The MPs who are about to start investigating the effectiveness of the UK's £14 billion annual aid have the perfect reason to cut it; thanks to coronavirus, Britons are thinking of what's best for them.

As MPs on the newly-created House of Commons select committee on International Development roll up their sleeves before getting stuck in the nitty-gritty tomorrow, they have one thing on their side that might make efforts to slash the UK's aid budget more successful than in the past - the Covid-19 pandemic.

Because every time a newly-appointed minister has previously announced his or her intention to take stock of how the legally ring-fenced 0.7 percent of GDP is spent on overseas funding, there is a hardening of resistance from those that stand to benefit.

And there have been many ambitious, starry-eyed politicians to take on this role. From current incumbent Anne Travelyan, we have had eight secretaries of state for this department in the last 10 years, including Priti Patel, Rory Stewart, Andrew Mitchell, and Hilary Benn.

The Pentagon has announced it will drastically reduce the "size and scope" of its participation in the NATO 'Defender Europe 2020' exercise, stopping just short of calling quits on the much-touted drill set to run until May.

Some 20,000 American soldiers, who were expected to form the backbone of the massive 37,000-strong drill involving forces from 18 NATO member states, will now either stay home or - for those already moved into Europe - return to the US.

"As of March 13, all movement of personnel and equipment from the United States to Europe has ceased," US Army Europe confirmed in a press release on Monday. "As we make the appropriate adjustments, the linked exercises to Exercise Defender-Europe 20 - Dynamic Front, Joint Warfighting Assessment, Saber Strike and Swift Response - will not be conducted."

During the Democratic debate, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders had a heated exchange about how to deal with authoritarian governments. In the midst of the debate, Biden brought up a comparison between China and Jack the Ripper that was cut short. Now many on people want to know how he was going to finish his sentence.

Biden and Sanders were arguing about authoritarian governments. Sanders said that when one of those countries improves something, such as China decreasing poverty, it's OK to bring that up and praise that particular action while still condemning authoritarianism in general. Biden passionately disagreed with that, saying that you need to not be praising any aspect of authoritarian regimes.

In the midst of that, Biden said something about how praising China would be like praising Jack the Ripper. Sanders interrupted him, pointing out that he believed the statement was absurd, before Biden could finish his sentence.

All citizens have been ordered to stay home and will only be allowed out for "essential duties" such as trips to the grocery store or pharmacy, Macron told the nation on Monday.

The lockdown begins on Tuesday at noon. At the same time, France's borders with the rest of the Schengen area - much of the EU - will be closed as well, the president announced.

"We are at war," he repeated several times, noting that France's struggle is not against a nation or an army, but the "invisible enemy" of the Covid-19 virus, the rapidly spreading contagion rampaging through the EU.

Authorities of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia detained 298 public officials in a new alleged "anti-corruption push" amid reports that the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman is seeking to get rid of potential rivals to the Saudi Wahhabi throne.

A Saudi "anti-corruption body" known as Nazaha announced on Sunday that it had arrested 298 government officials for crimes such as "bribery, embezzlement and abuse of power" involving a total of 379 million riyals ($101 million), PressTV reported.

Among the detained officials, eight defense minister officers are suspected of money laundering in relation to government contracts during the years 2005-2015. Two judges are also amongst the list for allegedly receiving bribes. Another 29 interior ministry officials in the Eastern Province have also been detained, including three colonels, a major general and a brigadier general.

The US is dropping the much-hyped indictment for 'election meddling' against a company supposedly behind the so-called Russian troll farm, closing the opening chapter of special counsel Robert Mueller's Russiagate investigation.

Further pursuing the case against Concord Management & Consulting LLC, "promotes neither the interests of justice nor the nation's security," the Department of Justice wrote to the federal judge overseeing the case on Monday, in a motion to drop the charges.

DOJ lawyers cited "recent events and a change in the balance of the government's proof due to a classification determination," saying only that they submitted further details in a classified addendum.

"Fear is a primitive impulse, brainless as hunger, and because the aim of horror fiction is the production of the deepest kinds of fears, the genre tends to reinforce some remarkably uncivilized ideas about self-protection. In the current crop of zombie stories, the prevailing value for the beleaguered survivors is a sort of siege mentality, a vigilance so constant and unremitting that it's indistinguishable from the purest paranoia." — Terrence Rafferty, New York Times

What do zombies have to do with the U.S. government's plans for dealing with a coronavirus outbreak?

Read on, and I'll tell you.

The zombie narrative was popularized by the hit television series The Walking Dead, in which a small group of Americans attempt to survive in a zombie-ridden, post-apocalyptic world where they're not only fighting off flesh-eating ghouls but cannibalistic humans.

