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On this date in 1836 — Palm Sunday, as it happened — over 300 Anglo POWs fighting to separate Texas from Mexico were executed en masse outside Goliad’s fortress Less widely celebrated than the Battle of the Alamo preceding it by a fortnight, the Battle of Coleto on March 19-20 had seen Mexican troops surround and capture another force of Texians at Goliad.

The United States has indicted Venezuela’s socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro and other top regime officials in a narco-terrorism and drug trafficking conspiracy that aimed to “flood the United States with cocaine,” the Justice Department announced. The criminal indictment accuses Maduro of teaming up with Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) to smuggle cocaine into the United States.

As I post this in Australia, it is still 26 March in America, the 128th anniversary of Walt Whitman’s death. I invite Freeepers to reflect upon freedom via this collage of Whitman with some of my own thoughts: https://freedom-demokrasi-and-civilised-humanity.com/2020/03/27/american-energy/ Does Trump rediscover Whitman for America in …….. ………… his celebration of people scorned by Obama and Clinton as clinging and deplorable? ………… and in his urge to keep working when medical science around the world is saying stop and self-isolate? If we have to self-isolate, is there any place better to do that than in the glories of Walt Whitman?...

A local business is paying it forward, by supporting local businesses affected by the coronavirus pandemic. The CEO of MuniciPAY, a payment processor in Portland, is giving each of his employees $50 a week to buy food from local restaurants in the area. He says the company is fortunate to be economically stable during this time, and hopes he's making a difference in the community. "You know, the employees feel good, we're doing something good, and that's it, hopefully this will grow to be some big number,” MuniciPAY CEO Jamie Nonni said. “I know you can't save everybody, but that's...

A ringing phone stirred Somy Ali from her sleep one night last week. A call in the early morning hours is hardly unusual for Ali, who runs a Miami-based nonprofit for domestic violence survivors. But in recent days, as millions isolate themselves from the outside world while COVID-19 diagnoses surge across Florida, her phone hasn't stopped ringing. For now, the consensus advice has been to stay inside. Yet for those who experience domestic violence, the outbreak has created a perfect storm of circumstance, trapping some in their homes with an abuser as uncertainty compounds anxiety. In 2018, Miami-Dade saw 9,137...

After a shocking turnaround in his campaign — he was nearly left for dead after his crushing defeat in New Hampshire, only to become the presumptive nominee after Super Tuesday — Joe Biden was ready to pivot to a general election campaign against President Trump. But then the coronavirus hit the United States, and the ex-veep’s campaign has struggled mightily to deal with the political fallout. Trump has utterly eclipsed his would-be rival. And when Biden has been heard from, he has looked frankly pathetic. After disappearing for more than a week after his primary victories in Missouri, Michigan and...

A video from a reporter in Montana has gone viral after the reporter spots a herd of bison coming toward him while setting up for his shot. “Three, two, oh my god. I ain’t messing with you. Oh no. I’m not messing with you,” Deion Broxton says. Deion Broxton KTVM ✔ @DeionNBCMT There was a herd of bison walking right toward me at @YellowstoneNPS today! Embedded video 364K 1:25 PM - Mar 25, 2020 Broxton was doing a story at Yellowstone Park when he spotted the bison. He then packed up and got out of there. Then once he was...

Harvard University, which has the largest endowment of any school in the country, is cutting its subcontracted dining hall workers without pay as it shuts down in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The move is drawing criticism from employment rights advocates on and off campus who point to the university's $40.9 billion endowment as evidence that the school is hardly in financial straits. They also claim the decision violates Harvard's wage equality policy, which requires the university to compensate dining hall contract workers in a fashion comparable to the school's directly hired employees. Harvard closed campus dining halls and other...

A Chinese government-backed property giant has secretly raided in bulk Australia’s supplies of masks, hand sanitiser, antibacterial wipes and essential medical supplies and shipped them back to China. The Greenland Group, which manages high-end real estate projects in Sydney and Melbourne, proactively drained Australian supplies of anti-coronavirus equipment, The Sydney Morning Herald reported. Three million surgical masks, 500,000 pairs of gloves and bulk supplies of sanitiser and wipes were bought up in Australia and other countries where Greenland operates. While the bulk purchases and shipping were perfectly legitimate, the goods shipped in bulk to China include the very items that...

When polls showed that President Donald Trump was receiving unusually high marks for his handling of the Coronavirus pandemic, the first stage of grief the media went through was denial: The political media have been working extremely hard to craft a narrative that the spread of the coronavirus was essentially the fault of the man they had blamed for all other ills in recent years. How could the people not accept that narrative, particularly considering that most everyone in the media was pushing it? Things got worse when additional polls showed Trump receiving high ratings at the same time that...

