SITUATION IN NUMBERS
total and new cases in last 24 hours
Globally
28 276 confirmed (3722 new)
China
28 060 confirmed (3697 new)
3859 severe (640 new)
564 deaths (73 new)
Outside of China
216 confirmed (25 new)
24 countries
1 death
A Chinese doctor who tried to issue the first warnings about the deadly coronavirus outbreak has died, the hospital treating him has said.
Li Wenliang contracted the virus while working at Wuhan Central Hospital.
He had sent out a warning to fellow medics on 30 December but police told him to stop “making false comments”.
There had been contradictory reports about his death, but the People’s Daily now says he died at 02:58 on Friday (18:58 GMT Thursday).
The virus has killed 636 people and infected 31,161 in mainland China, the National Health Commission’s latest figures show.
The death toll includes 73 new deaths reported on Thursday…….
What is Li Wenliang’s story?
Dr Li, an ophthalmologist, posted his story on Weibo from a hospital bed a month after sending out his initial warning.
He had noticed seven cases of a virus that he thought looked like Sars – the virus that led to a global epidemic in 2003.
On 30 December he sent a message to fellow doctors in a chat group warning them to wear protective clothing to avoid infection.
Four days later he was summoned to the Public Security Bureau where he was told to sign a letter. In the letter he was accused of “making false comments” that had “severely disturbed the social order”.
He was one of eight people who police said were being investigated for “spreading rumours” Local authorities later apologised to Dr Li.
Is Trump’s Unorthodoxy Becoming Orthodox? The U.S. has become no better friend to an increasing number of allies and neutrals, and no worse an adversary to a shrinking group of enemies.
When candidate Donald Trump campaigned on calling China to account for its trade piracy, observers thought he was either crazy or dangerous.
Conventional Washington wisdom had assumed that an ascendant Beijing was almost preordained to world hegemony. Trump’s tariffs and polarization of China were considered about the worst thing an American president could do.
The accepted bipartisan strategy was to accommodate, not oppose, China’s growing power. The hope was that its newfound wealth and global influence would liberalize the ruling Communist government.
Four years later, only a naif believes that. Instead, there is an emerging consensus that China’s cutthroat violations of international norms were long ago overdue for an accounting.
China’s re-education camps, its Orwellian internal surveillance, its crackdown on Hong Kong democracy activists, and its secrecy about the deadly coronavirus outbreak have all convinced the world that China has now become a dangerous international outlier
Trump courted moderate Arab nations in forming an anti-Iranian coalition opposed to Iran’s terrorist and nuclear agendas. His policies utterly reversed the Obama administration’s estrangement from Israel and outreach to Tehran.
Last week, Trump nonchalantly offered the Palestinians a take-it-or-leave-it independent state on the West Bank, but without believing that a West Bank settlement was the key to peace in the entire Middle East.
In short, Trump’s Middle East recalibrations won few supporters among the bipartisan establishment.
But recently, Europeans have privately started to agree that more sanctions are needed on Iran, that the world is better off with Soleimani gone, and that the West Bank is not central to regional peace.
Iran has now become a pariah. U.S.-sponsored sanctions have reduced the theocracy to near-bankruptcy. Most nations understand that if Iran kills Americans or openly starts up its nuclear program, the U.S. will inflict disproportional damage on its infrastructure — a warning that at first baffled, then angered, and now has humiliated Iran.
In other words, there is now an entirely new Middle East orthodoxy that was unimaginable just three years ago.
Suddenly the pro-Iranian, anti-Western Palestinians have few supporters. Israel and a number of prominent Arab nations are unspoken allies of convenience against Iran. And Iran itself is seemingly weaker than at any other time in the theocracy’s history.
Stranger still, instead of demanding that the U.S. leave the region, many Middle Eastern nations privately seem eager for more of a now-reluctant U.S. presence.
For the last 20 years, much of the American orthodoxy had agreed with Europe that the increasingly anti-democratic, pan-continental, and borderless European Union was the remedy to all of Europe’s past 20th-century catastrophes.
As a result, American presidents did not do much when EU nations typically racked up large trade surpluses with the U.S., often a result of asymmetrical fees, tariffs, and fines.
The U.S. largely ignored the increasingly anti-democratic and anti-American tone of the EU.
Nor did Americans object much when lackadaisical European NATO nations habitually welched on their defense-spending commitments.
But then Trump again blew up more old assumptions.
NATO will now only survive if its members keep their word and meet their spending promises. An economically stagnant, oil-hungry, and top-heavy EU will have to make radical changes, or it will sink into irrelevance and eventually break apart.
Trump got little credit for these revolutionary changes because he is, after all, Trump — a wheeler-dealer, an ostentatious outsider, unpredictable in action, and not shy about rude talk.
