Judicial Watch Sues on Behalf of Daily Caller News Foundation for Dr. Fauci and WHO Communications!

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Washington, DC – Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit on behalf of the Daily Caller News Foundation against the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) for communications and other records of National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci and Deputy Director H. Clifford Lane with and about the World Health Organization (WHO) concerning the novel coronavirus (Daily Caller News Foundation v. U.S. Department Justice (No. 1:20-cv-01149)).

The suit was filed after HHS failed to respond to an April 1, 2020, FOIA request seeking:

  • Communications between Dr. Fauci and Deputy Director Lane and World Health Organization officials concerning the novel coronavirus.
  • Communications of Dr. Fauci and Deputy Director Lane concerning WHO, WHO official Bruce Aylward, WHO Director General Tedros Anhanom, and China.

The time period for the request is January 1, 2020 to April 1, 2020.

Additionally, the DCNF requested and was granted expedited processing of its request.

In March 2020, Fauci praised the work of the WHO and their chairman, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, saying: “Tedros is really an outstanding person … I mean, obviously, over the years anyone who says that the WHO has not had problems has not been watching the WHO. But I think under his leadership they’ve done very well.”

In April, President Trump announced a halt to funding the World Health Organization. According to the president, the WHO put “political correctness over lifesaving measures.” Additionally, President Trump said: “The WHO failed in this duty, and must be held accountable,” adding that the WHO ignored “credible information” in December 2019 that the virus could be transmitted from human to human.

Daily Caller News Foundation Co-Founder and President Neil Patel said: “This virus has killed hundreds of thousands of people and turned the whole world upside down. We know that China and WHO could have done a lot more to prevent or reduce this catastrophe. We therefore have a legitimate and urgent news purpose for seeking these documents regarding U.S. officials’ communications with WHO and demand that the agencies in question stop stalling and start following the law that entitles us to this vital information.”

“It is urgent that the NIH follow transparency law during the coronavirus crisis,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “It is of significant public interest to learn what WHO was telling our top medical officials about the coronavirus that originated in China.”

RELATED ARTICLES:

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Watchdog group sues for Fauci, World Health Organization communications Source: The Washington Times

FOIA lawsuit seeks access to documents regarding China and WHO Source: Washington Examiner

EDITORS NOTE: This Judicial Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

PODCAST: ‘We Can Protect Lives and Livelihoods,’ Says North Carolina Lt. Gov. Dan Forest

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North Carolina Lt. Gov. Dan Forest thinks his state is ready to reopen. “I believe right now many of our counties could start to open back up and you could start to do that in a safe and healthy way,” Forest, a Republican, says.

The lieutenant governor joins The Daily Signal Podcast to propose how America can begin to reopen at a local level to protect both lives and livelihoods. Plus, he discusses what he experienced traveling through North Carolina the past several weeks, and how he’s been helping those struggling. Listen to the podcast below or read the lightly edited transcript.

We also cover these stories:

  • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicts coronavirus-related deaths will reach 3,000 per day by June 1.
  • House GOP members are investigating China’s influence on U.S. university research of COVID-19.
  • The Supreme Court broadcasts teleconference arguments, allowing the public to listen in real time for the first time ever.

The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, Apple Podcasts, Pippa, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at letters@dailysignal.com. Enjoy the show!

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

Virginia Allen: I am joined by North Carolina Lt. Gov. Dan Forest. Lieutenant governor, thank you so much for being here.

Lt. Gov. Dan Forest: Virginia, thanks for allowing me to.

Allen: You have made it clear that your greatest concern during CCOVID-19 is helping the people of North Carolina. You’ve personally donated over $200,000 to the people in your state during the pandemic. Can you tell me about some of those people that you’ve helped?

Forest: Well, it was obvious, Virginia, right out of the gate when things started shutting down, that this was going to have devastating effects to people’s livelihoods, to a lot of business owners who, as you well know, and I’m sure you’ve covered them, have poured their life savings and their heart and soul into growing their business, maybe even over decades.

And then you can see how fragile things actually are and how quickly things can turn the wrong direction.

What we decided, really at the beginning, was … we were going to just start spending our time helping people across the state, and that’s what we did.

My wife Alice and I, we’ve spent the last six weeks traveling around the state and just trying to help people where we can.

Sometimes it’s helping a restaurant owner, write him a check, and help them to make their payroll or pay their rent or keep their lights on or even keep their employees fed.

Sometimes their employees have been furloughed and these restaurants are still trying to feed them and their families and it just goes on and on.

I know you’ve heard all the stories, but it’s truly devastating out there. And there’s two sides to this virus, there’s the virus side, which is devastating to a lot of people, and then there’s the economic side, which is devastating.

Allen: Last week you learned about a retired Army officer who is struggling to pay his bills and he was considering selling something very special and valuable to him. Can you tell me a little bit about that Army officer?

Forest: We actually found out about this online and the Bronze Star recipient, he was trying to help his wife keep her business afloat. So he posted online that he wanted to sell his Bronze Star to the highest bidder, which is sad enough in and of itself.

So we contacted him and said, “Listen, we will come and purchase your bronze star from you on one condition: that we can give it back to you at the same time.”

So last week … I went to Winston-Salem and met him and his wife and daughter and purchased his Bronze Star, and then turned around and handed it back to him.

Obviously, people that have put their lives on the line for our nation and earned metals shouldn’t have to be selling their metals in a time of crisis, but like a lot of people, they’ve fallen through the cracks on the bailout programs, the stimulus programs, and all those kinds of things, as you well know.

So, again, just trying to do a little part to help people out, to let people know you care. I think that’s [important] during times like this.

Allen: It’s so important. It really is. And those are the stories I think that just are giving all of us hope right now. To be reminding ourselves that, all right, when you turn on the news it might look bleak, but then, on the other hand, we’re seeing so much generosity of individuals.

I do just want to take a few minutes and talk a little bit about that issue of not only protecting lives but also livelihoods, like you mentioned.

You’ve made it very clear that you think North Carolina needs to begin reopening the state once again, and, of course, this is a big concern as well of The Heritage Foundation … we’ve been having those same discussions with the National Coronavirus Recovery Commission.

What plan are you advocating for in North Carolina to begin reopening the economy?

Forest: Well, the president laid out two platforms, one was state by state and the other was the states have the ability to open up county by county.

Our state is very diverse. Obviously, we have several large cities. The impact of the virus has been felt in those cities in particular, but not quite as heavily in many of the other counties. So we still have many counties that don’t have any deaths.

We have many counties who, I would suppose, if we were getting the correct data from our state, that we would find out that the people that have had the virus have recovered from it.

So the approach that I’ve suggested is the one that the president suggested, too, you can go county by county and open up.

We’re the second-most rural state in the United States of America, even though we have 10.5 million people, and we’re the eighth-largest state. So very diverse in nature and geography and so forth.

I believe right now many of our counties could start to open back up and you could start to do that in a safe and healthy way.

And, Virginia, I’ve said it from the beginning, this is the United States of America, we can protect lives and livelihoods at the same time. And you’ve seen governors across the country doing this.

You have these kind of two schools going on. You have governors who really have the perspective of saying we need to get the economy going, and we’re going to protect the most vulnerable. And then you have those governors who say we’ve got to lock everything down until there’s no other case of coronavirus left—and that’s not a reasonable approach for our country.

Allen: In your mind, how can North Carolina really balance both public health and reopening the economy? Is that kind of held within that county-by-county plan?

Forest: I think you just have to look at the facts here. The statistics line up, really, across the world. We know who the people are that are actually at real risk of this virus. It is the people that are the elderly and those that have immune issues already.

So people that are at risk fall into those categories, and so you can protect those people by quarantining them, having them stay at home for extra periods of time, creating shopping hours for those folks that don’t interfere with other people, creating times at restaurants where those people could actually go and get their food without coming into contact. All these kinds of things.

We know the demographics of the people that are hospitalized and the people that are dying. And I think we need to let the healthy folks get back to their livelihoods and allow freedom to reign again in America.

Personal responsibility and freedom is really important, but the government picking winners and losers in the economy based on their own preferences is, I think, a pretty bad thing.

You look at small-town America, a lot of these shops that exist in small towns have just a handful of visitors a day and you’re saying they can’t remain clean and they can’t social distance, but you’re going to close them down because they’re not essential.

I think every business is able to set those rules for themselves, and then if they don’t, then you come in with the stick. But I think the government should offer the carrot first and assume that personal responsibility is going to rule the day in America.

Allen: When the nation shut down about seven weeks ago, there was still a lot that we didn’t know about COVID-19. What have we learned about the coronavirus since the lockdown? And has that information affected your views?

Forest: I think everybody was probably in the same position. A couple months ago people were fearful and the statistics that people were presuming were 2 million people were going to die in the United States and this thing was going to be devastating.

So from a political leader’s perspective, I don’t blame anybody for any of the decisions they made with a lack of information. I think that is kind of the reactionary approach that people take when mayhem is on the line.

I think what you’ve seen is, again, you have seen the statistics start to tell us who the people are that are being hospitalized, and who the people are that are dying from this, and we know what categories they fit into.

So extra measures taken to test those population. Extra measures taken to screen people going in and out of those populations, of things like nursing homes and in places like that. And extra precautions taken by the business class of folks when they start to reopen again to continue to protect that population.

So we know a lot now. The statistics are really starting to show us who the vulnerable are and who the vulnerable are not. And we can go on about life and livelihood while protecting people at the same time.

