Free Republic

The U.S. is awash with scam text messages. Officials say it has become a billion-dollar, highly sophisticated business benefiting criminals in China. Your highway toll payment is now past due, one text warns. You have U.S. Postal Service fees to pay, another threatens. You owe the New York City Department of Finance for unpaid traffic violations. The texts are ploys to get unsuspecting victims to fork over their credit-card details. The gangs behind the scams take advantage of this information to buy iPhones, gift cards, clothing and cosmetics. Criminal organizations operating out of China, which investigators blame for the toll...

For thousands of manufacturers across China, it’s déjà vu—with implications for the country’s fragile economy. Earlier this year, after President Trump raised tariffs on Chinese goods to 145% in April, American customers of Alan Chau’s toy factory in southern China abruptly froze orders, sparking a cash crunch ttohat brought his business to the brink. So it came as a relief when the U.S. and China reached a trade truce weeks later in mid-May, rolling back most of their tariffs on one another—and allowing Chau to resume shipping his products again. Now, less than six months later, prohibitively high tariffs could...

BUTLER COUNTY, IOWA – Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem calling on the department to stop issuing work authorizations to student visa holders in direct violation of the law. Grassley also emphasized how foreign student work authorizations put America at risk of technological and corporate espionage, citing more than 33,000 current Chinese student visa holders with STEM work authorizations. “Competition from foreign graduates is contributing to rising unemployment rates among college-educated Americans. This should not be the case. Congress placed caps on employment visas for foreign graduates to ensure that...

The United States issued nearly one-fifth fewer student visas in August as the Trump administration tightened immigration rules, new data show. India, once the top source of U.S. international students, experienced the largest drop, while China became the leading country of origin. According to the International Trade Administration, the U.S. issued 313,138 student visas in August, the most common month for new university enrollments. This represents a 19.1 percent decrease compared with the same month in 2024. Student visas for Indian nationals fell dramatically by 44.5 percent over the past year. India had previously been the largest source of foreign...

A COVID wave is washing over California, with the state seeing continued increases in the number of newly confirmed cases and hospitalizations as some officials urged the public to take greater precautions. The extent of the recent increases has prompted some county-level health officials to recommend that residents once again consider wearing masks in indoor public settings, at least until transmission has declined. California currently has "high" coronavirus levels in sewage, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And increases are being seen across the Golden State, from Los Angeles County to the San Francisco Bay Area...

Chinese President Xi Jinping warned the world was facing a choice between peace or war at a massive military parade in Beijing on Wednesday, flanked by Russia's Vladimir Putin and North Korea's Kim Jong Un in an unprecedented show of force. The event to mark 80 years since Japan's defeat at the end of World War Two was largely shunned by Western leaders, with Putin and Kim - pariahs in the West due to the Ukraine war and Kim's nuclear ambitions - the guests of honour. -snip- "Today, mankind is faced with the choice of peace or war, dialogue or...

COVID-19 levels are up 32% percent from a month ago just as schools across the Bay Area are about to start for the fall semester.

You’re living in a Sci-Fi movie, they just want you too dazed and confused to know it. Over the past four years or so, since the advent of the COVID-19 bioweapon injections, numerous people across the world have been flabbergasted. The refrains are often the same. Never seen anything like it. Thirty years of practice and this is a first. Can’t explain it. Don’t understand it. Can’t believe what I’m actually seeing. Personally, I’ve felt the same way. At first, you’re ridiculed for even bringing it up, then people begrudgingly accept that it might exist, but they minimize it. They...

A mosquito-borne virus that leaves victims in crippling pain and has triggered Covid-era restrictions in China is already in the US, experts say.Chikungunya virus can cause sudden, agonizing joint pain in the hands and feet, sometimes so severe that it leaves sufferers unable to move normally for months.Southern China is currently battling its largest outbreak since at least 2008, with more than 7,000 cases recorded in Foshan, at the epicenter, and infections in 12 other major cities. Heavy rains and warm weather have fueled a surge in mosquitoes, driving the outbreak.Dr Louisa Messenger, a mosquito researcher in Nevada, told the...

The devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic may have left a significant mark on our brains, even if we didn't get sick. Fatal cases of COVID-19 look scarily like old age in the brain, and now, new research suggests that the mental, social, and financial stresses of the pandemic may have aged our brains as well. A team led by researchers at the University of Nottingham trained an AI model to recognize healthy aging in the brain, using the data of more than 15,000 adults in the UK Biobank. The algorithm was then used to analyze the brain ages of two...

