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Attention

Best of the Web: Masks and airport checks for coronavirus outbreak are there to keep population calm - no government can stop its spread now

coronovirus mask china airport temperature checks
© Getty Images / Anadolu AgencyCitizens wear masks to defend against new viruses on January 22,2020 in Guangzhou, China
As the Chinese coronavirus spreads rapidly around the globe, governments worldwide are making a show of doing something. But are their measures effective, or just exercises in population control?

On Wednesday, the World Health Organization may declare an international public health emergency. Whether or not they do this will greatly affect the response of both the Chinese government and others in dealing with the outbreak of the 2019-nCoV virus that has already infected hundreds and killed nine.

Comment:
Talk is now being raised about a global pandemic:
coronavirus spread
© AFP / Anthony WallaceA press conference in Hong Kong about the extent of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak in China, January 21, 2020
The deadly pneumonia-like illness that has sickened hundreds and killed nine in and near Wuhan, China has turned up in the US, despite precautions, as China's neighbors ratchet up screening efforts to prevent a global pandemic.

A Snohomish County, Washington man has become the first officially confirmed novel coronavirus case in the US. Local officials have not named the man, who is said to be very sick. He was hospitalized with pneumonia last week after returning from the Wuhan region, where the illness has already claimed nine lives, according to Chinese authorities.

It's not immediately clear how many other Americans may have been exposed to the disease, which is believed to have its origins in a seafood and poultry market in the city of Wuhan, home to 11 million people.

Over 440 cases had been confirmed by Wednesday in China, cropping up in cities including Beijing, Shenzhen and Shanghai; cases have also been reported in Thailand, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and - now - the US. Infectious disease experts from Imperial College London estimated the disease toll to be much higher, however, suggesting on Saturday that at least 1,723 people might be infected.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention set up screening points at airports in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York on Friday in hopes of catching coronavirus carriers before they made it into the country, but they were apparently too late - or too far south - for US Patient Zero. While the CDC has claimed the threat to Americans is low, it also claims to be taking "proactive preparedness precautions."

Russian airports in Moscow, Ekaterinburg and Irkutsk stepped up screening of travelers arriving from China to try to identify infected people on Tuesday, after it became clear the virus is able to spread from human to human. India has also expanded thermal screening of passengers arriving from China, including Hong Kong, to seven airports, among them Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Cochin, in addition to New Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata.


The sole South Korean airport operating direct flights to Wuhan set up special gates for passengers back on January 3, while Singapore also expanded travelers' temperature screenings at Changi airport. Malaysia beefed up its own evaluations at the major airport in Kuala Lumpur, and the Bangladesh aviation watchdog also ordered screenings for travelers from China to look for any signs of the illness. Australian health officials, meanwhile, are distributing pamphlets and asking everyone coming from Wuhan to identify themselves if they feel any symptoms.

It's not entirely clear how easily the virus - which causes pneumonia-like symptoms including fever, cough, shortness of breath, and chest tightness - spreads from person to person, or what predisposes a person to contracting (or dying from) it, but authorities believe it initially jumped from animals at the Wuhan market to humans. The World Health Organization is due to weigh in on Wednesday on whether the outbreak will be declared an international public health emergency.
The virus is feared to be adapting too fast for China to deal with. It has asked for help from WHO:
The virus seems to be adapting and mutating, according to the head of China's Disease Control Center, Gao Fu, who noted though that, so far, all of its changes have been in line with expectations.

There may now be up to 2,197 cases of "close contact" with confirmed carriers, though another Health Commission official said he has yet to see evidence for "super spreaders" of the illness, or highly contagious patients, adding that "relevant measures" were being taken in the event such patients arise.

The abrupt increase in confirmed cases comes with improvements in methods of detection, the vice minister said, but the government has nonetheless warned the public to avoid densely populated areas nationwide. Meanwhile, officials in both Wuhan and the city of Hubei have been asked to take the "strictest possible measures" to minimize public gatherings, while residents of both cities were requested to refrain from traveling.

