With a third wave of coronavirus infections sweeping the nation, Germany has reimposed its lockdown protocols in an attempt to control the spread of the virus, NBC News reports.

After experiencing the bottom of a dip one month ago, the seven-day running averages of new cases in Germany has rebounded to double the most recent low point, with the average increasing about 70% in the past five weeks as the British variant has swept through Europe.

“We are now basically in a new pandemic. The British mutation has become dominant,” Chancellor Angela Merkel told a news conference.  “Fundamentally, we face a new virus of the same kind but with very different characteristics. More deadly, more infectious, and infectious for longer.”

As we mark 11 years since the historic passage of the Affordable Care Act, Democrats renew our commitment to strengthen and expand its lifesaving protections to lower health costs and prescription drug prices for all Americans. https://t.co/gfYo4t4elW

— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) March 23, 2021

Montana Republican Governor Greg Gianforte was cited by his state’s wildlife bureau after he illegally trapped and killed a wolf outside Yellowstone National Park on the property of the owner of Sinclair Broadcasting, Boise State Public Radio reported.

The adult black wolf, designated as 1115 by wildlife resource trackers, was about 10 miles outside the bounds of Yellowstone where wolves are protected from hunters.  Gianforte reportedly laid a trap to capture the animal, a six-year-old male, before shooting and killing it.

The trap, which was laid on property owned by Sinclair Broadcasting owner Robert Smith, was placed illegally because Gianforte did not have the proper license nor had he completed a state-mandated class on how to humanely trap and hunt wolves. 

In the wake of the second mass murder with one week, President Joe Biden called for tighter gun control laws and called on the Senate to pass two measures passed by the House to curb gun violence, USA Today reports.

“I don’t need to wait another minute, let alone an hour, to take common sense steps that will save the lives in the future and to urge my colleagues in the House and Senate to act,” Biden said, speaking from the White House State Dining Room. “We can ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines in this country once again.”

The Senate, however, seems unlikely to push the House legislation, with Republicans on the Judiciary Committee voicing opposition to any restrictions even in the wake of two mass murders.  The hearing was scheduled before the Monday massacre in Boulder.

“These are bills that received votes with both Republicans and Democrats in the House. This is not and should not be a partisan issue,” Biden said.  “This is an American issue that will save lives, American lives. And we have to act. We should also ban assault weapons in the process.”

CNN: “Donald Trump has set the price of admission for Republicans in the midterm elections, and probably the next presidential race: an embrace of the big lie that he was cheated out of office by a historic voter fraud operation. The former President’s effort to turn 2022 polls into a personal revenge mission and to replenish his personality cult got a big boost Monday when a comrade-in-arms, Rep. Mo Brooks, launched an Alabama US Senate run. Brooks is the latest Republican to seek to leverage his efforts to thwart a democratic election as a springboard for higher office. He led a push in the House to block the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory after telling Trump supporters at the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally that turned into the Capitol insurrection on January 6: ‘Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass.’ Even Brooks admitted Monday that his campaign launch rally in Huntsville, Alabama, would not be quite so hyper. But he built the foundation for his run on proven falsehoods just the same.”

“Other outspoken pro-Trump Republican candidates are considering or have launched Senate campaigns in states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania where more GOP incumbents are retiring. Proteges of the ex-President are lining up challenges against some of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach him for inciting an unprecedented and deadly insurrection designed to destroy basic US democratic principles. The former President signaled to potential GOP candidates the price of his endorsement when he reemerged at the Conservative Political Action Conference this month, where he warned that Republicans needed to back an end to mail-in voting and called out GOP lawmakers who had voted to impeach him by name. The former President’s shadow in 2022 will ensure that yet another election will be dominated by his pernicious claims that voting in America is corrupt – with all the consequent damage to US democracy that brings.”

https://youtu.be/I1UQKj-IeuA

Louisiana Republican Senator and character rejected from the “Andy Griffith Show” for just being too absurd John Kennedy called on his Senate Judiciary Committee to act with restraint and put “in perspective” the second mass murder to happen in the US in less than a week.

Law enforcement authorities identified the other nine victims of yesterday’s shooting rampage at a Boulder, Colorado supermarket that left ten people dead, including a Boulder Police officer.

According to CBS News, the nine civilian victims were all between the ages of 20 and 65:  Tralona Bartkowiak, 49; Suzanne Fountain, 59; Teri Leiker, 51; Kevin Mahoney, 61; Lynn Murray, 62; Rikki Olds, 25; Neven Stanisic, 23; Denny Strong, 20; and Jody Waters, 65.  Boulder Police officer, 51-year-old Eric Talley, had been identified yesterday.

