Senate Committee Moves To Allow Americans To Sue China Over COVID-19 Tyler Durden
Thu, 07/30/2020 – 13:50
Marking the culmination of a process that began more than a month ago, a Senate committee is backing a bill that would allow Americans to sue China for failing to stop the coronavirus pandemic.
The Senate Judiciary Committee advanced a bill (S 4212) that would allow U.S. citizens to sue China for physical or economic damages related to COVID-19.
GOP supporters said the bill would hold China accountable for actions related to the disease’s spread. "The CCP’s lies and deceit and incompetence helped turn the COVID-19 disaster from would have been a very deadly but local disease into a worldwide pandemic," said @HawleyMO.
Democrats were opposed, worried it would leave the U.S. open to similar litigation. "If we eliminate sovereign immunity for countries engaging in reckless behavior that contributed to the spread of COVID-19, other countries may very well do the same to us," said @SenFeinstein.
It’s the latest in a growing list of antagonistic tit-for-tat actions including ordering the closure of China’s consulate in Houston, the first to open in the US following President Nixon’s historic meeting with Mao back in the early 1970s. China retaliated by closing a US consulate in Chengdu, the capital of China’s Sichuan Province.
Portland, Oregon’s, now-famous “Wall of Moms” — a group, “primarily of women who identify as mothers,” according to their official literature, who protest regularly against the presence of federal agents protecting a Portland federal courthouse — is facing allegations of “anti-blackness” from a black-led community group who says Wall of Moms secretly organized to accept donations and used the Black Lives Matter movement as cover for their own agenda.
Oregon Live reports that Don’t Shoot PDX, a former partner of the “Wall of Moms,” claims the latter group is operating without transparency and without taking women of color into account.
“Portland Wall of Moms, a group formed in recent weeks and quickly recognized as a staple of nightly downtown protests, was accused publicly Wednesday of ‘anti-Blackness’ by leaders of an existing, Black-led community group,” Oregon Live reported Thursday.
Don’t Shoot PDX listed out its complaints about Wall of Moms in an Instagram post, responding to claims by Wall of Moms that women of color are being placed at the forefront of the organization, and that Wall of Moms is concerned, primarily, with the Black Lives Matter movement, rather than with the presence of federal agents in Portland.
“After leaving vulnerable Black women downtown after marching, failing to support those on the ground that put trust in them, @wallofmoms leadership also found time to make THREE registrations through Oregon’s Secretary of State,” Don’t Shoot PDX claimed in its post. “This was all done in privacy and without the knowledge of the Black leadership WOM was claiming to implement.”
“We began having safety concerns within the group because Black women started saying they were not protected by WOM leadership,” the post continued. “Too frequently would be in communication for safety, transport etc and when the time came, there would be zero response and no leadership to rely on. It’s put many on the ground in direct danger. Once these registration filings with Secretary of State came out, it became more clear – WOM was not started for BLM, but to get the feds out of PDX.”
“The lies are finally clear and we are sad but ultimately not surprised that anti-Blacknessshowed its ugly face with Wall of Moms,” the group said.
Wall of Moms’ leader, Bev Barnum, Don’t Shoot PDX claims, “appeared to file three business registrations on Tuesday including one that makes The Wall of Moms a 501c3 nonprofit,” per Oregon Live. Members of Don’t Shoot PDX “interpreted the filings to mean that Wall of Moms goal was to get federal officers out of Portland — not to support Black Lives Matter.” The filings show Barnum as the group’s president, per the Washington Examiner — a role she assigned herself without telling her black colleagues.
Late Wednesday, Wall of Moms appeared to admit wrongdoing, posting on Twitter that it’s trying to “regroup” and “do things the right way” and that leadership roles had changed.
“The founder went rogue,” the organization claimed. “Many of us do not agree with her decisions. And she does not currently have access to this account.”
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a member.
Federal prosecutors charged a Democratic Tennessee state senator on Wednesday with embezzlement and theft.