The Health Commission said it will continue to publicize new cases daily throughout China's lunar New Year as researchers work to track the source of the illness and create a vaccine, adding it is now in its "most critical" stage for prevention and control.



Gold Seal

Best of the Web: You GO girl! Tulsi Gabbard announces $50 million defamation lawsuit against Hillary Clinton


Comment: Who else has the balls to stand up against The Killary like this?


Tulsi Gabbard
© Alex Wong/Getty Images
Democratic Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard filed a defamation lawsuit Wednesday against former First Lady Hillary Clinton.

A press report released from Gabbard's campaign announced the lawsuit Wednesday. Gabbard's lawyers previously demanded Clinton retract her comments, where she claimed Gabbard was the Russian's favorite candidate.

"Tulsi Gabbard, a United States Congresswoman, Army National Guard Major, and 2020 presidential candidate, today filed a defamation lawsuit against Hillary Rodham Clinton," according to the press release.


Comment: More from Fox News:
"Clinton lied about her perceived rival Tulsi Gabbard," the lawsuit, filed in U.S. district court in New York, read. "She did so publicly, unambiguously, and with obvious malicious intent. Tulsi has been harmed by Clinton's lies — and American democracy has suffered as well."

In October, Clinton said that an unnamed Democratic presidential candidate was "the favorite of the Russians."

"I'm not making any predictions, but I think they've got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate," Clinton said, speaking on a podcast with David Plouffe, a former adviser to President Obama.

Although she never named Gabbard, a four-term congresswoman from Hawaii, there were just five women running for president at the time: Gabbard, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Marianne Williamson.

When a CNN reporter asked Clinton's spokesperson, Nick Merril, whether Gabbard, who has served in the Army National Guard, was the candidate she was referring to, he said: "If the nesting doll fits," a reference to Russian nesting dolls.

Gabbard's suit claimed she suffered "significant actual damages, personally and professionally, that are estimated to exceed $50 million — and continue to this day."

Clinton's remarks at the time ignited a political firestorm, evoking responses in defense of Gabbard from both President Trump and fellow Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders. Clinton has not responded publicly to the suit and did not immediately respond to a FOX Business request for comment.

Gabbard's suit suggests that Clinton targeted her with a false accusation for "retribution" over her endorsement of Sanders, Clinton's rival in the Democratic primary, in 2016. (Sanders eventually endorsed Clinton for president in July 2016).

"Tulsi was told that the Clinton team would never forget this," the suit says.
Twitter was quick to jump on the court filing, which included a dig at the long string of mysterious deaths that seem to follow the Clinton Machine:



Here's hoping this doesn't come to pass...

Oops! Killary Clinton accidentally posts condolences for Tulsi Gabbard's suicide a day early


Megaphone

Best of the Web: Worst lie since fake claim sparked Iraq war? OPCW report behind Syria bombings was altered, whistleblower tells UNSC

OPCW
A former inspector with the OPCW has accused the chemical weapons watchdog of issuing a sanitized report on the alleged 2018 attack in Douma, Syria, arguing it ignored serious reservations of its own fact-finding team.

The OPCW's final report on the Douma incident, released last March, omitted key findings of its own inspection team which would have cast serious doubt on whether a chemical attack took place at all, a now former OPCW specialist, Ian Henderson, told members of the United Nations Security Council in a recorded video address - after his visa application to attend the meeting in person was rejected.

"The findings in the final [Fact Finding Mission] report were contradictory, were a complete turnaround with what the team had understood collectively during and after the Douma deployments," Henderson said.

Comment: Moon of Alabama comments:
We have long maintained that the alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria, on April 7 2018 was faked by Jihadists shortly before they were evicted from that Damascus suburb.

