The city of Kaesong has been placed on lockdown after a person with symptoms of coronavirus "illegally" crossed the border, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un announced at an emergency anti-epidemic meeting.

The suspected patient zero reportedly entered the country on July 19, after defecting to South Korea some three years ago. He has since been quarantined, but "several medical check-ups of the secretion of that person's upper respiratory organ and blood" returned "uncertain results," according to state news agency KCNA. If confirmed, it would be the first Covid-19 case officially acknowledged by North Korea.

At an emergency meeting on Saturday, top North Korean leadership and health officials discussed the "dangerous situation in Kaesong city that may lead to a deadly and destructive disaster."

The US government has made further attempts to force European firms to ditch the Russian-led Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project, Welt am Sonntag reported, citing people familiar with talks on the issue.

According to the newspaper, officials from US Department of State, the Treasury Department, as well as the Department of Energy approached European contractors to make sure they fully understand the consequences of staying in the project. Up to a dozen officials reportedly held at least two online conferences with representatives of the firms in recent days.

Speaking in a "friendly" manner, the US side stressed that it wanted to prevent completion of Nord Stream 2, observers of the online talks said. "I believe the threat is very, very serious," one of them revealed to the German outlet.

Despite Pentagon statements that it disbanded a once-covert program to investigate unidentified flying objects, the effort remains underway — renamed and tucked inside the Office of Naval Intelligence, where officials continue to study mystifying encounters between military pilots and unidentified aerial vehicles.

Pentagon officials will not discuss the program, which is not classified but deals with classified matters. Yet it appeared last month in a Senate committee report outlining spending on the nation's intelligence agencies for the coming year. The report said the program, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, was "to standardize collection and reporting" on sightings of unexplained aerial vehicles, and was to report at least some of its findings to the public within 180 days after passage of the intelligence authorization act.

While retired officials involved with the effort — including Harry Reid, the former Senate majority leader — hope the program will seek evidence of vehicles from other worlds, its main focus is on discovering whether another nation, especially any potential adversary, is using breakout aviation technology that could threaten the United States.

As reported last week, Oregon's far left attorney general, Ellen Rosenblum, sought a federal court order to protect her terrorist friends and prevent the feds from intervening in the continuous riotous acts that have been ongoing in Portland. Her motion was DENIED today by a judge in the very same courthouse that has been subjected to the repeated vandalism and arson.

While anonymous federal agents have thrown protesters into unmarked vans and fired tear gas at Portland's mayor in recent days, an Air Force surveillance plane designed to carry state-of-the-art sensors typically reserved for war zones has circled the Oregon city's outskirts from above.

The plane, a DO-328 "Cougar," was spotted via the open source flight tracking website ADS-B Exchange, allowing the public to monitor its course. The Intercept reviewed this flight data, confirming tight, circular flights consistent with surveillance operations in and around Portland.

The aircraft is a twin-engine plane built in a modular fashion that allows it to be outfitted with long-range surveillance equipment suitable for supporting U.S. Special Operations commandos on the ground, according to Air Force documentation and previous public reporting. It was in Colorado earlier this month, looping over Denver and Boulder, before flying to Portland on July 19, and has been circling above Portland and its suburbs since July 21, according to publicly available flight data aggregated by websites like ADS-B Exchange.

US President Donald Trump has signed a measure giving the nod to American weapons producers to sell more military-grade drones to foreign nations, insisting previous export controls were "outdated" and "unfair."

The new directive - announced by the White House on Friday - eases restrictions on the sale of large drones, which were previously classified similarly to cruise missiles and under strict export restrictions. The move marks a significant change to the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), an informal body of rules governing munitions sales to some 35 participating countries.

"Not only do these outdated standards give an unfair advantage to countries outside of the MTCR and hurt United States industry, they also hinder our deterrence capability abroad by handicapping our partners and allies with subpar technology."

The White House stressed the need to expand the US drone market and "increase economic security."

Under the new rules, UAVs that fly at speeds under 800 kilometers per hour - including General Atomics' Reaper drone and Northrop Grumman's Global Hawk spy plane - will be reclassified to a lower category, easing restrictions on sales to foreign states.

HSBC took to Chinese social media on Saturday to debunk what it calls "misinterpretation of facts" and defend its role in the United States' inquiry of Huawei Technologies, as it faced blistering criticism this week in several of mainland China's newspapers.

