Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer slashed more than $100 million from the Michigan State Police budget just a few weeks after admitting she supports the “spirit” of the ‘Defund the Police’ movement.
In an executive order unveiled this week, Whitmer cut nearly one-quarter of state law enforcement’s budget, along with $392 million from the Department of Corrections.
The cuts were made as part of an ongoing effort by state legislators to close a $2.2 billion budget deficit, according to the Detroit Free Press.
Whitmer plans to replace the funds she’s cutting from MSP with federal coronavirus relief funds. But it’s not clear whether federal funds will be able to fill the entire gap—or whether she’ll follow through on following the gap at all.
“You look at budgets, and they’re focused on policing—they should be focused on education, transportation, access to healthcare, access to skills and leveling the playing field,” Whitmer told The Rootlast month.
“If you do all those other things, you don’t need all the money that’s going to the police departments,” she continued. “So, yeah, I mean, the spirit of [Defund the Police], I do support that spirit of it.”
After facing criticism, Whitmer backtracked and ‘clarified” her statement with what appeared to be a full reversal: “I don’t believe the police should be defunded,” she said.
Whitmer and other Michigan Democrats are already arguing that the budget cuts are not an attempt to defund the police, since federal funding will make up the difference.
They’ve also argued that ‘Defund the Police’ means reallocating funding from police departments to other public sectors, such as healthcare and education. But the underlying goal of the movement, according to several of its prominent activists, is to rid communities of police entirely.
How that would work in Michigan, which has some of the strictest coronavirus regulations in the country, is unclear.
Whitmer certainly relies on law enforcement to make sure citizens are following her executive orders, which might be why she reconsidered her initial support for the movement.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, is the latest GOP lawmaker to introduce federal legislation intended to force public officials in Democrat strongholds to protect their residents.
In cities across the country, mayors and other urban officials have declined to confront left-wing rioters, looters and arsonists.
Instead, they have enabled them, and even ceded territory for Black Lives Matter and Antifa “autonomous zones.”
Cruz unveiled his Restitution for Economic losses Caused by Leaders who Allow Insurrection and Mayhem Act, or RECLAIM Act, on Wednesday.
He told Fox News host Sean Hannity that “anyone who’s physically harmed in a lawless autonomous zone” could personally sue the local officials responsible for failing to protect them.
Cruz added that business owners, homeowners and anyone else who suffers harm as a result of public officials barring the police from enforcing the rule of law would be able to sue for “treble damages,” or three times the amount of incurred losses.
“The Democrats have unleashed the craziest, angriest voices in their party,” he said, “and we’re seeing extreme radicals advocate for socialism, we’re seeing them advocate for lawless autonomous zones.”
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Cruz declared, that, “As public officials, our first responsibility is to protect our fellow citizens.”
The RECLAIM Act would further remove or limit federal grant assistance for local governments that bar police forces from protecting citizens and their property inside law enforcement free autonomous zones.
Cruz said in a statement that he will address the crisis of left-wing political violence and the protections offered by friendly politicians next week in a committee hearing.
“The hearing will highlight how Antifa and other anarchists are hijacking peaceful protests and engaging in political violence that is not only criminal, but antithetical to the First Amendment,” he said.
A similar bill was proposed in the House earlier this month.
Known as the Justice for Victims of Lawless Cities Act, the legislation would allow victims in Black Lives Matter-inspired autonomous zones to sue cities and states.
“Any state or city that takes federal funds and fails to enforce the laws should both lose those funds and be liable for the harm they have allowed to occur, including those allowing lawless autonomous zones to be created,” said Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, the bill’s co-sponsor.
A third bill would make it a federal crime to assault any law-enforcement officer during a riot.
The No Reward for Inciting Organized Turmoil, or No RIOT Act would update current penalties to include local and state officers trying to maintain order.
“I join most Americans in being appalled by increasing attacks on our law enforcement nationwide,” said Rep. Dan Bishop, R-NC, the bill sponsor.
