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The World Health Organisation said it is in ongoing contact with authorities in China over an unidentified outbreak of viral pneumonia in the central city of Wuhan, amid concern it may have been transmitted from animals. Wuhan health authorities on Tuesday said 27 people – most of them stallholders at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market – had been treated in hospital, with seven said to be in serious condition. Pathology tests were under way to try and identify the virus, officials said. Hong Kong medical authorities were also on alert.

....During a phone call with Xi on June 18, Trump raised Biden's political prospects as well as those of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who by then had started rising in the polls, according to two people familiar with the discussion. In that call, Trump also told Xi he would remain quiet on Hong Kong protests as trade talks progressed.The White House record of that call was later stored in the highly secured electronic system

In internal memo, Thomas DiNanno, then acting ass't secretary of @StateDept Arms Control, Verification, Compliance bureau documented his team was "warned...“not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19” because it would “‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.

Evidence continues to point to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) as the origin of SARS-CoV-2. Meanwhile, based on the now publicized emails sent to and from Dr. Fauci, it has become evident that there was a strong push to downplay this theory and convince the world the virus evolved naturally. The story grew thicker on Thursday. According to a report from Vanity Fair, last March, leading scientists aggressively tried to silence former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield after stating his belief on CNN that the virus originated from a lab in Wuhan. Following his public...

A group of Chinese virologists released a strange new paper on Monday that claims the new coronavirus was engineered in a Chinese lab. One of the virologists, Li-Meng Yan, told the Fox News host Tucker Carlson it was a "man-made virus" that the Chinese government released "intentionally." Yan and her coauthors work for groups cofounded by the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon. He directed the groups before his arrest in August. Some members of the Trump administration have pushed a fringe theory that the virus accidentally leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, but there's no evidence of this.

History shows totalitarian regimes fall when brave people rise up. As the future of Hong Kong, time is on the side of Joshua Wong, Agnes Chow, and Ivan Lam.Three prominent leaders of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement were sentenced to prison this week for leading a protest last year. Joshua Wong received 13 and a half months; Agnes Chow, 10 months; and Ivan Lam, seven months. Wong has already been in prison a few times as the result of his activism.They are young. Lam is 26. Wong is 24. Chow turned 24 this past Dec. 3, the day after she received...

Dozens of Hong Kong citizens gathered in shopping malls across the city Tuesday to call for press freedom, one day after Hong Kong police raided the local Apple Daily newsroom and arrested its owner, Jimmy Lai, under the city’s new “national security” law. Lai, a Hong Kong media tycoon, is also a prominent pro-democracy figure in the city. He was arrested Monday along with nine other pro-democracy activists, news executives, and his sons for alleged offenses under the city’s new national security law, including “collusion” with foreign forces, Hong Kong Free Press (HKFP) reported. Using the Telegram messaging app, organizers...

When it comes to human rights and race relations, Beijing has no moral authority to criticize and condemn the United States. The Chinese Communist Party has ramped up its criticism of human rights issues in the U.S., as protests and riots spread across America, sparked by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. However, given Beijing’s own record of human rights violations and its inhumane treatment of Chinese minorities, especially on the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Beijing’s criticism is nothing but hypocrisy.No one can dispute Beijing’s delight in seeing scores of American cities go up in flames....

Taiwan will provide the people of Hong Kong with “necessary assistance”, President Tsai Ing-wen has said, after a resurgence in protests in the Chinese-ruled territory against newly proposed national security legislation from Beijing. Taiwan has become a refuge for a small but growing number of pro-democracy protesters fleeing Hong Kong, which has been convulsed since last year by protests. Hong Kong police fired tear gas and water cannon to disperse tens of thousands of people who rallied on Sunday to protest against Beijing’s plan to impose national security laws on the city. Writing on her Facebook page late on Sunday,...

China is becoming increasingly assertive in the region as the coronavirus crisis eases on the mainland while raging elsewhere in the world, with a crackdown in Hong Kong and sabre-rattling around Taiwan and in the South China Sea.

Hello welcome aboard as we consider the "Dictatorship of Covid 19" and some protests like the one in the key battleground political state of Michigan last Wednesday and the one planned in another key battleground political state of Pennsylvania set for Monday. They aim at the Democrats who govern the states President Trump won in 2016 and needs to win this year. But where are the protests against the Republican governors and their house arrest, shut down the economy orders in the battleground states of Florida and Ohio? Ohio's Republican Governor Mike DeWine an early imposer of house arrest and...

