Category: US Politics

Hong Kong’s pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai, who was arrested in August after a massive police raid on the offices of his Apple Daily newspaper, was reportedly arrested again on Wednesday and charged with helping 12 people flee from Hong Kong to Taiwan.

Lai, 72, was arrested in August on charges of “colluding with foreign forces,” which is a criminal offense under the “national security” law Beijing imposed on Hong Kong last year. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) portrays Lai as a saboteur working with the United States and other foreign interests to destabilize Hong Kong’s government. At the time of his arrest, he was already facing charges for participating in the massive 2019 Hong Kong protests and illegally attending a Tiananmen Square vigil.

According to Apple Daily, the new charges against Lai accused him of helping 12 fugitives escape from Hong Kong by boat last summer, allegedly in a bid to find refuge in Taiwan. The escapees were caught by the Chinese Coast Guard and held in a mainland prison until they went on trial in December, at which time the ten adult detainees were given jail terms for illegally crossing the border.

At least one of the ten fugitives, 30-year-old democracy activist Andy Li, was charged under the same national security law that has been invoked against Jimmy Lai. Li fled Hong Kong two weeks after he was arrested for participating in the protests and collaborating with the British government. Fearing he would be sentenced to life in prison, he unsuccessfully appealed to the British consulate for protection.

The South China Morning Post (SCMP) said Lai was re-arrested in Stanley Prison on charges of “conspiracy to assist an offender” and “conspiracy to collude with a foreign country or with external elements to endanger national security.” Originally facing over a decade in prison, Lai could face life in prison if convicted on those charges.

Lai’s legal assistant Chan Tsz-wah was slapped with similar charges and portrayed in a Kowloon courtroom as part of a vast conspiracy against Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China:

Prosecutors said Chan conspired with Lai, the media tycoon’s right-hand man Mark Simon, Li, Lau Cho-dik, and others “to request a foreign country or an institution, organisation or individual outside the mainland, Hong Kong, and Macau … to impose sanctions or blockade or engage in other hostile activities against [Hong Kong] or People’s Republic of China”.

The offence was said to have taken place between last July and Monday, the day Chan was arrested. Simon and Lau are still wanted in connection with the case.

Chan, who was among nine people arrested last October on suspicion of helping the fugitives flee to Taiwan, was also charged with one count of “conspiracy to assist an offender” in connection with Li’s escape attempt.

The SCMP noted the judge presiding over the case, Chief Magistrate Victor So Wai-tak, was “hand-picked by the city’s leader Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor to handle national security proceedings.” The judge denied Chan’s request for bail, even though bail was granted routinely for non-violent offenses in Hong Kong before the national security law. Lai was denied bail last week. 

Reuters noted Lai is the “most high-profile person to be charged under the new security law,” which may not bode well for him in court.

Talk radio legend Rush Limbaugh understood gun rights and was keenly aware Democrats had politicized those rights in hopes of extending their support from voters around the country.

As a result of the politicization, he suggested gun control became a class issue; one that elites and establishment politicians embraced but were unable to logically explain or defend.

During the January 13, 2015, airing of his show, Limbaugh noted that elites view we the people with disdain. Therefore, when one discusses the rights possessed by “the people.” elites imagine the NASCAR crowd and envision “hayseeds, hicks, [and] people who drive pickups.”

He observed that such elites could not explain why their gun-controlled worldview was better than the vision of the Founding Fathers, nor how government could be trusted to keep us safe.

Limbaugh said, “They (the elites) don’t even know what they’re talking about. You hit them with irrefutable logic on this and all they do is stare at you like you are brain-dead when they don’t have a retort to it.”

Limbaugh’s comments came days after the January 7, 2015, Paris attack. He reacted to that attack by pointing out the gun-free rules that engulf so much of Europe. He then suggested that becoming a liberal is a “gutless” choice and the “easiest thing” to do because it removes any pressure to think for oneself. He bolstered his point about not thinking by noting that a terror attack can happen in Europe where gun control guarantees the criminals will be armed but the victims will not, and, as a liberal, people respond by calling for more gun control in America.

Less than a week after the February 14, 2018, Parkland high school shooting Limbaugh suggested Democrats were focused on politicization of attacks rather than school safety. He claimed Democrats respond to such shootings by going “political” and “[making] tracks for the NRA … and for the gun lobby.”

Roughly a year and a half later, in August 2019, Limbaugh said the politicization of gun rights had brought us to a point where Democrats wanted to point to the danger of mass shootings without doing anything to stop them.

