Free Republic

China’s attempts to make the UN a tool for achieving its hegemonic ambition could end up destroying the body from within. The optimism of neoliberalism has been challenged by rising concerns about China playing a more active role in the United Nations (UN) and its specialized agencies. Currently, four of the 15 UN specialized agencies are headed by Chinese nationals, including the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDP), and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). And with its contribution rising to 12 percent of the UN regular budget, passing...

CNN and MSNBC on many days repeatedly cut in and out of the daily White House briefings on the coronavirus pandemic, with CNN the most eager to replace remarks from President Trump, Vice President Pence or any number of medical and logistical experts with derisive commentary by its anchors and reporters. MSNBC carried a little more than CNN, but its anchors also weren’t hesitant to chime in with their condemnations of Trump’s remarks. A Media Research Center study found that CNN has carried just 69 percent of the briefings’ runtime of those conducted March 30 through April 14. That’s 999...

The late Archbishop Job sings the 15th Antiphon at Matins for Great and Holy Friday. (appx 6 minutes)

The mayor of a Northern California city this week announced plans to step down after outrage erupted over recent social media posts comparing President Donald Trump’s supporters to members of the Ku Klux Klan, Fox News reported. The angry Auburn community, about 33 miles northeast of Sacramento, weighed in on Mayor William Kirby’s controversial comments on Facebook during a virtual City Council meeting by video Monday. Kirby addressed the controversy after several voicemails from residents were played. “I spent 40 years dedicating my life to serving the community of Auburn as a physician and through my volunteer efforts. Am I...

National Public Radio is planning significant cost cuts as the coronavirus pandemic hits sponsorship and donation revenue, the public broadcaster's chief executive, John Lansing, said in a memo to staff. NPR is facing a budget deficit of between $30 million and $45 million through its 2021 fiscal year, Mr. Lansing said in the Wednesday memo. Sponsorship money is drying up amid "a very tough marketplace," he wrote, and donations could also take a hit as foundations and individuals "will be thinking hard about gifts as they watch the swings in the values of their own portfolios." NPR will need to...

Someone needs to explain to Joe Biden that he's the presumptive Democratic nominee, not the presumptive next president. The Democratic candidate is reportedly assembling a White House transition team with over six months to go before the general election. During a virtual fundraising event, Biden announced his campaign has already begun building a transition team, and the candidate would not rule out announcing cabinet nominees before November's election. "Sounds presumptuous," Biden acknowledged. "I don't want to say we started thinking about it a month ago -- we did -- because that sounds like I was certain this was going to...

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall asked a federal court Thursday to allow the state to restrict elective abortions during the coronavirus pandemic, saying the abortion industry should not get “special treatment” when so many other medical procedures are being postponed. WDHN reports Marshall filed the appeal Thursday to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. He also requested an emergency stay of a federal judge’s order blocking the state from enforcing the restriction. “At a time when all Americans are making significant sacrifices to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus, it is remarkable that one class of providers demands to...

Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys representing a Chattanooga church filed suit in federal court Thursday to challenge the city’s ban on drive-in church services. Originally, the city and its mayor, Andrew Berke, tailored its COVID-19 restrictions to a statewide order that allows for drive-in church services but abruptly reversed course to specifically to prohibit them. On April 9, Berke posted a message aimed at churches on the city website and on his official Facebook page regarding the order, stating that “drive-in services…even in their cars with the windows rolled up, for any length of time, will be considered a violation of...

Comedian Chelsea Handler suggest that it took lockdowns for the country to go a month without a school shooting but failed to acknowledge that this occurred just as there were more firearm background checks than anytime on record. “Last month was the first March without a school shooting in the United States since 2002. It took all schools to be closed and everyone forced to be inside because of a pandemic, but we finally did it,” Chelsea Handler said. Ironically, Handler did not mention that there were more firearm background checks in March 2020 than any month, in any year,...

I am in the shelter in place camp. I am also in the camp of thinking we cannot stay sheltered in place for long. I am also in the camp of thinking we must treat this as a regional problem, not a national problem. I am also in the camp of thinking we need the White House to form an articulable plan to help the 50 states reopen. When I was in campaign management, we had a date certain -- the same date every campaign uses, i.e., the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. From there, we worked...

