Month: December 2020

Authored by Lily Zhou via The Epoch Times,

The organiser of an anti-lockdown protest in London is facing the prospect of a £10,000 ($13,488) fine, the Metropolitan Police said on Monday.

The Met said that officers were called on Sunday afternoon to find about 100 people gathering in Ray Lane, Southwark, in what appeared to be a pre-planned protest.

“This sort of gathering is specifically prohibited under the tier four restrictions brought in following the recent rapid rise in cases,” Acting Inspector David Smith said in a statement.

“We all have a responsibility to follow the rules, stay at home as much as possible, and help stop the rapid spread of COVID-19 in our city,” he added.

“Anyone coordinating intentional breaches on this scale should know they risk very significant financial penalties,” he said.

The Met said that the organiser, a 58-year-old man, will be reported for the consideration of a fixed penalty notice of up to £10,000.

London is currently under tier four restrictions to curb the spread of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, following the discovery of a new variant of the virus that authorities say is more infectious. Residents have been told to stay at home unless they have a “reasonable excuse” to leave their houses.

Under the Health Protection Regulations 2020, gatherings organised by a business; a charitable, benevolent, or philanthropic institution; a public body; or a political body can take place if the organiser carries out a risk assessment that satisfies regulations and takes all reasonable measures to limit the risk of transmission.

On Dec. 19, the Met arrested 29 protesters after they allegedly refused to cooperate with police.

The Met said on Dec. 20 that the female organizer of one of the protests, which was attended by around 150 people, had been reported for consideration of a £10,000 fixed penalty notice.

Three men, Christmas Fallah, 35, Joss Lillis, 27, and Leon Larose, 28, “have been charged under Health Protection Regulations with participating in a gathering of two or more people. All three men were also charged with assaulting an emergency worker,” the Met said in a statement.

“The majority of the other 26 people arrested were issued with fixed penalty notices for breaching Health Protection Regulations. A number of other people attending the protest were also issued with fixed penalty notices but were not arrested,” the statement reads.

Lockdowns Modelled After Chinese Regime: Former SAGE Adviser

After the Chinese regime started to lock down cities in January, many Western countries adopted similar methods to attempt to control the spread of the virus.

Neil Ferguson, an Imperial College professor who was a government adviser for the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) until May, said the government didn’t think it was possible to use lockdowns in the UK in the same way as in China.

“It’s a communist one party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought,” Ferguson told The Times of London last week.

“And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.”

Ferguson said that the data from China showed lockdown was “an effective policy.”

Ferguson quit SAGE in May after he was caught breaking CCP virus restrictions.

By March 11, when the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic, Chinese officials reported 3,169 deaths from the CCP virus, but information provided by residents at the epicenter of the virus in Wuhan, China, indicated that the real death toll there could be 12.7 times the official figure.

A new book by Canadian scholars said that Ottawa adopted large-scale lockdowns after Ferguson’s report in March predicted tens of millions of deaths worldwide.

But Ferguson’s model has since been found to be greatly flawed, according to the Montreal Economic Institute and others. Research by data scientist and computational epidemiologist Chris von Csefalvay found numerous problems with Ferguson’s modelling, including that it was 13 years old and was written to model an influenza pandemic.

After suddenly finding themselves on lockdown as Switzerland imposed restrictions on British travelers as part of its reaction to the new “mutant” B.1.1.7 that has emerged in the UK and elsewhere (a strain that the WHO just said isn’t any more dangerous than other strains), a group of some 200 British skiers fled a ski resort in Verbier where they had been on holiday, presumably interacting with skiers of many other nationalities.

The move has elicited outrage in Switzerland and in the Swiss press, as some locals accuse the British tourists of abusing the country’s hospitality.

However, Local officials, who depend on British tourists to bolster the local economy (which is heavily dependant on Switzerland’s famous ski resorts), were somewhat more understanding.

