RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinese-factories-shutter-as-export-orders-dry-up-amid-pandemic_3310277.html#

A large number of export-oriented Chinese factories were shuttered recently after they didn’t have enough orders to fill.

Some home appliance manufacturers also announced that they laid off employees because of a lack of export and domestic demand due to the pandemic.

As the outbreak of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as novel coronavirus, became severe in January, much of China was placed under lockdown and factories halted production for more than a month.

In February, Beijing encouraged companies to resume operations as it grew concerned about an economic slowdown. But Chinese companies were worried that the virus could spread among employees; many factories remained closed.

As some factories reopened in March, they realized they faced a bigger challenge—having no orders to fill. Orders were canceled as the virus spread to other countries, which also adopted social distancing measures and reduced economic activity.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-still-misleads-the-world-on-the-coronavirus-11586818132?mod=hp_opin_pos_2

As the world struggles to contain the coronavirus outbreak without triggering a new Great Depression, China is withholding vital information that would save lives and significantly alleviate the economic catastrophe that now threatens to immiserate hundreds of millions of people around the world.

This isn’t the old coverup, when Communist Party bumbling and deceit allowed a local outbreak to turn into the worst global disaster in decades. The new coverup is even more brazen. China continues to falsify vital information about the epidemic on a massive scale.

The evidence comes from many sources. In a classified report to the White House, the U.S. intelligence community has concluded that China underreports both deaths and the total number of cases. The Economist magazine compared China’s reported statistics with those from other countries and found that numbers changed dramatically in response to political events, such as the firing and replacement of local officials. Using conservative figures and assumptions, a report by Derek Scissors of the American Enterprise Institute estimates 2.9 million total cases in China, rather than the total of about 82,000 Beijing reports. If Mr. Scissors is right, the number of cases that China has concealed is greater than the total number of cases reported in the rest of the world.

These data matter. Without accurate information about the number and location of cases, including asymptomatic cases from China, it is much harder for the rest of the world to understand basic facts about the disease and its spread. And the absence of accurate information from China makes it much more difficult to know when it is safe to lift lockdowns.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/legacy-marxist-failure-dr-who-frontpagemagcom/

Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is the name of the top global health official. But what do we know about this man?  The globalization-favoring leftist mainstream media has been silent, apparently reluctant to investigate the total lack of qualifications of this man for the role.
They give him the moniker of “Doctor”, but he is not really a doctor at all. In fact, he is the first World Health Organization Director-General without a medical degree.
 
He has never cured a patient in his life. He has a diploma in public health, but even this could not cover his dangerous incompetence as Ethiopia’s Health Minister.
 
There is growing unhappiness with this man following the disastrous virus crisis. Prominent US senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio joined the global call for Doctor WHO’s removal.
 
Rubio accused him, with reasonable cause, of pandering to Communist Beijing who, through the office of Dr. WHO, misled the global community. Tedros echoed China’s false claim that the virus had no human-to-human transmission.
 
In other words, he was the global mouthpiece for Chinese lies.
 
Former US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, tweeted about Tedros’s unquestioning promotion Chinese lies. “This was posted by the WHO on January 14, that the WHO found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15880/coronavirus-france-disaster

The first bad decision was that, in contrast to the European Union fantasies, borders apparently do matter. France never closed them; instead it allowed large numbers of potential virus-carriers to enter the country.

In January 2020, several hundred thousand masks were available, but on February 19, President Macron decoded to send them to Wuhan, as a “gesture of solidarity with the Chinese people”…. The French government announced that masks would be available soon, but by the end of March, most doctors and caregivers still had no masks. Several doctors fell ill. As of April 10, eight have died from COVID-19 and several others are in critical condition. On March 20, the Government’s spokeswoman, Sibeth N’Diaye, incorrectly said, “masks are essentially useless”.

