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The Eurozone economy will fall into a deeper recession this year than initially thought, and the recovery in 2021 will be less robust, according to an updated economic forecast released by the European Commission on Tuesday. The revised forecast predicts the economy of the 19 nations that use the euro will shrink 8.7% in 2020 before recovering by 6.1% next year. For the 27 countries that comprise the EU, a downturn of 8.3% is expected in 2020, before growing 5.8% in 2021. This means that in 2021 Europe will still be worse off than before the global outbreak of COVID-19...

First coronavirus, then murder hornets, now bubonic plague?! Authorities in China have responded to one confirmed case of the black death and another suspected case. Both cases emerged in the semi-autonomous region of Inner Mongolia. According to Chinese Communist Party reports, a herdsman in Bayannur contracted bubonic plague and is in quarantine and in stable condition, the BBC reported. Officials also said they were investigating a second case.That case involves a 15-year-old patient who came down with a fever after close contact with a marmot hunted by a dog. #Mongolia discovered another suspected patient infected with the bubonic plague. The...

Kellyanne Conway’s anti-Trump teenage daughter won’t stop trolling her parents on social media. Claudia Conway, 15, livestreamed a confrontation with her mother, a counselor to President Trump, on TikTok and told her father, conservative Trump critic George Conway, she was “sorry [his] marriage failed.” Claudia, who has posted a wave of anti-Trump and pro-Black Lives Matter content on her TikTok, claimed her mother was trying to shut off her phone and pressuring her to delete her social media accounts — even though Kellyanne Conway had previously stated she supported her daughter’s independent expression. “My parents, particularly my mother, are trying...

The China Meteorological Administration issued a "No. 1 Flood" warning as a second month of rain and earthquakes risks collapse of Three Gorges Dam and the safety of 400 million.   Southern China in June suffered its worst flooding since 1940 with the overflowing of 250 rivers impacting 15 million residents and causing at least 121 people dead or missing.  The world's largest hydroelectric dam, the 1.4-mile-wide and 630-foot-high Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtse River with a 5-trillion-gallon capacity, fully opened its seven massive outlets to begin discharging a record 28 acre-feet per second. But after thirty-one days of rain, a record 16.8 inches falling between...

A friend of mine told me that her daughter, who attends UCLA, will be living at home and taking only online classes in the fall.  While the family will be spared the cost of on-campus housing, there is no tuition deduction.  On Monday, Harvard announced the same policy.  Also on Monday, the Trump administration used the new academic reality as a way to eject Chinese nationals from America. For several decades now, America's colleges and universities have been making bank by holding spaces open for foreign nationals, especially Chinese students who are the scions of powerful people in the Communist Party.  The beauty...

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on Monday hinted that President Trump will announce executive orders dealing with China after they mishandled the coronavirus outbreak. “This president will do more in the next four weeks than Joe Biden and his team did in the last 40 years, so you just need to stay tuned because starting this week, you’ll see executive orders, you’ll see business that goes forward from the Oval Office,” Meadows told "Fox & Friends." Meadows said that when Congress “does not act” against China, Trump will take action. “We’re going to be looking at how we...

China's Sinovac Biotech is starting Phase III trials of its potential coronavirus vaccine in Brazil, it said on Monday, becoming one of three companies to move into the late stages in the race to develop an inoculation against the disease. It follows a fast-track approval for the trials by Brazilian regulators last week. Sinovac said the study, which will be done in partnership with Brazilian vaccine producer the Instituto Butantan, would recruit nearly 9,000 healthcare professionals working in COVID-19 specialised facilities and start this month. AstraZeneca's experimental COVID-19 vaccine, developed by researchers at the University of Oxford, and China National...

The US military "will continue to stand strong" in relation to a conflict between India and China or anywhere else, a top White House official said on Monday, after the US Navy deployed two aircraft carriers to the South China Sea to boost its presence in the region. "The message is clear. We're not going to stand by and let China or anyone else take the reins in terms of being the most powerful, dominant force, whether it's in that region or over here," White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows told Fox News. "And the message is clear. Our...

Across seven states in the Southwest, thousands of wild and domestic rabbits are dying from a rare outbreak of a highly contagious disease known as rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus (RHDV2). "We refer to it as 'bunny Ebola,'" Amanda Jones, a veterinarian from Killeen, Texas, told The Cut. While the rabbit virus is "not related in any way, shape, or form" to ebola — a virus that causes severe bleeding, organ failure, and death in humans and primates — Jones said RHDV2 ravages rabbit bodies in a similar manner. The virus causes lesions in rabbits' organs and tissues, which leads to...

Documents show Hunter Biden still controls a stake in a Chinese investment firm despite his promise to resign from the company’s board and a pledge from his father Joe Biden that no one in the family will have foreign business entanglements if he is elected in November. The troubled son of Joe Biden, a former vice president who is now the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee, holds a 10% equity stake in the Chinese government-linked Bohai Harvest RST (Shanghai) Equity Investment Fund Management Company, according to Chinese business records first reported by the Daily Caller. Through his lawyer, Hunter had...

