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Italy to shutter ALL businesses besides pharmacies & grocery stores as coronavirus outbreak continues to spread


RT
Thu, 12 Mar 2020 06:24 UTC
Piazza Navona
© Reuters / Remo Casilli
Very few people are seen in Piazza Navona, which would usually be full of tourists, in Rome, Italy, March 2, 2020.
Italy will shut down most businesses across the country amid the fast-spreading coronavirus outbreak, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said, leaving only pharmacies, food markets and certain "essential" factories open.

Bars, hair salons, restaurants and all other businesses not necessary for production will be forced to close, Conte said in a televised address on Wednesday. The move comes as Rome steps up containment measures to combat the spread of the lethal coronavirus, including nationwide travel restrictions.

"We will only be able to see the effects of this great effort in a couple of weeks," the prime minister said, later noting the new measures would come into effect on Thursday and remain in place until March 25.

Italy saw its deadliest day yet for the outbreak on Wednesday, reporting another 196 fatalities - an increase of over 30 percent - bringing the total in the country to 827, with nearly 12,500 confirmed cases. Over 2,000 new infections were reported in the last 24 hours.

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Attention

Chelsea Manning attempted suicide while in jail for refusing to testify against WikiLeaks - lawyers


RT
Wed, 11 Mar 2020 23:32 UTC
chelsea manning
© Ritzau Scanpix/Torben Christensen via REUTERS
File photo of Chelsea Manning from July 2018.
Former US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, jailed a year ago for refusing to testify before a federal jury investigating WikiLeaks, has attempted suicide ahead of a court hearing, her lawyers said.

Manning is in the hospital and recovering, Gizmodo reported on Wednesday citing the imprisoned activist's legal team. The 31-year-old reportedly used a sheet to hang herself inside the Alexandria Detention Center in Virginia, according to the Daily Mail. That report has not been officially confirmed.

Manning has been locked up since March 2019, when she refused to appear before the federal grand jury and testify against WikiLeaks. Judge Anthony Trenga found the activist in contempt of court and ordered her jailed, later adding a steep fine of $1,000 a day for non-compliance. The fines have piled up to over $250,000 by now, which the destitute Manning has no way of paying.

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Stock Up

The unlikely businesses winning big from the coronavirus chaos

Sophia Epstein
Wired
Wed, 11 Mar 2020 08:27 UTC
corona beer
© Igor Golovniov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
It's official: the sale of Corona beer hasn't been impacted by its unfortunate name association. One study may have inspired a few thousand clickbait headlines about people associating it to coronavirus, but as marketing professor Mark Ritson explained in a recent column, the virus is more likely to help than harm the brand.

We're all constantly hearing the word "corona", and regardless of whether it prefaces the word "virus", he argues, and that's going to keep the brand front of mind.

When you buy something you revert back to instincts and habits; you pick the first thing you think of. When you order a beer, for example, you aren't thinking about current events.

"When you walk into a bar, the question is not 'does this pandemic make you feel different about any of the beers on the following list?'. The question is: 'What can I get you?'." And for thousands of people the answer will be Corona, Ritson says. "Not because of what it stands for. Not because of the negative associations it evokes. Just because that was the first beer that came to mind."

Comment: See also: Markets plunge in worst fall since 2008 crisis - and the reasons why

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Roses

Time to bring the troops home: More veterans committed suicide last decade than died in Vietnam war

Matt Agorist
The Free Thought Project
Tue, 10 Mar 2020 00:00 UTC
sad American soldier
It is no secret that the leading cause of death among active duty troops deployed to the Middle East is not combat or accidents, or IEDs — it's themselves. The Pentagon's own statistics show that this is a crisis but it is being ignored.

In 2019, according to the Department of Defense, 17 service members were killed during hostile situations in Afghanistan. The number of soldiers who killed themselves was nearly 19 times that amount. The most recent numbers, coming from 2018, show that a total of 321 active-duty members took their lives during the year.

Not only are active duty soldiers tragically ending their own lives at an increasing rate, but once they finish their service, these numbers skyrocket. While the suicide rate for active duty members is certainly shocking, veterans kill themselves at a rate nearly 200 percent more.

The most recent data shows that a veteran kills himself or herself in the United States about every hour and 26 minutes. That is 6,100 veterans a year.

When we look at these numbers over the past ten years, the results are shocking: more veterans have killed themselves in the last decade than service members who died in Vietnam.

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Blackbox

Iran agrees to hand over black boxes from downed Ukrainian plane to Kyiv


RFE/RL
Wed, 11 Mar 2020 22:39 UTC
memorial to the victims at Kyiv's Boryspil Airport

People mourn victims of the January 8 plane crash at a memorial to the victims at Kyiv's Boryspil Airport
The Iranian Civil Aviation Organization has agreed to send the flight recorders from a downed Ukrainian passenger plane to Kyiv for analysis, an Iranian diplomat said.

Tehran has also invited other interested countries to participate in reading the data from the black boxes, Farhard Parvaresh, who heads Iran's delegation at the UN's Montreal-based International Civil Aviation Organization, told Reuters on March 11.

The Iranian military said it accidentally shot down the Ukrainian jet on January 8, killing all 176 people on board.
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Extinguisher

Momento Mori - Unpopular Thoughts on Coronavirus

Craig Murray
craigmurray.org.uk
Sat, 07 Mar 2020 21:49 UTC
craig murray family flu
© craigmurray.org.uk
I have always been very fond of this photo, for reasons which are perhaps obvious. We are left to right Celia, Stuart, Neil, Craig and throughout our childhood we really were that close and that happy. The reason that I post this now is that my mother always told me she was amazed how good we looked in the photo, because it was taken when we were all off school sick with Hong Kong flu.

