Month: April 2020

California Gov. Gavin Newsom is planning to close all of the state’s beaches as of Friday, according to a memo circulating among California police agencies, a decision one local government leader slammed as “overreaction.”

The memo from the California Police Chiefs Associated reflected a Wednesday call state officials.

“After the well-publicized media coverage of overcrowded beaches this past weekend, in violation of Governor Newsom’s Shelter in Place Order, the Governor will be announcing tomorrow [Thursday] that ALL beaches and all state parks in California will be closed, effective Friday, May 1^st,” the memo said.

“We wanted to give all of our members a heads up about this in order to provide time for you to plan for any situations you might expect as a result, knowing each community has its own dynamics. The League of Cities and CSAC leadership have also been informed. State Parks personnel will be out in to help support local efforts as well,” the memo said.

You heard it here first, folks! I’ll be live at 10 on @FOXLA with what we know so far. https://t.co/FCN7ZUqElE

— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) April 30, 2020

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As of Thursday morning, media outlets were reporting that Newsom’s office was not commenting upon the memo.

However, on Wednesday, Newsom indicated that parks might be targeted as well as beaches, according to the Los Angeles Times.

“I’m working with state parks and others,” he said. “And a lot of our other partners — Coastal Commission, State Lands [Commission] and others — to really figure out what our next steps are. And I can assure you that clarity will come in a very short period of time.”

On Monday, the Democratic governor scolded those who flocked to beaches in Orange and Ventura counties.

“This virus doesn’t take the weekends off,” he said. “The only thing that will set us back is people stopping to practice physical distancing and appropriate social distancing. That’s the only thing that’s going to slow down our ability to reopen this economy.”

Newsom noted the widespread media coverage showing beachgoers not wearing masks or practicing social distancing.

“Those images are an example of what not to see, people, what not to do if we’re going to make meaningful progress,” he said, according to NPR.

Many on Twitter pushed back against a beach ban.

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What’s the “science” behind his decision? NONE. California has 51 COVID deaths per million. “Gov. Newsom to announce closure of all beaches and state parks” | FOX 11 Los Angeles https://t.co/UucwvBpkL5

— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) April 30, 2020

And again the police will be patrolling CITIZENS.

Not criminals..
Not illegals..
Not homeless..

But law-abiding citizens who can see through Gov. Hair Gel’s need to control/punish the masses.

It’s NOT about the virus.#RECALLNEWSOM#OPENAMERICANOW

— Anita Miller ❌ (@FoxNewsMom) April 30, 2020

I said this when @GavinNewsom locked down CA & I’ll say again: Newsom is insane.

Closing down beaches?!

People ARE distancing.

It’s hot out (which kills virus).

COVID doesn’t transmit outdoors.

Young, healthy people aren’t at risk.

We NEED sun & exercise.

Newsom is awful.

— Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) April 30, 2020

Orange County Supervisor Donald Wagner said Newsom was making a mistake if he closed the beaches.

“I believe Governor Newsom has the power to close Orange County beaches. However, it is not wise to do so. Medical professionals tell us the importance of fresh air and sunlight in fighting infectious diseases, including mental health benefits,” Wagner said.

“Moreover, Orange County citizens have been cooperative with California state and county restrictions thus far. I fear that this overreaction from the state will undermine that cooperative attitude and our collective efforts to fight the disease, based on the best available medical information,” the Republican said, according to KCOP-TV.

Dianne Jacob, a member of the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, said a statewide ban was a mistake, according to KFMB-TV.

“Now is not the time to further erode the judgment and authority of county public health officers and local government leaders,” Jacob said. “While you have every right to be concerned about areas of California that have been flooded with beachgoers, not every region experienced the same activity and shouldn’t be treated with a broad brush. The reopening plan in San Diego County was based on data and executed successfully.”

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The Trump administration indicated it will allow federal social distancing guidelines to expire Thursday.

