Free Republic

A Berlin official, who accused the U.S. administration of “piracy” after 200,000 masks for the city police went missing, backtracked Saturday and said the masks were ordered from a German firm. In a statement distributed by the city mayor’s office and senate a day earlier, Andreas Geisel, Berlin’s senator for the interior, was quoted as saying a delivery of FFP2 masks only made it as far as Bangkok before it was “confiscated.” He had said the consignment was ordered from a U.S. firm and “we are currently assuming that this is related to the U.S. government’s ban on mask exports.”...

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo acknowledged Friday the state did have a stockpile of unused ventilators, despite his complaints the federal government was not sending enough. Cuomo responded to a comment from President Donald Trump on Twitter that there were thousands of ventilators in New York not being used. “Yes, they’re in a stockpile because that’s where they are supposed to be, because we don’t need them yet,” Cuomo said. “We need them for the apex, the apex isn’t here, so we’re gathering them in a stockpile.” Cuomo’s comments demonstrate there is not an immediate shortage in ventilators in the...

Epidemiologist Neil Ferguson, who created the highly-cited Imperial College London coronavirus model, which has been cited by organizations like The New York Times and has been instrumental in governmental policy decision-making, offered a massive revision to his model on Wednesday. Ferguson’s model projected 2.2 million dead people in the United States and 500,000 in the U.K. from COVID-19 if no action were taken to slow the virus and blunt its curve. However, after just one day of ordered lockdowns in the U.K., Ferguson has changed his tune, revealing that far more people likely have the virus than his team figured....

March 23 (Reuters) - An Arizona man has died and his wife is in critical condition after they ingested chloroquine phosphate - an aquarium cleaning product similar to drugs that have been named by President Trump as potential treatments for coronavirus infection. The couple, in their 60s, experienced immediate distress after swallowing the drug, an additive used at aquariums to clean fish tanks, according to Banner Health Hospital in Phoenix. Chloroquine phosphate shares the same active ingredient as malaria drugs that President Trump has touted as possibly effective against COVID-19, the potentially life-threatening disease caused by the coronavirus.

A US government laboratory mistakenly mixed a common flu strain with a dangerous and deadly type of bird flu and shipped it to another lab, authorities said Friday. The latest news followed admissions of mishandled anthrax and forgotten smallpox vials at separate US government labs, and raised new concerns about the safety of dangerous agents which could be used as bioterror weapons. No one was endangered by the mixed flu strain, said Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Tom Frieden, who nevertheless said he was "astonished" that protocols could have been violated in that way. "Everything we have looked...

President Trump said he is seriously considering a pardon for former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn. “So now it is reported that, after destroying his life & the life of his wonderful family (and many others also), the FBI, working in conjunction with the Justice Department, has 'lost' the records of General Michael Flynn. How convenient. I am strongly considering a Full Pardon!” Trump tweeted on Sunday. Flynn, 61, pleaded guilty in December 2017 for lying to investigators about his conversations with then-Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak, and faces possible prison time. After swapping legal teams,...

The cancelations around the sports world continued to mount Wednesday as the number of reported COVID-19 coronavirus cases climbs in the United States. Organizational leaders in athletics have gone from discussing potential moves and making small modifications to being forced by local governments to make bigger judgements, like keeping fans from games. At a press conference Monday, Gobert attempted to make a point about overreaction and fear by touching everything in sight before he left. He leaned over and touched all of the microphones and recorders.

WASHINGTON - A U.S. customs inspector praised for keeping the 20th hijacker in the 9/11 plot from getting into the country told Congress yesterday that the "hostile" Saudi gave him the creeps and vowed, "I'll be back." Jose Melendez-Perez told the 9/11 Commission, the panel probing the attacks on America, that he was spooked enough by the man identified only as "Al-Qahtani" to put him on a plane out of Orlando after he arrived in the U.S. from London and Dubai, United Arab Emirates, with a one-way ticket and $2,800 in cash. Al-Qahtani was dressed head-to-toe in black when he...

First, the background… On Super Tuesday the biggest shock was that Joe Biden won Texas in the Democrat presidential primary. Specifically, it was the moment when results from Dallas County, Texas, were reported when the media narrative of a Biden win began to be broadcast. Go back to election night, re-watch the coverage, and you’ll see all media broadcasting pointing to Dallas County, Texas, as the Biden inflection point. Now this: Sketchy as heck. These are not Russians; these are U.S. election officials. TEXAS – Dallas County Elections Administrator Toni Pippins-Poole discovered her office did not count about 10% of...

