New York City Property Taxes Rise as Coronavirus Pushes Values Down

New York City property owners owe $1.65 billion more in property taxes than they did last year, despite a pandemic that has hobbled real-estate values.

A Wall Street Journal analysis of the latest city assessment rolls found that the industry's new tax bill will rise 5.7%. That is because the tax assessment date was Jan. 5, well before property values deteriorated in response to the March shelter-in-place orders that led numerous businesses to close and many tenants to withhold rent.

Property taxes are of central importance to New York City's budget.

The New York real estate community made a plea in recent weeks to persuade the city and state to freeze property taxes at the current level.

A spokeswoman for Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city realizes the impact the virus has had on the real estate community but added that "We must balance the very real needs of the City, which relies on property taxes to fund essential city services like hospitals and our first responders."

Because changes in assessments are phased in over many years, property taxes have continued to rise in good years and bad. The total New York City property tax levy has risen every year since 1997, even in the aftermath of the financial crisis in 2008, according to figures from the city's office of management and budget.

Under the mayor's proposed budget, for the fiscal year beginning July 1, other city taxes are due to fall by $5.3 billion, or about 15%, from current levels, including a $2 billion decline in the personal city income tax, while property tax collections are due to rise to $30.8 billion, according to the budget estimate.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-city-property-taxes-rise-as-coronavirus-pushes-values-down-11590926402?mod=hp_lead_pos10

The Mysterious Missing Link - Anti-Malaria Drug & Zinc

Criticism of the President rose sharply after a non-randomised study published in the Lancet said that HCQ provided no benefit to hospitalised Covid-19 patients while being linked to increased deaths.

What the mainstream media did not point out is that the Lancet study failed to test HCQ with zinc.

HCQ is said to work as a delivery systemfor zinc in fighting coronavirus.

Ironically, the Lancet study came out at the same time as it was reported that India's premier health body had expanded use of HCQ as a preventive for key workers following three studies showing positive results.

HCQ has been around for decades and is a 'safe' treatment for malaria and other conditions including lupus and arthritis.

Reports from France, Italy and Spain point to positive results from the use of HCQ, while a number of other countries are seeing success including Turkey, Costa Rica, Algeria, Belgium and Bahrain.

Why don't the media note that the combination of zinc and HCQ is crucial?

https://conservativewoman.co.uk/malaria-drug-and-zinc-the-missing-link/

Chinese cheating rampant in U.S. college applications, and in classrooms

Chinese students represent approximately one-third of all international students, and their presence has grown by 56.68 percent since the 2012-2013 academic year.

Unfortunately for U.S. colleges and universities, which have struggled to monitor and identify the fraud, reports seem to suggest that cheating only continues once many of these students are on campus or in the U.S. Schools like the University of Arizona, Ohio State University, and the University of Iowa have experienced cheating scandals involving Chinese students.

The federal government arrested Liu Cai, a Chinese student who attended UCLA, and four other California residents of Chinese descent for using fake passports to impersonate Chinese nationals to take the TOEFL exam, which is required to obtain a student visa.

Fulbeck began to realize that a significant number of students engaging in such behavior were Chinese international students.

Fulbeck later met with UC Santa Barbara's Vice-Chancellor and some aggrieved students, but ultimately blamed the school for failing to deal with the increasing number of Chinese students and educating them on American classroom and education standards.

Paul Spickard, a history professor at UC-Santa Barbara and member of the faculty admissions committee, told the L.A. Times that at a meeting, faculty were told that Chinese students account for one-third of all plagiarism cases on campus, despite only comprising 6 percent of the entire student population.

Spickard caught one Chinese student's plagiarism after the student used old British English colloquialisms and citations that were over 50 years old.

https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=14951

A half-million bogus, imported coronavirus items seized at nation's borders

Federal border authorities inspecting imported goods at ports of entry have blocked more than half a million counterfeit or prohibited items that claimed to treat and prevent the coronavirus.

Between the beginning of the pandemic in March and May 1, U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized 83,500 test kits, 425,000 face masks, 2,261 anti-virus lanyards, 8,700 chloroquine tablets, and 3,000 herbal medicine tablets that did not meet Food and Drug Administration and Environmental Protection Agency standards.

