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Cuomo aide admits to hiding data about nursing home deaths By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on February 12th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/cuomo_aide_admits_to_hiding_data_about_nursing_home_deaths.html

At the end of January, we learned that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Wuhan virus policies when the disease first hit his state killed approximately 50% more elderly people than his administration had first acknowledged. That information just got worse with word that one of his top aides apologized to the state’s Democrat legislators for deliberately lying about the nursing home death toll. They had to lie, she explained, because President Trump was after them for killing “everyone in nursing homes.”

Within a very short time of the Wuhan virus’s accelerated appearance in America last year, it was obvious that the elderly were the most likely to die from the virus. Nevertheless, Andrew Cuomo mandated that group homes housing the elderly (retirement communities, long-term care facilities, etc.), accept from hospitals patients diagnosed with the Wuhan virus.

He did this even though President Trump moved with incredible rapidity to bring a hospital ship to New York City and to build temporary hospitals in the city. It’s tempting to speculate about Cuomo’s decision-making, which was sure to kill the elderly in his state, but I won’t. I’ll just say that there is no scenario that makes him look anything other than grossly negligent or actively malignant.

By July, the data that New York state released showed that the virus had killed 6,400 elderly people. That’s why, in August, the Department of Justice began investigating New York, along with New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Said the DOJ, “New York has the highest number of COVID-19 deaths in the United States, with 32,592 victims, many of them elderly.”

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The Callous COVID Cruelty of Our Ruling Class As Joe Biden abandons a key campaign promise on reopening schools and contemplates a travel ban to Florida, the inhumanity of COVID “mitigation” efforts is laid bare. By Julie Kelly

Posted By on February 12th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/11/the-callous-covid-cruelty-of-our-ruling-class/

The cruelty, Donald Trump’s foes often claimed, is the point.

Whether in response to a mean tweet or childish name-calling or the infamous “kids in cages” episode, the president’s critics collectively wailed in performative grief about Trump’s self-gratifying “cruelty” toward others.

But Trump’s outbursts pale in comparison to the level of cruelty inflicted on the country’s most vulnerable by those in power. As I wrote in April, coronavirus hysteria has unleashed the inner tyrant in anyone with a modicum of authority, from fame-seeking aged bureaucrats down to the local homeowners’ association president. The only upside, if one can be found in an otherwise catastrophic period of unnecessary human misery, is that the ruling class’ depravity now is fully exposed; the face mask, so to speak, has slipped, and slipped for good.

More horrifying, however, is that no one in power shows the slightest hint of regret. They are, by all indications, actually enjoying it. They are sadists.

In her briefing Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki glibly moved the goalposts on school reopenings. Joe Biden weaponized school shutdowns during the campaign as more evidence that Trump mishandled the pandemic. “If President Trump and his administration had done their jobs early on with this crisis, American schools would be open and be opened safely,” Biden said during a speech explaining his school reopening plan in October. “Instead . . . American families are paying the price for his failures.”

Biden referred to prolonged school shutdowns as a “national emergency” and accurately lamented that millions of children, particularly those with special needs and from poor communities, were falling behind. He pledged to reopen most schools within the first 100 days of his presidency; the plan, of course, was contingent on at least a few hundred billion dollars in no-strings-attached goodies for public school systems.

Now that he occupies the Oval Office, the “national emergency” apparently has been downgraded to a political nuisance for Biden. 

“His goal he set is to have the majority of schools, so more than 50 percent, open by day one hundred of his presidency and that means some teaching in classrooms,” Psaki said Tuesday. “So at least one day a week, hopefully it’s more. Teaching one day a week in the majority of schools by day 100.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

China in Focus (Feb. 11): Biden’s First Phone Call With China’s Xi Jinping By Tiffany Meier

Posted By on February 12th, 2021

https://www.theepochtimes.com/china-in-focus-feb-11-bidens-first-phone-call-with-chinas-xi-jinping_3694187.html

President Joe Biden speaks with Chinese Communist Party head Xi Jinping for the first time. We take a look at what Biden did in his first three weeks for U.S.-China policy.