In addition to being a state senator, Katrina Robinson is the director of a health care job-training program that has received $2.2 million in federal grants from the Department of Health and Human Services. Robinson allegedly stole more than $600,000 of that amount between 2015 and 2019. She used the funds to pay for her wedding and luxury items for her family, according to the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Tennessee.
This is not the first time Democratic state legislators have faced allegations of corruption in recent weeks. Illinois house speaker Michael Madigan, who chairs the state’s Democratic Party, is at the center of a bribery scandal involving the state’s largest public utility company.
In addition to paying for a wedding, Robinson allegedly used the funds to pay for home upgrades, her daughter’s 2016 Jeep Renegade, and a $500 Louis Vuitton purse, the New York Post reported. She also allegedly used the funds to invest in her children’s snow cone company and pad her retirement fund.
A federal investigation of Robinson began in 2016, two years before she was elected to represent Shelby County, which includes Memphis, as a state senator. Robinson said she will continue to serve in the legislature "with the same integrity" as before the charges.
If convicted, Robinson could serve up to 20 years in federal prison and receive a $250,000 fine.
Chinese-owned TikTok suspended the account of a Muslim teenager from New Jersey after she uploaded a video to the app this month criticizing Beijing for its repression of Muslim minority Uyghurs, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported Tuesday.
American high school graduate Hana Hassan, 18, uploaded a video of herself to TikTok this month in which she blasts “Beijing’s policies of mass incarceration” in China’s northwestern Xinjiang province where “up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities are believed to have been detained in a vast network of internment camps in the region since April 2017,” the U.S. government-funded broadcaster noted.
With more than 884,000 followers on TikTok, Hassan’s Uyghur video went viral this month. It was reportedly viewed more than 4.2 million times before TikTok administrators removed it and prohibited Hassan from posting live video streams to the platform.
In an interview with RFA’s Uyghur Service on Tuesday, Hassan detailed her experience with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) censorship. The teenager said she posted the video to TikTok four times, each time encountering resistance from administrators:
I posted it four times. The first three times, it was all shadow banned, meaning it had zero views and TikTok wasn’t going to let it get on the page until they [reviewed] the video. Then, the first one got taken down and the third and fourth one … But the second video I posted, that one started reaching at least like 12 people … And thankfully it got a decent amount of attention.
Hassan said that the Uyghur video incident this month was not the first time the Chinese app has censored her. The young woman claimed TikTok has banned or restricted her account “multiple” times after she uploaded videos to the app in which she discussed political themes:
[A]nytime I speak on government or politics, they’ll usually take those videos down. They have permanently banned me from live streaming … And they didn’t really give me a reason besides [saying] violating community guidelines. They’ve suspended my account from posting multiple times and each time I’m suspended it’s for like a week duration. So, lots of my videos have been taken down.
In November 2019, a 17-year-old American high school student named Feroza Aziz, a Muslim Afghan American, experienced similar censorship after she uploaded a video to TikTok in which she, too, discussed “China’s oppression and maltreatment of the Uyghurs,” RFA reported. Unlike Hassan, Aziz initially hid her message by speaking it during a fake make-up tutorial. Aziz’s video garnered more than 1.6 million views before TikTok administrators removed the content and temporarily suspended the teenager’s account for “violating a policy on terrorism-related material,” according to the report.
China’s repression of ethnic minorities in its northwest region, Xinjiang, especially of Uyghur Muslims, has drawn increasing criticism from citizens and western governments alike in recent months. On June 17, U.S. President Donald Trump signed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act into law, the world’s first official challenge of the CCP’s use of concentration camps to detain Uyghur Muslims.
During yesterday’s hearing before the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel, the CEOs of Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook were unable to agree on whether or not China has been stealing technology and intellectual property (IP) from American companies. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave the only honest and straightforward answer to Rep. Greg Steube’s question, answering: “I think it’s well documented that the Chinese government steals technology from American companies.”
Yesterday, the CEO’s of the most powerful tech companies in the country, Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook, appeared before the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel to discuss the market dominance of their firms and issues relating to censorship on their platforms. During the hearing, the CEOs were asked about whether or not they believe that the Chinese government steals technology from U.S. companies. The response was far from unanimous.
Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL) asked the tech CEO’s during the hearing: “Do you believe that the Chinese government steals technology from U.S. companies?” Apple CEO Tim Cook responded in a neutral manner, focusing on his own company instead of the industry in general, stating: “I don’t know of specific cases where we have been stolen from by the government. I know of no case [of] ours where it occurred … I can only speak to firsthand knowledge.”
Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who’s company briefly attempted to launch a Chinese government-censored search engine, replied: “I have no firsthand knowledge of any information stolen from Google in this regard,” before later correcting himself, stating that Google acknowledged a China-linked cyberattack in 2009 in which a portion of the firm’s intellectual property was stolen.
Amazon CEO and richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, responded that he had “heard many reports of that” but added: “I haven’t seen it personally.” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, however, gave an extremely straightforward response stating: “I think it’s well documented that the Chinese government steals technology from American companies.”
Zuckerberg made a point to note that China has been catching up to the U.S. in terms of tech dominance, stating: “If you look at where the top technology companies come from, a decade ago the vast majority were American. Today, almost half are Chinese.”
However, despite acknowledging the issue, neither Zuckerberg nor the other tech CEO’s had any response to Steube when he asked how Congress could protect American companies from “aggression and government intervention abroad.” Steube waited for 15 seconds in silence as the tech CEO’s failed to answer before yielding the rest of his time.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolanor contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
President Trump’s one-year extension of former President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program is about buying time ahead of the 2020 election, immigration reformers tell Breitbart News.
On Tuesday, Trump’s administration announced a one-year extension of DACA to undertake a “comprehensive review of the program.” The move means that nearly 800,000 DACA recipients will be able to apply for a one-year renewal of work permits.
NumbersUSA’s Rosemary Jenks said the group is “disappointed” with Trump’s one-year DACA extension and called the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision, where Trump was told he would have to refile paperwork to end the program, “outrageous.”
Jenks said:
We understand that the courts are requiring the administration to jump through ridiculous hurdles to end a program created in a memo, but we are disappointed that the administration is granting a one-year extension to DACA beneficiaries. It remains outrageous that a court would actually order the President to continue an unlawful program.
Dan Stein of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) said Trump must begin to refocus on Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden’s immigration record. Stain said:
Politically, the President needs to stop talking about DACA and spend his time explaining what the overall Biden immigration positions mean for America’s future. There is virtually no attention to this. Does Biden have a plan to stop illegal immigration, stop incentivizing illegal aliens when public benefits, stop asylum fraud, prevent more caravans — and will he restart a flood of more foreign labor? What’s the actual impact of what Biden wants?
Biden has vowed to halt deportations of illegal aliens for his first 100 days, dramatically increase the refugee resettlement program, free border crossers into the interior of the United States, provide amnesty to 11 to 22 million illegal aliens, increase legal immigration levels beyond already historic levels, and says illegal aliens “enrich” the U.S.
Stein said DACA remains “unlawful” and that “what Trump is doing is better than furthering an illegal program, and it buys time until after the election.”
“It’s not optimal, but probably the best he can do under the circumstances,” Stein said. “At least the President can focus on the bigger immigration issues for the next 100 days.”
D.A. King, a grassroots activist who heads the Dustin Inman Society, praised Trump’s decision and blasted the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for their claim that the president has no authority to end DACA.
“Today is another cruel day for Dreamers, their families, and all Americans,” ACLU officials wrote in a statement following Trump’s announcement.
Center for Immigration Studies Director of Policy Jessica Vaughan called the decision to extend DACA for one year “a smart move” that allows Trump to avoid false attacks from Biden and Democrats.
“So now he will take a year to study it. That’s the exact thing that state lawmakers do when they don’t want to vote on a bill they think should not pass,” Vaughan said.
“[Trump] gets to keep it on his own terms, and the program doesn’t grow,” Vaughan said. “If Congress thinks there should be a legalization for DACAs, now they have space to get it done, next year.”
Vaughan said:
This is one time where kicking the can down the road makes sense. No one is hurt by this decision, at least not until the next violent person among the nearly 80,000 DACAs with a criminal history, commits a crime, and certainly, no one is hoping for that.
