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OAK PARK, Ill. (WLS) -- Ottis Dugar, 86, and his 67-year-old wife Demitri still can't believe they were mistaken for armed thieves. Ottis is a Korean War veteran with glaucoma and Demitri is diabetic. They said the incident happened after they left their Oak Park Bank. Demtiri was driving Ottis to a Denny's when they were surrounded by Oak Park and River Forest police, all with guns drawn. "Yelling, 'Get out of the car! Put your hands up!' And when I'm having a bad knee, I cannot get out," Demitri said. "They asked me, 'Who's in the car?' I said...

'No Hate in Our State' is a new campaign being launched by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. It's a series of proposals in the 2021 budget designed to combat hate, division and anti-Semitism in New York. The campaign includes a first-in-the-nation domestic terrorism law, a $25 million investment to help protect not-for-profit religious organizations, creating an education curriculum on diversity and tolerance, and investing $2 million to support the Hate Crimes Task Force. "The rash of anti-Semitism and hate crimes that has been spreading across our State and the country is a virus. I thought that New York would be...

Some coronaviruses can linger on surfaces for up to 9 days ... how long can the new coronavirus linger on surfaces, anyway? The short answer is, we don't know. But if this new coronavirus resembles other human coronaviruses, such as its "cousins" that cause SARS and MERS, it can stay on surfaces — such as metal, glass or plastic — for as long as nine days, according to a new study. (In comparison, flu viruses can last on surfaces for only about 48 hours.) In the new study, researchers analyzed several dozen previously published papers on human coronaviruses (other...

President Donald Trump may not divert $89 million intended for a military construction project in Washington state to build his border wall, a U.S. judge in Seattle ruled Thursday. The U.S. Supreme Court and some other courts have said the administration can begin diverting billions of dollars in military spending to the wall. But U.S. District Judge Barbara Rothstein ruled Thursday that a case brought by Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson contains different arguments which are not covered by those decisions. Rothstein found that diverting the money is unlawful because it would take money that Congress appropriated for military construction...

ROCK HILL, S.C. — Democrats are getting a taste of their own medicine after years of playing the race card against Republicans. All of the top Democratic presidential candidates have racial blemishes on their records, and their rivals have been more forceful in targeting them as they fight tooth and nail for black voters in the first-in-the-South primary Saturday. Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden has faced blowback over the 1994 crime bill that activists blame for putting more minorities behind bars. Sen. Bernard Sanders of Vermont has been challenged on his commitment to confront the gun violence that has...

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...