| North Korea Fires Missile Into East Sea Posted: 28 Mar 2020 04:47 PM PDT |
| North Korea fires missiles into sea, criticized by South Posted: 28 Mar 2020 04:40 PM PDT  North Korea on Sunday fired two suspected ballistic missiles into the sea, South Korea said, calling it "very inappropriate" at a time when the world is battling the coronavirus pandemic. South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said it detected the projectiles flying from the North Korean eastern coastal city of Wonsan into the waters between the Korean Peninsula and Japan on Sunday morning. It urged North Korea to stop such military action.
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| Saudi forces intercept missile over curfew-locked Riyadh Posted: 28 Mar 2020 03:47 PM PDT  Saudi forces intercepted a missile over Riyadh late Saturday, state media said, after at least three explosions were heard in the curfew-locked capital amid efforts to curb the coronavirus pandemic. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, but Yemen's Iran-aligned Huthi rebels have previously targeted Riyadh and other Saudi cities with missiles, rockets and drones. It was the first major assault on Saudi Arabia since the Huthis offered last September to halt attacks on the kingdom after devastating twin strikes on Saudi oil installations.
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| Saudi forces destroy missile fired over capital Riyadh Posted: 28 Mar 2020 03:23 PM PDT |
| Coronavirus: latest global developments Posted: 28 Mar 2020 02:15 PM PDT  More than 30,000 people have died worldwide from the coronavirus -- two-thirds of them in Europe -- since the epidemic started in China in December, according to an AFP tally compiled at 1900 GMT Saturday based on official sources. The countries with the most official deaths are Italy with 10,023, Spain (5,690), mainland China (3,295), Iran (2,517) and France (2,314).
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| The week that was: Stories from the coronavirus saga Posted: 28 Mar 2020 12:12 PM PDT  The world changed remarkably this past week — yet again, just as it did the week before, as the coronavirus marched across the world. The Federal Bureau of Prisons has a scattershot policy on COVID-19 safety, and both advocates and even prison guards are calling for quick reform.
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| What you need to know today about the virus outbreak Posted: 28 Mar 2020 11:25 AM PDT  President Donald Trump is raising the idea of what he's calling a quarantine involving New York and parts of New Jersey and Connecticut, states hard-hit by the coronavirus pandemic. The United States has more confirmed coronavirus infections than any other country. Cities including Detroit, Chicago and New Orleans are growing as hot spots of infection, while New York City continues to be pummeled.
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| Brazil’s Bolsonaro makes life-or-death coronavirus gamble Posted: 28 Mar 2020 10:47 AM PDT  Even as coronavirus cases mount in Latin America's largest nation, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has staked out the most deliberately dismissive position of any major world leader, calling the pandemic a momentary, minor problem and saying strong measures to contain it are unnecessary. Bolsonaro says his response to the disease matches that of President Donald Trump in the U.S., but the Brazilian leader has gone further, labeling the virus as "a little flu" and saying state governors' aggressive measures to halt the disease were crimes. On Thursday, Bolsonaro told reporters in the capital, Brasilia, that he feels Brazilians' natural immunity will protect the nation.
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| Whales face more fatal ship collisions as waters warm Posted: 28 Mar 2020 09:11 AM PDT  Climate change is imperiling the world's largest animals by increasing the likelihood of fatal collisions between whales and big ships that ply the same waters. Warming ocean temperatures are causing some species of whales in pursuit of food to stray more frequently into shipping lanes, scientists say. The phenomenon already has increased ship strikes involving rare North Atlantic right whales on the East Coast and giant blue whales on the West Coast, researchers say.
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| Coronavirus roils every segment of US child welfare system Posted: 28 Mar 2020 08:39 AM PDT  Child welfare agencies across the U.S., often beleaguered in the best of times, are scrambling to confront new challenges that the coronavirus is posing for caseworkers, kids and parents. For caseworkers, the potential toll is physical and emotional. Child welfare workers in several states, including Michigan, Massachusetts, New York and Washington, have tested positive for COVID-19.
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| Ex-Sen. Tom Coburn, conservative political maverick, dies Posted: 28 Mar 2020 08:23 AM PDT  Former U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn was stubborn as a mule and conservative to his core. Coburn, who died early Saturday at age 72, joined the U.S. Senate the same year as President Barack Obama, and the pair became fast friends despite their contrasting ideologies. In Oklahoma, where Obama failed to carry a single county in his 2008 presidential bid, voters took note.
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| Analysis: Virus pulls federalism debate into 21st Century Posted: 28 Mar 2020 08:00 AM PDT  A flu pandemic was ravaging the world, killing indiscriminately in almost every country, including more than 600,000 deaths in the United States. Woodrow Wilson did not address the nation on the subject of the pandemic of 1918-19 a single time. While his posture on the flu seems passive, even reckless, in a modern light, Wilson's approach to war demonstrated an entirely different view of federal power than President Donald Trump's approach to the current pandemic.