According to the BBC, a spokesman for Bagnes, the part of Switzerland’s Valais Canton that includes Verbier, voiced understanding for the British guests, who reportedly vanished in the middle of the night, with many hoteliers only discovering their absence the next morning when room service trays were found untouched. “We understand their anger,” Jean-Marc Sandoz told the SonntagsZeitung, a Swiss newspaper. “Suddenly families with small children were locked into 20 sq m (215 sq ft), and that’s intolerable.”

Just a couple of days before Christmas, Switzerland imposed a 10-day quarantine backdated to Dec. 14 because of the new virus strain spreading in the UK. The country also imposed restrictions on travel from South Africa due to reports of a different mutant strain that also spreads more quickly.

Switzerland’s decision to leave its ski resorts open for the season was controversial, though likely in the end driven by the important economic role that tourism plays in the tiny Alpine state.

Whether the skiers face any repercussions for defying the lockdown isn’t clear, though it seems unlikely, unless the whole thing blows up into some kind of international incident, as the country’s halt to flights to and from the UK aggravates relations with London.

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

When it comes to sowing – and profiting – from division, Erdogan’s Turkey is quite the superstar.

Under the delightfully named Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), the Trump administration duly slapped sanctions on Ankara for daring to buy Russian S-400 surface-to-air missile defence systems. The sanctions focused on Turkey’s defence procurement agency, the SSB.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu’s response was swift: Ankara won’t back down – and it is in fact mulling how to respond.

The European poodles inevitably had to provide the follow-up. So after the proverbial, interminable debate in Brussels, they settled for “limited” sanctions – adding a further list for a summit in March 2021. Yet these sanctions actually focus on as-yet unidentified individuals involved in offshore drilling in Cyprus and Greece. They have nothing to do with S-400s.

What the EU has come up with is in fact a very ambitious, global human-rights sanctions regime modeled after the US’s Magnitsky Act. That implies travel bans and asset freezes of people unilaterally considered responsible for genocide, torture, extrajudicial killings and crimes against humanity.

Turkey, in this case, is just a guinea pig. The EU always hesitates mightily when it comes to sanctioning a NATO member. What the Eurocrats in Brussels really want is an extra, powerful tool to harass mostly China and Russia.

Our jihadis, sorry, “moderate rebels”

What’s fascinating is that Ankara under Erdogan always seems to be exhibiting a sort of “devil may care” attitude.

Take the seemingly insoluble situation in the Idlib cauldron in northwest Syria. Jabhat al-Nusra – a.k.a. al-Qaeda in Syria – honchos are now involved in “secret” negotiations with Turkish-backed armed gangs, such as Ahrar al-Sharqiya, right in front of Turkish officials. The objective: to boost the number of jihadis concentrated in certain key areas. The bottom line: a large number of these will come from Jabhat al-Nusra.

So Ankara for all practical purposes remains fully behind hardcore jihadis in northwest Syria – disguised under the “innocent” brand Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. Ankara has absolutely no interest in letting these people disappear. Moscow, of course, is fully aware of these shenanigans, but wily Kremlin and Defence Ministry strategists prefer to let it roll for the time being, assuming the Astana process shared by Russia, Iran and Turkey can be somewhat fruitful.

Erdogan, at the same time, masterfully plays the impression that he’s totally involved in pivoting towards Moscow. He’s effusive that “his Russian colleague Vladimir Putin” supports the idea – initially tabled by Azerbaijan – of a regional security platform uniting Russia, Turkey, Iran, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia. Erdogan even said that if Yerevan is part of this mechanism, “a new page may be opened” in so far intractable Turkey-Armenia relations.

It will help, of course, that even under Putin pre-eminence, Erdogan will have a very important seat at the table of this putative security organization.

The Big Picture is even more fascinating – because it lays out various aspects of Putin’s Eurasia balancing strategy, which involves as main players Russia, China, Iran, Turkey and Pakistan.