But his paradoxical and successful policies — the product of conservative, anti-war, and pro-worker agendas — are gradually winning supporters and uniting disparate groups.
After all, the U.S. is beefing up its military but using it only sparingly. It hits back hard at enemies but does not hit first. For Trump, being conventional is dangerous; being unpredictable is far safer.
For all Trump’s tough talk, his ace in the hole is American soft power — based on a globally dominant economy, its global lead in the production of gas and oil, and an omnipresent cultural juggernaut.
The result of the new orthodoxy is that the U.S. has become no better friend to an increasing number of allies and neutrals, and no worse an adversary to a shrinking group of enemies. And yet Trump’s paradox is that America’s successful new foreign policy is as praised privately as it is caricatured publicly — at least for now.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump said on Thursday the United States had killed Qassim al-Raymi, the leader of Islamist group al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), in a counterterrorism operation in Yemen.
“Under Rimi, AQAP committed unconscionable violence against civilians in Yemen and sought to conduct and inspire numerous attacks against the United States and our forces,” Trump said in a statement.
“His death further degrades AQAP and the global al-Qa’ida movement, and it brings us closer to eliminating the threats these groups pose to our national security,” the president said. He did not say when Raymi was killed.
The United States regards AQAP as one of the deadliest branches of the al Qaeda network founded by Osama bin Laden.
Reports in Yemen have suggested in recent days that Raymi had been killed in a drone strike in Marib. Reuters was unable to verify the reports.
One Yemeni government official told Reuters there had been a drone strike in Marib but it was not Raymi who had been killed.
Senator Leding doesn’t really get why his bill failed as he believes his fellow legislators just didn’t understand it. That’s a common delusion of those on the left. They believe the only reason someone could disagree with them on anything is a lack of understanding. I think the committee members who killed in dead understood it just fine.
LITTLE ROCK (KATV) — Could a red flag law come to Arkansas? They’re designed to reduce gun violence but at the cost of some individual rights.
In the last legislative session, some lawmakers tried but failed to pass similar legislation here. This proposal would have given law enforcement the ability to request an individual’s gun rights be temporarily restricted based on mental health concerns.
While one legislator touted this could save countless lives, the opposition said it would infringe upon an Arkansans’ gun rights.
A few Arkansas legislators had high hopes of passing some type of red flag law in the state following the mass shootings that have rocked the nation.
But a proposal couldn’t even make it past a legislative committee, let alone to the floor for a vote.
Senator Greg Leding, the bill’s sponsor, said in an interview that there were enough misconceptions that led to its failure.
“There were a lot of questions about how these laws work, they can be very effective but they do need to be put together in a proper way so it can protect individuals and the public and I think it was just a matter of having not had sufficient time to really sit down with lawmakers and address all of their concerns.”
While he began working on the proposal a year prior to the 2019 legislative session, it still wasn’t enough time to convince his Republican counterparts who believe red flag laws violate peoples’ rights.
“There are some lawmakers who simply won’t come aboard for whatever reasons, but I do think there are enough who once they understand how these laws work and they’re confident that the law is constructed in such a way that it protects everybody that we will get the support necessary,” Leding said.
It’s not just the “building blocks of U.S. health care”, it’s all the stuff imported from China and how much of that stuff we depend on that’s not being manufactured because of so many people being in quarantine.
Chinese President Xi Jinping recently warned of the “grave” situation posed by the “accelerating spread” of the coronavirus in China. Xi’s frank warnings were unusual for the seniormost official of the Chinese Communist Party and reveal the depth of the concern at the highest levels of the country’s leadership.
While many are rightfully concerned about stopping the virus, few are focused on the fact that the more it spreads, the more the U.S. ability to treat any Americans who are stricken is vulnerable to the tender mercies of the Chinese Communist Party because of a strategic shift in health care that occurred without debate or decision in Washington.
Everything from antibiotics to chemotherapy drugs, from antidepressants to Alzheimer’s medications to treatments for HIV/AIDS, are frequently produced by Chinese manufacturers. What’s more, the most effective breathing masks and the bulk of other personal protective equipment — key to containing the spread of coronavirus and protecting health care workers — and even the basic syringe are largely made in China. The basic building blocks of U.S. health care are now under Xi’s control.
As Rosemary Gibson, author and health care expert noted, the United States does not produce its own penicillin anymore — the last U.S. based penicillin production facility closed in 2004. Of course, antibiotics may not do any good against the coronavirus, but they may be needed to deal with a related sickness, just as flu often leads to respiratory infections.
This makes the U.S. acutely vulnerable for several reasons. First, China has a record of faulty products and poor oversight that have resulted in recalls, production delays and other problems Americans certainly don’t want to encounter when trying to obtain lifesaving drugs. As Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross stated recently, it is time for the U.S. to “consider the ramifications of doing business with a country that has a long history of covering up real risks to its own people and the rest of the world.”
