RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15844/coronavirus-china-cover-up

Bats were not, it seems, sold at Wuhan’s seafood market. The Lancet noted in a January study that the first Covid-19 case in Wuhan had no connection to the market.

One more person has just disappeared. Ai Fen, a Chinese physician, who… claimed her bosses silenced her early warnings about coronavirus, appears to have vanished…. The journalists who saw what happened inside Wuhan have also disappeared.

“No one has been able to study it. How can you say it’s not a release from a lab if you can’t go to the lab? Indeed, we have seen Beijing do its best to prevent virologists and epidemiologists from actually going to Wuhan.” — Gordon Chang, in Die Weltwoche, March 31, 2020.

That is another major problem. The potential major investigator on Wuhan’s origin, the World Health Organization, is now accused of being “China’s coronavirus’ accomplice”.

Why is China trafficking in dangerous viruses in the first place?

“Debate may rage over which center it is, but at this point it seems undeniable that a center has been directly involved with research on viruses, although not necessarily on the creation of a virus.” — Father Renzo Milanese, AsiaNews.it, March 13, 2020.

We have been paying dearly for China’s lies.

“This is one of the worst cover-ups in human history, and now the world is facing a global pandemic,” said Rep. Michael T. McCaul, the ranking Republican member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, before the US intelligence community concluded, in a classified report to the White House, that China has concealed the origin and extent of the catastrophic global coronavirus outbreak.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15846/iran-exploit-coronavirus

The international community needs to refrain from handing the Iranian regime any direct financial aid. The four-decade history of the ruling mullahs has shown that any extra revenues obtained by the leadership have not benefited the ordinary people in Iran.

If the mullahs are seeking financial assistance because they actually desire to help their own people, why did they refuse America’s offer of medical assistance? Why did their regime revoke its approval for the emergency team sent by Doctors Without Borders (Médecins sans frontières), along with the materials needed to build a 50-bed inflatable treatment unit?

The international community therefore must not directly give the Iranian regime financial aid: it will most likely be funneled into supporting the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its terror and militia groups across the region.

Instead of handing billions of dollars to the ruling mullahs, financial aid can alternatively be towards trustworthy international medical organizations to combat coronavirus directly on the ground, both in Iran and other countries afflicted.

The Iranian leaders have been pushing the international community to provide it with financial assistance to “combat coronavirus” there. The EU has apparently decided to give the mullahs €20 million (approximately $21 million), all while many EU citizens are languishing in Iran’s prisons, often on trumped-up charges. The EU taxpayers’ money will more likely be misused by the Iranian regime to advance still further the mullahs’ malign agendas.

Iran’s leaders are also demanding that the US-based International Monetary Fund (IMF) give them financial assistance. They are asking for a $5 billion emergency loan after the IMF declared that it is making $50 billion available to assist countries with the coronavirus crisis.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif, on Twitter, ordered the IMF to provide Iran with money:

“IMF’s @KGeorgieva has stated that countries affected by #COVID19 will be supported via Rapid Financial Instrument. Our Central Bank requested access to this facility immediately. IMF/IMF Board should adhere to Fund’s mandate, stand on right side of history & act responsibly.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15845/china-fake-news-coronavirus

The virus is hitting China in a second wave. The second wave is claiming victims, including the Party’s propaganda narratives. The most dangerous of these narratives is that ruler Xi Jinping, with heaven’s mandate, has an obligation to dominate the international system.

To push America aside and seize global leadership, China got Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, to say that China’s response to the coronavirus showed the “superiority of the Chinese system and this experience is worthy of emulation by other countries.” Then Beijing set about making a big show of “donating” medical equipment and diagnostic kits, most notably to stricken Europe.

Xi’s initial policies turned a local outbreak into a pandemic, and now they are making even more people sick and forcing China into another pit of disease. China’s inaccurate diagnostic kits and substandard protective gear donated around the world along with the new infections will show the truth: communism is incompetent if not downright malign.

China can lie with statistics, but the virus gets the last word. “Victory” over both COVID-19 and the United States is still far out of sight.

China has “defeated” the coronavirus and declared “victory,” Communist Party media tells us.

A funny thing happened on the way to victory, however. The virus is hitting China in a second wave. The second wave is claiming victims, including the Party’s propaganda narratives. The most dangerous of these narratives is that ruler Xi Jinping, with heaven’s mandate, has an obligation to dominate the international system.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/covid-19-and-swedish-exception-bruce-bawer/

A few weeks ago, while other countries around the world were locking down in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK and Sweden chose to go with business as usual: keep everything running, act as if nothing’s wrong, let people hold parties and meetings and candlelight suppers. In response to a public outcry and a growing sense that the nation was barreling toward disaster, British officials soon backed off from this policy. But Sweden, on the advice of top government epidemiologist Anders Tegnell – described by Reuters as “only months ago a little known civil servant but now rivalling the prime minister for publicity” – stuck to its guns. Hence the denizens of IKEA-land are still going to work, kids are still going to school, and shops and bars and restaurants and gyms and barbershops are still open.

To be sure, this approach has its share of credentialed and outspoken domestic critics. Epidemiologist Joacim Rocklöv has called it “a big and risky experiment with the entire population that could have a catastrophic outcome.” Cecilia Söderberg-Nauclér, a virologist at the Karolinska Institute, used the same word: Sweden’s government, she charged, is “leading us to catastrophe.” Meanwhile, a mathematics professor at the University of Stockholm has warned that thanks to the official hands-off strategy, half of the country’s population could be infected with the virus by the end of April. And at last count, no fewer than 2300 academics, including the head of the Nobel Foundation, have signed a petition calling “for more stringent measures” against the virus.