Allen: How do you think that the president has handled the situation with COVID-19? And have you and the folks of North Carolina been working with the Trump administration on this?

Forest: Well, I have conversations, obviously, separately from our governor. Our governor is a different party. We don’t really communicate much, which is too bad. I wish that was the case, but it’s just not here.

And so yes, I’ve had conversations with the administration. I asked them a lot of questions. I get feedback. They’re very responsive.

I think the president actually has shown amazing restraint through all this. I think the first thing is he and his team had the foresight to close down travel from China as early as they possibly knew about this, while China was doing the opposite and sending people around the world still.

The president said, “Hey, let’s shut that down.” As you well know, and I’m sure you’ve talked about it a lot, he got criticized heavily for doing that, but that was probably a great major step.

Then after that, Virginia, I think he’s really shown amazing restraint. He has allowed federalism to do its job, allowing the governors to make the decisions for their state, and I think that is really the way it should be.

Again, just like I believe there’s not a one-size-fits-all approach for our counties across our state, there’s not a one-size-fits-all approach for the United States of America either.

So he laid out a framework and said, “Here’s a healthy framework for moving forward and you guys go make the choices.”

Allen: Now we are beginning to see different states, like you say, take different actions.

You know North Carolina has about 11,000 cases compared with a state like Georgia that has over 28,000 or Texas that has over 30,000, but the governors of those states and many others have already begun to reopen their economies.

Do you think that this is wisdom? Should many, many states now be reopening specifically across the South?

Forest: I think they should be. I think we’re doing incredibly well compared to other states our size. If you line us up against the top 10 states, we’re at the bottom of the list for cases and deaths and so forth. So we are doing extremely well in that category.

I think we are in a position to pass through the first gates, and we are not receiving the data from the state that we should be receiving that other states are producing.

I’ve been asking for that for a solid six weeks now. We need to know how many people have recovered from this.

Continuing to count the number of cases and watching that hockey stick go up as you test more and more and more, you’re going to continue to have more cases. You’re going to have more cases until you have a reliable vaccine for this thing, in fact.

So how many people are actively infected with this virus right now is a really important number. How many people have recovered, obviously, is an important number.

But also, we’ve asked for the data surrounding people that have been hospitalized. What’s the exact number of people hospitalized? Not the daily number because that’s not as important as how many people.

And then on the people that have been hospitalized or the people that have died, what’s their exact age, not within a broad range category? What’s their exact age and did they have other complications associated with their situation as well?

They’re just basic questions to help give the kind of data that we need to make clear, intelligent choices in our state about how to protect people and how to move forward at the same time.

Allen: Yeah, absolutely. Well, summer’s right around the corner and, of course, many parts of North Carolina and states all across the country really depend on tourism during the summer to fuel a lot of the business. Are you optimistic that we can reopen our economy in time for summer vacations and trips?

Forest: I’m very optimistic. In fact, I think the people of North Carolina are ready for it. I think the people of North Carolina have done a phenomenal job of making great sacrifices to protect their state and to protect their neighbors and do all the right things. And we’ve seen that across our state.

I happened to be down east a couple of days ago, I guess it was on Friday, Saturday, and there were hundreds of boats out in the water. People were out there, the sun was shining, and it was a beautiful day. It was a warm day.

There are so many people that are just eager to get back about life right now, and I don’t think you can really hold them down. That’s why leadership is tough during these things.

It’s very difficult, and you have these two schools of leadership, one that is kind of the police state that’s going to try to tell everybody what to do every second, but the government is here to protect us, but not to run and control our lives. And that’s really, really important.

We have to make sure that when we come through this thing, we learn a lot of lessons.

I think the biggest lesson that we’re going to learn through this is how do we protect our Constitution and our constitutional freedoms as we move out of this and make sure that we don’t move into a police state mentality every time something starts to go down in our country?

So that’s going to be a very tough one to navigate and I’m sure it will play out in the elections coming up in November.

Allen: Absolutely. Well, you’ve been serving as lieutenant governor since 2013. You have certainly witnessed a lot of policy and political changes over the past seven years. From where you sit in a place of leadership, how have you seen America change over the past several years?

Forest: Oh, boy, I think it’s actually been quite drastic. I think that this whole notion of identity politics and dividing people into identity politics subgroups out there and then using fear to divide and separate is a dangerous thing. I think we’ve seen that over the last handful of years especially.

I’m hoping that one of the things that usually happens during a time of disaster, whether it’s a natural disaster or something like this, is people come together and they get unified.

I think that we have a lot of work to do in America to unify people and unite people, and we even see different schools during a pandemic.

You kind of have those that say, “At all costs, stay home and stay locked down.” And they cross all political spectrums and ideologies.

And then you have people that say, “Let’s get back to work, let’s get the economy going.” And they cross all spectrums and ideologies.

So it’s not just a right-versus-left kind of thing. So it’d be very interesting to see how that unity plays out as we go forward.

I think we can have empathy and compassion for both the sides of this challenge that I mentioned earlier. And we should have empathy and compassion for it.

Again, I think protecting our freedoms based on our constitutional ideas is the most important thing we can do going forward.

Allen: Yeah, absolutely. What policy issues do you feel you’ve been most proud to play a role in implementing in North Carolina?

Forest: We do a lot of policy work behind the scenes as lieutenant governor. I preside over the Senate. I don’t have the opportunity to actually put my name on a lot of policy, but we have a lot of friends in the House, a lot of friends in the Senate, and we write a lot of policy. So it’s really across the board.

I spend a lot of my time in education. So I’m really proud of a lot of things we’re doing in education to move to competency-based education.

We’re the first state in the nation to have every single classroom connected to high-speed broadband and providing the kinds of access and technology, especially to people who haven’t had it before across our state, that’s been important to me.

Human trafficking, we’ve spent a lot of time on the human trafficking issue. We were No. 6 in the nation for human trafficking in our country, on the bad side, not on the good side. So we have a lot of work to do there, and we passed some really good bills to help push that forward.

I think that I could go on, but there’s a lot of things that we do at the small level as lieutenant governor that I’m very proud of and we have a great team.

Allen: Lieutenant governor, we certainly thank you for your service to our country and we just really appreciate your time today.

Forest: Thank you, Virginia, for having me on. And thanks to Heritage for all the great work you do to protect freedom in our country.

PODCAST BY

Virginia Allen

Virginia Allen is a news producer for The Daily Signal. She is the co-host of The Daily Signal Podcast and Problematic Women. Send an email to Virginia. Twitter: @Virginia_Allen5.

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A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The End of ‘Believe All Women’

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Editor’s note: The media’s double standard when it comes to sexual assault allegations is once again in the spotlight. Until very recently, there had been little media attention paid to an accusation of sexual assault against former Vice President Joe Biden. (Biden denies he assaulted Tara Reade, a former aide to Biden.) Just last year, the media similarly was largely quiet about an allegation of sexual assault against another liberal politician, Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax.

But it’s not just the media. In stark contrast to the “believe all women” mantra heard ad nauseam when Justice Brett Kavanaugh faced allegations of sexual assault, liberal icons are now stepping up in support of Biden, effectively admitting they don’t “believe all women.”

So we’re republishing this article from 2019 that looked at the hypocrisy of the left on this topic of sexual assault.

Feminists haven’t been this silent since the Bill Clinton years.

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

Vanessa Tyson came forward Wednesday to accuse Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax of sexually assaulting her during the Democratic National Convention in Boston in 2004, saying in a statement that “What began as consensual kissing quickly turned into a sexual assault.”

Tyson, now a politics professor at Scripps College in California, says she had accompanied Fairfax to his hotel room.

“His hand was holding down my neck, and he was much stronger than me,” she recalls, and he forced her to perform a sexual act.

“I cannot believe, given my obvious state of distress, that Mr. Fairfax thought this forced sexual act was consensual,” Tyson, 42, writes in the statement released by her law firm, Katz, Marshall & Banks, the same firm that represented Christine Blasey Ford amid her accusations against Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court confirmation process.

Fairfax, 39, denies any sexual assault occurred—and has hired the same law firm Kavanaugh used, Wilkinson Walsh + Eskovitz.

So far, there’s been an eerie silence.

No sexual assault survivors have confronted lawmakers in elevators. No protesters have waited for lawmakers at airports, and, while filming, tried to talk to them about sexual assault. No women have donned the Pilgrim-esque “Handmaid’s Tale” costumes meant to show lack of sexual autonomy and appeared in the Virginia State Capitol. No protests have occurred, and on social media, there’s a notable absence of cries to “believe all women.”

Apparently, if you accuse a Democrat, “believe all women” doesn’t apply.

Of course, Tyson, who calls herself “a proud Democrat,” just released her statement. And one Democrat freshman congresswoman, Rep. Jennifer Wexton of Virginia, has said she believes her.

But even if the “believe all women” crowd does eventually end up supporting Tyson, the pause is telling—because it reveals that the left never really believed in believing all women.

Because if it did, it wouldn’t need time to weigh Tyson’s accusations vs. Fairfax’s denials. (Or more cynically, time to weigh whether believing Tyson is worth the cost of pushing out the pro-abortion, Planned Parenthood-endorsed Fairfax.)

