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WASHINGTON DC (Kurdistan 24) On Thursday, Iranian media reported that the country’s Vice President for Women and Family Affairs, Masoumeh Ebtekar, had tested positive for the coronavirus, and The Washington Post suggested “infections appear to be rapidly spreading among the Iranian political elite.” In addition, the head of the national security and policy committee of the Iranian parliament, Mojtaba Zolnour, also announced on Thursday that he, too, had the virus. The 56 year old parliamentarian is from Qom, one of Shi’a Islam’s two holiest cities and the epicenter of the virus in Iran. Another parliamentarian from Qom, Ahmad Amirabadi Farahani,...

New York governor is charging that the Republican president is trying to punish New York through a series of recent federal acts: from quietly cutting funding for a study proposing a sea wall to protect the New York City region from coastal storm surge flooding, to restricting New Yorkers from federal programs that allow travelers to avoid long security lines at borders and airports. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, told reporters Wednesday that the President Donald Trump is punishing blue states including New York over their politics as he runs for re-election. SNIP Trump has often complained about New York...

New York’s governor is asking state lawmakers to approve spending $40 million to respond to the threat of the COVID-19 virus. New York City has set plans that include making as many as 1,200 hospital beds available. Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday the state has had no confirmed cases of the new virus, but officials are waiting for test results regarding one person in Nassau County. SNIP

... Now I have to decide if I’d support Bernie Sanders over Trump. We all start from personal experience. I covered the Soviet Union in its final decrepit years. The Soviet and allied regimes had already slaughtered 20 million people through things like mass executions and intentional famines. Those regimes were slave states. They enslaved whole peoples and took away the right to say what they wanted, live where they wanted and harvest the fruits of their labor. And yet every day we find more old quotes from Sanders apologizing for this sort of slave regime, whether in the Soviet...

During a staff meeting at the Riverbend plant Wednesday morning, Panasonic Solar North America President Mark Shima announced what published reports had already indicated: all 400 Panasonic employees at the South Buffalo solar production plant would be losing their jobs at the end of May. "This is a really tough announcement but I'd like to express my sincere gratitude to all of you," Shima told the employees. 7 Eyewitness News obtained audio of the meeting, in which Shima explains why Panasonic is shutting down and what this means for staff at the facility co-located with Tesla. "We have been dealing...

Pope Francis has come down with a “slight indisposition,” forcing him to cancel a planned Mass in Rome, just a day after he expressed his solidarity with coronavirus sufferers around the world — and as the disease continues to spread across Italy. The illness has forced the 82-year-old pontiff to nix a penitential Mass, marking the start of Lent, that he’d planned to celebrate at the St. John Lateran basilica across town with Roman clergy, the Vatican said. Francis will proceed with the rest of his planned work Thursday, but “preferred to stay near Santa Marta,” the Vatican hotel where...

A Chinese destroyer used a weapons-grade laser to target a US Navy P-8A surveillance aircraft flying above the Pacific last week, US Pacific Fleet said Thursday.

South Korea spike: South Korea has the biggest outbreak outside China, with 2,022 cases.

Continuation of Coronavirus live Thread. 4.

Israeli scientists are reportedly only a few weeks away from having developed the first vaccine to combat the coronavirus, which originated in China, and could have the vaccine available 90 days after that. “Congratulations to MIGAL [The Galilee Research Institute] on this exciting breakthrough,” Science and Technology Minister Ofir Akunis said, according to The Jerusalem Post. “I am confident there will be further rapid progress, enabling us to provide a needed response to the grave global COVID-19 threat,” Akunis said, referring to the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. A team of scientists at MIGAL had been working for years...

Tell Us Your Favorite "Truck or Trucking" Songs *Video* Joe Diffie ~ Pickup Man Well, I got my first truck when I was three Drove a hundred thousand miles on my knees Hauled marbles and rocks and thought twice before I hauled a Barbie Doll bed for the girl next door She tried to pay me with a kiss and I began to understand There's something women like about a pickup man When I turned sixteen, I saved a few hundred bucks My first car was a pickup truck I was cruising the town and the first girl I...

Bloomberg is running slick ads talking about healthcare for all basically on Spanish language radio stations. All commentary about Trump in any form or fashion is VERY negative in general conversation on almost all Spanish-language radio stations.

