The hunt for the world's first coronavirus vaccine is taking place with numerous companies and countries seeking to solve the COVID-19 pandemic. At the forefront, we find one American company that has been given a clear advantage in the process.

On May 15, 2020, Donald Trump announced this:

"Today I want to update you on the next stage of this momentous medical initiative. It's called Operation Warp Speed. That means big and it means fast. A massive scientific, industrial, and logistical endeavor unlike anything our country has seen since the Manhattan Project. You really could say that nobody has seen anything like we're doing, whether it's ventilators or testing. Nobody has seen anything like we're doing now, within our country, since the Second World War. Incredible.

"Its objective is to finish developing and then to manufacture and distribute a proven coronavirus vaccine as fast as possible. Again, we'd love to see if we could do it prior to the end of the year. We think we're going to have some very good results coming out very quickly. In addition, it will continue accelerating the development of diagnostics and breakthrough therapies....

"To date, Operation Warp Speed has brought together all of the experts across the federal government from places like the NIH, CDC, FDA, and many other agencies. This historic partnership will now bring together the full resources of the Department of Health and Human Services with the Department of Defense. And we know what that means. That means the full power and strength of military — the military. And that — really, talking about the logistics — if we get it, when we get it. That means the logistics, getting it out, so that everybody can take it.

"And today, we're proud to announce the addition of two of the most highly respected and skilled professionals in our country — worldwide respected. Operation Warp Speed's chief scientist will be Dr. Moncef Slaoui, a world-renowned immunologist who helped create 14 new vaccines — that's a lot of our new vaccines — in 10 years, during his time in the private sector. One of the most respected men in the world in the production and, really, on the formulation of vaccines." (my bolds)

Notice "...so that EVERYONE can take it". That sounds pretty non-optional to me.

Turkey has been violating the UN embargo by sending arms and militants from Syria to Libya, a spokesman for Khalifa Haftar's Libyan National Army (LNA) claimed as he showed videos that allegedly proved Ankara's violations.

Turkey "continues its aggression against our country" by supporting the rivaling Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA), Major General Ahmed al-Mesmari, the LNA's official spokesman, said during a press-conference.

Once prosperous, Libya remains divided since 2011 when NATO led a bombing campaign to overthrow the country's longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi. The fighting between the LNA and Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj's GNA intensified last year, with international efforts to bring peace to the country, including those by Russia, so far being in vain. Haftar's forces have been advancing on Tripoli for months, but the tide has changed recently, with the UN-recognized GNA now being on a counteroffensive.

Turkey's interference is to blame for the failure of all initiatives aimed at settling the crisis, al-Mesmari insisted. "Until this hostile force is removed from the Libyan land, the radical elements will keep sowing discord and bloodshed."

Ankara has been violating the UN arms embargo and supplying the GNA with hundreds of armored vehicles, artillery pieces, UAVs, heavy machine guns, other offensive weapons and loads of ammunition, he claimed.

World Usury Institutions are set to profit from the COVID-19 lockdown as their own reports talk about financial "aid" to the world's poorest nations. According to the World Bank, there will be over 60 million people more living in extreme poverty this year alone and the Bank considers providing "emergency aid loans" to these (mostly African) countries.

Needless to say, becoming more indebted has never really made anyone less poor, so it is not quite clear how loans can "help" the impoverished African nations. Even if the loans were to give an impression of a temporary improvement in the lives of millions of Africans (which they won't really since corrupt puppet politicians in power are most likely to keep the money for themselves), the debt will grow. Exponentially.

The indebted countries are thus left with only one choice if they were to repay their ballooning national debt - giving away natural resources. And Africa has an abundance of those. Thus, the World Bank is definitely going to help... itself. Here's the AFP report, released on May 19, 2020.

Iranian oil tankers heading to Venezuela are facing an imminent threat of a US armed attack in what Caracas labels a "crime of aggression and extermination," the country's envoy to the United Nations has warned.

The South American country has previously deployed the military to shield the friendly vessels from such attacks. Venezuelan ambassador to the UN, Samuel Moncada, sounded the alarm over what he described as Washington's hostile intentions earlier on Saturday, asking the Security Council to put an end to US "warmongering and criminal policies."

Iranian tankers ferrying gasoline to Venezuela's ports are facing "the threat of imminent use of military force by the United States," he later told his Twitter followers, adding that this would amount to "an act of war" against his country.