The extension does come at a time when a DACA illegal alien has been arrested and charged with killing three former law enforcement officers and injuring nine others in Texas this month.
Ivan Robles Navejas, a 28-year-old DACA illegal alien, has been able to remain in the U.S. for years thanks to the program. This month, Navejas is accused of killing 48-year-old retired officer Joseph Paglia, 74-year-old retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Jerry Harbour, and retired U.S. Army officer Michael White.
Already, DACA-eligible illegal aliens in Texas are suing Trump to demand that new applicants be allowed to get on the program.
Since DACA’s inception, more than 2,100 recipients of the program have been kicked off because they were found to be either criminals or gang members.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) on Thursday criticized New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) for his “hypocrisy” in launching an investigation into a Chainsmokers concert in Southampton over the weekend amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
In reaction to footage from the concert showing thousands of fans gathered seemingly not following social distancing orders, Cuomo called the event “illegal & reckless.”
Stefanik called into question Cuomo’s “failed nursing home policies” that resulted in thousands of deaths early on in the pandemic, adding the governor himself should be independently investigated.
“Fox & Friends” host Pete Hegseth asked Stefanik, “I have to ask you about Governor Cuomo. He has announced that he’s launching an investigation into a concert that happened in the Hamptons where it appears that social distancing did not happen. I have to ask, though, do you suspect he’ll also be launching investigations into say protests or riots that have happened in New York City, Black Lives Matter protests? Are we looking at a double standard at work here?”
“It’s the height of hypocrisy,” replied Stefanik. “The only investigation that we need to focus on like a laser is the investigation into Governor Cuomo’s failed nursing home policies. We lost thousands and thousands of our beloved seniors. And I’ve talked to my constituents who have lost one or both of their elderly parents because of the horrific policies from Governor Cuomo’s department of health. So Governor Cuomo is so quick to point fingers and launch investigations into New Yorkers. He needs to ensure that we have an independent investigation into his failed policies when it comes to protecting our seniors in nursing homes.”
On Wednesday, the Chicago Blackhawks banned fans from wearing Native American-style headgear during games at the United Center.
“We have always maintained an expectation that our fans uphold an atmosphere of respect, and after extensive and meaningful conversations with our Native American partners, we have decided to formalize those expectations,” the team said in a statement as reported by ESPN. “Moving forward, headdresses will be prohibited for fans entering Blackhawks-sanctioned events or the United Center when Blackhawks home games resume. These symbols are sacred, traditionally reserved for leaders who have earned a place of great respect in their Tribe and should not be generalized or used as a costume or for everyday wear.”
Recently, the team decided not to dump its name of 94 years and would continue being named after the team founder’s World War I military unit, the Blackhawk Division. The unit itself was named after Indian Chief Black Hawk, head of the Sauk Nation of Indians in the early 1800s, and who led a short war against U.S. militia in Illinois in 1832.
On July 8, the team said its name is a tribute to an “important and historic person.”
“The Chicago Blackhawks name and logo symbolizes an important and historic person, Black Hawk of Illinois’ Sac & Fox Nation, whose leadership and life has inspired generations of Native Americans, veterans, and the public,” the team said.
“We celebrate Black Hawk’s legacy by offering ongoing reverent examples of Native American culture, traditions, and contributions, providing a platform for genuine dialogue with local and national Native American groups. As the team’s popularity grew over the past decade, so did that platform and our work with these important organizations,” the statement continued.
“We recognize there is a fine line between respect and disrespect, and we commend other teams for their willingness to engage in that conversation. Moving forward, we are committed to raising the bar even higher to expand awareness of Black Hawk and the important contributions of all Native American people,” the Hawks concluded.
The team noted this week that the banning of the headgear is only the start of its plans to advance “dialogue” about racism.
When it comes to prosecutions, it doesn’t get much more political. St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, the prosecutor who decided to bring weapons charges against a couple who made national news last month for displaying weapons to deter a mob of Black Lives Matter “protesters” trespassing on private property, is using her decision to…