The Pentagon is using Camp Ashland in Nebraska to quarantine up 75 individuals possibly infected with the coronavirus, the Defense Department announced Wednesday.
Americans evacuated overseas in need of quarantine will be flown to a remote spot at Eppley Airfield in Omaha as soon as Thursday, according to Defense Secretary Mark Esper, and will be transported to the camp.
“DOD personnel will not be in direct contact with the evacuees and will minimize contact with personnel supporting the evacuees,” the announcement read. “Should routine monitoring of the evacuees identify ill individuals, [the DepartmentHealth and Human Services] HHS has procedures in place to transport them to a local civilian medical facility. HHS will also ensure that no evacuated personnel are transferred to any DOD installation if they are infected or ill.”
Nebraska National Guard officials have prepared three buildings with 85 beds at the camp, and Guard officials said evacuees won’t be interacting with guardsmen or employees there.
The HHS also said that planes will arrive at bases in California and Texas. All passengers will be screened for symptoms and are subject to 14 days of mandatory quarantine. It typically takes about two weeks before seeing symptoms of the coronavirus, which part of the reason it has spread so fast.
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (WVLT) – A proposed bill, if passed, would allow students to have a concealed carry gun at public higher education institutions. The idea sparked conversations inside and outside the classroom at the University of Tennessee
“It makes me a little nervous, guns, in general, make me nervous, I’m just an anxious person,” Gray, a student, said.
Some students said they were indifferent about guns on campus. Many students were for the move saying it’s a means of self-defense.
The proposal states students would need a carry permit and be in compliance with state law. Some students said lawmakers could use their energy elsewhere.
“Having concealed carry, but also not having the options of suitable mental health access is not a good idea,”
Guns on campus was a hot button topic back in 2016 when lawmakers were deciding whether or not to allow faculty and staff to carry. More than 80 percent of UTK faculty, who were asked in a poll, did not want guns on campus.
The final decision was not on their side as lawmakers passed the 2016 bill.
If passed, the new bill would go into effect July 1, 2020.
Though popular belief holds that more guns on college campuses will lead to an uptick in gun violence, several universities have reported no such increase even after their states legalized the carrying of concealed weapons on school grounds.
According to the website of Armed Campuses, a pro-gun-control initiative that tracks firearm policies at universities across the country, seven state legislatures have broadly permitted concealed carry on public university grounds. Five more have instituted limited campus carry regimes. Ten states prohibit campus carry altogether, while the remainder either allow the university to set the policy or else mandate that the guns must be left in locked cars.
The College Fix reached out to multiple public universities in states where campus carry is legal. All of the schools that responded confirmed that they have seen no uptick in violence since their respective policies were put in place.
Emporia State University is located in Emporia, Kansas. Armed Campuses states that, in that state, “any individual 21 years or older who is otherwise legally allowed to possess a concealed handgun may do so in any public facility, or on any public grounds unless proper security measures are in place.”
Reached via email, Emporia State campus spokeswoman Gwen Larson told The College Fix that the school has observed no change in gun violence since that rule was instituted. “Emporia State did not have gun violence before the law changed, and there has been no violence since the law changed,” she wrote.
Asked if there had been an uptick in campus carry since the policy change, Larson responded that she couldn’t say.
“There is no way of knowing the answer to this question. Kansas law prohibits tracking people who are carrying concealed handguns or making inquiries about who may or may not be carrying,” she wrote.
No gun violence increase, no ‘concerns’ regarding campus guns
Utah’s Dixie State University, located in St. George, has also not seen any increase in gun murders or injuries since guns were allowed on campus there, according to campus law enforcement. Utah law has actually permitted campus carry for nearly a decade and a half.
Dixie State’s campus Chief of Police Blair Barfuss told The College Fix via email that there has been no “reported or observed increase with gun violence on campus” related to the state’s campus carry policy.
“DSU does restrict firearms in on-campus residential housing units, unless the individual possesses a state issued firearms concealed carry permit, which is allowed by state statute,” Barfuss said.
He added that the university, like Emporia State, “does not track who on campus possess state issued concealed carry firearm permits.”
“This would be very difficult to do due to DSU students coming from many states across the country. We have not seen any increase in reports of firearms on campus, and we have not been made aware of any concerns regarding concealed carry permit holders by students or staff, related to Utah state legal statute.”
The Fix reached out to Valdosta State University, a public university in Valdosta, Georgia, to inquire about its experiences with concealed carry. Armed Campuses says that state has permitted concealed carry on college campuses since July of 2017.
Campus spokesman Keith Warburg provided The Fix with a letter from Steve Wrigley, the chancellor of the University System of Georgia. That letter, dated May 24, 2017, affirms the general right to carry a gun on public campuses while outlining several locations in which guns are still forbidden, including residence halls as well as classrooms in which high school students are studying.