On the eve of the first anniversary of the assassination of Gen Soleimani, Tehran is far from cowed and “isolated”. For all practical purposes, it is slowly but surely forcing the US out of Iraq. Iran’s diplomatic and military links to Iraq, Syria and Lebanon remain solid.

And with less US troops in Afghanistan, the fact is Iran for the first time since the “axis of evil” era will be less surrounded by the Pentagon. Both Russia and China – the key nodes of Eurasia integration – fully approve it.

Of course the Iranian rial has collapsed against the US dollar, and oil income has fallen from over $100 billion a year to something like $7 billion. But non-oil exports are going well over $30 billion a year.

All is about to change for the better. Iran is building an ultra-strategic pipeline from the eastern part of the Persian Gulf to the port of Jask in the Gulf of Oman – bypassing the Strait of Hormuz, and ready to export up to 1 million barrels of oil a day. China will be the top customer.

President Rouhani said the pipeline will be ready by the summer of 2021, adding that Iran plans to be selling over 2.3 million barrels of oil a day next year – with or without US sanctions alleviated by Biden-Harris.

Watch the Golden Ring

Iran is well linked to Turkey to the west and Central Asia to the east. An extra important element in the chessboard is the entrance of freight trains directly linking Turkey to China via Central Asia -bypassing Russia.

Earlier this month, the first freight train left Istanbul for a 8,693 km, 12-day trip, crossing below the Bosphorus via the brand new Marmary tunnel, inaugurated a year ago, then along the East-West Middle Corridor via the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway, across Georgia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan.

In Turkey this is known as the Silk Railway. It was the BTK that reduced freight transport from Turkey to China from one month to only 12 days. The whole route from East Asia to Western Europe can now be travelled in only 18 days. BTK is the key node of the so-called Middle Corridor from Beijing to London and the Iron Silk Road from Kazakhstan to Turkey.

All of the above totally fits the EU’s agenda – especially Germany’s: implementing a strategic trade corridor linking the EU to China, bypassing Russia.

This would eventually lead to one of the key alliances to be consolidated in the Raging Twenties: Berlin-Beijing.

To speed up this putative alliance, the talk in Brussels is that Eurocrats would profit from Turkmen nationalism, pan-Turkism and the recent entente cordiale between Erdogan and Xi when it comes to the Uighurs. But there’s a problem: many a turcophone tribe prefers an alliance with Russia.

Moreover, Russia is inescapable when it comes to other corridors. Take, for instance, a flow of Japanese goods going to Vladivostok and then via the Trans-Siberian to Moscow and onwards to the EU.

The bypass-Russia EU strategy was not exactly a hit in Armenia-Azerbaijan: what we had was a relative Turkey retreat and a de facto Russian victory, with Moscow reinforcing its military position in the Caucasus.

Enter an even more interesting gambit: the Azerbaijan-Pakistan strategic partnership, now on overdrive in trade, defence, energy, science and technology, and agriculture. Islamabad, incidentally, supported Baku on Nagorno-Karabakh.

Both Azerbaijan and Pakistan have very good relations with Turkey: a matter of very complex, interlocking Turk-Persian cultural heritage.

And they may get even closer, with the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INTSC) increasingly connecting not only Islamabad to Baku but also both to Moscow.

Thus the extra dimension of the new security mechanism proposed by Baku uniting Russia, Turkey, Iran, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia: all the Top Four here want closer ties with Pakistan.

Analyst Andrew Korybko has neatly dubbed it the “Golden Ring” – a new dimension to Central Eurasian integration featuring Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, Azerbaijan and the central Asian “stans”. So this all goes way beyond a possible Triple Entente: Berlin-Ankara-Beijing.

What’s certain as it stands is that the all-important Berlin-Moscow relationship is bound to remain as cold as ice. Norwegian analyst Glenn Diesen summed it all up: “The German-Russian partnership for Greater Europe was replaced with the Chinese-Russian partnership for Greater Eurasia”.

