The global persecution of Christians has reached unprecedented levels: “260 million Christians experience high levels of persecution” around the world, notes the recently published Open Doors World Watch List 2020, an annual report that ranks the top 50 countries where Christians are most persecuted for their faith.
Additionally, “2,983 Christians were killed for faith-related reasons. On average, that’s 8 Christians killed every day for their faith”: “9,488 churches or Christian buildings were attacked,” and “3,711 Christians were detained without trial, arrested, sentenced and imprisoned.” (Note: All quotes in this article are from the World Watch List 2020 report.)
Dictatorial paranoia continues to make North Korea (#1) the worst nation. “If North Korean Christians are discovered, they are deported to labor camps as political criminals or even killed on the spot.”
Otherwise, and as has been the case in all statistics and reports on the global persecution of Christians, not only does “Islamic oppression” remain the chief “source of persecution” faced by Christians in seven of the absolute ten worst nations, but 38 of the 50 nations composing the list are either Muslim-majority or have a sizeable Muslim population.
The overwhelming majority of these Muslim nations are governed by some form of shari’a (Islamic law). It is either directly enforced by government or society or, more frequently, both, though societies — family members in particular — tend to be more zealous in its application. Brief summaries of the seven Muslim nations making the top ten follow:
Afghanistan (#2) is “an Islamic society where Christianity exists in secret.” Not only is it “illegal for an Afghan person to leave Islam,” but family members are often first to attack or kill them.
In Somalia (#3), “[c]onversion to Christianity is regarded as a betrayal”; ” family members and clan leaders will harass, intimidate and even kill” converts. Al Shabaab, “the youth,” an Islamic group, slaughters Christians “on the spot when discovered.”
In Libya (#4), “There is no freedom of speech, no equal treatment of Christians, no recognition of the church and no churches being built.”
Pakistan (#5) “is afflicted by numerous radical Islamic groups,” which “regularly target” churches. More generally and in the eyes of both government and people, “Christians are regarded as second-class citizens. Also, the country’s anti-blasphemy laws are disproportionately applied against the Christian minority — making it difficult and dangerous to live out one’s faith in public.”
In Sudan (#7), “the government has arrested or intimidated many Christian leaders, and numerous churches have been demolished. Extremists have attacked Christians, especially in the Nuba Mountain region, where thousands of Christians have been killed or displaced.”
In Yemen (#8), civil “war has allowed radical Islamic groups to expand their operations in certain areas, leading to Christians being abducted and killed. Open church activities are forbidden and leaving Islam is forbidden. Muslims who decide to follow Jesus could face the death penalty.”
In Iran (#9), which “is governed by Islamic law,… the rights and professional possibilities for Christians are heavily restricted…. [I]t is illegal to produce Christian literature or hold church services in Farsi. Converts from Islam face persecution from the government.”
Some notable trends are also on the rise. Christians in sub-Saharan Africa are “increasingly under threat from Islamic extremist groups”:
In Burkina Faso (No. 28, a rise of 33 spots from 2019), long-known for its religious tolerance, Christians say they are in a fight for survival. Dozens of Catholic priests have been killed, and Protestant pastors and their families have been killed or kidnapped by violent Islamic militants. In Mali (No. 29), the president said in late 2018 that his country’s existence is under threat because of Islamic jihadists. Central African Republic (No. 25) is in constant upheaval partially due to the fighting of rebel Islamic militants, many of whom target Christians. And Cameroon (No. 48) faces violence in the north—still a stronghold of Boko Haram [which, along with Muslim Fulani herdsmen, are slaughtering Christians in Nigeria, #12].
Militant Islam has also arisen in unexpected areas. “In Sri Lanka (No. 30, up from 46 in 2019) 250 people died and more than 500 were injured in attacks on Catholic and Protestant churches and hotels on Easter Sunday.” Maldives (#14)—popularly recognized as a beautiful island nation and tourist destination—is a bastion of shari’a:
The Maldives’ constitution requires all citizens to be Muslim. Conversion from Islam means that someone can be stripped of their citizenship and punished under Shariah law. Even foreign workers who are Christians are closely watched, which makes church life extremely difficult and practically non-existent. Churches are outlawed, and openly carrying the Bible is illegal. The country is so tightly controlled by Islamic law that there is not even a Bible fully translated into the native language of most citizens of the Maldives.
Algeria worsened by five sports — going from #22 last year to #17 in 2020 — due to “the seemingly systemic closure of Protestant churches. In some of these cases, Christians were forcibly expelled by police in the middle of church services. Pressure from family also remains high, particularly for Christians who were previously Muslim.”
Aside from “Islamic oppression,” the targeting of Christians around the world has become more widespread than ever. Part of this is because “persecution against Christians has taken a technological turn.” For example, in India (#10) — where “Hindu radicals often attack Christians with little to no consequences” — “the government plans to introduce a national facial recognition system. There were at least 447 verified incidents of violence and hate crimes against Christians in India… There is fear that more tracking could increase these attacks.”
Similarly, China (#23) — which seeks to make all religions, including Christianity, “fall in line with their interpretation of communism” — is “rolling out a country-wide Social Credit System (SCS) by which authorities plan to reward ‘good’ citizenship and punish ‘bad'”:
Already, one community has reportedly decided to add penalties for those who “illegally spread Christianity.” It’s easy to see how surveillance technology could be used in tandem with the SCS to make everyday life very difficult for anyone the Chinese government deems insufficiently “Chinese” — including Christians.
Perhaps the most disturbing trend is that the number of persecuted Christians continues to grow year after year: “260 million Christians experience high levels of persecution,” says the new 2020 report. This represents a 6% increase from 2019; then, 245 million Christians were persecuted — and that was a 14% increase from 2018, when 215 million was the number.
Will this trend ever stop and reverse, or will it continue to get worse — and possibly even spill into those nations that, for now, enjoy religious freedom and equality?
In the 1940s and 50s, advocating Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism could get you fired from your job, blacklisted, deplatformed and even imprisoned. Though communists and socialists were instrumental in the struggles of the 1930s and 40s that built the industrial labor movement in the U.S., by the late 1940s those radical ideas were vilified and virtually outlawed.
Communism was purposely conflated with the crimes of Stalin. Communists and socialists were driven out of the unions. A layer of union bureaucrats that supported the witch-hunt was promoted. For fear of reprisals, many radicals kept quiet and self-censored. Some “recanted” socialist beliefs. Some fingered others to save themselves.
The poison unleashed by that witch-hunt dealt a body blow to the labor movement and its devastating effects are felt to this day. It’s no coincidence that the U.S. is the only major capitalist country with no independent labor party, no universal healthcare, no federally mandated vacation and no parental leave.
After a time, the leader of the anti-communist witch-hunt, Joseph McCarthy, was discredited and the formal apparatus for pursuing the campaign was dismantled. But the damage had already been done.
Moreover, McCarthyism was so effective in house-breaking the labor movement that the tool would never be permanently abandoned by the powers that be. It was merely set aside, to be resurrected again once the need arose and memory of its corrosive cost faded.
Two key features of McCarthyism are thought control and guilt-by-association.
Certain ideas are ruled out of bounds.
Anyone who defends the censored ideas or questions the censorship regime itself is harshly dealt with.
Anyone defending or associating with someone accused of running afoul of the thought police is dealt with just has harshly. The net result is generalized fear, self-censorship and compliance.
Fast forward to 2016. The Democratic Party manipulated its own presidential primary process to ensure that neoliberal warmonger and Wall Street servant Hillary Clinton ran against odious billionaire Donald Trump. And the Democrats lost!
Rather than engage in any self-examination to determine why a career Democratic politician lost to a Republican gameshow host, the Democrats concocted the Russiagate conspiracy.
Trump, we were told, colluded with Russia to steal the election. The evidence for this was razor-thin, but anyone who questions the narrative is smeared as a Russian agent or Putin apologist. Anyone associated with or speaking in defense of someone smeared as a Russian collaborator is denounced and attacked as well. A new McCarthyism blossomed.
Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s multi-year investigation into the affair concluded that “…the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government…” But the smears, evidence-free charges and witch-hunt associated with Russiagate persist to this day. Many on the liberal “left” – from Democracy Now! to the New York Times – bought into and continue to promote this baseless conspiracy.
Meanwhile, another McCarthyite witch-hunt has spread like wildfire. This one proclaims that people can be born into the “wrong” body and denounces anyone who questions this belief as a reactionary bigot. Sadly, in this case, the socialist, as well as the liberal left, has jumped onto the McCarthyite bandwagon.
Trans identified males are biological males who think of themselves as females. Trans identified females are biological females who think of themselves as males. No democratic-minded person questions the right of everyone, including transgender individuals, to their own beliefs, behaviors and lifestyle preferences, free from bigotry or discrimination.
But extreme transgender ideology goes a step further.
It demands not only support for the civil rights of trans people but insists that everyone must also embrace the beliefs of trans extremists.
Not only is the imposition of the belief of one group a violation of the democratic rights of others, this particular belief has negative implications for the rights of women, gays, lesbians and children:
Gays and lesbians are accused of bigotry if they insist on choosing partners based on biological sex rather than gender.
Minor children experiencing gender dysphoria are steered toward life-altering surgeries and hormone treatments, even though 80-90% of childhood gender dysphoria resolves itself naturally after puberty, and a many untreated, formerly dysphoric children grow up to be healthy gays and lesbians.
To question extreme trans ideology today is to be denounced, de-platformed, fired, face death threats and physical attack. As with all McCarthyite campaigns, thoughts which question the orthodoxy are ruled out of order. Anyone raising censored thoughts is persecuted and isolated.
In this way, facts and material reality are jettisoned. In this manner, those promoting extreme transgender ideology avoid having to make their case; they simply rule any contrary facts and opinions out of bounds. So, the following facts are deemed heretical, bigoted and in need of suppression:
Sex and gender are not synonyms.
Biological sex is objective and real, while gender is a subjective social construct.
There is no such thing as a distinctly male or female brain.
There are only two sexes because there are only two gametes. One sex (male) is optimized to produce small, mobile gametes. The other sex (female) is optimized to produce large, immobile gametes.
99.98% of all humans are unambiguously identifiable as male or female at birth.
One can change their appearance, but no one can chemically or surgically change their biological sex.
A tiny percentage of people are born with Disorders of Sexual Development (DSDs, or Intersex conditions.) The vast majority of intersex people are not transgender, and the vast majority of transgender people are not intersex.
Homosexuality and transgenderism are not analogous. Homosexuality is a sexual orientation, but extreme trans ideology is based on the denial of biological sex.
There are as many gender expressions as there are human individuals.
Transwomen (i.e. trans identified males) are not literally female.
Transmen (i.e., trans identified females) are not literally male.
Transgender extremists do not speak for all trans people.
According to the largest socialist groups in the US – Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Socialist Alternative and the International Socialist Organization (ISO before it imploded) – accepting or even debating the above assertions cannot be allowed because that would somehow “deny the existence” of trans people.
The same holds for the British Labor Party (which currently has a trans-identified male as its Constituency Women’s Officer) and for many smaller socialist groups in the US and around the world.
Of course, those on the liberal “left,” like Democracy Now!, the ACLU, the Democratic Party and others, march in lockstep with extreme trans ideology and vigorously pile on anyone who might suggest that the emperor has no clothes.
A perfect example is provided by the February 1, 2020 meeting held at the Seattle Public Library entitled Fighting the New Misogyny: A Feminist Critique of Gender Identity which explored many of the above points.
The event was protested by trans activists who slanderously claimed the gathering was a “fundraising event for transphobic hate speakers,” and that “These speakers include professional anti-trans hate writer Meghan Murphy, and a WoLF [Women’s Liberation Front] board member.”
They continued:
We, as a city, must rally against this event to tell transphobic hate groups that they are not welcome here, that transphobia has no place in feminism, and that Seattle Public Library must make major changes to make our libraries safe for trans employees and patrons.
These same activists tried unsuccessfully to have the Library ban the event outright. If they had their way, the important ideas outlined above would be forever censored.
Unfortunately, among those opposing the meeting and siding with the McCarthyites was Socialist Alternative City Councilperson Kshama Sawant, whose office sent representatives to the anti-meeting protest.
Marxism, the philosophical underpinning for the socialist left, relies heavily on historical materialism. That is, the idea that there are tangible, physical reasons for what we observe in the development and interaction of societies and classes of people within those societies.
This makes it all the more astonishing when some socialists so thoroughly reject biology and material reality in their analysis of transgender ideology and its effect on other oppressed groups.
The left’s abdication on this issue – especially the misdirection of the socialist left – is a gift to the right, as it allows those on the right to pose as the sane ones. The socialist left bears particular responsibility because it presents itself as a collection of thoughtful, considered leaders.