With peak viral transmission largely behind the nation and economic reopening plans being set into motion, President Donald Trump told reporters Wednesday in an Oval Office news briefing that federal public health orders will now begin “fading out,” giving states increased procedural control going forward.

Since mid-March, states have been encouraged by federal officials to follow the administration’s “30 Days to Slow the Spread” guidelines, which included enhanced personal hygiene suggestions, growth of populations working from home, decreased social interaction and other advisories meant to curb the spread of COVID-19.

While a majority of states have followed these guidelines directly, others have instead chosen to make them a baseline, implementing executive orders to enforce adherence to broader public health measures.

The guidelines would not be done away with entirely upon expiration Thursday, Vice President Mike Pence said, indicating all of them were in some way incorporated into the federal plan states have been asked to follow as they begin reopening their communities.

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“The current guidelines, I think you can say, are very much incorporated in the guidance we’re giving states to open up American again,” Pence said.

Pres. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that the current coronavirus social distancing guidelines will be “fading out”https://t.co/Sn26l57Lcd pic.twitter.com/oRuv2uACcy

— CBS News (@CBSNews) April 29, 2020

“Frankly, every state in America has embraced those guidelines or even done more. Now, our focus is working with states as governors like Gov. John Bel Edwards unveil plans to open up their states again,” the vice president said, referring to the Louisiana governor who was present at the briefing. “And the new guidance that we’ve issued is guidance for how they can do that safely and responsibly.”

The administration previously had come to the table on April 16 with a tranched plan to reopen the U.S. economy in three phases.

The plan, meant to be put into place by governors on a rolling basis only after several restrictive health criteria were met, would begin with a period of slow public re-entry, allowing specific business reopenings and a return to small-group gatherings, but continue to emphasize “telework” and social distancing.

With even the hard-hit state of New York now reporting a slow decline in confirmed coronavirus case totals, according to The Associated Press, many governors across the country believe they soon may be ready to enter that first phase.

Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has indicated his state might begin reopening on a regional basis as early as mid-May, despite leading the nation in both deaths and confirmed cases of the coronavirus.

First phase for individuals:

🔺 Vulnerable individuals shelter in place
🔺 Maximize social distancing in public
🔺 Avoid groups of 10+
🔺 Minimize non-essential travelhttps://t.co/gdCIY9wJP8 pic.twitter.com/Fmb56oEIDA

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) April 17, 2020

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According to The Advocate, Lousiana’s Democratic executive has also expressed support for the Trump administration’s efforts to procure and distribute the resources necessary for a federalist reopening strategy, saying those efforts are “sufficient” for his state to begin reopening shortly.

“They’ve committed to resourcing Louisiana’s request for 200,000 test kits per month,” Edwards said. “That gets us to 43 out of every 1,000 tested each month. We believe that’s sufficient for us to move forward as we’re able to reopen our economy.”

As of Monday, nine states have begun partial reopening, with seven expected to see shutdown orders lapse at month’s end, The New York Times reported.

States currently reopening are Alaska, Colorado, Georgia, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Tennessee.

Current shutdown orders expire Friday in Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Maine, Nevada and Texas.

According to Johns Hopkins data, the U.S. recently passed the threshold of 1 million confirmed cases, and more than 60,000 Americans have died from the virus.

We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.

British doctors have warned that 250 ventilators bought from China could cause “significant patient harm, including death” if there are used on Chinese coronavirus suffers in hospitals in the United Kingdom.

Senior doctors from a National Health Service (NHS) regional trust in Birmingham said that the build of the Shangrila 510 model ventilators, made by Beijing Aeonmed Co Ltd, was “basic” and that the oxygen supply was “variable and unreliable”.

It was also the wrong type as it was designed for ambulances, meaning medics had to set up make-shift stands for the mobile devices to place next to hospital beds. The cloth casing is also said to be difficult to clean, causing hygiene concerns in the high-infection environment, according to the letter seen by American network NBC News and published on Thursday.

