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Giacomino Nicolazzo_ is one of Italy’s most beloved writers. Born and raised in Central Pennsylvania, he lives in a small village in Lombardy where he writes his books. _

Montecalvo, Lombardy, Italy_. As I sit here in my involuntary isolation, it was just reported that overnight 743 more people died and 5.249 new cases have been reported. This brings the total cases of infection to 69,176 and the body count to 6,820. We take relief in knowing that 8,326 people have recovered so far. (Numbers as of 3/24, 8:30pm in Italy 

Most towns here in Italy, from the upper reaches of the Alps to the ancient shores of Sicilia and Sardenia, while not deserted, are closer to being ghost towns than the bustling centers of tourism, business and daily life they were just a few weeks ago.

Stores and shops have been shuttered. Restaurants and coffee shops no longer serve customers. Schools, universities, sporting arenas…even our museums and theaters…all closed. Even the Vatican City has closed its gates and armed patrols monitor the 20 foot tall walls that protect it!

Streets and roads are now empty for as far as the eye can see. Normally, they would be filled with crazed Italian drivers in tiny cars and scooters (the ones that sound like demonic insects) darting here and
there, reaching the limits of centrifugal force on our roundabouts. In the piazze of our towns and cities, there are now officially more pigeons than people. Many of us know someone who has been infected and recovered. Some of us know someone who did not recover…now they are dead. But everyone knows someone who has been affected by this microscopic monster in one way or another.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15808/fing-swede

In Gothenburg, a criminal gang of youths forced their victim to kiss the gang leader’s feet, while they filmed him. After that, they stamped on his face until he passed out. — Expressen, October 1, 2019.

“It is a way to show your power. They want to dominate places. They do that by putting fear in other youths.” — Thomas Petterson, analyst for the Gothenburg police, Expressen, August 31, 2019.

“Even little girls aren’t safe… The gangs have gained respect, as it is called. This means that they have taken over certain neighborhoods…” — Ingrid Björkman, Jan Elfverson, Jonathan Friedman and Åke Wedin, in the book, Exit Folkhemssverige (“Exit the Swedish Welfare State”), 2007.

“Previously, gang rapes were virtually unknown in Sweden. But since the 1980s, they have steadily increased. Since 1995, they have quadrupled. In 1999, 35 gang rapes were recorded in Stockholm alone. Today, the media reports every week or every two weeks on such violent crimes.” — Ingrid Björkman, Jan Elfverson, Jonathan Friedman and Åke Wedin, in the book, Exit Folkhemssverige.

A new kind of crime is making the headlines in Sweden, in Swedish known as förnedringsrån. Förnedring means “humiliation” and rån means “robbery.” The victims of these “humiliation robberies” are almost always children or teenagers. As previously reported by Gatestone Institute:

“The number of children who rob other children has increased by 100% in only four years, according to a new study by Swedish police… In 2016, there were 1,178 robberies against children under 18 years of age. In 2019, the number had increased to 2,484. The number of violent crimes where the suspect is a child under 15 years of age has also gone up dramatically: In 2015, there were 6,359 reported violent crimes where the suspect was a child under 15. In 2019, that number had increased to 8,719 reported violent crimes”.

https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2020-04-02/frances-coronavirus-death-toll-jumps-to-nearly-5-400-as-nursing-homes-included

PARIS (Reuters) – The coronavirus death count in France surged to nearly 5,400 people on Thursday after the health ministry began including nursing home fatalities in its data.

The pandemic had claimed the lives of 4,503 patients in hospitals by Thursday, up 12% on the previous day’s 4,032, said Jerome Salomon, head of the health authority. A provisional tally showed the coronavirus had killed a further 884 people in nursing homes and other care facilities, he added.

This makes for a total of 5,387 lives lost to coronavirus in France – an increase of 1,355 over Wednesday’s cumulative total – although data has not yet been collected from all of the country’s 7,400 nursing homes.

