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Broom

France recalling troops from Iraq over coronavirus as it deploys others to its borders


RT
Wed, 25 Mar 2020 21:06 UTC
french soldiers
© REUTERS/Christophe EnaFILE PHOTO: French soldiers on the outskirts of the city of Mosul, outside the Kurdish city of Erbil, Iraq, January 2, 2017.
Paris will remove all of its troops currently stationed in Iraq for the time being over concerns about the spread of Covid-19, the French military announced.

"France has taken the decision to repatriate until further notice its personnel deployed in operation Chammal in Iraq," the Armed Forces Ministry said on Wednesday, adding that around 100 troops were in the country, and that air strikes against the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) would continue.

Abdul-Karim Khalaf, the spokesman for the caretaker Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi told the newspaper Al-Sabah on Wednesday that the French troops have already left Iraq.
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Clipboard

Senate Republicans hold press conference demanding immediate fix to 'life-threatening drafting error' in coronavirus package

Henry Rodgers
Daily Mail
Wed, 25 Mar 2020 02:28 UTC
Senator Graham
Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham on Wednesday held a press conference with a group of Republican Senators to call for an immediate fix to a "life-threatening drafting error" in the coronavirus package.

Graham was joined by South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, and Florida Sen. Rick Scott at the press conference to discuss the coronavirus emergency legislation. The presser was first announced in a tweet by Graham, saying they "will discuss a massive drafting error in the current version of the coronavirus relief legislation that could have devastating consequences."

"A massive drafting error in the current version of the coronavirus relief legislation could have devastating consequences: Unless this bill is fixed, there is a strong incentive for employees to be laid off instead of going to work," the group said in a statement.

"This isn't an abstract, philosophical point — it's an immediate, real-world problem. If the federal government accidentally incentivizes layoffs, we risk life-threatening shortages in sectors where doctors, nurses, and pharmacists are trying to care for the sick, and where growers and grocers, truckers and cooks are trying to get food to families' tables," the statement said.
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Biohazard

Analysis finds UK security agencies had ample warnings, yet did 'no planning or intel gathering' on pandemic threats


RT
Wed, 25 Mar 2020 19:58 UTC
london pedestrian facemask coronavirus
© Reuters / Hannah McKay
The risk of a devastating pandemic was repeatedly raised by UK policy-making officials for 15 years, but the threat was never taken seriously or prepared for by British security and intelligence officials, new analysis says.

Systematic planning or intelligence gathering around health crises "does not appear to take place in any UK security agency" despite the fact that their proclaimed roles are to keep the country safe, according to Declassified UK, which conducted the research.

The lack of focus on health crises is not for lack of warnings. The National Risk Register has "regularly concluded" that an influenza pandemic is the "gravest threat" to UK security, and could see potentially 750,000 deaths in a worst-case scenario as well as major supply disruptions without proper precautions.

Comment:

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Bullseye

Trump outs New Green Deal and the shut-down folly of the US economy

Matthew Ehret
The Canadian Patriot
Wed, 25 Mar 2020 00:00 UTC
Trump/Hemmer
© AP/Evan VucciPresident Donald Trump and FOX News host Bill Hemmer during a virtual town hall with members of the coronavirus task force, in the Rose Garden, March 24, 2020.
President Trump has demonstrated a dramatic about-face on his support for a total shutdown of America during a Virtual Town Hall meeting on March 24 which comes in the wake of the President's attacks on Pompeo's State Department (which Trump referred to as Pompeo's "Deep State Department" on March 20).

During his March 24 Virtual Town Hall event, Trump not only called for an end to the economic shutdown which has crippled America's economy, but also described how he was backed into a wall by teams of "experts" who made it impossible for him to avoid declaring a state of emergency on March 13 whereby America effectively ground to a halt, while trillions were issued to bailout failing banks and corporations.

Comment: Is Trump suffering from the flu? His independent thinking has produced too many logical answers for such odd and suspicious dictates!

See also:

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Arrow Down

Will $2T fix it? Covid-19 exposes the state of America's economy and society

Scott Ritter
RT
Tue, 24 Mar 2020 18:18 UTC
burnt dollar
© Getty Images/skodonnell
As Congress and the president bicker over a huge financial stimulus package designed to keep the US economy afloat, they must confront the real existential questions facing the country.

Despite all the wrangling, there will be a national economic stimulus package passed by the Congress and signed by the president. Domestic political imperative guarantees as much. The American economy has largely shut down because of the social lockdown mandated by the coronavirus pandemic, and without a stimulus package the entire system would collapse with little hope of ever fully recovering.

The cost of the package will approximate $2 trillion, give or take a few hundred billion. No matter what the final amount is, it will exceed by far the nearly $1.5 trillion combined bailout/stimulus packages approved by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama to recover from the 2008 economic crisis. The 2008 package, however, was a one-time deal; the coronavirus stimulus covers a period of approximately one month, after which the economy either gets restarted, or Congress and the president will be looking at the need for a follow-on stimulus package of similar size and scope.

Comment: Many nations are in the same or worse conditions due to coronavirus mandates. All of them will be making hard decisions during recovery. Few leaders will be as quick and financially astute as Trump regarding the need to jump-start national productivity and public well-being. Will it work? Time will tell.