“We believe that if used, significant patient harm, including death, is likely,” the letter said, continuing: “We look forward to the withdrawal and replacement of these ventilators with devices better able to provide intensive care ventilation for our patients.”

The letter was dated April 13th and penned by a doctor from Sandwell and West Birmingham NHS Trust on behalf of other medics working in the region and sent to a senior NHS official. It was written eight days after senior Cabinet minister Michael Gove thanked the communist Chinese government for helping them secure an order of 300 ventilators.

After lying and covering up the seriousness of its deadly Chinese coronavirus pandemic, Communist China is now blaming other nations for its busted, faulty medical equipment. https://t.co/Oq0hN37usJ

— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) April 2, 2020

This is not the first time there have been concerns over faulty Chinese medical equipment during the coronavirus pandemic.

In April, the British government admitted that the UK had bought millions of Chinese-made coronavirus tests that did not work. The New York Times later claimed that the British government had spent some £16 million on just two million coronavirus home test kits alone.

Spain, one of the worst-hit countries in Europe, had also received faulty equipment from China. In late March, it was revealed that Spain’s EU-certified coronavirus tests from China did not work. While in late April, defective Chinese masks forced more than 1,000 Spanish medics into self-quarantine over fears they may have been exposed to coronavirus.

The Netherlands also recalled 600,000 ineffective Chinese masks; the Czech Republic found that its 80 per cent of it order of 300,000 test kits were defective; and Finland found that its consignment of masks and personal protection equipment (PPE) that arrived from China were not up to standard.

In response, China has either blamed its customers for misusing the medical equipment or claimed that it had not received any complaints from its clients using official Chinese government channels at all.

Coronavirus Has Brought UK and China Closer Together, Claims Chinese Ambassador https://t.co/o6FJlXA2gR

— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) April 24, 2020

On top of the growing mountain of evidence, nothing points to Joe Biden being guilty of a brutal and violent sexual assault more than his own suspicious behavior.

Tara Reade has credibly accused Biden of sexually assaulting her in 1993.  At the time, she was working in Biden’s U.S. Senate office and alleges he pinned her against a wall and then went under her skirt to stick his fingers in her vagina. She says she filed an official complaint and was fired in retaliation.

All available evidence so far backs Reade’s claim, including five contemporaneous witnesses who say Reade told them about the assault at or near the time she says it occurred. We also have videotape of Reade’s now-deceased mother and her anguished call to a 1993 edition of CNN’s Larry King Live to ask for advice about what to do about her daughter’s problems with a “prominent senator.”

What’s more, we have an alleged victim in Reade who is behaving like a woman with nothing to hide. She has made herself ridiculously available to a media who have either demeaned or ignored her, she is challenging investigative journalists to dig into her story, and she wants Biden to authorize the release of his senate papers, which she hopes will prove she did, indeed, file this harassment complaint.

This is not the behavior of a liar. This is not the behavior of a Christine Blasey Ford, who hid behind her attorneys, who was caught telling countless lies, and whose own witnesses — her own witnesses — rebutted her allegation.

Now, let’s contrast Reade’s behavior with Joe Biden’s… He is acting like the guiltiest man alive. In fact, I’ve never seen a politician behave in a more guilty manner. Here’s the rundown….

1. Joe Biden Refuses to Defend Himself

For months, Biden has been facing this terrible allegation, and not once has he said he’s innocent. Not once has he defended his innocence and character. Instead, he hides behind a campaign that releases statements on his behalf but never a statement directly from him.

Contrast that with anyone you have ever known who was falsely accused of something. Compare Biden to Brett Kavanaugh, who was chomping at the bit to go before the Senate and the public to defend himself and his honor.

Biden is in hiding.

Guilty men hide.

2. Joe Biden Is Scared to Claim He’s Innocent

Why won’t Joe Biden defend himself? Well, I think there are only a couple of valid reasons, and both point to his guilt.

