January 29, 2020
In an interview in August John Bolton praised President Trump and called his call with Zelensky “warm and cordial.”
Cristina Laila reported this Bolton interview with Radio Free Europe in August.
Via Mark Levin.
JANUARY 29, 2020
Just hours after the UK Foreign Office warned Britons against traveling to China, British Airways, Britain’s flag carrier, and its second-largest airline in the UK, suspended all flights to China.
British Airways operates direct flights from Heathrow to Beijing and Shanghai, but right now, passengers can’t book flights on those lines until Feb. 29. CNN called it “the most drastic action yet by a major airline” in response to the crisis.
The decision comes after United Airlines said it would temporarily reduce the number of flights between the US and China.
“We have suspended all flights to and from mainland China with immediate effect following advice from the Foreign Office against all but essential travel,” the company said in a statement Wednesday.
This comes after United said Tuesday that it had seen a “significant decline in demand” and been forced it to suspend flights from Feb. 1 through Feb. 8 between its US hubs and Beijing, Hong Kong and Shanghai. In total, 24 round trips have been impacted between Hong Kong to San Francisco and Newark; Beijing to Dulles, O’Hare and Newark; and Shanghai to San Francisco, Newark and O’Hare.
American Airlines, Delta and United all extended change fee waivers through the end of February, while Hong Kong flagship carrier Cathay Pacific said it will reduce the capacity of flights to and from mainland China by half or more until the end of March.
Finland’s Finnair is canceling three weekly flights between Helsinki and Beijing between Feb. 5 and March 29, and two weekly flights between Helsinki and Nanjing between Feb. 8 and March 29, because of the suspension of group travel by Chinese authorities. It will continue to operate flights to Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Guangzhou.
There are now 5,974 cases in China, with 1,239 of whom are severely ill, according to state media on Wednesday. Initial theories, put forward by some infectious disease experts, that the mortality rate of the virus is much lower than reflected in press reports because thousands with mild cases are likely toughing it out in their homes. If anything, it looks like the virus is more lethal than we previously believed.
And it’s certainly more infectious.
Per the SCMP, a 48-hour span of no new nCoV infections came to an end Wednesday when Hong Kong authorities announced two more patients tested positive for the potentially deadly illness, bringing the local total to 10, as the HK government suspends high-speed rail travel between the Special Administrative Region and the mainland. The HK Department of Health said the two new patients, an elderly couple, aged 72 and 73, tested positive at Queen Mary Hospital in Pok Fu Lam, and, because of their age, fall into the high-risk category of infections. More than 100 people are still in isolation in HK.
The situation is growing increasingly worrisome in Guangdong province, which is centered around the city of Guangzhou, the fifth-largest in China.
Guangzhou is at the center of a massive conurbation stretching out all the way to Shenzen, and to the other neighboring cities of Foshan, Dongguan, Zhongshan and several other neighboring provinces. This agglomeration is one of the largest of its kind on Earth, home to more than 100 million. City officials announced five new infections, two locals and three foreigners. With more than 270 confirmed cases, this well-connected and economically important province is behind only Hubei and Zhejiang in terms of number of cases.
Now that several countries have copies of the coronavirus genome, the race for a workable vaccine is intensifying. Russia joined that race on Wednesday after receiving a copy of the virus genome from China, Russian state media reported on Wednesday. The US said on Tuesday that it would take three months to start initial trials for a vaccine that it’s developing, and three further months to gather data.
In Hong Kong, infectious diseases expert Professor Yuen Kwok-yung said on Tuesday that the city’s researchers had stumbled on a vaccine, but that it would take months to test on animals and at least another year to conduct trials on humans before it could be confirmed ready for human use. Scientists in Melbourne said they grew the virus from a patient sample, which could prove a “game-changer” in combating the outbreak. It was the first time the virus had been grown in a cell culture outside China (here’s hoping it isn’t misused as a potential bioweapon).
After confirming the first case of human-to-human transmission in Japan, health officials in Tokyo have shared more information about the case with the press: The man did not travel to Wuhan but drove buses with tour groups from the city twice this month. The man is in his 60s and lives in Nara Prefecture, according to the Japan Times.
Overnight, the first case of the virus in the Middle East have been confirmed in the United Arab Emirates, according to the country’s Ministry of Health and Community Protection. The 4 infected patients are members of a family that had traveled from Wuhan. In its statement, the health ministry reported the family as being in a stable condition under medical observation, according to CNBC.
