Free Republic

Beijing has lied about the coronavirus from the start, while here in the West our corporate media has actively and enthusiastically spread its lies to households across the free world. But now that news of China’s lies is beginning to seep out, will it make a difference? Will there even be corrections? Don’t count on it.Even before reports on incinerators “working around the clock,� massive orders for urns, government bribes to keep mourners quiet, and total government censorship, China’s lies were obvious. Even before China concealed the outbreak, blamed the U.S. military, and expelled foreign reporters, their lies were obvious.Their...

MILAN—In the town of Coccaglio, an hour’s drive east of here, the local nursing home lost over a third of its residents in March. None of the 24 people who died there were tested for the new coronavirus. Nor were the 38 people who died in another nursing home in the nearby town of Lodi. These aren’t isolated incidents. Italy’s official death toll from the virus stands at 13,155, the most of any country in the world. But that number tells only part of the story because many people who die from the virus don’t make it to the hospital...

China won’t be a nation of “silent lambs in the face of malicious insults and smearing”, a spokesman with the country’s foreign ministry vowed on Monday, as Beijing continued to lash out at The Wall Street Journal over a commentary it has deemed racist. Zhao Lijian, a former senior diplomat in Pakistan, made the remarks while hosting his first press conference since being named deputy director of the Chinese foreign ministry’s information office in August. His comments came a week after Beijing expelled three reporters with the New York-based newspaper over an opinion piece headlined “China is the real sick...

The article published on 3 February criticised the country's response to the deadly coronavirus outbreak. The Chinese foreign ministry said it had asked the newspaper to apologise several times but it had declined. The newspaper said the journalists - who had not written the opinion piece - were given five days to leave China. China's decision came a day after the US State Department tightened rules on Chinese state media organisations operating in the US, classifying them as foreign missions. It told five outlets including state-run Xinhua news agency and the China Global Television Network that they had to submit...

The Trump administration plans to release guidance as soon as this month for granting states waivers to convert Medicaid funding to block grants, according to two people familiar with the matter, paving the way for a transformation of the 55-year-old program that is likely to reignite a partisan feud. The impending release comes as a surprise after the Office of Management and Budget, which reviews regulatory actions, indicated in November that block-grant instructions had been withdrawn. Lawmakers and legal advisers speculated that the guidance may have been shelved or significantly delayed. Approving state waivers to change Medicaid funding to block...

WASHINGTON—When revelations about President Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine first started dribbling into the public in late September and early October, Republicans were caught off guard. Some members of the GOP criticized Mr. Trump’s request for Ukraine to open investigations that benefited him politically, while others sought to avoid the topic altogether. As many as 20 House Republicans initially were open to supporting Mr. Trump’s impeachment, according to Rep. Pete King (R., N.Y.), a retiring member from a competitive district who quickly made up his mind that Mr. Trump’s conduct wasn’t impeachable.

Michael White didn’t deny killing Sean Schellenger. He admitted to police and at his trial that he plunged a knife several times into Schellenger’s back during a July 2018 scuffle in Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square. Numerous witnesses and a cellphone video confirmed what happened. Yet in October 2019 a jury acquitted Mr. White, a 22-year-old college student, of voluntary manslaughter. Many, including the victim’s family, blame Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s soft-on-crime district attorney. Mr. Krasner is one of a new crop of “progressive prosecutors” who have won election in liberal cities. They include San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin, who was raised by Weather...

U.S. Rep. Max Rose of Staten Island announced his endorsement of Michael Bloomberg’s presidential bid, making Mr. Rose the first member of Congress to back the former New York City mayor’s campaign. Mr. Rose, a Democrat, specifically cited Mr. Bloomberg’s management of the city in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Mr. Bloomberg was elected to the first of his three terms as mayor that year. “Mayor Bloomberg’s even-keeled and visionary leadership is what we need to reduce the chaos, partisanship and hyper-vitriol that has overtaken Washington,” Mr. Rose said. “Rather than submit to another stage of...

Allies of President Trump are pursuing an effort to acquire right-leaning news channel One America News Network, according to people familiar with the matter, in a bid to shake up a conservative media market that has been dominated by Fox News. The investment firm Hicks Equity Partners is looking to acquire the channel and is pitching other wealthy GOP donors to arrange a bid of roughly $250 million for the channel’s parent company, the people said. The firm is owned by the family of Thomas Hicks Jr., co-chairman of the Republican National Committee and a close friend of Donald Trump...

BERN, Switzerland—Hours after a U.S. strike killed Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the Trump administration sent an urgent back channel message to Tehran: Don’t escalate. The encrypted fax was sent via the Swiss Embassy in Iran, one of the few means of direct, confidential communication between the two sides, U.S. officials said. In the days that followed, the White House and Iranian leaders exchanged further messages, which officials in both countries described as far more measured than the fiery rhetoric traded publicly by politicians. A week later, and after a retaliatory Iranian missile attack on two military bases hosting American...