The shooter was named as Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, a 21-year-old from Arvada, Colorado.  Alissa was wounded in the incident and is getting treatment in a local hospital; he will be transferred Boulder County Jail once he is medically cleared.  No motive has been determined.

At least fifteen were killed in a massive fire at a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh, leaving tens of thousands homeless, 550 injured and more than 400 missing in southeastern Bangladesh town of Cox’s Bazar, the Washington Post reports.

Louise Donovan, a spokeswoman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Cox’s Bazar, said that at least 10,000 shelters were damaged and that nearly 45,000 people were displaced.

The Rohingya are a stateless ethnicity originally from Myanmar who have been fleeing to Bangladesh since the late 1970s as Myanmar (previously known as Burma) has undergone regular political strife during which the Rohingya people were persecuted.

A woman in California was attacked by a man with a knife Monday afternoon while on a Zoom call with a work associate, who called 9-1-1 to alert police.  According to NBC News, police arrived on the scene to find a man and a woman stabbed to death.

Police found the body of a man in the front yard of the home and the woman’s body was inside.  Neighbors told them that the couple’s car was missing.  The victims have not been identified, but police said the couple were in their 60s and lived in Altadena.

While police were on the scene, Robert Cotton, 32, drove up in the missing car saying that he lived at the residence.  Police took him into custody and was booked on two counts of murder.

A fire broke out in an assisted living facility 30 miles north of New York City early Tuesday morning, leaving one resident dead and one firefighter missing, the Associated Press reports.

Fire broke out at Evergreen Court Home for Adults in the Rockland County community of Spring Valley, with staff able to get the majority of 100 to 125 residents to safety; authorities were trying to determine exactly how many people were in the building.

A firefighter was attempting to rescue a resident on the third floor of the building when he issued a “mayday” call.  Other firefighters attempted to reach him but were pushed back by flames.  Video shows the second floor collapsing before an entire section of the building fell to the ground.

Daily Beast: “Before Brandon Straka was storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, he was a hair-dressing, #WalkAway-tweeting MAGA influencer – taking in tens of thousands of dollars in government pandemic money. According to The Daily Beast’s review of records from the Project on Government Oversight’s Covid Tracker, Straka is one of at least nine individuals facing charges stemming from the Capitol riots who received special coronavirus funds through small business loan programs over the last year. And Straka is far from the only notable insurrectionists among the group. Collectively, these business owners took in more than $227,000 from three small business relief initiatives – the Paycheck Protection Program, Economic Injury Disaster Loans, or Disaster Assistance Loans – and they are facing charges ranging from entering a restricted building to assaulting police officers with a deadly weapon. In Straka’s case, he personally received $20,800 in PPP funds and got an additional $12,354 in PPP money for the WalkAway Foundation.”

“Straka, the founder of the #WalkAway movement that encourages Democrats to vote Republican, has more than half a million Twitter followers and claims to have been a devoted Democrat before Donald Trump’s election. But a 2019 review by Gay City News found that Straka – who is gay – never once donated to a Democrat and only once voted in a Democratic primary since 2004. Straka is charged with impeding a law-enforcement officer during civil disorder, knowingly entering restricted grounds, and disorderly conduct with intent to disturb a hearing before Congress. Another high-profile loan recipient, Dominic Pezzola, is facing some of the stiffest charges of any insurrectionist. Pezzola, a member of the far-right Proud Boys, broke a window into the Capitol and was one of the very first rioters to breach the building. He also stole a police officer’s riot shield and is facing 11 charges, including confronting Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman.”

“James Huntsman, son of a prominent Mormon family from Utah, filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday accusing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints of fraud, saying it spent members’ tithes meant for charity on commercial purposes. In the suit, Huntsman says he wants back millions of dollars he donated and plans to give it to ‘organizations and communities whose members have been marginalized by the Church’s teachings and doctrines, including by donating to charities supporting LGBTQ, African-American, and women’s rights.’ The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, comes 16 months after a former high-level investment manager with the church filed a whistleblower complaint to the Internal Revenue Service. The complaint, which The Washington Post obtained in December 2019, alleged that the Church amassed about $100 billion in accounts intended for charitable purposes and misled members by stockpiling surplus donations using the tax-exempt donations to prop up a pair of businesses.”

“Huntsman, 50, runs a film distribution firm in Southern California. He stepped down in 2016 as an executive with Huntsman Corp., a massive chemical supplier his father founded in 1970. Jon Huntsman Sr., who died in 2018, was a billionaire industrialist and philanthropist in Utah. James’s brother Jon Huntsman Jr. was a Utah governor, presidential candidate and an ambassador to Russia, China and Singapore. In the suit, Huntsman says after the reports of the fund came out, he ‘repeatedly approached the corporation and demanded the return of his donations. However, the LDS Corporation refused, effectively taking the position that it could do whatever it wanted with tithing funds'” – Washington Post.

