NEWS YOU CAN USE: Coronavirus masks: What’s the difference between N95 and KN95?
THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING: Germany sends China £130billion bill for ‘coronavirus damages’ – sparks fury in Beijing.
Q & A ABC
Can we trust the Australian government and public health researchers with data collected from our personal mobile phones? #QandA (Dr Simon Longstaff)
Simon Longstaff’s quote
Trust in God, but tie your camel’s 🐫 legs
When Wagga Wagga City Council announced last week that it would end its sister-city relationship
with the Chinese city of Kunming after 30 years — citing concerns over
coronavirus and Communism — it didn't take long for the Chinese
Government to respond.
State-owned newspaper The Global Times accused the council of being an American "mouthpiece", but has since removed the original editorial. The Chinese Consulate in Sydney also responded.Coronavirus sparked a diplomatic spat between Wagga Wagga and China that holds a lesson for us all
Put Wagga Council in charge of China relations
Copenhagen | Denmark has become one of the first countries to ban companies that are registered in tax havens from accessing financial aid during the coronavirus pandemic.
The Nordic country, which has spent billions on aid for companies experiencing drastic drops in revenues due to a wide-ranging government lockdown, announced an extended aid package worth 100 billion Danish crowns ($22 billion) on Saturday
Denmark blocks firms registered intax havens from state aid
BIG BROTHER IN THE SKY: Police Use Chinese Drones to Enforce Social Distancing. “DHS warned that Chinese-made drones may be sending sensitive flight data back to their manufacturers in China, where the Communist Party-dominated government can access it. The DHS sent an alert last May warning about the drones, almost a year before American mayors decided to use DJI drones to enforce social distancing measures to fight the coronavirus.”
The COVID-19 pandemic is likely to widen even further the growing class divides now found in virtually every major country. By disrupting smaller grassroots businesses while expanding the power of technologies used in the enforcement of government edicts, the virus could further empower both the tech oligarchs and the “expert” class leading the national response to the crisis.
How COVID-19 Showed America’s Dependence on Blue-Collar Workers
The outbreak of “hero” talk is a long-overdue admission that blue-collar workers are the backbone of the US economy. Time to pay them more
Such twisted standards at the WHO should come as no surprise. China began colonizing the WHO at least 13 years ago, when China’s candidate, a former Hong Kong director of health, Margaret Chan, became WHO director-general, serving for 10 years before Tedros took charge. Chan was already controversial in Hong Kong for her slow and bungling early response to the 2003 SARS outbreak that spread from China to Hong Kong. Under her leadership, the WHO’s response in 2014 to the Ebola crisis in West Africa was a debacle — leaving the U.S. and a number of private medical charities to ride to the rescue. Commenting on this at the time, a Nov. 4, 2014, Wall Street Journal editorial noted that “since the 1990s the WHO has devoted ever more of it resources to political activism instead of its core disease-fighting mission — a loss of function that helps explain why the WHO failed to contain Ebola when it was less rampant.” Sound familiar?
Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting
Julio Vincent Gambuto writes that the Covid-19 pandemic has given Americans an unprecedented chance to “see ourselves and our country in the plainest of views” and that we should prepare for a coalition of powerful forces that will try to convince us that this whole thing never happened.\Until then, get ready, my friends. What is about to be unleashed on American society will be the greatest campaign ever created to get you to feel normal again. It will come from brands, it will come from government, it will even come from each other, and it will come from the left and from the right. We will do anything, spend anything, believe anything, just so we can take away how horribly uncomfortable all of this feels. And on top of that, just to turn the screw that much more, will be the one effort that’s even greater: the all-out blitz to make you believe you never saw what you saw. The air wasn’t really cleaner; those images were fake. The hospitals weren’t really a war zone; those stories were hyperbole. The numbers were not that high; the press is lying. You didn’t see people in masks standing in the rain risking their lives to vote. Not in America. You didn’t see the leader of the free world push an unproven miracle drug like a late-night infomercial salesman. That was a crisis update. You didn’t see homeless people dead on the street. You didn’t see inequality. You didn’t see indifference. You didn’t see utter failure of leadership and systems.
Oxford English Dictionary Updates With COVID Words
The dictionary’s executive editor Bernadette Paton said that it was “a rare experience for lexicographers to observe an exponential rise in usage of a single word in a very short period of time, and for that word to come overwhelmingly to dominate global discourse, even to the exclusion of most other topics”. –The Guardian
Good News? Will COVID Kill Influencer Culture?
Social media influencers have had increasing… er… influence in recent years for their ability to get advertising messages out to their followers. But the COVID lockdown has crashed the market. And there’s even been backlashes to influencers who seem to be flaunting their enviable circumstances while the rest of us are stuck inside our apartments. – Wired