Month: March 2020

Facebook confirmed on Thursday that a contractor at its Seattle office had been infected with Covid-19, the first known infection within the social media company, prompting it to close the office for “sanitation measures,” reported Bloomberg.

“A contractor based in our Stadium East office has been diagnosed with the COVID-19,” Tracy Clayton, Facebook spokesperson, said in a statement. “We’ve notified our employees and are following the advice of public health officials to prioritize everyone’s health and safety.”

The bldg on 1st Ave S. in SODO where Facebook has its Stadium East office. pic.twitter.com/oP9TxxOjxK

— Ted Land (@TedLandK5) March 5, 2020

The Seattle office will be closed through March 9, with employees encouraged to work from home through the end of the month. Employees that came in contact with the infected person are expected to self-quarantine at home.

News of a possible virus breakout at a Facebook office in Seattle comes after an Amazon employee at the company’s Seattle headquarters tested positive for the virus this week. 

Seattle is the epicenter for confirmed cases to date in the US, with 39 cases and ten deaths.

Public Health Seattle King County authorities have recommended people in the Seattle Metropolitan Area to avoid large groups and stay home. Parts of Seattle have turned into a ghost town this week as confirmed cases and deaths surge. 

The virus promoted Facebook last month to close a developer center in San Jose, California, and pull out of local events and conferences.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg detailed in a post on Tuesday ways in which the social media platform is helping to fight the epidemic by limiting the spread of ‘non-credible information’. Zuckerberg also said the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Gates Foundation have been working with researchers in Cambodia to “sequence the full genome of the virus that causes COVID-19 in days, making it much easier and faster for them to identify if people had the virus.”

The next big problem developing for Seattle and other West Coast cities is the potential for a surge in virus patients that overwhelms hospitals. As health experts have pointed out, the US virus response appears to be designed to delay the virus’s spread to stop the health-care system from being completely overrun.

It’s been two years to the day since disgraced former military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia, were allegedly found on a park bench in Salisbury, near unconscious and apparently very unwell.

A lot has been said about the unanswered questions revolving around the incident. But, as Off-Guardian’s Kit Knightly writes, perhaps the best way of demonstrating the peculiarity of the alleged situation is to simply relate, in full, the “official version”.

Here it is:

• Sergei Skripal, a Russian military intelligence officer, was found guilty of spying for the UK in 2006, and sentenced to 13 years in prison.

• In 2010 he was released and traded to the United Kingdom as part of a spy swap. Having settled in the UK Sergei lived a quiet and comfortable life of retirement, so far as we know

• Eight years later, in early 2018, with a Presidential election looming and just weeks before Russia was due to host the FIFA World Cup, Vladimir Putin decided to assassinate him for as yet obscure reasons.

• The GU, Russia’s military intelligence unit, dispatched two of their elite officers, who proceeded to fly direct from Moscow under aliases they had allegedly already employed and using Russian passports.

• These alleged assassins carried with them two perfume bottles full of “Novichok”, allegedly one of the deadliest nerve agents ever devised. This would be enough to kill around 800,000 people.

• On arriving in the UK these highly-trained covert agents book a hotel with a CCTV camera on the front door, and the next day, March 3, they travel to Salisbury by train, allegedly to recon the area, then return to London. They are apparently observed by CCTV camera’s the entire time.

• The day following, March 4, they again travel to Salisbury, this time the master assassins walk to Skripal’s house and somehow “smear” the liquid Novichok on the handle of his front door.

• No eye-witness, photograph or piece of CCTV footage has ever been made publicly available to show either of these two men anywhere in the area of Sergei Skripal’s house.

• The whereabouts of the opened bottle of poison have never been established.

• Having applied the poison, the two highly trained assassins do two things before returning to London. 1) They drop their second, unopened, bottle of novichok (presumably enough to kill approx 400,000 people) in a charity donation bin, rather than destroying it or taking it back to Russia. 2) They stop by an antiques store to browse.

• The two assassins leave the country that afternoon, flying direct to Moscow, without knowing if their alleged target is dead, and again making no effort to conceal their origins.

• Despite both handling the poison, and somehow carrying enough of it back to contaminate their hotel room, neither of the men – nor any of the staff, train passengers or passersby who come into contact with them – ever become sick, even though only 0.2mg of Novichok is an allegedly lethal dose.

• Later that afternoon, Sergei and Yulia Skripal are found “almost unconscious”on a park bench in Salisbury town centre. It is claimed this was due to contact with the Novichok smeared on Sergei’s door handle, though reports originally stated neither he nor his daughter had returned to the house, and the timing seems to make it unlikely they did

• The person who found them was the most senior nurse in the British Army (likely in the area as part of Toxic Dagger, the British Military’s landmark chemical weapons training exercise which began Feb 20th and ran on until March 12th).

• The nurse and her family administer “emergency aid” to the two alleged poisoning victims. Neither she nor anyone else on the scene, nor any of the first responders, ever experience any symptoms of nerve agent poisoning. Neither do any of the other people the Skripal’s came into contact with that day.

