RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/03/how-freedom-dies/

Islamic terrorism is a tunnel with no way out. It’s Wednesday, January 7, again. A door opens, again. Two black-clothed figures holding weapons enter, again. The balaclavas they hide behind have owl-shaped eye slits: popular knitting with motorbike riders. One hundred and nine seconds later they have fired sixty bullets into the Charlie Hebdo offices and, from religious motives, have murdered eleven people—on the floor their broken bodies lie over, on and between the wounded. Later, it will be widely accepted on the French Left that the dead and mutilated brought their fate upon themselves because the magazine had published a cartoon of Mohammed.

Line drawings are displayed on a wall in the cramped office, proposals for the current edition of the magazine. Among them is Charb’s last picture, a sketch of author Michel Houellebecq. His novel Soumission is published the morning his caricaturist is murdered. Months later the office, most of the blood stains cleaned away, is briefly unsealed to allow Riss (above), an artist and magazine editor, back into the room to collect his belongings. He notices that Houellebecq is still pinned to the wall, and then the portrait disappears. When Riss has file copies of the publication transferred to their new office some copies are seen to have been ripped by a bullet, and in an unused wooden box, one side punctuated with a clean round hole, a bullet is found resting peacefully inside.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/italys-coronavirus-death-toll-surpasses-that-of-china/

The death toll from Wuhan coronavirus in Italy has surpassed the number of reported deaths in China, marking a new milestone in the coronavirus pandemic.

Italy reported 427 new deaths from the coronavirus on Thursday, with a total of 3,405 to China’s 3,245, according to Reuters.

Italy now has 41,035 confirmed cases of coronavirus. The country remains on lockdown with travel restrictions between provinces as authorities struggle to contain the spread of the illness.

Most of Italy’s cases are centered in the country’s northern Lombardy region, home to the city of Milan. Videos shot by townspeople in Bergamo, near Milan, showed Italian soldiers arriving in a column of military vehicles to remove the bodies of coronavirus victims. Bergamo’s cemeteries did not have the capacity for all the bodies.

Italy’s government is considering further measures to reduce the amount of time spent outside their homes.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15761/european-union-coronavirus

The EU’s failure to address the coronavirus issue earlier has resulted in the Schengen Agreement, which stipulates that the citizens of any EU state can travel freely throughout the union, becoming null and void.

Perhaps the most shameful episode concerning inter-EU relations since the start of the coronavirus outbreak was Germany’s refusal to allow the export of much-needed face masks and ventilators to Italy after the Italian government made a direct appeal to the rest of the EU for help. Instead of demonstrating the so-called solidarity that is supposed to underpin the EU’s founding ethos, the German government issued a ban on the export of the equipment to Italy.

The EU’s handling of the coronavirus has not just been incompetent. It raises serious questions as to whether it is about to become yet another victim of the deadly pandemic.

The emergence of Europe as the new epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic has as much to do with the European Union’s inept handling of the crisis as it does with the resilience of the virus itself.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15766/coronavirus-germany-anti-americanism

The attempt to whip up anti-Americanism appears to be an effort by the German government to blunt public criticism of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her cabinet for their lackadaisical response to the coronavirus epidemic.

The story was quickly picked up and uncritically disseminated by print and broadcast media throughout Europe — and America. Nearly all quoted the Die Welt article verbatim without confirming the story on their own.

“To make it clear again on coronavirus: CureVac has not received from the US government or related entities an offer before, during and since the Task Force meeting in the White House on March 2. CureVac rejects all allegations from press.” — Statement by CureVac, March 26, 2020.

U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell denied the allegations. “Not true,” he tweeted. “The Welt story was wrong. But Business Insider, Reuters and others went with it anyway despite not having their own sources. Now everyone is back peddling.”

The newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine, in an article titled, “CureVac Has Not Received an Offer from the U.S. Government,” described the Welt article as “Fake News” concocted by CureVac in order to secure government funding. The paper suggested that the German government helped to promote the lie…

“A German minister, who heard from another German minister, that a German journalist, who was not there, reported that the U.S. president offered $1 billion for a company that has not yet developed a vaccine against COVID-19…. For my taste, much hearsay, the striving of Die Welt for many clicks, the fueling of resentment against Trump and perhaps intelligent marketing by the company for public funding in times of the corona crisis.” — Reader comment in Die Welt, March 17, 2020.