Ignoring a cadre of former leaders who owned slaves, embraced the Ku Klux Klan and openly used the n-word, presumptive Democrat nominee Joe Biden claimed Wednesday that President Donald Trump was the country’s “first” racist president.
Biden’s comments came during a virtual town hall organized by the Service Employees International Union.
When a questioner complained of racism surrounding the coronavirus outbreak and mentioned the president referring to it as the “China virus,” Biden responded by blasting Trump and “his spread of racism.”
“The way he deals with people based on the color of their skin, their national origin, where they’re from, is absolutely sickening,” the former vice president said.
“No sitting president has ever done this. Never, never, never. No Republican president has done this. No Democratic president. We’ve had racists, and they’ve existed. They’ve tried to get elected president. He’s the first one that has.”
While ironically engaging in his own desperate race-baiting, Biden also suggested that Trump is using race “as a wedge” to distract from his mishandling of the pandemic.
The former vice president has long played defensive on his own history of making offensive and racist comments. In May he told a black podcast host that anybody who declined to support his candidacy “ain’t black.”
And recent archival transcripts of a 1985 hearing revealed Biden repeatedly using the n-word on the floor of the US Senate.
The bizarre accusation from the blunder-prone Biden not only called attention to worries over his own cognitive decline, but also raised the obvious matter of Democrats’ troubled historical legacy when it comes to race issues.
Biden has fondly recalled cooperating with pro-segregation Southern Democrats early in his career and has been hammered for his own past positions that were harmful to minority communities.
He also offered a eulogy at the funeral of Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., a former grand-wizard in the KKK.
While many of the earliest US presidents—including the nation’s first, George Washington—owned slaves, they arguably were not the most overly racist chief executives.
President Woodrow Wilson, the country’s 28th president, is having his name removed from Princeton University’s public policy school after recent protests against institutional racism and police brutality.
Wilson—who is considered in many regards to have ushered in the modern progressivist movement with policies like his UN precursor, the League of Nations—supported segregation and imposed it on several federal agencies.
Lyndon Johnson, a Texas Democrat who served as John F. Kennedy’s vice president before becoming president himself, worked with Republicans in Congress to pass meaningful civil rights reforms. But he also was not shy about casually using the n-word at a time when it would have been frowned upon.
At a White House briefing later Wednesday, Trump responded to a question about Biden’s comments by pointing to his administration’s efforts passing criminal justice reform legislation and expanding opportunity zones, as well as the low unemployment numbers for minority groups before the coronavirus outbreak.
“I’ve done more for Black Americans than anybody with the possible of exception of Abraham Lincoln,” the president said. “Nobody has even been close.”
Katrina Pierson, a senior adviser for Trump’s reelection campaign, said in a statement that ”no one should take lectures on racial justice from Joe Biden.”
The U.S. Space Force revealed its new logo and motto this week as part of its effort to build the service’s brand and cultural identity.
Today we are proud to showcase the Space Force logo to the world. Over the next few hours, we will share the history and legacy of our new logo. pic.twitter.com/tKe8QCWEiG
— United States Space Force (@SpaceForceDoD) July 22, 2020
The black-and-silver service logo depicts a delta wing, which is also found in the Space Force seal and flag. Inside the delta are two spies, which represent “the action of a rocket launching into the outer atmosphere in support of the central role of the Space Force in defending the space domain,” according to the branch.
In the center of the delta, there is a star, “which symbolizes how the core values guide the Space Force mission,” the USSF explained.
Together, the four pieces of the logo symbolize “the joint armed forces supporting the space mission: Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marines,” the USSF said in a statement.
The Space Force motto is “Semper Supra,” meaning, “always above.”
It represents the service’s role in establishing, maintaining, and preserving the U.S.’s freedom of operations in the ultimate high ground, according to a Space Force spokesperson.