“We are in France confronting an exceptional epidemic with an unprecedented impact on public health,” Salomon told a news conference.

The country’s broad lockdown is likely to be extended beyond April 15, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said on Thursday, extending a confinement order to try and deal with the crisis that began on March 17.

The government was racing to try to ensure it can produce or procure itself certain medications needed to treat coronavirus patients as stocks were running low, Philippe told TF1 TV, echoing concerns across Europe as the pandemic places a huge strain on hospitals in Italy, Spain and elsewhere.

https://nypost.com/2020/04/02/chinas-deadly-coronavirus-lie-co-conspirator-the-world-health-organization/

The fog of war obscures much about the novel coronavirus pandemic. But two facts seem absolutely certain. First, China’s Communist authorities have lied, concealed and misled about the origins of the epidemic and the toll of the virus in China. Second, the World Health Organization has acted as Beijing’s handmaid.

The result: The global toll of the tragedy will be much greater than it need have been.

We shouldn’t be surprised that the Beijing regime lies about the epidemic: It lies about, well, ­everything. From economic data to air pollution figures, the Communist Party doctors information to protect and promote itself.

Naturally, in the face of a grave national-health threat, the incentive for dissembling was tremendous. So Beijing spun and suppressed information about the outbreak and impact of the coronavirus.

Independent Chinese journalists have detailed the Wuhan coverup: They report that a Chinese lab isolated and identified the strange new virus last December — but that the authorities ­ordered it to stop its work, get rid of its specimens and keep quiet. It took almost another month for the government to acknowledge that a SARS-like contagion, spread by human contact, was exploding in Hubei province.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/pakistans-emergency-order-prevents-release-of-men-convicted-of-murdering-wsj-reporter-daniel-pearl/

Pakistani authorities on Thursday issued an emergency order preventing the release of four prisoners convicted in the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, a day after their convictions were overturned.

British national Omar Saeed Sheikh was convicted in 2002 for the murder of Pearl earlier that year, but his death sentences for abduction, murder, and terrorism were reduced to seven years for one charge of kidnapping. The convictions of three Pakistani men as accomplices to Sheikh were thrown out completely.

The appeals court in Karachi ruled earlier this week that there was a lack of evidence against Sheikh and his alleged accomplices and rejected computer evidence that the men sent ransom notes after Pearl was kidnapped.

The Sindh government used the Maintenance of Public Order law to detain the four men for another 90 days, arguing that they could threaten law and order in the province if released.

“I am shocked at the decision, especially its timing,” Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi remarked of the appeals court decision, saying the ruling harms Pakistan’s recent anti-terrorist efforts, for which he said they have sacrificed greatly.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/yes-hungarys-emergency-law-is-flawed/

The lack of a sunset clause is worrisome. But pace Anne Applebaum, it doesn’t herald a “dictatorship.”

In a tweet that has now been followed by more than 100 tweeters, Anne Applebaum says she’s “looking forward to the justifications” for the Hungarian government’s state of emergency law responding to the COVID-19 crisis from Rod Dreher, from “so many others,” and from me. She also speculates on what our justifications might be. Will it be “justified by circumstances”? Or “the people support it”? Or some “whataboutism”?

As Ms. Applebaum has pointed out in The Atlantic magazine, the Danube Institute, of which I’m president, has received funding from the Batthyanyi Foundation, which itself gets money from the Hungarian government. I invite those who think my opinions tainted by this to visit our website, on which we post all our events, to judge if that is so. Ms. Applebaum presumably doesn’t think so because she has just asked me, rather than Viktor Orban, for my opinion. And my response is an eirenic one:

I don’t justify the emergency law as it stands.

As an old classical liberal of a conservative disposition, I accept there will be occasions when a crisis is so severe that a government needs emergency powers to deal with it outside the regular law. The coronavirus threat is plainly such a challenge. If a law granting emergency powers to the government to deal with it is proposed, however, I would submit it to certain tests before supporting it.