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| A Virus to Kill Populism, Or Make It Stronger Posted: 28 Mar 2020 07:11 AM PDT  (Bloomberg) -- The last global crisis paved their way to power. The question is whether the latest one will loosen their grip on it.Fallout from the 2008 financial meltdown produced an electoral earthquake that upended postwar party politics, brought a new breed of populists to government and decisively shifted the balance among global powers toward China from the U.S. Novel Coronavirus may prove just as disruptive.It's too soon to predict which governments will suffer politically from their handling of the virus, as the death toll continues to grow and a quarter of the world's population remains in lockdown. Whether responses to Covid-19 unmask or entrench such leaders as U.S. President Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, or Italian opposition chief Matteo Salvini remains unclear.So, too, whether China will succeed or fail in transforming a disease that appears to have spread across the globe from Hubei province into a geopolitical opportunity, as it airlifts medical teams and supplies of masks and other equipment to burnish its image in countries such as Iran and Italy.But what's already apparent is that for populist leaders who thrive on portraying their country as under siege, the coronavirus is proving a challenge. This time the enemy is an invisible one that doesn't easily fit into a simple anti-elite, anti-migrant or anti-science narrative that has proven so politically fruitful before. Rather than fear others, people fear for themselves. Not only is the coronavirus creating a Darwinist test of which systems and societies are better able to cope, more citizens will put a premium on political decisions being underpinned by truth, said Ahn Cheol-soo, a former South Korean presidential candidate and trained physician. Ahn was speaking from self-isolation after treating the sick in the country's outbreak epicenter of Daegu."It will eventually help build a political landscape in which the public isn't swayed by populism," said Ahn, who has formed a political group to mount a challenge in April 15 parliamentary elections. "That will eventually make populists lose ground."At the same time, some leaders have sought to tap into wider unease about a virus that has spread across a deeply interconnected globe at the speed of modern airliners. It's forced even governments that favor globalization to shut down travel and disrupt supply chains. The course of the virus could yet be portrayed as vindicating nationalist arguments for a less connected world.After initially dismissing the severity of the pandemic, Trump has since tweeted that "THIS IS WHY WE NEED BORDERS!" He referred to the coronavirus as "Chinese" before backtracking.In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban initially focused popular ire on a group of Iranian students who were quarantined and later tested positive. As the virus took hold in the wider community, he then dropped the anti-immigrant theme that helped him win a third straight election in 2018.Salvini, leader of the League party whose roots are in the hardest-hit north of Italy, linked the spread of the disease with migrants who crossed the Mediterranean to Italy from north Africa. He didn't provide any evidence.A League official said that regional governors in northern Italy in early February had asked for quarantine for everyone arriving from China but that the pandemic exploded because the Rome government did not act fast enough. The League believes more checks have to be made on people arriving from outside Italy, the official said.A former interior minister, Salvini has also portrayed Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte as doing too little too slowly to combat coronavirus, while at the same time accusing him of imposing the decisions of an elite without consulting parliament. Yet none of these arguments has gained traction to date, in a country struggling to cope with what's quickly becoming the world's largest outbreak of the disease.Italians are instead rallying behind their institutions in the emergency. Conte's imposition of an ever-tighter lockdown has seen his government's popularity reach a record high, backed by 71% of Italians in March, according to a Demos survey. But whether that popularity will survive a postmortem of Conte's handling of the crisis also remains to be seen.A similar dynamic seems to be at play in Germany. Chancellor Angela Merkel and her beleaguered Christian Democratic Union party were severely damaged in elections by the wave of refugees who fled to the country from the Syrian war in 2015-16.They are now seeing their popularity rise on the back of their coronavirus response. A recent poll showed support for the Christian Democrats has jumped by five percentage points. The party joined traditionally fiscally cautious peers such as U.S. Republicans and Britain's Conservatives in abandoning ideological commitments to cutting budget deficits. Finance Minister Olaf Scholz called for a "bazooka" to be fired into the economy."The economic crisis, rising immigration, these are things you can easily blame on one group or the political elite," said Benjamin Moffitt, a senior lecturer in politics at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, whose latest book "Populism" was published this month. "But this is a biological crisis—to stop it, you can't just drain the swamp or block refugees from coming."Whereas Salvini has the luxury of opposition and risks at worst being side lined, the stakes are higher for Trump and Bolsonaro.The U.S. president has come under attack from state governors for not acting quickly enough to contain Covid-19, despite a $2 trillion aid package for the economy passed in the Senate. He claimed churches would be full again for Easter, a little over two weeks away. On Thursday, the U.S. surpassed Italy in cases, with more than 80,700, and is poised to overtake China.In Brazil, Bolsonaro's insistence that life and business should go on as usual, despite the virus, has led to protests in the major cities with people hanging out of their windows to bang pots and pans. Already under pressure before the pandemic as scandal swirled around his family and a promised economic renaissance failed to materialize, Bolsonaro looks vulnerable."This crisis has knocked the government out of his orbit," said Creomar de Souza, chief executive of Dharma Political Risk and Strategy in Brazil. "The characteristics he has that were seen as positive, like combativeness and obstinacy, are now being seen as a liability."Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrado, a populist from the left, has also downplayed the severity of the threat from the virus, telling people "to keep taking the family out to eat."Although Mexico still has relatively few recorded cases, a telephone poll by the owner of newspaper Reforma found 44% of Mexicans now disapprove of his handling of the coronavirus threat, to 37% in favor. On Thursday, he appeared to change his tone and called on companies to send their workers home.In the U.K., the urgency surrounding Covid-19 has even buried the debate over the terms of the country's departure from the European Union—and with it Prime Minister Boris Johnson's flirtation with populism.He deferred conspicuously to medical and epidemiological experts in his initial attempt at taking a measured approach to fighting the disease. During the Brexit campaign, experts were deliberately derided.Yet the idea that fighting coronavirus will lead to a restoration of a pre-financial crisis faith in fact is probably wishful thinking, according to Moffitt. That particularly goes for the U.S."Expertise, in terms of this idea of neutral knowledge is dead in a lot of people's minds," he said. "You cannot spend a decade arguing that climate change is nonsense and that you don't need vaccines, and then turn around and say actually, yes we need experts." (Adds background on Italy's League in 12th paragraph)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Trump: No quarantine, but travel advisory for NY, CT and NJ Posted: 28 Mar 2020 07:08 AM PDT  President Donald Trump backed away from calling for a quarantine for coronavirus hotspots in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, instead directing Saturday night that a "strong Travel Advisory" be issued to stem the spread of the outbreak. Trump had told reporters earlier that he had spoken with Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, among others who wanted the federal government to restrict travel from the New York metropolitan area to their states.