“This motto reminds us of the strategic imperative to ensure that our space capabilities and the advantages they provide the nation and our Joint and Coalition partners are always there. We can accept nothing less. Semper Supra!” the spokesperson said.
The logo was first introduced to the public in May when the Trump administration unveiled the USSF’s flag.
Critics were quick to point out that the delta wing looked like a Star Trek Starfleet knockoff.
However, USSF officials noted that the U.S. Army Air Forces was using the delta symbol as early as the 1940s.
The USSF recently selected more than 2,400 Air Force Airmen to permanently transfer to the new branch, and has already recruited 8,500 Airmen recruits to train in space-related specialties.
The evidence includes Patricia McCloskey’s gun, which was deemed inoperable when she confronted the violent protesters who were trespassing on private property.
But Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner ordered the city’s crime lab to reassemble the gun into working order after confiscating the firearm so that she could score a conviction against the McCloskeys.
Missouri law requires the state to prove that firearms are “readily capable of lethal use.”
Because Patricia McCloskey’s gun was inoperable at the time of its “use,” Gardner would not have been able to score a conviction based on the felony charges brought against her.
But because the city’s crime lab reassembled the gun, Gardner is able to claim that the gun was, in fact, operable at the time and press charges that could carry a sentence of up to four years in prison.
Experts in the gun lab admitted that when they disassembled the firearm, it was not working at all. The firing-pin spring was put in front of the firing pin, which was backward, and the entire weapon was incapable of firing, according to documents from the lab.
Patricia McCloskey intentionally disabled her firearm so that she would not hurt anyone, said her attorney, Joe Schwartz.
“It’s disheartening to learn that a law enforcement agency altered evidence in order to prosecute an innocent member of the community,” he told 5 On Your Side, a local NBC News affiliate.
Gardner, a radical whose campaign was heavily funded by billionaire mega-donor George Soros, did not mention the lab’s original findings in her criminal complaint against the McCloskeys.
Missouri Gov. Mike Parson has made it clear that if Gardner moves forward with these charges, he will pardon the McCloskeys.
“I will do everything within the Constitution of the State of Missouri to protect law-abiding citizens and those people are exactly that. They are law-abiding citizens, and they’re being attacked frankly by a political process that’s really unfortunate,” he said.
During his presidency, Barack Obama was able to claim such whoppers as “If you like your doctor, you can keep him.”
In his post-presidency, the streak continued with his claim to a “scandal-free” administration.
Now, in a rare show of support for his former vice president’s White House bid, the 44th president is trotting out his latest historical revisionism.
Presumptive Democrat nominee Joe Biden got an assist from Obama in a new campaign video attacking incumbent President Donald Trump.
The 15-minute video, which was posted online Thursday, purported to show the dissociative duo’s first in-person meeting since the coronavirus outbreak began.
It marked the desperate Biden campaign’s latest effort to get the former president more involved as they try to rebuild Obama’s winning coalition while banking on amnesiac voters’ nostalgic recollections of the relatively stable Obama years.
Of course, much of the acrimony and instability in the intervening years has been wrought by Trump’s opponents for the express purpose of undermining him and damaging his political prospects.
Notwithstanding, the pair saw an opportunity to draw comparisons between their administration and Trump’s response to the current coronavirus pandemic.
Mainstream media have long resisted such a comparison to this point since it underscores the disproportionate panic-mongering that wrecked one of the most robust economies in US history last March.
But with virus fatigue, paired with ongoing race riots, appearing to wear on Trump’s approval rating, the Fake News now has the all-clear to spin away.
The video appeared to be a spoof of the famous “Frost + Nixon” interviews in which the Watergate president reflected on his tenure in office. However, in this case both participants fittingly assumed the Nixon role.
The two men are shown wearing masks while arriving at an office, then sitting down well apart from each other to observe social distancing for an unmasked chat.
“Can you imagine standing up when you were president and saying, ‘It’s not my responsibility, I take no responsibility’?” Biden said, offering a line of attack similar to his recent campaign speeches when he asserted that Trump “quit” on the country and has “waved the white flag” in the pandemic.