What’s also certain is that Erdogan, a master of pivoting, will find ways to simultaneously profit from both Germany and Russia.

Authored by Robert Bridge via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Once it became clear to the Western elite that their subjects would readily accept draconian anti-Covid measures, it encouraged them to usher in a code-red lifestyle where there will be no ‘return to normal’ in the foreseeable future and, possibly, never.

If nothing else, nobody can say we were not warned about the madness that would descend upon leap year 2020, making it one of the worst 366 days ever recorded on the Gregorian calendar.

On October 18, 2019, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, together with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hosted the incredibly visionary Event 201, an exercise that simulated the outbreak of a pandemic “transmitted from bats to people that eventually becomes…transmissible from person to person.”

The simulation proved to be so uncannily similar to the real thing that started just three months later – from imagining a dramatic drop in air travel and business, to breaks in the global supply chain – that Johns Hopkins eventually felt compelled to release a statement saying their exercise was not intended to be a prophecy of future events.

Isn’t it crazy how “social distance for two weeks so our hospitals aren’t overwhelmed” evolved into “social distance til 2022 until a vaccine is developed…”

— Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) April 26, 2020

“To be clear, the Center for Health Security and partners did not make a prediction during our tabletop exercise,” the statement read, in what just might be the creepiest caveat ever.

“For the scenario, we modeled a fictional coronavirus pandemic, but we explicitly stated that it was not a prediction… We are not now predicting that the nCoV-2019 outbreak will kill 65 million people.”

Shortly after the global elite played Nostradamus, on January 15th to be exact (the very same day, incidentally, that the Democrats presented articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump in the Senate), the first Covid-positive person arrived in Seattle from Wuhan, the Chinese city where the disease is said to have sprung to life. From there it has been a non-stop roller-coaster ride of government-sponsored insanity.

Before continuing, it is important to remember the context with which the pandemic has been happening, that is, in the most consequential U.S. presidential election in recent memory. It should thus come as no surprise that the Democrats and Republicans would use the scourge to achieve some sort of advantage, demonstrating Machiavellian opportunism at its very best. Indeed, such is the nature of the political beast.

For example, although Trump shut down the U.S. border on January 31 to Chinese nationals, the Democrats and leftist media pounced, saying the U.S. leader responded too late to make a difference. Even Trump’s use of the term ‘Chinese virus’ was slammed by his opponents as ‘racist.’ Meanwhile, it was the Democrats themselves who were the pioneers in taking the first draconian steps of locking down society to stop the contagion.

On March 16, 2020, six counties in northern California and the city of Berkley ordered an unprecedented stay-at-home order for some 7 million Bay Area residents. This was all part of “flattening the curve” logic that would “buy time for hospitals to gear up for the onslaught…” Well, 233 days later political leaders are not only still flattening the curve, but flattening their economies as well. Today, although the survival rate for those infected with Covid-19 is reported to be in the neighborhood of 99.85 percent, harsh lockdowns continue to wreak havoc, not least of all for small businesses.

Over 100,000 restaurants have closed this year due to lockdowns, but not a penny for them in the “Covid Relief” bill?

— Cari Kelemen (@KelemenCari) December 22, 2020

Consider the situation in California, where Governor Gavin Newsom has mandated yet another ‘shelter-in-place’ order, which has shuttered, among other businesses, hair salons, barbershops, personal care services, movie theaters, wineries, bars, breweries, family entertainment centers and amusement parks. What is hard to fathom, however, is how the corporate big-box stores are considered “essential businesses,” apparently immune to the scourge, while the small business owner is trashed as expendable.

By way of example, consider the tragic plight of Angela Marsden, the owner of Pineapple Hill Saloon and Grill in Los Angeles. In an effort to comply with the ever-changing anti-Covid rules, Marsden spent over $80,000 to build an outdoor patio so she could stay in business during the pandemic. With Newsom’s latest lockdown restrictions, however, city officials denied her permission to serve clients on location, even in the parking lot.

