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Almost a year has passed since the Huanan wholesale market in Wuhan, China – the suspected source of the Covid-19 pandemic – closed down. Anti-coronavirus measures in place here and at other markets have enabled business to continue, but Chinese authorities now say that imported frozen food, rather than trade in live animals, caused the virus' outbreak. The site of the Huanan market is hidden from view behind walls and watched over by a few policemen. Among the stalls were a handful of vendors who traded in wild animals, and who are blamed for enabling the animal to human transmission....

SAN JOSE DE GUANIPA, Venezuela (Reuters) - Francisco Belisario, a Venezuelan mayor, retired general and member of the ruling Socialist party, had enough. His loudest local critic had accused him of bungling the response to the coronavirus outbreak and other big problems. In August, he wrote a state prosecutor and requested an “exhaustive investigation” of his nemesis, Giovanni Urbaneja, a former lawmaker who had become a gadfly to the mayor and other Socialist officeholders. Urbaneja, Belisario wrote in a letter reviewed by Reuters, was conducting a “ferocious smear campaign” on Facebook and elsewhere. Urbaneja not only defamed him and President...

As we can see, Christine Fang (Fang Fang) was quite a social butterfly, mingled with low to mid-level state politicians, and eventually found her way into California House Rep Eric Swalwell's circle. (Many photos at his feed. She really was dedicated if she took on jabba the hut, I mean harrison)

Black Lives Matter signs that apparently were burned and destroyed at historic Black churches in Washington, D.C., during a pro-Trump rally this weekend are being investigated as possible hate crimes, authorities said Sunday. D.C. police said they were seeking information about the incidents, which occurred at Asbury United Methodist Church, founded in 1836, and Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church, where Frederick Douglass' funeral was held in 1895. "This weekend, we saw forces of hate seeking to use destruction and intimidation to tear us apart," Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, said in a statement Sunday. "We will not let that happen,...

<p>HONG KONG (AP) — Hong Kong pro-democracy activist and media tycoon Jimmy Lai has been charged under the city’s national security law as authorities step up a crackdown on dissent, local media reported.</p><p>Lai, who founded the Apple Daily tabloid, was charged on suspicion of colluding with foreign forces and endangering national security, local broadcaster TVB reported Friday. He is the most high-profile person out of more than two dozen charged under the sweeping law since it was imposed by Beijing in June.</p>

MINNEAPOLIS - The Minneapolis City Council unanimously approved a budget early Thursday that will shift about $8 million from the police department toward violence prevention and other programs - but will keep the mayor’s targeted staffing levels for sworn officers intact, averting a possible veto. Mayor Jacob Frey, who had threatened to veto the entire budget if the council went ahead with its plan to cap police staffing, said the vote was a defining moment for the city, which has experienced soaring crime rates amid calls to defund the police since the May 25 death of George Floyd. “We all...

Shut Down DC is one of several violent Antifa groups combining forces to target patriots attending a pro-Trump rally to be held in Washington, D.C. on December 12, 2020. Using the hashtag #DefendDC, militant groups are doxxing specific staff members of hotels who dare to host Trump supporters, and plan to confront patriots exercising their First Amendment right to peaceably assemble. SEE BELOW ON HOW TO TAKE ACTION! The Antifa groups are using the website defenddc.org to organize their comrades. Some of the Antifa groups listed are: Black Lives Matter DC, All Out DC, Autonomous Liberation Collective NYC, Baltimore Liberation...

Nowadays, one of the few issues that can unite Republicans and Democrats in Congress is the effort to hold Communist China accountable. In early December, the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed legislation that would ban trading shares of Chinese companies whose audit papers aren’t inspected by U.S. regulators for three consecutive years. The same legislation was approved with bipartisan support in the U.S. Senate in May and President Trump is likely to sign it into law in the coming days.This effort is long overdue. Chinese companies have enjoyed open access to U.S. capital markets for years and collectively raised...

Since becoming the head of the Catholic Church in 2013, Pope Francis has not shied away from the political domain. On Sunday, the religious leader used the COVID-19 pandemic to renew his criticisms of free-market capitalism. In a video message he sent to the International Conference of judges members of the Committee for Social Rights in Africa and America, Pope Francis said that the right to private property is “a secondary natural right derived from that which everyone has”, which in turn arises from the “universal destiny of created goods” and affirmed that “the Christian tradition never recognized as absolute...

WUHAN, China - In the early days in Wuhan, the first city first struck by the virus, getting a COVID test was so difficult that residents compared it to winning the lottery. Throughout the Chinese city in January, thousands of people waited in hours-long lines for hospitals, sometimes next to corpses lying in hallways. But most couldn’t get the test they needed to be admitted as patients. The widespread test shortages and problems at a time when the virus could have been slowed were caused largely by secrecy and cronyism at China’s top disease control agency, an Associated Press investigation...