Like many Americans, I was troubled when Ford accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault. I was glad to see the Senate Judiciary Committee took Ford’s allegations seriously, investigated them, and ultimately gave Ford a hearing with questioning on the Republican side done by an experienced sex-crimes prosecutor. I was likewise glad the Senate Judiciary Committee researched two further claims of sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh.

It’s absolutely true that when a woman makes a sexual assault allegation, she should be taken seriously, particularly given that she has put her own name and reputation on the line—as well as come forward knowing that she’ll likely face significant political vitriol from supporters of her alleged attacker.

And I would hope that partisans on both sides would do their best to wait for the evidence, and not base their sentiments on whether the alleged attacker is one of their guys or not.

But “take seriously” is a very different standard from “believe all women.”

“Believe all women” reduces every woman to some kind of inane idiot, unable to lie even if she wanted to. It assumes no woman has ever gotten confused or been mistaken about the exact circumstances surrounding a trauma.

And it’s also certainly not a standard the left applied before Christine Blasey Ford, as Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, and others can attest.

Unfortunately, by politicizing the issue of sexual assault, the left has distracted us from the real work that needs to be done.

What can the U.S. do to help ensure any woman who experiences sexual assault is best equipped to get justice against her perpetrator? Can police officers be better trained to help a traumatized woman when she comes to make a report? Are these cases being prosecuted in the best way, consistently?

Are there steps we as a culture can take to help ensure women aren’t put in vulnerable positions? Given the role of hotel rooms in some of the #MeToo scenarios and now allegedly in the Fairfax case as well, can we make it completely socially and professionally inappropriate for any man to ask a female colleague to come up to a hotel room, no matter the pretext? (Of course, no woman who does go up to a hotel room is in any way to blame for her assault—the only person to blame in any sexual assault is the attacker.)

Do we try to put women on a more equal footing with men by encouraging women who are interested to carry a firearm?

Kimberly Corban, who says she was sexually assaulted while in college, now advocates guns as a way for women to protect themselves. “After [the attack], I started taking my Second Amendment rights very seriously because I knew that that was going to be the only equalizer and the one thing I could train and do for myself,” Corban told The Daily Signal in 2016.

“Believe all women” never made sense as a standard. But the left’s inconsistent application of it makes clear that it’s not women liberals care about, it’s the right to abortion.

COMMENTARY BY

Katrina Trinko

Katrina Trinko is editor-in-chief of The Daily Signal and co-host of The Daily Signal Podcast. Send an email to Katrina. Twitter: .

RELATED ARTICLE: Biden to 14-yo Girl: You’re well-endowed

A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Betrayal and the Programming behind Covid 19 – A UK Perspective [Part 1]

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These are my views as a woman living in England, on how the culture and spirit of my country has changed over 50 years.   Why the country does not feel protected or strong any more, how it has lost, and is losing it values and decency, and how we are daily losing our free speech.

Since Cain killed Abel and the growing enmity between Ishmael and Isaac’s existence, the world has never been a safe place for us to hide from.   We can be subject to thousands of incidents, accidents and illnesses inside and outside our home every day of the week.   We take precautions; but the virus of evil is much more destructive than we can ever imagine.

It is very strange and slightly sad when you listen and bear witness to two continuous and very different narratives every day.

You see the battle between fact and fiction, reality and lies, in relation to Covid 19, are currently coexisting in a parallel world right now.   However, I sense storm clouds are gathering; and the stoic British pride of working together during a national crisis may just be about to turn a bit nasty if certain ‘other’ truths should ever get openly reported.

Right now some people are dealing with what they see as manageable in a world of sleeping, eating, on line shopping and exercising. They trust what they are told.  An initial fear and panic has slowly subsided and along with some unusual sunny weather, the British public are now, according to TV programming, ‘In this Together’ and ‘Undefeated’ against a virus which in only a few short weeks has dictated its very presence to every second of our waking moments

Between messages of staying fit, connecting with loved ones,  helping each other out (all worthy virtues) and finding new ways of interacting with each other from a distance; also including the latest technology of course, the alerts of ‘Staying Home to Protect Lives’ are constantly being aired.   And, as if by chance you should feel bad about your life, programmes are still being interrupted by how much worse it is for those who are also suffering from cancer, heart disease and arthritis, just to name a few of the many illnesses which have also affected everyone’s lives and coexisted in our world for a very long time.

Recently, as though for a moment forgotten, talking about our Mental Health state has also just been resurrected.  There is another type of suffering as a result of being confined or separated from humanity, also taking place.  Could it be the loss of a person’s identity creates confusion and fear when the world falls apart?  The negative aspects and the cost to human life are not being equally reported against the statistics for the deaths created by Covid 19.

There are also posters on a main road near to me instructing me to ‘Be Kind’.  It’s a positive message to consider, but I’m not sure if this means that we cannot speak up against any evils that we may see along the way, and I have wondered how kindness can suddenly be a virtue which can over-ride the secret evil that resides in many men’s hearts?

For some reason there seems to be a whole lot of emotions being toyed with here. It is like being bombed from a great height with no air raid shelter to protect you and you see people accepting without question any orders that they are being given.     Life, if you are not objective, is like a roller coaster, being up one moment, down the next, turned upside down and looping the loop.   The results have become a false high or an actual sickness.

Many people are now avoiding the alerts as best as they can for many different reasons.   Some are aware it frightens them and some are aware there is other information out there which does not correspond with what they are seeing.    Some have found a renewed faith and stillness and an appreciation of the simple things in life, like a silver lining around a very dark cloud.   Genuine kindness then surfaces.   In some respects a search and rescue mission has been taking place regardless of the silence of the Church of England or the religion of your best life now which is indifferent to everyone else who is perishing in their sins.

However, on the whole, the mainstream media and our TV programming are reporting a collective humanism, which is minus God of course, which is doing fine thank you, whilst still remembering the facts of the virus.     We have to remember we are in this together like a new one world religion that is strong and undefeated.

It looks good and it feels good, but sadly, we are being tricked.  We have no idea of what, or who the enemy really is, if we are only listening to what we are being told.     At times like these it is worth remembering or being aware of how evil really works if you can stomach some facts, do a little research and use some rational and critical thinking for ourselves.  Another virus, the virus of inherent evil which does not care about humanity, and only cares for itself, still operates. It has always taken advantage.  It gives people a false illusion of heroism and togetherness, feeds people false facts, and offers a helping hand too.   It comes appearing as an angel of light, when really it is a demon of darkness.  It uses Commonality to promote its Purpose.   Whilst it has you feeling inclusive, it is usually carrying out it own divisive agenda.

Staying at Home to Save Lives

Whilst many people believe they are staying at home to save lives, on the 30th March, the UK government approved new measures which allow DIY abortions to be performed on women by themselves in their homes without the need of a medical professional to be present.

Considered to be a ‘temporary’ policy, it is reported doctors can prescribe mifepristone and misoprostol over the phone or via Face time and Skype, which is the new normal way of interacting.

An urgent application for a judicial review has been made by a Christian law firm.   CEO Andrea Williams states:

“The government appears to be caving to the long-standing pressure from abortion industry promoters for whom this has long been a goal.

 “If this goes unchallenged and is widely practiced there will be no going back and that is tragic for women and their children.

Staying at Home to Save Lives

Whilst many people are making sacrifices by socially distancing themselves from their loved ones and staying home, it has been reported by Brexit Party UK Leader, Nigel Farage that up until recently our borders were open and illegal immigrants were still entering the UK, together with passengers arriving by flights to the country, and were not being tested for Covid 19.   On the 28th April 2020, he tweeted “What is the Government doing to stop the boats from crossing the British channel.   Border Force seems to be complicit.   In the Telegraph he wrote:

“When you think about just how relaxed the UK government has been with regard to people arriving on our shores since this situation unfolded, isn’t the very term ‘lockdown’ a misnomer?  

The BBC, the British Broadcasting Company which sadly people no longer trust very much, reported that 40 people were recently picked up by Border Force.  They stated:

“Our priorities are to arrest and dismantle the organised crime gangs who are prepared to gamble with the lives of others and returning those who have come here illegally, from a safe country.”

Staying at Save Lives Home to

The appreciation towards the dedication that some of our doctors and nurses working for our National Health Service, and of course all of our Emergency Services goes without saying.   Prior to Covid 19, there were very mixed reactions being targeted towards our NHS who were working with a system that was overloaded and stretched unable to support the growing number of people who were using the service?   Waiting times and a lack of available beds, together with how money was being spent, were some of the problems that were constantly being criticized.

Over the last six weeks, an appreciation towards carers is now being demonstrated by residents across the country coming out of their homes at a certain time of night on a Thursday, and cheering and clapping in the streets.   There are also posters of hearts and rainbows in the windows of some people homes showing their appreciation to the NHS.

However, it is now being reported by a doctor who keeps an on line diary for the NHS on the BBC website, that they are experiencing ‘clapping injuries’.  Yes.

He writes:

People might need to be a bit more cautious, especially if they’ve been sitting down all day and then get up to clap. It might be one of the only times older people come outside and so there is a risk of falling and I’d just remind people to take care.

“The clap for carers has made us a little busier,” says Richard Pilling, consultant orthopaedic surgeon at Harrogate District Hospital.

“It’s very nice that everyone is very enthusiastic about showing support but it’s escalated, so people are coming out banging pans and seeing who can clap the loudest, and therein accidents lie.

I am embarrassed to write about this just as I would be embarrassed to warn people about clapping.  As an over-protective mother I have learnt some lessons about being too cautious and the consequences that arise from that; but seriously, clapping!

