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BEIJING (AP) — Former NBA star Jeremy Lin, who plays for a Chinese team, was fined 10,000 yuan ($1,400) for criticizing quarantine facilities, China’s professional league and a news report said Friday, as the government tries to stop protests against anti-virus controls that are among the world's most stringent. Also Friday, more cities eased restrictions, allowing shopping malls, supermarkets and other businesses to reopen following protests last weekend in Shanghai and other areas in which some crowds called for President Xi Jinping to resign. Urumqi in the northwest, site of a deadly fire that triggered the protests, announced supermarkets and...

In what she has called a David versus Goliath battle, New York real estate lawyer Bobbie Anne Cox sued Governor Kathleen Hochul for issuing directives mandating quarantine for people exposed to or infected with highly contagious diseases such as COVID-19. The directives, dubbed “quarantine camp regulations,” have been compared to laws that relocated Japanese during World War II without due process. Cox won the lawsuit on the grounds that Hochul’s regulation was unconstitutional. In a recent interview on Epoch TV’s American Thought Leaders, Cox told host Jan Jekielek that it’s crucial Americans learn about the U.S. Constitution so that they...

Workers in a manufacturing facility in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou appear to have left to avoid COVID-19 curbs, with many traveling on foot for days after an unknown number of employees were quarantined in the facility after a virus outbreak. Videos circulating on Chinese social media platforms showed people who are allegedly Foxconn workers climbing over fences and carrying their belongings down the road. The Foxconn plant in Zhengzhou, Henan province, is one of the largest factories in China that assembles products for Apple Inc., including its latest iPhone 14 devices. Not all the videos that showed workers...

The victims of a bus crash which killed 27 people and injured a further 20 in southwest China's Guizhou province were in an official government health vehicle and were being transported for COVID reasons, local media reported on Sunday. The accident took place in the early hours of Sunday morning on a highway in Sandu county, which lies around 170 km (105 miles) southeast of the provincial capital, Guiyang, police said. The bus, which overturned on a section of a highway that leads from Guiyang to Libo, a county just south of Sandu, was carrying 47 people... Sunday afternoon on...

New York judge overturned a law that allowed the state government to place even healthy citizens in quarantine camps for an indefinite time without review. Until July 8, the New York Department of Health had immense power to enforce quarantine measures on citizens. It received this power from the state’s Rule 2.13. Legislators never voted to allow the New York Commissioner of Health to put any individual into quarantine for any length of time. Gov. Kathy Hochul and the Department of Health ordered the rule’s protocols during the COVID-19 pandemic. Then, the state renewed Rule 2.13 every 90 days. The...

We have had a tremendous victory here in New York: a Supreme Court Judge has struck down Governor Kathy Hochul’s forced quarantine regulation! On July 8, 2022, Judge Ronald Ploetz ruled that the “Isolation and Quarantine Procedures” regulation is unconstitutional and “violative of New York State law as promulgated and enacted, and therefore null, void and unenforceable as a matter of law.” Shockingly, New York’s Governor, Kathy Hochul, and Attorney General, Letitia James, plan to appeal the decision. Yes, that’s right…the Governor and AG, both unabashedly support quarantine camps! One would think that this fact, in and of itself, would...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Thousands more doses of monkeypox vaccine are expected to soon begin shipping to the U.S. after federal health officials said they had completed an inspection of the overseas plant where they were manufactured. The update from the Food and Drug Administration comes amid growing frustration about limited access to the two-dose vaccine as thousands of people in New York City, California and other parts of the U.S. await a chance to get the shot. Most of the roughly 1,000 cases reported in the U.S. have been among men who have sex with men, but health officials stress...

A New York Supreme Court judge this month quietly ruled that regulations mandating that people infected with or exposed to highly contagious communicable diseases be quarantined are a violation of state law, declaring them null and void. The Isolation and Quarantine procedures, known as Rule 2.13, were enacted in February. Under the rule, “whenever appropriate to control the spread of a highly contagious communicable disease, the State Commissioner of Health may issue and/or may direct the local health authority to issue isolation and/or quarantine orders, consistent with due process of law, to all such persons as the State Commissioner of...

This is the fight for freedom we Americans never dreamed we would have to fight. Imagine a land where the government has the power to lock you up because the unelected bureaucrats in the Health Department think that you might, possibly have a communicable disease. They don’t have to prove you are sick. They don’t have to prove you are a health threat to others. They just need to think that, maybe, you were possibly exposed to a disease. And when I say “lock people up,” I mean lock you in your home or force you from your home into...