To add insult to injury, the authorities granted permission for a film company to set up a large outdoor eating area for its staff just across the road from where Marsden had built her patio.

“I’m losing everything,” she exclaimed in a video posted to Twitter that has been watched almost 10 million times. “Everything I own is being taken away from me. They have not given us money and they have shut us down. We cannot survive; my staff cannot survive…”

This is criminal. Complete BS!!! I guess this is “science”! RT @ClayTravis: Watch this video of an LA bar owner that perfectly crystallizes the absurdity of California’s absurd and ridiculous shutdown rules. pic.twitter.com/XVLmAVyy70

— Larry The Cable Guy (@GitRDoneLarry) December 5, 2020

For the Fortune 500 companies, however, the pandemic has translated into a windfall. Between April and September, at a time when thousands of small business were quietly getting crushed underfoot, 45 of the 50 most valuable publicly traded American companies turned a profit, according to the Washington Post.

At the same time, at least 27 of the 50 largest firms slashed their workforce this year, collectively cutting more than 100,000 workers, while at the same time distributing billions of dollars to shareholders. As just one example, Walmart distributed more than $10 billion to its investors during the pandemic while terminating 1,200 office staff.

To put these figures another way, since mid-March – when President Donald Trump declared a national emergency – America’s 614 billionaires saw their net worth explode by $931 billion in total. Jeff Bezos, for example, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, saw his private wealth go from $73.2bn since the start of the crisis to a record $186.2bn.

What’s Good For Thee Is Not Good For Me

A thread ⬇️ https://t.co/42p9Yc2xY7

— Patriotic Candor (@PatrioticCandor) December 3, 2020

It would probably come as no surprise that the very individuals who helped pave the way for astronomic wealth generation among the 1 percent, are the same ones breaking their own rules. Governor Newsom and his wife, for example, attended a birthday party with a dozen friends at the French Laundry restaurant in San Francisco. Equally maddening is that Dustin Corcoran, the CEO of the California Medical Association, was also in attendance. And who could forget the photo of Nancy Pelosi walking through a California hair salon when such businesses were deemed ‘super spreaders’?

Such incidences only served to reinforce the idea that the draconian lockdowns, the worst of which are centered on Democratic-controlled states, were specifically designed not to contain a contagion, but to foster as much anger and frustration among the general population in the most consequential presidential election in many decades. After all, unhappy people have a tendency to vote out their leaders whom they believe are responsible for such dire circumstances. And with the mainstream media almost totally in the Democratic anti-Trump camp, placing the blame on the president has proven no difficult task.

So where do we go from here? Now that we have reached the end of 2020, will the situation begin to improve? Will political leaders begin to loosen the screws and let some semblance of normality return once again? Or will people be forced to rise up and demand the return of their freedom and liberty?

At this great loggerhead in human history, there has been much talk about creating ‘freedom passes’ that will be demanded from people before they are allowed to travel or visit any sort of entertainment again.

“People who test negative for coronavirus could get a five-day freedom pass to attend big events or access public buildings, under plans being considered by public health experts running a trial program in England,” reported Bloomberg in November.

Already, five global airlines – United Airlines, Lufthansa, Virgin Atlantic, Swiss International Air Lines and JetBlue – have announced they will observe the so-called CommonPass to passengers on some flights from December.

“The project, developed by non-profit group The Commons Project and backed by the World Economic Forum, uses a digital certificate downloaded to a mobile phone to show a passenger has tested negative for Covid-19,” according to the Financial Times. Here is the kicker:

“The airlines are not making the CommonPass mandatory, but in time it will also be used to provide proof of vaccination.”

It seems rather obvious where all of this is heading: mandatory vaccination for anyone who ever wishes to board an aircraft or visit another entertainment venue again. Over time, it is not difficult to imagine a vaccine regimen extending to all human activities, including shopping and even getting a job. Yet what about the millions of people who have expressed extreme skepticism in being administered a vaccine that has been developed so quickly?