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Health

Maduro: Suspended rent payments, increased wage protections as coronavirus cases reach 77 in Venezuela

Paul Dobson
venezuelanalysis.com
Mon, 23 Mar 2020 05:35 UTC
Maduro
© PrensaPresidencial/TwitterVenezuelan president Nicolas Maduro addresses COVID-19 virus measures.
The Venezuelan government announced a series of measures on Sunday in attempts to protect the population from the economic effects of the coronavirus crisis. The economic measures come as the country enters its seventh day of national lockdown.

Speaking on a live televised address, President Nicolas Maduro instructed that all commercial and residential rent, as well as all capital and loan interest payments, are to be suspended for six months.

Public- and private- sector workers will receive a special government bonus, and wages of small and midsize companies will be paid by the state until September. A pre-existing workplace stability decree has also been extended until the end of the year, outlawing job dismissals as a result of the quarantine.

Loan appeals by small and medium businesses are to be fast-tracked, and a special agricultural investment plan will look to guarantee the contents of the subsidised Local Food Production and Provision Committees (CLAP) food boxes for a reported seven million families. Telecommunications companies have also been barred from cutting off customers for six months.

Upon unveiling the measures, Maduro promised to use "all his power and consciousness to protect jobs" and the most vulnerable in society during the quarantine lockdown.

Comment: President Maduro shows a remarkable competency and care for the wellbeing of Venezuelans, belying Western consensus he's an 'evil dictator' out to trash his country!

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Oil Well

Trump reportedly okay with Saudi plan to squeeze Russia out of the oil market


Sputnik
Wed, 25 Mar 2020 19:19 UTC
donald trump
© Drew Angerer / Getty Images / Agence France-Presse
President Donald Trump last week hinted that the US would wade into the oil price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia at the appropriate time, saying low gasoline prices were good for American consumers despite hurting the industry.

US President Donald Trump was quite happy with Saudi Arabia's plans to oust Russia from certain oil markets by hiking oil production, Politico reports citing informed sources.

Comment:

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Bad Guys

Trump defying the odds as he outflanks the Left

Joaquin Flores
The Strategic Culture Foundation
Wed, 25 Mar 2020 18:38 UTC
trump rally campaign
© Michael Vadon/Wikimedia
Did you know that 25% of Americans want their state to secede from the United States? In part one of our series, we laid out our opening - that the betrayals of the Democrat Party against its own working class base would lead towards an uprising, finally coalescing around a National Labor Movement, christened through blood and sacrifice. This would ultimately team-up with Trump's small business and working class base, making every conservative-libertarian's worst horse-shoe theory nightmare a living reality.

This is the era of the new populism, beyond left and right.

We said in the previous article in this series that because of Trump's commitments and Reaganomic view of wealth creation, that he would not be able to rise to the 'FDR level' needed to radically transform America's social contract and forge a genuine New Deal. As it stands, the American economy is set to shrink by a depression-era 14% in Q2 alone.

Comment:

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Sherlock

Best of the Web: Did COVID-19 escape Fort Detrick vaccine trial? Evidence that virus originated in US bioweapons lab

Larry Romanoff
Global Research
Wed, 11 Mar 2020 17:56 UTC
Fort Detrick Maryland
Fort Detrick, Maryland, actual source of the 'Wuhan' Flu?
It would be useful to read this prior article for background:

China's Coronavirus: A Shocking Update. Did The Virus Originate in the US?
As readers will recall from the earlier article (above), Japanese and Taiwanese epidemiologists and pharmacologists have determined that the new coronavirus could have originated in the US since that country is the only one known to have all five types - from which all others must have descended. Wuhan in China has only one of those types, rendering it in analogy as a kind of "branch" which cannot exist by itself but must have grown from a "tree".

The Taiwanese physician noted that in August of 2019 the US had a flurry of lung pneumonias or similar, which the Americans blamed on 'vaping' from e-cigarettes, but which, according to the scientist, the symptoms and conditions could not be explained by e-cigarettes. He said he wrote to the US officials telling them he suspected those deaths were likely due to the coronavirus. He claims his warnings were ignored.

Immediately prior to that, the CDC totally shut down the US Military's main bio-lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland, due to an absence of safeguards against pathogen leakages, issuing a complete "cease and desist" order to the military. It was immediately after this event that the 'e-cigarette' epidemic arose.

Comment: This analysis sounds like it's on the right track. The media shouted too loudly about that Wuhan market. We initially suspected a connection with China's only BSL-4 biolab in Wuhan, but that does indeed appear to be pure coincidence.

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Info

DOJ asks Congress for "indefinite detention powers" to fight the Coronavirus

Mac Slavo
SHTFPLAN.com
Mon, 23 Mar 2020 00:00 UTC
fema camp
The Justice Department is using the outbreak of the coronavirus to expand their power. They have reportedly asked Congress for the power to detain Americans indefinitely without a trial in order to fight the outbreak which has so far, infected 32,000 Americans.

The government is rapidly moving to destroy human rights and the basic fundamental freedoms we hold dear in the name of fighting the coronavirus. This is far more severe than an outbreak. Enslaving humanity should never be the solution to a problem. However, the justice department thinks this request is acceptable. They are asking Congress to allow the U.S. attorney general to ask courts to suspend court proceedings. These include "any statutes or rules of procedure otherwise affecting pre-arrest, post-arrest, pre-trial, trial, and post-trial procedures in criminal and juvenile proceedings and all civil process and proceedings," reports Betsy Woodruff Swan, citing DOJ documents presented to Congress.

Basic human rights are in danger of being severely diminished if not outright destroyed. If Congress approves this power grab (and I wouldn't put it past them) totalitarianism is in our very near future.
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