By the end of last year leaked documents and a whistle blower from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had proven that the OPCW managers had manipulated the report their staff had written about the incident. The OPCW inspectors who had investigated the case on the ground in Douma found that there was evidence that a chemical attack had happened. The murdered people seem in videos from the alleged attack must have died of other causes. The yellow canisters found at the locations of the alleged attack were not dropped from helicopters but clearly manually placed.

Using the Arria-formula, a procedure to have witnesses testify to the UN Security Council, Russia and China invited other UN members to listen to the testimony of OPCW inspector Ian Henderson. He denounced the false final report the OPCW management had published. Henderson, a South African engineer, was a team leader at the OPCW where he had worked for more than twelve years.

Henderson's testimony can be watched here. Transcript here.

[...]

In his closing remarks at the UNSC Russia's Permanent Representative at the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, said:
Today's discussions reveal one thing clearly - that something fishy is cooking in the OPCW. When we point at it, our colleagues tell us every time that OPCW, the 2013 Nobel peace prize laureate, is the gold standard of professionalism, integrity and impartiality. We would like it to be such and we adopted a PRST in November 2019 exactly aiming at this. Unfortunately, the impartiality and integrity of the OPCW TS is seriously questioned, and not just by us and other member states, as today's presentation demonstrated. Members of the "Courage Foundation" can hardly be labeled as "Russian agents". They are reputable personalities and include such figures as Jose Bustani, first OPCW DG, respectable members of academic community, former senior officials of the US and UK intelligence community, and such names as Noam Chomsky and Oliver Stone to name a few. (You were provided with a copy of their letter and related materials).
Why do some of our colleagues so vehemently defend the reports by the OPCW FFM, which some are believed were fabricated? Because any seed of doubt about chemical episodes conclusions would lead to challenging the expediency and legitimacy of already illegitimate missile attacks against a sovereign UN member state. In that light the Douma incident plays a key role. Because if it transpires that the FFM report was made up, it would lead to questioning earlier episodes like Khan-Shaykhun and others, which resulted in the termination of [Joint Investigation Mechanism].
...
Our colleague from Viet Nam asked what to do next, what are the nest steps. I think that this issue must be discussed at the OPCW. Legitimate questions and issues that member states face should be addressed and discussed. The question why the first report of the OPCW FFM was shelled initially, and then disappeared and destroyed should be answered. So far we are denied - we and other member states - are denied such an opportunity.
Videos from Douma at the time of the incident showed some 30 bodies of dead persons. Most were children. It is up to day unknown who they were and who had murdered them. The OPCW manipulation of the original reports of its inspectors' findings is a cover up for that huge crime.
See also:


Rainbow

Best of the Web: Western 'political correctness' cannot make all people 'equal'

poor child poverty
In the West, there is a new wave of political correctness at work: it is all about one's sexual orientation; who has sex with whom, and how. Suddenly, the mass media in London, Paris and New York is greatly concerned about who has the right to change his or her sex, and who does not want to belong to any 'traditional' gender bracket.

Thinking about 'it', writing about it, doing it, is considered "progressive"; cutting edge. Entire novels are being commissioned and then subsidized, as far away as in the Asia Pacific. Western organizations and NGOs (so-called "non-government organizations", but financed by Western régimes), are thriving on the matter.

These days it is not just LGBT that are in the spotlight, glorified and propagandized; there are all sorts of new types of combinations that many people never even heard about, or imagined could exist.

Yellow Vest

Best of the Web: French insurgency: Mass arrests as tens of thousands converge for Acte 62 of Yellow Vest movement and Day 45 of national strikes

macron louis king protest
© REUTERS/Benoit TessierA striking French worker holds a portrait of French President Emmanuel Macron as King Louis XVI at a demonstration against pensions reform plans, Paris, 9 January 2020.
Demonstrators shouted slogans denouncing the police, President Macron and his pension reforms on Saturday.

French police have fired tear gas at protesters hurling projectiles and arrested dozens of people as thousands of "yellow vest" anti-government protesters returned to the streets of Paris.