Primarily, I think Biden’s terrified that if he claims he’s innocent, this will trigger an immediate civil suit. Reade will sue him for smearing her as a liar.

The statute of limitations might be up on the alleged assault, but if Biden slanders or libels her, she will have cause to file a civil suit, which means videotaped depositions and subpoenaed documents.

Kavanaugh was willing to risk all of this.

Biden is cowering in his basement.

Secondly, much of the evidence against him is impossible to explain away.

Why would Reade — a Democrat — tell five people decades ago she was sexually assaulted by Biden?

What was her motive other than to unburden herself?

And how does Biden explain away Reade’s anguished mother calling into CNN in 1993, a call where he is undoubtedly the “prominent senator” in question.

3. Joe Biden’s Campaign Is Lying About the Reade Allegation

Just this week, the Biden campaign reportedly issued three talking points to its surrogates about the Reade scandal, and all three of those talking points were exposed as lies.

Innocent men don’t lie.

4. Joe Biden Is Asking Women to Lie for Him

This week, Joe Biden’s campaign reportedly handed Stacey Abrams — who is on Biden’s potential list of vice president picks — that list of talking points that were all lies. Abrams then went on CNN and told the lie about the New York Times clearing Biden.

Talk about déjà vu all over again…

To those of us of a certain age, this is all depressingly reminiscent of Bill Clinton, a sexual predator who told lie on top of lie on top of lie and then manipulated others, including women, to lie on his behalf.

Joe Biden sent Stacey Abrams out to lie for him. How pathetic and suspicious is that?

Innocent men don’t lie, and they surely do not ask others to lie for him.

5. Joe Biden’s Serial Pattern of Sexual Misconduct

On top of Reade, seven other women have accused Biden of inappropriate behavior. Creepy stuff like unwanted kisses, hair sniffing…  We have tons of videotape proving Biden has a disgusting sense of entitlement when it comes to inappropriately touching women AND children.

6. Joe Biden Refuses to Release Documents

Joe Biden has so far refused to authorize the release of his Senate papers from the University of Delaware.

On the other hand, Reade wants these papers made available to the public because she believes the harassment complaint she filed might be among them.

Again, Biden is acting like a man with everything to hide, while Reade is acting like a woman with nothing to hide.

7. Joe Biden Has Yet to Explain Why Tara Reade Was Fired

Reade claims she was fired by Biden’s Senate office in retaliation for the harassment complaint. Investigative reporter Rich McHugh (one of the only good guys in the media who’s actually looking into this) says he found an intern who worked under Reade in Biden’s Senate office, and this intern verifies Reade abruptly disappeared at the time in question.

If Biden is innocent, personnel records would make this the easiest Reade allegation to debunk. But Biden has so far not only refused to release those records, no one has bothered to explain why Reade was fired, and if she was not fired, why she left.

Again, one lie begets a million little lies.

8. Joe Biden’s Engaging in a Cover-Up

I’m sorry but “cover-up” is the only way to define Biden’s refusal to come out of hiding, his refusal to answer these questions, and, most especially, his refusal to release pertinent documents.

Again, compare Biden to Kavanaugh, who went before the country to profess his innocence and who publicly released his calendar and other documents from 1983, the year in question.

Bottom line: Biden’s videotaped history of inappropriate behavior, combined with multiple accusations, his deafening silence, his campaign’s lies, and his refusal to release documents, amount to the behavior of a guilty man.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.

China’s state newspaper China Daily – typically one of the least belligerent in the stable of Communist Party-run outlets – published a column Thursday claiming America had a history of “bacteriological warfare” to imply the possibility the Chinese coronavirus pandemic was created by the U.S. military.

The article, whose central thesis is that Washington is incompetent in facing health emergencies, claims “U.S. politicians feel no shame in ignoring the truth” and that America generally has found “failure to effectively cope with the pandemic while China manages to curb domestic cases.” The article accuses American politicians of attacking China to distract from their inability to curb the disease, a common claim in Chinese media.