“Those words didn’t come out of our mouths while we were in office,” Obama replied.
In fact, what the Obama administration was responsible for allowing the H1N1 virus, also known as the “swine flu,” to spread for months during his first term before he meaningfully addressed it.
As of July 22, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicated that only 36 children below age 15 had died from COVID-related illness. Most—if not all—had pre-existing underlying conditions.
By contrast, roughly a thousand children died during the swine flu outbreak without any discussion of closing down schools.
Meanwhile, despite the data showing that elderly citizens are particularly vulnerable for coronavirus—with more than 40 percent of nationwide deaths coming out of nursing-home facilities—blue-state leaders have forced infected residents to co-mingle with healthy ones.
And the recent uptick in the virus appears to have only weeks after Democrats openly encouraged minorities and young activists to participate in mass gatherings to protest social injustice, with many of the new cases coming from younger patients.
Serendipitously for the Obama–Biden administration—and for the country at the time—the H1N1 virus evolved independently of any efforts they made (or lack thereof) to ‘flatten the curve.’
However, when faced with a new challenge during the Ebola outbreak—a far less contagious but more terrifying virus—the veteran pandemic-handlers had a new tactic: blame the Republican congress.
He did so with aplomb, accusing his political opponents of delaying his massive expenditures which sought relief not only for the U.S. but the entire globe.
Despite receiving such funding, the administration still failed to replenish the national stockpiles of crucial protective equipment such as respirators.
Trump’s campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the new video, but the Republican National Committee issued a scathing assessment of “slickly produced, substance-free love fests,” dubbing the effort “Biden and Obama’s fiction.”
In other exchanges, Obama and Biden blasted Trump’s view of American society, and Obama praised Biden as possessing empathy that he said Trump lacks.
“He ran by deliberately dividing people from the moment he came down that escalator, and I think people are now going, ‘I don’t want my kid growing up that way,’” Biden said, recalling Trump’s 2016 campaign launch.
Obama has privately expressed reservations about Biden and has been reluctant to embrace his gaffe-beleaguered campaign.
Last November, he told Democrats that Biden lacked the same “magic” that his campaign had. But he appeared, yet again, to reverse himself on that trivial detail.
In the video, he claimed he had confidence in Biden’s “heart and your character.”
Governing, the former president said, “starts with being able to relate. If you can sit down with a family and see your own family in them … then you’re going to work hard for them, and that’s always what’s motivated you.”
Obama has promised an active role on the campaign trail this fall.
A judge ordered the release from prison of President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer on Thursday, saying he believes the government retaliated against him for planning to release a book about Trump before November’s election.
Shortly thereafter, prison officials said he violated the terms of the release and sent him back to complete his three-year sentence.
But U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein claimed Cohen’s First Amendment rights were violated when he was ordered back to prison on July 9.
The reason behind it was that Cohen refused to sign a form banning him from publishing the book or communicating publicly in other manners, the Bill Clinton-appointed judge said during a telephone conference.
“How can I take any other inference than that it’s retaliatory?” Hellerstein asked prosecutors.
He ordered Cohen to be released from prison by 2 p.m. on Friday.
Hellerstein has courted controversy in the past while presiding over the Southern District of New York.
He has made controversial rulings regarding the recovery of victims at the World Trade Center following the 9/11 attacks, forced the release of videos showing Iraq prisoners detained at the Abu Ghraib prison, and dismissed 17 of the charges against left-wing Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein.
Prosecutors insisted in court papers and again Thursday that Probation Department officers did not know about the book Cohen planned to write when they wrote a provision of home confinement that severely restricted his public communications.
“I’ve never seen such a clause in 21 years of being a judge and sentencing people and looking at terms of supervised release,” the judge said. “Why would the Bureau of Prisons ask for something like this … unless there was a retaliatory purpose?”