Demonstrators on Saturday shouted slogans denouncing the police, President Emmanuel Macron and his pension reforms that have triggered the longest French transport strike in decades, which has snarled public transportation for millions of commuters in the French capital for 45 days.

With sirens wailing, dozens of vans carrying riot police fanned out the route along which thousands of protesters marched.

Young people wearing masks shouted "revolution" as tear gas drifted by the Bastille, the square where the French revolution erupted in 1789.


Comment: Paris Opera employees also took to the streets... and did this!




Black Cat

Best of the Web: Britain in mourning for its favourite Middle Eastern dictator, Oman's Sultan Qaboos

Sultan Qaboos Oman
© EPA-EFE/Hamid al-Qasmi/FileSultan Qaboos bin Said, Sultan of Oman, holds the opening session of the annual Council Meeting in Muscat, Oman, 31 October 2011.
Not one UK national newspaper has described Sultan Qaboos as a dictator, despite his being the Middle East's longest-serving autocrat, having taken power in 1970. Qaboos' half century in power was more than twice as long as Saddam Hussein's 24-year-rule in Iraq and even surpassed Muammar Gaddafi's 42 years in Libya.

Qaboos acted as Oman's prime minister, defence minister, finance minister, foreign minister and head of the judiciary. If the Sultan had been as popular as some commentators claim, then he could have successfully run for office. Yet he was never elected by the people of Oman and instead ruled by decree with absolute power for 50 years, suppressing all opposition.

Political parties were banned, independent media muzzled and it was a criminal offence to insult the sultan.

Comment: It seems Oman has been quietly sidling up to the West for some time. It's playing a dangerous game of attempting to steer a middle ground in the Middle East as the Great Powers jockey for hegemony.


Dominoes

Best of the Web: Unintended consequences of the Soleimani assassination: Did Trump just gift the Middle East to China and Russia?

china iraq oil deal
After waiting 15 years too long, Iraqi PM Abdul-Mahdi signs over his country's reconstruction to China, October 2019
By the series of actions in recent months in Iraq and across the Middle East, Washington has forced a strategic shift towards China, and to an extent Russia, and away from the United States. If events continue on their present trajectory it could well be that a main reason why Washington backed the destabilization of Assad in Syria - to block a planned Iran-Iraq-Syria gas pipeline - will now happen, unless Washington initiates full scorched-earth politics in the region. This is what we can call unintended consequences.

If nature abhors a vacuum, so too does geopolitics. When President Trump months ago announced plans to pull US troops out of Syria and the Middle East generally, Russia and especially China began quietly intensifying contacts with key states in the region.

Chinese involvement with Iraqi oil development and other infrastructure projects, though large, was significantly disrupted by the ISIS occupation of some one third of Iraqi territory. In September, 2019 Washington demanded that Iraq pay for completion of key infrastructure projects destroyed by the ISIS war - a war where Washington as well as Ankara, Israel and Saudi Arabia played the key hidden role — by giving the US government 50% of Iraqi oil revenues, an outrageous demand, to put it politely.

Network

Best of the Web: Assassination of Soleimani Just One Shot in Battle of The Ages to Stop Eurasian Integration

naval drills
© AFP / HO / Iranian Army officeIranian seamen salute the Russian Navy frigate Yaroslav Mudry while moored at Chabahar on the Gulf of Oman during Iran-Russia-China joint naval drills. The photo was provided by the Iranian Army office on December 27, 2019.
The Raging Twenties started with a bang with the targeted assassination of Iran's General Qasem Soleimani.

Yet a bigger bang awaits us throughout the decade: the myriad declinations of the New Great Game in Eurasia, which pits the US against Russia, China and Iran, the three major nodes of Eurasia integration.

Every game-changing act in geopolitics and geoeconomics in the coming decade will have to be analyzed in connection to this epic clash.