The Hong Kong flu pandemic of 1968/9 was the last really serious flu pandemic to sweep the UK. They do seem extraordinarily regular - 1919, 1969 and 2020. Flu epidemics have much better punctuality than the trains (though I cheated a bit there and left out the 1958 "Asian flu"). Nowadays "Hong Kong flu" is known as H3N2. Estimates for deaths it caused worldwide vary from 1 to 4 million. In the UK it killed an estimated 80,000 people.
uk deaths flu
If the current coronavirus had appeared in 1968, it would simply have been called "flu", probably "Wuhan flu". COVID-19 may not be nowadays classified as such, but in my youth flu is definitely what we would have called it. The Hong Kong flu was very similar to the current outbreak in being extremely contagious but with a fairly low mortality rate. 30% of the UK population is estimated to have been infected in the Hong Kong flu pandemic. The death rate was about 0.5%, mostly elderly or with underlying health conditions.
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Bug

Ghislaine Maxwell 'persuaded' Prince Andrew to snub FBI's Epstein probe

Lee Brown
NY Post
Wed, 11 Mar 2020 20:28 UTC
Prince Andrew and Ghislane Maxwell
© AP; Getty Images
Prince Andrew and Ghislane Maxwell
Prince Andrew has hired a crisis management specialist dubbed "the backroom fixer" — after snubbing the FBI on the advice of Jeffrey Epstein's accused madam Ghislaine Maxwell, according to reports.

The Duke of York was on Monday once again shamed by US authorities who say he "completely shut the door on voluntary cooperation" with the investigation into his late pedophile pal's crimes.

Now a family friend of Maxwell's claims Andrew was "persuaded" to do so at her urging.

"Ghislaine told me that yes, the lawyers and Ghislaine have finally convinced Andrew that it would do no good for him to talk to the FBI," Maxwell friend Laura Goldman told The Sun.
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Arrow Down

Markets plunge in worst fall since 2008 crisis - and the reasons why

Nick Beams
World Socialist Website
Tue, 10 Mar 2020 00:00 UTC
New York Stock Exchange President Stacey Cunningham
© AP
New York Stock Exchange President Stacey Cunningham consults with specialist Peter Giacchi, left, on the floor of the NYSE, Monday, March 9, 2020.

Comment: This article provides one of the best summations of where we sit today economically, and what is likely to occur in the not-too-distant-future. It does, however, miss the role of debt - which is discussed in some of the links below.


Global stocks plunged yesterday in the worst sell-off since the global financial crisis of 2008, with indications that worse may still be yet to come as reflected in the fall in Asian markets when trading began today.

Yesterday, after falls across the Asia-Pacific, where the Tokyo and Sydney markets dropped by around 7 percent and similar sell-offs in Europe, Wall Street plunged on opening. The fall was so large that it triggered a circuit breaker that suspended trading for 15 minutes in order to try to halt panic selling.

The fall continued throughout the day with the Dow closing more than 2,000 points down, its largest one-day point fall in history. There was a drop of more than 7 percent in all market indexes, taking Wall Street close to entering a bear market — defined as a 20 percent fall — since its high in mid-February.

The downturn, initiated by the economic impact of the coronavirus, entered a new stage over the weekend with Saudi Arabia launching an oil price war. It boosted production and offered discount prices, following the breakdown of an agreement with Russia to limit supply and maintain prices.

The decision sent oil prices tumbling by between 25 and 30 percent when markets opened this week.

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Star of David

Abuse, oppression, murder: The PA is doing Israel's dirty work in the West Bank

Ramzy Baroud
MintPress News
Tue, 10 Mar 2020 00:00 UTC
Pal Security forces
© Majdi Mohammed/AP
Members of Palestinian security forces wear masks outside a hotel n Bethlehem, West Bank, March 6, 2020.
Merely two weeks after Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, declared that the PA will suspend all 'security coordination' with Israel, Palestinian security forces in the West Bank killed unarmed teenager, Salah Zakareneh.

Zakareneh is not the first and, sadly, will not be the last Palestinian to be killed by the PA security forces, which in recent years have dramatically increased their oppressive tactics against any form of political dissent in Palestine.

The 17-year-old boy died soon after PA security was dispatched to the village of Qabatiya, south of Jenin, in the northern West Bank to allegedly confront a "military-style demonstration" that was being planned.

The official version of the story claimed that as soon as the PA force arrived in Qabatiya, armed men from the village opened fire while others hurled rocks, prompting PA officers to respond with live bullets and teargas canisters, resulting in the death of Zakareneh and the wounding of others. No PA officers were wounded by gunfire.

Comment: As a colluding appendage to Israel, power is the payoff for the PA and Abbas at the expense of their own people. The 'protectors' have become the oppressors.

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No Entry

Coronavirus quarantine: National Guard locks down New Rochelle, NY


RT
Tue, 10 Mar 2020 19:35 UTC
man facemask
© Reuters/Eduardo Munoz
A man wears a face mask in New Rochelle, New York.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has ordered the state National Guard to New Rochelle, a town in the affluent Westchester County, to enforce a two-week COVID-19 coronavirus quarantine.

The troops will help clean and deliver food in the designated "containment area" in a one-mile (1.6 km) radius around the area where the contagion appears to have originated, until the lockdown is lifted on March 25.

"It is a dramatic action, but it is the largest cluster of cases in the country," Cuomo said at a news conference on Tuesday. "The numbers are going up unabated, and we do need a special public health strategy for New Rochelle."
Westchester County is a suburban area just north of New York City, where 108 cases of COVID-19 have been registered so far - the vast majority of New York state's 173 known cases.

Comment: See also: WHO says COVID-19 now officially a pandemic - and other coronavirus news

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