Instructing people, some of whom have fought in many different battles throughout their life about clapping, should seriously raise some questions about what is really going on right here and who and what is controlling your life.

We should remember that more than one million British military personnel lost their lives in World War I and World War II alone.  What has happened to the spirit that fought for freedom and has now been reduced to being warned about clapping?  Are we also being controlled by the same virus?

“The receptivity of the masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.” ― Adolf Hitler

©All rights reserved

SOURCES:

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Members of Congress and Their Highly Selective Indignation

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Stephen Flatow notes that a letter signed several weeks ago by 60 members of Congress shocks the conscience, or should. Here is his story :

Did you hear the shocking news? Sixty Congress members just signed a letter demanding that the Federal government stop the dismantling of any illegally built homes that have been built by Arabs. But they did not object to Israel’s continuing policy of dismantling illegally built Jewish homes.

The letter demanded that the American government not allow American-made equipment it supplied to Israel to be used in what they called “the ongoing home demolitions” of Arab homes. There was no mention in the letter of the Israeli government’s dismantling of Jewish homes and settlements it deemed “illegal.” Nor was there any mention of the demolition of houses belonging to the families of terrorists as an effective way to discourage would-be terrorists.

Who would have thought that in this day and age, members of Congress would stoop so low as to make policy recommendations based on the idea that one specific ethnic group should be targeted?

We were supposed to have given up the old practice of making policies based on the color of people’s skin, rather than the content of their character. Images of George Wallace standing in that schoolhouse door were supposed to be just a bad memory. Yet here we are, in 2020, with 60 Democrats signing a letter that echoes the attitudes of those dark times.

J Street played a major role in organizing the Congressional letter. In a December 10 press release, the group announced that “J Street supporters across the country are contacting the offices of their members of Congress and urging them to sign on to this important and timely letter.”

The letter was sent to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on March 16, bearing the signatures of 60 members of Congress, all Democrats. They urged the US government to prevent Israel from using American-made equipment in “the ongoing home demolitions and forcible transfer of Palestinian civilians in the West Bank.”

The letter’s reference to “Palestinian civilians” indicates that J Street misled the members of Congress. Evidently, the J Streeters did not explain to potential signatories that house demolitions in Israel are not based on the race, religion, or ethnicity of the homeowners.

Israeli courts authorize dismantling illegally built homes on the basis of whether the homes were built illegally. The Israeli government does not have a policy of demolishing Palestinian homes. If it did, it would be doing quite a poor job of it, since 99.9% of Palestinian homes are still standing!

Both Jews and Arabs in the West Bank have illegally built homes. Some are on “state and waste” lands that are owned by the Israeli government, and from which permission for such building had not been obtained. In some cases Jewish settlers have wrongly claimed – as was the case with the settlement at Amona — to have bought the land they built on from Palestinians, claims that did not stand up in court. Individual houses, owned by Arabs and Jews – though mostly by the former – have been pulled down when the builders violated building codes so egregiously that only demolishment would discourage them, and warn others, from continuing to flout the law.

Clearly, J Street never informed these members of Congress that the Israeli government has been demolishing illegally built Jewish homes too.

On October 24, Israeli bulldozers destroyed two housing structures in the unauthorized Jewish community of Shevah Ha’aretz, near the town of Yitzhar. On November 26, the government sent tractors to level a Jewish housing structure near the community of Bat Ayin and to plow over an adjacent olive grove that had been planted by Israeli Jews and their Christian Zionist supporters. On January 15, the bulldozers were active in Yitzhar, destroying two more Jewish homes that were built illegally.

Had you heard or read about this Israeli destruction at Shevah Ha’aretz, near Bet Ayin, and at Yitzhar of Jewish houses that had been built illegally? No, of course not. It’s not something the Times or the Post or the BBC or any other part of the mainstream media would want brought to your attention. And while we hear constantly about the destruction of “Palestinian” olive trees by mad-dog Jewish settlers, have you ever heard of Israeli tractors plowing over an olive grove planted by Jews that the government considered “illegal”? No, you never have, until just now.

So why didn’t the Congressional letter ask Secretary Pompeo to make sure that no American-made bulldozers were used to smash those Jewish homes?

There are two possible answers.

One would be that those members of Congress are a bunch of racists who care only about the demolition of homes owned by one ethnic group and don’t care about the ones owned by another ethnic group.

But I don’t believe that. I believe that the signatories, except for a few die-hard Israel-haters such as Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, are simply unaware of the reality on the ground in Judea and Samaria. They are unaware because J Street misled them. J Street led them to think that the Israeli government has a racist policy of targeting Arab houses.Comment:

The Israeli government demolishes with equal firmness both Arab and Jewish houses that have been built illegally, or that for security reasons needs to be demolished. Some Arab homes have been built on state or waste land the Palestinians did not own. In other cases, demolitions may be carried out to enforce building codes and regulations that have been repeatedly flouted. The IDF also carries out house demolitions as a counter-insurgency measure to impede or halt militant operations. An Arab house may have been strategically built just above an Israeli settlement, from where those in the house could do the most damage to Jewish civilians living below. That could be grounds for its demolition.

House demolitions are also carried out to discourage terrorism. The demolition of houses belonging to the families of convicted terrorists is used both to punish terrorists and to deter future would-be terrorists, who might not want their families to suffer. As a policy, it seems to have worked, in significantly decreasing Palestinian terrorist attacks.

If J Street had fully informed these 60 Congresspeople about the situation, then the entire premise of the anti-Israel letter would have collapsed.

Racism has no place on Capitol Hill. There should be no discrimination between houses owned by Arabs or Jews, whites or blacks, or any other racial or ethnic groups.

J Street, the so-called “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobby, should be ashamed of itself.

In 2005, the Israeli government demolished many houses of Israeli settlers who were transferred in accordance with the Israeli disengagement from Gaza. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs has said this was done by request of the Palestinian Authorities.

In addition to removing all traces of the Israeli settlements in Gaza, as demanded by the Palestinians, who might have used for their own purposes both the residential housing and the greenhouses left intact by Israelis, were they not so consumed with hate, Israel has routinely demolished “illegal” buildings put up by settlers in the West Bank — that is, “illegal” because their builders had failed to obtain permission from the Israeli state. Sometimes entire outposts have been demolished, if the Israeli government determines they were built “illegally.” Yet very little attention is given to these Israeli actions in the world media, for it would not do to deflect attention from what so many see as the only outrage, that committed by those oppressive Israelis, in destroying structures put up by the inoffensive Palestinians.

When Israel tears down “illegal” buildings or settlements put up by Jews, it does so either because the land on which the settlement was built turns out, according to scrupulous investigation by the Israeli officials, to be owned by Palestinians, or it is state land on which the Israeli government had refused to give permission for Jews to build. It may, for security reasons, want to prevent new Israeli settlements to be built too perilously close to Arab villages – given the enormous effort that might be necessary to defend their inhabitants in case of hostilities. Some settlements or outposts may actually weaken the state if they are likely to prove hellishly difficult to defend.

The government of Israel has not hesitated to remove settlers, and demolish their settlements if, after judicial decisions and appeals that go all the way up to the Supreme Court, they are given the go-ahead. Israeli decisions to demolish Arab structures are also subject to the same judgements and appeals.

In February 2017, Israeli forces began an operation to evacuate settlers from the West Bank outpost of Amona after the Supreme Court stated that it must be demolished by 8 February. According to the Supreme Court the outpost had been built on private Palestinian land settlers claimed they had bought; the land had been declared a “closed military area” by the government.

At Amona, it took thousands of Border Police to subdue a crowd of 10,000, who had come from all over Israel to protest the decision. But the sight of Israeli police violently subduing fellow Jews who were protesting the demolishment of Jewish homes did not make it to Western media; it didn’t fit the story that the media likes to present of ruthless Israelis demolishing, for no conceivable reason, Arab houses.

Perhaps some of those 60 Democratic Congressmen will take the time to find out more about the reasons for Israel’s demolishment of Jewish settlers’ houses, demolishments about which they appear not to have heard, which might provide them with a more nuanced view of the matter. And then they should have the decency to listen to the Israeli government’s explanation of the reasons for its demolition of a handful of Arab homes – an infinitesimal number, though you wouldn’t think so from the mainstream media reports — including gross violations of building codes, and erecting structures — without permission — on state and waste lands. Finally, the Congressmen should understand that demolishing the family homes of terrorists in order both to punish them and to discourage other would-be terrorists, does, in fact, work. It took the Israelis quite a while to fully comprehend, but now they do. They know that given their merciless and relentless enemy, there is no point in gentle persuasion or observing Marquess of Queensberry rules. This is the Middle East.

COLUMN BY

HUGH FITZGERALD

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

EXCLUSIVE: Trump Denies COVID-19 Funds to Planned Parenthood

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The Trump administration has acted to ensure that no funds from the new Paycheck Protection Program, set up to assist small businesses battered by COVID-19, will go to Planned Parenthood.

“President Trump is committed to ensuring Paycheck Protection Program money is used for saving jobs at small businesses, not getting the government into the business of funding abortion,” a senior administration official told The Daily Signal.

“While not all Americans share President Trump’s pro-life beliefs, there is broad bipartisan support for the idea that American taxpayers should not have to fund abortion,” the official said Wednesday night.