On February 25, a renowned French epidemiologist, Professor Didier Raoult… published a video… In it, he said he had found a treatment quickly to end the pandemic: hydroxychloroquine… (used with azithromycin)… On April 10, Professor Raoult published data showing that he had treated and cured 2,401 patients.

Immediately, Olivier Veran, the new French minister of health, said that Professor Raoult’s statements were “unacceptable” and that the treatment he was proposing was “worthless”…. In an attempt to quell the controversy, the French government, by decree, authorized Professor Raoult’s treatment in “military hospitals” for “patients reaching the acute phase of the disease” but prohibited family doctors from prescribing hydroxychloroquine. Professor Raoult replied that the treatment was only effective if administered “before the disease reaches its acute phase”. [Emphasis added]

France’s mainstream media would do well to fight harder for physicians to be able supply hydroxychloroquine with azithromycin and zinc sulfate. The French media would also do well to be more aware of the dirty game China is playing.

“The behavior of our leaders has been marked by unpreparedness, casualness, cynicism, and many of their acts imply the enforcement of the criminal law. Deliberate endangerment of the lives of others and failure to provide assistance to people in danger are obvious… In war, generals who are judged incompetent are sometimes shot. The President and other officials are well aware of this.” — Regis de Castelnau, attorney, in Marianne, a center-left magazine, April 4, 2020.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15884/imf-iran-coronavirus-lies

The U.S. Embassy wrote in a Facebook post: “The possessions of the current supreme leader Ali #Khamenei alone are estimated at $200 billion, while many people languish in poverty because of the dire economic situation in #Iran after 40 years of rule by the mullahs.”

If the Iranian leaders are so concerned about the public health, why they have been ratcheting up their use of lethal force, suppression and human rights abuses against those who have been revealing the truth about the COVID-19 virus in Iran or who have been voicing their concern about the regime’s mishandling of the coronavirus crisis?

“The world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism is seeking cash to fund its adventurism abroad, not to buy medicine for Iranians. The regime’s corrupt officials have a long history of diverting funds allocated for humanitarian goods into their own pockets and to their terrorist proxies.” — U.S. State Department Spokesman to CNN, April 9, 2020.

The ruling mullahs of Iran are doubling down on requests to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), headquartered in Washington DC, immediately to give Tehran an emergency $5 billion loan.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani stated that his government wants to use the $5 billion fund to fight the coronavirus pandemic, and stressed once again, “I urge international organizations to fulfill their duties … We are a member of the IMF.” The IMF, however, should definitely decline the mullahs’ financial request, because the ruling mullahs have plenty of cash and that they would most likely misuse the funds to advance their anti-American and anti-Semitic — and even anti-Iranian people — agendas.

Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, for instance, the unelected “representative of God on earth” and the longest-ruling autocrat in the Middle East, has a financial empire worth at least $95 billion, according to a report published by Reuters in 2013.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/04/when-panic-is-mistaken-for-policy/

On Friday, March 20,  I was due to fly from Sydney to Adelaide for a much anticipated family wedding.  Four days earlier and after much thought, my wife and I, being in the age-related ‘at-risk’ group for the Wuhan virus, decided to do the responsible thing and cancel our trip.  I doubt that, among the threatened cohort, we were alone in protecting ourselves, and, indirectly, the health system from what by then was recognised as a pandemic.

On Wednesday, March 18, Prime Minister Scott Morrison, with the support of the National Cabinet, announced the first tranche of what has turned out to be a rolling series of restrictions.   Essentially, these initial measures involved the still-novel term ‘social distancing’, hygiene rules, a limit of 500 people at outside gatherings and no more than 100 at inside gatherings,. Schools were to remain open, despite calls that they be shut. All these measures were based on what, at the time, was billed as the best medical advice available.