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| Analyzing the Patterns in Trump's Falsehoods About Coronavirus Posted: 28 Mar 2020 07:08 AM PDT  Hours after the United States became the nation with the largest number of reported coronavirus cases on Thursday, President Donald Trump appeared on Fox News and expressed doubt about shortages of medical supplies, boasted about the country's testing capacity, and criticized his predecessor's response to an earlier outbreak of a different disease."I don't believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators," he said, alluding to a request by Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York. The president made the statement despite government reports predicting shortages in a severe pandemic -- and he reversed course Friday morning, calling for urgent steps to produce more ventilators.Speaking on Fox on Thursday, Trump suggested wrongly that because of his early travel restrictions on China, "a lot of the people decided to go to Italy instead" -- though Italy had issued a more wide-ranging ban on travel from China and done so earlier than the United States. And at a White House briefing Friday, he wrongly said he was the "first one" to impose restrictions on China. North Korea, for one, imposed restrictions 10 days before the United States.He misleadingly claimed again Friday that "we've tested now more than anybody." In terms of raw numbers, the United States has tested more people for the coronavirus than Italy and South Korea but still lags behind in tests per capita.And he continued to falsely claim that the Obama administration "acted very, very late" during the H1N1 epidemic in 2009 and 2010.These falsehoods, like dozens of others from the president since January, demonstrate some core tenets of how Trump has tried to spin his response to the coronavirus epidemic to his advantage. Here's an overview.Playing down the severity of the pandemicWhen the first case of the virus was reported in the United States in January, Trump dismissed it as "one person coming in from China." He said the situation was "under control" and "it's going to be just fine" -- despite a top official from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention telling the public to "expect more cases."No matter how much the count of cases has grown, Trump has characterized it as low."We have very little problem in this country" with five cases, he said in late January.He maintained the same dismissive tone on March 5, as the number of cases had grown by a factor of 25. "Only 129 cases," he wrote on Twitter.A day later, he falsely claimed that this was "lower than just about" any other country. (A number of developed countries like Australia, Britain and Canada as well as populous India had fewer reported cases at that point.)By March 12, when the tally had again increased tenfold to over 1,200, the president argued that too was "very few cases" compared to other countries.He has also misleadingly suggested numerous times that the coronavirus is no worse than the flu, saying Friday, "You call it germ, you can call it a flu. You can call it a virus. You can call it many different names. I'm not sure anybody knows what it is."The mortality rate for the coronavirus, however, is 10 times that of the flu and no vaccine or cure exists yet for the coronavirus.In conflating the flu and the coronavirus, Trump repeatedly emphasized the annual number of deaths from the flu, and occasionally inflated his estimates. When he first made the comparison in February, he talked of flu deaths from "25,000 to 69,000." In March, he cited a figure "as high as 100,000" in 1990.The actual figure for the 1990 flu season was 33,000, and in the past decade, the flu has killed an estimated 12,000 to 61,000 people each flu season in the United States. That's so far higher than the death count for the virus in the United States, but below projections from the Centers for Disease and Prevention, which estimated that deaths from COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, could range from 200,000 to 1.7 million. As of Friday evening, more than 1,200 deaths in the United States have been linked to the coronavirus.On the flip side, Trump inflated the mortality and infection rates of other deadly diseases as if to emphasize that the coronavirus pales in comparison. "The level of death with Ebola," according to Trump, "was a virtual 100%." (The average fatality rate is around 50%.) During the 1918 flu pandemic, "you had a 50-50 chance or very close of dying," he said Tuesday. (Estimates for the fatality rate for the 1918 flu are far below that.)This week, as cities and states began locking down, stock markets tumbled and jobless claims hit record levels, Trump again played down the impact of the pandemic and said, with no evidence and contrary to available research, that a recession would be deadlier than the coronavirus.Overstating potential treatments and policiesThe president has also dispensed a steady stream of optimism when discussing countermeasures against the virus.From later February to early March, Trump repeatedly promised that a vaccine would be available "relatively soon" despite being told by public health officials and pharmaceutical executives that the process would take 12 to 18 months. Later, he promoted treatments that were still unproven against the virus, and suggested that they were "approved" and available though they were not.Outside of medical interventions, Trump has exaggerated his own policies and the contributions of the private sector in fighting the outbreak. For example, he imprecisely described a website developed by a company affiliated with Google, wrongly said that insurers were covering the cost of treatment for COVID-19 when they only agreed to waive copayments for testing, and prematurely declared that automakers were making ventilators "right now."Often, he has touted his complete "shut down" or "closing" of the United States to visitors from affected countries (in some cases leading to confusion and chaos). But the restrictions he has imposed on travel from China, Iran and 26 countries in Europe do not amount to a ban or closure of the borders. Those restrictions do not apply to U.S. citizens, permanent residents, their immediate families, or flight crews.Not only were these restrictions