All the more tragic, then, is the fact that this new McCarthyism, which disingenuously wraps itself in the mantle of “woke” leftism, could never have taken hold if the real left had spoken out clearly and forcefully from the start.
At this point, it remains to be seen whether the left will correct its error or be bypassed by the multitudes who will surely punish those who tried to gaslight them into rejecting material reality.
Mysterious Deep Space Radio Signal Repeats At Regular Intervals, Baffling Astronomers
A startling scientific find by space researchers which sounds straight from the plot of the 1990’s sci-fi movie “Contact” is the last thing you might expect to read on CNN this week.
“Mysterious radio signals from space have been known to repeat, but for the first time, researchers have noticed a pattern in a series of bursts coming from a single source half a billion light-years from Earth,” the report begins.
Illustrative file image: The Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder, via New Scientist
The “mystery radio signal” has been recorded as repeating based on a clear discernible pattern according to a new paper by a team of astrophysicists in Canada that pinpointed bursts which are unprecedented, identified as “fast radio burst” — or a short radio emission, with a 16-day cycle.
“The discovery of a 16.35-day periodicity in a repeating FRB source is an important clue to the nature of this object,” the team of scientists said in the paper. A brief summary of some of the key findings are as follows:
Between September 16, 2018 and October 30, 2019, detected a pattern in bursts occurring every 16.35 days. Over the course of four days, the signal would release a burst or two each hour. Then, it would go silent for another 12 days.
…The signal is a known repeating fast radio burst, FRB 180916.J0158+65. Last year, the CHIME/FRB collaboration detected the sources of eight new repeating fast radio bursts, including this signal. The repeating signal was traced to a massive spiral galaxy around 500 million light-years away.
The team hopes to eventually trace the origin of the mysterious bursts, which has a variety of possibilities, and has even raised the question of alien life “reaching out” to establish contact.
So could it be aliens seeking to establish contact via hidden messages meant to be deciphered from rational patterns?
The MIT Technology Review’s Neel Patel, who first broke the story this week of the research team’s latest breakthrough, thinks it highly unlikely:
Wait, is it aliens? Almost certainly not. The signals are a sign of energetic events that are on the extreme scale of the cosmos. Even a highly intelligent species would be very unlikely to produce energies like this. And there is no detectable pattern so far that would suggest there’s a sentient hand at play.
Patel offers likely scenarios including a celestial body orbiting another object, such as a “low-mass black hole.”
Some analysts have elsewhere suggested it’s the result of a binary system involving two massive stars orbiting each other. And Phys.org described what could be the most mundane theory, that it could be “nothing more than the noise created when two stars collide.”
“Another possibility is that stellar winds might be alternately boosting or blocking signals from a body behind them. Or it could be that the source is a celestial body that is rotating,” the same source offered.
The CHIME telescope in British Columbia will attempt to detect future fast radio bursts (FRBs), via USA Today.
Regardless, the breakthrough observation could help future astronomers better map out the universe.
“Understanding fast radio bursts can also help astronomers learn more about the universe itself,” CNN concludes. “The more bursts they can trace, the better they may be able to use the signals to map how matter is distributed across the universe.”
Facing accusations that it issued a doctored report alleging a chemical attack in Syria, the OPCW has released an inquiry attacking two whistleblowers as rogue actors. Leaked documents obtained by The Grayzone reveal serious distortions in the OPCW inquiry as well as a campaign of intimidation against internal dissenters.
For the past year, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has been roiled by allegations that it manipulated an investigation to falsely accuse the Syrian government of a chemical weapons attack. An OPCW report released in March 2019 lent credence to claims by Islamist militants and Western governments that the Syrian military killed around 40 civilians with toxic gas in the city of Douma in April 2018. The accusation against Damascus led to US-led military strikes on Syrian government sites that same month.
But leaked internal documents published by Wikileaks show that OPCW inspectors who deployed to Douma rejected the official story, and complained that higher-level officials excluded them from the post-mission process, distorted key evidence, and ignored their findings.
After months of virtual silence, the OPCW has responded with an internal inquiry that lambasts two veteran officials who raised internal objections, attacking their credibility and qualifications. The OPCW’s self-described “independent investigation” describes the pair as rogue, low-level actors who played minor roles in the Douma mission and lacked access to crucial evidence. In a briefing to member states, OPCW Director General Fernando Arias dismissed them as disgruntled ex-employees.
The two “are not whistle-blowers,” Arias said.
“They are individuals who could not accept that their views were not backed by evidence.”
But a leaked document calls Arias’ assertions into serious question. Ian Henderson, one of the two inspectors, recently addressed a special session of the United Nations Security Council with his concerns about the Douma mission. Henderson submitted a supplemental written account that was distributed among participating UN member states and obtained by The Grayzone. It offers the most extensive and detailed account of the internal dispute over the OPCW’s Douma investigation to date.
Henderson provides a thorough timeline that bolsters suspicions that the OPCW leadership covered up a staged deception in Douma. Combined with the available record – which includes other OPCW leaks, as well as Arias’ and the OPCW’s own statements – Henderson’s account firmly demonstrates that he and a fellow dissenting colleague occupied veteran leadership roles inside the organization, including during the Douma fact-finding mission.
Henderson also exposes key gaps in the OPCW’s inquiry, which fails to specifically address the revelations that critical evidence was kept out of the OPCW’s published reports; that key findings were manipulated – and that all of this occurred under sustained US government pressure.
In addition to Henderson’s complete testimony, The Grayzone has obtained a chilling email from a third former OPCW official. The former official, who worked in a senior role, blamed external pressure and potential threats to their family for their failure to speak out about the corruption of the Douma investigation.
This official was not among the pair of dissenting inspectors targeted by the inquiry. The email corroborates complaints by Henderson and his colleague about senior management’s suppression of evidence collected by the team that deployed to Syria.
“I fear those behind the crimes that have been perpetrated in the name of ‘humanity and democracy’”
In his briefing about the investigation of the inspectors, Arias, the OPCW Director-General, described the pair as stubborn actors “who took matters into their own hands and committed a breach of their obligations to the Organization.” He characterized their behavior as “egregious.”
But leaked documents and testimony point to an OPCW leadership that has committed egregious acts of its own, including intimidating internal dissenters.
In an email obtained by The Grayzone, a former senior OPCW official described their tenure at the OPCW as “the most stressful and unpleasant ones of [their] life,” and expressed deep shame about the state of the organization they departed in disgust.
“I fear those behind the crimes that have been perpetrated in the name of ‘humanity and democracy,’” the official confided, “they will not hesitate to do harm to me and my family, they have done worse, many times, even in the UK… I don’t want to expose my self and my family to their violence and revenge, I don’t want to live in fear of crossing the street!”
The former OPCW senior official went on to denounce the removal of members of the original fact-finding team to Syria “from the decision making process and management of the most critical operations…” This tracks with complaints expressed in leaked OPCW documents that superiors who had not been a part of the investigation in Douma marginalized those who had.
The atmosphere of intimidation was confirmed by a second member of the OPCW’s original fact-finding mission to Douma. The whistleblower, identified by the pseudonym “Alex,” spoke to the journalist Jonathan Steele and to a panel convened by the Courage Foundation in October 2019. Alex revealed that a delegation of three US officials visited the OPCW at The Hague on July 5th, 2018. They implored the dissenting inspectors to accept the view that the Syrian government carried out a gas attack in Douma and chided them for failing to reach that conclusion. According to Steele, Alex and the other inspectors saw the meeting as “unacceptable pressure.” In his statement to the UN Security Council, Henderson confirmed that he attended the meeting.
The US intervention at the OPCW could possibly violate the chemical weapons convention, which forbids state parties from attempting to influence investigations. It would not be the first time Washington has attempted to bully the OPCW into submission. During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2002, the George W. Bush administration engineered the ouster of the OPCW’s First Director-General, Jose Bustani. The Bush administration was concerned that Bustani’s negotiations with Iraq about allowing international inspectors could undermine its plans for war.
Bustani later revealed that John Bolton, then an under secretary of state, had personally threatened him and his family with violent retaliation. The US pressure on the OPCW over Douma also took place under Bolton’s watch. When the US bombed Syria in April 2018 and pressured OPCW officials just three months later, Bolton was in the midst of his first months as President Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor. (Bustani, meanwhile, was among a group of panelists who heard direct testimony from Alex at a gathering convened by the Courage Foundation in October 2019.)
OPCW’s inconsistent story on “Inspector A”
The OPCW’s internal inquiry goes to great lengths to denigrate and discredit the two former staffers that challenged the official story on Douma. It refers to its two targets as “Inspector A” and “Inspector B.” The latter’s identity has not been publicly confirmed. “A” is Ian Henderson, a South African engineer and veteran OPCW official with extensive military experience.
Henderson’s written testimony to the United Nations, obtained by The Grayzone, undercuts the negative portrayal of his former managers, and offers a window into the pressure campaign and cover-up that he and his colleagues faced.
A suppressed internal study by Henderson first brought the OPCW scandal to public attention. In May 2018, an engineering assessment bearing Henderson’s name was leaked to a group of British academics, the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media. The document is a detailed engineering analysis of two gas cylinders found at the scene of the alleged attacks in Douma. Whereas the OPCW’s final March 2019 report concluded that the cylinders were likely dropped from the air, Henderson found that there is “a higher probability that both cylinders were manually placed… rather than being delivered from aircraft.” The OPCW’s final report made no mention of this conclusion.
The inference of Henderson’s study is that the attack was staged by the armed opposition. At the time, Douma was under the control of the extremist Saudi-backed militia, Jaysh Al-Islam, and was on the brink of being re-taken by Syrian government forces.
From a political and military standpoint, a chemical weapons attack was the most self-destructive and unnecessary action the Syrian military could possibly take. From the standpoint of a foreign-backed militia on the verge of defeat, however, staging a chemical attack was a desperate Hail Mary operation that offered the hope of US military invention in accordance with Washington’s “red line” policy. The suspected gambit by Jaysh Al-Islam appeared to have paid off when the Trump administration accepted its claims that a chemical attack had killed dozens of civilians in Douma, and initiated cruise missile strikes in response. Yet the US-led attacks failed to prevent the Syrian government from retaking Douma and the whole of eastern Damascus. Within days, Western reporters had entered the area and were able to access local eyewitnesses who claimed that the chemical attack was a staged deception.
Henderson was among the first OPCW staffers to visit the site of the alleged attack in Douma. However, the OPCW inquiry dismissed Henderson’s role in the Douma probe, characterizing his engineering study as a personal, rogue operation. Henderson, the inquiry said, “was not a member of the FFM [Fact Finding Mission]” that deployed to Douma, and only “played a minor supporting role.”
There is ample evidence that contradicts this characterization. In his written UN testimony, Henderson revealed that he served in five Douma deployments as part of the FFM. This includes three instances as a sub-team leader for critical operations: visiting a suspected chemical weapons production site in Douma; conducting interviews and taking chemical samples at the Douma hospital; taking detailed measurements at one of the sites; and inspecting, itemizing, and securing the two cylinders that were removed from the sites of the alleged gas attack. The notion that he “was not a member” of the mission that he played such an active role in strains credulity.
A leaked email shows that at least one of Henderson’s colleagues protested a previous instance in which the OPCW leadership attempted to minimize his role. The “falsehood… that Ian did not form part of the Douma FFM team,” the colleague complained, was “patently untrue” and “pivotal in discrediting him and his work.”
The inquiry also falsely insinuated that Henderson was a low-level official. While acknowledging that Henderson served as an OPCW team leader during his first tenure with the OPCW from 1997 to 2005, the inquiry said that he was “rehired at a lower level” when he returned in 2016, and remained there until his departure in May 2019. Yet the OPCW’s own documents from that latter period showed that Henderson was described as an “OPCW Inspection Team Leader” as late as February 2018, just two months before his deployment to Douma as part of the OPCW’s Fact-Finding Mission (FFM). According to his UN testimony, Henderson served as an inspection team leader for multiple inspections of Syrian laboratory facilities at Barzaeh and Jamrayah in November 2017 and in November 2018, after the US bombed Barzeh on dubious grounds.
After casting doubt on Henderson’s status within the organization, the OPCW inquiry dismissed his engineering report as “a personal document created with incomplete information and without authorisation.” Henderson, the investigators said, defied higher-level officials’ orders and conducted a study on his own with outside contractors.
In his briefing to member states on the inquiry’s findings, OPCW Director General Fernando Arias echoed this conclusion, describing Henderson’s report as “a purported document disseminated outside the Organisation.”