Asked if the university has experienced an increase in gun violence since the legalization of concealed carry, Warburg did not directly answer. Instead he provided The Fix with the school’s 2019 Annual Security and Fire Safety report. Data from that report show no increase in murder or manslaughter on the school’s campus from 2016-2018; in all years it was zero. Aggravated assaults on campus dropped from three in 2016 to one in 2018. Burglaries dropped from 22 in 2016 to nine in 2018.
The lack of evidence that liberalized campus carry laws lead to more campus violence stands in contrast to the often-heated rhetoric of gun control activists. The Campaign to Keep Guns Off Campus, an activist group partnered with Armed Campuses, has claimed that efforts to allow concealed weapons on campus are “dangerous.” That group says it is working “to protect American’s colleges and universities.”
On its website, Armed Campuses lists a study examining campus crime rates following the passage of liberalized concealed carry laws. The study also looks at state-level and national crime statistics. The report concludes that available data “do not prove that campus carry causes more crime.” Armed Campuses did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday morning.
It is uncomfortable to face violent threats. We endure that discomfort because it is better to face them than run from them. Communists in the US have flocked to Senator Bernie Sanders’ campaign, and the things they want to do are horrible. Fortunately, we’ve faced threats like this before and we’re prepared to face them again. The US model of limited government and an empowered people is up to the dangerous task of defending liberty. We are made for this.
I’m not going to put words in the mouth of American Communists. Project Veritas recorded many Sanders’ staffers in candid conversations. These are their words, not mine. Please see my sources and listen to the Communists in their own words. It is worth your time to read what they said-
“Well, the Gulags were founded as Re-Education Camps…What will help is when we send all the Republicans to the Re-Education Camps.”
“I’m ready to start tearing bricks up and start fighting.. I’ll straight up get armed.. I’m ready for the ****** revolution, bro.. Guillotine the rich.”
“The Soviet Union was not horrible…I mean, for women’s rights the Soviet Union – I think – the most progressive place to date in the world.”
“So, do we just cease – do we just dissolve the Senate, House of Representatives, the Judicial Branch, and have something Bernie Sanders and a cabinet of people, make all decisions for the climate? I mean, I’m serious.”
“..I think the goal is just to build a..coalition… Their politics fall outside of the American norm, so their politics are Marxist/Leninist.. they have more of a mind for ‘direct action’ for engaging in politics outside of the electoral system.”
“…Once we break up Google, YouTube, Facebook, nationalize these things, then that would be a huge thing forward so far as education stuff goes.”
“We would need a federal government and labor union movement that is working together to strip power away from capitalists and preferably directing violence toward property.”
“..it’s gonna take militancy…like a militant labor movement that’s willing to…strike, and if necessary, you know, just destroy property and things like that.”
“A militant labor movement is kind of.. our last real chance before we try other means.”
“After we abolish landlords, we don’t have to kill them, that’s my feeling I think it’s damaging to the soul, but um, there were plenty of excesses in 1917 (Russian Revolution) I would hope to avoid.”
“We don’t want to scare people off, you first have to feel it out before you get into the crazy stuff…You know we were talking about more extreme organizations like Antifa, you were talking about, Yellow Vests, all that but we’re kinda keeping that on the back-burner for now.”
“It’s unfortunate that we have to make plans for extreme action but like I said, they’re not going to give it to us even if Bernie is elected.”
Communists in the Sanders campaign said they would take power by force once elected, or burn cities if the convention, or the voters, rejected their candidate. Politicians who still call themselves Democrats also want ordinary citizens disarmed. That strange coincidence is no coincidence at all.
Bernie’s campaign workers are not alone in their ideas. Their fellow communists, the Ruling Council in China, said Americans should be disarmed. Remember that the Chinese government killed over 10 thousand unarmed students who were protesting in Tiananmen Square. The Bernie Bros want to bring that level of terror here. I’ll remind you that 10 thousand dead students at is a mere dust mote when compared to the 45 million people the Chinese government killed during Mao’s “Great Leap”. The Bernie Bros think a few million corpses here in the United States will bend us to their will.
Communists Utopia is always a few million corpses away.
The current M240 is a slightly modified version of the FN-MAG , which is derived from the FN Model-D BAR, which is a modified version of the Ye Olde BAR designed right at the end of World War 1 by His Royal Highness of Gun Design, John Moses Browning hisself.
Interesting that two of the action types he designed, the M2 and the BAR are still being used as standard issue over a century after they were taken from the drafting desk and put into production.
In my experience the M240 beats all other man portable medium caliber belt fed mgs hands down in reliability and accuracy. In the decades I worked on, and shot them, I never had one fail on me or have to code one out due to simple wear. And as long as my guys didn’t treat it like it was one of their Mini-guns, or try some half-baked idea on dry lubrication because they didn’t like having to clean them everyday in the desert, it would always work when they needed it to.