total and absolute in Trump's telling, they were also imposed on China "against the advice of a lot of professionals, and we turned out to be right." His health and human services secretary, however, has previously said that the restrictions were imposed on the recommendations of career health officials. The New York Times has also reported that Trump was skeptical before deciding to back the restrictions at the urging of some aides.Blaming othersThe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent test kits to states in February, some of which were flawed and produced inconclusive readings. Problems continued to grow as scientists and state officials warned about restrictions on who could be tested and the availability of tests overall. Facing criticism over testing and medical supplies, Trump instead shifted responsibility to a variety of others.It was the Obama administration that "made a decision on testing that turned out to be very detrimental to what we're doing," he said on March 4. This was a misleading reference to draft guidance issued in 2014 on regulating laboratory-developed tests, one that was never finalized or enforceable. A law enacted in 2004 created the process and requirements for receiving authorization to use unapproved testing products in health emergencies.The test distributed by the World Health Organization was never offered to the United States and was "a bad test," according to Trump. It's true that the United States typically designs and manufactures its own diagnostics, but there is no evidence that the WHO test was unreliable.As for the shortage of ventilators cited by Cuomo, Trump has misleadingly said that the governor declined to address the issue in 2015 when he "had the chance to buy, in 2015, 16,000 ventilators at a very low price and he turned it down."A 2015 report establishing New York's guidelines on ventilator allocation estimated that, in the event of a pandemic on the scale of the 1918 flu, the state would "likely have a shortfall of 15,783 ventilators during peak demand." But the report did not actually recommend increasing the stockpile and noted that purchasing more was not a cure-all solution as there would not be enough trained health care workers to operate them.Rewriting historySince the severity of the pandemic became apparent, the president has defended his earlier claims through false statements and revisionism.He has denied saying things he said. Pressed Tuesday about his pronouncements in March that testing was "perfect," Trump said he had been simply referring to the conversation he had in July with the president of Ukraine that ultimately led to the House impeaching him. In fact, he had said "the tests are all perfect" like the phone call.He has compared his government's response to the current coronavirus pandemic ("one of the best") favorably to the Obama administration's response to the H1N1 epidemic of 2009 to 2010 ("a full scale disaster"). In doing so, Trump has falsely claimed that former President Barack Obama did not declare the epidemic an emergency until thousands had died (a public health emergency was declared days before the first reported death in the United States) and falsely said the previous administration "didn't do testing" (they did).At times, Trump has marveled at the scale of the pandemic, arguing that "nobody would ever believe a thing like that's possible" and that it "snuck up on us."There have been a number of warnings about both a generic worldwide pandemic and the coronavirus specifically. A 2019 government report said that "the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large scale outbreak of a contagious disease." A simulation conducted last year by the Department of Health and Human Services modeled an outbreak of a rapidly spreading virus. And top government officials began sounding the alarms about the coronavirus in early January.Despite his history of false and misleading remarks, Trump has also asserted, "I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company
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| Trump boosts virus aid, warns governors to be 'appreciative' Posted: 28 Mar 2020 07:05 AM PDT  After days of desperate pleas from the nation's governors, President Donald Trump took a round of steps to expand the federal government's role in helping produce critically needed supplies to fight the coronavirus pandemic even as he warned the leaders of hard-hit states not to cross him. "I want them to be appreciative," Trump said Friday after the White House announced that he would be using the powers granted to him under the Korean War-era Defense Production Act to try to compel auto giant General Motors to produce ventilators. "We have done a hell of a job," Trump said, as he sent an ominous message to state and local leaders who have been urging the federal government to do more to help them save lives.
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| 'Officers are scared out there': Coronavirus hits US police Posted: 28 Mar 2020 06:45 AM PDT  More than a fifth of Detroit's police force is quarantined; two officers have died from coronavirus and at least 39 have tested positive, including the chief of police. An increasing number of police departments around the country are watching their ranks get sick as the number of coronavirus cases explodes across the U.S. The growing tally raises questions about how laws can and should be enforced during the pandemic, and about how departments will hold up as the virus spreads among those whose work puts them at increased risk of infection. "I don't think it's too far to say that officers are scared out there," said Sgt. Manny Ramirez, president of Fort Worth Police Officers Association.
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| Epidemic infects Europe with 'germ of division' Posted: 28 Mar 2020 06:38 AM PDT  The European Union has faced and survived a series of existential threats over the years but the coronavirus epidemic has exposed old wounds that could yet prove fatal. A debt crisis in Mediterranean countries, a series of refugee influxes and the ongoing saga on Brexit all rattled the European project but did not sink it. "The germ is back," former European Commission president and one of the modern union's chief architects, Jacques Delors, told AFP on Saturday.
