Free Republic

The Chinese city of Wuhan is drawing up plans to test its entire population of 11 million people for Covid-19, state media report. The plan appears to be in its early stages, with all districts in Wuhan told to submit details as to how testing could be done within 10 days. It comes after Wuhan, where the virus first emerged, recorded six new cases over the weekend. For a while it seemed like life was getting back to normal as schools re-opened, businesses slowly emerged and public transport resumed operations. But the emergence of a cluster of cases - all...

Most of us have been in lockdown for about six weeks. The objective was to flatten the curve and reduce the total number of victims of COVID-19. Well, the curve has been flattened indeed, but how is it six-weeks later there are 25,375 new cases in a single day? With all the laws and policies implemented to knock out this virus, I expected we’d be on the last leg of the downward curve by now. But, instead of a peak and decline, we’ve had three peaks and shallow valleys between them. If people are staying at home, practicing social distancing,...

BEIJING - China has issued a lengthy rebuttal of what it said were 24 “preposterous allegations” by some leading U.S. politicians over its handling of the new coronavirus outbreak. The Chinese foreign ministry has dedicated most of its press briefings over the past week to rejecting accusations by U.S. politicians, especially Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, that China had withheld information about the new coronavirus and that it had originated in a laboratory in the city of Wuhan. A 30-page, 11,000-word article posted on the ministry website on Saturday night repeated and expanded on the refutations made during the press...

Nina Turner, former co-chair for the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., wants progressives “go crazy” and turn up the heat on the Democratic Party and maybe mimic how the Tea Party previously defied Republicans. “What I would love to see the progressive movement do — from the progressive members of the House of Representatives and progressive members who may be in the Senate — is to go crazy,” she said during an interview published on Thursday. Turner told Jordan Chariton, CEO of the liberal outlet Status Coup, that Democrats might want to “take a page out of the...

The Trump administration is tightening visa guidelines for Chinese journalists in response to the treatment of U.S. journalists in China, as tensions flare between the two nations over the coronavirus. The Department of Homeland Security has issued new regulations, set to take effect Monday, that will limit visas for Chinese reporters to 90 days. There is a potential to extend the visa. Those visas previously didn’t have to be extended unless the employee switched companies, and they were considered open-ended. The regulations don’t apply to journalists from Hong Kong or Macau, two territories considered semiautonomous, according to the regulations published...

Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer (N.Y.) said Thursday that he and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) will soon unveil a coronavirus relief package that he described as “Rooseveltian” in its scope and size. “We need big, bold action," Schumer said in an MSNBC interview with Stephanie Ruhle, adding that he and Pelosi "are working very closely together on putting together a very strong plan, which you will hear shortly.” “We need Franklin Rooseveltian-type action and we hope to take that in the House and Senate in a very big and bold way,” he added. Schumer's remarks came in response to Senate...

A host of celebrities and scientists including Madonna, Robert de Niro and a clutch of Nobel Prize winners have called for radical change in the world rather than 'a return to normal' after the coronavirus lockdowns. Hollywood stars Cate Blanchett, Jane Fonda, Marion Cotillard and Monica Bellucci also added their names to the open letter published in the French daily Le Monde. The signatories are pleading for an end to unbridled consumerism and a 'radical transformation' of economies to help save the planet. The movement has been penned and led by actress Juliette Binoche and astrophysicist Aurélien Barrau. A full...

They’re using COVID-19 as an excuse release convicted criminals, and to jail the innocent. This article is called, “So Far, More Than 300 Prisoners Released Due To COVID-19 Under Mass. High Court’s Ruling.”Meanwhile, this other article is called, “Dallas salon owner jailed for defying virus shutdown order.”So they’re using COVID-19 as an excuse to let convicted criminals out of jail.And at the same time, they’re using it as an excuse to put an innocent person in jail.This is some of the worst hypocrisy that I have ever heard of.

BEIJING - The European Union ambassador to China said on Thursday it was “regrettable” that part of an opinion piece co-authored by 27 European ambassadors and published in the official China Daily had been removed before publication. A comparison between the original op-ed uploaded onto the EU embassy website and the one published on Tuesday by the China Daily showed that in a sentence beginning, “But the outbreak of the coronavirus”, the words that followed - “in China, and its subsequent spread to the rest of the world over the past three months” - were removed. “It is regrettable that...

A Kansas City phased reopening guideline requiring churches to keep “lists” of attendees, has alarmed many who see it as an infringement on religious liberty and privacy. In the policy issued by Mayor Quinton Lucas, houses of worship are treated with the same restrictions as “non-essential” businesses in terms of keeping records of who attends a service, or even anyone who enters the building. “Never in our wildest dreams could we have imagined Nazi-like measures designed to surveil, track and spy upon what was once a FREE American people,” Liberty Counsel founder Mat Staver said. “Yet that is exactly what...