In ruling, Hellerstein said he made the “finding that the purpose of transferring Mr. Cohen from furlough and home confinement to jail is retaliatory.” He added: “And it’s retaliatory for his desire to exercise his First Amendment rights to publish the book.”
Cohen, 53, sued federal prison officials and Attorney General William Barr on Monday, saying he was ordered back to prison because he was writing a book to be released before the November presidential election.
He has been in isolation at an Otisville, New York, prison camp, quarantined while prison authorities ensure he does not have the coronavirus.
His attorney, Danya Perry, said in a statement that the order was “a victory for the First Amendment” and showed that the government cannot block a book critical of the president as a condition of release to home confinement.
“This principle transcends politics and we are gratified that the rule of law prevails,” she said.
The book will address “Trump’s personality and proclivities, his private and professional affairs, and his personal and business ethics,” according to the lawsuit.
It further stated that the government’s demand that Cohen agree not to speak to or through any media, including by publishing a book, violated his constitutional rights.
When he was furloughed in May along with other prisoners, Cohen was one year into a three-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to campaign finance charges and lying to Congress, among other crimes.
Campaign finance charges related to his efforts to arrange payouts during the 2016 presidential race to keep the porn actress Stormy Daniels and model Karen McDougal from making public claims of extramarital affairs with Trump.
(Headline USA) The next session of Congress may go on without either of its two obstreperous and controversial Muslim congresswomen.
After reports that her self-declared “sister,” Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., was being outraised considerably by a Democrat primary challenger, troubles are now shaping up for Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., who faces, perhaps, an even greater challenge from an established Detroit Democrat.
Tlaib had been in Congress for a matter of hours when she was seen on video telling supporters that she and other Democrats were going to impeach President Donald Trump, using an expletive rather than Trump’s name. The room full of activists cheered, but some people back home—and in Democratic leadership—were not pleased.
It wasn’t the last time Tlaib’s approach to governing—shaking up the political status quo alongside three other first-term congresswomen who form “the Squad”—would make her a target of criticism.
And every time, Detroit City Council President Brenda Jones says, agitated constituents would call and encourage her to challenge her fellow Michigan Democrat to a rematch of their 2018 battle for the party’s congressional nomination.
Now Tlaib is the Squad’s most vulnerable member as she and Jones prepare to square off again in Michigan’s Aug. 4 primary.
The only other member of the Squad still facing a primary challenge is Omar, whose top challenger on Aug. 11 is a political newcomer Antone .
Melton–Meaux raised millions more than the incumbent Omar last quarter, with some of his donations coming from pro-Israel groups and conservative donors.
New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez easily won her primary last month, while Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley is unopposed.
Tlaib, meanwhile, has a huge financial advantage over Jones, having raised more than $2 million. As in 2018, she has backing from the political action committee Justice Democrats and other progressive groups.
Jones has brought in only about $140,000, but already she has shown that a massive war-chest of outside money won’t guarantee victory for Tlaib.
Jones was far outraised in 2018 and lost by only 1 percentage point. And the four other former primary candidates in the current race are all now backing Jones.
Diverging Democrat Visions
Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib / IMAGE: One America News Network
The Detroit primary battle underscores to the broader debate in the Democratic Party between the establishment and largely younger, more radical, progressive activists.
Jones’s challenge also portends the inevitable collisions and frictions within intersectional identity politics, highlighting the racial dynamics of a heavily Democratic Detroit-area district at a time when the social injustices of the black community are getting renewed attention.
Over half of the residents in the district are black, while the rest are a mix of white, Arab American, Latino and other races. Tlaib, a Palestinian who was born and raised in Detroit, was one of the first two female Muslim members of Congress; Jones is black.
Democrats’ coalition of competing interest-groups has sometimes come into conflict—notably in bouts of anti-Semitism expressed by pro-Palestinian and black Muslim leaders.