When can America reopen? The National Coronavirus Recovery Commission, a project of The Heritage Foundation, is gathering America’s top thinkers together to figure that out. Learn more here>>.

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

The Paycheck Protection Program, designed to shore up small businesses that had to close or otherwise were affected by the coronavirus pandemic, allows businesses with fewer than 500 employees to be forgiven for the principal of a government loan if they don’t lay off their employees. The employers still have to pay the interest on the loans, overseen by the Small Business Administration.

The program’s initial $350 billion fund, established in legislation passed March 30 by the House, was depleted April 16. The program received $320 billion in new funding in a bill passed Thursday by the House and signed into law Friday by Trump.

The senior administration official told The Daily Signal that the Small Business Administration’s mission already excludes big enterprises such as Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider.

“The SB in SBA is for ‘small business,’ so SBA has regulations called ‘affiliation rules’ to define when small employers might be so closely affiliated with a parent organization that they should be considered one large employer,” the official said, adding:

While each Planned Parenthood affiliate has fewer than 500 employees, nationwide it has over 16,000 employees. So when applying PPP’s affiliation rules neutrally, it’s clear that Planned Parenthood is one large employer and not eligible for PPP money.

The interim final rule made crystal clear that an organization with Planned Parenthood’s corporate structure doesn’t qualify.

So far, over 1.6 million businesses have received forgivable loans from the Paycheck Protection Program, with Trump saying that the SBA processed more loans in 14 days than it had in the previous 14 years.

A quote was added to this report shortly after initial publication.

COLUMN BY

Rachel del Guidice

Rachel del Guidice is a congressional reporter for The Daily Signal. She is a graduate of Franciscan University of Steubenville, Forge Leadership Network, and The Heritage Foundation’s Young Leaders Program. Send an email to Rachel. Twitter: @LRacheldG

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A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

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Trump Suggests He May Withhold Bailout Funds From States With Sanctuary Cities

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President Donald Trump suggested Tuesday that he may withhold federal bailout funds from states with cities that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities.

Trump was asked at a White House event with business leaders about the idea of another round of stimulus money for U.S. taxpayers. The president said he liked the concept of payroll tax cuts, then shifted to the possibility of bailout funds for state governments.

“The problem with the states is we’re not looking to recover 25 years of bad management and give them the money they lost. That’s unfair to other states,” Trump said.

“If it is COVID-related, we can talk about it, but we want certain things also, including sanctuary city adjustments,” he continued. “We have so many people in sanctuary cities, which I don’t even think they are popular even by radical left because people are being protected that shouldn’t be protected and a lot of bad things are happening with sanctuary cities.”

The president continued to suggest that, for state governments to be eligible for more bailout aid, they would have to clamp down on their cities that refuse to work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“If we are going to do something for states, I think they probably want something having to do with sanctuary cities and other different points that we can discuss a little bit later on,” he said.

Trump has previously tried to withhold funds from sanctuary cities.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in February that the White House is legally allowed to withhold millions of dollars in federal law enforcement grants from states and other localities that refuse to work with ICE, delivering a major victory for the administration in its fight against sanctuary jurisdictions.

Democrats, however, have tried to stop the administration from tying coronavirus aid to immigration policy.

The CARES Act, a $2.2. trillion stimulus relief package for Americans suffering from the coronavirus, included millions in law enforcement grants. Language in the bill specifically forbid Trump from withholding those funds from jurisdictions that have sanctuary policies in place.

In response to the coronavirus pandemic, the Trump administration has closed the northern and southern borders to all “nonessential” traffic, and the president has issued an executive order that bars many green card applications from foreign nationals living abroad.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities for this original content, email licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

U.S. Won’t Give Gaza Covid-19 Aid That Could Be Used For Jihad Terror Attacks

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The relentless war on Israel by Hamas is being answered by the Trump Administration with a relentless war of its own on funding for that terrorist group. That includes a refusal by the Americans to supply Gaza – that is, Hamas – with money to fight the coronavirus. After all, cash intended by donors for PPE (masks, gowns, gloves) and ventilators can be diverted to pay for rockets and terror tunnels.

The latest installment in this campaign to cut funding for Hamas appeared in the New York Post:

The United States Agency for International Development has moved to aggressively block the distribution of coronavirus relief funds to the entire Gaza strip over concerns the money could fall into the hands of Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.

No doubt Hamas thought the coronavirus pandemic would make it hard for the Trump Administration to refuse to give aid to Gaza – which today is the same thing as giving aid to Hamas, the terror group that controls every aspect of life in the Strip. But Hamas was wrong.

“The Trump administration is not supporting assistance to Gaza,” a senior administration official with knowledge of USAID plans told The Post. “There is a Hamas government in Gaza. They have indicated no interest in engaging with us, no interest in peace with Israel and in fact they continue — despite having coronavirus cases in Gaza — to fire rockets at the Israelis on a regular basis.”

The issue of Gaza funding came to the fore internally after the United States pledged $5 million to help Palestinian relief services in their fight against the deadly pandemic.

“I’m very pleased the USA is providing $5M for Palestinian hospitals and households to meet immediate, life-saving needs in combating COVID-19. The USA, as the world’s top humanitarian aid donor, is committed to assisting the Palestinian people, & others worldwide, in this crisis,” U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman announced in an April 16 tweet.

The plan currently calls for USAID to distribute the funds entirely within the West Bank, ruled by the comparatively more moderate Palestinian Authority and its aging leading Mahmoud Abbas. The funds will be released to a contractor, who would then have discretion to divvy up the cash on the ground as they see fit.

First, notice the derisory sum involved — $5 million. It’s almost breathtaking in its paltriness, and the clear intent to belittle the demands of the Palestinians, with their hands perennially outstretched for ever more aid. Some might describe the sum as deliberately derisory. One is surprised that Mahmoud Abbas didn’t turn it down, in one of his well-known rants, as an “insult to the Palestinian people, and the Palestinian people do not accept insults from anyone.” He may still be nursing a stunned fury: “how dare the Americans offer me so little?” But that’s just the point: the days of big handouts to the Palestinians are over, even during this pandemic. The sum the Americans offered was designed to be just enough to forestall accusations that Washington was unwilling to offer aid “at a time like this,” but the amount shows a clear intent to provide the absolute minimum. Never before have the Palestinians had to deal with an administration like this. They are at their wit’s end.

Of course this $5 million, which is being given to the PA for use in the West Bank, may be supplemented by a subsequent separate sum for Gaza; that will depend on whether the Trump Administration can find a local contractor in Gaza it trusts to distribute aid in the Strip, without any involvement by Hamas. If that happens, the donated sum is likely to be a similarly paltry amount.

Finding a trusted contractor to ensure the money flows exclusively to COVID-19 efforts instead of rockets and terror tunnels in Gaza has proved difficult. The leading contender for the job right now, Catholic Relief Services, has repeatedly expressed interest in distributing cash in the Hamas-controlled territory and has petitioned both the State Department and USAID to release funds previously awarded to them to spend in Gaza.

The CRS puts itself forward as the best candidate to distribute cash to the Palestinians, but obviously the Administration has had grave doubts about the CRS for some time; the State Department and USAID previously refused to release funds that the CRS had been awarded and wanted to spend in Gaza. The Administration is unlikely to change its mind about the CRS now. The problem remains of finding a group in Gaza that can distribute cash to both hospitals and people without involving Hamas. For if the past is any guide, if,Hamas is involved with that distribution, itwill find a way to take a cut for its leaders or to allocate whatever American aid is forthcoming to its members alone.

Catholic Relief Services (CRS), along with other faith-based and U.S. private voluntary agencies, is desperately mobilizing to mitigate the potentially catastrophic impact of COVID-19 in Gaza,” wrote CRS chief Sean Callahan in a March 20 missive to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and USAID administrator Mark Andrew Green. “We are urgently requesting the support of USAID in these efforts. ”

The Catholic Relief pitch to distribute funds has also raised eyebrows among staff at the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem — who raised a number of possible concerns about how the relief organization would allocate funds.

Catholic Relief Services thinks it is beyond reproach, an organization that needs no vetting, as a dispenser of charity with a holier-than-thou halo around its institutional head. Not everyone agrees. Those in the Trump Administration who are familiar with the organization, which in the U.S.and Europe has pushed for more Muslim migrants, has parroted the Pope’s line that “authentic Islam” has nothing to do with Islam, has been enthusiastically involved in interfaith outreach that always ends up with Christians apologizing for their islamophobia and with Muslims accepting the apology –are not enthusiastic about entrusting the CRS with the task of distributing funds to Muslims in Gaza.

USAID should ask up front the entire list of ‘local partners’ and ‘key partners’ who will receive any U.S. taxpayer dollars so that USAID can do thorough and proper vetting of each ahead of time,” embassy staff wrote.

American diplomats in Jerusalem remain impressively unimpressed by the CRS’s pretense of pure motives; they want to know exactly to whom in Gaza CRS intends to give American taxpayers’ money, so that these would-be recipients can be investigated for possible ties to terrorism. Assurances from CRS that it would never support terrorists simply won’t wash.

