A Major Study That Fueled National Vape Panic Has Been Retracted

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After months of pressure from the scientific community, the American Heart Association’s academic journal on Tuesday evening retracted a widely circulated vaping study, which claimed that using e-cigarettes increased the likelihood of having a heart attack.

Last June, the authors, Stanton Glantz and Dharma Bhatta of the University of California San Francisco, stated in the original study that vaping and smoking cigarettes posed a similar risk, while doing both at the same time was an even more dangerous option. Following its publication in the summer, the peer-reviewed research was referenced by major news organizations, including CNN, Yahoo News, and USA Today.

In a statement explaining the retraction, editors at the Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA) expressed worry that the study may have been based on misleading data. . .

JAHA pulled the paper after Brad Rodu, a tobacco control expert at the University of Louisville, noted that many of the vapers Glantz and Bhatta analyzed for the study were also current or former smokers. Rodu argued that there was a possibility that the use of combustible cigarettes is what made them more likely to suffer heart attacks. (Read more from “A Major Study That Fueled National Vape Panic Has Been Retracted” HERE)

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BOMBSHELL: Somali Leader Claims Ilhan Omar Did Marry Her Brother

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‘Squad’ congresswoman Ilhan Omar told friends years ago that the man who went on to become her second husband was in fact her brother, DailyMail.com can confirm.

And now for the first time one of those friends has come forward to reveal exactly how Omar and Ahmed Elmi scandalized the Somali community in Minneapolis.

Abdihakim Osman is the first person to go on record to speak of how Omar said she wanted to get her brother papers so he could stay in the United States, at a time when she was married to her first husband Ahmed Hirsi. . .

‘No one knew there had been a wedding until the media turned up the marriage certificate years later,’ Osman, 40, exclusively told DailyMail.com.

Osman’s revelations are sure to renew calls for an investigation into the Minnesota freshman representative who has repeatedly refused to answer questions on her marriage to Elmi. (Read more from “BOMBSHELL: Somali Leader Claims Ilhan Omar Did Marry Her Brother” HERE)

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South Korea Steps Up Containment Efforts As Virus Cases Jump To 208; Health Officials Worry As Untraceable Coronavirus Clusters Emerge

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By The Korea Herald. South Korea said Friday the new coronavirus is in the initial stage of a full-blown outbreak, but stressed that it is still “manageable,” although the number of infections has almost quadrupled in just three days.

The country reported 104 new cases of the novel coronavirus as of 7 p.m. on Friday, bringing the total number of infections to 208, the Korea Center for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) said.

Most new infections have been traced to church services in the southeastern city of Daegu.

Daegu, where the 2.5 million inhabitants have been asked to stay indoors, and neighboring Cheongdo were designated as a “special management zone” earlier in the day. The nation’s capital, Seoul, banned demonstrations in downtown areas.

Of the 104 new cases, 86 are in Daegu, 300 kilometers southeast of Seoul, and neighboring North Gyeongsang Province. Another seven were reported in Seoul, the KCDC said. (Read more from “South Korea Steps Up Containment Efforts As Virus Cases Jump To 208” HERE)

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Health Officials Worry As Untraceable Coronavirus Clusters Emerge

By Star Advertiser. In South Korea, Singapore and Iran, clusters of infections are leading to a jump in cases of the new viral illness outside China. But it’s not the numbers that are worrying experts: It’s that increasingly they can’t trace where the clusters started.

World Health Organization officials said China’s crackdown on parts of the country bought time for the rest of the world to prepare for the new virus. But as hot spots emerge around the globe, trouble finding each source — the first patient who sparks every new cluster — might signal the disease has begun spreading too widely for tried-and-true public health steps to stamp it out.

“A number of spot fires, occurring around the world is a sign that things are ticking along, and what we are going to have here is probably a pandemic,” said Ian Mackay, who studies viruses at Australia’s University of Queensland.

That worst-case isn’t here yet, the WHO insists. It isn’t convinced that countries outside China need more draconian measures, but it pointed to spikes in cases in Iran and South Korea to warn that time may be running out to contain the virus. . .

The newest red flag: Iran reported 18 cases, including four deaths, in just two days. The cluster began in the city of Qom, a popular religious destination, but it’s not clear how. Worse, infected travelers from Iran already have been discovered in Lebanon and Canada. (Read more from “Health Officials Worry As Untraceable Coronavirus Clusters Emerge” HERE)

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American Workers Last: WH Chief Of Staff Mulvaney Thinks Record Immigration Is Not Enough

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Are you sick of one administration official after another calling for even more foreign labor?