Whatever the case may be, should such a plan of action become mandatory, peoples’ lives will be entirely dominated by fears over a virus, together with an endless bureaucratic process of being tested and approved to move about. Vaccines will become a regular requirement since viruses are in a state of constant mutation, which makes them the authoritarians dream instrument of domination.

Such a system of totalitarian control, should it ever come into fruition, will have achieved in mere months what fascism could not in years: the pacification and unification of a great swath of the world’s population not by bayonet, but by syringe. In fact, today the people of London are fleeing their fair city not out of fear of the virus per se, but out of fear of the lockdown restrictions put in place by the authorities. To put it otherwise, the world gave an inch and the globalists took a mile, and a person would have to be a fool to believe it could have turned out any other way.

In contrast to the EU, the US Congress passed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act in June 2019, and on September 22, 2020, the US House of Representatives passed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.

As The Gatestone Institute’s Judith Bergman notes, the US has sanctioned at least 28 Chinese officials over their actions in Xinjiang. The list includes senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials, such as current Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) Party Secretary Chen Quanguo, who executes Chinese government policy in the region. He is also the current First Political Commissar of the XPCC, a role in which he has exercised control over the entity. According to the US Department of the Treasury:

“The XPCC is a paramilitary organization in the XUAR that is subordinate to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The XPCC enhances internal control over the region by advancing China’s vision of economic development in XUAR that emphasizes subordination to central planning and resource extraction. The XPCC’s structure reflects a military organization, with 14 divisions made up of dozens of regiments… [Chen Quanguo]… has a notorious history of intensifying security operations in the Tibetan Autonomous Region, where he was deployed before arriving in Xinjiang…”

Meanwhile, the European Council, consisting of the heads of state of the EU member states and that is currently presided over by Germany, is unlikely to demand anything from China, let alone sanction it or do anything that might jeopardize its trade with Europe. This year, for the first time, China became the EU’s largest trading partner, surpassing the US.

Crucially, the EU does not want to jeopardize the finalization of the EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment, which the EU and China have sought to realize for seven years now.

And, as The South China Morning Post (SCMP) reports, China and the EU could complete the deal this week, with the 27 countries in the trade bloc unanimously approving the agreement despite earlier reservations.

An EU diplomat with knowledge of the discussions said that on Monday representatives of the EU member states were briefed by EU negotiators who had “reported on recent positive developments in the negotiations with China including on labour standards”.

The representatives “broadly welcomed the latest progress in the EU-China talks”, the diplomat said.

“After four years of Donald Trump, the EU is sending a very clear message that it will go its own way on China,” said Noah Barkin, an EU-China specialist with Rhodium Group, a research firm.

“This doesn’t doom transatlantic cooperation with Biden, but it shows just how difficult it will be. The big winner if this deal does come together is Beijing.”

Erik Brattberg, director of the Europe programme at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the EU’s “last-minute push” to complete the deal with China “has already raised eyebrows in Washington”, adding:

“It risks undermining the credibility of the EU’s call for a joint transatlantic China strategy with the US even before the new Biden administration settles in.”

The unanimous support from the EU member states came despite France and Poland previously raising reservations about the deal.

Franck Riester, the minister delegate in charge of trade in the French foreign ministry, said last week that if the EU failed to commit to abolishing forced labour “we cannot facilitate investment in China”.

Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau also warned that Europe would need more consultations and transparency to win over its transatlantic allies.

By moving forward with the deal, Brussels also turned a blind eye to a thinly veiled warning from Jake Sullivan, Biden’s designated national security adviser, who said the Biden administration “would welcome early consultations with our European partners” on the concerns about China’s economic practices.

Outspoken China hawk, and hedge fund billionaire, Kyle Bass summed it up succinctly:

“Europe is so deeply corrupted by Chinese money that this deal was a fait accompli.”

