WHO's Not Declaring Pandemic For $ 425 Millions

(Whitney Webb's article from the MPN NEWS on 26 February 2020.)

Not a "Pandemic" yet till after July 2020, ha, ha, ha.

Is Wall Street Behind the Delay in Declaring the Coronavirus Outbreak a “Pandemic”? A little known financial mechanism set up by the World Bank could be behind the decision not to declare the coronavirus a pandemic.  

Alittle known specialized bond created in 2017 by the World Bank may hold the answer as to why U.S. and global health authorities have declined to label the global spread of the novel coronavirus a “pandemic.” Those bonds, now often referred to as “pandemic bonds,” were ostensibly intended to transfer the risk of potential pandemics in low-income nations to financial markets.

Yet, in light of the growing coronavirus outbreak, the investors who purchased those products could lose millions if global health authorities were to use that label in relation to the surge in global coronavirus cases.

Bio-warfare Army General Takes Over Wuhan Lab

(Billie Thomson's article from the DAILY MAIL UK on 14 February 2020.)

China has reportedly appointed its top military biological weapon expert to take over a secretive virus laboratory in Wuhan after the outbreak of a new coronavirus, sparking conspiracy theories that the health crisis could be connected to the army.

Chen Wei, a Major General of the People's Liberation Army, was flown in to Wuhan by the central government late last month before officially taking the helm of Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to a report. The 54-year-old's designation prompted some people to speculate that the epidemic could have been spawned in the little-known lab and that the lab is run by Beijing's military.

Chen is also a leading specialist in genetic engineering vaccines in China. She developed a medical spray during the SARS outbreak in 2003, preventing around 14,000 medical workers from contracting the virus, said another state-media report.

China Admits Virus Originates Not In Wuhan Market

(Staff article from the GLOBAL TIMES CHINA on 22 February 2020.)

A new study by Chinese researchers indicates the novel coronavirus may have begun human-to-human transmission in late November from a place other than the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan.

The study published on ChinaXiv, a Chinese open repository for scientific researchers, reveals the new coronavirus was introduced to the seafood market from another location, and then spread rapidly from market to market. The findings were the result of analyses of genome-wide data, sources of infection and the route of spread of 93 samples of the novel coronavirus collected from 12 countries across four continents.

The study believes that patient zero transmitted the virus to workers or sellers at the Huanan seafood market. The crowded market facilitated the further transmission of the virus to buyers, which caused a wider spread in early December 2019.

China's Virus Death Count Is Too Bloody Low!

(Anna Field's article from the Washington Post on 23 January 2020.)

BEIJING — Chen Min was healthy when she and her husband boarded a train from Hankou station in Wuhan at the end of December, headed for a trip to the southern coastal city of Xiamen. When the 65-year-old developed a persistent cough and fever a week later, she assumed it was just a common cold.

But the cold didn’t get better, and the fever didn’t break. So she visited Wuhan Tongji Hospital again and again until she was isolated in the infectious diseases unit on Jan. 15. She was dead within six hours.

Although Chen had all the symptoms of the coronavirus that is spreading across China and beyond, she is not counted on the official list of those who have died as a result of the infection. Her death certificate, which her family showed to The Washington Post, reads “severe pneumonia.”

But hospital staff told her stepson, Kyle Hui, that they strongly suspected she had “that” kind of pneumonia. At the crematorium, where the workers were in hazmat suits, Chen’s body was immediately incinerated without a proper farewell, and the vehicle it arrived in was disinfected.

Most Of Us Are Likely To Get Wuhan Virus!

(James Hamblin's article from the ATLANTIC Health on 24 February 2020.)

30 to 40 millions will die in next few years?

In May 1997, a 3-year-old boy developed what at first seemed like the common cold. When his symptoms—sore throat, fever, and cough—persisted for six days, he was taken to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Hong Kong. There his cough worsened, and he began gasping for air. Despite intensive care, the boy died.

Puzzled by his rapid deterioration, doctors sent a sample of the boy’s sputum to China’s Department of Health. But the standard testing protocol couldn’t fully identify the virus that had caused the disease. The chief virologist decided to ship some of the sample to colleagues in other countries.

At the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, the boy’s sputum sat for a month, waiting for its turn in a slow process of antibody-matching analysis. The results eventually confirmed that this was a variant of influenza, the virus that has killed more people than any in history. But this type had never before been seen in humans. It was H5N1, or “avian flu,” discovered two decades prior, but known only to infect birds.

Socialist Latinos Are Voting For Comrade Bernie

(Ronald Brownstein's article from the CNN OPINION on 23 February 2020.)