Mandatory vaccinations are required for citizens in one Chinese city. But authorities are keeping quiet about possible side effects.

British television station BBC is banned from airing in China in a new form of retaliation from Beijing.

And a Canadian visa application center in Beijing could be run by Chinese police—putting citizens’ personal information at risk.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more first-hand news from China.
For more news and videos, please visit our website and Twitter.

Follow Tiffany on Twitter: @tiffanymeier_

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Yemen: Watch the Magician When the president lifted the terror designation, it was not for the benefit of Yemen, but for Iran. Shoshana Bryen

Posted By on February 12th, 2021

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/feb/10/yemen-magician-bidens-misdir

When the magician tells you to look right, look left, because that’s where the action is.

Unfortunately, Congress looked right.

In a striking bipartisan vote, the Senate voted to keep the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem. Good move, but not where the action is. Instead, the Biden administration has announced it has a  series of steps planned to restore funds and political status to the Palestinian Authority, including the possibility of reopening the Jerusalem Consulate – understood as the American Embassy to the Palestinians.

The UN, EU, and U.S. all sanctioned Iran at some point since 1980. While effective in some areas, the sanctions did not prevent Iran from cheating on its nuclear and ballistic missile obligations. President Biden has announced an intention to return in some form to the 2015 JCPOA – and from there, to negotiate another, stronger deal. In response, Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said the U.S. must first lift sanctions – most importantly, oil and banking sanctions, which are terrorism-sponsorship-related, not nuclear or missile related. Congress is working to prevent that. Good idea.

But the action on Iran is on the other side.  In Yemen.

The President announced the lifting of the terrorism designation from Houthi rebels in Yemen, couched in diplo-speak: “This decision has nothing to do with our view of the Houthis and their reprehensible conduct, including attacks against civilians and the kidnapping of American citizens. We are committed to helping Saudi Arabia defend its territory against further such attacks.”

So, the Houthis are acknowledged to behave like a terror organization, and their “reprehensible conduct” includes the use of child soldiers, but the Biden administration plans to ignore that. Why?

Look left.

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Sino-forming south of the border Huawei’s development of Mexico’s mobile broadband infrastructure has powered extraordinary growth By David P. Goldman

Posted By on February 12th, 2021

https://asiatimes.com/2021/02/sino-forming-south-of-the-border/

Huawei’s development of Mexico’s mobile broadband infrastructure has powered extraordinary growth
Mexico’s retail ecommerce sales growth led the world in 2019.

Sometime in 2015, I sat in the back of a Mexico City taxi, reading instructions from Waze to the driver. We took detours through small residential streets, zigzagged from one major artery to another, and hung risky U-turns – all of which cut half an hour from our travel time. I had to give the directions because the driver didn’t use Waze, because, like most Mexican taxistas in 2015, he couldn’t afford the mobile broadband, which cost more in Mexico than in any other large country.

That was then. By 2020 about a third of Mexico City drivers were using the navigation app. In 2019 Mexico had 77 mobile broadband accounts per 100 people, vs. only 23 accounts in 2013. And Mexico last year had the world’s highest percentage growth in e-commerce.

This transformation had something to do with my taxi ride of 2015, at least tangentially. I had a cabinet-level meeting at Mexico’s Ministry of Telecommunications, in my then capacity as head of Americas for a Hong Kong investment banking boutique. As I reported in my book You Will Be Assimilated: China’s Plan to Sino-Form the World, I introduced top Huawei executives to senior Mexican officials, then debating an overhaul of the country’s woefully inadequate broadband system.

Nothing happened in 2015; later that year Jack Ma acquired the boutique and within a few months fired the Western bankers. But in 2017 Mexico invited Huawei and Nokia to build a “shared network” (red compartida) for mobile broadband. Banned from the United States, Huawei flourished in Mexico, and its broadband base stations provide service for dozens of Mexican cities, including a few that originally were assigned to Nokia. The cost of broadband service plunged and the number of subscribers more than tripled. Waze, a luxury that only a visiting gringo could afford in 2015, now serves 2 million users per day in Mexico City alone, and Mexico has become the app’s number four market globally. Anyone who has tried to negotiate the Mexican capital’s paralytic traffic knows how much that improves quality of life.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Re-Election of London’s Sadiq Khan A city screams out in pain. Katie Hopkins

Posted By on February 12th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/re-election-londons-sadiq-khan-

In a little under three months, Sadiq Khan will be re-elected Mayor of London.