On the March 19, my wife and I travelled to Sydney for a small family gathering (nine of us) at the Kingsgrove Hotel for my grand-daughter’s second birthday.  At 5pm the hotel’s main lounge  hosted no more than 30 people. We sat in a separate lounge with an open roof and dutifully maintained observed the social-distancing rules: during the two hours we were there, at any one time there would have been no more than five other people in that lounge.  Looking back, it seems to me that even so early in the ‘lockdown’, people were pretty much “doing the right thing” — the encomium with which all of Australia would soon become endlessly familiar.

On March 24, PM Scott Morrison announced Stage Two of the restrictions:

# Food courts, nail salons, museums and libraries are among those ordered to shut

# Weddings have been limited to the couple, celebrant and witnesses

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15878/persecution-of-christians-february

Saleem Masih, a 22-year-old Christian farmhand, was tortured and killed for using his Muslim employer’s water well…. The employer later insisted that he had committed no crime; it was the murdered Christian who had “committed a crime by dirtying” their water, his murderer insisted, and therefore his punishment — torture and death — was “justified.” — CLAAS, February 28, Pakistan.

“Are we to deny the evidence before us, of kidnappers separating Muslims from infidels or compelling Christians to convert or die?” — Matthew Hassan Kukah, Bishop of Sokoto Diocese, Zenit.org, February 12, 2020, Nigeria.

“Christians are losing everything they own without an actual legal basis. They are losing everything Christians have worked for over the course of history.” — Fr. Slavomir Dadas, Aid to the Church in Need, February 6, 2020, Turkey.

“Another Christian girl aged 14 was recently abducted and gang-raped by some Muslim youths… The abductors not only raped her but also obtained her signatures and thumb impressions on some papers.” Although police recovered her, the rights activist “fears the suspects will use her signed documents to produce a fake marriage certificate and religion conversion letter in a bid to escape abduction and rape charges,” which, he said, “is common modus operandi of Muslims to confuse the court and avoid justice.” — Napoleon Qayyum, executive director of the Pakistan Center of Law of Justice, Morningstar News, February 12, 2020, Pakistan.

The Slaughter of Christians

Burkina Faso: On Sunday, February 16, Islamic gunmen raided a church during service and slaughtered 24 worshippers, including their pastor; 18 other congregants were injured and several others kidnapped. The terrorists torched the church building before leaving.

In a separate incident on February 10, militant Muslims abducted and slaughtered a church pastor, his son, two nephews, and another Christian clergyman. According to yet another report on February 3:

“Jihadists, claiming to be killing ‘in the name of Allah,’ returned to the scene of a previous atrocity … and murdered at least ten Christian men in a village market place; some estimates have put the death toll as high as 50.”

The attack took place in the same small town “where Boko Haram extremists began their murderous rampage last year on 28 April 2019, shooting the pastor, his son and four members of the congregation.” Then, as in other instances, the Islamic gunmen “threatened to kill anyone who would not convert to Islam.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15644/liberals-trump-peace-plan

While it is morally right to help any community or individual unjustly persecuted or forced to live in squalor, the historical record shows that Israel did not launch the wars against it, nor inspire terrorism, nor perpetuate the multi-generational refugee crisis, nor force Palestinians to remain in camps without citizenship in Lebanon, Syria, or (partly) in Jordan.

We must ask why so many secular liberals, Christians, and a minority of Jews do not grasp that negotiations based on… Islamic law can never play any role in current international law and can never bring peace to the Middle East. This longing to replace Western law with Islamic law inspires not just Hamas and Islamic Jihad, but also Hezbollah, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Islamic State, and, as we have seen, the entire Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.

It is the Jews, not the Arabs, who have been for 3,000 years, the indigenous people on that land, and it has been the Arabs, not the Jews, who are the settler-colonialists in the territory. Arabs first entered Palestine in and after the year 634, when it was invaded by Muslim conquerors — a fact recognized by every Islamic history down the centuries.

“Other stateless peoples can only dream of being offered independence and $50bn by the US president… offers of a kind that Chechens, Kurds, Baluchis, Tibetans and dozens of other stateless people would have jumped at.” — Tom Gross, journalist, Mideast Dispatch Archive, January 30, 2020.