He said, “The Republicans are signaling a willingness to talk to [Democrats]” about gun control but “they don’t want any part of it.” He added, “[The Democrats] don’t want any part to a solution to any of these problems.”

Limbaugh made these comments days after the heinous August 3, 2019, shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and the August 4, 2019, shooting in Dayton, Ohio. He said the issue of guns had become so politicized that Democrats worried it they would inadvertently benefit Trump by supporting his efforts to reduce the number of shootings.

Limbaugh observed that Democrats were putting forth “all this rhetoric about guns and [President Trump] said, ‘Okay, I’ll talk to you about it,’ and he’s doing this with full knowledge that they are not going to take him up on it. He knows they are not serious about it.”

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.

Venezuelan conservative leader María Corina Machado shared a video this week showing citizens in the country using a garbage truck to transport an injured person to a clinic in lieu of an ambulance.

The video shows a group of people placing a man clearly incapable of walking arriving in front of a clinic in the back of a garbage truck.

“And some come out to ask that we don’t call it a ‘failed state’ because that damages the dialogue,” Machado remarked, referring to the small minority of Venezuelan political elite still seeking talks with socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro. “While our country collapses in the hands of criminals, we have to ask ourselves, who is worse, them, or the ones who want to cohabitate with them?”

Machado, a former lawmaker whom Maduro’s henchmen violently expelled from the National Assembly in 2014, is the leader of the right-wing Vente Venezuela party, which has repeatedly found itself at odds with the leadership of President Juan Guaidó, the socialist leader of the opposition. While constitutionally the president of the country, Guaidó has failed to exercise any of his powers as Maduro has refused to vacate. Most Venezuelans, polling shows, do not consider him their leader.

The video has gone viral in Venezuelan media following Machado’s post but appears to be from 2019. The Venezuelan news organization NTN24 identified the video at the time as being from Portuguesa state and explained that residents used the garbage truck because they had no access to an ambulance or any other emergency vehicle.

The situation is not an unusual one in Venezuela. The Spanish news wire service EFE detailed a similar story in early February of this year of “paramedics” using a pick-up truck to tend to a man who had barely survived being hit by a tow truck. The “paramedics” are part of a vigilante group known as the “Highway Angels” who organized to help victims of the increasingly common traffic accidents in Caracas, in light of the fact that the government does little to help those in need.

Under late dictator Hugo Chávez, Venezuela established a socialist universal healthcare system. Under the Chávez-drafted national constitution, health care is considered a “human right,” but access declined dramatically as the socialist government failed to properly invest in the health sector. Under Maduro, Venezuela rapidly began to run out of basic medications until, by 2016, hospitals were urging patients to bring their own medicine, as they were not stocked. Upwards of 90 percent of the basic medications the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) considers indispensable to functional health care have not been available in Venezuela for years. The list includes items like birth control, antibiotics, painkillers, and advanced drugs for HIV, cancer, and other potentially terminal diseases.

Compounding the unfortunate medical situation is the fact that, for years, the Venezuelan socialist regime has largely failed to properly sanitize locations it is responsible for, from hospitals to public streets. Large piles of garbage have lined the streets of Caracas for years, featuring decaying food and other toxic substances. Starving Venezuelans have notoriously resorted to eating scraps out of these piles of garbage, exposing them to potential infections for which they have no access to antibiotics to fight.

In response to this humanitarian crisis, Maduro has repeatedly denied that anything is wrong and blocked humanitarian groups like Doctors Without Borders from entering the country.

The medical situation has triggered international alarm in light of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, which Venezuela entered 2020 extremely ill-prepared to combat. Maduro has responded to the pandemic with a bizarre quarantine strategy he dubbed “7+7”: for seven days, the nation is forced into a strict lockdown, schools and businesses are closed, and police limit mobility. For the next seven days, all restrictions lift, returning life to normal. There is no evidence that the strategy has benefited Venezuela in any way, and it has more recently been used to allow Maduro to lift lockdowns for holidays like Christmas and Carnaval.

Failing to procure one of the many Chinese coronavirus vaccine candidates currently available, Maduro has also taken to publicizing dubious coronavirus “cures” including “rectal ozone therapy” and the use of a substance he has dubbed “miracle droplets.” International public health experts have actively discouraged the administration of ozone to fight Chinese coronavirus, as the amount necessary to kill the virus is greater than the amount necessary to kill a person. The droplets, meanwhile, have undergone no independent verification process. Facebook recently censored Maduro’s promotion of these “cures,” prompting Maduro to call Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg an “abuser.”