As hysteria surrounding the outbreak grows, SCMP reports that resentment toward people from Wuhan is growing across China, as provincial authorities ramp up screenings of those from Wuhan, and citizens build unauthorized roadblocks to keep strangers out of their towns.
Meanwhile, President Xi said Wednesday that “preventing and containing the virus remains a severe and complex task,” a follow up to his claims that China would do whatever is necessary to contain the “demon” virus.
After sliding to the lowest close in over a week on Friday over the spread of the deadly virus, US stocks rebounded slightly as the new trading week began, with the key Dow Jones Industrial Average index climbing over 200 points on Tuesday. However, the markets could still grossly underestimate the consequences of the outbreak and are just hinging on the Fed’s injections, says former Fed insider Danielle DiMartino Booth.
“The markets are woefully underestimating the important economic impact globally of what this [outbreak] means given that we started the year leaning on multinationals to charge out of the US earnings recession and leaning on Germany to come out of its own industrial recession. That’s not going to happen either,” she told RT’s Boom Bust.
Booth explained that the companies which were set to lead the US out of the earnings recession are highly dependent on revenues and profits from overseas. The coronavirus could easily impede this, but the markets may still “press towards all-time highs, because they’re saying this bad news is good enough that it’s going to actually cause [the] Fed’s liquidity injections to grow.”
JANUARY 28, 2020
As we reported late yesterday, the death toll in China has soared past 100 while the number of confirmed cases doubled overnight. Health officials around the world have confirmed more than 4,500 cases, more than triple the number from Friday. All but a few of the deaths recorded so far have been in Wuhan or the surrounding Hubei province, per the SCMP.
Panic has swept across the region as border closures appear to be the overarching theme of Tuesday’s sessions. Even North Korea, which relies on China for 90% of its foreign trade, has closed the border with its patron. More than 50 million remain on lockdown in Hubei, and transit restrictions have been imposed by cities and regions around the country.
An ‘extension’ of the Lunar New Year holiday is threatening GDP growth, as economists try to size up the knock-on potential impact on the global economy. The virus has now spread across China and another 17 countries/autonomous territories globally, according to BBG.
But the most important announcement made overnight – at least as far as global markets are concerned – was Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s decision to suspend high-speed rail and ferry service, while halving the number of flights between HK and the mainland.
This news helped send US stock futures higher in early trade, after health experts yesterday urged Lam to use ‘draconian’ measures to curb the spread, for fear of a repeat of the SARS epidemic, which killed some 300 people, according to the BBC.
“The flow of people between the two places needs to be drastically reduced” amid the outbreak, Ms Lam told the South China Morning Post.
China, meanwhile, said it would stop individuals from traveling to Hong Kong to try and curb the virus.
Jiao Yahui, deputy head of the NHC’s medical administration bureau, said during a press conference Tuesday that shortages of medical supplies in Wuhan were still a serious problem.
CDC has issued new travel recommendations urging people to avoid all non-essential trips. But officials remained reluctant to declare a global emergency, instead insisting that this is merely an emergency “in China”. Of course, after yesterday’s brutal pullback, that’s to be expected.
The big piece of evidence that the WHO is purportedly looking for is human-to-human transmission outside China. Zhong Nanshan, a leading expert on SARS and other communicable diseases in China, confirmed human-to-human transmission in at least one case in Wuhan and two cases in Guangdong Province.
Meanwhile, as we noted yesterday, one case of possible human-to-human transmission is being investigated in Canada, while Vietnam and Japan have now each confirmed one cases.
Japan revealed on Tuesday that a bus driver in his 60s, who recently carried passengers from Wuhan, has been found to have the virus.
During a meeting in Beijing, President Xi told World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus that the safety of the people is his government’s first priority, and that he recognizes the situation is “very serious.”
“This was supposed to be a time for rest, but because of the pneumonia outbreak caused by the novel coronavirus, the Chinese people right now are faced with a very serious battle,” Xi said. “This is something we take very seriously because in our view nothing matters more than people’s safety and health. That is why I myself have been personally deploying, planning, and guiding all the efforts related to containment and mitigation of the outbreak.”
That’s ironic, considering Beijing’s sluggish response after the first cases were discovered in December. After all, Wuhan Mayor Zhou Xianwang on Tuesday spoke out against the deluge of criticism he has faced to accuse Beijing of tying his hands. This comes after President Xi and the party tried to scapegoat him and other local party officials for the crisis.