DAVOS, Switzerland—President Donald Trump said China’s human rights record and the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong are part of phase two trade discussions with China, in response to a question from The Epoch Times on Jan. 22. At a press conference in the Swiss Alpine town of Davos on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum, Trump said “we would like to see we can do something” about the issues in China and Hong Kong. “We are discussing that already,” he told reporters. “We’re doing a trade deal, and it’s a very big deal. Phase one is done, phase two...

If these predictions come to pass, their fulfillment will have lasting effects upon America in the 2020s and beyond. In 2008, as the Obama administration prepared to take control in Washington, retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey offered a list of bold predictions for the coming five years. Some of them bore out: The economy performed well globally despite the Great Recession, relations with Russia became more hostile without devolving into outright dysfunction, and the United States withdrew from Iraq right at the 36-month mark, which McCaffrey specified. Other predictions, such as a North Korean collapse, improved prospects for success in...

Encryption, other privacy measures, and decentralization have made the protest movement possible...... A major priority of the protest movement that has consumed Hong Kong for the past three and a half months has been to thwart the surveillance apparatus that's virtually everywhere. Demonstrators have felled camera poles with chainsaws, spray-painted security camera lenses, used green lasers to destroy sensors, and shielded themselves with umbrellas while marching through the streets.....

Hong Kong activists announced on Wednesday that protests would be suspended to observe the 18th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States. China’s state-run media accused the protesters of planning 9/11-style terrorist attacks themselves, complete with photos of the planes hitting the World Trade Center in 2001. “In solidarity against terrorism, all forms of protest in Hong Kong will be suspended on Sept. 11, apart from potential singing and chanting,” protest organizers said in a statement.The statement went on to denounce Beijing’s state-run China Daily for a Facebook post warning that “anti-government fanatics are planning massive terror attacks,...

(Video at Source) Hong Kong (CNN) - Protests calling on US President Donald Trump to intervene in the ongoing Hong Kong political standoff escalated rapidly Sunday, with marchers setting fire to a barricade outside a subway station entrance in the city's business district. Earlier in the day, tens of thousands of protesters waving US flags marched on Hong Kong's US Consulate to call for help from the Trump administration in ending a three-month confrontation with the government. The march began in the Chater Garden public park in Central before heading to the consulate as part of the 14th straight weekend...

September 4, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – In today’s special episode of The Van Maren Show, Jonathon Van Maren speaks with Alessandra Bocchi, a journalist who just returned from Hong Kong, about the historic protests happening there. The Hong Kong protests started months ago as a peaceful demonstration against an extradition bill passed by the Hong Kong government. The people of Hong Kong are concerned the authoritarian government will use this extradition policy to bring individuals accused of political crimes back to mainland China. Amazingly, according to Bocchi, the protests aren’t organized by a single person, but were more of a spontaneous...

Violence Erupts on 12th Weekend of Hong Kong Protests By VOA News August 25, 2019 Hong Kong police drew their guns, fired tear gas and, for the first time, water cannons at anti-government protesters on Sunday in the 12th weekend of demonstrations. Thousands of protesters took to the streets, some of them throwing bricks at police, attacking them with sticks and rods and spraying detergent on streets to make it slippery for police. Some of the demonstrators, many in masks and wearing black, broke store windows and hurled tear gas canisters back at police. Early Monday, police said one officer...

Hong Kong (AFP) – Hong Kong police used water cannon for the first time and at least one officer fired his sidearm during pitched battles with protesters Sunday, one of the most violent nights in three months of pro-democracy rallies that have rocked the city.An afternoon rally in the district of Tsuen Wan spiralled into violent running confrontations between protesters and police, with officers several times caught outnumbered and isolated by masked youths wielding sticks and throwing rocks.In one instance, several police officers drew their sidearms, an AFP reporter at the scene said. “According to my understanding, just now a...

HONG KONG (AP) — Protesters turned Hong Kong streets into rivers of umbrellas Sunday as they marched from a packed park and filled a major road in the Chinese territory, where mass pro-democracy demonstrations have become a regular weekend activity this summer. Organizers said they hoped the assembly would be peaceful, which would make for a rare calm weekend in a movement that has been marked by violent clashes with police. Law enforcement officers were keeping a low profile, with no riot police seen from the procession’s main routes. “We hope that there will not be any chaotic situations today,”...