But Arias’ statements today contradict his own words from less than a year ago. Just days after Henderson’s report was leaked in May 2019, Arias delivered an extensive briefing and announced that an inquiry into the disclosure was underway. Arias made no claims of Henderson going rogue, and described his report as an “internal document… produced by a staff member.” It is unclear how Henderson’s report went from an “internal document” by an OPCW staffer in May 2019 to a “purported document disseminated outside the Organisation” in February 2020. Arias has not explained this discrepancy.
In his latest missive, Arias has offered a completely new rationale for keeping Henderson’s report from the public. In May 2019, Arias stated that because Henderson’s report “pointed at possible attribution,” it was therefore “outside of the mandate of the FFM [Fact-Finding Mission] with regard to the formulation of its findings.” The FFM is prevented from assigning blame to parties involved in chemical attacks. However, the OPCW’s published conclusion suggested the Syrian government was to blame for the attack – an act of attribution – since the Syrian military (or its Russian ally) was the only warring party in Douma with aircraft. Even more curiously, by accusing Henderson of freebooting and “subterfuge,” Arias and his organization’s independent inquiry has now offered a completely different explanation than it previously had for the omission of Henderson’s report.
Why was critical evidence excluded?
In yet another highly dubious assertion, the OPCW inquiry claimed Henderson “did not have access to all of the information gathered by the FFM team, including witness interviews, laboratory results, and assessments by independent experts regarding the two cylinders—all of which became known to the team after [Henderson] had stopped providing support to the FFM investigation.”
But an important piece of context is missing from this salvo: by the time Henderson carried through on his study in summer 2018, he and other members of the FFM had already complained to the OPCW leadership that their findings were being manipulated and suppressed.
According to Henderson’s testimony, a draft interim report circulated in June 2018 was subjected to “‘last-minute unexpected modifications” that were “contrary to the consensus that had been reached within the team.” This included a change to “reflect a conclusion that chlorine had been released from cylinders,” which was not consistent with the findings at that stage. An intervention by one of the FFM team members, possibly Inspector B, forced FFM team leader Sami Barrek to revise the interim report before its eventual release on July 6 2018.
Despite agreeing to hear his team’s objections, Barrek personally blocked critical evidence that conflicted with the official story of Syrian government responsibility. One email chain revealed that Barrek resisted pleas from an inspector to include the relatively low levels of chemicals found in Douma. Alex, the anonymous second OPCW whistleblower, told journalist Jonathan Steele that chlorinated organic chemicals at the scene “were no higher than you would expect in any household environment.”
Another leaked document showed the OPCW had consulted with toxicologists in June 2018 to determine whether symptoms observed in victims were consistent with exposure to chlorine. According to minutes of that meeting, “the experts were conclusive in their statements that there was no correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure.” But these critical findings, which dramatically undercut the official narrative, were inexplicably omitted from both the interim and final report.
The “core” cover-up team
One day after US officials attempted to bully OPCW staff into submission on July 5 2018, an interim report on Douma was published that reflected some of the inspectors’ key objections, albeit with watered-down language and significant omissions. A critical change then took place. OPCW officials announced that the ensuing final report would be drafted by a “core team” that was separate from the one which deployed to Douma. That left the core team without any of the FFM members who had been on the ground at the site of the supposed attack, with the exception of one paramedic. Henderson told the UN that the move deprived the core team of anyone qualified to conduct the needed engineering assessments on the chlorine cylinders that were said to have been dropped in Douma.
With superiors omitting critical information, Douma inspectors excluded from the so-called “core” team, and US officials applying direct pressure, Henderson attempted to carry on with his report. Despite the inquiry’s claims, Henderson presented evidence to the UN that his work was approved by his superiors. Henderson reported that he held several meetings with top OPCW officials beginning in late summer 2018, where he informed them of his study and relayed concerns about the methodologies of the then-FFM team leader. Henderson said he was told by the then-Chief of Cabinet, Sebastien Braha: “I don’t see why both studies can’t be done.” Henderson took that as a green light.
Henderson completed his engineering study in January 2019 and submitted a “detailed executive summary” for peer review. OPCW colleagues, including members of the Douma FFM, an unidentified former “core team” former inspector, and other “trusted [Technical Secretariat] staff members who had expertise in specific areas,” studied Henderson’s work and offered written feedback.
“This review was considered necessary and responsible,” Henderson wrote, “in that I knew (after the analysis had been completed) that these would be unpopular findings; therefore, I wanted to make sure there were no objections to any of the facts, observations, methodology used or findings reported in the summary.”
In its bid to portray Henderson’s engineering study as the work of a disconnected freelancer, the OPCW’s inquiry strangely made no mention of this peer review.
When he met with FFM team leader Sami Barrek the following month, Henderson ran into more obstructions. Barrek flatly rejected Henderson’s report, “stating that he had been instructed not to accept it.” Alarmed by the possibility that the OPCW would soon release a final report without a sound engineering assessment, Henderson submitted a physical copy to the OPCW’s Documents Registry Archive, and alerted management by email.
It was then that another hostile response arrived from above. Braha, the Chief of Cabinet, emailed back an order: “Please get this document out of DRA (Documents Registry Archive) … And please remove all traces, if any, of its delivery/storage/whatever in DRA.”
Days later, on March 1 2019, the OPCW’s final report was released. Omitting Henderson’s engineering findings, it reached a conclusion that contradicted that of its own inspectors. According to the report, the investigation found that there were “reasonable grounds that the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon took place…This toxic chemical contained reactive chlorine.” For its analysis of the cylinders, the report claims it relied on “three independent analyses” without specifying them and only directly citing one.
This raises an ineluctable question: why did the OPCW rely on three unspecified “independent analyses” from outside experts who never set foot in Douma, rather than on the evidence-based reports of a veteran OPCW staffer and his colleagues who investigated the site of the supposed attack? The OPCW has yet to offer an explanation.
“I was shocked by the decision to release the report without having taken into account the engineering report, as all the FFM management knew it had been submitted,” Henderson recounted in his UN testimony. “I had expected the report to reflect the situation that had been the consensus of the Douma FFM team after the deployments, and for the assessment of the cylinders to be consistent with the findings of the engineering assessment, but found the complete opposite. I saw what I considered to be superficial and flawed analysis in the section on the cylinders.”
Henderson tried to resolve his concerns internally. He met with at least six high-level officials, and sought a meeting with Arias. A senior manager angrily rebuffed that request, telling Henderson that “you will never get to the Director-General, and if you try and go around me to get to him, there will be consequences.” Henderson also submitted a detailed dossier outlining his concerns to the Acting Director of the Office of Internal Oversight, which was later rejected.
Perhaps most critically, Henderson sought a meeting where the drafters of the FFM report – the so-called “core” team that had excluded all but one member of the team that visited Douma – “would explain what new information had been provided or new analysis conducted, that had turned around the situation from what had appeared to be clear at the end of deployments to Douma.”
Henderson also requested an opportunity to hear from the “three experts” who had conducted the engineering studies cited by the FFM’s final report. “This would be a technical discussion, comparing the information and inputs used and methodology applied, and interpretation of results, and would very quickly identify any flawed approaches and would help clarify the situation,” Henderson recalled.
“Throughout this period, I acknowledged there was a possibility that I could be wrong, but stressed that I was not the only one with concerns,” he added.
“Investigating the situation would bring things to light and potentially defuse the situation.”
But Henderson’s requests were denied. “Whilst many in management were shocked and concerned, and all expressed sympathy with my concerns,” Henderson told the UN, “the responses I received included ‘this is too big’; ‘it’s too late now’; ‘this would not be good for the [Technical Sectrariat’s] reputation’; ‘don’t make yourself a martyr’; and ‘but this would play into the Russian narrative’.”
A leaked memo written by Henderson to Arias, the OPCW Director General, in March 2019, captures his contemporaneous objections. The final report, Henderson wrote, “does not reflect the views of all the team members that deployed to Douma,” a view he said was shared by about 20 inspectors. (Alex relayed a similar account to Jonathan Steele: “Most of the Douma team felt the two reports on the incident, the Interim Report and the Final Report, were scientifically impoverished, procedurally irregular and possibly fraudulent.”) On top of the fact the report was written by a “core” team that excluded all but one Douma inspector, Henderson complained that its authors “had only operated in Country X” – believed to be Turkey.
Arias instructed Henderson to submit his report to the newly formed Investigation and Identification Team, which had been mandated to further investigate the Douma attack. The IIT met with Henderson in March 2019 and accepted a copy of his report. But two months later, Henderson was suspended and removed from the OPCW building after a leaked copy of his engineering assessment was published on the internet. The OPCW’s inquiry does not accuse Henderson of responsibility for the leak.
Conspicuous claims about “Inspector B”
Less is known about “Inspector B,” the second OPCW inspector targeted by the inquiry. It is possible, though unconfirmed, that B is the same person as “Alex,” the aforementioned Douma team member turned whistleblower. Like Henderson, B has been with the OPCW since its formation. The inquiry notes that B initially served from July 1998 to December 2011, including as Team Leader, and then again from September 2015 until August 2018.
As with Henderson, the inquiry attempted to portray Inspector B as a marginal figure in the Douma inquiry who went rogue after he had left the OPCW. While acknowledging that he was a member of the FFM team that deployed to Syria in April 2018, the report said that B “never left the command post in Damascus”, and therefore did not visit Douma.
By the OPCW’s own standards, however, that was hardly disqualifying: Sami Barrek, the FFM team leader, was only in Damascus for three days and departed before his team members – including Henderson – first reached Douma. Yet Barrek was tasked with drafting the final report, and, as leaked emails show, faced internal complaints that he excluded critical evidence.
According to the Working Group, the British academic collective that received and published Henderson’s leaked report, Barrek subsequently visited Turkey where he met with members of the White Helmets. The White Helmets are a Western government-funded organization known for carrying out rescue operations in areas under the control of foreign-backed anti-government militias. As The Grayzone has reported, the US and UK-funded White Helmets have operated alongside extremist militants during Syria’s proxy war, and been used for propaganda efforts to promote U.S. military intervention and sanctions on Syria. In the case of Douma, the White Helmets participated in a staged video to create the appearance that a local hospital was treating victims of a chemical attack.
Conspicuously, the inquiry offered no specifics on what “Inspector B” did in Damascus or his role in the FFM. This omission could be seen as an indication that an accurate description of his role would reveal that he played a significant one. The inquiry noted that he “was involved in the drafting of the interim report on the Douma incident” – but did not offer further details. It seems unlikely that someone with a limited role in the investigation would have been entrusted to participate in drafting the public report on its findings.
As with its portrayal of Henderson, the inquiry claimed that the FFM “undertook the bulk of its analytical work, examined a large number of witness interviews, and received the results of sampling and analysis,” in the months after Inspector B was no longer involved. But it had nothing to say about Inspector B departing only after raising concerns that the Douma team’s analytical work was manipulated and excluded, including on vital chemical samples. Accordingly, the fact that more work was done after B’s ouster did not resolve his concerns; if anything, it only raised further questions about the OPCW’s faulty final product.
Western media outlets complicit in cover-up
The OPCW’s unprecedented rebuke of two career officials has received a warm reception in mainstream media outlets that have carefully ignored the OPCW scandal to date, turning a blind eye as one explosive internal document after another appeared on Wikileaks.
Though the scandal was itself a product of disclosures by the OPCW’s own staff, The Guardian bizarrely described it instead as “a Russia-led campaign” that has now “been dealt a blow” by the OPCW’s inquiry. The New York Times published reports by Reuters and the Associated Press that also aired the inquiry’s conclusions without a scintilla of critical scrutiny.
At a time when whistleblowing is supposed to be held in high esteem, the Western political and media establishment’s flagrant disinterest and disregard for the two dissenting inspectors and the explosive leaked documents is glaring. This carries significant dangers.
As the email by a “former senior official at the OPCW” – someone who was not among the pair of dissenting inspectors – made clear, fear within the organization is almost as profound as the pressure to self-censor and conform to the dominant narrative.
The experience of the OPCW’s first director-general, Jose Bustani – who was ousted from his position after direct threats from John Bolton to him and his family – attests to the threats these new whistleblowers face. When Bustani heard Alex’s testimony, he came away from the meeting firmly convinced that something had gone extremely wrong at the OPCW.
“The convincing evidence of irregular behaviour in the OPCW investigation of the alleged Douma chemical attack confirms doubts and suspicions I already had,” Bustani said after the session.
“The picture is certainly clearer now, although very disturbing.” Bustani added that he hoped the Douma revelations “will catalyse a process by which the [OPCW] can be resurrected to become the independent and non-discriminatory body it used to be.”