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| Locked up: No masks, sanitizer as virus spreads behind bars Posted: 28 Mar 2020 06:21 AM PDT  The chow hall line at New York's Rikers Island jail had halted. For three hours, the men stood and waited, without food, until a correctional officer quietly delivered the news: A civilian chef was among those who tested positive for the coronavirus. Health experts say prisons and jails are considered a potential epicenter for America's coronavirus pandemic.
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| AP FACT CHECK: Trump a rosy outlier on science of the virus Posted: 28 Mar 2020 06:19 AM PDT  It's been that way since before the virus spread widely in the United States, when he supposed that the warmer weather of April might have it soon gone, a prospect the public health authorities said was not affirmed by the research. Now he's been talking about a country revved up again by Easter, April 12, while his officials gingerly play down that possibility from the same White House platform.
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| Living outside lockdown: Barbers, beauty shops still open Posted: 28 Mar 2020 05:43 AM PDT  With South Carolina's first coronavirus hot spot just a short jaunt up the highway, Johellen Lee hadn't been out for anything but groceries for nearly a month. Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said in a Facebook question-and-answer session that "Mississippi's never going to be China," referring to the authoritarian country's near total shutdown of COVID-19 hot spots.
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| Virus prevention measures turn violent in parts of Africa Posted: 28 Mar 2020 04:08 AM PDT  Police fired tear gas at a crowd of Kenyan ferry commuters as the country's first day of a coronavirus curfew slid into chaos. Virus prevention measures have taken a violent turn in parts of Africa as countries impose lockdowns and curfews or seal off major cities. Cases across Africa were set to climb above 4,000 late Saturday.
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| Iran coronavirus death toll tops 2,500: ministry Posted: 28 Mar 2020 03:37 AM PDT  Iran announced Saturday that 139 more people had died from the novel coronavirus, raising the official death toll to 2,517 in one of the world's worst-affected countries. Health ministry spokesman Kianoush Jahanpour told a news conference that 3,076 more cases had been confirmed in the past 24 hours, bringing the total number of infections to 35,408. Iran has imposed strict new containment measures, after weeks of public appeals largely failed to deter hundreds of thousands taking to the roads to visit family for the Persian New Year holidays.
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| A walk through town: Families, coronavirus and togetherness Posted: 28 Mar 2020 03:30 AM PDT  In a quiet suburb just north of Richmond, Virginia, a mother and her three children spend a weekday afternoon planting a small garden of spinach, red cabbage and lettuce. Stuck at home, thrust together, parents and children are navigating the most unsettling of circumstances and finding new ways to connect. This is one community's story, gathered this week from walks and observations of families keeping to themselves yet still, somehow, managing to remain part of a larger whole.
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| China sends medical aid to Pakistan to combat virus outbreak Posted: 28 Mar 2020 02:51 AM PDT  China sent a plane loaded with medical personnel and supplies Saturday to help Pakistan fight the spread of the coronavirus in one of the world's most populous nations. In Iran, which is battling the worst outbreak in the region, state TV said Saturday another 139 people had died from the virus. China has sought to portray itself as a global leader in the fight against the outbreak, which began a few months ago in its Wuhan province.
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| The Coronavirus Disaster You’re Not Paying Attention To Posted: 28 Mar 2020 02:16 AM PDT  BARCELONA—It was a perfect Barcelona day. The wet air was filled with spring smells. The city's pollution rate had declined by 89 percent. Crime had dropped more than 70 percent. Police cars, lights flashing, sat idle on the empty street. The ambulances, around 10 of them, were parked in front of my local health center. One rode past, its lights on but with the siren silent.A perfect day, except the COVID-19 death toll had just exceeded that of China, a country of 1.4 billion.After Putin's Big Fail, Russia Braces for COVID-19 OnslaughtSpain is reeling from the coronavirus epidemic. By Friday, the daily death toll reached 769 over 24 hours. As of this writing, Spain has suffered 4,858 fatalities overall with 64,059 confirmed cases—including 9,444 health workers. Some 36,293 people are hospitalized. Only 9,357 patients have recovered. All this in a county with a population one-seventh the size of the United States.The mood in this context of looming mortality is surreal. The virus is invisible, death omnipresent and the silent streets speak to an almost ghostly existence.The only reasonably good news was that Thursday saw only a 14 percent increase in cases compared with 18 percent a day earlier and 20 percent on Wednesday. Across the country, the army has been deployed to deep-clean hospitals and other facilities—including some 900 nursing homes where at least 1,517 deaths have been recorded. Members of the Military Emergencies Unit found corpses, including "some totally abandoned elderly people—even some who were dead in their beds," Defense Minister Margarita Robles told the Ana Rosa TV program. Nearly two weeks into a general quarantine that the government says will last at least until April 12, and it is hard to remember a time when people rubbed shoulders, drinking and dancing in the ciudad condal. Now, the time of revelry feels like a distant era. To be sure there are the nightly 8 p.m. cheers for health workers on the front lines of the crisis. And on a Friday night clutches of young people put out disco lights and dance on their balconies. The spectacle lasts for maybe 10 minutes before they go back inside and shutter their doors. How did it all go so wrong so quickly?While China was busy fighting the virus, warnings about the critical importance of being prepared for what was coming went largely unheeded. "Perhaps stopping the entry of the virus was impossible, because it involved confining a country without [visible] cases," wrote a Spanish researcher, a consultant physician in internal medicine and infectious diseases, in an opinion piece in the Spanish daily El Periodico. "But we could have bought equipment and designed protocols that would not put our health workers in the battle that they are currently fighting piecemeal and without adequate weapons." Even when the disease had arrived at Spain's doorstep there was a feeling of business as usual. In a country where the elderly often pick up their grandchildren, schools didn't close until just before a national emergency was declared. Airports didn't bother to screen passengers for signs of fever. The week before, on March 8, a huge march celebrating International Women's