Here’s one possibility: Washington could provide another $5 million in aid for Gaza, but insist that it be distributed by the one group that would certainly steer clear of Hamas – that is, those who are loyal to the PA. Perhaps the money ultimately intended for Gaza could be sent to the PA in Ramallah, which would then be asked to have its loyalists in Gaza distribute the aid directly to hospitals and sufferers from the coronavirus. Would Hamas try to stop this? Unlikely, given the wrath of Gazans if the terrorist group were to block that infusion of cash. If the PA can resist helping itself to any of that money, and distributes it openly and fairly, it might regain some of its popularity, at the very moment when the mismanagement and greed of Hamas have made that terror group intolerable to many Gazans. Were the PA to be able to renew its rule in Gaza, at the expense of Hamas, which in the last 12 years of misrule has been tried and found wanting, that would be a good thing. The PA is bad, but Hamas is far far worse. It’s a consummation devoutly to be wished.

COLUMN BY

HUGH FITZGERALD

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Trump Showcases Jobs Preserved by Paycheck Protection Program Amid COVID-19 Shutdown

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Michael Heup not only got his job back at Bitty & Beau’s Coffee, which was temporarily closed because of the COVID-19 crisis, but he also had the chance to talk about it at the White House on Tuesday.

“I love my job, and I am excited about going back to work,” Heup, a disabled employee, said at the East Room event. “At Bitty & Beau’s, we like to use the phrase called ‘not broken.’ That means me and all my amazing co-workers are not broken, and we have lots to offer. I know the great country of the United States isn’t broken either.”

The Wilmington, North Carolina-based Bitty & Beau’s Coffee had to temporarily close and lay off 120 employees at the company, most with intellectual and developmental disabilities. But it was able to rehire all the employees after getting a federal loan through the Paycheck Protection Program.

The White House had representatives from eight companies at the event sharing their stories of staying afloat after governments’ COVID-19 mitigation efforts forced much of the economy to close.

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

Under the program, if businesses with fewer than 500 employees do not lay off employees, the principal on the loan is forgivable. Employers still have to pay the interest.

Bitty & Beau’s Coffee has locations in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Maryland. For most of the employees, it’s their first paying job. The employees are now “working from home, writing handwritten notes that we include with each online order we ship,” said Amy Wright, CEO of Bitty & Beau’s, also speaking at the event.

“I know everyone is ready to return to normal,” Wright said. “I believe it’s time for a new normal, one where people with disabilities are valued, especially in the workplace. As a recipient of the [Paycheck Protection Program] loan, we will continue to take up the charge and help everyone, especially people with disabilities, pursue the American dream.”

The Paycheck Protection Program has disbursed $350 billion to small businesses across the United States, and more than 1.6 million forgivable loans have been approved by the Small Business Administration. Trump said the SBA has issued more loans in the past 14 days than it has in the past 14 years.

However, the program has come under scrutiny for doling out loans to large employers, such as Harvard University and Shake Shack. Several of the big businesses returned the loans after the rash of bad publicity.

“The press has commented on a lot of big companies that inappropriately took the money,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said at the event. “We’ve been very clear. We’ve announced today that any loan over $2 million will have a full review for forgiveness before they are repaid because this is the story of small business here.”

When taking questions from reporters, Trump was asked about Democrats in Congress calling for guaranteed incomes that could go on for months.

“I like payroll tax cuts. I’ve liked that from the beginning. That was a thing that I would really love to see happen. Most economists agree with me,” Trump said.

The president expressed skepticism of bailing out states, but he said aid could come with the precondition of changing sanctuary policies, in which local jurisdictions refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities.

“We are not looking to recover 25 years of bad management and to give them the money they lost. That’s unfair to other states. Now, if it’s COVID-related, I guess we could talk about it,” Trump said, adding:

But we’d want certain things also, including sanctuary city adjustments, because we have so many people in sanctuary cities, which I don’t even think are popular by radical left folks.

What’s happening is, people are being protected that shouldn’t be protected, and a lot of bad things are happening with sanctuary cities.

COLUMN BY

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal and co-host of “The Right Side of History” podcast. Lucas is also the author of “Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections.” Send an email to Fred. Twitter: @FredLucasWH.

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To Prepare for COVID-19 Vaccine, Let’s Ensure Manufacturing Capacity Will Meet Demand

Our Pharmaceutical and Medical Supply Chain Poses National Security Issue, Says Rep. French Hill

Today’s Americans and Yesteryear’s Americans

A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

New Study Demolishes Fauci, Birx and Bill Gates’ Lies

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“The main difference between a cat and a lie is that a cat only has nine lives.” – Mark Twain

“When we give government the power to make medical decisions for us, we in essence accept that the state owns our bodies.” –  Ron Paul

“The more laws that governments pass, the less individual freedom there is. Any student of history will tell you that. Totalitarian countries ban pretty much everything.” – Bill O’Reilly

“It will not be denied that power is of an encroaching nature and that it ought to be effectually restrained from passing the limits assigned to it.” – James Madison, Federalist 48, 1788

We’ve just been through the twilight zone with a taste of socialism, all based on lies sold to us by establishment globalist “experts” and their scientific models.  A good friend said to me, “This is a political event, not a medical event.”  How right he is!  Healthy people should not have been quarantined despite what “experts” told us.  Everything the country has done is backasswards.  A lot of us are angry, others are sheeple who follow government orders implicitly without a thought of our freedoms, and buy exorbitant amounts of toilet paper for nothing.

Alexander Hamilton said, “Every act of a delegated authority, contrary to the tenor of the commission under which it is exercised, is void. No legislative act, therefore, contrary to the Constitution, can be valid. To deny this, would be to affirm, that the deputy is greater than his principal; that the servant is above his master; that the representatives of the people are superior to the people themselves; that men acting by virtue of powers, may do not only what their powers do not authorize, but what they forbid.”

Personally, I rebel against government orders that take my God given freedoms from me.  So, do we really have those God-given freedoms or are they only on loan from the feds?  I fear the latter because most Americans no longer know the Almighty, nor do they know or cherish our Constitution.

2020 Lockdown

Healthy Americans have been quarantined, but officially, the definition of “quarantine” is very specific: It’s the seclusion of a person potentially exposed to a disease for a period of time to see if they become infected. A person under quarantine typically stays in one place to avoid nearly all contact with the outside world. When such a quarantine is ordered by the government, it’s illegal to violate them…but in 2020, the state governments have quarantined healthy people.

During the 1918-1919 Spanish flu epidemic, homes had signs on them that they were quarantined, everyone wore masks, and everything was done outdoors, including haircuts, church services and holding court, (check these photos).  In America alone, 675,000 died when our population was a third less than today…but little was shut down.

The congregation prays on the steps of the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption, where they gathered to attend mass and pray during the influenza epidemic, in San Francisco, California.

Today, synagogues and churches are closed to parishioner’s with “social distancing,” but in 1918, church services were held outside and people prayed to end the scourge.

The state of Tennessee is shut down until the end of April, despite only having had 178 deaths in a state of 6.829 million people, and was it really Covid-19 that caused their deaths or underlying health issues?

Experts Wrong Again

Two new studies have proven the experts wrong again.  The truth about the actual number of Americans infected with coronavirus via a Stanford University study, tells a totally different story.  There were 3,300 people tested for antibodies and the results showed that 50 – 80 times more people are infected than the actual numbers officially reported as infected by Fauci, Birx and Gates.

Another study out of the University of Southern California is confirming the Stanford study.  They reported that when they tested 863 people in Los Angeles County, about 4.1 percent tested positive. The population of LA County is about 8 million, so 4.1 percent, that means about 320,000 adults have had a Covid-19 infection before April 9th.  Comparing this to the confirmed cases of Covid-19, the study shows that LA County cases are actually 40 times larger than reported.

The implications are two-fold.  One is that mortality rates based on confirmed cases are going to be much lower than based on the number of infections or the estimated number of infections in the study.  The good news is that the mortality rate is far lower than what was prognosticated.

Fox reporter John Roberts was caught on a hot mic in the White House talking about it.  He told an employee he could take off the mask as the case fatality rate was .01 to .03 or 1/10th of what was forecast. He said USC and Los Angeles County Health did the study and they reported 7,000 cases and they really believe there were 221,000 to 442,000 people who were infected.  What I want to know is why the worker with the mask said he didn’t have to worry because they’d been vaccinated anyway.  This means the case fatality rates are far less than forecast than the models presented by “experts” Fauci and Birx.  In reality, the death rate/fatality rate is way down.

It’s not a hoax, there is a real infection and it can kill the elderly and those with compromised immune systems, but it seems to be no more lethal than the common flu and is being spread more widely by those who show no symptoms.  They have only tested people with symptoms and not even all of them, so their figures vary widely from factual infection and death.  This proves the information from Drs. Shiva and Buttar are correct.  We need true accountability.

Obviously, the catastrophic numbers have been exaggerated to crash the economy and control the people with fear, resulting in 26 million people out of work and destroying over 30% of our small businesses.  All of which was planned with great precision to destroy the presidency of Donald J. Trump.

If fear ruled Americans, we would never have fought the Revolutionary War or World War II. Normandy, the Battle of Crete, of Anzio, of Monte Cassino, of Sedan, of the Bulge, and many others would have been lost along with Iwo Jima.

Get America Back to Work

Two doctors have collected data in clinics in California and they have presented their conclusions in two videos.  You can listen to the first video here, and the second here.  This article gives you only short portions from their conclusions.

Doctors Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi recently completed a 51-minute press conference.  They said their facilities have tested over 5,200 patients for the coronavirus throughout the county, making up for over half of all testing in Kern, California. According to their data, the death rate of the coronavirus is similar in prevalence to the flu.  “Now that we have the facts,” said Dr. Erickson. “It’s time to get back to work.”