In his statement to the United Nations, Henderson echoed this sentiment. The ousted expert called on the United Nations to allow for a scientific, peer review process to weigh his report against the three “independent experts” whom the OPCW claimed to rely on for its final report. The “method of scientific rigour,” Henderson wrote, “dictates that one side cannot profess to be the sole owner of the truth.
“Should an independent scientific panel be allowed, he concluded, “I have no doubt that this would successfully clarify what happened in Douma.”
With his explosive UN testimony and the leaks that preceded it, Ian Henderson and his colleagues have made clear that the OPCW experts who deployed to Syria are determined to bring the cover-up of an elaborate deception to light.
Federal Judge Dismisses Some Charges Against Disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes
Late on Tuesday, a Federal judge dropped several charges against former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes but allowed wire fraud charges to stand. The wire fraud charges accuse Holmes and her former boy-toy, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, of misleading patients about the abilities of Theranos’ blood tests.
The court ruled that since the tests were paid by customers’ medical insurance companies, that the patients were not deprived of any money or property in using Theranos’ blood testing services, according to Reuters. The court also found that there was “no evidence” to show that Holmes and Balwani directed doctors to make misrepresentations to their patients.
The indictment alleges that Holmes and Balwani knew that Theranos was not capable of consistently producing accurate results, yet they encouraged doctors and patients to use their tests regardless. They were both indicted in June of 2018 on 11 counts of conspiracy and wire fraud.
Recall, about two weeks ago, we noted that Holmes literally phoned in her defense in an Arizona fraud lawsuit after her civil lawyers quit due to non-payment.
Holmes still maintains a team of “high caliber” attorneys for her criminal case in San Jose federal court. But in the concurrent civil suit taking place in Phoenix, Holmes was forced to dial into an audio feed without a lawyer several weeks ago, telling the judge she wouldn’t make any arguments.
The civil hearing, which ended without a decision, was to try and determine whether or not the case should advance as a class action. The judge asked Holmes at the beginning of the hearing if she wanted to make any arguments and Holmes said she was relying on the arguments made by attorneys for her co-defendants.
The lawyers representing her in Arizona quit back in September, claiming Holmes hasn’t paid them. As Bloomberg noted at the time, “it’s highly unusual for a defendant of Holmes’s stature in such a suit to not be represented by an attorney, prompting some speculation on her financial situation.”
Tracy Connors tweeted a video of herself attempting to have Siri read out a Daily Caller headline entitled ‘Virginia House of Delegates Passes Gun Ban, Seizure Bill’.
Instead of saying the word ‘gun’, Siri spelled out the letters G-U-N.
This is wild! Check out what happened when I had my iPad read me a @DailyCaller headline about the gun ban bill that passed VA’s House today. pic.twitter.com/MoXcbv6GKY
“Apple is now our parent and we’re fragile little children who can’t hear scary words,” said Connors.
As far back as 2016, Apple replaced its gun emoji with a water pistol in response to “a series of shootings in the US.”
Apparently, censoring words and changing how cartoon drawings appear is going to stop mass shootings.
Good luck with that, Apple.
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Hong Kong’s Largest Mall Owner Cuts Rents Up To 50%
Commenting on the regional impact of the Covid-2019 epidemic, Morgan Stanley writes that Hong Kong’s tourism, trade and domestic consumption could be significantly affected, further aggravating the technical recession the financial hub found itself going into 2020.
Looking ahead, MS lays out two scenarios: should the outbreak peak in February/March with swift normalization of economic activity (Scenario 1), the bank estimates a 1-2% drag on 1Q GDP growth, meaning the recession started by Hong Kong’s protests will likely extend for one more quarter, but the impact could be larger at 2-4% if existing travel restrictions stay for longer and the production normalization process is slow in mainland China (Scenario 2). In the worst-case scenario 3, where the outbreak lasts for months, the impact on growth could reach 3-4.5% in 1H.
As such, Morgan Stanley remains cautious on the local stock market (the Hang Seng Index) and keeps MSCI HK Underweight given their sizeable revenue exposure to the local Hong Kong market (19% for Hang Seng and 50% for MSCI HK), and see greater near-term pressure for Banks and Retail than Telecom, Insurance and Macau Gaming.
One sector where Morgan Stanley is especially concerned is retail property, as landlords are especially vulnerable to the Coronavius impact, which would further dampen already weakened retail sales.
Confirming Morgan Stanley’s concern that a bloodbath is coming to the retail sector, earlier today Reuters reported that some shopping mall landlords in Hong Kong, including Sun Hung Kai Properties, the city’s largest property developer, are offering relief measures such as rental concession to their tenants during the coronavirus outbreak.
Sun Hung Kai Properties, which owns major malls in some of the local districts that host international fashion brands ranging from Coach to Zara, said on Wednesday it would reduce February rent by up to 50% for most of its tenants, in an effort to stabilize economy and protect employment.
Separately, MTR Corp, which runs malls on top some of its subway stations, said it will adjust rent for small-medium companies, and after collecting the sales data of its international tenants, it will launch relief measures for them too.
Link Real Estate Investment Trust, whose tenants are mostly small to medium businesses, also said it has set up a HK$80 million relief scheme, which includes allowing rent payment in installments, waiving late payment interest and service charges, granting rent-free periods and reducing rents.
In short, Hong Kong’s retail sector, already battered by months of often violent anti-government protests, which has already sent retail sales into a worse contraction than during the financial crisis and China’s 2015/2016 market crash and devaluation…
… is on the verge of collapse with following the coronavirus outbreak in mainland China, which has emptied shopping centres and closed down tourist attractions, and will likely push countless CRE developers to the verge of bankruptcy.
When one era ends and another begins is always a hot topic for historians and academics, because history does not make it easy. The old staggers on for a long time, despite it having become pointless or exhausted. The new is not always ready to take center stage, so it is never clear as to when it started. It is Sorites Paradox. Just as we know there is a point where grains of sand eventually become a heap, we know one epoch gives way to another, but exactly when is impossible to say.
Of course, while you are in such a transition period, it is even more difficult to know when the old has finally receded into the past and when the new has begun. History is full of false starts and false transitions. Ideologues are always sure the great transition is right around the corner. For the people living through a transition, it just feels like a “great muddling through” for those aware of what’s happening. For the rest it is just the way things are, as they try to not to think about such things.
Whether we are in such a great transition is hard to know for certain, but people who think of such things are thinking about it. This paper on how NATO can adapt to the populist era is such an example. It is written by Jeff Giesea, someone who has been on the edges of populist politics in America. The focus on the paper in how NATO can adapt to the rise of populism in Europe in order to maintain itself and address some of the issues that give rise to populist movements.
NATO is a great example of why marking the end of one period and the start of the next is so difficult, especially for the people living through it. The senior administrative staff in NATO probably started their careers in the Cold War. Many of the senior political leaders in the West are still people who came of age in that era. NATO has already outlived the Cold War and now may be outliving the age of globalism. It is a legacy institution that still staggers on for no obvious reason.
That’s why they invest time and money thinking about how the institution can adapt to the new age, whatever one calls it. What started as a temporary alliance among Western nations to guard against Soviet aggression in Europe, is now a permanent part of the European landscape. It’s like a union job or a government contract. No one wants to see it end. The Red Army is long gone, but NATO remains ready for them if they ever reappear on the European Plain.
It is a good example of the problems of post-nationalism. NATO was always a national entity, designed to defend nations. In a world without borders, having a military organization built for defending borders makes little sense. Critics of the organization always point to the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the bigger problem for NATO is that it is rooted in the concept of sovereign nations. Each member contributes men, material, bases and money to maintain a joint military force.
In a world where European countries don’t have control of control over their own budgets and cannot mint their own coins, how can they possibly have an active voice in a military alliance? Italy, for example, has to get permission from Brussels to operate a new landfill or power plant. The EU regulates the acceptable size of bananas and how much can be spent on picking up dog droppings. Globalism reduced nations to dependents with no agency of their own.
NATO also underscores a hidden truth about globalism and that is it only exists because the American empire exists. NATO exist because America keeps it going. If America ever started acting like a real country again, it would abandon legacy entities like NATO, as they serve no national interest. The same is true about globalism. The EU has been allowed to flourish, because it enjoys American protection. Take that protection away and Europe returns to a continent of nations.
It’s also an example of how the people muddling through a transition period may be all wrong about what they are noticing. The conventional wisdom says the world is transitioning from nationalism to post-nationalism. Global entities will supplant nation states and global corporations will manage the global economy. These populist uprisings we see in the West are just rearguard actions by those who will not be part of the glorious multicultural global paradise that is tomorrow.
In reality, we may be living through the opposite. The Cold War era may have been the globalist era, dominated by two great democratic empires. On the one side was the democracy of communism. On the other was the democracy of natural rights. First the Soviet Empire collapsed and now the American Empire is receding. The flurry of cosmopolitan globalism is not a rearguard action, but more like the scavengers profiting from the end of that great epoch in Western history.
What is called populism today is simply the West waking up from the long slumber that was the great battle between two empires. Generations of Europeans sublimating national interests for a common defense are now waking up from that period to assert those interests again. In the US, regional and now racial interests that have long been suppressed are bubbling up to the surface. Just as NATO is an entity from a bygone era, cosmopolitan globalism is the echo of a bygone age.
Sudden Militarization Of Wuhan’s P4 Lab Raises New Questions About The Origin Of The Deadly Covid-19 Virus
The reported militarization of Wuhan’s P4 Lab has raised new questions about the origin of the Covid-19 virus and the apparent cover-up that has occurred since it was first made public.
Following the removal of the most senior health officials in Wuhan yesterday, Chinese State Media has just reported that Chen Wei, China’s chief biochemical weapon defense expert, is now to be stationed in Wuhan to lead the efforts to overcome the deadly, pneumonia-like pathogen.
According to the PLA Daily report, Chen Wei holds the rank of major general, and along with reports that Chinese troops have started to “assist”, it strongly suggests that the PLA has taken control of the situation.
As Epoch Times reports, before this latest report, Chen’s military rank and specialization was not widely known. She was first interviewed on Jan. 30 by the state-run China Science Daily. In a second interview the next day, she predicted that the outbreak in Wuhan would let up over the next few days, but could worsen again soon…
“We need to prepare for the worst-case scenario, find the best solutions, and be ready to fight the longest battle,” she said.
Amid constant propaganda from CCP officials, and widespread censorship, many – including US Senator Tom Cotton – have wondered if the virus was bio-engineered, and was ‘leaked’ from the lab (which just happens to be located at the epicenter ofg the virus).
The militarization, and bringing in of China’s foremost bio-weapons expert raises the question once again of whether the Wuhan Strain of coronavirus (Covid-19) is the result of naturally emergent mutations against the possibility that it may be a bio-engineered strain meant for defensive immunotherapy protocols that was released into the public, most likely by accident since China’s rate of occupational accidents is about ten-times higher than America’s, and some twenty-times more than Europe’s – the only other regions with high-level virology labs.
A new report –a product of a collaboration between a retired professional scientist with 30 years of experience in genomic sequencing and analysis who helped design several ubiquitous bioinformatic software tools, and a former NSA counterterrorism analyst – suggests that this possible mistake may have been precipitated by the need to quickly finish research that was being rushed for John Hopkin’s Event 201 which was held this past October and meant to gameplan the containment of a global pandemic. Research may also have been hurried due to deadlines before the impending Chinese New Year – the timing of these events point to increased human error, not a globalist conspiracy.
Given that this outbreak was said to begin in late December when most bat species in the region are hibernatingand the Chinese horseshoe bat’s habitat covers an enormous swath of the region containing scores of cities and hundreds of millions people to begin with, the fact that this Wuhan Strain of coronavirus, denoted as Covid-19, emerged in close proximity to the only BSL-4 virology lab in China, now notoriously located in Wuhan, which in turn was staffed with at least two Chinese scientists – Zhengli Shi and Xing-Yi Ge (both virologists who had previously worked at an American lab which already bio-engineered an incredibly virulent strain of bat coronavirus) – the accidental release of a bio-engineered virus meant for defensive immunotherapy research from Wuhan’s virology lab cannot be automatically discounted, especially when the Wuhan Strain’s unnatural genomic signals are considered.
Zhengli Shi notably co-authored a controversial paper in 2015 which describes the creation of a new virus by combining a coronavirus found in Chinese horseshoe bats with another that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice.
This research sparked a huge debate at the time over whether engineering lab variants of viruses with possible pandemic potential is worth the risks.
As Nature.com reported in 2015, the findings reinforce suspicions that bat coronaviruses capable of directly infecting humans (rather than first needing to evolve in an intermediate animal host) may be more common than previously thought, the researchers say.
But other virologists question whether the information gleaned from the experiment justifies the potential risk. Although the extent of any risk is difficult to assess, Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, points out that the researchers have created a novel virus that “grows remarkably well” in human cells.