The more immigration we have, the more it feeds the insatiable appetite of the crony monopolies created by government for even more cheap labor – be it farm work or entry-level white-collar jobs. This culturally gerrymanders Americans out of these jobs, as foreign labor interests work with U.S. special interests to monopolize them with immigrant workers. But it apparently will never be enough for people like White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney.

The Washington Post reports that during a private speech in London, the top gun at the White House said the following. “We are desperate — desperate — for more people. We are running out of people to fuel the economic growth that we’ve had in our nation over the last four years. We need more immigrants.”

Did Hillary Clinton hack into the White House?

Amid the sudden clamor for more foreign labor, Trump returned to Phoenix, Arizona, this week for a campaign rally, the home of his famous immigration speech on August 31, 2016, when he promised to put American workers first. “While Hillary Clinton meets only with donors and lobbyists, my plan was crafted with the input from federal immigration officers, along with top immigration experts who represent workers, not corporations,” charged Trump at the 2016 rally.

In point 10 of the plan that Trump laid out that night, he said, “We will reform legal immigration to serve the best interests of America and its workers.”

Some might say he was only referring to low-skilled manual labor, not high-skilled foreign workers. However, there are two problems with this excuse.

First, the administration is pushing more low-skilled labor as forcefully as calling for more “high-skilled” labor, aka nothing more than entry-level IT and nursing jobs. The vice president and the agriculture secretary are rumored to be pushing for massive amnesty for illegal aliens working on farms and the creation of a permanent underclass of indentured servants on H2 visas that will depress wages beyond anything Trump warned on the campaign trail. Moreover, this administration has increased the existing H2 visas for low-skilled migrant workers more than any other administration – to the point that even Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., signed on to a bipartisan letter telling him to slow it down.

“Well, Americans just don’t want to do those jobs” is the typical mantra from purveyors of mass migration. The problem with that assertion is that our willing suspension of disbelief dissipates the minute these same people suddenly demand more giveaways for Indian workers in IT and nursing. Really? Americans can’t or don’t want to pursue basic white-collar jobs like that? So they don’t want blue-collar or white-collar jobs?

When seeking the votes of these very forgotten Americans, Trump’s campaign recognized the truth. “We graduate two times more Americans with STEM degrees each year than find STEM jobs, yet as much as two-thirds of entry-level hiring for IT jobs is accomplished through the H-1B program,” stated Trump’s immigration policy outline for the 2016 campaign.

Again, Trump understood the reality that the same way low-skilled foreign labor drives down hourly wages for blue-collar jobs, the endless supply of foreign IT labor will drive down annual salaries of entry-level white-collar jobs too.

“More than half of H-1B visas are issued for the program’s lowest allowable wage level, and more than eighty percent for its bottom two,” observed the Trump campaign white paper. “Raising the prevailing wage paid to H-1Bs will force companies to give these coveted entry level jobs to the existing domestic pool of unemployed native and immigrant workers in the U.S., instead of flying in cheaper workers from overseas.”

These are not hypersensitive specialties dealing with rocket science that are only magically found in other countries. These are entry-level IT, nursing, or almost any other white-collar job.

One would think that with record high immigration and visas, it would be enough. But no. Hiring Americans is not even an option when they have the boundless visa pork and the ability to lobby for more.

The Indian contract companies like Infosys, HCL, Wipro, Cognizant, and Tata have already successfully used the vast pipeline of H-1B, L-1, F-1,and Optional Practical Training (OPT) to own Silicon Valley and the American tech companies with a supply of cheap labor, boxing out Americans and treating the Indian recruits as indentured servants.

This is the same thing we are seeing with low-skilled labor. The same self-fulfilling prophecy of meat-packers only relying on African refugees and farm conglomerates only relying on Latin American laborers has created a culture and climate that is discriminatory toward Americans getting into the industry. Indian companies are using the “high-skilled” visas to do the same to Americans in everything from IT to banking.

As the Perry News reported this week regarding one Tyson Foods plant in Iowa, “The company currently employs 1,368 workers at the Perry plant, and about 800 of the employees are refugees, with 400 each of Africans and Asians. … Some nine languages are spoken among Tyson’s refugee workers.” Once such a dynamic is in place, manipulated by immigration policies that are harmful to the country for numerous other reasons, Americans have no ability to break into that culture, even putting the wage depression aside. Don’t think for a minute that this isn’t occurring in Silicon Valley too.

