminatory practices that limit consumer choice, competition, and innovation online.'” The business...

The leftist ruling body of Britain’s Labour Party has voted not to adopt the international definition of anti-Semitism in its code of conduct, bringing relations between the Jewish community and the party to a new low since socialist Jeremy Corbyn became leader. (snip) At a meeting hosted by the Stop the War coalition in 2009, Corbyn referred to Lebanese terror organisation Hezbollah and Palestinian terror group Hamas as “friends”. Calling Hezbollah “an organisation that is dedicated towards the good of the Palestinian people and bringing about long-term peace and social justice”, Corbyn said it was “really a big, big historical...

Senior Justice Department officials announced late Thursday criminal charges against Senate Intelligence Committee’s long-time director of security James Wolfe. The indictment charges Wolfe with making false statements to the FBI and details how Wolfe passed classified information, including presumably information related to one-time Trump campaign aide Carter Page, to a series of media outlets, confirming long-standing suspicions of the career intelligence community’s complicity in leaks. The three-count indictment charges Wolfe with separate instances of making false statements to the FBI, not directly charging him for leaking classified information, but appearing to detail how he did allegedly leaked classified information to...

The National Transportation Safety Board’s preliminary report on the fatal collapse in March of a pedestrian bridge at Florida International University in Sweetwater focuses attention on the widely discussed pre-collapse cracking in the main span. The report also confirms accounts about what the construction crew working on the bridge was doing before the structure fell. But the report contains no definitive explanation of what occurred and months and possibly years more will be needed to determine the probable cause of the failure, which killed five motorists and one project worker.

While congresscritters expressed outrage at Facebook’s intrusive data grabs during Capitol Hill hearings with Mark Zuckerberg this week, not a peep was heard about the Silicon Valley–Beltway theft ring purloining the personal information and browsing habits of millions of American schoolchildren. It doesn’t take undercover investigative journalists to unmask the massive privacy invasion enabled by educational technology and federal mandates. The kiddie data heist is happening out in the open — with Washington politicians and bureaucrats as brazen co-conspirators. ... Under the guise of customizable assessments, public and private preschools in Colorado experimented with toddlers whose student activities and social/emotional...

A whistleblower in the southern California construction industry says illegal alien workers have “taken over every trade” in the business while driving down wages by an estimated 40 percent. ... Blaine Taylor, the whistleblower, said the construction industry in California once offered a starting wage of about $45 an hour in the late 1980s. Fast-forward to 2018 — nearly two decades into when illegal aliens began flooding the industry — he now says that wages have fallen by more than half, standing at just $11 an hour.

A transgender woman is suing Tinder on behalf of other transgender people living in the Portland area, claiming it rejects all transgender people from the dating service. Ariel Hawkins claims in a new lawsuit, obtained by TMZ, a few days ago she edited her profile to disclose that she was a pre-op trans woman. She says Tinder immediately deleted her account. She says the company sent her email saying she violated its terms of service ... but didn't point her to any term and refused to explain the basis for the rejection.