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The Trump administration said on Tuesday it will begin treating 5 major Chinese state-run media entities with U.S. operations the same as foreign embassies, requiring them to register their 'employees' and 'U.S. properties' with the State Department. The new determination is being applied to the...Xinhua News Agency...China Global Television Network...China Radio International...China Daily Distribution Corp... Hai Tian Development USA Inc.......Tuesday's decision, the officials said, is not linked to any recent developments in Sino-U.S. relations and has been under consideration for some time. The 5 U.S. operations will have to disclose their personnel rosters and hiring and firing decisions and register...

During a CNN town hall in Nevada, Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg is asked if he'd accept money from Michael Bloomberg, discussed his views on Christianity, and responded to president Trump's support of conservative radio personality Rush Limbaugh's attack on Buttigieg's sexuality. ...

February 19 2020 Wednesday of the Sixth Week in Ordinary Time Reading 1 Jas 1:19-27 Know this, my dear brothers and sisters: everyone should be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger for anger does not accomplish the righteousness of God. Therefore, put away all filth and evil excess and humbly welcome the word that has been planted in you and is able to save your souls.Be doers of the word and not hearers only, deluding yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks...

KerriKupecDOJ @KerriKupecDOJ Official DOJ Twitter account. AG Barr Spox; Dir. of Comms & Public Affairs @TheJusticeDept Addressing Beltway rumors: The Attorney General has no plans to resign. 10:28 PM · Feb 18, 2020

The propaganda department in virus-stricken Hubei Province has engaged over 1,600 censors to scrub the internet of “sensitive” information relating to the coronavirus outbreak, according to an internal document obtained by The Epoch Times. The internal report, dated Feb. 15, detailed the agency’s efforts to ramp up censorship measures. It was drafted after a speech given by Chinese leader Xi Jinping via video link on Feb. 10 to “frontline responders” of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei, where the virus first broke out. The revelations come as the Chinese regime tightens information controls over the worsening outbreak,...

Despite China’s incredible economic success as of late, it’s important to remember that it is still fundamentally a communist country. Recent events have been a stern reminder. Freedom can be messy, but it’s nothing like the mess an authoritarian regime creates when it fears losing power. The disturbing outbreak of the coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in China and the communist government’s response to it should be a reminder of the consequence of a system based on state control, without rule by the people and a vibrant civil society. Many are impressed by the fact that China built a 1,000-bed hospital in 10...

George Zimmerman wants a day in court against two of the leading Democratic presidential contenders, accusing them of defamation. In a lawsuit filed Tuesday in Florida, the man who killed Trayvon Martin in self-defense in 2012 accused Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of “maliciously defam[ing]” Mr. Zimmerman, using the killing “as a pretext to demagogue and falsely brand Zimmerman as a white supremacist and racist to their millions of Twitter followers.” Mr. Zimmerman was acquitted of all charges on traditional self-defense grounds, because Martin attacked him and beat his head against the ground, supposedly for profiling the black teen...

Some of the New Orleans city building inspectors who signed off at key points of the construction of the Hard Rock Hotel before it pancaked and collapsed on Oct. 12, killing three laborers, do not appear to have been properly certified for the work, records show. One inspector, Bryan Cowart, appears to be certified only for residential inspections. Inspector Julie Tweeter, whose whereabouts during inspections she claimed to have completed at the Hard Rock on several days last year are now under investigation, did not receive her commercial building inspector’s license until July 2018. By then, she’d signed off on...

The actress Rosario Dawson has come out in a wide-ranging interview touching upon her latest projects, activism and her relationship with former Democratic presidential candidate Cory Booker. In the interview with Bustle, Dawson clarified that a 2018 Instagram post about Pride, in which she stated that she was "sending love" to her "fellow LGBTQ+ homies," was mistaken as her coming out. “People kept saying that I [came out] ... I didn’t do that,” she told Bustle. “I mean, it’s not inaccurate, but I never did come out come out. I mean, I guess I am now.” While Dawson did not...

