And in May 2013, seven Muslim “chemical engineers” were caught trespassing at the Quabbin Reservoir, a key supply of water for Boston, after midnight. Only months later and indirectly did we hear that it was a “criminal matter.” A month later, locks were cut at the aqueduct that supplies water to Greater Boston.
“Karnataka: Two youths Haneef and Irshad arrested for poisoning Phalguni river, thousands of fish die,” by Abhinav Singh, TFI Post, May 7, 2020:
A rather shocking incident has come into light from the southern state of Karnataka where thousands of fish have been killed and the entire aquatic ecosystem disrupted after two youths were found to have poisoned the Phalguni River at Dadelu in Belthangady in Dakshina Kannada district.
According to a Deccan Herald report—on April 30, thousands of fish were found floating dead in Phalguni river, triggering an alarm that water had been poisoned. As a result the entire area reeked of a nauseating smell.
The Phalguni River is not only the life-source of the residents of the area but the hundreds of cattle, livestocks, birds and the entire delicate ecosystem.
“Poisoning of water body is an unpardonable offence. The issue should be considered seriously by the police, Forest and Revenue department officials.” the Zilla Panchayat member Dharanendra Kumar had demanded when the news came out.
The police was quick in its investigation and nabbed the two sadist youths named Mohammad Hanif and Mohammad Irshad who are believed to be the mastermind behind the poisoning of the river….
As Memorial Day weekend approaches, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio on Monday said “no swimming” will be allowed at beaches and warned New Yorkers that they would “be taken right out of the water” if they violate the rules amid the city’s coronavirus response.
During his daily press briefing, de Blasio explained new beach rules and maintained that the city's beaches would remain closed for swimming, despite New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's move to reopen state beaches ahead of the holiday weekend. Cuomo, though, gave local officials the option to keep beaches closed.
“If you want to walk on the beach, fine,” de Blasio said Monday. “But no swimming, no parties, no barbecues.”
“Anyone tries to get in the water they’ll be taken right out of the water,” he warned, while noting that there would be “fencing” that would “be in position,” but said it “doesn’t have to be put up unless we have to take tougher measures.”
“The fencing, again, is available, but we don’t want to use it if we don’t have to,” de Blasio said. “The goal is not to have it implemented.”
He added: “No swimming, no sports ... Use common sense and observe social distancing.”
The mayor said that the New York City Police Department would work to “avoid” boardwalks crowding.
“It is not beach season like normal,” de Blasio said. “It is a pandemic.”
De Blasio went on to urge people to avoid “nonessential travel” to the beaches.
“If more enforcement is needed, we’ll do it,” de Blasio said, while noting that he is hopeful that beaches will be able to reopen as normal before the end of the summer.
All of New York City's beaches – Wolfe’s Pond Beach in Staten Island; South Beach in Staten Island; Rockaway Beach in Queens; Orchard Beach in the Bronx; Midland Beach in Staten Island; Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn; Coney Island in Brooklyn; Cedar Grove in Staten Island; Brighton Beach in Brooklyn – are closed for swimming and will not reopen ahead of Memorial Day weekend.
De Blasio, on Sunday, said New York City beaches would not reopen before Memorial Day weekend, saying: "It's not safe. It's not the right thing to do."
"No one has to be reminded, we are the epicenter of this crisis," de Blasio said Sunday.
As of Monday, New York City reported more than 193,000 positive cases of COVID-19 and more than 15,700 deaths.
Meir Gitelis, co-developer of an Israeli company, eats while wearing a mask fitted with a mechanical mouth that opens to enable diners to eat without taking it off.
Avtipus Patents and Inventions has developed a mechanical face mask that would allow the wearer to open and close the mouth in order to eat food without having to remove it.
The Israeli company created the protective gear, which would be powered by a hand-controlled lever attached to the mask, as a way to allow diners to eat out while potentially limiting the risk of contracting coronavirus.
“The mask will be opened mechanically by hand remote or automatically when the fork is coming to the mask,” Asaf Gitelis, vice president of Avtipus Patents and Inventions, said on Monday as he demonstrated the device, Reuters reported.
“Then you can eat, enjoy, drink and you take out the fork and it will be closed, and you’re protected against the virus and other people sitting with you,” he continued.
