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Halle Berry spilled the beans on a secret she’d been keeping since her time on the 2002 James Bond installment of “Die Another Day.” The actress spoke with Jimmy Fallon on Tuesday’s edition of “The Tonight Show” and revealed that while filming the movie alongside Pierce Brosnan, he once saved her life on the set after she began choking — and for that, she’s eternally grateful to the Bond star. “I was supposed to be all sexy, trying to seduce him with a fig,” Berry said of her Bond girl character Jinx Johnson. “I end up choking on it and...

The new research provides the first quantitative synthesis of faulting across the entire continent, as well as hundreds of measurements of compressive stress directions—the direction from which the greatest pressure occurs in the Earth's crust. The map was produced by compiling new and previously published measurements from boreholes as well as inferences about kinds or "styles" of faults based on earthquakes that have occurred in the past. The three possible styles of faulting include extensional, or normal faulting, in which the crust extends horizontally; strike-slip faulting, in which the Earth slides past itself, like in the San Andreas fault; and...

Essential Rights and Non-Essential Governments Ask your own questions of Freedom Center's Shillman Fellow and Editor of 'The Point'! FREEDOM CENTER WEBINAR: TEACH-INS FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. The Freedom Center is proud to announce our exclusive new webinar series, “Teach-Ins for the Twenty-First Century.” Join us as some of the leading thinkers and pundits on the scene today discuss key issues related to the coronavirus pandemic and its ongoing implications, confronting the Left, the jihad terror threat, and much, much more. Ask your own questions of our experts! Click Here to Sign Up!

California officials who closed a popular skate park and filled it with 37 tons of sand in hopes of keeping residents away during the coronavirus outbreak have inadvertently turned the recreational site into a dirt biker’s paradise.

Jobless claim filings continued at a historically unprecedented pace last week with 4.4 million new signups for unemployment insurance, bringing the total of the past five weeks to 26.4 million, the Labor Department said Thursday. The number represented a decline of 810,000 from the previous week, but the five-week total has now surpassed all of the job gains since the Great Recession. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had expected 4.3 million new claims.

President Trump is cutting off funding for the World Health Organization, headed by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, as a Reuters report notes, “the first director-general in the WHO’s 72-year history not to be a medical doctor” but a favorite of China with a radical leftist past. This is not the first time a Communist regime installed their mouthpiece and deployed an international body for their own purposes.   The WHO is part of the United Nations, which dates from the waning days of World War II. Stalin’s foreign minister Andrei Gromyko suggested U.S. State Department official Alger Hiss, a Stalinist spy,...

High blood pressure, obesity and diabetes are risk factors for severe cases. People with obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure are at greater risk for complications from the coronavirus, according to a large study of patients hospitalized with the illness it causes. The findings, published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, confirm what physicians nationwide have noted anecdotally. The study included data on 5,700 people hospitalized with COVID-19 in the New York City area. Underlying conditions were common. The researchers found that, among all patients, 57 percent had high blood pressure, 41 percent were obese and just...

What we can learn from conservatism’s “patron saint,” Edmund Burke. As we are forced to endure the Great UnReason of 2020—the Big Government/Big Media orchestrated mass hysteria over COVID-19—all of us who value reason and liberty, particularly self-identified conservatives, would be well served to revisit more sober voices from our past. Edmund Burke, the “patron saint” of modern conservatism, is one good place to start.   While calling out the conflagration of the French Revolution from his seat in Parliament across The Channel, Burke delineated for the whole world to see the glaring contrasts between what would become known as...

A Chinese citizen journalist who has been missing for almost two months after reporting from Wuhan during the coronavirus outbreak has reappeared. Li Zehua was last seen on February 26 after he posted a video to several social media platforms which showed him being chased by a white SUV and a live stream that ended when officials entered his apartment, according to the Guardian. He was subsequently made to accompany the so-called public security to a local police station where he was told he was told he was being investigated for disrupting public order.

Ellen Barkin is the latest celebrity to place blame for the many coronavirus deaths in the United States solely on the shoulders of President Donald Trump. On Wednesday, the “Diner” actress took to Twitter, where she unflatteringly compared Trump’s handling of the coronavirus and its subsequent death toll to past presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. She even went as far as to liken Trump to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. “Trump is responsible for more deaths than Kennedy Johnson and Nixon,” the actress tweeted. “He will go down in history as the Stalin of incompetence and greed.”