WASHINGTON -- With COVID-19 cases and deaths mounting daily, the U.S. government has intensified attempts to fan the flames of anti-China rhetoric to divert attention from its direct responsibility for the crisis. The number of COVID-19 deaths in the country reached 66,369 as of Saturday night, with total infections at 1,132,539, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University. Instead of doing everything they can to save as many Americans as possible, President Donald Trump's administration and its supporters in Congress are working furiously to frame Beijing as the original culprit and use China...

On Friday, the World Health Organization reiterated that the novel coronavirus, which caused a major pandemic in the world, is "natural in origin". Frankly speaking, that's not a fresh conclusion. As early as in January, there had been wide consensus among scientists that the novel coronavirus could not possibly have come from man-made sources and that its origin was definitely in nature. A few Indian scientists claimed it might have been "man-made" in origin in their shared paper on the pre-publishing website BioRxiv, but they soon withdrew that paper and apologized for that groundless guess. Yet some US politicians have...

“Americans reported bipartisan distrust of the (communist) Chinese government’s public statements about the coronavirus pandemic…according to a new Harris poll. Ninety percent of Republican respondents said that China was to blame for the spread of the coronavirus, and 67 percent of Democrats concurred," National Review reports. And yet, 20 years ago this very month, according to Gallup: “Americans say it’s in Elian Gonzalez best interest to return to (communist) Cuba with his father…a majority (of Americans) favor Elian’s physical removal from the home of his Miami relatives if necessary.” So how did such a majority American opinion come about? Well,...

For centuries now, even millennia, May 1 has been a very big day. Ancient Romans, Etruscans, Greeks and Celts had seasonal festivals as May began, celebrating the coming of summer… modern European countries have May Day carnivals, flower sales, and dances. The Catholic Church considers May the month of Our Lady, a special time of devotion to that greatest of mortal role models… for kids, May is the winding down of the school year, and for adults, it is the long-awaited beginning of planting season (here in the north, at least). And so of course the Left had to go...

In our exultation, we forgot to finish the job. Communism lived on in mainland China, and is once again challenging the free world for dominance. When the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union dissolved, the Western world thought, with considerable justification, that the generational struggle with communism had ended. But in our exultation, we forgot to finish the job. Communism lived on in mainland China and is once again challenging the free world for dominance.This time, theyÂ’re doing it with our money. As we have begun to realize these past few years, and as the coronavirus outbreak has made...

As Americans continue to suffer under a public health lockdown due to the Wuhan coronavirus, many of them have turned to video-streaming services to pass the time. But few probably expected to scroll through their Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Google Play Movies & TV, or Vudu and be exposed to blatant anti-American Chinese military propaganda. Yet that is exactly what audiences of “Operation Red Sea,” by screenwriter Feng Ji, producer Yu Dong and director Dante Lam are being unknowingly exposed to.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is being accused of singling out his city’s Jewish community after a Brooklyn funeral was broken up by police for allegedly violating social distancing requirements being enforced during the coronavirus pandemic. The funeral of Rabbi Chaim Mertz in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn appeared to draw a massive crowd, as images of the scene appeared on social media. De Blasio even went to the site of the funeral with police before posting a tweet that touched off the backlash. “My message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the...

Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Sunday that he has put First Lady Chirlane McCray in charge of a special coronavirus task force — insisting her work with her embattled ThriveNYC initiativemade her perfect for the new job. McCray will work with Deputy Mayor Phil Thompson in leading a task force on racial inclusion and equity to make sure the Big Apple rebounds as a “better and more just society than the one we left behind,” Hizzoner said. The mayor insisted that the First Lady deserved her place at the head of the new initiative because of the ideas she generated  —...

As I write this, there are over a quarter of a million recorded deaths from the corona virus and many many more to come. We know now that the virus originated in Wuhan China, probably in its virology lab, and that the Chinese concealed the fact that it was contagious between humans and deadly for weeks. They allowed a Lunar New Year celebration in Wuhan that involved tens of thousands of people, and also permitted 5 million inhabitants of Wuhan to leave the city and spread the virus. Moreover, they permitted hundreds of thousands of Chinese to travel abroad to...

BEIJING (Xinhua) -- China Monday expressed strong opposition to embroiling China in U.S. electoral politics, in response to a memo exposed by news outlet Politico that urged U.S. Republican candidates to address the COVID-19 crisis by aggressively attacking China. The 57-page strategy document, obtained by Politico last Friday, is focused on three main lines of assault: That China caused the virus "by covering it up," that Democrats are "soft on China," and that Republicans will "push for sanctions on China for its role in spreading this pandemic," Politico summarized. "Why have some political forces in the United States spared no...