But the globalist outlook of progressives like Tlaib—envisioning massive spending packages like the multi-trillion-dollar Green New Deal—also fails to resonate on a more basic level with lower-income voters who are struggling to get by in the conflict zones within their own neighborhoods during a sputtering economy and health crisis.
It all boils down to one thing for a district that is among the country’s poorest: who can “bring home the bacon,” Jones said.
“There are things that I might feel, but I just don’t say in public and an example is ‘impeach the M-F’ on the very first day,” said Jones, 60.
“Not to say you’re going to always agree, but you have to be able to work with those people because you never know who you’re going to need in order to get things done that need to be done,” she added.
Black Votes Matter
The two candidates have a history. In 2018, Jones finished a close second to Tlaib in a six-person primary for the seat long held by Democratic Rep. John Conyers, who stepped down amid sexual harassment allegations.
But Jones defeated Tlaib in a two-person special election to finish the final weeks of Conyers’ term—which she did, spending five weeks in Washington before Tlaib was sworn in for the full term in January.
Conyers was also black and was the longest-serving black member of Congress, holding office for over five decades.
Ian Conyers, whose grandfather was the former congressman’s brother, said the district was drawn to ensure a voice for black residents, and he believes it should continue to have a black representative, particularly following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the elevation of racial justice issues.
“Folks are wanting someone to make their case in their own words,” said Conyers, who also ran in the 2018 primary.
He said other candidates of color should look to gain political power in white districts, “and not simply look at urban areas and the African–American community as a place to win a seat.”
Besides the racial issues, Conyers said Tlaib has been too focused on issues outside the district.
Jones points to moments like last summer, when Tlaib booed Hillary Clinton at an event for Clinton’s former rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders, in his 2020 presidential bid.
Tlaib remains unapologetic.
“I didn’t have to change who I am” to please voters, Tlaib said. “I didn’t sell out. That’s one thing I promised them, that I wouldn’t do it. And I didn’t.”
The ‘Real’ Deal?
William Clark works in his yard in Detroit. / PHOTO: Associated Press
However, some black voters who planned to support Tlaib said race didn’t matter.
William Clark, 74, thinks Jones is too conservative.
“Black, white, Hispanic, Martian, I don’t care who is in power, just do what you say you’re going to do,” he said. “Rashida will speak. She is real.”
Branden Snyder, who leads the grassroots organization Detroit Action, called Tlaib a “visionary” and praised her candor and willingness to fight, saying she isn’t beholden to “the same old status quo.”
“Right now politics as usual ain’t been working for our communities,” Snyder said during an event announcing the organization’s endorsement of Tlaib.
Tlaib says that she has legislated exactly the way she promised and that she’s gotten results by pushing back against those who are too cozy with corporations and big developers.
She denies that her uncompromising approach has clogged the political works within the Beltway by making powerful enemies.
She notes that Trump signed into law a bill she sponsored to protect retirees’ pension benefits—even if she didn’t get invited to the White House for the signing—and that she’s gotten amendments approved with bipartisan support, including a measure that provides billions to replace lead pipes and prioritizes low-income communities.
“I’m pretty tenacious, and it’s resulting in actual things getting done,” Tlaib said.
“It’s not just about me as a person, but all of the various social justice issues that I’ve been standing up for for the last year and a half that have not been popular among the wealthy,” she added.
Coronavirus guru Dr. Anthony Fauci isn’t as infallible as the mainstream press would have you believe.
Nor—according to some of those in the White House who have worked with him during the coronavirus pandemic—is the National Institutes of Health’s resident contagion authority entirely above-board when it comes to his seemingly altruistic motives.
In fact, a recent investigation by trusted conservative reporter John Solomon cast additional light on the disease expert’s checkered past while overseeing AIDS research.
Passing the Buck, Claiming the Credit
Fauci has become known for flip-flopping and indecisively taking multiple sides of Wuhan virus-related issues to hedge against criticism.
When in doubt, he defers to shutting down the economy.
