Tina Moore, Gabrielle Fonrouge and Bruce Golding
New York PostTue, 21 Apr 2020 17:51 UTC
New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio
Mayor Bill de Blasio's critics let him know how they
really felt about him ordering New Yorkers to
snitch on each other for violating social-distancing rules — by flooding his new tip line with crank complaints including "dick pics" and people flipping the bird,
The Post has learned.
Photos of extended
middle fingers, the mayor
dropping the Staten Island groundhog and news coverage of him going to
the gym have all been texted to a special tip line that de Blasio announced Saturday, according to screenshots posted on Twitter.
One user sent the
message "We will fight this tyrannical overreach!" to the service and got an automated message that in part said, "Hello, and thank you for texting NYC311."
Comment: A healthy civic response to bureaucratic overreach that threatens the social bonds of the city. Nothing like 'New Yawkers"!
Bank of America (BofA) has jumped boots-and-all into gold bug territory.
The title of the bank's latest report says it all:
The Fed can't print gold.
BofA analysts have ramped up their already bullish tone about the yellow metal with a new 18-month target of US$3,000 per ounce for the gold price. That's a 50% gain on the bank's previous 18-month target of US$2,000/oz.
And the bank predicts an average gold price for 2021 of US$2,063. At the current rate of exchange, that's an Australian dollar gold price of A$3,215/oz — a figure that would super-charge profitability for local producers.
Wilfred Reilly
spikedWed, 22 Apr 2020 17:44 UTC
© Getty
Several weeks ago, one of the USA's better quantitative scientists, John Ioannidis of Stanford, made a
critically important point. During the coronavirus pandemic, 'we are making decisions without reliable data', he said.
As Ioannidis and others have pointed out, we do not even know the actual death rate for Covid-19. Terrifying and widely cited case-fatality rates like 'three per cent' come from comparing known fatalities to the small pool of people who have officially been tested. Those test cases are mostly made up of sick and symptomatic people or those who had direct contact with someone known to have had Covid-19 - rather than to the far larger pool of people who may have had a mild version of the disease.
Because of the same denominator problem, we also don't know the true infection rate. A recent German study indicates this could be as high as 15 per cent.Finally, we do not seem to know the effectiveness of the various strategies adopted by national and regional governments to respond to the disease - ranging from the advocacy of social distancing to full-on lockdowns.
Leigh Hopper
USC NewsMon, 20 Apr 2020 16:32 UTC
© Kit Karzen
USC and the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health on Monday released preliminary results from a collaborative scientific study that suggests
infections from the new coronavirus are far more widespread — and the fatality rate much lower — in L.A. County than previously thought.
The results are from the first round of an ongoing study by USC researchers and county health officials. They will be conducting antibody testing over time on a series of representative samples of adults to determine the scope and spread of the pandemic across the county.
Based on the results of the first round of testing, the research team estimates that
approximately 4.1% of the county's adult population has an antibody to the virus. Adjusting this estimate for the statistical margin of error implies about 2.8% to 5.6% of the county's adult population has an antibody to the virus —
which translates to approximately 221,000 to 442,000 adults in the county who have been infected. That estimate is
28 to 55 times higher than the 7,994 confirmed cases of COVID-19 reported to the county at the time of the study in early April. The number of COVID-related deaths in the county has now surpassed 600.
"We haven't known the true extent of COVID-19 infections in our community because we have only tested people with symptoms, and the availability of tests has been limited," said lead investigator
Neeraj Sood, professor of public policy at the USC Price School for Public Policy and senior fellow at the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics.
"The estimates also suggest that we might have to recalibrate disease prediction models and rethink public health strategies."
Comment: As more time passes, more stats come out, painting a clearer picture (which is still murky, however). More people are infected, the death rate is lower than previously believed. Voice of America reports that perhaps
25% of Americans may already have it, the vast majority showing mild or no symptoms. And up to 70% of the military may already have had it. Another study
suggests something similar for Sweden, where at least 11% of the population are believed to have contracted the virus. Iceland screened 6% of its population and only 0.7% tested positive. Yet here's an anomaly: a French boy who had the virus somehow didn't manage to pass it on to any of the
172 people he came into contact with.
As for deaths, there are contradictory bits of information. On the one hand, doctors are being encouraged to list Covid-19 as the cause of death for practically anyone (if they're dead and test positive, count it as a Covid-19 death). This suggests the death numbers are inflated. Yet many hard-hit areas (like NYC, London, Bergamo, etc.) have seen a large spike in mortality over the past month or two, and not all of these excess deaths have been attributed to Covid-19. Official numbers released by the UK government don't even include all deaths attributed to Covid-19 - just those who die
in hospital.
It will be a while before we can say anything with certainty about the extent of Covid-19 and
unrelated deaths in said areas.
Carl Campanile and Kate Sheehy
New York PostTue, 21 Apr 2020 17:44 UTC
© Taidgh Barron/NY PostAn FDNY ambulance responds to a call in the East Village.
New York state just issued a drastic new guideline urging emergency services workers not to bother trying to revive anyone without a pulse when they get to a scene, amid
an overload of coronavirus patients.