The slit in the mask appears large enough to fit a fork or other utensil through. However, some handheld foods – like hamburgers or ice cream — may be more complicated to consume while wearing the mask.
The company is planning to begin manufacturing the specialty masks in the coming months.
President Trump late Sunday accused CBS’ “60 Minutes” of putting the spotlight on another “Fake Whistleblower” who wants to inflict damage on his administration's coronavirus response in order to benefit the "Radical Left Democrats."
Rick Bright, who has a Ph.D. in virology and ran the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, reiterated earlier claims that the government was slow to respond to the unfolding pandemic and said the administration was instead worried about politics instead of science. He blamed Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar of not heeding an early warning about the virus.
Bright told the show that there was a Jan. 23 meeting where he was the only person in the room who said, "We're going to need vaccines and diagnostics and drugs. It's going to take a while and we need to get started."
Bright told Norah O’Donnell, the "60 Minutes" correspondent, that his resistance to Trump’s push of hydroxychloroquine was what ultimately cost him his position at the agency.
“I knew that all of the signs for a pandemic were present,” says government scientist Rick Bright. “It was just a matter of time before that virus then jumped and left China and appeared in other countries.” https://cbsn.ws/2TixHzs
“I believe my last-ditch effort to protect Americans from that drug was the final straw that they used and believed was essential to push me out,” he said.
Bright told the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week that the nation could face “the darkest winter in modern history” if the virus rebounds.
"We don't yet have a national strategy to respond fully to this pandemic," he told O'Donnell. "The best scientists that we have in our government who are working really hard to try to figure this out aren't getting that clear, cohesive leadership, strategic plan message yet. Until they get that, it's still gonna be chaotic."
.@60Minutes & third place anchor, @NorahODonnell, are doing everything in their power to demean our Country, much to the benefit of the Radical Left Democrats. Tonight they put on yet another Fake “Whistleblower”, a disgruntled employee who supports Dems, fabricates stories, &...
....spews lies. @60Minutes report was incorrect, which they couldn’t care less about. Fake News! I don’t know this guy, never met him, but don’t like what I see. How can a creep like this show up to work tomorrow & report to @SecAzar, his boss, after trashing him on T.V.?....
Trump was quick to lash out against the criticism. He said this “whole whistleblower racket” needs to be “looked at very closely” because it is “causing great injustice & harm.”
Trump has had famous run-ins with whistleblowers, including the one who made a complaint about Trump’s July 25, 2017, phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which almost cost him his presidency, and another whistleblower behind an unfavorable book about his leadership called “A Warning.”
Trump has been quick to defend his administration over its COVID-19 response and said an early travel ban with China played a major role in limiting early disease transmission.
Trump said the famed program and O’Donnell “are doing everything in their power to demean our Country, much to the benefit of the Radical Left Democrats. Tonight they put on yet another Fake “Whistleblower”, a disgruntled employee who supports Dems, fabricates stories & spews lies.”
He called the “60 Minutes” report “incorrect, “which they couldn’t care less about. I don’t know this guy, never met him, but don’t like what I see. How can a creep like this show up to work tomorrow & report to @SecAzar, his boss, after trashing him on T.V.”
"60 Minutes" did not immediately respond to an after-hours email from Fox News for comment.
Bright was removed from his BARDA position in April and reassigned to a post at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), but he has yet to show up at that post. HHS denied Bright’s claim that he was unfairly demoted, and blamed him of “politicizing the response” to the virus. HHS told “60 Minutes” that it was Bright who made the request for an emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine.
“Bright was transferred from his role as BARDA director to lead a bold new $1 billion testing program at NIH, critical to saving lives and reopening America,” an HHS spokesperson said in a statement last week. “Mr. Bright has not yet shown up for work, but continues to collect his $285,010 salary, while using his taxpayer-funded medical leave to work with partisan attorneys who are politicizing the response to COVID-19.”
Bright's lawyers told CNN that he intends to report to that job next week.
"Contrary to administration talking points, Dr. Bright has never refused to report to NIH, and now that his position there has been identified, he plans to begin next week," the attorneys said. "Dr. Bright is fully prepared to step into this new role unless Secretary Azar honors OSC's request and grants a stay of his reassignment."
