Comment: Similarly strange behavior, during what is claimed to be crisis, can be seen in the UK, with MPs taking their Easter holidays from Parliament a week early - not before rushing through emergency laws, of course - and there's no word on when they plan to return and to be held accountable:

• What crisis? UK parliament on holiday till April 21st while some furious MPs demand recall immediately
• UK MPs to leave Parliament for month-long recess as controversial Coronavirus Bill is rushed through

Comment: See also:

• Pentagon Biological Weapons Program Never Ended: US Bio-labs Around The World
• Danger cruises: Dozens infected with Covid-19 on ANOTHER quarantined ship - this time on Egypt's Nile
• Coronavirus hysteria: The Diamond Princess cruise ship does not fit the media narrative

Comment: The US Air Force has responded to the reports by saying that the biological samples have been collected for "research". The use of Russians for the research was also explained by Air Force spokesman Capt. Beau Downey:

The request [by the research center] did not specify where the samples should be received from, but to continue the study, similar samples were required. Since the supplier originally provided samples from Russia, suitable for the initial group of diseases, the control group of the samples should also be of Russian origin," he said. "The goal is the integrity of the study, not the origin [of the samples]."

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Tuesday that Russian intelligence is aware that foreign NGOs are collecting genetic information from the population:

"Some emissaries are really carrying out such activities, representatives of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and other bodies. Such cases were registered, and security services, the president naturally have this information," he said.

If the Kremlin and Putin are openly talking about this, you can be sure that Russian security services are going to be paying very close attention to the activities of NGOs in Russia. It's worth pointing out that the CIA is well-known for farming out clandestine activities to various US-government funded NGOs who are really just fronts for Deep State activities. Whatever is going on, it does not seem to be as benign as the Air Force says it is.

Comment: So much for Nixon ending the US deep state's mad science bio-weapons program in 1969.

Many years ago, we noted that Israel has a similar infatuation with finding something that would 'target Arabs '.

The Pentagon's bio-weapon Frankenstein-research is not only alive and well, like NATO, it has metastasized since the collapse of the USSR, spreading into Africa, the Middle East, and on Russia's doorstep.

President Putin noted the uptick in US bio-research focused on 'Russians/Caucasians' last October and, addressing Russia's Human Rights Council, said:

"[...] do you know that biological material is being collected all over the country, from different ethnic groups and people living in different geographical regions of the Russian Federation? The question is - why is it being done? It's being done purposefully and professionally. We are a kind of object of great interest."

Franz Klintsevich, the first deputy chairman of the Federation Council's Committee for Defense and Security went on to add this on his Facebook page:

"I'm not saying that it is about preparing a biological war against Russia. But its scenarios, are, no doubt, being worked on. That is to say, in case the need arises."

It may, for now, remain more sci-fi than fact, but the concept of ethnic-specific weapons and/or viral means of 'improving the human genome' are clearly uppermost in certain American minds.

What do they think is going to happen if they unleash some kind of bio-weapon pandemic that ostensibly targets 'only Russians'? Or if they accidentally unleash a global pandemic that will hurt Americans too because they were attempting to 'make people more docile'?

It apparently hasn't yet dawned on them that most Caucasians are of mixed descent/genotype. Additionally, attempting to 'improve' the human genome would likely backfire on them.

UPDATE 16 April 2020

See here for a follow-up report in 2018 from the above reporter on this global bio-weapons lab architecture.

See here for the original report during the Covid-19 pandemic that linked Fort Detrick with SARS-CoV-2.

Comment: It's hard to believe that some factions within the US would ever truely leave Iraq - at least willlingly: Joe Quinn on PressTV: 'Like Iran, Trump Wants US Forces Out of Iraq, But Only With Trade Guarantees - Elephant in The Room is Israel'

Comment: Is all this rhetoric towards Venezuela another bone that Trump is throwing to the deep state - or does he intend to let Washington go the full imperial distance?

See also:

• 'Profound lack of human decency': Oliver Stone tears into US govt over Iran & Venezuela sanctions amid Covid-19 crisis
• Russian FM slams West, US for wanting to 'exploit' Covid-19 crisis in Venezuela: 'No humanism or democracy'
• Coup plan B! US tells Guaido he may renounce his Venezuela 'presidency' claim - but they're not giving up just yet
• Maduro: US is hatching plans for war against Venezuela
• Maduro says US plotting to invade Venezuela, country 'not afraid of combat'

Comment: See also:

Comment: RT provides more detail on the dystopian diktats from Cuomo:

"You want to use New York state as a laboratory? We are ready, willing and able," Cuomo gushed on Wednesday during his daily coronavirus press conference, addressing the Food and Drug Administration, which is conducting early-stage vaccine trials on a number of experimental coronavirus vaccine compounds.

New York was not only "energized, and creative, and ambitious" about turning its population into pharmaceutical guinea pigs, Cuomo suggested, it was only natural given its status as the global epicenter of the epidemic. "You need a place to test [a vaccine] in large numbers, think of New York."

"Anything we can do to accelerate that vaccine, we will do."

Cuomo seemed to have confidence that the state's economy would reopen soon, however. "We have the infection spread down to a manageable number," he said, even while acknowledging that the state would be "going to a different place, which is a new normal" rather than reverting to status quo.

"By the way, people will enforce it, they'll say to you, if they're standing next to you on a street corner, 'Where's your mask, buddy?' in a nice New York kind of way."

Calling for aid from the Trump administration, Cuomo claimed "large-scaling testing" was "the single best tool to safely reopen society" but insisted "we can't get either diagnostic or antibody testing to scale without federal support."

New York recorded 752 deaths with the coronavirus in the last 24 hours - a slight drop from the previous day - but Cuomo cautioned that "we are not out of the woods yet" and pledged to conduct 2,000 or more finger-prick antibody tests per day, focusing on first responders and healthcare workers. The state is currently the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, with over 202,000 confirmed cases and 10,834 deaths with the virus, according to New York statistics. However, casualty numbers released on Tuesday by New York City include close to 3,800 people who were never tested for coronavirus but merely assumed to have the disease. The US has 614,482 cases as of Wednesday and some 132,276 fatalities, according to Johns Hopkins University.