In neighboring Denmark, which has pursued a lockdown along the line of America’s, the state of affairs in Sweden is causing no small degree of trepidation. “Looking at Sweden is a bit like watching a horror film,” a Danish TV reporter, Lisbeth Davidsen, said the other day. The reaction in next-door Norway has been similar. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/world-health-coronavirus-disinformation-11586122093?cx_testId=3&cx_testVariant=cx_4&cx_artPos=1#cxrecs_s

The coronavirus pandemic will offer many lessons in what to do better to save more lives and do less economic harm the next time. But there’s already one way to ensure future pandemics are less deadly: Reform or defund the World Health Organization (WHO).

Last week Florida Senator Rick Scott called for a Congressional investigation into the United Nations agency’s “role in helping Communist China cover up information regarding the threat of the Coronavirus.” The rot at WHO goes beyond canoodling with Beijing, but that’s a good place to start.

The coronavirus outbreak began in Wuhan, China, sometime in the autumn, perhaps as early as November. It accelerated in December. Caixin Global reported that Chinese labs had sequenced the coronavirus genome by the end of December but were ordered by Chinese officials to destroy samples and not publish their findings. On Dec. 30 Dr. Li Wenliang warned Chinese doctors about the virus, and several days later local authorities accused him of lies that “severely disturbed the social order.”

Taiwanese officials warned WHO on Dec. 31 that they had seen evidence that the virus could be transmitted human-to-human. But the agency, bowing to Beijing, doesn’t have a normal relationship with Taiwan. On Jan. 14 WHO tweeted, “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.” The agency took another week to reverse that misinformation.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/04/maladies-and-diseases/

There was a rare cheerfulness in much of the country over Christmas and the New Year. It would be hard to exaggerate the relief that many Britons felt after December’s unexpected election result. Thanks in large part to the people of the traditionally Labour-voting cities of the north of England, the country (and by extension the NATO alliance) had just been saved from a Corbyn government. The Tory prime minister Boris Johnson had won a large enough majority to avoid the political paralysis that had marked the previous six months. It seemed at least possible that, so equipped, this clever but transparently flawed chancer with a talent for winning the affection of ordinary people might achieve great things, or at least things that his more conventional predecessors and rivals had not.

In March, things felt rather different. There have been any number of reminders of the deep problems in British governance and society that recent governments have failed to grapple with. On February 2 for example, only two months after the London Bridge terrorist stabbing incident, yet another Islamist terrorism convict who had been released from prison “on licence”, attacked random citizens in the streets of Streatham. There could hardly have been a better illustration of the disastrous inadequacy of the country’s probation system, its under-staffed, overcrowded, poorly-run prisons, its laughable sentencing laws, its hopeless de-radicalisation programs and its failure to confront the ideological roots of Islamist terror.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/suspected-cartel-shootout-kills-19-in-northern-mexico_3298854.html

CIUDAD JUAREZ —A shootout between suspected drug cartel hitmen has killed 19 people in the northern Mexico state of Chihuahua, the state government said on Saturday, in one of the country’s worst outbreaks of gang violence this year.

“They’re two criminal groups fighting over drug trafficking routes to the United States,” Chihuahua’s attorney general Cesar Peniche told Reuters.

Security forces found 18 bodies on Friday evening at the site of the gunfight in the municipality of Madera, and a wounded man picked up at the scene later died of his injuries, the state attorney general’s office said in a statement.

They also secured 18 long firearms, two vehicles and two grenades, the statement said, adding that the search for armed men and the investigation of the site was continuing.

Local media reported that the gunmen belonged to groups linked to the Juarez Cartel and the rival Sinaloa Cartel, which Peniche said was correct.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/uk-prime-minister-boris-johnson-admitted-to-hospital-over-covid-19_3299338.html?utm_source=pushengage&utm_medium=pushnotification&utm_campaign=pushengage

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson was taken to the hospital for tests, coming just days after he was diagnosed with COVID-19, according to his office, which said the move is precautionary.

Johnson is one of nearly 48,000 UK residents to have contracted the potentially fatal Chinese Communist Party (CCP) virus, a novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

A Downing Street spokeswoman told UK news outlets: “On the advice of his doctor, the Prime Minister has tonight been admitted to hospital for tests.”

The spokeswoman added that Johnson, 55, has “continue[d] to have persistent symptoms of coronavirus 10 days after testing positive for the virus,” while stressing that his hospitalization was precautionary.

“The Prime Minister thanks [National Health Service] staff for all of their incredible hard work and urges the public to continue to follow the Government’s advice to stay at home, protect the NHS and save lives,” the statement read.

Johnson was diagnosed with the CCP virus on March 27 and was showing mild symptoms at the time, the government said. Johnson had informed his social media followers that he had mild symptoms before he tested positive.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/two-dead-five-wounded-in-terrorist-knife-attack-in-france/

A Sudanese national in the French town of  Romans-sur-Isere, just south of Lyon, went on a rampage Saturday on a busy street attacking 7 people, killing two and wounding five.

Police arrested him without incident when he was found kneeling on the ground “praying in the Arabic language.”

ABC News:

In a press release, the Counterterrorism Prosecutor’s office revealed that “handwritten documents with religious overtones in which the author of the lines complained in particular of living in a country of disbelievers” were found duringa search carried out at the suspect’s home.

The alleged perpetrator was taken into custody on charges of assassination and attempted assassination in connection with a terrorist enterprise and criminal terrorist association. An acquaintance of the suspect’s was also placed in police custody.

Police, deployed for the coronavirus pandemic, probably prevented a larger body count.

The Interior Minister saluted the mobilization of a hundred police officers during an ongoing nationwide lockdown to stem the spread of  COVID-19 which already claimed the lives of more than 6,000 in France.