My mom was not a model of ethnic sensitivity. Once she made me cringe when a bunch of visiting rural Cajuns (led by a friend of mine) took us out to New York City’s Little Italy. We couldn’t find a spot, so I suggested parking in neighboring Chinatown. Mom took a stand on principle. Absolutely not. “Oh no,” she said, in her twangy, George-Costanza’s-mom Astoria accent. “I haven’t trusted those people since Pearl Harbor.” She’d been 14 when that happened, and her brother ended up getting wounded fighting at Normandy. Though not against … the Chinese. I stepped in, pedantically,...

An Idaho evangelical church might have had its app pulled from the Google Playstore for having references about the coronavirus within the app. Christ Church, a church in Moscow, Idaho, alleged that its app was supposedly suspended on Good Friday, April 10. The church’s Twitter account made a speculation: “We presume they're talking about Pastor @douglaswils' short lessons on responding faithfully to the COVID-19 crisis. Or maybe Pastor @TJSumpter's sermon calling God's people to humble repentance.” An image provided by the church in its tweet showed an apparent notification from Google’s Playstore, which said: “We don’t allow apps that lack...

This may seem like bad news on the surface, but it is actually very positive news on two fronts. First, it demonstrates that many Americans have been infected and either never presented symptoms or presented symptoms mild enough to prevent them from seeking medical attention. It was previously known that some carriers of the coronavirus never get sick at all, but this study shows the number is much higher than previous estimates. More importantly, it shows the mortality rate from infection is much, much lower than other studies have indicated. According to this comprehensive study by one of the leading...

Welcome back to history, America, it was wondering where you were. The coronavirus pandemic has upended most everything we assumed about the future, including the assumption that the Drudge Report would forever be a grounded center-right news aggregator. Of course, it is not just the United States where things have reverted to a mood from a few centuries ago. In the town of Ragland, New Zealand, locals erected a sign at the town line telling outsiders to stay out and stop buying up all of the town’s flour. The good progressive government currently in power in New Zealand made sure...

One of the top progressive Super PACs has reportedly not seen one single backlash from its coronavirus ads against President Donald Trump that mostly use his own words, showing that Trump’s daily press briefings may actually be doing the president more harm than good in critical swing states.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is easy to cast as just another lumbering UN bureaucracy and there is more than a bit of truth in that. Established in 1948 in the aftermath of the Second World War, its mandate comes from no fewer than 193 member states, each with their own peculiarities and vested interests. The organisation is lauded for its role in the eradication of smallpox, the near-eradication of polio and the fight against the three big global killers of HIV, malaria and tuberculosis. But, as it freely admits, it also gets things wrong. It reacted too slowly to...

Rarely has a word been subject to so much misuse in recent years as “stimulus.” The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES), overwhelmingly passed by Congress and signed by President Trump on March 27, represents an apex of this language malpractice. The stated purpose of this $2.2 trillion “stimulus plan” is to boost our economy in the wake of virus-induced mass layoffs and business closings. But the implicit purpose is paying people not to work. Section 4022, a residential landlord bailout, effectively does that. And it may prove very expensive. Fear of COVID-19 has triggered an economic downturn...

The liberal New York Times devoted two stories between Apr. 15 and Apr. 17, attacking President Donald Trump’s decision to freeze funding to the World Health Organization. The effort attempted to insulate one of the president’s biggest liberal critics on the matter from conservative scrutiny: billionaire Microsoft Co-Founder Bill Gates. The Times piece published Apr. 17 and headlined, “Bill Gates, at Odds With Trump on Virus, Becomes a Right-Wing Target,” grumbled Gates “has effectively assumed the role occupied by George Soros, the billionaire financier and Democratic donor who has been a villain for the right.” NPR reported that the U.S....

The Deep state coup attempt (sometimes called the soft coup or the "insurance policy") was an effort by high-level ( Obama administration intelligence community officials) and holdovers to sabotage the agenda of ( President Donald Trump,) remove him from power, and hide the illegal actions of the Obama administration. Major players in the coup attempt were (Barack Hussein Obama,) (Hillary Rodham Clinton,) John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Rod Rosenstein, Sally Yates, Bruce Ohr, Andrew Weissmann and a host of other lower level (DNC) operatives in the ( US intelligence community) and partisan aligned ( mainstream media organizations.)...

Scientists have been chasing silicon-based lasers for years—they’d provide a faster, cheaper way to move data across or between computer chips. Now researchers say they’ve gotten efficient light emission from silicon by forcing it into a new shape. Replacing copper wires with beams of light makes it possible to send data from one transistor on a chip to another, or from one chip to another, at higher speeds and with less power, without having to worry about the excess heat generated by electrical resistance. Other types of lasers can do that, but the semiconductors they’re made of are more expensive...