"We are detaining a significant amount of unapproved items that we're working very closely with our partners with the Feds to get those items approved to our first-line responders in their middle of this pandemic," Anthony Bucci, spokesman for CBP's New York region, told the Washington Examiner on Friday.

CBP officers at the New York field office found coronavirus tests and face masks in shipments of cargo received at John F. Kennedy International Airport or the international mail facility in Jersey City, New Jersey.

The coronavirus-related products being seized are sometimes ordered by first responders, sometimes even federal contractors, who mistakenly purchase them from a less than credible website, Bucci said, making it urgent to intercept them.

The medical items will be seized by CBP until FDA or other agencies can clear them as safe, then they will continue to their final destination, whereas marijuana or cocaine found in imported goods would be seized then destroyed.

In the case of the 425,000 face masks, they may be approved for one type of medical use but not specifically deemed by the FDA as efficient for healthcare workers treating coronavirus patients, Bucci said.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/a-half-million-bogus-imported-coronavirus-items-seized-at-nations-borders

Minnesota Rioters From Out of State Just Like Antifa and BLM

In a press conference Saturday, St. Paul, Minnesota Mayor Melvin Carter divulged that every person arrested the previous night came from out of state.

This mirrors previous riots by antifa and Black Lives Matter that featured professional protesters bused in from out of state into cities across America to foment violence.

Mayor Carter says he has been told that every person arrested in Saint Paul last night was from out of state https://t.

Because we had a relative stillness in St. Paul, we didn't make an enormous number of arrests, but every single person we arrested last night, I'm told, was from out of state.

2/Across the country, white privileged kids were caught on camera starting violent riot behavior in the midst of organized Black protests.

The Black community in MN is calling out white Antifa members for starting the riots and destroying their communities.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz says he suspects white supremacist groups and drug cartels are carrying out some of the violence in Minneapolis, but cannot confirm it at this time.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/jeff-reynolds/2020/05/30/mayor-minnesota-rioters-are-from-out-of-state-just-like-antifa-and-blm-riots-n467164

The Supreme Court Has a Chance To End Qualified Immunity and Prevent Cases Like George Floyd's

The killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer on Monday has reignited calls for national reforms to policing, including ending qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that civil liberties groups say has become a shield for grotesque police misconduct.

While some of the actions that criminal justice advocates are calling for-such as national use-of-force standards and limiting the power of police unions-would require large amounts of political capital, the issue of qualified immunity happens to be before the Supreme Court right now.

The Court considered 13 different petitions for cases involving qualified immunity at a conference hearing yesterday.

Qualified immunity, created by the Supreme Court in the 1970s, shields police and other government officials from liability in civil rights lawsuits when the illegality of their actions was not "Clearly established" at the time of the offense.

"We need legislation that specifically goes after qualified immunity and the additional protections offered to law enforcement officersWe want to make sure that the laws from a federal level, number one, that these cases are no longer handled solely locally, but that the federal government will be asked to come in in each of these cases or these states will be denied federal funds."

"Such a one-sided approach to qualified immunity transforms the doctrine into an absolute shield for law enforcement officers, gutting the deterrent effect of the Fourth Amendment," Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote.

Ending qualified immunity wouldn't end police brutality, but it would put departments and individual officers on notice that they can no longer brazenly harm and kill people without consequences.

https://reason.com/2020/05/29/the-supreme-court-has-a-chance-to-end-qualified-immunity-and-prevent-cases-like-george-floyds/

Leftists Working Overtime to Frame the Narrative on George Floyd Riots

As violent riots erupted in sections of Minneapolis over the death of George Floyd, Velshi insisted that the protests were basically peaceful.

Vox recently published an article by Morgan State University professor Jason Johnson titled "What we're missing when we condemn 'violence' at protests," which attempted to discount reality and explain away what our own eyeballs are seeing when we view the footage of the George Floyd protests unfolding across the country.

"[M]uch of the property damage attributed to protesters is often the result of police action or inaction in the face of lawful public behavior," Johnson stated, explaining that "Police munitions often start fires at protests."

Cops were throwing tear gas not at innocent black teens peacefully protesting the death of George Floyd on a quiet Minneapolis street, but because rioters had first vandalized, and then burned down, the Third Police Precinct.

The contrast between the George Floyd protests erupting in big cities across America and those protests against the lockdowns happening at state capitols couldn't be more stark.