On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wasted no time after the Senate acquitted President Trump in his impeachment trail, immediately filing cloture on a number of judges as he continued his relentless march toward remaking America’s judiciary with a conservative bent.
The judges included
Andrew Lynn Brasher to be U.S. Circuit Judge for the Eleventh Circuit,
Joshua M. Kindred to be U.S. District Judge for the District of Alaska,
Matthew Thomas Schelp to be U.S. District Judge for the Eastern District of Missouri,
John Fitzgerald Kness to be U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of Illinois, and
Philip M. Halpern to be U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of New York.
In March 2019, Politico reported that McConnell was intent on moving as quickly as he could to get conservative judges confirmed:
The Senate is on track to confirm the 34th Circuit Court judge of Trump’s presidency in the next week and the GOP has three more ready for floor action; that would give Trump roughly 20 percent of the Circuit Court seats in the country after just two years in office. At this rate, McConnell and Trump could leave few, if any, vacancies there for a potential Democratic president in 2021.
Even more alarming for Democrats, the GOP is also preparing to pull the trigger on the “nuclear option” and change Senate rules once again with a simple majority to allow much quicker confirmation of lower court judges in the coming months. …
Trump currently has 128 District Court vacancies to fill, and each one can take multiple days under current rules if any senator demands a delay; if Republicans change the rules, Trump could conceivably fill most of those over the next 20 months.
Just to put it in perspective, President Obama appointed 55 Circuit judges in 8 years. President Trump with our Senate confirmation has done 50 in 3 years. So the pace is dramatic. What these men and women have in common is they’re all young, they’re all smart. A heavy percentage of them have been Supreme Court clerks. They’ll be on the court for a very long time, and what they have in common is what Justice Scalia used to say – the job of a judge is to follow the law and the Constitution.
You would think that wouldn’t be such a quaint notion, but among Democratic appointees, that’s been their approach. President Obama tipped his hand when he said he wanted to appoint judges who had empathy. Well, that’s great if you’re the litigant for whom the judge has empathy, not so good if you aren’t.
TALLAHASSEE — Florida Supreme Court justices on Tuesday cast a skeptical eye on a constitutional amendment banning assault weapons, with the chief justice calling part of it “prohibitively misleading.”
The proposed amendment, drafted after the 2018 Parkland massacre, would outlaw a variety of weapons and require current owners to register them with the state. Organizers missed the deadline to go before voters this fall and they’re now aiming for 2022.
Lawyers for Attorney General Ashley Moody and the National Rifle Association argued Tuesday that the amendment is overly broad and applies to far more weapons than AR-15s and other semi-automatic rifles, which the public commonly views as “assault weapons.”
NRA attorney George Levesque said the ban could even apply to even pellet guns and paintball guns.
“The average voter is not going to appreciate that and they’re going to be confused by that,” Levesque said.
But justices largely glossed over those arguments, focusing instead on one particular sentence in the ballot summary.
The sentence says the amendment “exempts and requires registration of assault weapons lawfully possessed prior to this provision’s effective date.”
The lawyer who crafted that language, Jon Mills, said it meant that current owners of assault weapons were exempt from the ban, but that they had to register their weapons. When the person died, they could not hand them down to a family member or anyone else. The weapon would have be turned over to authorities.
But Chief Justice Charles Canady read it differently. The sentence, he said, says the weapon itself is exempt from the ban, he said, meaning that the weapon could be transferred to another person after the ban takes effect.
“I don’t know how anybody could get an idea from that that when the person who possessed it trundles off this earth, then all of a sudden that weapon becomes illegal and is no longer exempt,” Canady said. “If it means that, if I’m reading it correctly, then that is prohibitively misleading.”
Mills said that interpretation was “completely nonsensical,” noting that if that were true, the amendment would allow someone to buy up thousands of assault weapons before the ban takes effect, then sell them after it takes effect.
“It says what it says,” Canady responded. “I didn’t write this.”
Before constitutional amendments go before voters, justices have to decide whether the proposals deal with only a single subject and has a fair ballot summary. If justices decide the summary is misleading, organizers would have to start over.
The amendment would ban all “assault rifles,” which it defines as “semiautomatic rifles and shotguns capable of holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition at once, either in fixed or detachable magazine, or any other ammunition-feeding device.” It does not apply to handguns.
“It seems to me that the chief purpose of this amendment is to eliminate long guns in the State of Florida within a generation,” Justice Ricky Polston said.
Mills said that it only applies to semi-automatic long guns. Bolt-action rifles, which require the user to pull a lever in between each shot, would be permitted.