• DS Nick Bailey, a CID officer is in contact with the Skripals or their home at this time and subsequently becomes ill. It has never been stated how exactly he was exposed. It was initially reported he was a first responder to the scene, but that story was changed and it was later claimed he visited the Skripal hpouse. Despite the alleged lethality of novichok in even very minute doses, Bailey is fit to return home after 18 days.

• Porton Down, the British government’s chemical weapons research centre, is brought in to help identify what chemical – if any – the Skripals/Bailey were exposed to.

• Within a month they release a statement claiming the poison was “a novichok like agent”, but that they could not pinpoint its origin. How they were able to test for a (at the time) theoretical chemical without having a sample to test against, has never been explained.

• Porton Down is 8 minutes away from Salisbury by car.

• Nearly four months later, in late June of 2018, Charlie Rowley finds the unopened perfume bottle a full of novichok (whether he bought it from a charity shop or found it in a bin is unclear, both stories have been reported). Upon using the perfume Rowley’s partner, Dawn Sturgess, falls ill. Later that day Rowley also falls ill. Sturgess dies in hospital two weeks later. But Rowley survives. Making him the fourth person in this narrative to survive exposure to an agent lethal in doses as small as 0.2mg.

• Sergei Skripal and Julia both recovered and allegedly chose to live secluded lives. Sergei has not appeared in public at all since allegedly being found on that park bench. Yulia made one brief press statement. Their current whereabouts are totally unknown. Their family in Russia have apparently been denied all access to them. DS Bailey was initially also keen to maintain his privacy but has subsequently given at least one interview some while after the event.

This is the UK government’s version of what happened. Unvarnished and unsatirised. None of it is disputed, exaggerated or speculative.

If you can see any unanswered questions, logical gaps or peculiar coincidences…you are likely a Russian bot.

In fact, as TheBlogMire’s Rob Slane explains in a fantastic post-mortem, for those who have accepted The Met’s and Government’s account of the case, I am struck by a couple of things.

Firstly, their claims that those who haven’t accepted it are conspiracy theorists is really quite funny when you begin to count the number of absurd, implausible and sometimes downright impossible things that one has to believe to accept that official account (of which more below).

But secondly, I am struck by their remarkable apathy and complacency, given what they claim to believe.

Let me put it this way:

if I truly believed that agents of a foreign power had come to my country and had entered my home city carrying, using and discarding enough deadly nerve agent to kill thousands of people in my neighbourhood, I would not only be livid at that foreign Government; I would be absolutely furious with the British authorities for their pathetic, feeble response.

Two dozen diplomats expelled in response to the use of the (apparently) deadliest nerve agent known to man, which could have wiped out half the population of Salisbury? It’s the equivalent of sentencing an attempted murderer to a £100 fine. Of course, while I accept that a declaration of war in response to such a reckless act would have been a step too far, given that Russia is a nuclear-armed country with a hugely powerful military, I would certainly want a response that was far closer to that than the paltry expelling of a few diplomats.

However, the fact that those who bark the loudest about the alleged use of a nerve agent that could have killed 10,000 people are prepared to accept the expulsion of a few diplomats as an adequate response, suggests that many of them are not nearly as convinced as they make out that a lethal nerve agent was indeed used. ​Either that or they’re just a bit wet!

…

Questions, questions, questions. To which there must be answers, answers, answers. Unfortunately, those controlling the narrative are not about to give them any time soon, and they will no doubt continue to perpetuate the absurd, the implausible, and the impossible, rather than coming clean with the truth.

Perhaps it will take a whistleblower to leak the truth. But then who would do such a thing and who would publish it? A man who published secrets about war crimes that the US Government didn’t want revealing, is currently being treated in Belmarsh Prison and Woolwich Crown Court in much the same way that Soviet political dissidents and enemies of the state were treated back in the day. Another man who is tenaciously publishing the truth behind the OPCW’s sham investigation into the Douma chemical incident is smeared and slandered as a charlatan by those who are not fit to lick his shoes.

This is the kind of country we are becoming. This is the kind of society that those behind this riddle, wrapped in a cover up, inside a hoax, are leading us to. A national security state, where the truth is buried underneath an avalanche of deception, and where those who try to honestly get to the bottom of it are labelled enemies of the state, treated shamefully, so that others are deterred from following suit.

…

It’s not the kind of society I hoped to see when I was growing up. It’s not the kind of society I hoped my children would grow up in. My guess is that it’s not even the kind of society that those who are playing these elaborate games wanted to grow up in. Yet it is what it is, and I am persuaded that those who have brought us to this point have more trouble sleeping than I do.

Starting Tuesday Turkey’s parliament began a closed session on the situation in Idlib province, where Erdogan’s military adventurism to protect al-Qaeda linked factions coming under Russian-Syrian air power is resulting in mounting Turkish troop casualties and the potential for escalation with the Russians, not to mention a new ‘state of war’ footing with Damascus.

Near daily new dead and wounded have been reported after 34 Turkish soldiers were killed on Feb. 27 in an airstrike blamed by Ankara on Syria — but widely believed to have been carried out by Russia.

