'Rioters in Portland set fire to a federal courthouse Wednesday night as nightly violence continues to rock the city and local officials call for federal law enforcement agents deployed by the Trump administration to leave.

More than 1,000 protesters congregated near the Justice Center and Federal Courthouse downtown and threw incendiary devices over the fence around the federal courthouse, which resulted in a large fire. Protests and rioting in Portland have been nearly constant since the May 25 death of George Floyd that sparked national outrage and demonstrations across the country.

Some protests have been peaceful, but demonstrators who remain on the streets after dark have engaged in property destruction, throwing rocks at police, marking buildings with graffiti, and earlier this month briefly set another courthouse on fire.

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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/rioters-set-fire-to-federal-courthouse-in-portland/

'The New York Times on Wednesday published an op-ed by a Chinese scientist without noting that the professor has taken credit for helping create the Thousand Talents Program, which funds the work of foreign scientists in exchange for their agreeing to share information about their work with Beijing.

In his Times op-ed, Yi Rao, a neuromolecular biologist at Peking University, lamented the death of his uncle in New York during the coronavirus pandemic. Yi claimed that his uncle would have survived if he had been in Wuhan, where the pandemic began and where residents have said the death toll may have reached as high as 40,000.

The Times did not disclose that Peking University, where Yi teaches, has cracked down on dissent and deepened its ties to the Chinese Communist Party since 2018.

Yi stated in a February Times article that he proposed the Thousand Talents Program, by which the Chinese government funds research grants for scientists. The U.S. government has charged a number of researchers participating in the program with intellectual property theft, while the head of Harvard’s chemistry department was indicted in January for failing to disclose his ties to the program.

“While association with a Talent Program is not illegal, it can create incentives to steal, violate export controls, or (at a minimum) conflicts of interest,” John Demers, chief of the national security division at the Justice Department, said in November.

The Times also did not disclose that Yi has been denied a visa to enter the U.S. despite multiple applications since 2016. The reasons for the denials were not given by the U.S. government.

Yi has been harshly critical of the U.S. response to the coronavirus, and has mocked President Trump’s handling of the crisis on his blog on the Caixin website, 40 percent of which is controlled by a state-owned media conglomerate.

“On June 5, 1981, AIDS was reported in the US for the first time,” Yi wrote in one post. “According to the ‘stable genius’s’ logic, shouldn’t AIDS be called American Sexually Transmitted Disease, and HIV the American Sexually Transmitted Virus?” (President Trump has referred to the coronavirus as the “China virus” or “Wuhan virus,” a term proposed by deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger to counter China’s attempts to cover up its failure to control the initial outbreak.)

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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/nyt-publishes-op-ed-by-chinese-professor-who-mocked-trump-by-calling-aids-american-sexually-transmitted-disease-in-post-on-propaganda-outlet/

'Defrocked ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who is already the subject of a Vatican sexual abuse investigation, now faces new allegations that he allegedly ran a “sex cabal” out of his New Jersey beach house.

In a newly filed lawsuit, an unnamed victim claims McCarrick, now 90 years old, and three other priests molested him beginning when he was 14-years-old during overnight stays at McCarrick’s Jersey Shore house in 1982.

“In the night, with the assistance of others, McCarrick would creep into this kid’s bed and engage in criminal sexual assault of him, whispering, ‘It is OK,’” Jeff Anderson, the attorney for the now 53-year-old victim, said at a virtual press conference Wednesday.

The victim’s attorneys described a scheme of sexual abuse involving at least seven children over dozens of years. Other priests served as “procurers” to bring victims to McCarrick at his beach house where he “assigned sleeping arrangements, choosing his victims from the boys, seminarians and clerics present at the beach house,” and paired victims with adult clerics, the suit alleges.

The suit also details abuse the victim experienced at the hands of priests Michael Walters and John Laferrera, who were permanently removed from ministry, and the late Gerald Ruane — all three of whom were on a list of 188 clergy in the state accused of sexual misconduct, NJ.com reported.

Anderson said priests and others under the control of McCarrick engaged in “open and obvious criminal sexual conduct” that was kept cloaked by the church.

“That continued for 50 years until McCarrick, having been publicly exposed, was ultimately defrocked,” he said.

The suit was filed Tuesday in New Jersey Superior Court in Middlesex County against the Diocese of Metuchen where McCarrick served as bishop, the Archdiocese of Newark where he was archbishop, and several New Jersey schools the victim attended.

The victim, described as having been raised in a devout Roman Catholic family, attended St. Francis Xavier in Newark and Essex Catholic in East Orange.

The lawsuit also describes sexual abuse experienced at St. Francis Xavier, when the victim was an 11-year-old altar boy, by Father Anthony Nardino, and at Essex Catholic by Brother Andrew Thomas Hewitt, the then-principal. Hewitt died in 2002, according to an online obituary. Nardino, who has not been publicly accused before, has left the ministry, NJ.com reported.

Last year, Pope Francis defrocked McCarrick, making him the highest-ranking official in the church to ever be stripped of a title, after a church investigation found he sexually abused minors and adult seminarians. McCarrick has been accused of sexual abuse by James Grein, the first child he baptized, who said McCarrick began molesting him at 11-years-old.

John Bellocchio, a former Catholic schoolteacher and principal, alleged in a lawsuit that McCarrick sexually assaulted him when he was the archbishop of Newark.

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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/lawsuit-claims-ex-cardinal-theodore-mccarrick-ran-beach-house-sex-ring/

'Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot expressed agreement with President Trump’s plan to deploy federal police to the city during a Wednesday evening phone call with the president, according to the mayor’s office.

Trump has ordered the Department of Homeland Security to send 200 officers to Chicago, which recorded an abnormally high number of shootings over the past two months, to quell the surging. The unrest in Chicago differs in kind from that in Portland, Ore., which has seen continuous rioting and destruction of city and federal property over the same period.

Lightfoot had previously rejected the deployment of federal police in Chicago, writing on Twitter on Tuesday, “Under no circumstances will I allow Donald Trump’s troops to come to Chicago and terrorize our residents.”

Trump “reached out to Mayor Lightfoot this evening to confirm that he plans to send federal resources to Chicago to supplement ongoing federal investigations pertaining to violent crime,” the mayor’s office said on Wednesday in a statement to the Chicago Sun-Times. “Mayor Lightfoot maintains that all resources will be investigatory in nature and be coordinated through the U.S. Attorney’s office. The Mayor has made clear that if there is any deviation from what has been announced, we will pursue all available legal options to protect Chicagoans.”

Federal officers drew media criticism after demonstrators in Portland reported being grabbed off the street by unidentified federal law enforcement and brought to other locations. DHS head Chad Wolf has said the officers were in fact identifiable and has criticized demonstrators as “rioters” and “anarchists.”

The deployment of federal police in the city will be overseen by U.S. Attorney John Lausch, whom Lightfoot knows from her tenure as a former federal prosecutor.

“This is not patrol. This is not against civil unrest,” Lausch said. “This is working with the Chicago Police Department to do what we can to reduce the staggering violent crime we’re facing right now.”

Even after the announcement, Lightfoot said on Thursday that “The president has been on a campaign now for some time against Democratic mayors across the country.”

During riots that followed the death of George Floyd during his arrest by Minneapolis police officers, Chicago city council members criticized Lightfoot for refusing to deploy the National Guard outside the city’s business district.

“My ward is a s–t show,” complained Alderwoman Susan Sadlowski-Garza in a conference call. “They are shooting at the police. I have never seen the likes of this. I’m scared.”

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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/chicago-mayor-agrees-with-trump-to-allow-deployment-of-federal-police-to-chicago/