Democratic president candidate Michael Bloomberg drew mockery from both sides of the ideological spectrum after a viral clip of him showed the billionaire media tycoon belittling farming at a 2016 business school talk and contrasting it with the “gray matter” necessary to work in the modern information economy. Bloomberg’s 2016 comments during a sit-down discussion at Oxford’s Said Business School gained attention after a Twitter account with the handle, Pete Mentes, posted a one-minute snippet of the former New York City mayor — who has never farmed — claiming “I could teach anybody in this room” to be a farmer....

(CNN) — An extremely rare, $194,000 grand piano was smashed when movers dropped it while taking it out of a recording studio, Canadian virtuoso Angela Hewitt has revealed. Hewitt, one of the world's leading classical pianists, said in a Facebook post that she had just finished recording Beethoven's piano variations in Berlin when the movers entered the studio control room to tell her they had dropped her handmade Fazioli piano. The pianist said it had taken her 10 days to share the "very sad piece of news" because it "has been such a shock to me that I didn't immediately...

Hat tip to Motzilla at The Conservatice Treehouse:

Carol Moseley Braun, whose career includes a term in the U.S. Senate representing Illinois and a stint as U.S. ambassador to New Zealand, clearly has an impressive record of achievement behind her. One accomplishment that she can't claim, however, is having graduated with a degree from Harvard. Be that as it may, Braun did just that in a radio interview on a Chicago radio station last Wednesday, but Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune quickly caught the glitch. Braun, currently a candidate in Chicago's mayoral election, was speaking about the city's finances before changing the topic to education and saying:...

We all owe Chief Justice John Roberts a big thank you for confirming the name of the phony, Deep State whistleblower who launched this stupid impeachment hoax. Eric Ciaramella. Eric Ciaramella. Eric Ciaramella. Eric Ciaramella, a CIA analyst and raging partisan who falsely accused President Trump of impeachable crimes, who has a history of working with former Vice President Joe Biden, and who might have had his own agenda in wanting Biden’s corruption in Ukraine covered up… Yep, that’s him. After much speculation that Ciaramella is the guy, Roberts confirmed it Thursday through his unconstitutional act of commission. Justice Cuck...

A woman dancing on top of her Jeep outside The Breakers Palm Beach caught the attention of a Florida Highway Patrol trooper working a security detail at the luxury resort. When he approached the woman, she got into her Jeep, ignored him and drove away, breaching two security checkpoints near President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and prompting authorities to open fire, Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw said Friday. The woman, identified as Hannah Roemhild, 30, continued driving onto Southern Boulevard and crossed the bridge into West Palm Beach, where she and another woman were taken into custody, Bradshaw said....

Jan. 28 (UPI) -- Firefighters in Florida said a hazmat team responded to a gas station where a man filling up his boat confused a fishing pole holder for the gas tank. Orange County Fire Rescue said the customer at 7-Eleven in Orlando was attempting to fill up his 18-foot boat about 11:35 a.m. Monday when he accidentally pumped 30 gallons of gas directly into the cockpit. Fire Rescue said the man pumped about $60 worth of fuel into the cockpit and then put another $40 of gas into the actual gas tank. The hazmat team was able to siphon...

The top US general said Monday a letter suggesting the US would withdraw troops from Iraq was released by mistake and poorly worded, telling reporters "that's not what's happening." Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley sought to address the confusion that began after the leak of aletter to the Iraqi government from US Command in Baghdad suggesting US troops would be withdrawn from the country. "That letter is a draft. It was a mistake, it was unsigned, it should not have been released ... (it was) poorly worded, implies withdrawal, that is not what's happening," Milley...

BosGlobe..2013-04-15, Jahar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev; two brothers Boston Marathon Terrorism. SNIP 2013-04-22 Vo R, HuffPo, Ibragim Todashev had been arrested and charged with aggravated fight with great bodily harm in Florida. BEIJING, May 23 (Xinhuanet), Florida early Wednesday morning while a man was being questioned by an FBI agent in Florida, law enforcement officers, including an FBI special agent from the Boston field office, and two Massachusetts State Police troopers, interviewed for approximately eight hours at his apartment in Orlando, Florida, They said that he implicated both himself and Tamerlan Tsarnaev in the murders during the questioning and was beginning...

The gunman who opened fire in a Texas church on Sunday, killing two before dying from gunshot wounds, owned a shooting range and had taught its parishioners how to shoot, the Texas Attorney General said on Monday.

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden attacked Texas Governor Greg Abbott earlier this year for signing a bill into law that allowed lawful gun owners to carry firearms in places of worship, repeatedly calling Abbott’s decision “irrational.” Biden’s resurfaced remarks come as an attacker opened fire on a church congregation in Texas on Sunday, where he was immediately stopped by a good guy with a gun.