Emphatically no, we do not need to continue to shelter in place and we never should have done it to begin with.  Do we need businesses to be shut down?  Again, emphatically no!  Do we need to test people and get them back to work?  Yes, we do!  Is the flu less dangerous than Covid?  No!  It’s not! They are similar in prevalence and death rate.  It’s time to open society and get back to work!  Bill Gates funded globalist NIH Doctor, Anthony Fauci, says Covid-19 is ten times more lethal than the flu. People, we’ve been had!  Their projected numbers created policies that are destroying far more lives than the virus itself. Their model has collapsed.

Fauci and Birx were brought in by Coronavirus Task Force leader, VP Mike Pence.  Had he brought in MIT’s Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai; we would undoubtedly not be in this economic nightmare.

Rates of Infection in California

In California there are a reported 33,865 Covid cases out of a total of 285,900 tested; that’s 12 percent of Californians were positive for Covid.  The initial models were woefully inaccurate.  They predicted millions of cases of death, not of prevalence or incidence, but of death.  That has not materialized.  In California, 12 percent are positives, but the population is 39.5 million.  A basic calculation extrapolated out gives us 4.7 million cases throughout California which means this virus is widespread.  They’ve seen 1,227 deaths in California with a possible incidence or prevalence of 4.7 million.  That means you have a 0.03 chance of dying from Covid-19 in the state of California.

Drs. Erickson and Massihi ask if this necessitates sheltering in place, does that necessitate shutting down the medical systems, does that necessitate people being out of work?  We certainly didn’t react the same way with the flu!

Dr. Erickson continues, “If this is a typical extrapolation, 328 million people times 19.6 is 64 million and that’s a significant amount of people with Covid.  It’s similar to the flu if you study the numbers from 2017-2018, we had 50-60 million sick with the flu and a similar death rate.  The death rate was 43,545 and we have a death rate of 30 to 60,000 every year from flu in the United States. And there is no pandemic talk, no sheltering in place, no shutting down businesses and no sending our doctors home.”

Emergency rooms in California are empty, hospital floors are shut down, and basically hospital ICUs are empty.  They are furloughing patients and doctors.  In New York, the health system is working at maximum capacity, although we’re seeing the rates of infection drop exponentially, whereas California is at a minimal capacity.

Everything Dr. Erickson has said verifies the Stanford and University of Southern Cal study that talks about how widespread this virus really is and how this data needs to be shared with all of America.  This virus is not as deadly as Fauci, Birx and Bill Gates have made it out to be. Once again, massive fear was sold to us by the “experts” and the mainstream media.  The prevalence with this virus goes up and up, but the death rate gets smaller and smaller, millions of cases, but a small amount of death.  The response to this virus was completely and totally misguided.  The unnecessary lockdown will end up being more destructive than Covid-19.

Rates of Infection in New York

New York State cases of Covid as of April 22, are 256,272. According to public data on line, a total of 649,325 tests and 39 percent of New Yorkers tested positive for Covid.  Even with social distancing, the “experts” totals were far out of range.  The extrapolated-out figures are far closer to reality than the predictive models that have been nowhere in the ballpark.  The deaths in New York are 19,010 out of 19 million people which is a 0.1 percent chance of dying of Covid in the state of New York and they have a 92 percent recovery rate if indeed you are diagnosed with Covid.  Again, millions of cases, and a small number of deaths.

Sweden v. Norway

Sweden did not lockdown, and they have 15,325 cases of Covid and they did 74,600 tests and 21 percent of all those tested came up positive for Covid.  Sweden’s population is about 10.4 million.  Extrapolating out the data, there are about two million cases of Covid in Sweden.  They did a bit of social distancing and mask wearing, but schools and stores were open, businesses openly functioned, their daily lives continued with a small amount of social distancing.  The death rate was 1,765 and California had 1,220 with isolation.  There are more people in California, but it’s still millions of cases and very small death rate.

Norway, which is next door to Sweden, shut down their entire economy.  They had 7,991 cases, total tested 149,279.  They came up with 4.9 percent of all Covid tests were positive in Norway.  The population is 5.4 million.  Extrapolating data gives Norway about 1.3 million cases and their deaths were 182, which is fairly low and statistically insignificant and a .003 chance of death in Norway and a 97 percent recovery.  Norway’s numbers are a small bit better than Sweden, but it doesn’t necessitate shutdown, loss of jobs, destruction of the oil industry and furloughing doctors.

Basically the numbers worldwide are the same, but what Fauci, Birx and Gates didn’t take into consideration were the deaths from the lockdown, alcoholism, suicides, drug addiction and overdoses, bankruptcies, loss of jobs and businesses…all of which will be more devastating than Covid-19 whose figures are very close to yearly flus.

Secondary Effects of Covid-19

Covid-19 is only one aspect of our health sector, but what has social isolation caused? Dr. Erickson has collected data from ERs across the country and talked to fellow physicians.  Child molestation is increasing at a severe rate.  Unemployed family members are home with no paychecks, they’re angry and intoxicated and doing damage that will last a lifetime.  Spousal abuse is also massively on the rise.  Alcoholism, anxiety, depression, drug addiction, suicides, education has dropped off, economic collapse, the medical industry is suffering because the staff is not there and there is no volume of patients.  These are all things Dr. Erickson and Massihi see every day in their clinics from Fresno to San Diego, and the lockdown results are spiking in every community across America.

This is the ripple effect of listening to Fauci and Birx and their false models.  Remember in January Fauci said this virus was nothing to worry about, but his tune changed, and so did our economy…all because of their false forecasts of the death rates of this virus.

Covid-19 v. Seasonal Flu

Is Covid-19 significantly different asks Dr. Erickson…well no, it isn’t.  Deaths per the CDC are 24,000 to 60,000 each year.  We had about 45 million cases of flu in 2017, with 62,000 deaths or a 0.13 chance of death from flu in America.  Our other numbers were 0.02 for Covid, so the lethality of Covid-19 is much less.  They followed the true science.

Sadly, what was presented to our president by Fauci and Birx at the onset of this pandemic was outrageously wrong, and now we have 26 million people out of work, a totally destroyed economy, humongous additional debt, and inflation on the near horizon.  They told him to either sacrifice his economy or two million lives, what choice did the man have?  But here’s the thing, who the hell vetted these two before putting them in power over America and our president’s decisions?  Certainly not Pence.

Conclusion

The death counts from Covid-19 have been hugely amplified to include people who were not even tested and died from other ailments.  I believe this entire virus was planned and executed by Fauci and Birx who are hardcore leftists tied to WHO, the UN the Clintons, and Obama.  This eight-minute video is unverified and may be false, but it tells a lot of truth, albeit I do not believe anything negative will happen to Fauci.  Decide for yourselves.

© All rights reserved.

RELATED VIDEO: Barak Lurie on the Math of Covid-19.

Iowa Candidate Under Fire for Call to Define Islam as ‘Militant Cultural Imperialism Seeking World Domination’

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My latest in PJ Media:

The real pandemic today is not the coronavirus, but cowardice. Nonetheless, even in these days of political correctness, wokeness, the cancel culture, and “hate speech,” there are a few public figures with courage. One of them is Rick Phillips, a Republican Congressional candidate from Iowa, who has dared to grasp the third rail of American public life and state that Islam is not actually the cuddly religion of peace that every enlightened American assumes it to be at this point.

The Des Moines Register reported Monday that Phillips’ “platform calls for redefining Islam as ‘militant cultural imperialism seeking world domination,’” and that he “drew fire Monday for saying he doesn’t believe Islam is protected under the First Amendment.

Phillips stated on Quad Cities TV station WHBF that the Founding Fathers had only Christianity in mind when they wrote the First Amendment. “They were not talking about anti-Christian beliefs,” he explained. “Now, if a person doesn’t want to believe in Christ, that’s their business. But to say that this First Amendment right includes all religions in the world, I think, is erroneous.”

The usual reaction ensued, Robert McCaw of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), demanded that both the Iowa Republican Party and the national Republican Party “repudiate these Islamophobic, unconstitutional views.” McCaw thundered: “The Constitution must protect Americans of all faiths. The kind of hatred and anti-American views promoted by Mr. Phillips places in danger both constitutional protections of religious freedoms and the safety of ordinary American Muslims.”

Responding like the good invertebrate that most Republican Party leaders are, Iowa party spokesman Aaron Britt said that Phillips’ statements “are not reflective of the views of the Republican Party of Iowa.”

Lost in all this predictable intimidation on the one hand and equally predictable pusillanimity on the other was the question of whether or not Phillips was right. Surely everyone can agree, or should agree, that the First Amendment is not and was never intended to be a license to commit all manner of crimes if such activity is mandated by one’s religion. No one, Muslim or non-Muslim, should be considered anything but innocent until proven guilty, but sooner or later the United States and all non-Muslim countries is going to have to have a public conversation about how much to tolerate a belief system that is itself radically intolerant, authoritarian, supremacist, and violent.

Can Muslims in the U.S. repudiate those aspects of Islam? Should they? This discussion needs to take place, but right now it is covered over by claims of “Islamophobia.” In the same way, lost in the shuffle also was the question of whether or not Islam really is “militant cultural imperialism seeking world domination.”