At pro-Palestinian Black Lives Matter rallies in New York and Washington, chants were heard calling for “Death to Israel,” “Death to America” and “From Gaza to Minnesota, globalize the Intifada!” Several hundred protesters attended the July 1 demonstration in Brooklyn dubbed as a “Day of Rage” event, set to coincide with the earliest date Israel could begin its plans to apply Israeli law over parts of the West Bank and the Jordan Valley. Speakers issued inflammatory rallying cries that ran the gamut from anti-Semitic and anti-American to just plain absurd. One pro-North Korea activist called for the end of the...

Reports have circulated that Prime Minister Boris Johnson will call for Chinese-controlled Huawei to be locked out from Britain’s 5G by the end of this year, after the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) concluded that the products are not secure. The NCSC made the ruling that Huawei’s technology was not safe to use, in light of U.S. sanctions that block the Chinese tech firm from using American components. The prospect of Huawei using alternative components, certainly Chinese, “fundamentally changes” the situation, according to a Whitehall source speaking to The Times. Government ministers who sit on the National Security Council will...

The US sent two carrier groups to the South China Sea in a show of force intended to intimidate China in its aggressive takeover of a disputed archipelago. China responded by boasting of its “wide selection of anti-aircraft carrier weapons”, claiming that the mega-warships operated “at the pleasure of the PLA [People’s Liberation Army]”. The response by the US Navy was short and to the point: “Not intimidated.” The decision to send the two nuclear-powered carriers, the USS Nimitz and the USS Ronald Reagan, into the South China Sea for dual-carrier operations and exercises was bound to ruffle the feathers...

Hunter Biden, the youngest son of former Vice President Joe Biden, appears to have kept his ten percent stake in an international private equity firm with ties to the Chinese government, months after resigning from the company’s board of directors. Biden, a one time lobbyist who reinvented himself as an international businessman during his father’s tenure in the Obama administration, officially resigned from the board of Bohai Harvest RST (BHR) in October 2019. His departure came amid scrutiny of Biden’s overseas dealings after President Donald Trump’s urging of Ukraine to probe his ties to one of its top energy conglomerates....

His Holiness the Dalai Lama turns eighty-five today. The atheists in Beijing are eagerly waiting for him to die so that they can pick his successor. They will do almost anything to gain control of Tibetan Buddhism—and all religion in China for that matter. Tibetans wear the robes of tragedy. His Holiness fled China-controlled Tibet in 1959, crossing the Himalayas on foot into India just ahead of Chinese soldiers. He and his followers have now settled into the foothills of Dharamshala. In that town and around the world, Tibetans are now celebrating the Year of Gratitude for His Holiness, which...

NEW DELHI/BEIJING—China began pulling back troops from along its contested border with India on July 6, Indian government sources said, following a clash between the two countries last month in which 20 Indian soldiers were killed. Troops fought for hours with rods and clubs on the night of June 15, with some falling to their deaths in the freezing waters of the Galwan river in the western Himalayas. China has yet to confirm whether it suffered casualties. The Indian deaths are the highest along the border in more than five decades, a dramatic escalation that led to weeks of talks...

A fascinating article from The Sunday Times in London reveals a potential relative to the coronavirus strain currently ruining everyone’s 2020 plans may have its origins from an abandoned southwest Chinese copper mine…in 2012. It’s important to note the viruses mentioned in The Times report are similar but not exact so there’s no proof COVID-19 came from the copper mine. On Tuesday April 24, 2012, a 45-year-old man with the surname of Guo was admitted to the hospital’s intensive care unit suffering from severe pneumonia.The next day a 42-year-old man with the surname Lv was taken to the hospital...

Beijing (AFP) - Chinese authorities on Monday detained a law professor who published essays criticising President Xi Jinping over the coronavirus pandemic and his efforts to consolidate power, according to friends of the man. Xu Zhangrun, a rare outspoken critic of the government in China's heavily censored academia, was taken from his home in suburban Beijing by more than 20 people, one of his friends said on condition of anonymity. Xu published an essay in February blaming the culture of deception and censorship fostered by Xi for the spread of the coronavirus in China. China's "leader system is itself destroying...

Do you get the feeling we are experiencing a modern day version of the 1930's all over again... You have a resurgent China claiming territory on every front....first it was the South China Sea, then in the Himalayan Mountains along their border with India, now some in the Chinese Media are beginning to assert claims on the Russian City of Vladivostok..... Hitler was insane to start a two front war, but China is engaging on at least 3 fronts as they move forward.... Certainly something to keep your eyes on the next few years....

An American Navy combat ship this week conducted “routine operations” near a Chinese geological survey ship in the South China Sea. The maneuvers in waters around the Spratly Islands echoed events off the north coast of Malaysian Borneo in April, when a Chinese survey vessel and a fleet of China Coast Guard (CCG) ships shadowed Malaysian oil exploration efforts, in an apparent bid to deter the smaller nation from exploiting resources in the disputed waters. “The Chinese Communist Party must end its pattern of bullying Southeast Asians out of offshore oil, gas, and fisheries. Millions of people in the region...