It is not guaranteed, of course. Londoners will head to the polls on May 6 to cast their votes in local elections, both for the office of Mayor of London and for members of the Greater London Assembly, a body designed to scrutinize the office.

But it feels horribly like a forgone conclusion.

The Conservatives are putting up about as much fight as Switzerland. Their candidate, Shaun Bailey, feels like a token effort, put up to tick the box but not expected to achieve much.

Others are making a bolder effort. Brian Rose from London Real has acquired a blazing black and red bus bearing his name and is valiantly touring the 32 London boroughs in his attempt to get elected, but faces impossible odds. As I know from personal experience, campaigning alone is hard. The fastest way to learn about the power of the party is to try to run without one. Brian is up against the might of the Labour Party and its vice-like grip on the levers of power in this city.

It is exasperating. Because of Labour and Union support, and Muslim majority in inner city London, it is impossible to still the wrecking ball that is Khan.

London is unrecognizable from the city many Americans once knew and loved. It is screaming out in pain, like a stuck creature desperate to be put out of its misery. This week there were 14 stabbings in one 24-hour period, leaving two dead in the street where they were cut down. And not a word was heard from the gilded cage of the London Mayor.

Stabbings are so often gang-related, confined to certain zip codes and certain segments of the population (young, black, living in sink estates), that it is easy for the Mayor to turn a blind eye.

It is the reason British natives are fleeing the capital in their droves. Burglaries and assaults are so commonplace as not to merit an officer in attendance, while the opportunity to do some politically-correct policing has the boys in blue falling over themselves to be seen. When diversity is the end goal, all else is lost along the way.

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinians: More Corruption as Biden Resumes Financial Aid by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on February 12th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17042/palestinians-corruption-financial-aid

The assumption that renewed financial aid would lead the Palestinian leadership to make “concessions” has proven, over the past three decades, to be completely baseless. Anyone in the Biden administration who thinks that the Palestinian leadership would make real “concessions” to Israel in return for hundreds of millions of dollars is living under an illusion.

Last year, the Palestinians rejected Trump’s $50 billion Middle East economic plan that would create a global investment fund to lift the Palestinian and Arab state economies. The Palestinians dubbed it an “attempted bribe.”

The “innocent Palestinians” the Biden administration is talking about would undoubtedly be happy to receive financial aid from the US or the European Union. These Palestinians, however, are concerned that their leaders will continue to deprive them of the financial aid, and that the money, ever-fungible, would, as usual, just end up in the pockets of Palestinian leaders as well as to incentivizing murder for “pay-for-slay” terrorists.

A recent public opinion poll showed that a majority of Palestinians are still worried about the corruption of their leaders, especially the Palestinian Authority.

The majority of Palestinians believe that corruption is concentrated among senior public sector employees, particularly in the executive public institutions (the ministries, the presidency and the security services). The Palestinians continue to believe that senior employees are the most corrupt individuals among the Palestinians.

All this means that, if and when the general elections take place, Hamas is well on its way to score another easy victory.

The message that the findings send to the Biden administration and other Western donors: The funds you are sending to Palestinian leaders are being stolen. If you want to send money, you must ensure that the money does not end up in the private bank accounts of Palestinian leaders.

If, as the poll shows, a majority of Palestinians continue to see their leaders as corrupt, this means that Abbas’s rivals in Hamas are again likely to win the vote.

Ignoring rampant corruption in the Palestinian Authority (PA), the US administration of President Joe Biden says it is preparing to resume unconditional financial aid to the Palestinians.

