Free Republic

Wednesday on MSNBC, House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) said “thousands” more people will die if President Donald Trump is successful in his attempt at reopening the economy so it can rebound for his election.

As the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 approaches 2.5 million globally and deaths surpass 166,000, clinicians and pathologists are struggling to understand the damage wrought by the coronavirus as it tears through the body. They are realizing that although the lungs are ground zero, the virus' reach can extend to many organs including the heart and blood vessels, kidneys, gut, and brain.

Alyx Irving, 18, first started spending time at Affirmations, an LGBTQ community center in the Detroit suburb of Ferndale, Mich., three years ago, when his gay older brother brought him along. It soon became his second home. “I’m usually there all the time,” Irving tells Yahoo Life. “It’s a joke between everyone that I actually live there.” It was at the community center and through its support groups that the teen, who identifies as genderqueer, found the acceptance he does not have at home. “There are a lot of really warmhearted, supportive people, and it’s a place where you can...

Businesses across the nation are struggling amid the coronavirus pandemic as closure orders have prompted a halt in revenue and clients. In Pennsylvania, nonessential businesses, including barbershops and salons, have been ordered closed since mid-March. But a Delaware County shop owner is planning to defy that order, saying she has little choice. Nichole Missino, owner of Giovanni's barbershop in Media, said she plans to reopen her business May 9. Missino told Patch on Wednesday she feels compelled to open because her employees are worried about feeding their families. "

In an exclusive interview with this reporter Wednesday, President of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, an NYPD union, Ed Mullins called New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio “an idiot” for instructing his officers to arrest people gathering in large groups after hundreds of Jewish people attended a funeral for a well-respected rabbi on Tuesday night. “You can’t tell law enforcement to go out and violate people’s rights,” he said. The grand rabbi from Williamsburg passed away. The community followed all guidance & wore masks. The Shomrim was there giving out masks if they saw somebody on the street with out...

President Donald Trump has said he knows something of the North Korean leader’s condition – but he won’t disclose it. NORTH KOREA THIS WEEK provided halting signs that leader Kim Jong Un remains in power and control as sensational reports circulated unabated across the world claiming he is grievously ill or perhaps even dead. Though their significance is disputed, a series of dispatches were reportedly issued in Kim's name to Syria, Cuba and South Africa as well as a letter of praise for local workers. But, as is historically the case when issues arise about its leader's fitness, signals from...

In the past two weeks, researchers across America have begun announcing results from studies showing that there have been many more coronavirus infections in their communities than were previously recorded. Findings have come in from Santa Clara County, California, as well as Los Angeles, New York, Chelsea, Massachusetts, and Miami-Dade County, Florida. The debates began immediately. What did the study results actually mean? If more people were infected than previously known, did that mean the death rate is actually lower than previously thought? Is the coronavirus actually more like the flu, after all? And are we close to “herd immunity,”...

Message from Gov. Whitmer - SNL “We’re not out of the woods, we never will be. we live in Michigan.”

As you can well imagine, my mailbox has been overflowing with questions about the coronavirus from precisely ZERO readers. So I decided to write my own questions. I know this is what you would be asking if you were not standing in line, outside, 6 feet apart, to purchase a quart of milk. What do you think of the media's coverage of the Wuhan virus? It's like a nonstop "War of the Worlds" broadcast, which in 1938 panicked more than a million Americans into believing Martians had landed in New Jersey, sending people fleeing to the mountains, loading their shotguns...

After spending nearly two months on the run, Speedy Gonzalez was nabbed by police in Georgia during a routine traffic stop. Federal authorities had been looking for Gonzalez since March when he was identified as a suspect in a case of mail fraud. Authorities accused Speedy, which is his legal name, of stealing checks from a mailbox in January. Officials said that he used the money to purchase $3,000 worth of items from Home Depot, which he later returned for cash. Gonzalez managed to evade capture for more than six weeks. Officials said he was spotted in Tennessee before he...

Rob Bilott (Mark Ruffalo) is a corporate defense attorney out of Cincinnati, Ohio. A part of his job is defending chemical companies. One day, however, an outraged and distressed farmer from West Virginia by the name of Wilbur Tennant (Bill Camp) visits Bilott’s office with a box of VHS tapes, and asks Rob to look at them....When Rob visits Wilbur’s cow farm, he learns that nearly a couple hundred of his cows have died. He tells Rob that he believes that there are chemicals in the water that his cows are drinking from, and that they’re seeping in from the...