In the Donbass, a tense military situation has recently arisen. However, from the beginning of May, trends towards a progressive escalation became apparent to everyone. Moreover, they were accompanied by implacable rhetoric from Kiev. In particular, in mid-May, representatives of the Donbass contact group on the part of Ukraine rejected the consolidation of the special status of Donbass in the Ukrainian constitution, which finally led to a deadlock for several years already stalled disputes about the implementation of the Minsk agreements.

The constitutional reform, which implies decentralization and the special status of Donbass, is enshrined in the Set of Measures for the Implementation of the Minsk Agreements, agreed by the parties in February 2015. The reaction to the intensification of shelling and statements by Ukraine, apparently aimed at sensing the soil and determining the boundaries of what is permitted, was to bring the DPR and LPR People's Police units to high alert . It is worth noting that the war did not stop even for a single day, the soldiers were at the forefront and were ready to repel a possible attack. So this statement, circulated by the media, was more likely to show Kiev its place and return it to the mainstream of political negotiations.

Instead of casting grudges aside to fight the coronavirus, anti-Russia elements in the US are striving to make the Kremlin a scapegoat, Moscow has said, decrying the new US grant to "expose Russian health disinformation."

The Russian Foreign Ministry has issued a rebuke to the US Department of State over its newly-published grant notice on Friday. The grant "opportunity" will see a hefty sum of money - some $250,000 - awarded to "an organization with experience in counter Russian disinformation, analysis and programming," which will have to "produce a report on Russian and Soviet health-related disinformation campaigns" under the watchful eye of "subject matter experts" from the State Department' Russia Directorate. The prospective contractors will have till June 20 to apply for the grant.

A US judge dismissed a defamation lawsuit by One America News Network against MSNBC over Rachel Maddow's claims that OAN was "literally" Russian propaganda, ruling that her segment was merely "an opinion" and "exaggeration."

OAN sued the liberal talk show host and MSNBC for defamation, demanding over $10 million in damages, back in September 2019. The lawsuit was based on the July 22 episode of The Rachel Maddow Show, where Maddow launched a scathing broadside against the conservative television network, labeling it "the most obsequiously pro-Trump right wing news outlet in America" and "really literally paid Russian propaganda."

In the segment, Maddow cited a story by The Daily Beast's Kevin Poulsen about OAN's Kristian Rouz, who has previously contributed to Sputnik as a freelance author. Toeing the general US mainstream line on the Russian media, be it Sputnik or RT, Poulsen branded the Russian news agency "the Kremlin's official propaganda outlet" and said Rouz was once on its "payroll."

Anybody who has been following the story about the coronavirus pandemic is hopefully aware of the constantly changing double, triple, quadruple and n-speak that the "experts" give us concerning the need for social distancing, wearing masks, not touching each other, and in America, especially about not being together in "non essential" places like... church. All of this has been more or less led and spurred on by one Dr. Anthony Fauci. We reported three weeks ago on some rather amazing accounts suggesting that this doctor was somehow connected to the research programs in a "chimeric virus" containing strains of SARS, HIV and other goodies to produce a supervirus - one that is incurable. That research program was ongoing in the United States before the government got wind of it and shut it down, rightly so, since it was a program designed to bring about nothing but death. However, the allegation goes, Fauci managed to channel money illegally to Wuhan, China, to a lab there to further the research, and it is that virus, the causal agent of COVID-19, that we all have come to know and roundly hate.

A report published by the European Commission in late 2019 reveals that the EU has been looking to increase the scope and power of vaccination programmes since well before the current "pandemic".

The endpoint of the Roadmap is, among many other things, to introduce a "common vaccination card/passport" for all EU citizens.

This proposal will be appearing before the commission in 2022, with a "feasibility study" set to run from 2019 through 2021 (meaning, as of now, it's about halfway through).

Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg had the biggest gains, with Bezos adding $34.6 billion to his wealth and Zuckerberg adding $25 billion, according to the report from Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies' Program for Inequality. The report is based on Forbes data for America's more than 600 billionaires between March 18, when most states were in lockdown, and May 19.

The billionaire gains highlight how the coronavirus pandemic has rewarded the largest and most tech-focused companies, even as the economy and labor force grapples with the worst economic crisis in recent history.

According to the report, the net worth of America's billionaires grew 15% during the two-month period, to $3.382 trillion from $2.948 trillion. The biggest gains were at the top of the billionaire pyramid, with the richest five billionaires -- Bezos, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, and Larry Ellison -- seeing combined wealth gains of $76 billion.