(CNN)Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders' big win among Latinos in Saturday's Nevada caucuses underscores the potential for the nation's largest minority group to reshape the next stage of the Democratic presidential race.

Almost all of the states with a large Latino population will vote in just the next four weeks: Nevada led the way Saturday, followed by Texas, California and Colorado on March 3, or Super Tuesday, and Arizona, Florida and Illinois on March 17. Cumulatively, the seven states with large Latino populations looming on the calendar will elect nearly half the Democratic delegates at stake in February and March.

This clustering will provide Latinos their best opportunity to influence the choice of the 2020 Democratic nominee. And it represents a key opportunity for Sanders, who has devoted enormous effort to organizing among Latinos after most of them backed Hillary Clinton during their 2016 contest for the nomination.

China Under-reporting New Wuhan-Virus Cases

(Yuan Yang's article from the FT on 13 February 2020.)

Frontline healthcare workers, patients and international experts have accused China of under-reporting coronavirus cases in the country, saying authorities were conducting inadequate testing and medical facilities were overwhelmed.

The accusations come as authorities in Hubei, the province at the centre of the outbreak, on Thursday reported a nearly tenfold increase in new cases and a death toll that was more than two times greater than the previous daily count.

The sudden rise, which was attributed to changes in methodology to include “clinically diagnosed” cases, followed eight consecutive days in which China’s health commission had reported declines in new cases. Health experts question the timeliness and accuracy of China’s official data, saying the testing system captured only a fraction of the cases in China’s hospitals, particularly those that are poorly run.

China: The Real Sick Man Of Asia?

(Walter Mead's article from the WALL STREET JOURNAL on 03 February 2020.)

China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia. Its financial markets may be even more dangerous than its wildlife markets. The mighty Chinese juggernaut has been humbled this week, apparently by a species-hopping bat virus.

While Chinese authorities struggle to control the epidemic and restart their economy, a world that has grown accustomed to contemplating China’s inexorable rise was reminded that nothing, not even Beijing’s power, can be taken for granted.

We do not know how dangerous the new coronavirus will be. There are signs that Chinese authorities are still trying to conceal the true scale of the problem, but at this point the virus appears to be more contagious but considerably less deadly than the pathogens behind diseases such as Ebola or SARS—though some experts say SARS and coronavirus are about equally contagious.

China Paying WaPo & NYT Millions For Propaganda

(Yuichiro Kakutani's article from the WASHINGTON FREE BEACON on 18 December 2019.)

China routinely broke federal law by not disclosing how much it spent to publish regime propaganda in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other newspapers, an expert review of foreign agent registration filings concluded.

China Daily, an official mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, has published hundreds of propaganda articles designed to look like ordinary news stories in some of America's most influential newspapers. 

While foreign agents may place ads in the United States, the propaganda outlet has repeatedly violated the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) by failing to provide full disclosures about its purchases.

China Daily has published propaganda in mainstream outlets for decades, but did not disclose its purchases of space in American newspapers to the Department of Justice until 2012. Even after it began acknowledging its relationship with the papers, the regime mouthpiece continued to violate federal disclosure requirements.

Bookies Predict 2020 Election Results: Donald Trump!

(Megan Henney'e article from the FOX BUSINESS on 17 February 2020.)

Bookmakers taking bets on who will win the presidential election in November mostly agree that President Trump is the favorite in the November race — unless he’s running against three-time New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

According to numbers published by Bet Online, an online bookmaker, oddsmakers gave Trump a 61.5 percent chance of winning the presidency by once again capturing the Electoral College but losing the popular vote.

Still, betting lines gave Bloomberg the best odds among Democratic candidates to win the Electoral College when running against Trump. The lower the number, the more the candidate is favored to win. The site puts Bloomberg at -125 against Trump in the Electoral College, while every other candidate is above +100.

ITER: Largest Commercial Nuclear Fusion Reactor

(Nathanial Gronewold's article from SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN on 24 July 2019.)

World’s Largest Nuclear Fusion Experiment Clears Milestone and the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor is set to launch operations in 2025. A multination project to build a fusion reactor cleared a milestone yesterday and is now 6 ½ years away from “First Plasma,” officials announced.

Yesterday, dignitaries attended a components handover ceremony at the construction site of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor in southern France. The ITER project is an experiment aimed at reaching the next stage in the evolution of nuclear energy as a means of generating emissions-free electricity.

The section recently installed—the cryostat base and lower cylinder—paves the way for the installation of the tokamak, the technology design chosen to house the powerful magnetic field that will encase the ultra-hot plasma fusion core.

