EARLY EDITION: Five Quick News Stories For Your Water Cooler Chat (Mon. Mar 6)
TODAY'S FIVE: Health Minister fearmongering; Russia trains Palestinian officers; CPAC success?; AOC ethics woes; Fauci exposed
TODAY’S FIVE: Health Minister fearmongering; Russia trains Palestinian officers; CPAC success?; AOC ethics woes; Fauci exposed
1. Pandemic-era Whatsapp leaks reveal panic-mongering
One hundred thousand supposedly-secure Whatsapp messages were leaked to journalist Isabel Oakeshott from the Telegraph. Alleged communication involving some of the UK’s government officials cast the government in a very poor light.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
When the public was pushing hard to relax lockdown rules for Christmas 2020, Matt Hancock (UK’s Health Secretary) and an aide had an interesting conversation.
In that conversation, they were getting ready to ‘frighten the pants off of everyone with the news strain’, to get ‘proper behavior change’, discussing plans about a new announcement, ‘when do we release the new strain’?
That ‘new strain’ was announced by Hancock the following day.
2. Is Russia sending Palestinians from Lebanese refugee camps off to fight in Ukraine?
Multiple sources have shared reports that Russia is recruiting Palestinian refugees from camps in Lebanon, training them, giving them $350 dollars, and sending them off to fight in Ukraine.
This claim has been substantiated by video of ‘officer cadets’ in Russian military academies with distinctive insignia identifying their national origin. It is suggested that Russia is scrambling to fill holes in the ranks of its assault on Ukraine.
Russia tells the story differently, claiming that this has nothing to do with the Ukraine war. They say it is routine arrangements they have had for years, training cadets from ‘Mali, Palestine, Angola, and the Central African Republic to name a few.’
3. Opinion divided on the success of CPAC
To hear Chris Christie tell it, CPAC was a massive flop and evidence that Trump’s magic is running out. To hear Reuters tell it, Trump will be ‘tough to topple’.
We are in-cycle for the Republican primary again, and it shows. Lines are being drawn. Sides are being chosen. Fingers are testing the political winds. Decisions were being made about whether to even attend this year’s CPAC after the private scandals being faced by the guy who organizes it.
Trump held court and received a hero’s welcome from the attendees who decided to attend the event. But there was nothing like the usual unity we had seen at similar events in the past. DeSantis, in particular, was notable in his absence, as he went to events in Texas and California during CPAC.
4. AOC’s Lawyer warned her about ethics conflict for Met Gala trip
She knew there was an ethics conflict. But that didn’t stop her from going.
Emails released by the ethics commission show that AOC’s lawyer advised that if she went to the Met Gala event as a guest of Vogue, or as a guest of Anna Wintour rather than as a guest of the Metropolitan Museum itself, she would be in violation of ethics.
Despite that warning, she accepted the invite anyway. On the night of he gala, Alexandria Occasio-Cortez was listed as a guest of Vogue magazine. When she started to get blowback the next day, her handlers pivoted to the claim that she was the personal guest of Wintour.
But the problem is, Wintour has personal and business interests. Such a gift can be used as a tool to lobby politicians of dubious integrity. For someone like AOC, who uses social media notoriety as a currency more valuable than cash, a night like this is especially motivating.
This was nothing less than an ‘investment’ by Wintour. What remains unclear is what she expected to get in return for that investment, whether now or later.
5. Fauci taking heat for attempt to discredit lab leak in February 2020.
Fauci’s official talking point, from long ago, was that the overwhelming evidence supports Covid was of naturally occurring zoonotic origin.
Forget the proximity of the lab, to the outbreak, the hospitalized staff from the lab, or China destroying evidence and samples, or closing borders within China while leaving residents of Wuhan free to travel abroad, and so on. Forget Fauci’s own warm relations with his Chinese counterparts. None of that swayed his unbending conviction that the evidence in support of natural origins was overwhelming.
Be that as it may, as a true man of science (who infamously went on to say ‘I AM the science’), he has told us that he maintains an open mind that can be swayed if he is faced with new and compelling information. Turns out, that was a lie he later used to discredit and silence people with whom he disagreed.
The bombshell emails released by House Republicans on Sunday shows that Fauci commissioned and edited a paper entitled The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 before he cited it as evidence that COVID did not originate from a lab in Wuhan.
It was written just four days after Fauci, and his NIH boss Francis Collins, held a call with the authors to discuss reports that COVID may have been leaked from a genetic testing lab in Wuhan and ‘may have been intentionally genetically manipulated.’
And in the emails, Dr. Kristian Andersen admits that Fauci ‘prompted’ him to write the paper with the goal of ‘disproving’ the lab leak theory.
He submitted the peer-reviewed paper to Nature Medicine on February 12, 2020 with a cover email reading, ‘There has been a lot of speculation, fear-mongering and conspiracies put forward in this space.
‘[This paper was] Prompted by Jeremy [Farrar], Tony Fauci and Francis Collins.’ — DailyMail
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