American politicians – primarily Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – have noted in public that China silenced medical experts who warned of the outbreak of a contagious disease in Wuhan, China, early on the pandemic, and that China destroyed early samples of the virus, making it difficult if not impossible for scientists to trace its evolution. The China Daily column responded to these allegations, some of which China does not deny, by claiming falsely that the United States used biological weapons during the Korean War.

“[T]he media outlets that prop up a blame game by the world’s single hegemonic power are forgetting that it was the U.S. that is alleged to have engaged in bacteriological warfare against Korean and Chinese soldiers during the Korean War (1950-53) and against the Vietnamese (1955-75),” author Rod P. Kapunan, a “Manila-based political analyst,” wrote. “It was the US and some other Western powers that framed people in Iraq and Syria for alleged possession of chemical weapons.”

“Yet the country that was the first to confront the coronavirus and the first to successfully combat the new challenge through its own initiative is today being condemned as the cause of the pandemic,” he claimed.

China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea have spread outrageous rumors for the past 70 years of American military officials using insects in biological warfare during the Korean War. Repeatedly, these countries refused to allow the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) and other global bodies to investigate the areas where the alleged biological warfare occurred, instead using Soviet puppet institutions to claim evidence existed substantiating their claims.

In 1998, documents from the former Soviet Central Committee surfaced revealing the claims to be false. Documents by several Chinese officials similarly revealed that no evidence existed of American biological warfare in the Korean War.

The Wilson Center revealed in a 2016 report that at least one journalist present in North Korea at the time said he saw Chinese soldiers planting “paper packets of insects,” the alleged evidence of American warfare bugs deployed against the Koreans.

Kapunan’s claims that the United States “framed” dictator Bashar al-Assad for chemical weapons use in Syria is also false. Evidence of chemical weapons use by the Assad regime came not only from the United States, but impartial organizations that China has co-opted, such as the United Nations.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has also released several reports on the matter.

The China Daily article did not elaborate on any relationship between the Syrian Civil War and the Chinese coronavirus pandemic. It concluded that those criticizing the Communist Party were guilty of “extreme bigotry, blind superiority, discrimination and contempt of others.”

“Those strongmen and so-called intelligentsia in the West cannot accept China or any other Asian or African country leading in charting the course of human destiny. They cannot conceive of the idea that the awaited emergence of China as an economic power should be welcomed as an epochal change in the history of mankind,” the column asserted.

The Global Times, typically the Chinese government’s most aggressive English-language publication, also published a scathing piece on Thursday insisting that the United States suffered from a “disdain for science” that has resulted in a much higher Chinese coronavirus case count than anywhere else.

“[S]ome said it might be the continual suppression of scientists, spiraling online rumors and conspiracies that have accelerated the downfall of public trust in science when the world needs it most to fight this war that threatens innocent lives,” the Global Times proclaimed.

The newspaper urged people to “show respect to prominent medical professionals and scientists.”

In Wuhan, where the virus originated, Chinese officials immediately arrested eight doctors and health workers for posting advice on social media on how to prevent the spread of contagious disease in January. One of those doctors, Dr. Li Wenliang, became globally renowned after mysteriously dying shortly after his release from police custody, which came accompanied by a profuse apology for encouraging doctors to wear protective gear and wash hands.

Another doctor, Dr. Ai Fen, disappeared for weeks after criticizing China’s cover-up of the outbreak. She recently surfaced in a social media video many have speculated may be staged.

China initially claimed that the virus originated at a “wet market” – where anyone can sell wild animals to eat – in Wuhan. Chinese officials have since claimed this not to be the case, however, and instead claimed the virus originated in an American Army laboratory, providing no evidence for that claim.

China currently claims it has documented 83,944 cases of coronavirus nationwide and 4,637 deaths, the vast majority in Wuhan’s Hubei province. The global scientific community doubts these numbers; one study found the real number of cases in China may be closer to 3 million.

Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.