Diamond Princess: Wuhan Virus Cruise Ship

(Julia Belluz's article from the VOX NEWS on 15 February 2020.)

It’s a hypochondriac’s worst nightmare and a startling public health crisis: The largest coronavirus outbreak outside of mainland China is currently floating in Japanese waters, on a cruise ship owned by Princess Cruises.

The outbreak was first detected when an 80-year-old passenger tested positive for the virus on February 1, a week after disembarking in Hong Kong. By February 4, the remaining 3,700 passengers and crew of the Diamond Princess — currently docked at the port city of Yokohama, Japan — were asked to stay on the ship under quarantine orders.

Since then, the number of passengers and crew aboard the Diamond Princess with the disease — known as Covid-19 — has surged to 218. While those who’ve tested positive are allowed to leave the ship for treatment, the rest have to remain there until at least February 19 with the exception of Americans on board. On Saturday, the US Embassy in Tokyo announced a chartered flight would arrive to evacuate citizens by Sunday.

Wuhan Virus: Will Eventually Kill Millions?

(Nicole Hao's article from the EPOCH TIMES on 09 February 2020.)

Hundreds of bodies waiting to be cremated.

Funeral Home Workers in Wuhan Are Working 24/7 to Cremate Bodies: Workers at crematoriums in Wuhan City, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, say their workload has increased dramatically in recent days, as they constantly transfer the bodies of victims from hospitals and private homes.

In an interview with The Epoch Times, a worker described long working hours to cope with the sudden increase in bodies to be cremated. Meanwhile, videos from workers dealing with the crisis have been circulating on social media, including one from a worker at a Wuhan funeral home who shared footage of more than 10 bodies lying on gurneys, lined up for cremation.

Some netizens also shared videos they shot within different hospitals in Wuhan, showing bodies waiting to be transferred from the hospitals to funeral homes. Since funeral home workers don’t know for sure whether the person died from the coronavirus, they wear protective suits and masks in order to defend themselves from potential infection.

Wuhan Virus: BioWar Weapon Escaped From A Lab?

(Staff article from the GREAT GAME INDIA on 03 February 2020.)

India To Investigate Wuhan Institute Of Virology on CoronaVirus: After Indian scientists were forced to withdraw their study concluding Coronavirus was injected with HIV AIDS virus amidst massive online criticism from Social Media experts, now Indian authorities have launched an investigation against China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The Indian government has ordered an inquiry into a study conducted in the Northeastern state of Nagaland by researchers from the U.S., China and India on bats and humans carrying antibodies to deadly viruses like Ebola, officials confirmed to The Hindu.

The study came under the scanner as two of the 12 researchers belonged to the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Department of Emerging Infectious Diseases, and it was funded by the United States Department of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). They would have required special permissions as foreign entities.

Hymn To A Gothic Beauty: Notre-Dame

(Ken Follet's article from the SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE - October 2019.)

On September 1, 1830, the 28-year-old poet Victor Hugo sat down to write Chapter 1 of a book called Notre-Dame de Paris. His wife recalled: “He bought himself a bottle of ink and a huge gray knitted shawl, which covered him from head to foot; locked away his formal clothes, so that he would not be tempted to go out; and entered his novel as if it were a prison.” (Writers are often swathed in wool, by the way; we sit still all day, so we get cold.)

By the middle of January 1831 the book was, astonishingly, finished. Hugo had written something like 180,000 words in four and a half months. It got poor reviews but the public loved it, and it was quickly translated into other languages. The English edition was called The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, a title at once more vulgar and more alluring. And Hugo became world famous.

The quality of Hugo’s writing is well illustrated by a passage in which he imagines, with spooky prescience, a fire at Notre-Dame:

Pelosi Rips Trump's SOTU Speech: Disgusting!

(AFP article from the TIMES OF ISRAEL on 05 February 2020.)

WASHINGTON, United States — US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ripped up her copy of Donald Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday, in a pointed political gesture after listening tight-lipped to the US president tout his achievements to Congress.

The tension between Trump and his Democratic nemesis was palpable from the outset, as Pelosi extended her hand for a handshake — and the president failed to return the favor. Seated in silence behind Trump in the House of Representatives, Pelosi frowned, repeatedly shook her head and smiled disbelievingly until he finished speaking and Republicans erupted in applause — at which point she rose and very visibly tore up the papers in front of him.

Asked afterwards by a reporter to give a reason for her gesture, Pelosi replied: “Because it was the courteous thing to do, considering the alternatives.” And in a follow-up tweet, the 79-year-old Pelosi said Democrats would “never stop extending the hand of friendship to get the job done.”