Day was allowed to take place, despite the obvious danger. An unprecedented number of Spain's politicians began to fall ill. Every ideological faction was hit, and right at the top.Spain's Minister of Equality Irene Montero, who attended the rally, tested positive, as did Isabel Díaz Ayuso, president of the Community of Madrid. Meanwhile Santiago Abascal, leader of the ultra right-wing Vox Party, along with Javier Ortega Smith, the party's secretary general, fell ill with the disease. So did Quim Torra, a leader in Catalonia's independence movement. Even Maria Begoña Gómez, the wife of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, was stricken. Throughout the country, but particularly in the Spanish capital of Madrid, the dead began to pile up. On Wednesday, reports surfaced that a new residence for the elderly in the posh district of Chamartin had been decimated by the virus. Some 25 people at the facility had perished, and 50 were infected. Management called the military for help as the silent plague raged around them.The virus has spread quickly to the countryside as well. In addition to Madrid, the Basque Country and Catalonia, the disease has reached Castilla y León, Castilla-La Mancha, and Valencia. Major hospitals as far as Murcia and Andalucia reportedly are inundated by coronavirus patients. To be sure, both Spanish authorities and citizens generally are doing whatever they can to combat the onslaught of disease and death. In Madrid the military has been hard at work trying to create extra capacity for the overflow of patients from hospitals struggling to keep up with an exhausting caseload. On Wednesday, more than 300 coronavirus patients were transferred to Pavilion 5 at the Madrid exhibition center, where scores of beds with oxygen tanks had been installed. A small laboratory was built to analyze patient data, and radiology equipment was brought in largely for chest X-rays. The hope is that an intensive care unit consisting of some 96 beds will be ready by Saturday. "Our role is to unclog all the hospitals in the region," said Eduardo López Puertas, the director general of Ifema, which manages the complex. Meanwhile, citizens played their part. Unlike in Los Angeles, where there are reports that businesses refused to close after a general quarantine was declared, Spaniards throughout the country cooperated as best they could. Faced with a shortage of medical supplies, people brought out their sewing machines and stitched together makeshift masks, which were donated to the elderly. Soup kitchens for the poor and the vulnerable began to emerge. In the United States, supermarkets were scenes of much-publicized chaos and disrespect for social distancing, but in Barcelona and elsewhere, people gently lined up two meters apart, giving the elderly and the vulnerable preference. In Barcelona and other cities, some even took the time to make sure the city's pigeons had enough feed to survive the plague. In the absence of humanity, rats braved some streets as never before. A wild boar was even reported rummaging for food in the city center. When the elderly, living alone and vulnerable, decided to go outside, normal people at newspaper kiosks and on street corners told them to stay in doors. Better loneliness than death, they urged. And while the police fined some for being outdoors, their response with the vulnerable was generally more an expression of concern than anything else. Still the number of intensive care beds, only some 5,000 spread throughout the country, did not nearly match the number who needed them. At the Severo Ochoa Hospital in Leganes, on the outskirts of Madrid, there were more than 260 patients in an emergency room with a capacity of 90. Medical professionals throughout the country had to begin to prioritize who would receive precious oxygen and artificial respiration machines. Patients lay on floors or sat in plastic chairs.Whatever could go wrong went wrong. On Thursday it was learned that fast coronavirus tests that government officials had purchased from a Chinese supplier were essentially garbage. The tests manufactured by a Chinese company were supposed to have a sensitivity level of 80 percent when in fact the level of sensitivity was 30 percent. The tests are to be returned.The lack of molecular testing kits means that the overall number of dead may be underreported in some parts of the country by as much as 70 percent, according to research conducted by the Institute of Health Juan Carlos III that was published in Spain's El Pais newspaper. The institute cited abnormally high overall death rates in hard hit parts of the country, even taking into account coronavirus mortalities.On Wednesday, associations of physicians, pharmacists, nurses, dentists and veterinarians representing some 721,000 medical professionals issued a joint statement in which they warned of a health care system on the verge of total collapse. "Health-care professionals find ourselves in a situation of total insecurity and helplessness," due to the lack of basic supplies, the statement said. Already, as of Wednesday, some 14 percent of the infected were medical professionals.A large hospital can use as many as 5,000 surgical masks per day. Now, at some facilities, hospital workers were jerry-rigging their own equipment including protective pants made from plastic garbage bags. On social media some doctors were touting the use of adapted one-piece diving masks as a protective measure. Workers caring for the elderly clamored for protective equipment, but to no avail. Yet as absolutely frightening as this situation is, virtually no one I know would trade enduring coronavirus in Spain with having to face it in New York, Los Angeles or Seattle, where quarantines and school closures weren't enacted until the very last minute. It is unbelievable to think that there are places that could be worse than Spain right now. But the overwhelming fear for those of us who care about America—and there are many here—is that the United States will endure an even greater catastrophe than we have seen.The new reality is that the virus creeps silently among us, eroding and in many cases destroying whatever sense of safety we had even a month ago. Cooped up in their apartments, people hear the sirens of passing ambulances riding along empty streets. They peek from the windows when the health workers stop to pick up another victim. The disease has become a neighbor.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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| AP PHOTOS: Italy's front-line medical heroes, in portraits Posted: 28 Mar 2020 01:22 AM PDT  The doctors and nurses on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic in Italy are almost unrecognizable behind their masks, scrubs, gloves and hairnets — the flimsy battle armor donned at the start of each shift as the only barrier to contagion. Associated Press photographers fanned out on Friday to photograph them during rare breaks from hospital intensive care units in the Lombardy region cities of Bergamo and Brescia, and in Rome. Friday was a bad day: Italy registered the most deaths since the country's outbreak had exploded five weeks earlier, adding 969 more victims to raise the world's highest COVID-19 toll to 9,134.