Belgium has become the first country to introduce a mandatory 21-day monkeypox quarantine for those who contact the virus, after three cases were recorded in the country. The infections were all linked to a festival in the port city of Antwerp, according to the Daily Mail, as Belgium is now one of 14 countries to confirm outbreaks of the viral disease (in addition to suspected, but not confirmed cases in Austria and Greece). (see chart) Belgium has become the first country to introduce a mandatory 21-day monkeypox quarantine for those who contact the virus, after three cases were recorded in...

The UK government’s restrictions on international travel during the CCP virus pandemic were “disproportionate to the risks to public health,” a select committee of MPs said. The Transport Committee on Monday published the report of its inquiry into airlines’ and airports’ recovery from the pandemic, urging the government to devise “a transparent and predictable system” that can be used in potential future pandemics. It also urged the government to regulate the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus testing market, introduce a mechanism to grant automatic refunds to airline customers, and draft a new airline insolvency bill to “handle future airline insolvencies...

Local authorities in Shanghai have made a big deal about their efforts to reopen factories and the city’s all-important port, while easing restrictions on some of the population. But the reality is that while authorities have focused on bringing factories (like Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory) back to some semblance of full production, millions of locals are still suffering under the weight of some of the world’s most stringent COVID measures (even after restrictions were eased on 4 million earlier this week). Despite continued reductions in new case numbers, the local government on Thursday signaled that it’s not planning on easing lockdown...

After testing positive for Covid-19, she was forced to live under 24/7 lighting in a Shanghai exhibition center along with thousands of strangers... By testing all 25 million residents and isolating positive cases, authorities hoped to break the virus’s chains of transmission. Officials raced to convert buildings, such as the convention center...into so-called fangcang—or square-cabin—hospitals to cope with the inevitable surge in compulsory quarantines. [O]fficial data published Friday show there were more than 270,000 asymptomatic cases nationwide under medical observation. It couldn’t be determined how many are in government centers... Shanghai has built more than 100 makeshift hospitals with a...

Shanghai reportedly aims to have zero COVID-19 cases outside of its quarantine centers by Wednesday, in what could be a turning point for the city’s strict “no tolerance” lockdowns that’ve left residents increasingly frustrated. The target will allow the city to further ease its lockdown and start returning to normal life, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. In order to meet the goal Wednesday, officials will accelerate COVID testing and the transfer of infected residents to quarantine centers, according to a speech by a local Communist Party official.

Rerouting freight to avoid the extended lockdown in Shanghai, where daily confirmed COVID cases topped a record 17,000 this week, is becoming more difficult and expensive as cargo facilities in other Chinese cities become overcrowded, logistics companies and carriers warn. The logistics challenges for ocean and airfreight in Shanghai are extreme. More than 90% of truck capacity is out of service. Trucks are prevented from moving in and out of the city without a special permit, which is only valid for 24 hours and only on specific routes. “Even with this arranged, it is possible for booked trucks to...

HONG KONG—Lu Jiaying hasn’t tested positive for Covid, and hasn’t experienced any symptoms. But at 7 p.m. on Sunday, the 34-year-old technology worker and resident of central Shanghai, was ordered to board a bus for a mass quarantine center. Nearly 16 hours later, Ms. Lu, still aboard the bus in a head-to-toe protective suit, hadn’t eaten a bite, sipped any water or gone to the bathroom, a casualty of the chaos that has seized China’s biggest and most prosperous city amid a surge in Covid infections.

MELBOURNE, Australia (LifeSiteNews) —The Victorian government has opened its $200 million quarantine camp at Mickleham in Melbourne’s north. The government is claiming it will be used to replace hotels and become Victoria’s only quarantine site from April. It says the first cohort of “unvaccinated international travellers” has been checked in. If there is one clear message from the behaviour of the Victorian government over the last two years, it is that nothing it says can be taken at face value. Either the quarantine camps are a waste of money or there is a darker motive. As someone who has spent...

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) describes the "Olympic Spirit" as one of "mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play." If the IOC expected China to play along with this spirit when they inexplicably awarded the 2022 Winter Games to a communist autocracy with an unparalleled record of human rights abuses and brazen espionage, they are gravely mistaken and hopelessly naïve. But as it turns out, China's failure to play fair is just the beginning of their sinister ambitions. Gordon Chang, author of The Great U.S.-China Tech War, joined "Washington Watch" to describe the extent to which...

Olympic athletes are exposing the disturbing measures China is taking in an attempt to hold a “COVID-free” Olympics.According to the UK Daily Mail, dozens of athletes said they had experienced inhumane conditions while in isolation due to positive COVID-19 tests.Russian biathlete Valeria Vasnetsova said she was served an extremely small and unappealing meal three times a day for five days while she was in isolation. By the end, she said her “bones [were] sticking out,” the Daily Mail reported.Vasnetsova posted a picture of the unsavory meal she was provided to Instagram.Is China using quarantines to rig the Olympics?A Russian athlete,...