The German government has promoted a fake news story asserting that the United States is trying to gain exclusive access to an experimental coronavirus vaccine being developed by a German biotech firm.

The story — which has sparked anti-American furor in Germany and elsewhere in Europe — has been swiftly debunked by the company, which denied that it had received financial offers from the U.S. government or any related entity.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/video-uk-muslim-rape-gang-members-walk-streets-frontpagemagcom/

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/the_diamond_princess_a_floating_chinese_virus_palace_provides_suggestive_data.html

Willis Eisenbach took a closer look at the data from the Diamond Princess cruise ship on which people were quarantined and discovered counterintuitive facts.

What’s frightening about the Chinese Virus is the overwhelming amount of inconclusive data. We’re inundated with media speculation and hyperventilation, Chinese disinformation, and data that changes daily thanks to the treatment and quarantine initiatives governments are trying around the world.

The fact that the disease has different rates of contagion and mortality in different parts of the world makes things more confusing. We can understand why it exploded in China, a place of censored information, pollution, smoking, and primitive socialized medicine. But why was it so virulent in Italy?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/how_did_italy_become_the_new_ground_zero_of_coronavirus.html

Hint: The connection is Red China which the msm doesn’t want to admit.

Much is being made of the fact that Italy – an advanced European nation – has become the hot zone of coronavirus impact. The implication is that if a First World country with the equivalent of “Medicare for All” could succumb to the pandemic, it should be really serious for the USA. Right?

Wrong! Despite all of the coverage and hype about Italy and COVID-19, some important information about the epidemiology or cause of the virus’s impact on Italy is being overlooked or ignored by the mainstream media. As the Times of India reported on March 19:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-scientist-youre-not-going-to-see-millions-of-pe Isaiah (Shy) Arkin is a professor of Structural Biochemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, whose research, among other achievements, has shed new light on the inner workings of viruses. The Times of Israel spoke to him to try to understand more about the coronavirus, how it compares to other viruses, how its spread […]

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15743/china-war-on-religion

China’s totalitarian system seems to perceive any movement that permits citizens to feel allegiance to any entity other than the state as a threat.

Communist cadres, evidently not content with coercing the external conformity and behavior of their citizens, appear to want to control their people’s thoughts as well. Beijing is now re-writing Christian scripture and printing other tracts to render religious beliefs politically aligned with state policies.

The American Center for Law and Justice, chaired by the attorney Jay Sekulow, through its “Be Heard Project,” urges all people concerned about freedom of conscience to sign petitions and otherwise pressure the Chinese government to release Pastor Cao, allowing him to return to his family in North Carolina. “China Aid” director Bob Fu, who monitors human rights violations in Communist China, calls upon citizens to write letters to Pastor Cao to keep his spirits up – address below. The sheer volume of mail would also let Beijing know that Cao’s persecution remains a serious concern to the “Free World.”In addition to trying to pin the blame for the coronavirus pandemic on the United States, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Party Chairman Xi Jinping is executing an anti-Christian campaign, the intensity of which has not been seen since Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s.

Persecution against Christians was reignited in earnest after the 19th CCP Congress in 2017. The state’s drive against Christian symbols, churches, and clerics seems to have become justified under the CCP’s “Sinicization of China’s Religions” initiative. The CCP appears determined to secularize religious thought, suborning it to serve state interests. Its anti-Christian project seems designed primarily to sever all international links that religious people have, whether those ties are Christian or Muslim.

Beijing is deploying the assets of the CCP’s security agencies against Christianity, in part, by establishing a regime of punitive measures, such as mandatory and intimidating facial ID screenings, restrictions on dissemination of religious tracts on the internet, and loss of “social credit” points that can result in the expulsion of the children of Christian parents from schools. Communist secret police have also been apprehending Christian preachers whom they apparently regard as effective, such as the Protestant Evangelical Pastor John Cao.

Pastor Cao, a permanent resident of the U.S., was arrested on March 5, 2017 after he crossed the border from Myanmar (Burma) to China’s Yunnan Province. Cao and his assistant, Jing Ruxia, were charged with allegedly organizing the illegal crossing of national borders, despite decades of similar movement from parish schools in Wa State, Myanmar to the Christian faithful in China. Cao, initially detained in a local jail near his arrest site, was later transferred to the regional jail in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province. Pastor Cao has served three of his seven-year sentence and is in declining health. Appeals for his release have been rejected by Chinese authorities.