But when confronted, Fauci continues to rely on his past government service to validate his coronavirus performance.
“I think you can trust me,” he recently told reporters, citing his record at the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases.
But that’s likely what he told foster children in New York, Illinois and other states when they were enrolled in an AIDS drug trial under Fauci’s supervision.
According to the investigative journalism website Just the News, an independent investigation concluded that the AIDS research division that reported to Fauci had failed to provide patient advocates to the children, which was not only unethical but in many cases illegal.
A One-Man Ego Trip
In an NPR interview, Dr. Jonathan Fishbein of the National Institutes of Health admitted to alerting an agency inspector general, and added that “the institute seemed unwilling to enforce many of the federal research rules, and punished me for trying to do so.”
Fishbein was fired for whistleblowing but was later reinstated when he was proved correct.
He told Just the News journalist John Solomon that “Fauci is all about Fauci” in an interview published this week.
“He loves being the headline. It’s his ego,” Fishbein said.
But using foster children as AIDS research guinea pigs without required protections wasn’t Fauci’s only instance of terrible judgment.
Just the News reviewed three decades of his leadership at the NIH and found numerous lapses.
Plagued by Scandals
Some past Fauci accusers, like former associate Judy Mikovits, have been brutally censored or derided in the media for making unsupported accusations.
But increasingly, the evidence has revealed a pattern of risky research practices unearthed by reliable and established reports.
In 2004, an internal review concluded that Fauci’s AIDS research division was a “troubled organization” where managers were creating a hostile atmosphere with “sexually explicit and colorful language.”
In another instance, an internal investigation determined that at least 10 children had died during an AIDS drug study and that the deaths were “significantly higher” than were expected or could be unexplained.
Drug trials in Africa were similarly plagued by safety reporting violations.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services nailed Fauci’s division for failing to report two stark vaccine conflicts of interest.
And at one point, two-thirds of the employees under his watch were moonlighting for private companies but without required ethics screenings.
Coronavirus / IMAGE: KHOU 11 via YouTube
Outlets including Newsweek and the Washington Post previously reported on the fact that he played fast and loose with research involving the transmission of diseases like the coronavirus from animal to human exposure.
In fact, he and the NIH gave millions in US taxpayer-funded grants to support research at the Wuhan Institute for Virology that specifically dealt with studies of bats transmitting coronavirus to humans.
For his part, Fauci has shrugged off the criticism, insisting that the risks (e.g. a mass pandemic) did not outweigh the rewards in a potential medical breakthrough.
“Information gained through biomedical research … provides a critical foundation for generating appropriate countermeasures,” he maintained in a said in a 2011 Post op-ed defending his practices.
A monument to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee that was set to be removed from a Virginia city’s downtown was toppled late Wednesday by impatient race-rioters bent on destroying public property, officials said.
A police officer driving near Roanoke City Hall just before midnight noticed the monument lying on its side and broken into two pieces, the city said in a statement Thursday.
Police said it appeared the marker was intentionally damaged. Authorities did not announce any suspects or arrests.
The City Council this month voted in favor of a resolution that would have removed the 60-year-old monument from its location at Lee Plaza, a park across the street from City Hall named for the Virginia-born general.
State lawmakers passed a bill this spring allowing local governments to decide the fate of such monuments, news outlets reported.
But the process to remove the monument from public land would have taken at least two months, The Roanoke Times said. Under the new law, the council needed to give a month’s notice of a public hearing on the removal, which was set for Aug. 17.
Despite the toppling, Mayor Sherman Lea said the city still planned to hold the meeting and would “proceed based upon the outcome of the public hearing.”
“It is an unfortunate incident, but this will not deter us from going through the legal process to remove the monument,” Lea said in the statement.
Crews in Roanoke hauled away parts of the stone obelisk early Thursday, leaving just its base with an orange traffic cone on top, news outlets reported.
City Manager Bob Cowell said the damaged monument was placed in storage for the time being.
