New Zealand military to oversee quarantine facilities after new COVID-19 case

New Zealand on Wednesday said the defence force will now oversee the country’s quarantine facilities and strengthen border requirements, after a slip up allowed two people with coronavirus to move around the country.

New Zealand on Tuesday lost its COVID-free status when two women who had been given permission to leave quarantine early on compassionate grounds after arriving from Britain tested positive for the coronavirus.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said she was appointing the Assistant Chief of Defence, Air Commodore Digby Webb, to oversee all quarantine and to manage isolation facilities, including the processes of exiting people from these facilities.

Ardern said Webb can seek access to military logistics, its operational expertise and, if needed, personnel, for running of the quarantine facilities.

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11 Trillion Reasons To Fear Joe Biden’s Presidency

By my calculation, there are at the very least 11 trillion reasons to worry about Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden. He’s the odds-on favorite to beat incumbent Donald Trump on November 3. Not only is the former vice president likely to win, but FiveThirtyEight predicts Democrats have a 74-in-100 chance of taking the Senate while holding the House of Representatives, meaning that he will have a great opportunity to deliver on all of his campaign promises, which add up to a mind-blowing total of $11 trillion in new federal spending over the coming decade. His “platform is more liberal than that of every past Democratic nominee,” writes The Washington Post.

That’s bad news not just for the economy but for a wide range of libertarian concerns about things such as individual autonomy, free speech, school choice, and gun rights. In last week’s debate with Trump, Biden warned that we are entering a “dark winter.” He was talking about rising COVID-19 cases, but his own platform is likely to keep us at home, out of work, and in a bad place for a long time to come.

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Trump Secretly Planned to Expand the Police State, Grant Unlimited Protections to Cops

A draft report from the Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice reveals the Trump administration’s plan to further expand the national police state, with an emphasis on supporting and expanding qualified immunity and facial recognition.

The president formed the commission via executive order in January. A federal judge recently blocked the release of the commission’s report due to a lack of diversity on the panel and evidence that it operated in secrecy in violation of public meeting laws.

The court order stemmed from a lawsuit filed by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (NAACP LDF). The suit claimed the commission failed to provide proper notice of public hearing and that it gave too much influence to law enforcement interests in violation of laws dictating how federal advisory committees must operate.

According to Reuters report, “The panel’s 18 commissioners include federal, state and local law enforcement representatives, but no civil rights advocates, defense attorneys or big-city police officials.”

Through an open records request, Reuters obtained a draft of the commission’s report, revealing a plan to further empower law enforcement in the United States. A New York Times op-ed declared, “The president’s commission was considering recommendations that could transform this nation into a dystopian police state.”

The report recommends increasing “due process” protections for police offers facing charges of misconduct, and called on the Justice Department to regularly affirm support for qualified immunity.

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