You can save money, cut down on food waste, and extract more flavor from your produce by keeping and using these precious scraps. For many cooks, onions and garlic are essential -- but most people don't know there's a lot of flavor in their papery outer layers. Though unpleasant to eat, the skins on both vegetables are great for infusing flavor into soups, sauces and stocks. If you're making a pot of short ribs, you can cut an onion in half and throw it in, skin and all. You'll just to remove it when the meat is finished cooking, but...

SummaryWhat is already known about this topic? Early data from China suggest that a majority of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) deaths have occurred among adults aged ≥60 years and among persons with serious underlying health conditions. What is added by this report? This first preliminary description of outcomes among patients with COVID-19 in the United States indicates that fatality was highest in persons aged ≥85, ranging from 10% to 27%, followed by 3% to 11% among persons aged 65–84 years, 1% to 3% among persons aged 55-64 years, <1% among persons aged 20–54 years, and no fatalities among persons aged...

"""New York tells nursing homes they'll need to take coronavirus patients discharged from hospitals, report says""" New York told nursing-home operators that they will be required to accept patients infected with the new coronavirus who are discharged from hospitals but may be still convalescing, amid more cases in the state that are straining the health-care system. The decision will draw pushback from some nursing-home officials, who have warned that such moves endanger residents who aren’t infected by the virus, because discharged patients may still be contagious. A group representing doctors who work in nursing homes, known as AMDA, the Society...

Approval of Trump’s overall job performance is up one point since February to 48 percent, while 51 percent disapprove. That puts him underwater by 3 points. Last month, his rating was 47 approve-52 disapprove (-5). His best marks were in February 2017, when he had a net positive rating by one point (48-47). The uptick comes from a record 16 percent of Democrats approving of Trump, up from a previous high of 14 percent. And approval among women matches an earlier record 43 percent. When asked specifically about responses to the coronavirus outbreak, 51 percent of voters approve of Trump...

NASA's DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission is scheduled to launch on July 22, 2021. It's a demonstration mission to study the use of kinetic impact to deflect an asteroid. It'll head for the tiny binary asteroid system called Didymos, (or 65803 Didymos.) This double asteroid system poses no threat to Earth. The larger of the pair, named Didymos A, is about 780 meters (2560 ft.) in diameter, while the smaller one, Didymos B, is only about 160 meters (535 ft.) DART will crash itself into the Didymos B. It's close to the typical size of an asteroid that threatens...

Q is the result of the sacrifices and commitment of countless patriots to win back our captured country from the Deep State and achieve the transformation President Trump promised in this campaign video. President Trump has said the awakening of the public is key to this transformation.Q describes this awakening as follows: "The Great Awakening ('Freedom of Thought’), was designed and created not only as a backchannel to the public (away from the longstanding ‘mind’ control of the corrupt & heavily biased media) to endure future events through transparency and regeneration of individual thought (breaking the chains of ‘group-think’), but,...

As NASA reports in a new post, researchers recently discovered that Voyager 2 cruised through a blob of charged gas called a plasmoid as it passed the planet. The spacecraft’s journey through the plasmoid lasted only about a minute, but that was still long enough for scientists to spot the anomaly in the decades-old data. The scientists believe that gas loss may have already drained as much 55% of the planet’s atmosphere. Loss of atmosphere resulting in plasmoids has been observed around other planets in our solar system, including Saturn and Jupiter, though it’s thought that Uranus has leaked far...

The push in the U.S. pandemic epicenter follows the president’s declaration that he ‘feels good’ about compounds with unproven efficacy, hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine. New York is moving at unprecedented speed and scale in a human experiment to distribute tens of thousands of doses of anti-malarial drugs to seriously ill patients, spurred by political leaders including President Trump to try a treatment that is not proved to be effective against the coronavirus. With no proven treatment for the coronavirus, and infections in New York topping 30,000, health experts say the Food and Drug Administration has moved with uncommon speed to authorize...

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There are several religious freedom issues in our responses to the Coronavirus pandemic. One is restricting access for chaplains, among others, to health care facilities and homes for the elderly, but the most contentious issue has been some governments outright bans on most religious gatherings, as in the U.K., or restrictions to groups of less than ten people. In South Korea, over half the cases are connected to the semi-cultic Shincheonji Church of Jesus, and hundreds of Protestant churches held services last Sunday despite government orders against large public gatherings. Some have argued that such restrictions are a violation of...