“If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” he says.
“The only impact of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk,” agrees Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and biodefence expert at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey.
Ebright and his co-author also conceded that funders may think twice about allowing such experiments in the future.
“Scientific review panels may deem similar studies building chimeric viruses based on circulating strains too risky to pursue,” they write, adding that discussion is needed as to “whether these types of chimeric virus studies warrant further investigation versus the inherent risks involved”.
Previously, scientists had believed, on the basis of molecular modelling and other studies, that it should not be able to infect human cells. The latest work shows that the virus has already overcome critical barriers, such as being able to latch onto human receptors and efficiently infect human airway cells, he says.
“I don’t think you can ignore that.”
Which brings us to perhaps the mostnotable finding.
A genetic analysis of the spike-protein genes – the exact region that was bio-engineered by the UNC lab in 2015, where Zhengli Shi and Xing-Yi Ge previously isolated a batty coronavirus that targets the ACE2 receptor just like this 2019-nCoV strain of the coronavirus does – indicates an artificial and unnatural origins of the Wuhan Strain’s spike-protein genes when they are compared to the genomes of wild relatives.
Instead of appearing similar and homologous to its wild relatives, an important section of the Wuhan Strain’s spike-protein region shares the most genetic similarity with a bio-engineered commercially available gene sequence that’s designed to help with immunotherapy research. It is mathematically possible for this to happen in nature – but only in a ten-thousand bats chained to ten-thousand Petri dishes and given until infinity sense.
And so, as the report goes on, a scientist who’s been prolifically involved with studying the molecular interaction of coronaviruses and humanity, spending decades and millions of dollars, and having even helped build a hyper-virulent coronavirus from scratch at UNC – just so happens to be working at the only BSL-4 virology lab in China that also just so happens to be at the epicenter of an outbreak involved a coronavirus that’s escaping zoological classification and whose novel spike-protein region shares more in common with a commercial genetic vector than any of its wild relatives
However, most recently, as an increasing number of global experts questioned China’s initial official story that this came from the food market in Wuhan, Zhengli Shi hurriedly wrote a new report, claiming instead of the initial findings that the novel virus came from a bat in Yunnan, the Chinese chrysanthemum. She said that this was a new discovery that she had worked hard for several years, and coincidentally wrote a paper after the outbreak and published it in the famous international academic journal Nature.
Which all seems like a very sudden about face for someone who had been working on bio-engineering the exact virus for decades…
The reason why #CCP held on releasing info about #CoronavirusOutbreak
is that they were waiting for Dr. Shi Zhengli’s paper to be published at Nature so that they could claim bat is the origin. #COVID2019
中共推遲公佈 #武汉肺炎 疫情 是為等石正麗提交論文https://t.co/Su5odFacas
A coronavirus spontaneously mutated and jumped to humans at a wet market or deep in some random bat cave which just so happened to be 20 miles from China’s only BSL-4 virology lab, a virus with an unusually slippery never-before-seen genome that’s evading zoological classification, and whose spike-protein region which allows it to enter host cells appears most like a bio-engineered commercial product, that somehow managed to infect its first three and roughly one-third of its initial victims despite them not being connected to this market, and then be so fined-tuned to humans that it’s gone on to create the single greatest public health crisis in Chinese history with approaching 100 million citizens locked-down or quarantined – also causing Mongolia to close its border with its largest trading partner for the first time in modern history.
Or, Chinese scientists failed to follow correct sanitation protocols possibly while in a rush during their boisterous holiday season, something that had been anticipated since the opening of the BSL-4 lab and has happened at least four times previously, and accidentally released this bio-engineered Wuhan Strain – likely created by scientists researching immunotherapy regimes against bat coronaviruses, who’ve already demonstrated the ability to perform every step necessary to bio-engineer the Wuhan Strain 2019-nCov – into their population, and now the world. As would be expected, this virus appears to have been bio-engineered at the spike-protein genes which was already done at UNC to make an extraordinarily virulent coronavirus. Chinese efforts to stop the full story about what’s going on are because they want the scales to be even since they’re now facing a severe pandemic and depopulation event. No facts point against this conclusion.
And, following tonight’s huge jump in reported cases and deaths…
…we thought the admittedly doomsday-ish conclusion from harvardtothebighouse.com seemed worthwhile noting:
“Simply and horribly, this is likely to become another Chernobyl or Fukushima – a catastrophic illustration of mankind’s hubris and intransigence clashing with Nature, as fate again reaps a once unimaginably tragic toll.”
As Professor Neil Ferguson warned, “we’re at the eary stages of a global pandemic”
Bernie, et al, imagine there exists some means to redistribute wealth, most likely following the economist Thomas Piketty, via a progressive tax on the rich. Just talking about that may be enough to scare the wealthy into putsching a corporate Democrat in Bernie’s place yet again, despite his human shield of nose-pierced volunteers. But even if Sanders were to win, it would not be enough to change America. It’s a reality problem.
The reality of wealth is that the gap between most Americans and those who sit atop our economy continues to grow. During the two decades after 1960, the real incomes of the top 5 percent and the remaining 95 percent increased at almost the same rate, about 4 percent a year. But between 1980 and 2007, incomes diverged, with those at the bottom seeing annual increases only half that of those at the top. Then it got worse.
Lower savings and hyper-available credit (remember fraudulent Countrywidemortgages, ARMs, and usurious re-fi’s?) put the middle and bottom portions of society on an unsustainable financial path that crashed into the Great Recession of 2008. Yet America’s top earners’ wealth still grew; the one percent captured 95 percent of post-financial crisis growth, as the stock market recovered, while the bottom people became poorer, as their missing homes did not. Their wealth, such as it was, was a Potemkin vision, held in the form of houses they didn’t actually own. The recession represented the largest redistribution of money in a century. How did the rich pull this off?
It came down to the reality of possession. The wealthy own stock and real estate, not just personal homes.Yet just under half of Americans own no stock (the wealthiest own over 80 percent of all stock, along with 40 percent of America’s land). Markets over time go up and those who own parts of them do well. A rising tide lifts all yachts, as historian Morris Berman observed. People who do not own homes have to rent them from those who do. Owners can raise rents anytime they want more money.
It can be hard to comprehend the sheer level of wealth possessed by the rich: Redfin figured out Bill Gates could buy all of the real estate in Boston. Candidate Michael Bloomberg, meanwhile, could pick up Anaheim. Google’s Larry Page is able to buy Boca Raton. Never mind yachts; they can buy whole cities.
It is the reality of the system.Walmart associates make minimum wage. Most of them are nowhere near full-time, so their take-home pay is well below the poverty threshold. Employer-assisted Obamacare, such as it is, only kicks in after one works 20 hours a week or more, so following the implementation of that policy, most employees were cut to less than 20 hours, meaning they had to juggle multiple jobs to live and still did not have health care, as qualifying hours are not cumulative.
Walmart can pay low wages, creating a new status known as working poor, without having to see workers literally starve on the job, because their employees receive $2.66 billion in government poverty assistance each year. That works out to about $5,815 per worker, or about $420,000 per store.
Food assistance is also key in profiting from income inequality. According to one study, in a single year, nine Walmarts in Massachusetts received more than $33 million in food stamp dollars spent at their stores. In two years, Walmart received about half of the $1 billion in food stamp expenditures in Oklahoma. Overall, 18 percent of all food benefits money nationwide is spent at Walmart. That’s about $14 billion.
So let’s Robin Hood the wealthy, Bernie, Elizabeth, and others say. After all, Jeff Bezos’ net worth is $109 billion. But that’s everything he has, not just the 6 percent tax Elizabeth Warren wants him to pay. The net worth of the entire Forbes 400 is under $3 trillion. That’s everything they own. The reforms Warren has proposed to address economic inequality will cost us some $20 trillion. The gap has gotten too big to raise everyone up.
But you have to start somewhere, right?
Given that America’s largest companies already pay little to no tax, it is unclear how such a system could ever be enforced in the long run, given that the wealthy will just offshore their money. Taxes still leave in place other factors driving economic inequality, including inheritance laws (money is immortal. The children of rich people are born rich and unless they get really into hookers and blow, will inevitably get richer. They almost can’t help it) and the ability of the wealthy to control wages and the availability of jobs. Unions are increasingly a thing of the past and automation threatens jobs daily. The rich decide when to pull the trigger on touch screens in fast food restaurants and deep-six cashier jobs. And never mind the mass extinction that driverless delivery vehicles will bring on, to say nothing of the one after that when advances in AI crush entry-level coding jobs.
The single most significant factor is that financial growth via capital ownership (what the rich do for money) always outstrips wage growth (what the rest of us do for money). Getting richer by owning stuff is always a better deal than trying to get rich by working for wages from the people who own stuff. Even if a magic wand were to somehow reset society, the nature of capitalism would soon set things back on the path to income inequality.
Rich people get money through capital gains, via assets they buy cheaply that become worth more over time (until slavery was replaced with the minimum wage, human beings were also considered a form of capital asset—seriously, check with human “resources” where you work). That’s why a short-term downturn that’s bad for you (you lose what you have, like a home) is ultimately good for most of them (downturns are discount buying opportunities for those with spare money). It’s why the stock market troubles that uninformed people wish for will not make Trump go away. Math!
The only hope lies in the reality of politics, right? Over large swaths of the earth, there are no elections. In some of the wealthiest countries in the Middle East and Asia, there is not even the pretext of anyone choosing a government. Most governments are controlled by family ascension, not unlike the Middle Ages. In more modern places, corruption and manipulation control things, as power and wealth work together.
Such is the case now in the United States. According to the once-prescient Lawrence Lessing (who has since lost his mind to Twitter and TDS), thanks to concentration of wealth, 132 people in the U.S. essentially control elections. They do so by donating—just that handful of people—over 60 percent of Super PAC money. Those 132 represent 0.000042 percent of the total number of voters; most other contributions to candidates are small, many below $200. It sounds nice when a candidate talks about this, but it diffuses power even as you think he owes you something now. That’s because it’s impossible under such circumstances for government to create laws against the interests of the wealthy; after all, they work for them.
The reality is there is no answer, no solution. That’s because things are working more or less as they are supposed to. From a certain perspective, income inequality means things are going according to the rigged rules. The system is designed to squeeze wealth up into a smaller and smaller group of hands. A byproduct is the creation of more and more poor at the bottom. It is the inevitable endpoint for a society set up to fund the wealthy via capital appreciation by paying low or stagnant wages to everyone else.
To say it can’t be is to ignore the last time it sort of was, one king in one castle sustained by tens of thousands of serfs living in sloven conditions, with feudalism the dominant force. A very, very few owned most everything of value. The 99.999 percent majority—serfs then, valued Target associates now—worked for whatever the feudal lords allowed them to have.
It’s very American to believe there are always answers, that there are not forces stronger than change at work, especially in an election year. Yet if you’re still looking for those answers—solutions—well, you’ve gotten to the end of the article.
Dozens Of Dead Birds Seized From Luggage Of Passenger Traveling From Beijing To Washington DC
We’re not quite sure the Chinese have the right idea for containing the climate of disease and virii coming out of their country. After all, what good is wearing a surgical mask on a flight when you have crammed several dozen dead birds into a bag for a 10 hour plus flight to the United States?
That’s exactly what happened two weeks ago: U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak, seized a bag of dead birds that was being carried in the luggage of an airline passenger traveling from China to Washington D.C. on January 27.
The birds were packaged in a bag that had cartoon images on it and was seized at Dulles Airport from a passenger, who was arriving from Beijing, according to the NY Post. The passenger claimed that the birds were “cat food” and that he was planning to bring them to Maryland after his flight.
Birds from China are (obviously) not allowed in the U.S. for fear of spreading the avian flu. The birds were “destroyed by incineration” with approval from the USDA.
Casey Durst, director of field operations for the agency’s Baltimore field office said: “Customs and Border Protection agriculture specialists continue to exercise extraordinary vigilance every day in their fight to protect our nation’s agricultural and economic prosperity from invasive pests and animal diseases.”
“These dead birds are prohibited from importation to the United States as unprocessed birds pose a potentially significant disease threat to our nation’s poultry industries and more alarmingly to our citizens as potential vectors of avian influenza,” he concluded.
The House of Representatives in the state of Virginia is quickly ramming liberal legislation down the throats of innocent people. They have passed an “assault weapons” ban, which would criminalize thousands of people who haven’t committed a crime.