Venezuela claims to have documented only 133,927 cases of Chinese coronavirus and 1,292 deaths attributable to a coronavirus infection nationwide, significantly less than the millions of cases documented in neighboring countries like Brazil and Colombia. International observers have questioned the legitimacy of the Maduro regime’s tallies, particularly in light of the sparse use of PCR testing in the country. A poll by the firm Meganálisis published in October found that 87 percent of Venezuelans told that they had coronavirus did not receive PCR tests, meaning they were not counted towards the official number of cases.

Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.

President Joe Biden’s administration is suggesting that foreign workers have a right to compete for jobs in the United States labor market against jobless Americans.

Last year, in the midst of the Chinese coronavirus crisis, former President Trump signed an executive order halting the admission of H-1B, H-4, H-2B, L, and J-1 foreign visa workers to protect the U.S. labor market. The order sought to free up at least 600,000 jobs for millions of Americans facing joblessness and underemployment.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked if the Biden administration would renew the order, as it is set to expire next month, but she dodged the question and suggested that protecting the U.S. labor market from foreign competition was “immoral.”

“Let me talk to our Department of Homeland Security. It’s likely a conversation that would happen in coordination with them,” Psaki said of discussions about whether Biden would let the order expire.

“Obviously, the president’s view is that the approach of the prior administration was immoral but also ineffective in terms of addressing the many challenges of an outdated immigration system,” Psaki continued. “But I don’t have an update on those particular requirements.”

Should Biden allow the order to expire, companies would be permitted to import hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals to take U.S. jobs, even as more than 17 million Americans remain unemployed — including 1.5 million teenagers, 930,00 black Americans, and 870,000 Hispanics.

Protections for the U.S. labor market are some of the most popular policies among likely voters despite their overwhelming opposition by the big business lobby and corporate interests who are invested in spiking their profit margins by cutting the cost of labor.

The latest Rasmussen Reports survey of 1,250 likely voters reveals that 74 percent want a reduction to legal immigration levels which are currently set at about 1.2 million green card admissions a year. Similarly, 65 percent say it is better for businesses to raise U.S. wages and try harder to recruit jobless Americans instead of importing foreign workers. Another 61 percent say the U.S. labor market has enough so-called “high-skilled” workers and does not need more.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here. 

Left-wing Hollywood celebrities wasted little time in popping the champagne following news of Rush Limbaugh’s death. As Breitbart News reported, the 70-year-old conservative radio legend died Wednesday morning following a battle with advanced lung cancer, his wife, Kathryn Limbaugh, announced at the beginning of Wednesday’s radio program.

Ignoring any sense of taste or decorum, the stars piled on with nasty insults, including actress Amber Tamblyn, who wished Rush Limbaugh to “RIP” — “Rot In Purgatory,” and her husband, actor David Cross, who declared that “cancer killed the cancer.”

Other Hollywood elies who celebrated Limbaugh’s death include John Cusack, Marc Maron, Larry Charles, and Star Trek veteran George Takei.

David Cross and Amber Tamblyn led the Hollywood hate parade with matching his-and-her insults aimed at the late radio host.

John Cusack tweeted besides Rupert Murdoch, “there has been no more destructive a practitioner of the big lie for profit in U.S. history.”

Rosanna Arquette tweeted, “It’s a real shame when someone wasted their lives spewing hate and lies.”

Billy Baldwin, the brother of Alec Baldwin, told Limbaugh to “enjoy hell.”

Star Trek actor George Takei expressed gratitude that Limbaugh “lived long enough to see Trump defeated by Biden.”

Borat director Larry Charles called him “another white man propagating hate and lies.”

Netflix’s Grace & Frankie actor Ethan Embry suggested that Limbaugh appealed to white supremacists.

Saving Private Ryan actor Adam Goldberg joked that Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-KY) tweet praising Limbaugh was “by far the lowest” thing he’s read about the late radio host.

Fox’s Brooklyn Nine-Nine writer Jess Dweck tweeted and later deleted an insult aimed at the late Limbaugh. “How mad is Rush that he got to hell before the Sackler family,” she wrote.

https://twitter.com/TheDweck/status/1362099112540139521

Actor Kirk Acevedo tweeted, “One bigot dead. Waiting for the rest to join him.”

Former Saturday Night Live cast member Luke Null tweeted that Limbaugh “already started a radio show in Hell” and is complaining about “outsiders.”

Follow David Ng on Twitter @HeyItsDavidNg. Have a tip? Contact me at dng@breitbart.com