“The suspension of aid to the Palestinian people has neither produced political progress nor secured concessions from the Palestinian leadership,” US State Department Spokesman Ned Price said at a press briefing earlier this month. “It has only harmed innocent Palestinians.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Cancel Culture Comes for Chaucer “De-colonizing” the curriculum to focus on race and “diversity.” Mark Tapson

Posted By on February 12th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/cancel-culture-comes-chaucer-mark-tapson/

Another week, another Dead White Male toppled off his perch in the classics canon by university administration milquetoasts pandering to the woke, anti-intellectual mob. This time the DWM in question is medieval literary giant Geoffrey Chaucer of The Canterbury Tales fame, courses on whom are being eliminated at the University of Leicester in England because the man often called the Father of English Literature doesn’t match the current “enthusiasms” of students there.

Last month, the University announced its intention to remove courses in The Canterbury Tales and replace them with courses centered on – what else? – sexuality, diversity, race, and ethnicity. “We want to offer courses that match our students’ own interests and enthusiasms, as reflected in their own choices and the feedback we have been hearing,” a university spokesperson explained to MailOnline. Students’ “interests and enthusiasms” apparently now are dominated by an obsession with the power dynamics of skin color and genitalia, and thus Chaucer is no longer relevant.

And not just Chaucer’s works, but anything written prior to the year 1500. Also potentially on the chopping block, reportedly, are courses on: Beowulf, the heroic epic considered to be the earliest work of English literature; John Milton’s magisterial Paradise Lost; the works of poet John Donne and playwright Christopher Marlowe; the chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, the 15th-century chronicle of the legend of King Arthur.

Leicester University management emailed the English department to notify them of these changes, stating, “The aim of our proposals [is] to offer a suite of undergraduate degrees that provide modules which students expect of an English degree.” Apparently a familiarity with Chaucer and other medieval authors is no longer what students expect of an English degree, but race-mongering identity politics is.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Another Member of the Equity Squad Joins the Biden Administration Inside the twisted world of Marcia Fudge. Jason Hill

Posted By on February 12th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/another-member-equity-squad-joins-biden-jason-d-hill-0/

Marcia Fudge, the Ohio Congresswoman, and now Secretary of Housing and Urban Development appointed by President Joe Biden, is an unabashed advocate of equity. In her confirmation hearing before the Senate, she explained to Senator Tom Cotton exactly what she meant by “equity” — and she made sure to distinguish the term from equality.

“From my own perspective, the difference is that one just means that you treat everybody the same… Sometimes the same is not equitable.”

Fudge went on to elucidate her points with examples:

You know if you say to me that I’m going to give you five dollars so you’re going to give my friend five dollars, my five dollars is not necessarily going to go as far because my friend already has a mother and father who is wealthy and they’re giving them.

Let’s just do it this way… Homeownership, let’s take it that way. They say let’s make everything equal. But it’s not equal because even though I may meet all of the qualifications to qualify for a loan, you know, I’ve got the right credit scores, et cetera, but I don’t have down payment money because my parents can’t afford to give me down payment money. There is no wealth coming to me.

Equity means making the playing field level… Sometimes it’s not level if you just say, “Let’s just treat everybody the same.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Democrat Precedent for Impeaching Trump Comes From a Racist Senator Who Wanted to Kill All Black People Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on February 12th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/democrat-precedent-impeaching-trump-comes-racist-daniel-greenfield/

Democrats say you can impeach a president after leaving office. Where did they get that idea?

“We are not in favor of giving a vote to the negro, because we believe that he is not fit to enjoy that right,” Senator Thurman once said.

These days, even while Democrats topple the statues of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, two men that Thurman hated, the old dead racist has become the basis for the unconstitutional Democrat campaign to impeach President Trump after leaving office.

Thurman, who was picked by the Democrats as their nominee for Vice President, had played a major role in the sole case of the Senate deciding to impeach a public official after leaving office. The Democrat case for impeaching President Trump rests on that one case.

And on Thurman.

Legal partisans have spent weeks debating whether President Trump can be impeached after leaving office. Every single one of these analyses is heavy on rhetoric and light on precedent.

There’s a very good reason for that.