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The tests indicate that the number of infections in the county is around 40 times as high as the number of confirmed cases. Preliminary results from antibody tests in Los Angeles County indicate that the true number of COVID-19 infections is much higher than the number of confirmed cases there, which implies that the fatality rate is much lower than the official tallies suggest. "The mortality rate now has dropped a lot," Barbara Ferrer, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, said at a press briefing today. In contrast with the current crude case fatality rate of...

The results of clinical trials are making their way to publication showing hydroxychloroquine to be effective in many, although possibly not all, situations. The American media is silent on these studies. The results of clinical trials are making their way to publication showing hydroxychloroquine to be effective in many, although possibly not all, situations. The American media is silent on these studies. Instead, the American media headline a non-experimental and biased study showing the drug to be ineffective and, even, a cause of death. The non-experimental study concerns a large number of COVID-19 patients (sample size 368) at Veterans Administration...

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos issued guidance Tuesday reminding colleges that financial assistance provided by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act was never intended for illegal immigrant students. As reported by Politico, the rule states that only students who qualify for federal financial aid, which includes U.S. citizens and some legal immigrants, are eligible for the more than $6 billion in emergency aid funding intended to go directly to students impacted by the pandemic. The $6 billion is part of the more than $14 billion Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund, which is part of the $2.2 trillion CARES Act....

Smile! Happy days WILL return! Music used in this mashup: Chic - Good Times Iron Maiden - Rime of the Ancient Mariner Link to Video

The coronavirus, COVID-19, which originated in China and is responsible for the global pandemic, has a unique structural feature that none of its closest viral relatives yet identified have, a furin polybasic cleavage site. Cleavage sites similar to that found in COVID-19 are present in some naturally-occurring coronaviruses, but in completely separate evolutionary pathways from COVID-19. It has also been demonstrated that such coronavirus cleavage sites can be modified by genetic engineering to alter viral pathogenicity, sometimes increasing it. Scientists in China have used site-directed mutagenesis to alter the cleavage site of an infectious bronchitis virus by introducing basic amino...

The hysteria drummed up by the mainstream media over COVID-19, in conjunction with the draconian lockdown measures being employed by many governors, is costing thousands of American lives.  In light of horrific job losses and a crashing economy, calls to suicide hotlines are up over 40 percent nationwide.  Although an increase in suicide calls does not necessarily translate to an increase in deaths, the fact that 132 Americans die by suicide daily is concerning.  A 40-percent uptick would mean an increase of 53 deaths per day, if the calls indeed correlate to suicides.  This translates to 1,590 deaths per month. Heart attacks are a major problem...

Crisis and upheaval have brought out the best in some (think of Ulysses Grant) and the worst in others (think of Vidkun Quisling).  This holds true of Christian churches and the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).  In previous columns, my colleagues and I have raised red flags about the SBC, including corruption and leftward drift.  One sees this in executive leadership (see this about president J.D. Greear), in missions (see here and here), in the management of seminaries (see here), in the workings of the SBC's publishing company (see here and here), in its political advocacy (see here), in its gatherings (see here),...

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...