Azar hit back Thursday, slamming Bright's testimony as "yet another attack on President Trump" laden with "disproven, unfounded allegations."
"The president literally did what Bright is saying should be done," Azar told "The Story." "This guy was singing in a choir back then of everybody. We were all singing the same tune, and now he's trying to claim that he was a soloist."
Covid-19 could be “petering out by itself” before the world comes up with any vaccine, a leading academic, formerly the World Health Organization’s (WHO) top oncologist has said.
“There’s a real chance that the virus will burn out naturally before any vaccine is developed,” Karol Sikora, the dean of the University of Buckingham’s medical school, wrote on Twitter.
We’re seeing a roughly similar pattern everywhere – I suspect we have more immunity than estimated. We need to keep slowing the virus, but it could be petering out by itself.
The statement triggered quite a response, making Sikora later clarify that it was his personal opinion and he was positing a “feasible scenario” that might be possible in the current “unknown situation.” The scientist went on to say that no one knows “what will happen for sure” and urged the public to stick to social distancing rules.
Countries and companies across the world have been racing to develop a vaccine against Covid-19, which has claimed more than 312,000 lives thus far, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Earlier this week, the WHO revealed that eight vaccine candidates are currently undergoing clinical trials, while another 110 candidates are now under pre-clinical evaluation. Nations including Britain and China have begun testing vaccines on humans.
However, it is still unclear when an effective cure will be ready, given that successful development is projected to take months or even years. Moreover, the head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, warns there is “no guarantee that the vaccine is actually going to be effective.”
Despite years of research and testing, there is still no vaccine for the severe acute respiratory syndrome, known as SARS, which had its first outbreak in 2002, or for the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), which started its rapid spread in 2012.
It is an astounding feature of the contemporary international political scene that almost no coverage of American affairs, including in most of the President Donald Trump-hating American media, reports or comments in a way that is even slightly relevant to the unfolding facts in that country. Unlike all other important countries except Britain and Canada, the United Stares has had the same political institutions for over 150 years. For over a century it has operated on a scale that the world had never imagined to be possible. It is a fantastic success, but it is not at all the shining “city on a hill” derived from the Sermon on the Mount and much bandied about by President Ronald Reagan. It is not at all like Canada and Britain only more populous, and its culture and institutions are only superficially similar.
It is a democratic meritocracy, but a tough country of profound inequalities, great garishness, extensive corruption by British and Canadian standards, a dysfunctional and profoundly unjust justice system and an inordinate amount of it is slums, strip malls and potholed roads. Its strength and its weakness is that it is a jungle — this produces immense productivity, competitiveness, fermentation, ingenuity, creativity and high achievement in almost every field, but it also grinds millions of people to powder needlessly. It is in this context that the current American political drama must be seen. The British and Canadian media are even more hopeless than usual reporting about America, as I have remarked before. The Financial Times this week, with almost impenetrable obtuseness, declared that the Justice Department’s withdrawal of charges against Gen. Michael Flynn is the “politicization of justice.” Last Saturday in the Globe and Mail, my accomplished and politically centre-left friend of over 50 years, historian Margaret MacMillan, lamented in an opinion piece about the coronavirus that President Trump is too incompetent to deal with any crisis, a widely held but uninformed opinion. On Thursday in the same paper, John Ibbitson quoted Canadian academics who claimed that Trump has “given up,” and that “irrational” people had taken over the Republican party in a “fearful, angry, insular, nativist … coup.” This is just drivel.
In the American jungle, justice has always been politicized, going back to President Thomas Jefferson’s spurious charge of treason against Aaron Burr, his former vice-president, in 1807. The magnificent National Gallery was created and endowed by former treasury secretary Andrew Mellon as part of an arrangement by which Franklin D. Roosevelt withdrew questionably motivated charges of tax evasion against Mellon. The America of Walt Disney and Norman Rockwell exists, but it doesn’t represent much of America. In 2016, the “OBushinton” post-Reagan coalition of the relatively think-alike bipartisan establishment was represented by the Bushes, as president and vice-president, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama for nine straight terms (in the previous nine terms there had been eight unrelated presidents). Trump, having made billions of dollars in a very tough industry, having come back from technical insolvency, having become and remained a great television star for 14 years in a format he devised and having been one of America’s great sports and entertainment impresarios, and after changing parties seven times in 13 years, became the only person never to have held any public office or military command to be elected president of the U.S.