The 51-48 vote in the House of Delegates moves H.B. 961 (the assault weapons ban) to the state Senate. Passage among senators could be in jeopardy, however, as Democrats only have a two-seat majority, meaning they can only afford to lose one vote should all the Republicans oppose the bill. But don’t assume it’s passage won’t happen. Taking away guns is essential for tyranny. But the propaganda is all about safety:
“This legislation, just like other bills passed by the House this year, is intended to make Virginians safer every day,” House Democrats said in a statement after the vote. –Fox News
This is to make tyrants safer against those they want control over. This is obvious to anyone who has even the slightest knowledge of history.
Virginia has become ground zero in the national gun debate as Democrats have made gun control the cornerstone of this year’s legislative session after capturing a full majority for the first time in two decades.
Fully prepping for tyranny is difficult because it takes relying on history for evidence of just how far humans will go to enforce laws on those who haven’t done anything wrong. But if the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany are any gauges, Virginians could be in big trouble.
Coronavirus “Likely To Wreak Havoc” And Decimate February China Auto Sales
Just days ago, we reported about a major inventory glut in the Chinese auto market due to the effects of the coronavirus on an industry that has already been mired in recession for months.
Now, auto industry executives are admitting that the virus could “wreak havoc” on sales and production for the first quarter, according to the Asia Times. Automakers across the country have been forced to cancel sales targets and offer subsidies to hold over dealers during the outbreak.
The coronavirus has now killed over 1,000 people (if you are to believe the CCP’s likely understated numbers) and more than 40,000 people are now confirmed to be infected in China.
Accordingly, traffic to showrooms has collapsed across the country since late January. A China Automobile Dealer’s association poll shows that dealers predict a drastic drop in sales of 50% to 80% this month, compared to February 2019. 70% of dealers have said they have seen “almost no customers” since the end of January.
Volvo has announced same day subsidies totaling about $1.42 million and BMW has cancelled dealers’ sales targets in February. It has also said targets for March will be “flexibly set”. Ford and Hyundai have simply decided not to assess the sales performance of their Chinese dealers in Q1.
The CADA said auto sales “show a cliff-like decline”.
Recall, we also reported just days ago that average inventory levels were at 62.7% for January, according to the China Automobile Dealer Association. These numbers are far above the standard 50% level that is considered normal in the industry.
This follows China’s Miao Wei, Minister of Industry and Information Technology, saying in mid-January (prior to the coronavirus outbreak becoming severe) that the industry still faces “big downward pressure”.
At the time, he predicted sales of just 25 million units for the year. We obviously think that this number could wind up being materially lower.
Recall, sales for 2019 totaled 25.769 million units. Sales of just 25 million units – an optimistic prediction in our eyes – would mark a third straight year of declines for the world’s largest auto market regardless.
The MIIT also said at the time that it would further study and review its NEV vehicle subsidies. Recall, Beijing backing away from these subsidies caused NEV sales to taper off toward the end of 2019, sullying what was an otherwise consistent silver lining for the country, even amidst the overall recession in autos.
With no signs of the country recovering from its ongoing epidemic, there doesn’t seem to be any silver linings left.
We noted in December that NEV sales plunged 42% in November after Beijing backed away. The government is ostensibly dedicating all of its efforts to deal with the country’s ongoing outbreak, and so Beijing has not revisited its comments about EVs yet, and we are already halfway through Q1 2020.
China did say, however, it is going to “maintain support” for NEVs, without getting into too much detail. Miao also said he’s confident that the country will ensure “stable industrial production in 2020” while phasing out “zombie firms”.
There may have been some spooky foreshadowing in those words from mid-January, as almost every business in the locked down major cities of China now looks like a “zombie firm”.
China Reports Huge Jump In New Coronavirus Infections And Deaths; Oil, Stocks Tumble
All those clueless hacks who warned us for years not to trust China’s economic numbers, yet were so gullible to believe any coronavirus pandemic “data” released by Beijing are going to look pretty stupid right about now.
Hubei just released its latest round of coronavirus outbreak figures, and in a clear confirmation of the ‘conspiracy theory’ that China had altered the way it was reporting Covid-19 deaths and cases – clearly in order to suggest that things were improving and you should go back to work, while ideally buying stocks, the province at the epicenter of the Coronavirus pandemic just came clean and the numbers are stunning.
The number of cases exploded by 14,840, resulting in a total of 48,206 cases, including 13,332 clinically diagnose cases:
Well, it appears that a few days later, China changed its mind and has reverted to the original definition of “infection” while also including “clinical diagonisis” to determine if a new infection had take place. This is how Hubei explained the change:.
With the deepening of understanding of new coronavirus pneumonia and the accumulation of experience in diagnosis and treatment, in view of the characteristics of the epidemic in Hubei Province, the General Office of the National Health and Health Commission and the Office of the State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine issued the “Diagnosis and Treatment Plan for New Coronavirus Infected Pneumonia (Trial (Version) “adds” clinical diagnosis “to the case diagnosis classification in Hubei Province, so that patients can receive standardized treatment according to confirmed cases as early as possible to further improve the success rate of treatment.
According to the plan, Hubei Province has recently conducted investigations on suspected cases and revised the diagnosis results, and newly diagnosed patients were diagnosed according to the new diagnosis classification. In order to be consistent with the classification of case diagnosis issued by other provinces across the country, starting today, Hubei Province will include the number of clinically diagnosed cases into the number of confirmed cases for publication.
Of course, the real reason for the original change as noted above was to give the impression that China was succeeding in containing the infection, which helped boost stocks – both in China and globally – sharply higher, and in the case of the S&P, to new all time highs.
As for the catastrophic revision, it may also explain why on Tuesday morning, China’s CCTV reported that Hubei province removed its two top health officials, namely health commission head Liu Yingzi and party chief Zhang Jin from their posts. Almost as if, in retrospect, they were caught hiding something…
And while China can now claim it wants to be more transparent (which is odd for a nation that is still refusing to admit the US CDC on the ground) and wants a more comprehensive definition of “infection” because it is suddenly so concerned about all those people it ordered to go back to work on Monday (with new cases now emerging in people’s workplaces forcing an immediate quarantine of all workers and co-workers), it somehow also changed the definition of “death”, because at the same time as the explosion in new cases, which clearly indicates that the pandemic is now clearly out of control, the number of reported deaths in Hubei alone spiked by 242 to 1,310 (we are still waiting for the official number of deaths across all of China which will likely add quite a few more cases to the Hubei total).
What is absolutely terrifying about the chart above is that, of the 242 new deaths, more than double the previous day’s total, is that according to the Hubei government, 135 are from the new “clinically diagnosed” category. This means that for weeks China was likely assigning coronavirus deaths to pneumonia (as we warned it was doing on Jan 25 in “This Is How China Is Hiding The True Number Of Coronavirus Deaths“),which also means that the real number of Coronavirus deaths is likely in the thousands.
For those curious what the now completely discredited fake coronavirus data, reported by China until today with the sole intent of boosting risk assets was, here is the full breakdown. Naturally none of these numbers matter anymore following today’s sudden burst of Chinese truthiness.
Who could have seen that coming? The stock market wanted so badly to believe the Chinese data… bonds and commodities knew better. The clearest indication that all Chinese data was fake, however, came from Global Times Editor on Chief who earlier today tweeted that “New infection cases outside of Hubei have dropped for 8 consecutive days. It is now time for the US and other countries to actively consider resuming flights to China.”
New infection cases outside of Hubei have dropped for 8 consecutive days. In Beijing with more than 21 million population, the daily new case of infection is around 10 recently. It is now time for the US and other countries to actively consider resuming flights to China.
Finally, we now look forward to what explanation China’s global tourism impressario, WHO Director Tedros Adhanom best known as the “WHO Candidate Accused of Covering Up Epidemics“, will come up with now after spending the past two weeks praising China’s response and claiming there is no risk of a global pandemic, while criticizing the US for daring to halt flights to China.
No more than 50% have said this in past election cycles
Evaluations of U.S. world standing mostly similar to past elections
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WASHINGTON, D.C. — Sixty-one percent of Americans say they are better off than they were three years ago, a higher percentage than in prior election years when an incumbent president was running. In the 1992, 1996 and 2004 election cycles, exactly half said they were better off. In three separate measures during the 2012 election cycle, an average of 45% said they were better off.
Relatedly, 52% of U.S. adults say it is easier for them to “go and buy things in the stores” than it was three years ago, higher than in the 1992, 1996 and 2004 election cycles, when the figures were closer to 40%.
Americans’ perceptions of whether they are personally better off, and whether it is easier to buy things, appear to be influenced much more by their party leanings than by their economic situations. Sixty percentage points separate Republicans’ (89%) and Democrats’ (29%) assessments of whether they are better off than three years ago. Independents are essentially in the middle of the two groups, at 60%. Meanwhile, 64% of those in both upper- and middle-income households say they are better off, as do 49% of those in lower-income households.
The Republican-Democratic gap is smaller — 44 points — when people indicate whether it is easier for them to buy things than it was three years ago: 76% of Republicans versus 32% of Democrats say it is, as do 49% of independents.
The party gaps on the “better off than three years ago” question were much smaller in the past, partly because supporters of the incumbent president’s party were less upbeat about their situations than Republicans are today.
In addition to higher ratings among Republicans, today’s higher figures are also driven by more positive ratings among independents — 60% today, compared with ratings near 50% in prior years.
Assessments of U.S. International Standing Similar to Past Elections
The majority of Americans do not believe the U.S. is as respected throughout the world as it was three years ago — 38% say it is and 59% say it is not. The percentage who think the U.S. is as respected is no worse than in past election years, with only as many as 40% saying so (in 1992 and 2000).
Additionally, 51% say the nation is as safe and strong as it was three years ago, while 43% say it is not. These readings are similar to what Gallup measured in the 2004 and 2012 election cycles, but lower than in 1992.
As on the economic items, wide party gaps exist on the international items. Seventy percent of Republicans, but only 9% of Democrats, believe the U.S. is as respected throughout the world as it was three years ago. Thirty-two percent of independents hold this view.
Also, 76% of Republicans, 51% of independents and 22% of Democrats believe the nation is as safe and strong as when President Donald Trump took office.
Trump Given More Credit Than Obama for Economic Improvements
Sixty-two percent give Trump a great deal or fair amount of credit for improvement in the state of the economy in the past few years — more than the 51% giving former President Barack Obama the same level of credit.
The economy will likely be as potent an election issue as any other, but there is no dominant issue in the public’s minds. In December, the economy was among the top six issues that U.S. adults rated as “extremely important” to their presidential vote. The latest poll, which asked Americans to choose among those six issues as the single most important to their vote, finds 29% choosing the economy and 25% healthcare. Fewer indicated that immigration (14%), gun policy (13%), education (11%) or terrorism (6%) is their top overall issue.
Bottom Line
If Trump asks Americans whether they are better off than before he came into office, most would say they are. Trump also gets more credit for recent economic improvements than Obama does, though majorities give both credit.
Trump was clear during his State of the Union that he plans to make the strength of the economy a major focus of his reelection campaign. Given Americans’ generally positive ratings of the economy — including a 63% job approval rating for Trump on the issue — it is a sensible strategy. But with Trump’s overall job approval rating still below the majority level, the ultimate question is whether his economic success will mean more to voters than the more controversial aspects of his presidency.
This Is What Happened After One Chinese Company Rushed To Reopen After The Corona-Chaos
Earlier today, Rabobank’s Michael Every laid out succinctly the dilemma facing Beijing, when he said that “China appears to have perhaps decided that the economic damage being wrought by a demand collapse and supply-chain shutdown is just too much to bear.” As reported overnight, Xi Jinping stated that China will meet its economic goals AND win the battle vs. the virus, and Beijing is urging firms to increase output even as the capital itself is largely locked down – and other cities are physically locking people into their homes. That’s as even the US admits that the Phase One trade deal will be slow off the market due to the virus impact.
Of course, China is no stranger to Double Think: as Every put it, “a freely-floating, controlled currency; market-determined, state-directed interest rates; and free-trade mercantilism. Yet increase economic activity from here and the virus will spread, both internally and globally. Concentrate on just the virus, and the local and global economic impact will be enormous.”
That, in a nutshell, was how Rabobank saw China’s “dialectic that has no comfortable Fichtean synthesis to the thesis and antithesis” and concluded that “things are going to get nasty for economies and markets – especially with official WHO word that a vaccine is 18-months away.”
Today, two days after China officially returned to work, we got the first confirmation of just how catastrophic Beijing’s order to local enterprises and businesses to rush back reboot the economy could be, when Jennifer Zeng reported that a company in Suzhou reopened, and immediately at least one CoVid2019 case found. As a result, the company’s 200+ employees couldn’t go home and were immediately placed under quarantine. At least the workers managed to “organize” quilts for themselves.