The tests are those most people would impose. First, is this emergency law within the constitution or a violation of it? And there’s no doubt that it’s constitutional. It was passed by the super-majority that such a law requires. Are there safeguards in it? There are two. First, the constitutional court could reject it in whole or in part, either today or after the epidemic has receded. That is unlikely since all the required constitutional procedures were fulfilled in its passage, but constitutional courts are unpredictable. The second is that Parliament can vote to end the state of emergency at any time by the same two-thirds majority by which it passed the law. I would not entirely rule out that happening if the Orban government were to abuse these powers, but I judge both serious abuse and a parliamentary rebellion against it to be unlikely. Third, are the emergency powers granted to the government too broad? Some of them may be. The fines and prison sentences for breaking quarantine and spreading false rumors, though not unreasonable in themselves when panic and plague are in the air (the latter quite literally), look to me to be too high. But those sentences won’t be imposed arbitrarily; courts will determine them; and the terms of the legislation are tightly written to prevent its being used for political censorship or anything unrelated to the pandemic. So I would urge moderation on the courts and government, and leave it at that. Finally, shouldn’t the legislation have a sunset clause — say of one year on the British model — rather than staying in force indefinitely or until ministers judge the epidemic to be over? And there I think that it should.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/soft-authoritarianism-comes-to-hungary/

But Hungarian democracy is not a lost cause.

The trouble with crying wolf is that sometimes the wolf shows up at your door. For years, critics have said that Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban is a tin-pot dictator, Central Europe’s answer to Vladimir Putin. The flaws in Hungary’s democracy and Orban’s own no-holds-barred approach to electioneering were held up as the decisive factors behind his political success, while other explanations—the advantages of incumbency, the pre-pandemic strength of the Hungarian economy, the divided state of the opposition—were downplayed or ignored. For those committed to the ideological project of ever-closer European integration, Orban’s outspoken nationalism, his Euroscepticism, and his strident opposition to immigration made him a particularly inviting target.

Now, however, the Hungarian government’s heavy-handed response to the coronavirus threatens to vindicate Orban’s critics. On March 30, the Hungarian Parliament passed emergency legislation that allows Orban to indefinitely govern by decree and threatens jail time for anyone spreading false or misleading information about the pandemic. Technically, Parliament can revoke this extraordinary grant of power with another vote, but Orban’s Fidesz party controls an overwhelming legislative majority.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/apr/2/hydroxychloroquine-rated-most-effective-therapy-do/

An international poll of more than 6,000 doctors released Thursday found that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine was the most highly rated treatment for the novel coronavirus.

The survey conducted by Sermo, a global health care polling company, of 6,227 physicians in 30 countries found that 37% of those treating COVID-19 patients rated hydroxychloroquine as the “most effective therapy” from a list of 15 options.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave chloroquine and its next-generation derivative, hydroxychloroquine, emergency-use authorization Monday for treating the novel coronavirus, although the drug was already being used off-label by some doctors and hospitals for COVID-19 patients.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/coronavirus-another-typical-milestone-communist-don-feder/

The Coronavirus: Brought to you by those wonderful folks who gave China the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square.

Wuhan is nothing new for a regime that’s been sacrificing innocents to its demented ideology for over 70 years.Politically, nothing has changed since the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed on October 1, 1949.

The PRC is still a totalitarian state where dissent is brutally crushed, the Party is all powerful and human life is cheap.

Less than a year after the PRC was established, Mao sent his “volunteer” army of 3 million across the Yalu River to intervene in the Korean War, prolonging the conflict by almost three years and resulting in tens of thousands of Chinese, American and Korean casualties.

Then came the Great Leap Forward (1958 to 1962) in which 45 million died in a famine caused by Mao’s insane ambition to match Britain in iron and steel production, and setting fantastic targets for agricultural output. Much of the latter was used to repay debts to the Soviet Union or donated to Third World countries to buy influence.