It’s for good reason that Congress banned contract labor immigration in 1891. Sections 3 and 4 of the Immigration Act of 1891 prohibited all companies and travel agencies from marketing or soliciting for any immigration with the promise of employment. Our Founders wanted productive Americans who would come to assimilate into our political system and work anywhere they wanted; they had no interest in running a foreign labor mill.

What is truly disgusting is that because the OPT program is completely lawless without statutory backing, the lobbyists who pushed for its creation benefit from their crime. OPT workers, who are largely foreign students remaining here indefinitely (illegally, according to statute) to work are hired without payroll taxes. So why would any company hire an American fresh out of college when they can hire a foreign student OPT counterpart and save 16% on payroll? Trump should immediately abolish the lawless OPT program, which he can do overnight the same way he can get rid of DACA. Then see what the labor market looks like.

As the Trump campaign wrote in 2016, “Every year, we voluntarily admit another 2 million new immigrants, guest workers, refugees, and dependents, growing our existing all-time historic record population of 42 million immigrants.” That number is now up to 45 million. The number of foreign-language-speaking residents is now over 68 million, roughly 20% of the population, and much higher in certain states and cities. We now bring in 1.3 million foreign students a year, which creates a pipeline for cheap labor to compete with Americans for jobs, as hundreds of thousands of them are given defector permanent status under the OPT program. As Neil Munro estimates, there are now one million contract workers just from India alone in this country who remain here indefinitely.

At what point is enough enough? As Trump said recently, “We’re full.”

Well, full should mean full.

The administration has already moved away from cutting the numbers, has moved away from the no-amnesty pledge, and has moved away from mandatory E-verify. Meanwhile, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has become the most popular governor by touting it and the proposal enjoys supermajority support.

What exactly happened to putting Americans first, and what exactly is waiting for us on the other side of this election? Inquiring minds would like to know. (For more from the author of “American Workers Last: WH Chief Of Staff Mulvaney Thinks Record Immigration Is Not Enough” please click HERE)

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Houston Career Criminal Released After Arrest For Murder Now Wanted… For Murder

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Rarely do we give victims the help they need or the attention they deserve. Yet the protection of our citizens — to guard them from becoming victims — is the primary purpose of our penal laws. Thus, each new victim personally represents an instance in which our system has failed to prevent crime. Lack of concern for victims compounds that failure.” ~Ronald Reagan, April 8, 1981, proclamation creating National Crime Victims Week.

Gerald Washington, 27, of Houston should be the poster child for criminal justice reform on behalf of victims of crime, but this is the side of the issue that is never discussed by the “reform” movement, which simply does not believe in incarceration.

29-year-old Reginald Larry was on his way to visit his grandmother last week when he stopped off at a corner store in Houston to get a drink. That’s when Houston police say Washington shot and killed him just outside the store with no apparent motive. He remains a fugitive as of this writing.

This could have happened to anyone else in the wrong place at the wrong time, but if we had true criminal justice reform that prioritizes public safety over criminal freedoms, Larry would be alive today.

Washington was already charged with murdering a woman and shooting two others, but he was released on bail. And he had a criminal history and parole violations before that murder, but was still granted bail. Here’s the criminal history, according to ABC13.

Washington was charged for two counts of burglary in 2018 but was given parole rather than prison time.

Despite violating the terms of his parole several times, he was not incarcerated.

On October 5, 2018, according to Harris County court records, Washington was charged with murder and with aggravated assault for shooting two other women. According to ABC13, “One of the victims told ABC13 she was shot so many times that she played dead. She was in the hospital for a month and in rehabilitation for two months. She said she was shot between six or seven times.” One would think someone like this would be held without bond, but he was released on $200,000 bond, which usually means the defendant only pays 10 percent in cash.

A search of Harris County court records also shows a criminal trespassing charge and assault resulting in bodily injury in 2013. He served just 30 days and was given parole. He also spent 45 days in jail in 2016 for evading arrest.

He was wearing an ankle bracelet during this past release on bond, but it evidently did not prevent him from shooting Larry. Police say he has cut off his ankle monitor since the murder last week and remains a fugitive.

It’s a known fact that ankle bracelets simply do not deter violent criminals if they are not incarcerated, and there are too few officers to monitor too many volatile criminals. Yet our entire justice system, along with the weight of dozens of well-funded “criminal justice reform” nonprofits, only have the concerns of people like Gerald Washington in mind with their policies, not people like Reginald Larry.