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe apologized to an FBI investigator after changing his story regarding a leak to the media in October 2016, according to documents released Tuesday. McCabe was interviewed May 9, 2017, the same day James Comey was fired as FBI director, regarding two separate leaks to the media. During the interview, FBI agents also asked McCabe whether he knew how FBI information wound up in an Oct. 23, 2016, Wall Street Journal article about an investigation of the Clinton Foundation. McCabe said during that sit-down he did not know how the Journal story came about, but...

House Democrats now have the votes to impeach President Donald J. Trump on Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported late Monday. The Wall Street Journal‘s Siobhan Hughes, Lindsay Wise, and Natalie Andrews wrote Monday evening: By Monday afternoon, at least 18 from the 31 Democratic-held districts that Mr. Trump won in the 2016 presidential race had announced they would support the abuse-of-power and obstruction of Congress charges, according to a Wall Street Journal survey, with two saying they are opposed. In other words, given the recent surge over the weekend into early this week of announcements of support for Articles...

Here’s the deal: Presidential candidates issue plenty of pointed barbs in debates, but they use a lot of filler language, too. Phrases such as “let’s be clear” and “the end of the day,” buy the speaker time to collect themselves, think ahead and formulate an answer. Among the Democratic contenders, the fact is, Vice President Joe Biden utters them most frequently (and “the fact is” has been his most-used phrase). The Wall Street Journal identified 23 commonly used three-, four- and five-word phrases and their variations spoken by candidates during the four Democratic presidential debates and tracked the number of...

The Democratic Party’s internal dispute over Medicare for All has reached this battleground state, and so far, supporters of a single-payer health care system are finding a tough audience. Union members in this labor stronghold state have expressed unease with Medicare for All, fearing they would lose health benefits that were hard-won over years of negotiations. A survey of 600 likely voters commissioned by the Detroit Regional Chamber this summer found that a majority opposed a Medicare for All proposal that would eliminate private health insurance, as proposed by Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Kamala Harris, a...

President Obama argues that the election gave him a mandate to raise taxes on high earners, and the White House indicates that he won't compromise on this issue as the so-called fiscal cliff approaches. But tax rates are already high—much higher than is commonly understood—and increasing them will likely further depress the economy, especially by affecting the number of hours Americans work. Taking into account all taxes on earnings and consumer spending—including federal, state and local income taxes, Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes, excise taxes, and state and local sales taxes—Edward Prescott has shown (especially in the Quarterly Review...

It seems the prosecutors feared it would just be too humiliating to admit they had nothing, and hoped they’d somehow stumble on . . . something. Still, Thursday’s final retreat, dropping most charges at the very end, was a shocker. It left the judge dismissing those charges “with prejudice,” so the state can never refile them. And Exxon’s infuriated lawyers say those claims “have cost in many respects the most severe reputation harm to the company and to the executives,” so they want still stronger sanctions. Judge Ostrager has 30 days to issue a decision. The prosecutors are surely praying he’ll find...

Last Thursday, in a move that surprised everyone but perhaps shouldn’t have come as a surprise at all, New York State Attorney General Tish James withdrew two counts of fraud against ExxonMobil during her closing arguments in the flimsy case she and her predecessor, Eric Schneiderman, spent the last half-decade pursuing against the energy giant. Tellingly, AG James dismissed the two of her original fraud counts that were based on laws requiring demonstration of actual harm in order to obtain a positive judgment. Her suit claimed that ExxonMobil’s alleged “fraud” of keeping two separate estimates of the future costs of...

A reporter who now works for the New York Times failed to report on public records, which he obtained in April, that cut against Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (D., Mass.) claim that she was fired from a teaching position in 1971 due to pregnancy discrimination. Reid Epstein, who was then working for the Wall Street Journal, filed an open-records request with the Riverdale Board of Education on April 2 seeking “to inspect or obtain” copies of public records relating to Warren’s time teaching at Riverdale during the 1970-1971 school year. In response to his request, Epstein on April 10 received school-board...

Book includes how Steele was commissioned to write dossier Robert Reich: Trump is an international mobster The former journalists Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch are to publish a book on Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia, including an account of how they commissioned the British ex-spy Christopher Steele to write his dossier on the future president. Crime in Progress: The Secret History of the Trump-Russia Investigation will be published in December by Penguin Random House in the US and UK. Simpson and Fritsch founded the Washington intelligence firm Fusion GPS. In summer 2015, it began investigating Trump and Moscow. It hired...

Sunday on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” network political analyst Carl Bernstein said if President Donald Trump asked Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate 2020 presidential hopeful former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden, it is echoed of “Watergate.” Bernstein said, “Well, I think the first thing is to find out exactly what has happened here. And if the reporting of Shane Harris and The Wall Street Journal is accurate and it seems to be it clearly moves toward a grievance abuse of power by the president of the United States.”