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| Australia prepares to fly cruise passengers to Germany Posted: 28 Mar 2020 01:15 AM PDT  Australian authorities pressed ahead Saturday with plans to fly 800 cruise ship passengers to Germany this weekend after a downward revision in the number of people on board who needed to be tested for the coronavirus. Plans had been put in place to fly the European passengers to Germany from the Western Australia state capital, Perth, near where their ship, the Artania, is docked at the port of Fremantle. The plans were thrown into doubt by an apparent spike in the number of people on the ship who were suspected of being infected with the new coronavirus — from nine confirmed cases on Friday to more than 70 possible ones early Saturday.
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| Dozens Clash on Hubei Border After China Lifts Virus Quarantine Posted: 28 Mar 2020 12:36 AM PDT |
| One Battle Boris Johnson Is Clearly Winning Posted: 28 Mar 2020 12:30 AM PDT  (Bloomberg Opinion) -- As recently as a few weeks ago, it seemed as though U.K. politics could not possibly talk about anything besides Brexit, even after the country's formal departure from the EU. Business as usual was expected to return at some unspecified point in the future.As elsewhere, the coronavirus has turned British politics on its head. Unlike Brexit, which continues to divide opinion fairly evenly, the coronavirus crisis has prompted an outbreak of recently unfamiliar unity. Number Cruncher polling (excusive to Bloomberg) finds personal ratings for Boris Johnson -- himself now diagnosed with coronavirus -- that have not been seen for a British Prime Minister since the early days of Tony Blair's premiership in 1997.Fully 72% of eligible voters are satisfied with Johnson's performance as Prime Minister, with 25% dissatisfied. Ninety-one per cent of those currently supporting the Conservatives count themselves as satisfied, along with about half of Labour voters and those voting for other parties and a large majority of undecided voters. Johnson's government gets similar approval ratings, both overall (73% to 24%) and on its handling of the Coronavirus outbreak (72% to 25%).The 1,010 interviews were conducted Tuesday through Thursday, following Johnson's televised address on Monday, but completed before Johnson himself revealed that he had tested positive for the virus. There is some evidence in our data to suggest that these figures were higher in the immediate aftermath of the pre-recorded broadcast, which was watched by around half of the adult population.The strongest numbers of all are for the Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak (77% satisfaction). Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, whose successor will be named on April 4, remains in negative territory (with 54% dissatisfied).While wartime metaphors are now commonplace, this pandemic is not, of course, a war in literal sense -- people are being killed by a disease, not each other. But it does share many of the same characteristics and a similar "rally around the flag" sense. The most obvious of these is the unity against a common enemy, with a lot of agreement across parties and across the public. There is also clear sense of "national effort," and some extremely large government spending on its way.That's not to say that there have been no controversies — there have been debates over strategy and the policy response — though these can easily be drowned out by the enormity of the wider situation.This is not unique to the U.K. Polling elsewhere has shown that the crisis has helped incumbents in other countries too. Emmanuel Macron in France, Italy's Giuseppe Conte and Canada's Justin Trudeau have also seen their ratings improve. Even in the strongly polarized U.S., Donald Trump's approval ratings have seen gains.But what is specific to the U.K. is the perfect storm providing the tailwind to the Conservatives. The post-election bounce for Johnson and his party was still very much in evidence when the coronavirus became the dominant story, and was likely boosted by Brexit on Jan. 31st. Labour has been less visible than it might normally be, and when it is visible it's via its unpopular leader, who remains in place more than three months after his election defeat.Coupled with the rally-round-the-flag effect, it is not hard to see why records are being broken. Of likely voters, 54% would choose Conservatives, up nine points from the December election (excluding Northern Ireland). No Conservative government has ever had such a strong poll rating, according to records compiled by author Mark Pack beginning in 1943.Labour has dropped five points to 28%, giving the Tories their biggest lead while in office since Margaret Thatcher's peak during the Falklands war in 1982. The Liberal Democrats — who this week postponed their leadership election until 2021 — also fall five points to 7%.Of course, no U.K. election is imminent, with even the local elections scheduled for May having been postponed until next year. What's more, being hugely popular in a war or war-like situation can still end in electoral defeat, as it did for Winston Churchill and George H.W. Bush. And that's before we consider likely economic damage of the coronavirus, which is in the very early stages of being felt.But these numbers are significant for another reason. The immediate task for Johnson and other leaders is to convince their citizens to comply with personal restrictions that would be unthinkable in normal times. Irrespective of the wider politics, having the public united behind him can only help. For now, the U.K. feels strangely united.This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.Matt Singh runs Number Cruncher Politics, a nonpartisan polling and elections site that predicted the 2015 U.K. election polling failure.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