The leader of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps vowed Thursday that his troops will “destroy any American terrorist force” that threatens the country’s ships in the Persian Gulf. The inflammatory comments from Major General Hossein Salami on Iranian state TV come a day after President Trump warned the Islamic Republic in a tweet that he has “instructed the United States Navy to shoot down and destroy any and all Iranian gunboats if they harass our ships at sea." Trump was speaking in response to an incident last week in the Persian Gulf’s international waters, in which Iranian ships repeatedly crossed in...

In the coronavirus task force briefing Wednesday, President Trump said that the U.S. Navy's Blue Angels and the Air Force's Thunderbirds would be doing flyovers of major American cities in honor of "American medical workers" — and that on July Fourth he would bring back the Independence Day celebration held last year on the National Mall. "I'm excited to announce that in the coming weeks, the Air Force Thunderbirds – are incredible – and the Navy Blue Angels, equally incredible, will be performing air shows over America's major cities," Trump said. "What we're doing is we're paying tribute to our...

Another 4.4 million Americans filed for unemployment claims last week, the Labor Department reported Thursday, as massive job losses caused by the coronavirus pandemic continued to grow. The new report, which covers the week ending April 18, brings total job losses since the virus outbreak triggered widespread stay-at-home measures five weeks ago to more than 26 million, erasing the entirety of the 22.78 million labor market gains since the Great Recession more than a decade ago. With a labor force that totals about 162 million people, the claims figures suggest the unemployment rate is about 16 percent, or roughly one...

Rules are for the little people and by any objective measure George Stephanopoulos would qualify as a little person.But Georgie’s chosen profession and affiliations automatically granted him ‘elite’ status – the equivalent of adding a foot to his diminutive chassis. George Stephanopoulos: Senior political advisor to Bill Clinton, Democrat operative at ABC News and charter member of Ezra Klein’s JournoList. So normally he’d get a pass for not following rules others are expected to adhere to. But apparently this is not  the case when it comes to the Wuhan Cooties – or the Hamptons, where there currently are no actual...

Have we all just witnessed the largest psychological operation in world history? Utilizing media to create a global mass hysteria pandemic, The psyop was used to cripple world economies and push forward the vaccine agenda of Bill Gates and his plans for id2020. Bill Gates is out there telling the world he is going to save it from a virus. This is the same guy who wants to depopulate the planet. Furthermore, he could not keep his computer operating software clean from viruses. Oh the irony! Empty field hospitals with no patients ever in them. Medical workers being laid off...

The price of oil futures has collapsed catastrophically. In fact, the prices collapsed into negative territory in the near term. This bizarre situation, prompted by lack of consumer demand and lack of storage facility, led the irrepressible Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., to tweet: "You absolutely love to see it. This along with record low-interest rates means it's the right time for a worker-led, mass investment in green infrastructure to save our planet." This tweet was too dumb even for her – an extraordinary bar, given her past commentary – and she deleted it. But she then reiterated the point in...

Former Obama White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said during the 2008 financial crisis that lawmakers should “never let a crisis go to waste,” and many Democratic lawmakers appear to be heeding that advice -- using the coronavirus pandemic as a jumping-off point to renew calls for a historic expansion of government. Emanuel repeated his mantra again last month, this time in connection with the new crisis. “Start planning for the future. This has to be the last pandemic that creates an economic depression. We're going to have more pandemics, but this has to be the last economic depression,”...

You might have laughed at your buddy who was sweating a bet on how many quarterbacks would be taken in the first round of last year’s NFL draft. This April? NFL draft betting is the only game in town, unless you’re really into the Belarus Premier League. Without much other action to offer, BetMGM pumped up its NFL draft props. There are more than 160 NFL draft prop bets at BetMGM, from which team will draft Tua Tagovailoa to whether the Dallas Cowboys’ first pick will be an offensive or defensive player (offense is +200, defense is -250). A couple...

Poor old Bill Carlisle explains how he ran into a Female Hercules (1954). THE WESTERNER https://thewesterner.blogspot.com/

It is that time again, dear Morning Briefing readers, for me to express my dismay about some of the more heavy-handed government responses to our current coronavirus crisis. I will forego the disclaimers this time. Whiners are going to whine and we have important freedom-loving things to discuss on this fine Thursday morning. There has been more talk this week about eventually reopening businesses and relaxing some stay-at-home orders but that doesn’t seem to be resonating with many people who are just tired of this, already. They want things to happen now. Restlessness abounds in the Quarantine States of America,...