Company in #Suzhou reopened. One #CoVid2019 case found. Over 200 employed couldn’t go home and immediately under quarantine. They managed to organize quilts for themselves.
苏︍州单位提前开工，确诊一例 #武汉肺炎 ，全单位的人上了一天班，家都回不去了，200多人自带被子，全部隔离 pic.twitter.com/Fd660RKfqL
This is just the first such case. Expect many more – especially across Hubei and its neighboring provinces – as latent cases of Coronavirus which were never caught and cured spark new infections and mini epidemics, all of which dutifully captured on a smartphone clip for everyone in China to watch and freak out even more.
Which reminds us of another comment from Rabobank, which last week explained why the dilemma facing China is “truly awful”:
The quandary for China between releasing the quarantine straitjacket in days to stop its economy from getting truly sick, and allowing a virus like this to spread further as people start to mingle again is truly awful. There are no good options. For a world with a serious lack of final end-demand, and which has been relying on China, along with increasingly “Chinese” central banks, this is going to be a nasty shock either way that Mr Market is treating like he is Mr Magoo.
And since Beijing has no way out, especially since the epidemic is still raging despite Beijing’s “doctored”, no pun intended, infection and death numbers, expect China to unleash the most draconian censorship crackdown on any reports Covid-2019 has not only not been purged but is making unwelcome appearances across China’s enterprises, which will be quietly put under blanket quarantine even as Beijing pretends that all is well and its economy is once again humming on all cylinders until eventually the epidemic reaches a critical mass and China has no choice but to once again admit the full extent of the social and economic fallout. And just like in the case of SARS, don’t expect such “honesty” to emerge for at least several weeks if not months.
US Bombers Fly Near Taiwan After Chinese ‘Aggression’; Beijing Warned To “Focus On Fighting Coronavirus”
Though all eyes are on the deadly coronavirus pandemic, another dangerous military close encounter just played out off Taiwan’s coast on Wednesday.
“Three U.S. Air Force planes, including two B-52 bombers, flew near Taiwan on Wednesday, the island’s defense ministry said, after Taiwan’s air force scrambled earlier in the week to intercept Chinese jets,”Reuters reports.
The prior Sunday and Monday incidents involved Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) bombers and fighters approaching the self-declared Republic of China (Taiwan), before Taiwan scrambled its own US-supplied F-16 fighters to shadow the ‘invading’ aircraft.
Chinese air force H-6 bomber near a Taiwan F-16. February 10 photo by Taiwan Ministry of National Defense, via Reuters.
A senior US State Department official in the region called China’s behavior “completely inappropriate” and condemned the “aggressive act.”
Wednesday’s “response” by the Americans consisted in the following:
Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said one U.S. MC-130, a special mission aircraft based on the C-130 Hercules transport aircraft, flew down the Taiwan Strait in a southerly direction on Wednesday.
The two U.S. B-52 bombers skirted Taiwan’s east coast, also in a southerly direction, the ministry added.
Beijing has been engaged in provocative “island encirclement drills” somewhat routinely over the past half decade, resulting in multiple close encounters with US and Taiwanese forces, especially in the air and water, especially the contested Taiwan Strait.
Taiwan Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Joanne Ou pledged that such Chinese aggression will only “deepen cooperation with countries with similar ideals, including the United States, in response to the rising Chinese military threat.”
There’s little new here in such provocations and reactions, and counter-statements out of Taipei; however, Taiwan officials have tapped into a new argument sure to add insult to injury amid its ongoing standoff to assert territorial control in the face of much larger and more powerful China.
Reuters reports of a deeply provocative statement amid China’s worst crisis in years:
Taiwan has urged China to focus its efforts on fighting the new coronavirus rather than menacing the island.
No doubt this will do little to east tensions, and will only exacerbate them, likely only giving further invitation for China to “save face” and attempt to show that its military is stronger than ever and remains ‘undistracted’ by the deadly and society-threatening pandemic in its midst.
In the wake of the latest Hollywood buffoonery displayed at the Oscars, I think it is time for the American public to denounce in the strongest possible terms the rampant hypocrisy of sanctimonious cretins who make their living pretending to be someone other than themselves.
Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix and Barbara Streisand pop to mind as representative examples. All three are eager to lecture the American public on the need for equality and non-discrimination. Yet, not one of the recipients of the Oscar gift bags worth $225,000 spoke out against that extraordinary excess nor demanded that the money spent purchasing these “gifts” be used to benefit the poor and the homeless. Nope, take the money and run.
It is especially galling to see how the Hollywood Community has embraced the era of red-baiting Joseph McCarthy as the new standard for what is acceptable. There was a time that a few brave souls in Hollywood (I am thinking Lucille Ball, Kirk Douglas and Gregory Peck), spoke out against the blacklisting of actors, writers and directors for their past political ties to the Soviet Union. Now I have lived long enough to see the so-called liberals in Hollywood rail against Donald Trump and his supporters as “agents of Russia.” Many in Hollywood, who weep crocodile tears over the abuses of the Hollywood Blacklist, are now doing the same damn thing without a hint of irony.
If you are a film buff (and I consider myself one) you should be familiar with these great movies that remind the viewer of the horrors visited upon actors, writers and directors during the Hollywood Blacklist:
The Front–a 1976 comedy-drama film set against the Hollywood blacklist in the 1950s. It was written by Walter Bernstein, directed by Martin Ritt, and stars Woody Allen and Zero Mostel.
Good Night, and Good Luck–a 2005 historical drama film directed by George Clooney, tells the story of Edward R. Murrow fighting back against the hysterical red-baiting of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Trumbo–a 2015 American biographical drama film directed by Jay Roach that follows the life of Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who was blacklisted but continued to write award winning movies in alias (e.g. Spartacus).
This was an ugly, awful and evil time in America. It was a period of time fed by fear and ignorance. While it is true that there were Americans who identified as Communists and embraced the politics of the Soviet Union, we scared ourselves into believing that communist subversion was everywhere and that America was teetering on the brink of being submerged in a red tide.
Thirty years ago I reflected on this era and wondered how such mass hysteria could happen. Now I know. We have lived with the same kind of madness since Donald Trump was tagged as a Russian agent in the summer of 2016. And the irony is extraordinary. The very same Hollywood elite that heaped opprobrium on Director Elia Kazan for naming names in Hollywood in front of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, are now leading the charge in labeling anyone who dares speak out against the failed coup as “stooges” of the Kremlin or Putin.
Hillary Clinton’s crazy rant accusing U.S. Army Major and Member of Congress, Tulsi Gabbard, as a Kremlin puppet is not a deviation from the norm. Clinton exemplifies the terrifying norm of the political and cultural elite in this country. Accusing political opponents of being controlled by foreign enemies, real or imagined, is an old political tactic.
Makes me wonder what Edward R. Murrow or Dalton Trumbo would say if we could bring them back from the dead.
2nd Coronavirus Case Confirmed In San Diego As China Sends 2,600 Army “Medical Staff” To Wuhan
Summary:
China’s Hubei province admits a massive spike in virus cases and deaths (14,840 additional cases and 242 additional deaths)
CDC confirms second case in San Diego
The Sun reports first case confirmed in London, bringing UK total to 9
China Grand Prix cancelled
Couple onboard ‘Diamond Princess’ tell CNBC situation is “frankly terrifying”.
AFP publishes report exposing worsening shortages of food and supplies in Wuhan
Cruise ship rejected by four countries allowed to dock in Cambodia
Rumors of 10k in Wuhan not included in official count of cases
NYT follows WSJ in exploring problems with Chinese testing kits
Global Times says US should restart travel to China
US officials complain about China still denying American help
First ship-to-shore infection occurs in Japan from ‘Diamond Princess’
State Department lets non-essential personnel and their families leave Hong Kong because of outbreak
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Update (2050ET): Here comes martial law with Chinese characteristics. Moments ago, Bloomberg reported that China is sending 2,600 medical staff from the military to Wuhan, two weeks after it first deployed 450 “military medical staff” to Wuhan just as the pandemic was starting to spread.
It wasn’t quite clear just what “medical staff from military” means, but what is clear is that nearly 3,000 military personnel are going to Wuhan to make sure that there are no more incidents, like someone leaking another deadly pandemic from China’s only Level 4 biohazard lab, which just happens to be in Wuhan. That, or someone actually escaping alive from the quarantine zone for 11 million people.
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Update (1950ET): CDC officials confirmed to a local TV station that a second case of the virus has been confirmed in San Diego, bringing the total in the US to 14.
The patient was under quarantine at the same U.S. airbase in San Diego where another repatriated American was previously diagnosed with the disease known as Covid-19. There had been no contact between the two patients, who were on different flights coming out of China and were housed in separate facilities, indicating that the virus hadn’t spread between them. That suggests that more cases are highly likely as one case likely didn’t infect the other.
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Update (1855ET): Hubei just released its latest round of coronavirus outbreak figures, and in a clear confirmation of the ‘conspiracy theory’ that China had altered the way it was reporting Covid-19 deaths and cases – clearly in order to suggest that things were improving and you should go back to work, while ideally buying stocks, the province at the epicenter of the Coronavirus pandemic just came clean and the numbers are stunning.
The number of cases exploded by 14,840, resulting in a total of 48,206 cases, including 13,332 clinically diagnose cases:
What happened? Recall that on Monday we published “This Is How China Is Rigging The Number Of Coronavirus Infections” in which we explained that China on Feb 7 moved the goalposts by changing the definition of the term “infection” and that “going forward patients who tested positive for the virus but have no symptoms will no longer be regarded as confirmed.“
Well, it appears that a few days later, China changed its mind and has reverted to the original definition of “infection” while also including “clinical diagonisis” to determine if a new infection had take place. This is how Hubei explained the change:.
With the deepening of understanding of new coronavirus pneumonia and the accumulation of experience in diagnosis and treatment, in view of the characteristics of the epidemic in Hubei Province, the General Office of the National Health and Health Commission and the Office of the State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine issued the “Diagnosis and Treatment Plan for New Coronavirus Infected Pneumonia (Trial (Version) “adds” clinical diagnosis “to the case diagnosis classification in Hubei Province, so that patients can receive standardized treatment according to confirmed cases as early as possible to further improve the success rate of treatment.
According to the plan, Hubei Province has recently conducted investigations on suspected cases and revised the diagnosis results, and newly diagnosed patients were diagnosed according to the new diagnosis classification. In order to be consistent with the classification of case diagnosis issued by other provinces across the country, starting today, Hubei Province will include the number of clinically diagnosed cases into the number of confirmed cases for publication.
Of course, the real reason for the original change as noted above was to give the impression that China was succeeding in containing the infection, which helped boost stocks – both in China and globally – sharply higher, and in the case of the S&P, to new all time highs.
And while China can now claim it wants a more comprehensive definition of “infection” because it is suddenly so concerned about all those people it ordered to go back to work on Monday (with new cases now emerging in people’s workplaces forcing an immediate quarantine of all workers and co-workers), it somehow also changed the definition of “death”, because at the same time as the explosion in new cases, which clearly indicates that the pandemic is now clearly out of control, the number of reported deaths in Hubei alone spiked by 242 to 1,310 (we are still waiting for the official number of deaths across all of China which will likely add quite a few more cases to the Hubei total).
Who could have seen that coming? The stock market wanted so badly to believe the Chinese data… bonds and commodities knew better.
But of course, smart traders who were paying attention yesterday might have been able to deduce that something was up. Beijing dismissed some of the top health officials in Wuhan and Hubei earlier this week, and last week it administered administrative punishments to hundreds of lower-level bureaucrats.
They have already been set up to take the fall for President Xi and his inner circle. Let the scapegoating begin.
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Update (1515ET): What are they hiding? Well, isn’t it obvious?
Yesterday, Dr. Tedros revealed at a WHO press conference that China had finally agreed to allow a team of international experts to study the outbreak on the mainland. This ended weeks of Beijing steadfastly refusing any international aid as more than a thousand people died in Hubei’s overwhelmed hospitals.
Now, US health officials are complaining that Beijing is still blocking them from visiting China by refusing to allow Americans to join the WHO team traveling to China. US officials affirmed Wednesday afternoon in New York that they still hadn’t been given a reason for the refusal, and we strongly doubt one will be offered. After all, the Politburo certainly isn’t in the habit of explaining its decisions.
In the US, the CDC warned during a press conference too early to know if warm spring weather will slow or stop the coronavirus outbreak, as it usually is enough to bring the annual North American flu season to an end.
Contradicting President Trump, Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said Wednesday that she hopes “it will go down as the weather warms up, but it’s premature to assume that.”
The CDC also revealed earlier that some of the test kits it had distributed to state health officials might be defective, amid broader scrutiny of the tests that have so often failed to detect the virus in infected patients.
