1. Trump unveils new five-minute coronavirus test device, N95 mask sterilizer
A new coronavirus testing device that can produce a result in five minutes will soon be available throughout the US, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn announced Monday.
The test will be available in doctors’ clinics, emergency rooms and drive-through sites within the next month as officials try to rapidly overcome a lack of readily-available tests during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Just like tests for flu or strep where you go to the doctor’s office so you can get a test done, you can get an answer within minutes of having this test done,” Hahn said during President Trump’s coronavirus task force briefing in the Rose Garden.
The device produced by Chicago-based Abbott Laboratories would normally take 12 months to come to market but with support from the FDA and Trump administration, had been approved in just weeks, Hahn said. […]
The president also announced a separate FDA breakthrough which would allow health care workers to sterilize N95 respiratory masks that are in critically short supply.
The machines from Ohio company Battelle can disinfect 120,000 masks each day.
2. Tunisian with ax, machete wounds man in southern Germany
An assailant armed with an ax and a machete threatened a woman and wounded a man who came to her help in southern Germany on Tuesday, police said.
The suspect, a 27-year-old Tunisian citizen who lives in Augsburg, first broke the windshield of a bus taking bus drivers to their early shift in the Bavarian city, police said.
A few minutes later, at about 4 a.m., he smashed the windshield and side window of a 50-year-old woman’s car and threatened her. Another man tried to overwhelm the assailant, who hit him in the head with a machete, according to a police statement.
The injured 28-year-old was still able to prevent the suspect from attacking anyone else. Police arrested the assailant at the scene and the victim was taken to a hospital.
3. Canada’s spy service moves quietly ahead with data-crunching plans: documents
(If anyone who reads this site knows how to contact Ed Snowdon, I would like to hear his take on this please.)
OTTAWA — Canada’s spy agency is moving quietly ahead with plans to collect and use databases containing personal information about Canadians, newly released documents show.
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service says the initiative — made possible by sweeping security legislation passed last year — will enable the agency to crunch large volumes of information and detect previously unseen patterns.
However, the new power to gather, sift and keep Canadian datasets worries civil liberties advocates.
The government should give Canadians a better sense of the kind of information CSIS is now allowed to exploit, given the existing dangers of falsely identifying people as security threats, said Tim McSorley, national co-ordinator of the Ottawa-based International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group.
“It would help to ensure that Canadians’ rights are being protected,” McSorley said in an interview.
In a broader sense, McSorley questioned whether “we want to be moving in this direction of intelligence agencies collecting and retaining vast amounts of information?”
Memos disclosed to The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act show CSIS set the process in motion last July with a request to Ralph Goodale, public safety minister at the time.
(Ralph Goodale repeatedly lied to Canadians in order to protect Islam and demonstrated that his interests are not law and order and equality or even reality, but the preservation of a Neo-Marxist world view. Canadians should consider this intrusion to be a significant threat to democratic and individual rights)
4. India to Blacklist 800 Indonesian Preachers After Religious Gathering Leads to COVID-19 Fallout
New Delhi (Sputnik): A Muslim organisation in India organised a religious gathering in the national capital on 16 March, with participants from Malaysia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Kyrgyzstan. But around 1,400 people continued to stay at the venue even after New Delhi ordered a 21-day lockdown, risking their health in the process.
India’s federal Home Ministry is considering to blacklist around 800 Islamic preachers from Indonesia, known as Tablighi, who came on tourist visas to attend a three-day religious conference in Delhi amid the coronavirus outbreak.
They would be blacklisted for violating visa norms as the group entered the country on a tourist visa but participated in a religious congregation.
The 3-day religious gathering hosted on 16 March at an Islamic shrine in the densely populated Nizamuddin area of south Delhi was attended by around 8,000 people from India and countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Kyrgyzstan.