Inconveniently for Robert McCaw and his ilk, there are certainly some Muslims who think it is. I could quote violent passages of the Qur’an, but those might be waved away with the dismissive and erroneous claim that the Bible contains similar exhortations to violence. Let’s focus instead on what Islamic authorities say. One might get the impression that Islam is not a religion of peace from the authoritative sources in Sunni Islam, the schools of Sunni jurisprudence (madhahib):

Shafi’i school: A Shafi’i manual of Islamic law that was certified in 1991 by the clerics at Al-Azhar University, one of the leading authorities in the Islamic world, as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy, stipulates about jihad that “the caliph makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians…until they become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax.” It adds a comment by Sheikh Nuh Ali Salman, a Jordanian expert on Islamic jurisprudence: the caliph wages this war only “provided that he has first invited [Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians] to enter Islam in faith and practice, and if they will not, then invited them to enter the social order of Islam by paying the non-Muslim poll tax (jizya)…while remaining in their ancestral religions.” (‘Umdat al-Salik, o9.8).

There is much more. Read the rest here.

RELATED ARTICLES:

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UK: Muslims threaten to murder singer who converted to Islam for using Qur’anic prayer in music video

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Pakistan: Muslim cleric says coronavirus pandemic was caused by “immodest women”

Nigeria: Muslims murder four people and destroy 36 houses in raid on farming village

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Osama bin Laden’s Plan for Destroying America: Make Joe Biden President

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Osama bin Laden had money, a name, and a certain amount of charisma. But Al Qaeda’s successes had at best a limited amount to do with him, as opposed to the more experienced and pragmatic terrorist leaders. And by this point, he had long since become irrelevant, harbored by Pakistan, too dangerous to keep, too dangerous to get rid of, until Obama decided that he could get reelected by arresting Osama and putting him on trial. The men on the ground had other ideas and the rest is history.

But Osama had his own stupid plan for bringing America to its knees. Kill Obama.

O​sama bin Laden wanted to assassinate then-President Barack Obama so that the “totally unprepared” Joe Biden would take over as president and plunge the United States “into a crisis,” according to documents seized from bin Laden’s Pakistan compound when he was killed in May 2011.

The secretive documents, first reported in 2012 by The Washington Post, outlined a plan to take out Obama and top U.S. military commander David Petraeus as they traveled by plane.

“The reason for concentrating on them is that Obama is the head of infidelity and killing him automatically will make [Vice President] Biden take over the presidency,” bin Laden wrote to a top deputy. “Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the U.S. into a crisis.”

As opposed to Obama, who was really prepared.

Then again, Osama was getting his info on American politics from Michael Moore.

Sure having Biden take over would wreck the country, but a lot less so than Obama had. Unless Osama had a plan to get Carter back into office, that probably wasn’t happening.

Intelligence officials told the Post that bin Laden’s plan never progressed past the aspirational stage.

True of all his plans at that date, except his plan to listen to bad music and get shot by the infidels.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Minneapolis neighborhood to broadcast Islamic call to prayer over loudspeakers five times a day

Netherlands: Police admit “confused man” who murdered 18-year-old boy is Muslim migrant

Israel: “Palestinian” Muslim hits police officer with van, then stabs him with scissors

Coronavirus vs. Islamic Jihad Terrorism and Sharia Oppression

Afghanistan: The nation’s last Sikhs and Hindus plead for U.S. help amid persecution and murder by jihadis

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

PODCAST: Mark Green — Bring Our Companies Home

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The last thing we should do with sky-high unemployment is sending more jobs to China. Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.) has a plan to bring U.S. companies home — and make the communist party pay for it.

Listen in on our conversation from Wednesday’s “Washington Watch” to hear how.

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EDITORS NOTE: This FRC-Action podcast is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

DHS Study Shows Potential of Heat, Humidity to Kill Coronavirus

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A new Department of Homeland Security study shows that heat, humidity, and sunlight could help to kill the coronavirus, offering a potential literal ray of hope against the pandemic as summer nears.

“Our most striking observation to date is the powerful effect that solar light appears to have on killing the virus both [on] surfaces and in the air,” Bill Bryan, the head of the DHS science and technology directorate, said Thursday at the White House press briefing. “We’ve seen a similar effect with both temperature and humidity as well where increasing the temperature or humidity or both is generally less favorable to the virus.”

Bryan pointed to displayed charts that showed on surfaces with temperature between 70-75 degrees Fahrenheit, and 20% humidity, the half-life of the coronavirus was 18 hours.

When humidity was cranked up to 80%, the half-life dropped to six hours. With temperature at 95 degrees and 80% humidity, the half-life of the virus was only one hour. It even worked with no sunlight.

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

>>> When can America reopen? The National Coronavirus Recovery Commission, a project of The Heritage Foundation, is gathering America’s top thinkers together to figure that out. Learn more here.

Bryan said the test was done on nonporous surfaces such as door handles and stainless steel.

“As the temperature increases, as the humidity increases, with no sun involved, you can see how drastically that half-life goes down on that virus,” Bryan said. “The virus is dying at a much more rapid pace just from exposure to higher temperatures and just from exposure to humidity.”

Bryan stressed that this is not a reason to stop social distancing in summer months, and that continued testing will be done.

President Donald Trump was enthusiastic that outdoors might be preferred to indoors.

“I think a lot of people are going to go outside all of a sudden. People that didn’t want to go outside, they’ll be going,” Trump said.

Even before Bryan’s presentation, Vice President Mike Pence said the White House coronavirus task force looked forward to early summer.

“Our task force actually believes, Mr. President, that if we continue these mitigation efforts in the days ahead as states implement their policies, including phased reopenings that will preserve those gains, we do believe that by early summer we can be in a much better place as a nation with much of this coronavirus pandemic behind us,” Pence said.

Pence said that 16 states have released formal reopening plans—13 of those since the Trump administration issued its three-phase “Opening up America” guidelines for governors last week.

“To your point, Mr. President, states are beginning to make those plans,” Pence said. “We are encouraged to see so many states embrace the phased approach to reopen their economies.”

However, in response to a question, Trump again expressed his anger with Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp for allowing spas, salons, tattoo parlors, and other similar businesses where germs can easily spread to reopen.

“I want the states to open more than he does,” Trump said, adding, “I wasn’t happy with it and I wasn’t happy with Brian Kemp. I wasn’t at all happy, and I could have done something about it if I wanted to, but I’m saying let the governors do it. But I wasn’t happy with Brian Kemp.”

On another front, many hospitals across the country feeling financial strain from the COVID-19 virus heard welcome news.

“Given the unique burden on hospitals, we are now encouraging states to restart elective surgeries wherever possible, either statewide or on a county-by-county basis,” Pence said. “We recognize the role elective surgeries play in finances for local hospitals. We will be working with states to enable that.”

COLUMN BY

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal and co-host of “The Right Side of History” podcast. Lucas is also the author of “Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections.” Send an email to Fred. Twitter: @FredLucasWH.

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A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

How to Fight for Child Safety Online at the Federal Level Right Now

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Suppose an online technology platform’s lack of safety features and irresponsible policies allowed a sexual predator to have access to your child in order to sexually abuse and exploit them. In this tragic scenario, you can’t bring a civil lawsuit against that online technology platform because Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act prevents them from being held liable in any way.

It’s why a company like Pornhub is protected from being hit by a civil lawsuit after it came to light that dozens of videos featuring the rape of a 15-year-old sex trafficking victim were being hosted publicly on its site. It’s why companies like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok (among others) aren’t being slammed with civil lawsuits even though sexual predators are able to get direct access to minors via technology platforms that lack appropriate safety features. It’s why Facebook isn’t concerned about legal repercussions stemming from the fact that a National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) investigation found 9x more instances of child sexual exploitation on its platform than Facebook itself reported finding.

The National Center on Sexual Exploitation is continuing our policy work on these issues, calling for Congress and local governments to include online safety in any legislation and announcements during this difficult period.

We’ve endorsed and actually helped to shape the EARN IT bill in the U.S. Congress that has great potential to provide online safety for children like Leo.

Because of the carte blanche legal immunity that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act currently grants, technology companies have no legal incentive to prevent predators from grooming, recruiting, and trafficking children online. As a result, countless children have fallen victim to child abusers on online platforms with seemingly innocent intentions, like Leo and his wish to chat with friends while playing games online.

The EARN IT Act provides crucial incentives to technology companies by making their current gift of immunity conditional based on a demonstration that they are actively working to prevent online sexual exploitation of minors AND child sexual abuse material.  This is a game-changer!

Congress has an overriding interest in protecting the safety of citizens from profound harm and EARN IT offers that much-needed protection in the digital space.

We’re working hard to make sure Congress hears the research that shows the harm, listens to the stories of the children harmed, and acts on this critical piece of legislation soon.

This effort cannot happen without your help. Right now, we’re mobilizing our team, meeting remotely with key officials, and campaigning hard for the EARN IT bill to move forward.

Will you help us in this important effort with a tax-deductible donation of $50, $100, or $500? When you do your gift will be matched dollar for dollar by a generous anonymous donor and will ensure that Congress hears your voice and passes this incredibly important legislation to protect the innocent.

EARN IT has the capability to protect and prevent the online exploitation that is happening every day because it requires the tech companies to put children first!  This is especially critical in this time of increased online activity by children across the world.

We know you are passionate about helping keep children safe from the online dangers, especially during this time of increased online activity. You can make a difference today in the lives of our children!

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