On Monday, Trump once again said from the White House that “heat” would kill the virus. President Trump promised China any help it needs weeks ago, and the CDC has repeatedly offered to send doctors and nurses, but China has repeatedly refused.
In other news, Treasury Secretary Steven Muchin said during a Wednesday interview that the virus outbreak would likely slow implementation of the US-China trade deal, the latest warning about the viability of the pact. We still need three to four more weeks of data from the outbreak to really begin to understand what the impact will be, Mnuchin added.
After a senior regime economist assured the Chinese public that the hit to economic growth as a result of the virus would be minimal, President Xi and the Communist Party’s senior leaders have ordered local officials to accelerate the reopening of China’s economy, including ordering local factories and offices back to work.
Earlier, President Xi and the leadership announced a slate of monetary and fiscal policy measures to support the Chinese economy, including tax cuts and yet more monetary easing.
But as markets found some degree of comfort in today’s news out of China (despite looming doubts about Beijing’s ability to contain the outbreak and whether the numbers released by the regime are legitimate), the ‘Diamond Princess’, a cruise ship quarantined at a port in Yokohama, has become the site of the first confirmed ship-to-shore transmission, as a Japanese government official who boarded the ship to survey the situation has been diagnosed with the virus, according to the New York Times. That brings the number of coronavirus cases stemming from the ship to 176.
In Hong Kong, the US State Department is allowing all nonemergency consulate employees and their families to leave because of the coronavirus outbreak.
Not long after China’s top officials pledged to stabilize the Chinese economy and restore the world’s confidence in the Middle Kingdom, WSJ reports that a survey of economists found 83% believe the outbreak will hurt Q1 growth in the US, where only 13 cases have been identified.
“The negative demand shock from coronavirus is significant,” said Constance Hunter, chief economist at KPMG. China’s GDP will be impacted significantly and this will show up in everything from commodity prices to demand for global goods and services,” she said.
Not to worry, though. We’re sure that the patriotic socialist values of the Chinese people (or perhaps some badly goalseeked economic data) will come through in a pinch to save the Chinese economy from a house of cards style liquidity crisis.
* * *
Update (1325ET): As Twitter digests reports of the first confirmed case in London, adding to Wednesday’s torrent of coronavirus outbreak-related news, WHO Director General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, is speaking from Lausanne, delivering the WHO’s latest update on the outbreak, briefings that have become a daily occurrence.
Sounding uncharacteristically pessimistic, Dr. Tedros warned that the outbreak could still go in any direction, suggesting that Beijng’s heroic efforts aren’t really the “model for emerging nations”, as he once described it.
In other news, Global Times editor Hu Xijin, a longtime mouthpiece for the Communist regime on Twitter, also took the next step in Beijing’s carefully crafted narrative (which CNBC’s Eunice Yoon unravels in a string of tweets included below): He demanded that Western airlines reopen travel to China.
This comes as a senior economist for the regime said Wednesday that China can still hit its growth targets for 2020, and that the outbreak would likely be only a temporary bump.
New infection cases outside of Hubei have dropped for 8 consecutive days. In Beijing with more than 21 million population, the daily new case of infection is around 10 recently. It is now time for the US and other countries to actively consider resuming flights to China.
As evidence, Hu cites a drop in new cases outside Hubei, ignoring all the other frightening stats that his own regime has voluntarily shared with the press.
* * *
Update (1310ET): After a relatively slow day for coronavirus news, the Murdoch-owned UK tabloid the Sun reported Wednesday afternoon that the first coronavirus case has been confirmed in London.
The infected individual is a Chinese national. The paper said officials will now be scrambling to trace his steps and find and test everybody whom he came in contact with.
The news comes as 12 Sussex schools have been placed on infection alert as some teachers and students have been asked to quarantine themselves.
The paper is citing a source as city hall.
BBC reports all 83 people who were being held in quarantine at Arrowe Park Hospital in Wirral have tested negative.
This case in London is the UK’s ninth.
The news hits just as the WHO’s is beginning its latest press update at its headquarters in Switzerland.
WATCH LIVE: World Health Organization update on the novel coronavirus — Feb. 12, 2020 https://t.co/eXl1tLefDn
* * * Update (0955ET): CNBC’s Eunice Yoon, one of the most reliable western journalists covering the coronavirus outbreak from Beijing, just perfectly summed up the current state of things in China, as the regime projects a message of optimism to appease markets and investors…while many remain skeptical of China’s numbers.
#China reports lowest # new #COVID19 cases since late-Jan. Health off’ls say drop in new confirmed cases from 3,887 on Feb 4 to 2,015 Feb 11 “positive changes”. Drop seems to support prediction by gov’t epidemiologist Zhong Nanshan outbreak to peak late-Feb, maybe over by April.
Upbeat remarks coincide with slight change in attitude of government priorities. #China now describes local requirements on factories as “inappropriate”, “inconsistent” for “orderly” reopening. Gov’t economist says China can hit goal to double GDP by 2020 with 5.7% annual growth.
State TV reports President Xi chaired cabinet meeting on #virus prevention. #China to implement prudent yet flexible monetary policy; roll out targeted tax, fee cuts; boost investment projects; lower loan rates to firms; push factories to resume work; vows to avoid mass layoffs.
Leaders reveal their concerns about econ damage. Online people happy about drop in cases, hope outbreak to peak soon. Others skeptical about numbers, want more evidence virus squashed. (My read: so it could take more time for people to shop, see movies, go back to normal life.)
Late last night, Reuters reported on remarks from an influential economist at a top regime-controlled think tank. Cai Fang, the vice head of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, insisted in a column published in the People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s main newspaper, that the impact of the virus-inspired lockdown would be a “one off”, and that China’s economy will quickly recover and meet the government’s growth goals for the year.
And don’t forget – as Reuters reminds us – this year is critical for the Communist Party to fulfill its goal of doubling GDP in the ten years to 2020. They’re just about on track, but a pullback now could ruin the whole enterprise and make them look weak. Which is why we suspect the data will be as doctored as it can reasonably be without it being immediately dismissed as unreliable.
* * *
Update (0824ET): At this point, some of the world’s most prestigious media organizations, including WSJ and NYT, have reported that health officials are probably undercounting the number of coronavirus cases in Wuhan.
After WSJ spotlighted the issue in a story published online last night recounting how officials turned away seriously ill patients who failed to pass swabtests, the NYT followed up this morning with a piece about Beijing’s efforts to speed up testing.
Dr. Zhang Xiaochun, who works in a hospital in Wuhan, was in dismay. Her patient had been running a fever for nine days, and a CT scan showed signs of pneumonia — symptoms of the new coronavirus sweeping across the central Chinese city.
But a test to confirm the diagnosis would take at least two days. To Dr. Zhang, that meant a delay in isolating her patient — and getting potentially lifesaving treatment.
This past week, Dr. Zhang started a social media campaign with an urgent call to simplify screening for the new coronavirus. It was an unusually public effort that quickly found support among public health experts and the government as China grapples with one of the deadliest epidemics in its recent history.
“The purpose is to isolate and treat quickly,” Dr. Zhang said in a telephone interview. “It amounts to extraordinary measures taken in extraordinary times.”
To fix the issue, Chinese health officials are trying to increase the supply of nucleic acid coronavirus tests, which they believe to be more reliable than swap tests, which often don’t go deep enough into a patient’s chest to find evidence of the virus.
A major bottleneck has been a shortage of nucleic acid testing kits used to confirm the presence of the coronavirus. So Dr. Zhang proposed that doctors could first use CT scans to detect pneumonia and quickly isolate and treat patients who have it.
CT scans are convenient and can produce immediate results, Dr. Zhang said. Experts say people infected with the coronavirus would be likely to have lesions in both lungs.
Following a week of Chinese police rounding up anyone suspected to be infected and locking them away in an official quarantine, the rumors are that there are 10,000 cases in Wuhan who have been clinically diagnosed via CAT scans of their chest (as we explained earlier, swab tests being used in viral tests are notoriously unreliable), but haven’t been included in the official statistics, as twitter user @fxmacro reminds us.
Numbers have peaked but don’t be surprised to see an uptick over the next week because there are 10k clinically diagnosed via cat scans but not counted as confirmed in hubei … with another 10k still awaiting testing the rest of China is well on its way to recovery
Even the WHO has warned that we’re only seeing “the tip of the iceberg.”
It’s definitely something worth thinking about.
The number of cases and deaths hasn’t changed since Tuesday night in the US, with the number of confirmed cases around the world topping 45,000, with 44,653 of those in mainland China, according to the SCMP.
We leave you with this clip shared by reporter Jennifer Zeng of hazmat-suit-wearing workers loading bodies into a van…horrifying scenes that have become common in Wuhan.
Stock markets across the globe are back on the front foot Wednesday morning after officials in Hubei reported a lower number of confirmed cases, and a lower number of deaths, in their morning update, inspiring optimism that the “People’s War” – as President Xi put it – against Covid-19 can be won.
Interestingly enough, while the market felt satisfied that Chinese health authorities are finally getting a handle on the virus now that Beijing and Shanghai have joined the ranks of cities suffering ‘partial lockdowns’, most of the major newsflow concerning the outbreak shifted to Britain, where a ‘super spreader’ who picked up the virus in Singapore has apparently wreaked havoc on the country’s national health system, having infected at least two medical personnel.
Officials at Worthing Hospital in West Sussex confirmed late Tuesday that a member of their hospital staff was among the eight confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the UK announced earlier this week. The Worthing staff member is different from a locum doctor working in Brighton who is also among the eight confirmed cases.
Yesterday, it was reported that two prisoners at HMP Bullingdon – including one who was recently extradited from Thailand – are being tested for the virus and being held in isolation. They are both reported to be suffering flu-like symptoms.
As of Tuesday evening, a total of 1,358 people have been tested for coronavirus in the UK, of which 1,350 were confirmed negative and eight positive, the Department of Health said. But as the WSJ reminded us last night, virus tests are often inaccurate and can even rule out patients who are obviously suffering from symptoms of viral pneumonia.
The health-care worker at Worthing went on to treat “a small number” of patients over two days before he was pulled into a quarantine.
As Worthing hospital posted signs calling for patients to immediately report any mysterious flu-like symptoms, the seventh Brighton and Hove schools issued warnings to parents about the coronavirus outbreak on the south coast, prompting some to keep their children home. Two families with children at Carden Primary School have been told to isolate in place.
The Guardian also reported some details about the British man and alleged druggie who was expatriated back from Thailand and may have carried the virus with him.
The 31-year-old man’s name is Mark Rumble, was flown back to the UK on Jan. 27. He was arrested in Pattaya, Thailand, last November
In other news, CNBC conducted an interview with a couple stuck aboard the Diamond Princess, two of more than two dozen Americans stuck on board the ship. The couple said the experience of watching people get carted off the ship day to day has been “frankly terrifying”, and they questioned why authorities have been evacuating healthy people in recent days.
“They say [Feb. 19] – if we’re healthy on that date we can go. They say we’re all safest here quarantining in place. If that’s true, then why are they offloading buses of people who they don’t want to get sick? We’ve had 100 new cases since the quarantine started. This is not making sense.”
Will they ever go on another cruise? “It’ll be a while.”
“Those numbers that we hear from the captain over the loudspeaker are terrifying,” says Gay Courter, a quarantined passenger on the Diamond Princess cruise ship. “This whole thing has failed and they are using triage to prevent deaths of the most elderly.” #coronaviruspic.twitter.com/CHjokC588K
The couple added that they had found a hospital in Fla. that would take them under quarantine conditions, and aren’t sure why they need to stay here on a cruise ship moored in Japan if they haven’t tested positive for the virus.
Since being quarantined eight days ago, 136 passengers and crew aboard the ‘Diamond Princess’ have been found to have contracted the virus, making it the center of the largest outbreak outside mainland China.
In Wuhan, intensifying supply shortages of food, medicine, fuel and other critical supplies are beginning to weigh on the local population, who have been trapped in place for more than two weeks, according to an Epoch Times reporter.
A brave team of AFP reporters who have been documenting the effort to combat the virus on the frontlines of the outbreak published a sweeping report on Tuesday exposing how truly isolated Wuhan had become.
Racing fans received some disappointing news last night when it was reported that the Chinese Grand Prix is expected to be postponed because of the outbreak. The Formula-1 race was scheduled to be held in Shanghai on April 19.
In other news, Indonesia has rejected experts suspicions that health officials might be hiding instances of viral infection. In Russia, two Chinese who were found to be infected and quarantined in Siberia last month have recovered, and been released. Both had ‘mild’ forms of the virus. Russia has closed its border with China and North Korea because of the outbreak and suspended
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