Free Republic

The coronavirus pandemic has resurrected national boundaries that had all but faded away, upending businesses and lives. Perhaps nowhere is the change more dramatic than in Europe, which has spent years erasing borders.On the German side of the border with Poland, a laundry that washes hospital bed sheets is struggling to cope without almost half its staff, who used to commute from Poland. Polish workers, including doctors and nurses, have to decide whether to stay on the eastern side of the border or rent private rooms in Germany to keep working. A Polish business consultant has been paying truck drivers...

Border security is crucial to our nation’s efforts to control the coronavirus, and President Trump has a proven track record of effectively protecting our borders. Despite intense political opposition for over three years, the president has managed to significantly expand and strengthen the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border — and we remain on pace to reach the goal of 450 miles of new barriers by the end of the year. He’s also used his executive authority to close loopholes in our immigration system that had previously been widely exploited by illegal immigrants. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people —...

The Treasury announced late Wednesday that Social Security beneficiaries who typically do not file a tax return will automatically get the $1,200 payment. The announcement is a reversal from earlier in the week when the Internal Revenue Service said everyone would need to file some sort of tax return in order to qualify for the payments. Democrats and some Republicans criticized the IRS for requiring so many extra hurdles for this vulnerable population to get aid when the government already has their information on file. The reversal came as the Trump administration tries to rapidly get stimulus payments out to...

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex and baby Archie made a last minute dash from Canada to the US this week to start their new life in LA Questions are now being asked about who will foot the bill for their new Hollywood lifestyles A royal source said the couple will need to ask for 'special help' from President Trump if they want Secret Service protection in the USHarry will no longer be entitled to diplomatic protection in the US, because he is not an 'international protected person' after Megxit Angry Canadians on social media seemed glad to see the back of...

The F-16, hit by the cannon fire, caught fire and exploded having recently been refuelled and made ready for a training sortie due to take place later that day. Another aircraft received minor damage. If anyone ever needed a reminder of the lethal dangers of working with live munitions, then a recent incident at Florennes Air Base in Belgium is the ultimate wake-up call. It is thought a maintenance worker accidentally activated the six-barrel 20mm Vulcan M61A-1 cannon hitting another plane parked on the runway. No-one was in the line of fire, but two technicians were taken to the medical...

The ONC interoperability rule is a step in the right direction towards a nationwide health data exchange and enhanced interoperability. The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has put the importance of health data exchange and interoperability under a microscope. Niam Yaraghi, a fellow in governance studies at the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings Institution, penned an op-ed to explain why he thinks the US lacks health information technologies to stop or contain the COVID-19 epidemic. “The pandemic has shattered our common beliefs about the type and scope of health information exchange (HIE),” wrote Yaraghi. “It has shown us that...

As of this writing, 6,400 people all over the world have died from the coronavirus. In the United States, 68 people have died. Some perspective: Chinese deaths (3,217) account for half of the worldwide total. If you add Italy (1,441) and Iran (724), two countries where many Chinese were allowed in until recently, that totals another 2,165. In other words, outside of China, Italy and Iran -- with 5,382 deaths collectively -- 1,018 people have died. There are 7.8 billion people in the world. Regarding Italy, the Jerusalem Post of March 16 reported that according to Nobel Prize-winning chemist Michael...

The robot submarine (and unmanned surface ship) era is now nearly upon us. Chinese naval strategist have stated explicitly that they intend to circumvent their long-recognized weakness in submarine warfare by cultivating undersea AI and by developing highly capable UUVs. America should take notice.... ...Lyle J. Goldstein is Research Professor in the China Maritime Studies Institute (CMSI) at the United States Naval War College in Newport, RI. In addition to Chinese, he also speaks Russian and he is also an affiliate of the new Russia Maritime Studies Institute (RMSI) at Naval War College. You can reach him at goldstel@usnwc.edu. The...

Proximity is all. If they can't get to you, they can't get you. Most of us locate our fears on the far horizon – like the old maps where the known world dribbles away and the cartographer scrawls "Here be dragons". Sometimes, as Lincoln learned, the problem's right there standing next to you. In a globalized economy, the anti-glob mob and the eco-warriors want us to worry about rapacious First World capitalism imposing its ways on bucolic, pastoral, primitive Third World backwaters. But globalization cuts both ways, and the peculiarities of the backwaters can leap instantly to the metropolis -...

Travelers flying out of Pittsburgh International Airport will soon not have to display a boarding pass to get past security, airport officials said this week. Boarding passes will still be required at the gate to board the plane. Officials with the airport and Transportation Security Administration announced that Pittsburgh is among several U.S. airports set to phase out the use of boarding passes at security checkpoints this year. Instead, they are shifting to sophisticated screening machines that can verify passengers based solely on a government-issued ID card. The Credential Authentication Technology, or CAT, allows security agents to pinpoint passengers and...