HONG KONG - The rush by U.S-listed Chinese companies to secure a secondary listing in Hong Kong or China is only set to intensify as the United States readies a new law allowing it to kick firms off its exchanges if they do not comply with U.S. auditing rules. The “Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act” is expected soon to be signed into law by U.S. President Donald Trump after it was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday. It stipulates that failure to comply with the U.S. Public Accounting Oversight Board’s audits for three years in a row...

A column in China’s state-run Global Times propaganda newspaper on Monday threatened to “ruin America’s Christmas” in response to American law enforcement officials allegedly heightening inspections of Chinese ships entering the country. The inspections, the Times protested, including questioning ship crew members about their relationship with the Chinese Communist Party, including asking if they were members.

Portland’s descent into blue-haired, gender-confused madness is something new in America. The city’s criminal justice system tolerates vandalism and assaults by communist thugs, while punishing normal Americans who dare to protect themselves. Street commie antics in Washington, D.C. last weekend suggest this political rot is spreading. If we give anti-American Portlandesque district attorneys a bit more time, the scoundrels may turn a blind eye to more violent crimes as well. The arsonists are practicing. Chile provides an example of how this could go. In the early 1970s, under the Marxist president Salvador Allende, Chile’s criminal justice system began ignoring crimes...

“The role of declaring the winner of a presidential election in the U.S. falls to the news media. The broadcast networks and cable news outlets have vowed to be prudent.” – New York Times 11/3/2020 The New York Times‘ statement was not accidental, but pre-planned. We are in the middle of a coup d’etat by election-stealing against both President Trump and our republic, and the “mainstream media” is very much in on the plot. A first order of business before you read on: the intent of this piece is NOT to imply that it’s over, and that the evildoers will...

BOSTON - A friendly feast shared by the plucky Pilgrims and their native neighbors? That’s yesterday’s Thanksgiving story. Students in many U.S. schools are now learning a more complex lesson that includes conflict, injustice and a new focus on the people who lived on the land for hundreds of years before European settlers arrived and named it New England. Inspired by the nation’s reckoning with systemic racism, schools are scrapping and rewriting lessons that treated Native Americans as a footnote in a story about white settlers. Instead of making Pilgrim hats, students are hearing what scholars call “hard history” -...

Our friend David Horowitz wrote this essay, which he titled “Fighting Words.” It is a call for freedom-loving Americans to fight back against the totalitarian Left. By now it should be obvious – even to conservatives – that we are in a war. It is a conflict that began nearly fifty years ago when the street revolutionaries of the Sixties joined the Democrat Party. Their immediate goal was to help the Communist enemy win the war in Vietnam, but they stayed to expand their influence in the Democrat Party and create the radical force that confronts us today. The war...

China is using a new study about the early, hidden spread of coronavirus in Italy to cast doubt on the firmly held assumption that the Asian nation was the birthplace of the pandemic, according to reports. Officials in Beijing are pushing a new study that suggests the contagion may have been spreading in the European nation as early as September — three months before it was confirmed to be spreading in the long-assumed epicenter in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the Times of London noted. The Asian nation has also previously questioned Spain about the origins of the pandemic, as...

A man pleaded guilty on Thursday to helping set ablaze a Minneapolis police precinct during a George Floyd protest in May, a report said. Bryce Williams, 26, of Minnesota, copped to a charge of conspiracy to commit arson in connection to the May 28 fire at the Third Precinct, the Star Tribune reported. Williams helped torch a Molotov cocktail, which was then tossed inside the precinct by another man, the charges say. He also tossed a box onto an existing fire outside the precinct’s entrance, according to the charges. Protesters had been targeting the Third Precinct, where the four since-fired...

Liberation Theologian Leonardo Boff Is a Keynote Speaker at Vatican’s ‘Economy of Francesco’ ConferenceThe controversial former Franciscan priest was disciplined by the Vatican in the 1980s, for disseminating Marxist-oriented ideas that demonstrated ‘a profound misunderstanding of the Catholic faith.’VATICAN CITY — The controversial Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff will be a keynote speaker at the Economy of Francesco, a three-day international Vatican-organized conference that starts tomorrow aimed at making finance inclusive and sustainable.A former Franciscan priest, Boff will speak on “socio-ecological responsibility: global view, territorial actions” along with Father Vilson Groh, who works with the poor in the favela...

Black PAC's canvassing cash is the first expense from outside liberal groups supporting Warnock, Ossoff A group bankrolled by liberal billionaires George Soros and Michael Bloomberg is pouring $300,000 into Georgia to back Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in the runoff elections. The Black PAC, which works to push black voters to the polls, on Tuesday reported spending $300,000 on canvassing for the two Democratic candidates. This is the first significant expense from an outside liberal group in the pivotal Georgia runoffs that will determine which party controls Congress's upper chamber next year. The elections are expected to garner tens...