This was supposed to be a time for rest, but because of the pneumonia outbreak caused by the novel coronavirus, the Chinese people right now are faced with a very serious battle,” Chinese President Xi Jinping tells in Beijing.
Speaking at a press briefing in Beijing on Tuesday, Jiao Yahui, deputy head of the NHC’s medical administration bureau, said shortage of medical supplies was a major constraint in China’s efforts to contain the outbreak and treat infected people.
Tens of thousands of patients are under observation in China after displaying one or more symptoms of the virus. In the US, roughly 100 people are in isolation. But former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb told CNBC that China is obscuring the true number of cases – a suspicion that’s widely held among American infectous-disease experts.
According to some projections, there might be up to 300,000 cases in China, and there are likely dozens of people who have died of pneumonia who in reality died from nCoV – but those deaths will never be recorded. Although China is “behaving better” than it did during the SARS outbreak, they’re still concealing information from the international community.
“They’re still not behaving well. They’re concealing information, including the spread to health care workers, which we didn’t know until last week” Gottlieb said.
China is already in a “full-blown epidemic.” The US will likely face some limited outbreaks, but Gottlieb said we have the tools to suppress the virus and prevent the same thing from happening in the US.
Jiao said China was sending about 6,000 medical personnel to Hubei from around the country – with more than 4,000 already there and 1,800 more due to arrive by Tuesday evening – to work in Wuhan and seven other cities in the province.
In Wuhan, more than 10,000 hospital beds have been made available for patients, he said, while another 100,000 are being prepared.
In Beijing, CNBC’s Eunice Yoon reported that the local government is strongly encouraging the wearing of facemasks in public.
Police guarding Beijing’s public transit are wearing full hazmat suits, and anybody hoping to board a train must be wearing a mask, and must submit to a temperature check via infrared thermometer. If an individual is found to have a fever, they’re sent to a hospital to be quarantined.
As Beijing tries to telegraph to the world that it has the situation under control, health experts have raised new questions about the government’s response. One infectious disease specialist told the NYT that they were skeptical about the Wuhan quarantine’s ability contain the virus (unsurprising considering that 5 million left the city before the lockdown began).
Beijing and Guangzhou, a port city northwest of Hong Kong, have broken ground on new hospitals, mimicking the speedy construction of not one but two new hospitals in Wuhan to treat patients infected with the virus.
Beijing is also reopening a hospital used to fight the SARS outbreak in 2003, while 6,000 medical staff have been sent to Hubei.
“At this stage of the outbreak, the things that make the most difference are finding people, diagnosing people, and getting them isolated,” said Dr. Tom Inglesby, an infectious diseases specialist and director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
“If you isolate the city, then my question and my concern is that you’re making it harder in a number of ways to do those things you need to do,” including ferrying critical supplies and ensuring that infected victims receive adequate treatment.
November 12, 2019
During his speech President Trump referenced the increased violence in Sweden due to the tremendous influx of refugees.
President Trump: “You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden — Sweden, who would believe this? Sweden — they took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible. You look at what’s happening in Brussels. You look at what’s happening all over the world. Take a look at Nice. Take a look at Paris.
The media immediately pounded on President Trump.
They ran attacks all day Sunday claiming Trump said there was a terrorist attack in Sweden.
Migrants are changing the face of Sweden.
But Trump was right.
The bombings and violence have continued to escalate in once peaceful Sweden.
Via Breitbart.com.
Denmark will temporarily reinstate border controls with Sweden and step up police work along the border after a series of violent crimes and explosions around Copenhagen that Danish authorities say were carried out by perpetrators from Sweden.
The checks, which start Tuesday for six months, will take place at the Oresund Bridge between Copenhagen and the Swedish city of Malmo and also at ferry ports.
Lene Frank of Denmark’s National Police said there will be both random and periodic checks of people crossing the border and officers will focus “particularly on cross-border crime involving explosives, weapons and drugs.”
Since February, there have been 13 blasts in Copenhagen. Authorities believe an Aug. 6 explosion at the Danish Tax Agency “was committed by criminals that had crossed the border from Sweden.” Two Swedish citizens are in custody.
At approximately 10am local time, a gang of several masked attackers fired off between eight and ten shots, reportedly from multiple weapons, before fleeing the scene through the grounds of a nearby apartment building.