Michael Flynn reacts at a campaign event for then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in 2016.Mike Segar/Reuters
He ran against the entire political class that, he said, had flat-lined the economy, mired America in unsuccessful Middle Eastern wars, generated a humanitarian disaster and the worst worldwide economic crisis since the Great Depression, tolerated trade agreements in which Mexico attracted factories from the U.S. to just inside the border, which then exported unemployment back to the U.S. and retained the profits in Mexico, while that country facilitated the illegal entry of up to a million low-skilled workers a year into the U.S. The previous presidents had been swindled by Iran and North Korea and China and it was the conventional wisdom that China was about to surpass the U.S. as a world power. Within three years, Trump addressed all these problems — 80 per cent of illegal immigration had been ended, as were oil imports and unemployment, and the lowest 20 per cent of income-earners were gaining income more quickly than the top 20 per cent, a start at tackling the disparity of income problem. No one was speaking of imminent Chinese supremacy any more.
When the coronavirus pandemic descended, Trump’s enemies accused him of racism and xenophobia when he presciently stopped direct flights from China on Jan. 31, and he took an emergency health system that only tested for viruses by appointment in hospitals with results evaluated in Atlanta, invoked the national emergencies and war production acts to produce an instant testing device that now tests 300,000 people per day, vastly increased the production of ventilators and other necessities and got the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to create the largest hospital in the country in the Javits Center in New York in 10 days. He imposed a shutdown that “flattened the curve” of the virus and produced a $6-trillion assistance and liquidity package in one week (the European Union after two months adopted a complex $500-billion measure that hasn’t been distributed yet). Now that we know that approximately 80 per cent of the COVID-19 fatalities are in the eldest 20 per cent of the population, where one person in 1,200 has died from it but just one in 15,000 Americans below the age of 60, he is leaving it to the governors and municipal officials to reopen the country at the rate they judge appropriate, while redoubling protection of the vulnerable. Trump has again completely outmanoeuvred the Democrats, who have a completely unfeasible candidate bumbling out gaffes and nonsense from his basement and calling for an extended lockdown, financed by shovelling $1 trillion of borrowed money out to the Democratic bosses every two weeks. Trump’s performance has been more than adequate, despite some of his stylistic infelicities.
But the real message, which, incredibly, the soft-left, softly anti-American and mindlessly Trump-hating media of the world has missed or ignored is the emergence, as long predicted (including by me), of the greatest constitutional scandal in American history. Gen. Flynn committed no offence and only pled guilty to a process crime because prosecutors had threatened to charge his son and he had run out of money and had to sell the family home. Prosecutors in the cesspool of American criminal justice win 98 per cent of their cases, 95 per cent of those without trial because of their ability to abuse the plea bargain system and intimidate defendants.
Former U.S. president Barack ObamaChristof STACHE/AFP
Flynn is a sideshow. The real story emerged last week. It seems clear that all the Obama officials who endlessly announced their reasoned belief in the Trump-Russia collusion narrative knew it to be false, that the Mueller investigation was set up to investigate Trump-Russia charges after the FBI and intelligence agencies had concluded that there was nothing to it — Mueller’s task was to find something to besmirch the president by extorting inculpatory perjury from people they attacked, including Flynn. The former FBI director and other senior officials signed bogus applications for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants on the Trump campaign and transition team on the basis of the Steele dossier, which they knew to be malicious fiction commissioned and paid for by the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee. Senior Obama intelligence officials passed the fraudulent Steele material to the media as the product of an authentic counter-intelligence investigation rather than the spurious oppo smear job that it was. This was the only attempted coup d’etat in American history, and Obama and Joe Biden went through the entire operation on Jan. 5, 2017, 15 days before Trump’s inauguration. The American media are part of the political class that Trump promised to clean up, which is why their opposition to him is so frenzied. There are growing calls for the ringleaders of this attempted putsch to be indicted.
Like all jungles, the U.S. is run by 30-foot constricting snakes and 700-pound cats, and one group of jungle beasts is being defeated and overthrown by another. It is great drama, for those who have the intelligence to perceive it, instead of clucking over lapses of etiquette in the White House.
