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solarbirdDon't overlook the upcoming loans scandal. Not that it'll change much, but still. One more thing for the trial.
- Conservative radio host agrees with caller that vaping bleach might cure COVID-19: ‘You’re not crazy’ [EDITOR: The caller doesn't specifically say 'bleach.' The caller discusses 'cleaning supplies.' But, well, context.]
- Revealed: leader of group peddling bleach as coronavirus 'cure' wrote to Trump this week
- This thread summarizes the major-media investigative reporting on the TRUMP-CHINA SCANDAL
- What’s behind Trump’s fresh push to wrest control of Voice of America
- VA health chief acknowledges a shortage of protective gear for its hospital workers [EDITOR: much worse than it sounds]
- Is Trump killing people on purpose?
- The Trump administration reportedly wants control over U.S. Postal Service in return for emergency loan
- World leaders launch plan to speed COVID-19 drugs, vaccine; U.S. stays away
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Conservative radio host agrees with caller that vaping bleach might cure COVID-19: ‘You’re not crazy’
April 24, 2020
By Travis Gettys
[EDITOR: The caller doesn't specifically say 'bleach.' The caller discusses cleaning supplies generally. But, well, context.]
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/04/conservative-radio-host-agrees-with-caller-that-vaping-bleach-might-cure-covid-19-youre-not-crazy/
A talk radio caller suggested vaping bleach as a possible treatment for coronavirus, and conservative host Jeff Kuhner assured him the recommendation wasn’t crazy.
The caller, who identified himself as Zack from Stoughton, called into Boston’s WRKO-AM on Friday morning to talk about President Donald Trump’s dangerous suggestion to use disinfectants or powerful light internally to treat COVID-19.
“I’ve been thinking about this thing,” Zack began. “I was a smoker for years, I smoked about three packs a day, and I never liked this new vape thing coming out with the nicotine in it, but I also have a bunch of friends with big cleaning companies.”
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Revealed: leader of group peddling bleach as coronavirus 'cure' wrote to Trump this week
Mark Grenon wrote to Trump saying chlorine dioxide ‘can rid the body of Covid-19’ days before the president promoted disinfectant as treatment
Ed Pilkington in New York
Fri 24 Apr 2020 14.00 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/24/revealed-leader-group-peddling-bleach-cure-lobbied-trump-coronavirus
The leader of the most prominent group in the US peddling potentially lethal industrial bleach as a “miracle cure” for coronavirus wrote to Donald Trump at the White House this week.
In his letter, Mark Grenon told Trump that chlorine dioxide – a powerful bleach used in industrial processes such as textile manufacturing that can have fatal side-effects when drunk – is “a wonderful detox that can kill 99% of the pathogens in the body”. He added that it “can rid the body of Covid-19”.
A few days after Grenon dispatched his letter, Trump went on national TV at his daily coronavirus briefing at the White House on Thursday and promoted the idea that disinfectant could be used as a treatment for the virus. To the astonishment of medical experts, the US president said that disinfectant “knocks it out in a minute. One minute!”
He went on to say: “Is there a way we can do something, by an injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that.”
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Seth Abramson
twitter.com/SethAbramson
24 April 2020
https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/1253805301792477184
(THREAD) This thread summarizes the major-media investigative reporting on the TRUMP-CHINA SCANDAL, a bribery scandal involving Trump's hunt for dirt on Joe Biden in China, his debts to the Chinese government, and his decision to ignore life-saving COVID-19 intel. Please RETWEET.
[EDITOR: Much too long to include here. Go to the link, and read]
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What’s behind Trump’s fresh push to wrest control of Voice of America
Conservative anger over China and the U.S. media find a convenient foil in Voice of America chief Amanda Bennett.
By BEN SCHRECKINGER
04/22/2020
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/22/donald-trump-propaganda-war-199799
Voice of America director Amanda Bennett seems, at first glance, to be the perfect target for a Donald Trump attack on the mainstream media: A former Philadelphia Inquirer editor, wife of ex-Washington Post owner Donald Graham and Barack Obama appointee, Bennett has strived to maintain VOA’s independence from the White House during the Trump era.
So when Trump and his aides began attacking VOA earlier this month, stirring up anger on the right, the broadcaster and its leader seemed like another shrewdly chosen foil for rallying his populist base against Washington elites. But since then, a deeper motive has emerged: Trump is using the dispute to demand the confirmation of conservative activist and filmmaker Michael Pack, a close associate of Steve Bannon, to head the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees VOA.
Amid rising tensions with China, VOA’s coverage of coronavirus has reignited conservative discontent with the outlet’s editorial line under Bennett. The White House and conservative media have seized on coverage like a video of a light show celebrating the reopening of Wuhan, the city where the virus originated, and a graphic citing official Chinese Communist Party statistics that show a lower death toll in China than in the U.S.