The committee gathering signatures for the amendment is Ban Assault Weapons Now, whose chairwoman, Gail Schwartz, lost her nephew, Alex Schachter, in the 2018 Parkland massacre. The gunman was wielding an AR-15-style rifle.
The gun owner didn’t realize the suspect’s guns were fake when he shot him in the leg, authorities say
What did the snewzporter expect? Close inspection before defending himself? The crim is lucky he isn’t dead.
A man saw someone stealing from his neighbor in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, Tuesday night and shot the 17-year-old suspect when he pointed what appeared to be two guns in his direction, authorities say.
About 10 p.m., a woman saw the teen inside her car on Forbidden Forest Circle, the Spotsylvania County Sheriff’s office said. When she confronted him, he pulled a mask over his face and began to walk away with stuff he stole from her car, according to the sheriff’s office.
She followed the teen and yelled for him to stop. Then, a neighbor and his wife got into their car to try to intervene, the sheriff’s office said.
They called 911 and told the operator they were following the suspect and were trying to stop him, authorities said.
They then pulled their car in front of the suspect, and the man got out of the car while telling the suspect to stop, the sheriff’s office said.
That’s when the teen turned around and pointed what appeared to be two guns in their direction, according to the sheriff.
The man fired at the suspect, shooting him in the leg, the sheriff’s office said.
Investigators said the suspect ran to a nearby home in the area of Harrison Road and North Dickerson and asked the residents to call 911.
The man who shot the teen has a valid concealed weapon permit and cooperated with law enforcement.
Deputies discovered both guns were toy guns that were painted black.
The suspect was charged with brandishing a firearm, wearing a mask in public and petit larceny, the sheriff’s office said.
He was treated at a hospital and then transported to the Rappahannock Juvenile Detention Center.
CLEVELAND, Ohio — A Cleveland man suffered a gunshot wound that shattered his pelvis during an attempted robbery he tried to pull with a woman, court records say.
Surdeangelo D. Parhman, 22, and Cecilia R. Vargas, 20, are each charged with aggravated robbery in the Jan. 26 incident.
Parham made his first court appearance Saturday and remains in custody on $25,000 bond. Vargas is not in custody but a warrant was issued Friday for her arrest.
Detectives initially identified a 26-year-old man as a suspect in the shooting that injured Parham. They arrested and charged the man with felonious assault, but dismissed the case two days before they charged Parham and Vargas, according to court records.
The 26-year-old man told investigators that Parham tried to rob him at gunpoint prior to the shooting, which happened just before 10 a.m. Jan. 26 on Quincy Avenue near East 40th Street, according to a police report. Vargas acted as Parham’s accomplice, court records say.
FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) — A frightening situation for a Tulare County family started when they heard banging on their front door at around ten Tuesday night.
“They can hear them yelling ‘Sheriff’s Office, Sheriff’s Office,’ says Tulare County Sheriff’s Lt. Joe Torres. “The victims thought it was odd that it was late hours, so the suspects then forced their way into the living room area, they busted the front door.”
At this point, Torres says the homeowner knew for sure that the people at the door were not sheriff’s deputies, as they weren’t wearing law enforcement uniforms.
That’s when Torres says the homeowner and suspects started shooting at each other.
One suspect was hit in the upper body and died at the scene. The other suspects got away.
The homeowner’s wife, child, and another man were inside the house at the time. Thankfully, nobody was hurt.
“Although we are in the early stages, it was a home invasion that went terribly wrong,” Torres said. “There were four people in the residence, along with a 13-year-old that could have all been killed if it wasn’t for the homeowner taking action.”
Torres says everything unfolded in just a few minutes, and it left the family shaken up.
Detectives say they are not ready to release a motive for the home invasion.
An autopsy for the suspect who died has been scheduled for Thursday.
Sheriff’s officials say his name and cause of death will be released once it’s complete.
Facing Up To the Revolution. Our ultimate objective, unlike that of our enemies, is “peace among ourselves and with all nations.” But what kind of peace we may get depends on the extent to which we may compel our enemies to leave us in peace. And for that, we must do unto them more and before they do unto us.
Some conservatives, rejoicing that impeachment turned into yet another of #TheResistance’s political train wrecks and that President Trump is likely to be reelected by a bigger margin than in 2016, expect that a chastened ruling class will return to respecting the rest of us. They are mistaken.
Trump’s reelection, by itself, cannot protect us. The ruling class’s intolerance of the 2016 election’s results was intolerance of us.
Nor was their intolerance so much a choice as it was the expression of its growing sense of its own separate identity, of power and of entitlement to power. The halfhearted defenses with which the offensives of the ruling class have been met already advertise the fact that it need not and will not accept the outcome of any presidential election it does not win. Trump notwithstanding, this class will rule henceforth as it has in the past three years. So long as its hold on American institutions continues to grow, and they retain millions of clients, elections won’t really matter.