Applications of ultraviolet germicidal irradiation disinfection in health care facilities: Effective adjunct, but not standalone technology INTRODUCTION Ultraviolet germicidal irradiation (UVGI) has been used to ‘‘scrub’’ the air in health care facilities and laboratories for many decades. UVGI is known to be efficacious to varying degrees in controlling the circulation of airborne infectious particles. Approximately 60% of all UVGI air disinfection systems are installed in health care facilities. According to Kowalski and Bahnfleth, this equates to 41% in hospitals and 19% in clinics. Until recently, most of the experimental data that led to the development of UVGI systems were decades...

Anti-abortion pregnancy centers are working to adapt during the fight against COVID-19 as social distancing restrictions are limiting access to health services and narrowing the window of time to receive them. That pressure has made unintended pregnancies more nerve-racking. “An unintended pregnancy is stressful anyway -- you add a pandemic and economic collapse onto that, and it’s even worse for them,” said Leslie Salazar-Carrillo, CEO of Pathway Health Clinic in San Diego, California. The National Institute of Family and Life Advocates (NIFLA), an affiliate network of more than 1,500 centers, sampled about 350 of their clinics and reported that 21...

Wonders never cease – nor historic lessons for applying to the present. As we endure this coronavirus quarantine, a certain hard-to-define comfort comes from knowing crews of Apollo 11, 12 and 14 went through this, too – 50 years ago. They are teaching us, even today. On return, the first three crews that walked on the moon got quarantined for three weeks – in order to protect the world against spread of moon bacteria. In the process, they recalled recent events, helped each other process the novel experience, thought about the future. While we have not recently been to the...

Istanbul — Turkey has the biggest coronavirus outbreak in the Middle East, with more than 117,000 confirmed infections. More than 3,000 people have died. But the government claims to have a lower fatality rate than the global average estimated by the World Health Organization at over 3%. The Turkish government imposed weekend-only lockdowns and banned only those under the age of 20 and over 65 from leaving their homes during the week, in an effort to limit the economic impact of the pandemic. Turkey's Ministry of Health says the relatively low death toll is thanks to treatment protocols in the...

... The acting director of national intelligence (Richard Grenell) has decided that it's time for America to stop sharing information with countries who aren't as pro-LGBT as he is -- a view that's eerily similar to Hillary Clinton's State Department, where ideological blackmail was the order of every day. Instead, reverting to the cultural imperialism of the Obama years, he'd rather strong-arm countries -- putting national security on the line in the process... ..."I am not a seat warmer," Grenell warned. "The president asked me to do a job, and I am going to do the job to the best...

The next global pandemic may very well be a hunger pandemic as a result of the fallout from coronavirus. While the World Health Organization warns that stringent guidelines need to stay in place to combat the spread of COVID-19, fellow United Nations agency World Food Program (WFP) believes that it will lead to an uptick in global poverty and starvation, and the response to the virus itself may end up killing more people by the end of 2020. Last week, WFP cautioned the UN Security Council that the risk of large-scale famine in much of the developing world was now...

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) on Wednesday ordered that all New York City subway cars be cleaned every night by Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) workers to ensure the safety of essential personnel during the coronavirus pandemic. “Any essential worker who shows up and gets on a train should know that that train was disinfected the night before,” Cuomo told reporters at his daily coronavirus press briefing. “Letting them endanger their own life and endanger the lives of others is not helping anyone,” Cuomo said. The governor said that he wants the MTA to present to him a plan for...

House Democrats eager to limit White House spending authority introduced a bill Wednesday intended to increase transparency and heavily penalize violations. House budget committee Chair Rep. John Yarmouth, appropriations committee Chair Rep. Nita Lowey and oversight committee Chair Rep. Carolyn Maloney sponsored the 59-page Congressional Power of the Purse Act. Similar Senate legislation is expected from Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy. The House bill, in preparation for months, addresses what Democrats in Congress see as a series of abuses by the executive branch of President Donald Trump in withholding or redirecting funding to benefit his personal and political agenda. Trump's disputed...

The ReopenNC rally had largely disbanded by 2 p.m., but about 100 protesters blocked Blount Street in front of the governor’s mansion. State Capitol Police closed the sidewalk, so protesters shouted from the street, demanding that Cooper reopen the state’s businesses. They also took issue with the empty flagpoles in front of the mansion, asking why there were no flags flying. First Sgt. Michael Baker, spokesman for the N.C. Highway Patrol, said the flags were taken down as a precautionary measure due to a previous protest in which both the American and state flags were desecrated. “The state Highway Patrol...