While paramedics were previously told to spend up to 20 minutes trying to revive people found in cardiac arrest, the change is "necessary during the COVID-19 response to protect the health and safety of EMS providers by limiting their exposure, conserve resources, and ensure optimal use of equipment to save the greatest number of lives,'' according to a state Health Department memo issued last week.
First responders were outraged over the move."They're not giving people a second chance to live anymore,'' Oren Barzilay, head of the city union whose members include uniformed EMTs and paramedics, fumed of state officials.
Comment: No, these changes are orders handed down from the One World Govt.
Helen Buyniski
RTMon, 20 Apr 2020 22:12 UTC
© Reuters / Andrew Kelly
Restaurant chain Shake Shack has dutifully returned bailout money small businesses should have gotten as the US government's bailout fund for mom-and-pops runs dry. But their virtue signaling doesn't fix an institutional problem.
Shake Shack
announced on Sunday it is returning a $10 million loan received through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) - the government bailout fund for "small and medium-size" businesses that ran dry last week after handing out $350 billion in low-interest loans to foundering enterprises suffering amid the coronavirus economic shutdown.
But the chain didn't give the money back out of the goodness of its heart -
it did so only after the media exposed it as one of many large chain restaurants, hotels, and other large corporations to receive the coveted "small business" loans before the fund ran dry, even as countless actual small businesses were unable to access it. Giving back the money is little more than virtue signaling from a well-heeled business caught with its hand in the proverbial cookie jar.
Neil Clark
RTTue, 21 Apr 2020 17:24 UTC
© Getty Images / rohojamagic
Around half of the world's population are in some form of 'lockdown'. It's a tough time for many, but one classic novel, published over 300 years ago, offers hope, inspiration - and food for thought.
Daniel Defoe's
'The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York. Mariner', celebrated its tercentenary last year, but who could have predicted that the centuries-old book would become so relevant to our lives just one year later?
For in a sense, we're all Robinson Crusoe now. By and large we're in the same boat as he was.
© SPANISH NATIONAL POLICE VIA APPolice escort suspected Egyptian extremists detained in a Monday overnight raid, in Almeria, Spain, Tuesday April 21, 2020.
A former London rapper who stopped making music not long after his father's extradition to face terror charges in the bombings of two U.S. embassies was arrested Monday in southern Spain on suspicion of joining Islamic State fighters in Syria.
Two sources close to the investigation told The Associated Press that
police arrested Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary and two other men at a rented apartment. Abdel Bary is the son of an Egyptian operative of al-Qaeda who was convicted for events related to the 1998 bombings at U.S. embassies in Africa that killed 224 people.A media release from Spain's National Police didn't name Abdel Bary. It described him as an Egyptian national who left Europe to fight in Syria and Iraq.
The police statement also called him "one of the most sought terrorists in Europe, both because of his criminal trajectory in the ranks of Daesh (Islamic State) and because of the high danger that he represented."
Comment: It should come as no surprise that Abdel Bary and others in his circle have been well known to US and UK intelligence for quite some time, and have extensive connections to the Anglo-American establishments. See more about Adel Bary on SOTT.NET's Behind the Headlines show
Who is 'Jihadi John'? Interview with Jon Ryman recorded back in 2015.
Helen Buyniski
RTTue, 21 Apr 2020 17:04 UTC
© Reuters / KCNA
The rash of stories claiming North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is on his deathbed - all sourced to a South Korean blog post - show Western media will run any horrific item on the Hermit Kingdom, confident they won't be contradicted.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is clinging to life by a thread after heart surgery went horribly, horribly wrong! Or at least, US intelligence is monitoring reports that Kim was "in grave danger" after botched surgery, as CNN reported on Monday.
The source for Kim's health troubles was a single report from South Korean web outlet The Daily NK, itself citing a single source in the North.While CNN acknowledged it "couldn't independently verify" the
story (or
anything else happening in North Korea), the outlet ran with it anyway, leading others to do the same. And while the
Guardian eventually front-loaded its own
article with official denials from China and South Korea as the story began to unravel, its Twitter account reveals the original title, "North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has heart surgery - report," a much more authoritative-sounding line than the lukewarm "South Korea and China play down Kim Jong-un health claims" it became.
Comment: Trump himself
roasted CNN over the reports of the North Korean leader's demise:
"They came out with very, very serious medical reports, nobody's confirmed that. It was CNN. When CNN comes out with a report, I don't place too much credence in it."
RTWed, 22 Apr 2020 16:43 UTC
© AP Photo/Jeff Roberson (left) Wikipedia (right)Missouri has seen protests over stay-at-home orders put into place due to the Covid-19 outbreak (left). The bombing of Nagasaki (right).
News that the state of Missouri is suing China and a number of its state agencies for damage caused by the coronavirus has been met with derision online, with many citing other potentially litigious historical precedents.
Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt filed suit on Tuesday against the Communist Party of China, as well as governments at local and provincial level, along with a number of smaller government agencies and research institutes upon which he laid the blame for "causing a global pandemic that was unnecessary and preventable."
Comment: These corona-crazies should be careful of the precedents that they set, because as the Twitter users point out this could come back to bite them in the rear in a real bad way.
Comment: A healthy civic response to bureaucratic overreach that threatens the social bonds of the city. Nothing like 'New Yawkers"!