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VA health chief acknowledges a shortage of protective gear for its hospital workers
By Lisa Rein
April 25, 2020 at 3:00 a.m. PDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/va-health-chief-acknowledges-a-shortage-of-protective-gear-for-its-hospital-workers/2020/04/24/4c1bcd5e-84bf-11ea-ae26-989cfce1c7c7_story.html
For weeks, nurses and other employees at Veterans Affairs hospitals have said they were working with inadequate protective gear. VA officials denied it.
But in an interview, the physician in charge of the country’s largest health-care system acknowledged the shortage — and said masks and other supplies are being diverted for the national stockpile.
“I had 5 million masks incoming that disappeared,” said Richard Stone, executive in charge of the sprawling Veterans Health Administration. He acknowledged that he’s been forced to move to “austerity levels” at some hospitals.
Stone said the Federal Emergency Management Agency directed vendors with equipment on order from VA to instead send it to FEMA to replenish the government’s rapidly depleting emergency stockpile.
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Is Trump killing people on purpose?
As of Friday, the coronavirus pandemic has killed at least 50,000 people in the United States. That number is likely to be an undercount, and it’s possible we will never have a true reckoning.
April 25, 2020
By Chauncey Devega, Salon
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/04/is-trump-killing-people-on-purpose/
At almost every juncture, Donald Trump has made decisions about the coronavirus pandemic that have led to more death. His behavior is that of a person who has no care or concern for the health, safety and welfare of the American people. Nothing could epitomize that more perfectly than his grotesque suggestion this week that “injecting” disinfectants or household cleaning products might kill the coronavirus. This would seem comical, and entirely unbelievable, if it had not actually happened.
In 2016 the Obama administration told then President-elect Trump and his advisers of the high likelihood that a pandemic would strike the nation and advised the incoming administration to take appropriate steps to reduce its impact. Obama officials also left their Trump counterparts a step-by-step guide on how to respond to a pandemic. Trump and his inner circle ignored that guidance.
Last November, the U.S. military warned Donald Trump that the country was likely to be afflicted with a devastating pandemic originating in China.
In January 2020, the Trump administration was told by its own experts that the coronavirus would spread beyond China and become a global pandemic. Again, Trump chose inaction.
Trump has deprived Democratic-led regions of the country from receiving needed medical supplies. He also waited months to begin using the Defense Appropriation Act to compel American companies to produce more ventilators, masks and other emergency equipment.
Late last year, Americans working with the World Health Organization began to warn Trump and his administration about the coronavirus pandemic. These doctors and other medical professionals were ignored.
In these examples and many others, Trump and his inner circle ignored or purged experts and other truth-tellers, and lied about, misrepresented, deflected or denied the dire threat to the American people posed by the coronavirus pandemic.
Considered in total, Trump and his regime have shown themselves to be incompetent, callous, malevolent and deeply cruel in their response to the coronavirus crisis (as well as to a plethora of other issues).
But to merely document the Trump regime’s deadly failures in response to the coronavirus pandemic is to ignore the most important question: What were Trump and his advisers’ underlying motivations?
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The Trump administration reportedly wants control over U.S. Postal Service in return for emergency loan
April 24, 2020
https://theweek.com/speedreads/910666/trump-administration-reportedly-wants-control-over-postal-service-return-emergency-loan
In its $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief package, Congress authorized a $10 billion loan for the U.S. Postal Service, projecting a $13 billion shortfall this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic and its hit on mail, catalogs, and advertisements. But Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin rejected a bipartisan push for a USPS bailout in the package, and before he approves the emergency USPS loan, he wants unprecedented leverage over how the independent agency is run, The Washington Post reports.
Mnuchin has been pushing for significant changes at the USPS since President Trump named them as a priority in an Oval Office meeting more than a year ago, the Post reports. Trump has publicly criticized the Postal Service for years, usually pairing his grievances with USPS management and Amazon and its owner, Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Post.
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World leaders launch plan to speed COVID-19 drugs, vaccine; U.S. stays away
Stephanie Nebehay, Michael Shields
24 April 2020
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who/world-leaders-launch-plan-to-speed-covid-19-drugs-vaccine-u-s-stays-away-idUSKCN2261M7
GENEVA/ZURICH (Reuters) - World leaders pledged on Friday to accelerate work on tests, drugs and vaccines against COVID-19 and to share them around the globe, but the United States did not take part in the launch of the World Health Organization (WHO) initiative.
French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa were among those who joined a video conference to launch what the WHO billed as a “landmark collaboration” to fight the pandemic.
The aim is to speed development of safe and effective drugs, tests and vaccines to prevent, diagnose and treat COVID-19, the lung disease caused be the novel coronavirus - and ensure equal access to treatments for rich and poor.
