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A lot more than baby on board: Woman caught trying to sneak insane amount of contraband into Brazilian prison

Contraband
© Twitter/ Coronel Tadeu
Guards at a Brazilian prison were truly baffled when a 'pregnant' woman attempted to visit her husband but when asked several routine questions, revealed she was in fact attempting to smuggle in everything but the kitchen sink.

The 22-year-old woman was visiting her hubby who was banged up in the Nelson Hungria Penitentiary Complex near Belo Horizonte. Guards noticed she was wearing a rather fetching, if oddly-shaped, jumpsuit.

Pregnant women are not normally subjected to body scans when visiting inmates in Brazilian prison but, when officers attempted a pat down, the young woman crumbled and confessed to attempted smuggling. But nothing could have prepared the prison guards for the vast trove of contraband they were about to find strapped to the woman's body.

People 2

Canada: New Trudeau law could jail parents who oppose gender conversion

dad and kids
© juliane-liebermann/unsplash
Under the guise of prohibiting "conversion therapy," Bill C-8 would make it a criminal offence for parents to help their own gender-confused children find peace in accepting their biological gender. The Liberal government's proposed legislation, introduced as a First Reading on March 9, defines "conversion therapy" as "a practice, treatment or service designed to change a person's sexual orientation to heterosexual or gender identity to cisgender, or to repress or reduce non-heterosexual attraction or sexual behaviour."

This proposed House of Commons legislation has the same major flaws that the Senate's Bill S-202 had, as I argued in 2019. Under C-8, parents could spend up to five years in jail for trying to help their son accept himself as a boy, or for helping their daughter to accept herself as a girl. Bill C-8 also would impose prison terms up to five years for doctors, counsellors, psychiatrists, psychologists and other paid professionals whose treatment for gender confusion departs from politically correct orthodoxy. Parents would be punished if they do anything other than encourage a confused child to "transition" to the opposite gender. Transitioning is an extreme form of intervention that includes taking puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and undergoing permanent surgical sterilization, including the removal of healthy organs such as breasts and testicles.

Comment: Some day, hopefully, these bureaucrats pushing gender transitioning on kids will be held accountable for their crimes.

See also:


Microscope 1

Irony: Coronavirus conference gets canceled because of coronavirus

new york commuter coronavirus
© Victor J. Blue—Bloomberg/Getty Images
A commuter wears a mask and gloves while walking through a subway station in New York, U.S., on March 9, 2020.
So much for keeping business rolling during the coronavirus pandemic.

The Council on Foreign Relations has canceled a roundtable called "Doing Business Under Coronavirus" scheduled for Friday in New York due to the spread of the infection itself. CFR has also canceled other in-person conferences that were scheduled from March 11 to April 3, including roundtables in New York and Washington and national events around the U.S.

The CFR's confabs are joining a long list of canceled or postponed gatherings, including the annual New York auto show. The Greater New York Automobile Dealers Association said Tuesday that the car show will be rescheduled to late August.

No Entry

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

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.

Comment: See also:


Attention

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

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.

Comment: See also:


Stock Up

The unlikely businesses winning big from the coronavirus chaos

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


Roses

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

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.

Comment: See also:


Blackbox

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

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.

Extinguisher

Momento Mori - Unpopular Thoughts on Coronavirus

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.

Bug

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

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.