Our country is in a state of revolution, irreversibly, because society’s most influential people have retreated into moral autarchy, have seceded from America’s constitutional order, and because they browbeat their socio-political adversaries instead of trying to persuade them. Theirs is not a choice that can be reversed. It is a change in the character of millions of people.
The sooner conservatives realize that the Republic established between 1776 and 1789—the America we knew and loved—cannot return, the more fruitfully we will be able to manage the revolution’s clear and present challenges to ourselves. How are we to deal with a ruling class that insists on ruling—elections and generally applicable rules notwithstanding—because it regards us as lesser beings?
The resistance that reached its public peaks in the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and the impeachment imbroglio should have left no doubt about the socio-political arbitrariness that flows from the ruling class’s moral autarchy, about the socio-political power of the ruling class we’re forced to confront, or of its immediate threat to our freedom of speech.
Chief Justice John Roberts, presiding over the Senate’s impeachment trial, was as clear an example as any of that moral autarchy and its grip on institutions.
Pursuant to Senate rules, Senator Rand Paul sent a written question through Roberts to House Manager Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) regarding the extent of collaboration between Schiff’s staffer Sean Misko and his longtime fellow partisan, CIA officer Eric Ciaramella in starting the charges that led to impeachment. Roberts, having read the question to himself, declared: “The presiding officer declines to read the question as submitted.”
The chief justice of the United States, freedom of speech’s guardian-in-chief, gave no reason for declining to read Paul’s question. The question was relevant to the proceedings. It violated no laws, no regulations. The names of the two persons were known to every member of the House and Senate, as well as to everyone around the globe who had followed news reports over the previous months. But the Democratic Party had been campaigning to drive from public discussion that this impeachment stemmed from the partisan collaboration between a CIA officer and a Democratic staffer.
Accordingly, the mainstream media had informally but totally banned discussion of this fact, supremely relevant but supremely embarrassing to Schiff in particular and to Democrats in general. Now, Paul was asking Schiff officially to comment on the relationship. Schiff could have explained it, or refused to explain it. But Roberts saved him the embarrassment and trouble—and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) spared senators the problem of voting on a challenge to Roberts’ ruling. The curtain of official concealment, what the Mafia calls the omertà, remained intact. Why no reason?
Just as no dog wags his tail without a reason, neither did Roberts wag his without reason. Neither the laws of the United States nor the rules of the Senate told the presiding officer to suppress the senator’s question. Why was Roberts pleased to please those he pleased and to displease those he displeased? In short, why did this impartial presiding officer act as a man partial to one side against the other?
This professional judge could hardly have been impressed by the ruling class’s chosen instrument, Adam Schiff, or by Schiff’s superior regard for legal procedure. Since Schiff’s prosecution featured hiding the identity of the original accuser—after promising to feature his testimony—and since it featured secret depositions, blocked any cross-examination of its own witnesses, and prevented the defense from calling any of their own, it would have been strange if Chief Justice Roberts’ bias was a professional one.
Is it possible that Roberts favored the substance of the ruling class claim that neither President Trump nor any of his defenders have any right to focus public attention on the Biden family’s use of public office to obtain money in exchange for influence? That, after all, is what Washington is largely about. Could Roberts also love corruption so much as to help conceal it? No.
Roberts’ professional and ethical instincts incline him the other way. Nevertheless, he sustained the ruling class’s arbitrariness. Whose side did he take? His dinner companions’ side? The media’s? His wife’s? Roberts’ behavior—contrary as it was to his profession, to his morals, and to his political provenance—shows how great is the ruling class’s centripetal force.
The sad but inescapable consequence of this force is that conservatives have no choice but to follow the partisan logic of revolution—fully conscious of the danger that partisanship can make us as ridiculously dishonest as Adam Schiff or CNN’s talking heads, into rank-pullers like John Roberts, and into profiteers as much as any member of the Biden family.
And yet, revolution is war, the proximate objective of which is to hurt the other side until it loses the capacity and the will to do us harm. That means treating institutions and people from the standpoint of our own adversarial interest: controlling what we can either for our own use or for bargaining purposes, discrediting and abandoning what we cannot take from our enemies…
The scientist leading the UK’s research into a coronavirus vaccine says his team have made a significant breakthrough by reducing a part of the normal development time from “two to three years to just 14 days”.
Professor Robin Shattock, head of mucosal infection and immunity at Imperial College London, said he is now at the stage to start testing the vaccine on animals as early as next week with human studies in the summer if enough funding is secured.
He told Sky News: “Conventional approaches usually take at least two to three years before you even get to the clinic. And we’ve gone from that sequence to generating a candidate in the laboratory in 14 days.