For a while there, zombies could be found lurking around every corner: wreaking havoc at gun shows, battling corsets in movies such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and running for their lives in 5K charity races.

Understandably, zombie fiction plays to our fears and paranoia, while allowing us to "envision how we and our own would thrive if everything went to hell and we lost all our societal supports." Yet as journalist Syreeta McFadden points out, while dystopian stories used to reflect our anxieties, now they reflect our reality, mirroring how we as a nation view the world around us, how we as citizens view each other, and most of all how our government views us.

Indeed, the U.S. government has spent a lot of time and energy in recent years using zombies as the models for a variety of crisis scenarios not too dissimilar from what we are currently experiencing.

For instance, back in 2015, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put together a zombie apocalypse preparation kit "that details everything you would need to have on hand in the event the living dead showed up at your front door." The CDC, in conjunction with the Dept. of Defense, even used zombies to put government agents through their paces in mock military drills.

Fear the Walking Dead — AMC's spinoff of its popular Walking Dead series — drove this point home by dialing back the clock to when the zombie outbreak first appears and setting viewers down in the midst of societal unrest not unlike our own experiences of recent years ("a bunch of weird incidents, police protests, riots, and ... rapid social entropy"). Then, as Forbes reports, "the military showed up and we fast-forwarded into an ad hoc police state with no glimpse at what was happening in the world around our main cast of hapless survivors."

Forbes found Fear's quick shift into a police state to be far-fetched, but anyone who has been paying attention in recent years knows that the groundwork was laid long ago for the government — i.e., the military — to intervene and lock down the nation in the event of a national disaster.

We're seeing this play out now as the coronavirus contagion spreads.

What is the infamous ID2020? It is an alliance of public-private partners, including UN agencies and civil society. It's an electronic ID program that uses generalized vaccination as a platform for digital identity.

It seems, the more there is written about the causes of the Coronavirus - the more the written analyses are overshadowed by a propaganda and fear-mongering hype. Questions for the truth and arguments for where to look for the origins and how the virus may have spread and how to combat it, are lost in the noise of wanton chaos. But isn't that what the "Black Men" behind this intended pandemic want - chaos, panic, hopelessness, leading to human vulnerability - a people becoming easy prey for manipulation?

Today WHO declared the coronavirus COVID-19 a "pandemic" - when there is not the slightest trace of a pandemic. A pandemic might be the condition, when the death to infection rate reaches more than 12%. In Europe, the death rate is about 0.4%, or less. Except for Italy which is a special case, where the peak of the death rate was 6% (see below for further analysis).

Lesions in the frontal lobe of a normal human being will cause deficits in the executive mental capacities; things like organizing data, planning action, archiving for memory, controlling anger, and the ability to make inferences about the intentions of others. Neurological trials have proved this beyond reasonable doubt.

The lead images present the frontal lobes and the faces of the three principal prosecutors in the Dutch trial of murder in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 six years ago. Their names are, from left to right, Thijs Berger, Ward Ferdinandusse, and Dedy Woei-A-Tsoi.

Analysis of every word they have spoken on the second day of the MH17 trial, March 10, reveals so many mistakes in Dutch criminal law and procedure that the medical condition of their frontal lobes is, to independent specialists, suspect. The resulting risk is for the defendants they are prosecuting - three Russians and a Ukrainian; and also the Russian state, which Berger accused of "a disturbing pattern of active involvement on the part of Russian security services, specifically the GRU and the FSB in murders in other countries."

On 2 March, Israel held its third parliamentary elections in a year in a bid to resolve the political deadlock. Neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party nor the Blue and White alliance led by Benny Gantz were able to form a coalition government following two inconclusive votes in April and September of last year.

"Tomorrow, around midday, the president will assign the task of forming the government to head of [Blue and White party] Benny Gantz", President Reuven Rivlin's office said in a statement, seen by the Haaretz daily. Nevertheless, the president stated that he would invite both Gantz and Netanyahu for talks on Sunday night in a bid to encourage a unity government between the two largest parties.

Talks on Forging Unity Government

On Sunday afternoon, the president summoned the prime minister and the head of the Blue and White party for an "urgent conversation" to discuss the "possibility of forming a government immediately", according to the office's statement.

In the meantime, Yisrael Beitenu's leader, Avigdor Lieberman along with two members of Gantz's own Blue and White have claimed they would oppose a government that relies on support from the Joint List. Lieberman stated that he supports Gantz, but also called for the formation of an "emergency'' unity government to deal with the coronavirus threat.