Geneva: The US is following an egocentric foreign policy that is leading to global arms control agreements being devalued, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday. It is vital "to stop the degradation of international arms control", Lavrov told the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, urging Washington to resume talks on halting nuclear proliferation and banning weapons in space.

JERUSALEM - Concerns of a widening threat from coronavirus spiked just as millions of Israelis are preparing to gather at polling places for national elections next week, following reports that a group of South Koreans who had visited some of the country’s most popular religious and tourist spots tested positive for the infection. Dozens of school students who may have been in proximity to the South Korean tourists were directed to stay in home-based quarantine for two weeks, as were hotel housekeepers and employees of Masada, Tel Ber Sheeva and other national parks. Officials, who had previously expressed cautious optimism...

Microphones and cameras lurk everywhere. You may want to slip on some privacy armor.Last year, Ben Zhao decided to buy an Alexa-enabled Echo speaker for his Chicago home. Mr. Zhao just wanted a digital assistant to play music, but his wife, Heather Zheng, was not enthused. “She freaked out,” he said. Ms. Zheng characterized her reaction differently. First she objected to having the device in their house, she said. Then, when Mr. Zhao put the Echo in a work space they shared, she made her position perfectly clear:“I said, ‘I don’t want that in the office. Please unplug it. I...

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who made waves as a witness during the Trump impeachment proceedings, was fired Friday by the National Security Council and escorted off of the White House grounds, Fox News has confirmed. Vindman was on detail to the National Security Council from the Department of Defense, and it is expected he will return there. It comes just two days after President Trump was acquitted in the Senate on the impeachment charges brought by the House last year over his dealings with Ukraine. VINDMAN DRAWS APPLAUSE DURING IMPEACHMENT HEARING: 'THIS IS AMERICA' In a lengthy statement, Vindman’s attorney,...

Former Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz questioned why House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff is allowed a security clearance when he “continues to lie.” “I still, to this day, do not understand why Adam Schiff has a security clearance. He continues to lie. He continues to put out information that he knows is not true. He has stood in front of the United States Senate and talked about things that are not in the impeachment,” Chaffetz told Fox & Friends. Chaffetz also responded to the news from the night before that Adam Schiff had warned that President Trump could sell Alaska...

President Trump has just laid out a visionary plan for achieving peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Rather than trying to reconcile the fundamentally conflicting priorities of the two sides, he came up with a practical solution that reflects realities on the ground in the fairest way possible. Every American president since Lyndon Johnson has tried — and failed — to resolve the conflict, usually by sitting down with Israeli and Palestinian leaders to negotiate toothless agreements that have done nothing to ease tensions or prevent bloodshed. These well-intentioned efforts all made the same fatal mistake: they treated the Israeli...

The Secret Service on Tuesday slammed "outlandish" suggestions that its agents are "incompetent to carry out forensic examinations" following the arrest of a Chinese national who is accused of trying to enter President Trump's Mar-a-Lago club with a thumb drive containing malware. “Assertions that U.S. Secret Service agents are incompetent to carry out forensic examinations on digital media (ie thumbdrives, laptops, cellphones, etc.) is outlandish and not rooted in fact," a Secret Service spokesperson said in a released statement. The spokesperson added that the agency's Electronic Crimes Special Agent Program (ECSAP) "is internationally recognized" said there are special agents who...

Only up for five hours, but that's plenty of time for the wrong person to spot itUpdated An Amazon Web Services engineer published exchanges with customers and "system credentials including passwords, AWS key pairs, and private keys" to a public GitHub repository by accident.On 13 January, infosec biz UpGuard discovered a 954MB repository containing AWS resource templates – used to create cloud services – plus hostnames, and log files generated in the second half of 2019. There were also internal Amazon training resources marked "confidential." "Several documents contained access keys for various cloud services," UpGuard reported today. "There were multiple...

Sales for some at-home DNA testing kits are on the decline amid consumer privacy concerns. 23andMe, the home DNA-testing company, is laying off about 100 people, nearly 14 percent of its staff, the company confirmed to FOX Business Friday. The company cut staffers in its operations department in charge of growing and scaling the company as fewer people pay for genetic test results which can reveal things about their heritage or how prone they are to health conditions like type 2 diabetes or celiac disease, according to a CNBC report. The declining sales came as a surprise for CEO Anne...

A new report reveals that 250 million Microsoft customer records, spanning 14 years, have been exposed online without password protection. Microsoft has been in the news for, mostly, the wrong reasons recently. There is the Internet Explorer zero-day vulnerability that Microsoft hasn't issued a patch for, despite it being actively exploited. That came just days after the U.S. Government issued a critical Windows 10 update now alert concerning the "extraordinarily serious" curveball crypto vulnerability. Now a newly published report, has revealed that 250 million Microsoft customer records, spanning an incredible 14 years in all, have been exposed online in a...