Underscoring the mounting domestic anger and divide over Erdogan’s getting the Turkish Army more deeply bogged down in northwest Syria — after he days ago declared a large military offensive against pro-Assad forces — a large brawl erupted in parliament Wednesday after an MP lashed out at President Erdogan over his reckless Syria policy. 

“Video footage of the fist fight was captured and released to the public by several channels after the closed parliamentary session,” Mideast news site Al Masdar reported of the dramatic footage which captured the fight. 

🔴Meclis Genel Kurulu’nda yumruklu kavga

🔗Meclis Genel Kurulu’nda AKP’li ve CHP’li milletvekilleri arasında yumruklu kavga yaşandı.

👇CHP Grup Başkanvekili Engin Özkoç’un konuşması sırasında başlayan kavga sonrası oturuma 10 dakika ara verildi. pic.twitter.com/tV3f6cFuz7

— dokuz8HABER (@dokuz8haber) March 4, 2020

Journalist Ali Ornek reports the fist fight was triggered over scathing comments from People’s Republican MP Engin Özkoç offered toward Erdogan.

“Are you looking for Satan? You are the Satan cutting deals with the U.S. (for Idlib) You sent our soldiers to die for this,” the opposition MP said. 

More images of fight in Turkish parliament between Erdogan’s AKP and opposition over war in #Idlib, Syria pic.twitter.com/WKsmAn4TAq

— NewsBlog | breaking (@NBbreaking) March 4, 2020

Blaming Erdogan for the needless deaths of dozens of troops was enough to unleash chaos among the assembled politicians, and fists flew in the legislature which has actually witnessed multiple physical altercations in past years.

The Associated Press reports the following further details:

Fighting is a frequent occurrence in Turkey’s parliament. The clash on Wednesday started when Engin Ozkoc of the opposition Republican People’s Party took the rostrum. During a news conference shortly before, Ozkoc called Erdogan “dishonorable, ignoble, low and treacherous.”

He also accused the president of sending the children of Turkey’s people to fight while Erdogan’s own offspring allegedly avoided long-term military service.

Erdogan had actually addressed the assembly Wednesday, which included statements on the developeing refugee crisis, after he said Turkey has effectively ‘opened the gates’.

Opposition parties have vehemently opposed military intervention in Idlib while calling for peace talks with Damascus. It’s proving increasingly costly for Turkey, also as multiple of its drones have been shot down over Idlib in the past few days alone.

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

Marine Le Pen has called for a national referendum in order to stop what she called the “submersion” of France via a “globalist” program of mass immigration.

Speaking during a debate on the issue in the French Parliament, the leader of the National Rally political party scorched the political establishment for overseeing the dilution of French identity at the expense of ordinary people.

Le Pen said the last 30 years of immigration laws were designed to ineffective and resulted in “nothing more than political grandstanding.”

She said the French people “recognise that uncontrolled immigration is a threat, a threat to their daily lives, to their way of life, and even, at times, a threat to their lives.”

“Our country is experiencing a veritable submersion, yes a submersion, I dare to use that term, because it describes the reality of the unbroken wave that is crashing upon our cities, our towns, and now, because of your irresponsible policy of placing migrants in the rural areas, even the smallest villages,” said Le Pen.

She slammed establishment politicians for trying to make discussion of immigration taboo and demonizing dissidents even as a giant demographic displacement of people was taking place and accused them of “treason” for failing to “defend their people.”

“But above all, without ever consulting the people, they organized the streams of legal migration and tolerated illegal immigration,” she added, saying this was driven by “the globalist ideology that guides them inexorably.”

Le Pen also accused globalists of reducing man to his “economic dimension, as a producer and consumer, an interchangeable man, with no identity or cultural reference points, nothing but a cog in the wheel of global commerce.”

“The torrent of migration is destroying our welfare system, is making the entire penal system explode and is undermining the unity of the nation,” she added.

Slamming President Macron for exacerbating the problem, Le Pen dismissed the “debate” as a pointless “rehearsal for a high school play,” calling for a national referendum on stopping mass immigration.

“In this chamber a majority want this migration madness to continue. In France, a majority want this migration madness to stop,” she concluded.

Le Pen was heckled throughout the speech by pro-mass immigration politicians, but her words were absolute fire.

*  *  *

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Pricy cocaine is a very sought-after drug in the United Kingdom according to how much of it was seized in the country last year. As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz notes, 30% of the total weight of drugs confiscated while or after being smuggled into the country was cocaine in the fiscal year of 2018/19. 

You will find more infographics at Statista

In the U.S., amphetamines (methamphetamines in this case) took up a much bigger share of drugs confiscated by Customs and Border Protection, even though large amounts of the drug are also produced within the country. 11 percent of the total weight of confiscated drugs in the U.S. was meth, while 13 percent was cocaine.

In the UK on the other hand, meth use hasn’t quite caught on, as only 2 percent of drugs seized were amphetamines. In the UK statistics, meth is not listed as a separate entity as the statistic mentions only amphetamines in general. According to drug use statistics in the country, the larger part of those amphetamines would likely be party drugs like speed, making meth use even more scarce.

Cannabis was the most common drug to be seized in both countries, making up 74 percent of drugs confiscated in the U.S. and 65 percent of those confiscated in the UK.