Simply put, the EU is willing to turn a blind eye to any and every action by China against the world in the interests of money flowing into the failing super-state.

If reached, the deal would come hard on the heels of China’s success in creating the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership with 14 other Asia-Pacific nations, and the EU’s post-Brexit agreement with Britain.

Authored by Con Coughlin via The Gatestone Institute,

The incoming Biden administration has indicated that one of its top priorities will be to adopt a new approach in Washington’s dealings with the Middle East. In particular it wants to revive the flawed nuclear deal with Iran as well as re-establish a dialogue with the Palestinian leadership, which imposed a three-year boycott on the Trump administration.

Yet, while the new Biden team, the majority of whom are relics from the Obama administration, are keen to assert a new policy agenda for the region, they also need to take care that, in so doing, they do not squander the impressive legacy US President Donald Trump has built up in the region.

It is worth remembering that, when Mr Trump took office, the region was still reeling from the dire consequences of former US President Barack Obama’s inept and naive handling of the region.

By early January 2017, when Mr Trump took office, Iran was squandering the tens of billions of dollars it received for signing the nuclear deal, which Mr Obama had helped broker in 2015, on expanding its malign influence across the landscape of the Middle East.

This malign influence included supporting the Assad regime in Syria, the Hizbollah terrorist organisation in Lebanon, pro-Iranian Shia militias in Iraq and the Houthi rebels in Yemen, which regularly employed Iranian-made drones and missiles to attack Saudi Arabia, a key US ally.

Attempts to revive the Israeli-Arab peace process, meanwhile, were going nowhere because of the Obama administration’s antagonistic attitude towards Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as maintaining its hopeless quest for a more constructive relationship with the Palestinian leadership.

In addition, Mr Obama’s ambivalence about becoming involved in Syria’s brutal war meant that US forces were hampered in their attempts to destroy the Islamist fanatics of ISIS, which had succeeded in capturing large swathes of northern Iraq and Syria.

Mr Trump therefore deserves enormous credit for achieving a complete turnaround in America’s standing in the region during his tenure at the White House.

Thanks to Mr Trump’s robust approach to Iran, where he withdrew from the nuclear deal and re-imposed crippling sanctions against Tehran, the Iranian economy has been seriously diminished, thus limiting the ayatollahs’ ability to peddle their pernicious creed throughout the region.

ISIS, and its dream of establishing a self-governing “caliphate”, has been completely destroyed, mainly because, soon after taking office, Mr Trump gave US commanders the authority and freedom to intensify the military campaign against the Islamist fanatics.

Arguably, Mr Trump’s greatest achievement in the Middle East, though, has been the success he has enjoyed in breaking the impasse in the Israeli-Arab peace process, with a clutch of Arab regimes – the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco — establishing diplomatic relations with Israel under the so-called Abraham Accords, with many other Arab governments — including Saudi Arabia — said to be giving serious consideration to following suit.

Mr Trump’s Middle East legacy is not only impressive — it has completely redefined the landscape of the region from the chaos and conflict that prevailed when Mr Obama left office. Nowadays, the momentum in the region is moving towards peace, not conflict, as was so often the case during Mr Obama’s presidency.

So the challenge for the incoming Biden administration now will be to see how it can pursue a different foreign policy agenda without jeopardising the very significant achievements that have been accomplished during Mr Trump’s tenure.

Certainly, if the incoming Biden administration makes any serious attempt to undermine Mr Trump’s legacy in the Middle East, it will do so at its peril.

California’s response to COVID-19 ranks slightly below China welding people inside apartment buildings in terms of militancy, yet the for all the measures taken by the Golden State, it’s become one of the nation’s worst epicenters for the pandemic, according to Politico.

And if Politico is calling out California, whose Democratic governor deems himself above his own rules, you know it’s bad.

America’s most populous state has become one of the nation’s worst epicenters for the disease, setting new records for cases, hospitalizations and deaths almost every day. Things are so bad in Southern California that some patients are being treated in hospital tents, while doctors have begun discussing whether they need to ration care.