The woman was reportedly carrying the child when she was struck by a bullet in the unprovoked attack. She was taken to hospital for emergency treatment but later died of her wounds. The man they were with then went into shock.
According to Swedish media, one possible motive being explored by police is that the child’s father was the intended target of the attack. The man is said to have a criminal record in both Sweden and Denmark and has served time in prison previously.
UPS stops delivering to Swedish neighborhood as drivers get attacked in ‘no-go zone’ – report
Ambulances and police were immediately dispatched to the scene and authorities established a security cordon around the area. Specialized police sniffer dogs are already on the trail of the perpetrators, according to police. The three victims were transported to a nearby hospital for emergency treatment.
“This is one of the most serious crimes there is, so we are deploying all of our resources to investigate it, and also sending officers to speak to people near the scene of the attack, who might be disturbed by what has happened,” Calle Persson from the Malmö police told The Local.
Malmo has developed a reputation as something of a crime hotspot in Sweden, with the UPS delivery service declaring several areas in the city as no-go zones. In 2018, the police even arranged a hand grenade amnesty to try and stem the violence carried out by rival gangs in the city. Malmo also featured in spate of arson attacks last year.
By Kit Daniels
The president was referring to Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s statement that the idea of Denmark selling Greenland to the US was “an absurd discussion.”
“I looked forward to going, but I thought that the prime minister’s statement that it was ‘absurd,’ that it was an ‘absurd’ idea was nasty,” he said. “I thought it was an inappropriate statement.”
“All she had to do is say we wouldn’t be interested.”
He said he won’t allow the US to be treated “the way they treated us under Obama.”
“I thought it was a very not nice way of saying something,” he continued. “She’s not talking to me, she’s talking to the United States of America.”
“You don’t talk to the United States that way, at least under me.”
Previously it was reported that Denmark subsidies Greenland with over a half-billion dollars every year.
“Danish subsidies keep its economy afloat,” reported The Economist. “Last year the annual block grant from Denmark was 3.8bn kroner ($610m), more than a third of Greenland’s budget.”
“Many Greenlandic politicians reckon that new revenue streams from mining and tourism can help to wean the territory off Danish handouts.”
The “new revenue streams” the article is referring to is actually from Chinese investment – and China has a strategic geopolitical interest in the Arctic, which explains why President Trump is interested in buying Greenland.
China claimed it’s an “near-Arctic state” in its official Arctic Policy released last year and aims to create a “Polar Silk Road” in a partnership with Russia that would grant China an economic boost in the region.
“China aims to participate ‘in the exploration for and exploitation of oil, gas, mineral and other non-living resources’ in the Arctic,” reported The Diplomat. “However, the white paper also places a particular emphasis on nontraditional energy sources: ‘The Arctic region boasts an abundance of geothermal, wind, and other clean energy resources,’ the paper said, ‘China will work with the Arctic States to strengthen clean energy cooperation.’”
US lawmakers have also declared that the Arctic “is a region of strategic importance to the national security interests of the United States.”
“…The Department of Defense must better align its presence, force posture, and capabilities to meet the growing array of challenges in the region,” reads Section 1099T of the proposed National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020. “…Although much progress has been made to increase awareness of Arctic issues and to promote increased presence in the region, additional measures, including the designation of one or more strategic Arctic ports, are needed to show the commitment of the United States to this emerging strategic choke point of future great power competition.”
You are a centrist government in a democratic Western country. You want to be seen to be taking action on the environment, but you believe in consumer capitalism, and therefore wouldn’t dare to dismantle the profit-making machinery that actually contributes most of the CO2 within your economy. You praise the ideals of the Green New Deal, only because you know it will never become reality.
Your target must be insignificant economically, yet high-profile in its symbolic value. Meat works perfectly. Eating it already has an aura of hedonistic licentiousness, and restricting consumption covers several bases – animal cruelty, public health, and most importantly, climate change resulting from intensive livestock farming. You will get years of headlines, just as when you banned plastic bags or forced people to pay deposits on plastic bottles.
From brat to wurst? Germany proposes beefing up meat tax to battle climate change
But you can’t just ban meat. Or ration it to 200 grams a week for every citizen. Because that would be considered an authoritarian intrusion that fundamentally violates your people’s freedom.