Scrutiny of Huawei began well before the bank's involvement in late 2016, London-based HSBC said in a social media post on Saturday, adding that it did not prompt US investigations of the Chinese telecommunications company.

US investigations led to Canada's arrest of Huawei's chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou in December 2018 at the behest of the American Department of Justice (DOJ). Meng, the daughter of Huawei's founder, is under house arrest in Vancouver, where she is mounting her defence against an extradition to the United States to face US charges. "HSBC does not have any hostility towards Huawei and did not 'frame' Huawei," HSBC said in a post on its WeChat account in Chinese.

"The information provided by HSBC Group to the DOJ was done so pursuant to formal demand. In response to US DOJ's requests for information, HSBC Group simply presented the objective facts. HSBC did not 'fabricate' evidence or 'hide' facts. And HSBC would never distort the facts or seek to harm any of our clients for our own gain."

One of the iconic moments from my Who Is Bill Gates? documentary is the clip of Gates at the 2010 Aspen Ideas Festival discussing a proposal to increase funding for public education by diverting money from end-of-life care for the elderly and terminally ill.

Lamenting the skyrocketing tuition rates for college students, Gates tells the Aspen Institute's Walter Isaacson that, "That's a trade-off society's making because of very, very high medical costs and a lack of willingness to say, you know, 'Is spending a million dollars on that last three months of life for that patient — would it be better not to lay off those 10 teachers and to make that trade off in medical cost?'

Then, squirming around in his seat and looking over at the audience, Gates acknowledges that there may be some objection to this line of thinking: "But that's called the 'death panel' and you're not supposed to have that discussion."

A decade ago, when Gates made those remarks, it would be difficult to imagine an idea that was more out of touch with general public sentiment than the idea of "death panels" to free up money to hire more teachers. It was shocking enough to the general public that even the socially inept Gates realized that talking about it was verboten.

But what many sitting in the festival audience that day may not have realized is that the idea of trading health care for the elderly for public education funds is not Gates' own novel proposal. In fact, this "death panel" discussion has been around for a long time and that discussion was spearheaded by a relatively obscure — but incredibly influential — branch of philosophy known as bioethics.

Bioethics, for those not in the know, concerns itself with the ethical questions raised by advancing knowledge and technological sophistication in biology, medicine, and the life sciences. This often leads to serious academic debates about subjects that seem like bizarre, improbable, science fiction-like scenarios involving the ethics of using memory-enhancing drugs or erasing memories altogether.

While the musings of bioethicists on the case for killing granny and after-birth abortions and other morally outrageous ideas may still seem a little "out there" to much of the public, conversations about these previously unspeakable topics are going to become much more commonplace as we enter the COVID-1984 biosecurity paradigm.

In fact, they already are.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has asked the Department of Health to investigate following emerging reports of individuals receiving positive test results for the Chinese coronavirus, despite never taking the test.

"For that to come back positive, when there was no specimen submitted, is problematic, so I've heard it enough to be concerned about it," DeSantis said this week.

"I asked the Department of Health to look at that, because I heard it too. If you can give us, if people that have told you that are willing to provide their name, we're interested in investigating this because it's ridiculous," he continued.

Local news outlets, including Fox 35 News and Fox 4, have reported receiving mounting reports of this phenomenon.

The bid by London lawyer Michael Mansfield to take a multi-million pound payoff out of the Wiltshire coroner's inquest into the death of Dawn Sturgess, alleged victim of Russian poisoning on July 8, 2018, failed in the High Court on Friday.

A two-judge panel decided that a ruling last December by Senior Coroner David Ridley on the scope of his inquest into Sturgess's death - allegedly caused by a Russian-made nerve agent called Novichok — was faulty in law, but not in fact or evidence. The judges accepted every allegation about the circumstances of Sturgess's death by the British Government, repeated by Ridley but so far unattested or cross-examined in either the Wiltshire or London court. In sending the case back to Ridley, the High Court did not direct him to correct mistakes of evidence because none was found.

Mansfield had been hoping the court would order the coroner to broaden his investigation into the Russian state role, exposing thereby what Mansfield claims to have been British Government negligence in protecting Sturgess from the Russian danger.