My prayers are with the shoppers, employees, first responders & others affected by the shooting in Boulder.

May God be with them.

While we are still awaiting important information and details in this case, random public shootings & senseless acts of violence are never ok.

— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) March 22, 2021

Washington Post: “Almost as soon as she opened a politically charged investigation in 2019 into whether the Trump White House blocked hurricane relief to a devastated Puerto Rico, the internal watchdog at the Department of Housing and Urban Development ran into obstacles. HUD demanded that their attorneys sit in on witness interviews, a tactic inspectors general said was unusual and could shape witness testimony. White House officials told top agency appointees to withhold their communications, documents and interviews show. Other records took months to obtain. Four months after Donald Trump’s defeat, Inspector General Rae Oliver Davis still hasn’t announced whether her investigators found that Trump inappropriately held up federal disaster aid from an island reeling from a brutal hurricane. It’s far from the only politically sensitive work by government watchdogs – mandated by Congress to monitor federal agencies for waste, fraud and misconduct – that faced roadblocks or otherwise were dragged out during the Trump era.”

“Across the government, at least nine key oversight investigations were impeded by clashes with the White House or political appointees, people familiar with inspector general offices and public documents show. Long-anticipated reports were released only this month on two senior Trump officials. One found evidence that Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao may have misused her position by repeatedly deploying her staff on personal business. A second concluded that former White House physician Ronny Jackson bullied his staff and drank on the job. The timing meant their damaging disclosures emerged only after the former president left office and Jackson, a former Navy rear admiral, was elected to Congress from Texas. Tensions between federal watchdogs and the administration they monitor are not uncommon. But 11 inspectors general or their senior aides who served under Trump, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal government deliberations, said hostility to oversight reached unprecedented levels during his time in office.”

https://youtu.be/05FGGfFy8IM

Florida Man and rejected first attempt by Dr. Frankenstein Matt Gaetz, a Republican Congressman, was apparently worried about his son/not son Nestor going on a Spring Break trip during a pandemic.  Gaetz, who just announced the existence of his “son” last June, says that he lives with the boy, but Gaetz has not adopted Nestor, although he apparently used to sleep with the boy’s sister.

As we continue to hear the news coming out of Boulder, I’m praying for the police, first responders, and those affected by this tragedy.

May God be with us as we make sense of this senseless violence, and may we unify and not divide during this time.

— Rep. Lauren Boebert (@RepBoebert) March 22, 2021

https://youtu.be/D1A8WeBZgYE

Reportedly, ten people including a police officer were killed by a gunman in a mass murder in Boulder, Colorado–a story that led the CNN and MSNBC 9 p.m. (ET) primetime shows.  On Fox News, Sean Hannity spent a total of 17 seconds on it at the top of his show, opting to dedicate his opening segment to a three-day old story of President Joe Biden tripping on stairs going to Air Force One as he continues to push a false narrative that Biden is mentally declining, an obvious attempt to deflect from Donald Trump’s sociopathy and mental illnesses. 

A tweet from the National Rifle Association celebrating the overturning of a ban on AR-15 style assault rifles less than a week ago is coming under new scrutiny after a gunman walked into a supermarket and killed at least six people, including a police officer, reportedly using an AR-15 style assault rifle.

ICYMI: A Colorado judge gave law-abiding gun owners something to celebrate.

In an @NRAILA-supported case, he ruled that the city of Boulder’s ban on commonly-owned rifles (AR-15s) and 10+ round mags was preempted by state law and STRUCK THEM DOWN. https://t.co/wmdhGG16pc

— NRA (@NRA) March 16, 2021

CNN: “Eric Spinato, the head booker and senior story editor for the Fox Business Network, died over the weekend, the network said Monday. Spinato worked at Fox for nearly 20 years. He joined the network in 1998, before briefly leaving in 2004 to work at CNN and MSNBC. He returned to Fox in 2007 and worked at the company ever since, working primarily with Maria Bartiromo. Fox Business host David Asman reported on Spinato’s death Monday afternoon.”

“In a memo sent to employees Monday, Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott, Fox News president Jay Wallace, and Fox Business president Lauren Petterson said Spinato’s contributions to the company ‘were immeasurable.’ ‘Eric was an immensely gifted and aggressive booker and was renowned for booking the innumerable ‘gets’ we’ve seen on both FNC and FBN over the years,’ they wrote. ‘He was also always willing to lend a hand to help a colleague, mentor union staffers or troubleshoot an issue – countless bookers throughout the industry learned the ropes and the tools of the trade from Eric at one point or another in their careers.'”

The sadistic piece of shit also made his expected Senate run official on Monday: “Former Missouri GOP Gov. Greitens announces bid for state’s open Senate seat“