You try to turn it into a just cause. Activist organizations have been lobbying for this longer than you have been in power, and PETA will have the factory farming pictures. Scientists will supply the studies (take only the ones that support your view). You leverage entirely hypothetical but impressive sounding research such as the 2016 Oxford University one that claimed that going vegetarian would save 8 million lives and $1.5 trillion, or one that alleges that meat “kills” 2.4 million people a year around the world, or the one that says that the US going vegetarian would be the same as taking 60 million cars off the road.
Yet, even after the publicity campaign, you still can’t ban meat. This is the time for the moment of genius, the clever solution that squares the circle between a free populace and their paternalistic-minded rulers.
You put a tax on it. Not a declared one, but a stealth tax. Perhaps merely drop the VAT rebate that it enjoys, as was proposed in Germany, which currently taxes meat at 7 percent VAT, but is contemplating moving the levy to 19. You can have more meat – as much as you want – but you will pay more for the luxury, and there is a fairness to it too – the more schnitzel you consume the more dosh you dish out. Does the money go into environmental causes? Probably not – there is currently no way to separate meat VAT from others – but at least people will be nudged into the correct behaviors.
The fruits of your labors will be evident within months.
Being a wealthy lawmaker you will eat as much or as little meat as before, as food makes up a small proportion of your monthly budget. Your constituents – that is a different matter. Perhaps some will get the message, and eat more vegetables instead. Or perhaps, instead of buying organic, cruelty-free, carbon-neutral meat, they will now buy more factory-farmed meat. Or perhaps they will spend the money on a decent steak but will not be able to afford to repair their car, or take that holiday to the Balearics. Though I guess that could be a result in itself – after all, as a rule, the poorer someone is in the West, the less CO2 they emit. Some might be so deprived, however, that they will eat no meat at all. Their remaining money will now go to other, cheaper and more harmful high-calorie processed foods, like cakes or oven-fried chips. While your farmers will simply find it more profitable to export the food abroad, over longer distances, increasing their emissions. Is this what you wanted?
Oh, sin taxes, they used to be so simple when you were targeting the universally agreed-upon harms, such as smoking, with the aim of their complete eradication. But this is getting more nuanced now. Meat has been eaten by the homo sapiens since its emergence, and played an important role in its evolution. It still remains a key source of protein for your population. Ethically too, eating it is a source of legitimate pleasure to the sensory organs of millions. Is it the job of the government to strip its citizens of their daily pleasures, to literally deny adults the full choice of food for their dinner? What’s the morally correct trade-off between seven-course feasts of imported ostrich and elk and government-mandated buckwheat three times a day?
Let them sail yachts: Why Greta Thunberg and the environmental elite hate you
You, the politicians, will complain that you are only using the tools at your disposal – that you can’t charge a poor person less at the meat counter, that you cannot ban a farmer from exporting his carcasses, or a supermarket from opting for cheaper transatlantic chicken over homegrown beef. But then is your clever solution any better than rationing books and Iron Curtain-style central planning?
You will say that at least it is better to be doing something.
And indeed you are right – it is the “something” that matters, not the specific results. After all if there is one thing that Greta Thunberg and Nigel Lawson can agree on is that creating a meat tax in Germany, Sweden and Denmark, the three countries that have shown the greatest appetite for this policy, will make almost no difference to global emissions. For example, even if every resident of the United States, the country with the highest consumption of meat per capita, stopped eating meat tomorrow, that would only slice 2.6 percent off its emissions. Meanwhile, a Chinese person now eats five times as much meat as they did in the 1980s, and still only half as much as Americans – so he wants more. And the world population will likely double by the end of the century. Germans eating two fewer sausages a week was never going to be more than a gesture, and everyone knows it.
Though bearing in mind other environmental policy perversities – like banning nuclear to rely on dirty coal, or incentivizing biofuels and, in the process, rainforest destruction – perhaps “negligible” is the best effect we can all hope for. And you get to enjoy your steak guilt-free.
By Igor Ogorodnev
She might make grandma jokes about “wiping” her server with a cloth, but as RT’s Igor Zhdanov notes, there are few people in the world so adept at deleting information, that is potentially of state importance, off a server that even the FBI had no clue about.
And she would have managed to keep multi-million-dollar-earning Wall Street speeches a secret from the world, if it were not for the dastardly Wikileaks. So, there is a cautionary tale she can tell there.
And for the encore Clinton could explain how she cracked the Kremlin’s plan to meddle in the 2016 election and swing the result to Donald Trump, and then infiltrated the media to present her as a somewhat sore loser.
https://www.rt.com/usa/460978-clinton-cyber-security-email/
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