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Los Angeles County reached a “high” level of COVID-19 infections on Thursday, according to public health officials, meaning a mask mandate could be imposed in two weeks as the highly transmissible Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 make waves across the country. The health department bases its decision on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s three-tier criteria of community high, medium or low levels of COVID-19 rates. L.A. County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer expressed concern to reporters Thursday about the new infections, saying “we have a ton of transmission right now,” and stressed her position on masking up.

Nigeria has been declared officially free of Ebola after six weeks with no new cases, the World Health Organization (WHO) says. WHO representative Rui Gama Vaz, speaking in the capital Abuja, said it was a "spectacular success story". Nigeria won praise for its swift response after a Liberian diplomat brought the disease there in July. The outbreak has killed more than 4,500 people in West Africa, mostly in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone. An estimated 70% of those infected have died in those countries. The WHO officially declared Senegal Ebola-free on Friday. Meanwhile, European Union foreign ministers are meeting in...

News about the spread of the Ebola virus has been an increasing focus for market participants in recent days. Despite rising media coverage, Ebola seems to have had little discernible effect on consumer sentiment to date. However, as Goldman Sachs notes, the "fear factor" associated with Ebola appears more significant than in past instances of pandemic concern. While expert opinion sees the likelihood of a significant outbreak of Ebola in the US as very low, it is likely any negative macroeconomic consequences are most likely to be transmitted through fear or risk-aversion channels.

President Barack Obama has just experienced his "Mush From the Wimp" moment. That infamous March, 1980, Boston Globe headline signaled the imminent political demise of Democratic President Jimmy Carter. It followed upon the equally infamous Killer Rabbit episode and came in the midst of the Iranian Hostage Crisis, the birth of ABC's NIghtline program and at the mid-point of U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy's primary challenge to a sitting Democrat president. As Mr. Carter found, when your own media symcophants and political allies are mocking you, you're not in a good place. So, now, with the Archangel Barack. What has precipitated...

Most Americans think jarring economic problems will erupt if lawmakers fail to increase the government’s borrowing limit. Yet they’re torn over how or even whether to raise it, leaning toward Republican demands that any boost be accompanied by spending cuts. According to an Associated Press-GfK poll, 53 percent say that if the debt limit is not extended and the U.S. defaults, the country will face a major economic crisis. An additional 27 percent say such a crisis would be somewhat likely, while just 17 percent largely dismiss the prospects of such damage. … “The worst thing for the economy is...

The Mexican swine flu pandemic? Oh, that's soooo yesterday. Global Warming? All those confident "scientific" predictions are falling apart around the world, even as greedy politicians still try to squeeze the last little drops of power and money out of them. Human flesh-eating bacteria? SARS? Ozone holes? Mad Cow? The Curse of the Killer Tomatoes? Water torture? CO2? Bee Colony Collapse? It never ends. As long as scare stories sell, as long as millions of indoctrinated suckers fall for them they will never end. They've got you on a rat-running wheel, running scared every day, like rats scrambling to get...

For only the second time in 85 years, Time magazine abandoned the traditional red border it uses on its cover. The occasion – to push more global warming alarmism. The cover of the April 21 issue of Time took the famous Iwo Jima photograph by Joe Rosenthal of the Marines raising the American flag and replaced the flag with a tree. The cover story by Bryan Walsh calls green “the new red, white and blue.” Donald Mates, an Iwo Jima veteran, told the Business & Media Institute April 17 that using that photograph for that cause was a “disgrace.” “It’s...

SACRAMENTO, California (Reuters) - California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed an executive order on Thursday to reduce carbon emissions from transportation fuels, a move intended to widen the development and use of alternative vehicle fuels in the nation's biggest state. The order, the first of its kind in the United States, sets a standard to cut carbon levels in vehicle fuels by at least 10 percent by 2020. It also will implement a state law adopted last summer that mandates state emissions caps to reduce greenhouse gases linked to global warming by 25 percent by 2020. In a signing ceremony outside...