Puppet MastersS


Light Sabers

Trump says oil price war 'devastating' for Russia - but it's Saudis & US shale that stand to suffer most

Nebojsa Malic
RT
Thu, 19 Mar 2020 02:58 UTC
gas pump
© REUTERS/Thomas Peter
Plummeting oil prices have sparked another round of predictions about the economic collapse of Russia - this time from US President Donald Trump, who sounded a lot like his predecessor Barack Obama on the subject.

The price of crude oil has crashed to $20 this week, due to a one-two punch of Saudi Arabia flooding the market with record output and a sharp drop in global demand owing to the coronavirus pandemic. Asked about it during a press conference about the pandemic on Thursday, Trump described the price war as "very bad" for Saudi Arabia and "devastating" to Russia, but helpful in a way to American consumers as it will lower gas prices at the pump.

"We have a lot of power over the situation," Trump added, saying the US might get involved in mediating the dispute "at the appropriate time."
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Snakes in Suits

As Democrats attack Barr, Bill Clinton owns up to his 'worst mistake' at Justice

John Solomon
Just the News
Thu, 19 Mar 2020 19:00 UTC
bill clinton
© Ira L. Black/GettyBill Clinton attends opening ceremony for Veterans Day 2019 parade in New York.
In new documentary, 42nd president claims he gave 'go ahead' for DOJ to name Whitewater special prosecutor, and regrets it.

For months now, Democrats have assailed Attorney General William Barr as a flunky for President Trump who lacks the independence to make law enforcement decisions free of politics when it comes to scandals surrounding his boss.

Barr, of course, adamantly denies such accusations.

But as Democrats have upped the ante on this front heading into the 2020 election, one of their own former occupants at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has unexpectedly acknowledged he exercised his own political sway over the Justice Department.

In fact, former President Bill Clinton states in a new Hulu documentary entitled "Hillary" that he gave the "go ahead" for then-Attorney General Janet Reno to name special counsel Robert Fiske in 1994 to investigate the Whitewater scandal that tainted his presidency.

It's a decision he now regrets, having opened the door to his own impeachment after Fiske's successor, Ken Starr, widened the probe to encompass the Monica Lewinsky affair.
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Piggy Bank

India & Russia plan to open new trade route via Iran, regardless of threatened US sanctions


RT
Thu, 19 Mar 2020 21:31 UTC
shipping dock India
© REUTERS/Svetlana Burmistrova
Opening a long-pending multi-modal transportation corridor via Iran will be a big boost for bilateral trade between Russia and India, but it's not just the economy at stake. This is a bold move against the threat of US sanctions.

India's state-owned Container Corporation of India (Concor) and Russian Railways Logistics Joint Stock Company (RZD) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to transport cargo between India and Russia - based on a single invoice - via the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC), a 7,200-km multi-modal transportation network project cutting right across Central Asia, starting in Iran and ending in Astrakhan, Russia.

"Within three months, traders from India and Russia could move goods between the two countries through Iran," Concor chairman V Kalyana Rama said last week.

Comment: "Pandemic" not withstanding, life goes on. Trade between Russia and China is as brisk as ever:
While the coronavirus pandemic is wreaking havoc on global trade, cargo volume between Russia and its biggest trading partner, China, is growing, according to the Russian consul general in Harbin, Vladimir Oschepkov.

"According to our estimates, the volume of cargo transportation between our countries is gradually increasing," the diplomat told RIA Novosti.

More than 300 trucks and up to 35 trains cross the border in both directions every day. Russian carriers mainly transport wood, soy, coal, ore, and fertilizers, which are in demand in China due to the beginning of seasonal field work.

The consul general noted that the measures imposed to contain the spread of Covid-19 affect bilateral trade, but as soon as the restrictions are lifted, it will quickly rebound. The Chinese economy is slowly recovering from the pandemic, which is believed to have originated in Hubei province. Many companies, both domestic and foreign, have already resumed operations across the country, but some analysts say production capacity has not been fully restored.