“And we will have it in animal models by the beginning of next week. We’ve short-tracked that part. The next phase will be to move that from early animal testing into the first human studies.
“And we think with adequate funding we could do that in a period of a few months.”
And there it is. The single largest donor of Shadow Inc., the company behind the failed Iowa Caucus app, is George Soros. pic.twitter.com/qifQHVrTBt
LOS ANGELES — Kirk Douglas, renowned actor and father of Michael Douglas, with a decorated career spanning more than six decades, died Wednesday, Feb. 5 at 103, TMZ reported.
Kirk Douglas’ health had been in decline. In 1996, he suffered a stroke, but recovered most of his faculties.
TMZ reported Wednesday the last time he was seen enjoying life was in April 2019 when he was “camping” in his grandson’s backyard.
Until the FBI agents who did this are held accountable, and that means in a court of law facing charges, Directors Wray’s words are so much hot air.
FBI Director Christopher Wray testified Wednesday that the actions taken by the bureau to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant against former Trump campaign aide Carter Page were “unacceptable” and “cannot be repeated.”
During his first congressional appearance following the release of Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s FISA review last year, Wray vowed to reform the FISA system by implementing “specific procedures and safeguards.”
“The failures highlighted in the inspector general report are unacceptable, period. And they cannot be repeated,” Wray testified before the House Judiciary Committee.
“I have already ordered more than 40 corrective actions to our FISA policies and procedures,” Wray continued, adding that he has “gone above and beyond” in outlining what “should be changed” and “can be changed” and can provide “accountability,” “rigor” and “discipline.”
“I do not think anyone has carte blanche to bypass rules, and I intend to make it painfully clear that is unacceptable at the FBI today,” he added.
Meanwhile, Republicans on the committee used Wednesday’s hearing as an opportunity to further grill Wray and the FBI.
“I don’t trust your agency anymore,” Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., told Wray, adding that the FBI has “lost the trust of an awful lot of Americans.”
And Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, suggested that Wray was not taking the misconduct outlined in the inspector general’s report “seriously.”
“I’m concerned you’re not taking this seriously enough,” Jordan said. “Are you taking this seriously enough, Director Wray?”
The FBI director underscored that activities surrounding FISA during the 2016 presidential election were unacceptable and “unrepresentative of who we are as an institution.”
“Political bias has no place in today’s FBI,” Wray said.
A letter recently obtained by the Idaho Second Amendment Alliance shows that Sandpoint Mayor Shelby Rognstad is trying to recruit other Idaho mayor’s to support his ‘gun-free’ zone agenda.
The letter asks mayors to fill out a survey detailing what venues might benefit from a ‘gun-free’ zone.
Mayor Rognstad makes it clear that the economic interests of his city are more important than the natural right of self-defense.
He uses the typical “I believe in the 2nd Amendment but…” argument to try and justify his efforts.
ISAA President Greg Pruett slammed the letter, saying, “The Mayor should be ashamed of himself for putting money above the rights of his citizens. Mayors in Idaho should tell Mayor Rognstad that the 2nd Amendment means a lot more to them than money.”
At the heart of Mayor Rognstad’s concern is musicians who require concert-goers to be disarmed at their events.
He fears that these artists won’t come to Sandpoint if the city can’t disarm citizens on public property.
Idaho’s current firearm preemption law prohibits cities from enacting ordinances that deal with the possession of firearms on public property.
Mayor Rognstad is proposing that cities and counties have control over events where large groups of people are gathering. Mayor Rognstad’s proposal would be yet another law that criminals would ignore, and he would endanger the lives of Idahoans who wouldn’t be able to defend themself.
His proposal would likely impact an Idahoan’s ability to carry their firearm at a county fair or other popular events.
Rognstad also claims that we must disarm Idahoans at these events for “public safety.”
Idahoans have a long history of carrying firearms for self-defense. They don’t need or want the government’s permission to do so on public property.
However, Mayor Rognstad believes that he deserves the power to control whether you can defend yourself at a concert or other public venue where criminals love to target.
He is trying to convince other mayors and the legislature to go along with his proposal.
Idaho’s gun owners aren’t buying it.
The Idaho Second Amendment Alliance has launched a campaign to stop Mayor Rognstad and his ‘gun-free’ zone proposal.
The ISAA is proposing legislation this year that would strengthen the firearm preemption statute.
It will be interesting to see what side, if any, comes out on top of this fight.
You can see the letter and survey questions sent to the mayors in Idaho below.
Municipal Survey: Public leased Property
1. What jurisdiction do you represent?
2. Does your city, county or other public entity within your jurisdiction lease any public property to a private entity for a private event which bans guns from the event?
3. If yes, what is the venue, are there multiple events annually, are they recurring?
4. What is/are the name of the event and estimated total number of attendees?
5. What is the estimated total financial impact to the city and/or county for said events or events?