5. India is closing down mosques and even sealing in muslims who refuse to obey instructions not to gather in groups. This is one example of Indian attempts to stop repeated refusals to stop religious services in groups
6. The linked article here claiming that China is downplaying the consequences of the CCP WMD in their population by a factor of 15 to 40 times, would make sense of the measures our governments are taking and the way we are all supposed to live now.
7. Feminists (Neo-Marxists) may be responsible for the extent of infections and deaths in Spain.
- A class action lawsuit filed on March 19 accuses the Spanish government — highly ideological by any standard, as the Communist coalition partner, Podemos, was founded with seed money from the Venezuelan government — of knowingly endangering public safety by encouraging the public to participate in more than 75 feminist marches, held across Spain on March 8, to mark International Women’s Day.
- The Spanish government’s main point man for the coronavirus, Fernando Simón, claimed in a nationwide press conference that there was no risk of attending the rallies on March 8. “If my son asks me if he can go, I will tell him to do whatever he wants,” he said.
- “Honestly, it seems to me a joke that the government has waited until today, clearly for political reasons, to make this announcement. The Socialist-Communist government has once again put its political interests above the common good. This gross negligence should lead to resignations. — Elentir, Contando Estrelas, March 9, 2020.
8. Important document by ISECSO on how to make sure the Islamic ummah remains solid in the Diaspora in order to gain dominance. This is a PDF download document they have removed from their site at this point.
9. Turkmenistan bans the word “coronavirus”
(The following is a machine translation of what appears to be a Russian article. Fascinating if true, and for nations that still have immigration policies designed for the well being of it’s citizens, policies should be adjusted accordingly. Sadly, in Canada, it means these people will get priority)
Turkmen authorities have banned the use of the word “coronavirus” and excluded it from use in order to hide information about the pandemic. This was reported by the portal of the organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
According to human rights activists, all media in the country were banned from mentioning the word “coronavirus” in publications. It was also excluded from a special brochure that the Ministry of Health of Turkmenistan sends to educational institutions, hospitals and workplaces.
At the same time, citizens who wear masks on the street and talk about the global coronavirus pandemic can be arrested by plainclothes police officers.
Earlier, the President of Turkmenistan, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov , during a government meeting, advised citizens to defend themselves against viruses with an old folk remedy – garmala smoke. The leader of the country noted that over the millennia, the ancestors of Turkmens have created national methods to combat bad habits and prevent various infectious diseases.
According to the latest data, no cases of coronavirus infection have been recorded in Turkmenistan. The total number of infected SARS-CoV-2 in the world exceeded 786 thousand people; almost 38 thousand died, more than 165 thousand were cured.
Reporters without borders article here.
10. Nigel Farage update on CCP Virus, and the new authoritarianism in the UK
Thank you MaLo, PePi, M., Wrath of Khan, Richard, EB., Xanthippa, Chris Jones, Yucki and many more who have left thoughts, news and analysis in the Reader’s Links comments this week so far.
Turkmenistan is beyond the beyond.
From 28 March 2016
People have a particular way of explaining almost every process in their lives. If asked why a plane flies to Turkmenistan, we would say that it was due to lift force. But if you ask a Turkmen the same question, he would resolutely reply, “the plane flies to Turkmenistan because the passengers were given visas, and Gurbanguly Malikgulyyewic, our leader and wise ruler, has agreed to accept the plane on Turkmen land.”
See, in Turkmenistan, everything submits to the will of the leader; birds do not sing, the sun does not rise, and the wind does not blow without his approval. After all, Berdimuhamedow is the initiator and inspirer of the new Renaissance and global reformations; God give him the power and strength to carry a nation of 5.3 million Turkmens on his shoulders! There are no laws in Turkmenistan; there is only the will of the leader. Greater than any law, it lights the way for Turkmens like the sun.
http://varlamov.ru/1740845.html
31 March 2020
Turkmenistan: All’s well that ends well
State media is gradually breaking the taboo on mentioning the pandemic, but denialism is still the order of the day.
https://eurasianet.org/turkmenistan-alls-well-that-ends-well