What this case also demonstrates is that the weak-on-crime judges and policies are not only native to blue states, but are alive and well in states like Texas, particularly in Harris County. In December, a female Houston police officer was allegedly killed by Tavores Dewayne Henderson, a man who openly bragged about avoiding jail time, despite his extensive criminal record in three counties. Then, even after the capital murder charge, he was initially offered $150,000 bond before it was revoked.

Harris County is following in the footsteps of New York by abolishing pretrial jail in most cases. In addition to the problem of releasing dangerous violent criminals, there is further concern from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that such policies will lead to the release of criminal aliens before ICE is able to apprehend them, in contravention to the state’s anti-sanctuary law.

This concern played out in real life when Emilio Duarte-Lone, an illegal alien from Honduras with a deportation order, was arrested for DWI in December, but was released by Harris County without being turned over to ICE. He, of course, failed to show up to his January 24 court hearing and remains a fugitive.

I often hear proponents of jailbreak policies dismiss our concerns of rising crime after 25 years of plummeting crime by suggesting that most of the murders taking place are gang-on-gang violence, as if law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear. But career criminals like Gerald Washington don’t necessarily discriminate in choosing their victims. Just ask the family of Reginald Larry. (For more from the author of “Houston Career Criminal Released After Arrest For Murder Now Wanted… For Murder” please click HERE)

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Roger Stone Files Motion To Disqualify Judge Over Her Statements At His Sentencing

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Attorneys for Roger Stone filed a motion Friday for the judge in his case to recuse herself from hearing his upcoming argument for a new trial, saying her statements praising the jury during his sentencing hearing should be disqualifying. . .

Stone is currently seeking a new trial after it was revealed that the lead juror in the trial against him made social media posts criticizing President Trump and celebrating Stone’s conviction. That juror, Tomeka Hart, was also a former pollical candidate with a history of activism for the Democratic Party.

Because Judge Berman-Jackson praised the jury, Stone’s attorneys argue, it is reasonable to question her impartiality in hearing his case for a new trial based on the apparent bias within the jury that convicted him.

(Read more from “Roger Stone Files Motion To Disqualify Judge Over Her Statements At His Sentencing” HERE)

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Female Prisoner Claims She Was Raped By A ​Transgender Inmate And That The Prison Covered It Up

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A female prisoner at the Logan Correctional Center in Illinois is suing the prison for reportedly covering up her alleged sexual assault at the hands of a transgender inmate last year.

The woman, who is identified as Jane Doe in the lawsuit, alleged that an inmate who “identifies as female, but still has male genitalia” was moved into her housing unit last summer and immediately began to “express interest” in her, according to a report by WTTW-TV.

In the lawsuit, she recalled that she was “terrified of this inmate as the inmate was much bigger and stronger” and because she had heard that the inmate “had assaulted prior cellmates and had been convicted of murder.”

The woman then said she was raped by the inmate, but that after she reported the incident to authorities only a “sham investigation” ensued.

The woman alleged that she was told by an officer “that he did not believe her and he pressured Plaintiff to say there was no sexual assault.” She said she was “coerced” into saying the encounter was consensual and soon after filed a grievance with the Illinois Department of Corrections. (Read more from “Female Prisoner Claims She Was Raped By A ​Transgender Inmate And That The Prison Covered It Up” HERE)

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Trump Edges Out All Top 2020 Democratic Candidates Except Sanders; Bernie Sanders Surges To A 15-point Lead Over Biden, Bloomberg

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By New York Post. Bernie Sanders is carrying a commanding double-digit lead over the other Democratic presidential contenders, according to a national poll released on Wednesday.

The Vermont senator garnered 32 percent of support from Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents — an increase of 8 percentage points from the same survey taken last month, the ABC News/Washington Post poll found.

His closest competition was former Vice President Joe Biden, whose support fell 11 points to 17 percent.

The disappointing results continue a nosedive for Biden, once the race’s overwhelming frontrunner.

In contrast to Biden, Mike Bloomberg’s good fortune continued as he gained 6 percentage points in the poll, coming in third place with 14 percent. (Read more from “Bernie Sanders Surges To A 15-point Lead Over Biden, Bloomberg” HERE)

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Trump Edges Out All Top 2020 Democratic Candidates Except Sanders

By The Hill. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is the only Democratic presidential contender to beat President Trump in a head-to-head match-up, according to a new Emerson College poll released Wednesday.