The Deep State and crucial sectors of the US ruling class are absolutely terrified that China is already outpacing the "indispensable nation" economically and that Russia has outpaced it militarily. The Pentagon officially designates the three Eurasian nodes as "threats."

Comment: See also:


Blackbox

Best of the Web: What Poland Has to Hide About The Origins of World War II

nazi occupation poland
© Waldemar Engler/ Wikimedia CommonsA Nazi prepares to shoot a man during the Piaśnica massacres of 1939-1940, in which 12,000-14,000 Poles (intelligentsia, psychiatric patients, and others) were killed.
On 20 December 2019 President Vladimir Putin intervened very publicly to correct the West's fake history of the origins and waging of World War II. Four days later, obviously exasperated, he took aim at Poland, characterising the Polish ambassador in Berlin during the latter 1930s, Jósef Lipski, as "a bastard and anti-Semitic pig". The Polish governing elite was notoriously anti-Semitic, and in 1938 Lipski told Adolf Hitler that the Poles would "'erect him a beautiful monument in Warsaw' if he carried out [a] plan to expel European Jews to Africa." In reaction, the Polish parliament, with a bipartisan majority, has indicated its intention "to pass a law that criminalizes lies about the causes of World War II." Putin's language about Lipski was not very presidential, but he was clearly outraged. He had reasons to be.

Last August the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, issued a statement lamenting the "infamous" Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, concluded on 23 August 1939. Trudeau equated the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany in bringing "untold suffering upon people across Europe". Obviously, Trudeau knows nothing about the origins and unfolding of World War II, but he is not alone. A few weeks later the European Parliament in Strasbourg (PACE) approved a resolution along the same lines as Trudeau's statement: the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact "paved the way for the outbreak of the Second World War." The resolution appears to have originated with a group of Polish MEPs representing the right-wing, so-called ECR Group. For PACE and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), such resolutions are old hat. In 2008-2009 PACE established a bogus holiday on 23 August to commemorate the victims of fascist and communist "totalitarianism" and the signing of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact. East Europeans and the NATO (read: the United States) Parliamentary Assembly were also behind the launch of the new "holiday". The Poles would do well not to raise questions about the origins of the World War II. It is rather like digging with a stick into a pile of manure. As soon as you stir it up, the manure begins to stink.

Star of David

Flashback Best of the Web: Wikileaks Stratfor email: Israel behind blast that killed 36 IRGC troops at Iranian missile base in 2011


Comment: This interests us today because it's the same location from which missiles were fired at Ukraine Airlines Flight 752 last week - Shahid Moddares missile base, near the village of Bidkaneh, west of Tehran.

Then too, the Iranians insisted the incident was 'an accident'...


IRGC base Bidganeh Iran
© APIn this image taken from amateur video, smokes rises from an explosion at a Revolutionary Guard ammunition depot outside Bidganeh village, west of Tehran, last November
Israeli agents were responsible for a devastating blast last November that damaged an important Iranian military facility, according to an email written by the head of a leading private American intelligence company that was revealed Wednesday on Wikileaks.

Claiming to have spoken to multiple "good" Israeli sources, the CEO and founder of Texas-based intelligence company Stratfor, George Friedman, told his colleagues that he believes Israeli operatives were behind the explosion at a base of Revolutionary Guards on November 12. The blast killed more than 15 soldiers, among them at least one general.


Comment: In subsequent days, that death toll more than doubled to 36. And among the dead was General Hasan Moghaddam, described by the IRGC as "a key figure in Iran's missile programme."
moqaddam
General Hasan Moghaddam

"Everything I'm hearing from Israel is that they did it," Friedman wrote in an e-mail on November 15. While it isn't clear whether the explosion, which took place about 40 kilometers from Tehran, was caused by a special military operation or submarine-launched cruise missile, his Israeli contacts claim they were responsible for it, Friedman wrote.

Comment: WhatEVER it takes...

Was Iranian Missile Operator Tricked Into Shooting Down The Ukrainian Airlines Plane Over Tehran?