According to Oschepkov, around 90 percent of export-oriented facilities in the Chinese regions bordering Russia have already returned to work.

Trade turnover between the two countries set a new record last year, rising more than three percent to surpass $110 billion. Trade volume continued to increase in the first two months of this year - more than five percent compared to the same period of 2019.


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2 + 2 = 4

Best of the Web: You don't say. 'Coronavirus death rate in Wuhan 65% lower than previously thought'

Pam Belluck
New York Times
Thu, 19 Mar 2020 22:49 UTC
Researchers calculated a 1.4 percent likelihood of dying in the city where the pandemic began. Earlier estimates ranged from 2 percent to 3.4 percent.
Tedros Adhanom
Tedros Adhanom, Director general of the World Health Organization
A new study reports that people who became sick from the coronavirus in the Chinese city where the outbreak began likely had a lower death rate than previously thought.

The study, published Thursday in the journal Nature Medicine, calculated that people with coronavirus symptoms in Wuhan, China, had a 1.4 percent likelihood of dying. Some previous estimates have ranged from 2 percent to 3.4 percent.


Comment: Eh, 3.4%. You ALL were reporting 3.4%. Which is why most people on Earth have spent the last 6 weeks bleating that figure back to each other.


Assessing the risk of death in Wuhan is instructive because it provides a snapshot of the epidemic from the beginning, when doctors were scrambling to treat people with the brand-new virus and hospitals were overwhelmed. Some experts say that such a benchmark — known as the symptomatic case fatality rate — could be lower in countries like the United States if measures like widespread business and school closures and appeals for social distancing have the desired effect of slowing the spread of the disease.

Comment: They're STILL harping on about how 'this is worse than the seasonal flu'.

But the above is only their first revision down of the mortality rate.

Also reported today, 19 March: there are no new cases in Wuhan.

The virus is done there. For this winter season anyway.

So here's what will most likely represent the global mortality rate:

Population of Wuhan = 11 million

COVID-19 deaths in Wuhan = +/-2,200

What percentage of 11 million is 2,200?

0.02%

Which is far less than the season flu mortality rate.

Damn the Fake News Media and the horses of the Apocalypse they rode in on.

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Bad Guys

Lockheed Martin promo simulates preemptive strikes on Russian ICBM & S-400


RT
Thu, 19 Mar 2020 02:04 UTC
Lockheed
© YouTube / Lockheed MartinA screenshot from Lockheed Martin's latest promotional video, simulating preemptive US strikes on Russia.
Apparently chomping at the bit for a major conflict with a nuclear-armed rival, America's top arms dealer Lockheed Martin has released a promotional clip imagining a simulated first strike on Russian positions and weapons systems.

Boasting the superiority of US military tech - much of which appears only in concept and computer-generated graphics - the brief video was unveiled this week by Lockheed's Advanced Development Program, also known as Skunk Works. The troublesome F-35 fighter jet seems to be the only system featured in the video to actually exist at present, however - the rest being prototypes in various stages of development.

While the video's narrator makes no mention of Russia by name, about two-thirds into the clip, it's clear who's playing the role of villain in Lockheed's simulation. The clip shows US strikes on Russia's distinctive S-400 missile defense systems, as well as a Topol-M mobile intercontinental ballistic missile platform, exclusive to Russia's armed forces.

Comment: That this reality exists only in CGI is quite fitting... Although it gives us a hint - as if it was needed - just which entities are eager to stoke tensions with Russia:

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Bulb

Trump waives FDA regulations, opening door for chloroquine and other drugs to be used for coronavirus therapy

Christian Datoc
Daily Caller
Thu, 19 Mar 2020 20:22 UTC
FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn
© Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesU.S. President Donald Trump listens to FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn (R) speak on the latest developments of the coronavirus outbreak, in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House March 19, 2020 in Washington, DC. With Americans testing positive for the coronavirus rising, President Trump is asking Congress for $1 trillion aid package to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.
President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he has directed Federal Drug Administration commissioner Stephen Hahn to waive "outdated rules and bureaucracies" on the testing of various "anti-viral therapies" to combat coronavirus.