The Justice Department pushed back Tuesday night at multiple reports claiming Attorney General William Barr told people close to him he’s considering stepping down over President Trump’s tweets, days after Barr admitted that Trump’s tweeting made it “impossible for me to do my job.” “Addressing Beltway rumors: The Attorney General has no plans to resign,” DOJ spokeswoman Kerri Kupec tweeted. Barr “has his limits,” one person familiar with Barr’s thinking told The Washington Post. Its report suggested that Barr wanted Trump to “get the message” to stop weighing in publicly in ongoing criminal cases. An administration official gave a similar...

Opponents criticized an Iowa bill that would require schools to notify parents before teaching LGBTQ content to children. Lawmakers introduced the Republican-sponsored House File 2201 in January, a bill that would require schools to annually notify parents about any kind of material that discusses gender or sexual orientation. This would then give parents the opportunity to inspect such material and pull their children out of certain classes. The bill is one of 13 pieces of legislation introduced in the Iowa state Legislature that opponents are calling anti-LGBTQ, CNN reported Friday. Republican Iowa state Rep. Jeff Shipley says that the bill...

President Trump’s reelection campaign announced it is taking out a full-page advertisement in the Las Vegas Review-Journal on Wednesday, the same day Democrats will be squaring off in Nevada’s primary debate. The ad, which is running in Nevada’s largest newspaper based on circulation, will slam Democrats for “big government socialism” that it says will “kill Nevada jobs.” The color ad will also highlight job creation and dropping unemployment during Trump's tenure, declaring that “President Trump’s fighting for the economy.” “Nevada voters should know that it doesn’t matter which Democrat becomes their party’s nominee, because the big government socialist agenda will...

A new Emerson College National Poll finds Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders taking the lead, now at 29% support.

For generations, Pennsylvania’s blue-collar voters found political refuge in the Democratic Party. Even when the national party moved leftward on social issues, this voting bloc—largely Catholic, with multigenerational roots in coal and steel towns—elected Democrats to defend their economic interests. But the party’s environmental activists are jeopardizing this allegiance. A clash is taking place between progressives, who want a carbon-free future, and organized labor, which sees fossil-fuel industries and the jobs they create as essential for many communities. This opposition, reflective of a national trend, could fracture the party statewide and help ensure another victory for Donald Trump. From Pennsylvania’s...

Donald J. Trump Retweeted https://t.co/m4CEec9c7b pic.twitter.com/XTZLj8OyhB— Dan Scavino (@DanScavino) February 18, 2020

Four militants were killed and six were wounded as a result of the hostilities with Ukrainian military men in Donbas. Head of the General Staff / Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Ruslan Khomchak, has said this at a briefing, the Ukrainian News Agency reports. Khomchak said that the enemy requested a ceasefire regime at about 10 a.m. as they had to remove those killed and wounded. He assured that currently, the situation in Donbas is stable. As Ukrainian News Agency earlier reported, one Ukrainian military man was killed, three were wounded and two were shell-shocked at the contact...

WASHINGTON - Attorney General William Barr has told people close to President Donald Trump - inside and outside the White House - that he is considering quitting over Trump's tweets about Justice Department investigations, three administration officials said, foreshadowing a possible confrontation between the president and his attorney general over the independence of the Justice Department. So far, Trump has defied Barr's requests, both public and private, to keep quiet on matters of federal law enforcement. It was not immediately clear Tuesday whether Barr had made his posture known directly to Trump. The administration officials said Barr seemed to be...

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Chiu’s bill comes as the state and local governments are ramping up their spending on homelessness, but the number of people on the street continues to rise. Gov. Gavin Newsom recently proposed spending more than $1 billion on homelessness in his 2020-21 budget, including $750 million to build housing for the homeless and help prevent struggling families from ending up on the streets. His last budget also included about $1 billion to fight homelessness — including $650 million for cities and counties. Meanwhile, the crisis keeps getting worse. The homeless population grew by 42% between 2017 and 2019 in San...

February 17, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – A few years ago, the best way to trigger an advocate for redefining marriage to include same-sex couples would be to note that once the gender of those involved in the marriage became arbitrary, there really was no reason, strictly speaking, that the number of partners involved should be limited, either. This logical argument—that once you redefine one characteristic of an institution, there is no reason you can’t redefine others, too—was extremely inconvenient for the activists who recognized that they needed to move the Overton Window slowly enough that nobody would get too alarmed. It...