The turnabout has confounded leaders and health experts. They can point to any number of reasons that contributed to California’s surge over the past several weeks. But it is hard to pinpoint one single factor — and equally hard to find a silver bullet. –Politico

The state of nearly 40 million residents has seen almost 2 million cases and 22,000 deaths despite strict mask mandates, school and playground closures, and restrictions on dining that are destroying small businesses across the state.

“Nationally, there has been a kaleidoscopic application of every imaginable type of lockdown order with California being the most restrictive and inflicting the most devastation on small businesses and the most economically vulnerable service workers. And still, we are none the better as far as COVID is concerned,” said California Restaurant Association President and CEO Jot Condie, adding “In fact in L.A. where indoor and outdoor dining are completely shut down, with indoor dining [closed] since July, the virus rages on.”

Meanwhile, the state – like many others, is suffering from spikes in crime, mental illness and suicide.

At more than 100 new daily cases per 100,000 residents, California’s case rate is second only to that in Tennessee, according to the nonprofit tracking site Covid Act Now — though it’s a state that does not mandate mask wearing and allows indoor gatherings of up to 10 people. The website Covid Exit Strategy shows a 97 percent rise in Covid throughout California, which has gone in the opposite direction from its West Coast counterparts, Oregon and Washington. -Politico

“We are facing a very, very difficult and very dangerous time in our county, in our region and in our state. All of our numbers are going in the wrong direction, and our reality is rather grim at the moment,” said Santa Clara County public health officer Sara Cody last Wednesday. “If we have a surge on top of a surge… we will definitely break.”

Officials have few answers for what’s going on – blaming gatherings such as postseason viewing parties when the Dodgers and Lakers won championships this fall. Others have blamed the strict rules themselves – arguing that frustrated Californians couldn’t take it any longer and decided to live their lives – fueled in part by narrative-busting findings such as a Colorado study concluding that there is ‘no statistically significant‘ link between gyms and COVID cases.

Politico notes that the state – while imposing strict lockdowns – has very little capability to enforce, instead relying on its regulatory agencies to make examples out of the worst-offending establishments. Meanwhile, several Sheriffs have publicly announced that they will not enforce the state’s stay-at-home restrictions and other pandemic measures,

“It’s a big state. We get big numbers when things go wrong,” says UC San Francisco professor of epidemiology and statistics, George Rutherford.

Shame?

According to Gov. Gavin Newsom, residents need to rely on ‘social pressure’ to keep people apart. The state has spent tens of millions of dollars on billboards and advertisements promoting ‘responsible’ behavior. Newsom himself, however, made headlines when he broke his own guidelines to attend an upscale dinner party with lobbyists.

And perhaps thanks to Newsom’s hypocrisy, people are now ignoring his edicts.

In the biggest shopping month of the year, parking lots at malls and retail centers are packed. Such stores are among the few indoor operations allowed to stay open with stated capacity limits. Mobility data from Google suggests that Newsom’s December stay-home orders have barely made a dent in keeping people home compared to previous months, though the baseline doesn’t say whether it may have tamped down traffic compared to last December.

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Critics have questioned the science behind the regional lockdown orders. Public and industry pressure has already convinced state health officials to reopen playgrounds and relax limits on grocery store capacity. A Los Angeles trial court judge also said the county’s prohibition on outdoor dining was “arbitrary” and that there was insufficient evidence showing it was a source of virus spread. -Politico

According to state Assemblyman Jordan Cunningham (R-Templeton), the state’s attempt to “shut down types of human interaction without seeing if that’s effective” created a backlash, which is “driving people to higher-risk activity” such as holding large gatherings at homes instead of restaurants.

“The public health officials have lost credibility with a huge section of the populace. They’re just tuning them out now,” says Cunningham. “The goalposts are moving all the time. … People are fed up with it and they don’t think it makes any sense, and they’re not wrong.“