Trump noted that the vaccine pursued by the National Institutes of Health and other medical bodies, "by its nature" requires lengthy testing periods.

"The therapies are something we can move on much faster potentially," he continued, "treatments that will be able to reduce the severity or duration of the symptoms."
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Biohazard

Tucker Carlson drove down to Mar-a-Lago to warn Trump of 'coronavirus threat'

Chris Menahan
Information Liberation
Tue, 17 Mar 2020 17:23 UTC
Tucker Carlson
Tucker Carlson
Tucker Carlson shared the details of the trip he took to Mar-a-Lago to warn President Trump in person to take the threat of the coronavirus seriously in a must read interview with Vanity Fair released Tuesday.


From Vanity Fair, "'Dishonesty...Is Always an Indicator of Weakness': Tucker Carlson on How He Brought His Coronavirus Message to Mar-a-Lago" (March 17, 2020):
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Bad Guys

Iranian doctors urge neighboring countries to shut down US biological labs amid coronavirus fears


Sputnik
Thu, 19 Mar 2020 19:34 UTC
laboratory
© Sputnik / Ramil Sitdikov
With over 17,300 cases and 1,135 deaths to date, Iran has been one of the countries hit hardest by COVID-19, with the virus affecting not only the population at large, but a big portion of the political elite as well. Last week, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said there was evidence that the pandemic may have been a "biological attack."

A group of 101 Iranian doctors has penned a letter addressed to the leaders of Afghanistan, Georgia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Pakistan to take 'immediate action' to destroy "all of the US biological laboratories" in their countries amid fears that the coronavirus pandemic may have been spread deliberately as a form of biological warfare, Press TV has reported, citing the letter.

"We, as a group of Iranian physicians specializing in infectious and pulmonary diseases, asthma and allergy are witnessing that many of our compatriots are infected with the virus, and like all doctors across the world, we are trying day and night to cure and save them," the letter states.
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Stock Down

Part 1: The coronavirus as a global economic reset

sundance
The Last Refuge
Wed, 18 Mar 2020 00:00 UTC
coronavirus/Lincoln/$5
© PYMNTS.com
A very big picture discussion requires a considerable baseline.

The stock market is not the U.S. economy; the stock market is an investment instrument that determines valuations of economic activity company-by-company. The valuation is considerably arbitrary, based on the determinations of the arbiters (investors). This is empirically true.

However, that said, how would the multinational underwriters, the multinational financial systems, reset all transactional tables (the bookkeeping systems underneath the valuation) ...if the U.S. stock market was every forced to re-value economic nationalism over multinational globalism?

Enter "Coronavirus".
josh tweet
Four years ago CTH first explained a new way to look at the U.S. economic system and how Main Street was/is disconnected from Wall Street. We presented a metaphor to explain. Before going deeper into the discussion of tomorrow; and at the request of several people who now accept the era of "deglobalization" is upon us, I first present that prior reference & then will use this as the baseline to describe what could come next.
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Pirates

New evidence points to US terrorist ties

Valery Kuliukov
New Eastern Journal
Thu, 19 Mar 2020 00:00 UTC
ISIS
© unknownISIS
The United States has been systematically destroying countries in the Middle East for many years now with only one objective — to get away with plundering their resources while these countries are gripped by crises and wars. This became quite visible after the US intervened in Libya and Syria in 2011.

After the September 11 attacks in 2001, Washington used the "War on Terror" as an excuse to pursue an expansionist foreign policy and gain control of energy resources in other countries. This was what motivated the decision that was initially taken by the United States and their allies to use al-Qaeda (terrorist organization banned in Russia) in order to destabilize the situation in the region and overthrow the legitimate governments of Iraq, Libya, Syria and a number of other majority-Muslim countries. After that plan failed, Washington created the "Islamic State", also known by its Arabic-language acronym DAESH (banned in Russia), so that Washington could fight the regional governments it did not like, and it gave the Americans a pretext for direct military intervention, in order "to fight terrorists".
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