Alison Schumer (right), the younger of Sen. Chuck Schumer’s two daughters, married Elizabeth Weiland on Sunday in Brooklyn, with the couple posing for wedding photos on a bridge over the toxic Gowanus Canal. Alison Schumer, 29, is a six-figure product marketing manager at Facebook — which has donated about $50,000 to her Democratic Senate minority leader dad, a vocal defender of the social media titan on Capitol Hill. Weiland, 33, is pursuing an MBA at Columbia Business School and works in the MTA’s strategic initiatives office, according to her LinkedIn profile. Sen. Schumer showed up for his daughter’s big...

This is the data repository for the 2019 Novel Coronavirus Visual Dashboard operated by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering (JHU CCSE). Also, Supported by ESRI Living Atlas Team and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab (JHU APL). Visual Dashboard (desktop):https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6 Visual Dashboard (mobile):http://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/85320e2ea5424dfaaa75ae62e5c06e61 Lancet Article:An interactive web-based dashboard to track COVID-19 in real time Provided by Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering (JHU CCSE):https://systems.jhu.edu/ Data Sources: World Health Organization (WHO): https://www.who.int/ DXY.cn. Pneumonia. 2020. http://3g.dxy.cn/newh5/view/pneumonia. BNO News: https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/02/the-latest-coronavirus-cases/ National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China (NHC): http://www.nhc.gov.cn/xcs/yqtb/list_gzbd.shtml China CDC...

An illegal alien fined $280 for leaving two law enforcement officers dead after a negligent driving accident has since been driving freely in the United States, an investigation by the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) finds. Roberto Garza Palacios, a 28-year-old illegal alien from Guatemala, was given a slap on the wrist after he caused a car crash in December 2017 that immediately killed 33-year-old Sander Cohen, the Maryland State Fire Marshal’s Office deputy chief, and later left FBI agent Carlos Wolff, 36-years-old, dead at a nearby hospital. Palacios received a $280 fine for the deadly car crash, with prosecutors...

The next Democratic debate isn’t in Paterson, New Jersey, but it should be: that unlikely city is blazing new trails in multiculturalism and diversity. On Wednesday, the City Council voted unanimously (with two members not voting) to grant preliminary approval to the Islamic call to prayer being broadcast over loudspeakers in the city. This followed the swearing-in earlier this month, on the Qur’an, of course, of Paterson’s new police chief, Ibrahim “Mike” Baycora, the first Muslim police chief in an American city. Celebrate diversity, right? Sure. The problem is that it is by no means certain that this diversity will...

Coronavirus (Covid-19) has, to date (February 25th 2020) infected over 77,000 Chinese citizens, mostly in Hubei Province, since it was first identified in December 2019. It has so far spread to more than 30 countries. It has claimed more than 2,600 lives and been declared a global emergency by the World Health Organisation (WHO). We’ll focus just on data for China in the following series of maps. They are designed to look like small maps you might find on a news media web site. Relatively simple, and with just the basic facts. Many of the issues I’ll note are equally...

The southern Chinese city of Shenzhen wants local restaurants to take dogs and cats off their menus as the country clamps down on the wildlife trade scientists suspect led to the deadly coronavirus outbreak. Reuters reports a new city regulation states only nine meats that are permitted for consumption, including pork, chicken, beef and rabbit, as well as fish and seafood. “Banning the consumption of wild animals is a common practice in developed countries and is a universal requirement of modern civilization,” the notice said. Apart from dogs, the new Shenzhen act bars snake, frog and turtle meat from the...

PARIS (AP) — A Christian woman acquitted of blasphemy after spending eight years on death row in Pakistan, and who faced death threats from Islamic extremists, said she is going to request asylum in France. Asia Bibi will receive her diploma Tuesday as a Citizen of Honor of the city of Paris, a title she was awarded in 2015. She will meet French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday, officials said. Bibi has lived in Canada since she was released by Pakistan last year. She expressed her desire to live in France in an interview on French radio RTL on Monday....

The poll of 1,512 Catholic registered voters was conducted between Jan. 28 - Feb. 4, 2020, and surveyed U.S. Catholic opinion on a range of subjects, including political affiliation, preferred presidential candidate, the morality of abortion, and religious practices.WASHINGTON, D.C. — While the Catholic Church teaches that procuring an abortion is always immoral, a majority of U.S. Catholics do not believe abortion is intrinsically evil and say it should be legal in all or most cases. According to a RealClear Opinion Research poll sponsored by EWTN and published on Monday, 47% of Catholics in the U.S. believe abortion is “intrinsically...