Five years ago, COVID was all we could think about. Today, we’d rather forget about lockdowns, testing queues and social distancing. But the virus that sparked the pandemic, SARS-CoV-2, is still circulating. Most people who get COVID today will experience only a mild illness. But some people are still at risk of severe illness[1] and are more likely to be hospitalised with COVID. This includes older people, those who are immunocompromised by conditions such as cancer, and people with other health conditions such as diabetes. Outcomes also tend to be more severe in those who experience social inequities such as...

A new, highly transmissible COVID subvariant has been detected in California — heightening the risk of a potential summer wave as recent moves by the Trump administration threaten to make vaccines harder to get, and more expensive, for many Americans, some health experts warn. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced this week that he was rescinding the federal government’s recommendation that pregnant women and healthy children get immunized against COVID, effective immediately. Dr. Marty Makary, commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, also said the agency will no longer routinely approve annually formulated COVID-19 vaccinations...

A new, highly infectious COVID-19 strain that has left to a spike in hospitalizations in China has now been detected in the US, including cases in New York City, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The new NB.1.81 variant was first detected in the US in late March and early April among international travelers arriving at airports in California, Washington State, Virginia and New York City, with additional cases reported in Ohio, Rhode Island and Hawaii. The CDC has said there are too few cases in the US to be properly tracked in the agency’s variant estimates,...

COVID is still around, and it is still deadly for a lot of Americans. The CDC says that the virus is killing multitudes in the U.S. each week, even though there are vaccines and treatments available. Experts say that a lack of vaccinations and missed treatment opportunities are two of the main reasons why these deaths keep happening. Are people still dying from COVID? Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that COVID killed an average of 350 people every week, as per a report by GMA. The CDC data indicates that although the number of...

The Biden administration reportedly hid a 2022 report from the Defense Department that stated seven military members might have contracted COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, as early as October 2019. The December 2022 report from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness examined “the number of United States athletes and staff who attended the 2019 World Military Games and became ill with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)-like symptoms during or shortly after their return to the United States.” It added, “The Department of Defense (DoD) has concluded through correspondence with the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force,...

An international clinical trial has identified a medication that can help prevent symptomatic COVID-19 in people exposed within households. The results could be particularly important for families where someone is at high risk of serious complications from the illness. The drug, ensitrelvir, is already approved in Japan to treat mild to moderate COVID cases. The SCORPIO-PEP trial, however, has demonstrated that it also has the potential to protect against illness. Uninfected people who began taking the antiviral within 72 hours of symptoms first appearing in a household member were significantly less likely to contract COVID-19 than people who were given...

Most of the world found itself confined to their homes in March 2020 as Covid-19 spread at a blistering pace. Some countries didn't impose any lockdown restrictions – so was their decision the right one? In March 2020, billions of people stared out through their windows at a world they no longer recognised. Suddenly confined to their homes, their lives had shrunk abruptly to four walls and computer screens. Around the world, national leaders appeared on television, telling them to stay put – only leave the house to buy essential supplies or for once-daily exercise, maybe. It was a last-ditch...

A new Covid variant is causing thousands of infections with experts warning it has the potential to spread rapidly - and the number of cases it has caused in the UK has doubled in the last few weeks. The World Health Organisation says the new variant - LP.8.1 - is one of two designated a Variant Under Monitoring, the other being XEC. It has already been detected in 23 countries. XEC accounts for around half of all infections with Covid, and the recently detected LP.8.1 is already responsible for around 10 per cent of infections in some places - and...

Research was led by Shi Zhengli, a virologist known as the 'batwoman', who is best known for her work on coronaviruses at a lab in Wuhan A Chinese team has found a new bat coronavirus that carries the risk of animal-to-human transmission because it uses the same human receptor as the virus that causes Covid-19. The study was led by Shi Zhengli - a leading virologist known as the "batwoman" due to her extensive research on bat coronaviruses - at the Guangzhou Laboratory along with researchers from the Guangzhou Academy of Sciences, Wuhan University and the Wuhan Institute of Virology....

The new virus is even closer related to MERS, a deadlier type of coronavirus that kills up to a third of people it infects. Virologist Shi Zhengli, known as 'Batwoman' for her work on coronaviruses, led the discovery, published in a top scientific journal. Tests showed HKU5-CoV-2 infiltrated human cells in the same way as SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind Covid. Sharing their discovery in the journal Cell, the Beijing-funded researchers admitted it posed a 'high risk of spillover to humans, either through direct transmission or facilitated by intermediate hosts.'