It was inevitable that liberal politicians, pundits and media would speedily find fault with Donald Trump and Jared Kushner’s plan for peace in the Middle East, proclaimed as the “Deal of the Century”. So inevitable, in fact, that the plan was condemned years before it was actually announced in 2020.

As far back as May 2017, US President Donald J. Trump had met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Washington, offered, to get a peace deal and had asked Abbas to end the “pay-for-slay” system of payments to families of terrorist prisoners in Israeli gaols. On May 26, 2017, The New York Times ran an op-ed by PLO representative Diana Buttu in which she dismissed any plan to bring peace, while blaming every problem faced by the Palestinians on Israel and its presence in the West Bank.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15871/afghanistan-shady-peace

There are several fundamental problems with the “deal” touted by the administration as a ticket to peace in a land torn by war since the 1970s. To start with, it is not at all certain that the cast of characters that negotiated the “deal” actually do represent the Taliban…. Like the Mafia in Italy, it included a large number of “families” who came together… to set up an “Islamic emirate….” Today, we could identify a dozen groups of different sizes claiming the brand…. The only thing that unites the cartel members is a common dream to recapture Kabul and restore the “emirate” that allowed them to rule their patches of territory as they pleased.

The “deal” itself is a model of dangerous naiveté. It aims at exchanging something tangible and easily verifiable, that is to say the withdrawal of American troops, against something intangible and not easily verifiable in the form of a promise to prevent terrorist acts against American interests. More importantly, there is no mechanism for making the Taliban dealmakers pay for failure to honor it.

Any peace deal should be aimed at finding a place for them within the new Afghanistan, not the other way around, that is to say reshaping this new Afghanistan the way the mullahs want. They should disarm, accept the constitutional frame and seek a share of power through the ballot box.

Next, despite zigzags, the new Afghanistan, though cumbersome, corrupt and chaotic is stumbling forward on the right path; it is far better, or less bad, than anything the Taliban could or would offer…. The US won the war and the Taliban lost. The only way to peace, since the start of history, has been for those who lost to submit to the will of those who won.

Even before he entered the White House, Donald Trump insisted that, as president, he would avoid the policies that led to some of his predecessor Barack Obama’s glaring foreign policy failures. And, yet, he now seems set to pursue one of those failed policies with gusto by embarking on what could lead to a premature disengagement from Afghanistan.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/the-canadian-way-of-dealing-with-a-pandemic-ineffective-clueless-and-dishonest/

The only thing certain about the etiology of the COVID-19 pandemic is that it originated in and spread from China. Whether the local origin of the disease was a wet market in Wuhan specializing in bat soup or a Chinese lab with inadequate safety protocols is immaterial. The culprit in the lethal melodrama that is being played out around the globe is China.

Yet, if we are to believe many of our politicians and journalists, the good guy working to mitigate the effects of COVID-19 is—you guessed it—China. Some self-serving politicians in the U.S. would like to refer President Trump to the International Court of Justice in the Hague for crimes against humanity for his handling of the crisis—Ohio State Representative Tavia Galonski apparently can’t stomach Trump’s promotion of hydroxychloroquine, which ironically has already saved the life of fellow Democrat Karen Whitsett. A reporter for Phoenix TV tried to put Trump in a bad light by asking whether he was cooperating with China, in her estimation obviously the heroic partner in the struggle. It turns out that Phoenix TV has intimate ties to Communist China and is linked with the PRC’s Ministry of State Security. Joe Biden is a big fan of Communist China and has profited from his family’s business relations with the regime. Trump is beset by those who would like to see him fail in his ongoing effort to find a way between averting economic collapse and maintaining public health. Nonetheless, Americans can remain confident that a responsible president, for all the trials and confusions he must contend with, has their wellbeing at heart and labors tirelessly to provide a solution to the current disaster.