"The George Floyd protests have been marred by outrageous acts of violence and destruction - so much so that governors have declared states of emergency and have called in the National Guard. All manner of businesses have been looted, vandalized, and set ablaze. As reported in the Atlanta Journal Constitution,"Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms had a blunt message to protesters who turned the streets of downtown Atlanta into scenes of violence and destruction late Friday: "Go home.'".

No looting of department stores, vandalizing of police stations, or throwing of bottles and trashcans at police, which unfortunately cannot be said of the George Floyd protests breaking out across America.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/leftists_working_overtime_to_frame_the_narrative_on_george_floyd_riots.html

Dem Senate Candidate Sat on Advisory Board of Company That Partnered With Chinese Tech Giant

Senate candidate Mark Kelly sat on the advisory board of and held a significant financial interest in a Colorado company that partnered with a Chinese state-financed tech giant to bring supersonic aerospace technology to China in 2018, according to his financial disclosure reports.

Kelly, a former NASA astronaut, served on the advisory board for Boom Technology, a high-speed aircraft company in Colorado from 2015 to 2019 and owned private stock in the company worth between $115,000 and $300,000 as of last year.

In 2018, Boom Technology partnered with the Shanghai-based travel company Trip.com Group Limited, formerly known as Ctrip, to help "Bring supersonic flight to China," according to a joint announcement from the companies.

World View Enterprises, a company he cofounded and holds investments in, received funding from Chinese tech company Tencent, the Washington Free Beacon reported last October.

A Kelly spokesman said the candidate was an adviser to Boom but never sat on the company's board, calling this a "Misleading" attack by supporters of Kelly's Republican rival Martha McSally.

Typically advisory boards exist alongside a company's formal corporate board and provide strategic advice to leadership.

A spokeswoman for Ctrip declined to comment on the company's financial relationship with the Chinese government or provide details on its partnership with Boom.

https://freebeacon.com/2020-election/dem-senate-candidate-sat-on-advisory-board-of-company-that-partnered-with-chinese-tech-giant/

This is a Result of Democrat Governance

See the picture above? It's a result of Democrat governance.

We are getting wall to wall coverage of the aftermath of the in-custody death of George Floyd.

Innocent people are being harmed, while at the same time, some are attempting to affix cause and blame for Mr. Floyd's death on the wrong parties.

According to the Minneapolis Police Policy Manual the restraint used was in policy and it also indicates that training is given to officers on the maneuver.

According to my good friend and colleague Brad Slager, Klobuchar, while a Hennepin County prosecutor, failed to indict Chauvin and several other Officers in a Police shooting and death of a citizen.

Finally, We find out that the most horrifically perceived part of the whole incident, a Police Officer's knee on a handcuffed arrestee who does not appear to be struggling, is actually a sanctioned "Non deadly" or "Non lethal" restraint technique.

Not only does Democrat governance own a piece, a large piece of Mr. Floyd's death, but such governance has also made it immeasurably harder to bring to justice, the man who was likely responsible for his death.

https://www.redstate.com/darth641/2020/05/31/opinion-this-is-the-face-of-democrat-governance/

Biden Campaign Staffers, Celebrities Donate Funds to Help Bail Out Rioters Arrested in Minneapolis

At least 13 members of 2020 candidate Joe Biden's campaign have donated to a far-left group that bails out rioters who have been arrested from Minneapolis and potentially other Democrat run cities across the country.

At least 13 members of Joe Biden's campaign staff have made donations to a group that helps Minneapolis protesters get out of jail on bail, according to a report.

The staffers posted on Twitter that they contributed money to a group called the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which opposes the practice of making people who are arrested pay money to avoid pre-trial imprisonment, Reuters reported.

Biden himself opposes cash bail, comparing it to a "Modern day debtors prison," campaign spokesman Andrew Bates told Reuters.

The campaign would not comment on whether the staffers' donations were made in coordination with the former vice president's campaign, the report said.

Celebrities who've helped spread the word about the group include singer and actress Janelle Monae and actor Seth Rogan, both of whom have pledged to match donations, Forbes reported.

One of the biggest problems with the campaign of so called moderate Joe Biden is that so many of his staffers are far, far left.

https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/biden-campaign-staffers-celebrities-donate-funds-help-bail-rioters-arrested-minneapolis