Sanders edges out Trump by a 51 percent-49 percent margin in the poll. Meanwhile, Trump leads former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg by 2 points. All those margins are within the poll’s margin of error of 2.7 percentage points.

Trump also leads former Vice President Joe Biden 52 percent-48 percent, an advantage outside the poll’s margin of error.

Support in the head-to-heads is sharply split along gender lines. Trump leads all five Democratic contenders by double digits among men, while every Democrat leads the president by double digits among women, except Biden, who has an 8-point edge.

The poll shows Trump with an above-water approval rating, with 48 percent of registered voters approving of the job he’s doing and 44 percent disapproving. His disapproval rate is the lowest it’s ever been in the Emerson College poll. (Read more from “Trump Edges Out All Top 2020 Democratic Candidates Except Sanders” HERE)

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82nd Airborne Soldiers Who Rapidly Deployed To Middle East In January Return To Fort Bragg

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Some 800 soldiers from an 82nd Airborne Division brigade that rapidly deployed into the Middle East early this year amid heightening tensions with Iran returned to Fort Bragg, N.C., on Thursday, Army officials said.

The soldiers were the first group of some 3,000 paratroopers with the 82nd’s 1st Brigade Combat Team rushed to Kuwait during the first week of January to bolster security for U.S. troops in the region after an American airstrike killed Iran’s most powerful general. Army officials described the deployment that required soldiers to leave within hours as the “most significant no notice deployment of combat forces” in three decades.

Fort Bragg officials said the 800 paratroopers welcomed home Thursday were greeted by family and friends at the Army post. Most of the returning soldiers were from the brigade’s 2nd Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, which was the first element to deploy.

That battalion deployed within 18 hours of receiving orders to the Middle East, Pentagon officials have said. The 82nd Airborne’s 1st Brigade Combat Team is now assigned as the U.S. military’s Immediate Response Force Brigade, a designation which makes the unit responsible for responding to any emergencies across the globe. Army officials have long stressed the rapid deployment capability is important to maintain, though rarely used. The last time was in 2010, when soldiers quickly deployed to Haiti following a devastating earthquake.

“As the centerpiece of the nation’s Immediate Response Force, it’s critical that 1st Brigade and the 82nd Airborne Division are able to project global force employment,” Col. Andrew Saslav, the commander of the 1st Brigade Combat Team, said in a prepared statement. “Working across combatant commands not only demonstrates the flexibility and expeditionary capability of our airborne forces, but also better prepares our paratroopers for the complexity of the modern global security environment.” (Read more from “82nd Airborne Soldiers Who Rapidly Deployed To Middle East In January Return To Fort Bragg” HERE)

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Trump’s Economy Is What Obama Always Wanted But Never Got

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When Barack Obama secured the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, he famously declared, “We will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide … good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

Looking back with 2020 hindsight (pun intended), Obama and everyone else in 2008 would be surprised to learn that significant improvements in the economy, inequality, and emissions would occur but that the public would credit them not to Obama’s eight-year tenure but to Donald Trump’s victory on Nov. 8, 2016.

On Monday, Obama took a not-so-subtle swipe at the Trump economy, crediting the 2009 Recovery Act for “paving the way for more than a decade of economic growth and the longest streak of job creation in American history.” In a timely coincidence, the White House Council of Economic Advisers released the annual Economic Report of the President on Thursday.

Acting CEA Chairman Tomas Philipson was not shy about rebuffing Obama’s claims about the economy. “Some claim that the historically strong economy is simply a continuation of the previous part of the expansion,” he told reporters. “However, and this is important, typically GDP and employment growth is much faster at the start of an economic expansion. … The current recovery differs from the past ones because growth was slow initially and has accelerated since the election in 2016, more than seven years into the recovery.”

While Obama hoped his presidency would change the plight of the jobless, it’s the Trump economy that has achieved what Obama dreamed of and never accomplished. One sign of this is that, during his term, forecasters did not expect or project continued expansion after he left office. In its last forecast before the 2016 election, the Congressional Budget Office projected that unemployment would rise between 2017 and 2019 and that labor force participation would continue its decline. The opposite happened. Unemployment fell to 50-year lows under Trump, and the great economy actually pulled people back into the labor force. (Read more from “Trump’s Economy Is What Obama Always Wanted But Never Got” HERE)

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