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| One Battle Boris Johnson Is Clearly Winning Posted: 28 Mar 2020 12:30 AM PDT  (Bloomberg Opinion) -- As recently as a few weeks ago, it seemed as though U.K. politics could not possibly talk about anything besides Brexit, even after the country's formal departure from the EU. Business as usual was expected to return at some unspecified point in the future.As elsewhere, the coronavirus has turned British politics on its head. Unlike Brexit, which continues to divide opinion fairly evenly, the coronavirus crisis has prompted an outbreak of recently unfamiliar unity. Number Cruncher polling (excusive to Bloomberg) finds personal ratings for Boris Johnson -- himself now diagnosed with coronavirus -- that have not been seen for a British Prime Minister since the early days of Tony Blair's premiership in 1997.Fully 72% of eligible voters are satisfied with Johnson's performance as Prime Minister, with 25% dissatisfied. Ninety-one per cent of those currently supporting the Conservatives count themselves as satisfied, along with about half of Labour voters and those voting for other parties and a large majority of undecided voters. Johnson's government gets similar approval ratings, both overall (73% to 24%) and on its handling of the Coronavirus outbreak (72% to 25%).The 1,010 interviews were conducted Tuesday through Thursday, following Johnson's televised address on Monday, but completed before Johnson himself revealed that he had tested positive for the virus. There is some evidence in our data to suggest that these figures were higher in the immediate aftermath of the pre-recorded broadcast, which was watched by around half of the adult population.The strongest numbers of all are for the Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak (77% satisfaction). Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, whose successor will be named on April 4, remains in negative territory (with 54% dissatisfied).While wartime metaphors are now commonplace, this pandemic is not, of course, a war in literal sense -- people are being killed by a disease, not each other. But it does share many of the same characteristics and a similar "rally around the flag" sense. The most obvious of these is the unity against a common enemy, with a lot of agreement across parties and across the public. There is also clear sense of "national effort," and some extremely large government spending on its way.That's not to say that there have been no controversies — there have been debates over strategy and the policy response — though these can easily be drowned out by the enormity of the wider situation.This is not unique to the U.K. Polling elsewhere has shown that the crisis has helped incumbents in other countries too. Emmanuel Macron in France, Italy's Giuseppe Conte and Canada's Justin Trudeau have also seen their ratings improve. Even in the strongly polarized U.S., Donald Trump's approval ratings have seen gains.But what is specific to the U.K. is the perfect storm providing the tailwind to the Conservatives. The post-election bounce for Johnson and his party was still very much in evidence when the coronavirus became the dominant story, and was likely boosted by Brexit on Jan. 31st. Labour has been less visible than it might normally be, and when it is visible it's via its unpopular leader, who remains in place more than three months after his election defeat.Coupled with the rally-round-the-flag effect, it is not hard to see why records are being broken. Of likely voters, 54% would choose Conservatives, up nine points from the December election (excluding Northern Ireland). No Conservative government has ever had such a strong poll rating, according to records compiled by author Mark Pack beginning in 1943.Labour has dropped five points to 28%, giving the Tories their biggest lead while in office since Margaret Thatcher's peak during the Falklands war in 1982. The Liberal Democrats — who this week postponed their leadership election until 2021 — also fall five points to 7%.Of course, no U.K. election is imminent, with even the local elections scheduled for May having been postponed until next year. What's more, being hugely popular in a war or war-like situation can still end in electoral defeat, as it did for Winston Churchill and George H.W. Bush. And that's before we consider likely economic damage of the coronavirus, which is in the very early stages of being felt.But these numbers are significant for another reason. The immediate task for Johnson and other leaders is to convince their citizens to comply with personal restrictions that would be unthinkable in normal times. Irrespective of the wider politics, having the public united behind him can only help. For now, the U.K. feels strangely united.This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.Matt Singh runs Number Cruncher Politics, a nonpartisan polling and elections site that predicted the 2015 U.K. election polling failure.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
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| With virus, cherished Mideast traditions come to abrupt halt Posted: 28 Mar 2020 12:10 AM PDT  Under the sign "Take out only" and a tall bottle of antiseptic by his side, Mazin Hashim, 54, rearranged the coals heating a water pipe outside his famed cafe in Baghdad. No more evenings spent mostly by men in traditional coffee shops across the region. In a region where life is often organized around large families, communal meals and tribal rules, social distancing can be difficult.
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| 'Off the charts': Virus hotspots grow in middle America Posted: 27 Mar 2020 10:46 PM PDT  The coronavirus continued its unrelenting spread across the United States with fatalities doubling in two days and authorities saying Saturday that an infant who tested positive had died. It pummeled big cities like New York, Detroit, New Orleans and Chicago, and made its way, too, into rural America as hotspots erupted in small Midwestern towns and Rocky Mountain ski havens. Worldwide infections surpassed the 660,000 mark with more than 30,000 deaths as new cases also stacked up quickly in Europe, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.
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| Students provide sanitizers to daily workers to fight virus Posted: 27 Mar 2020 10:03 PM PDT  They toil on the fringes, without any job security or set hours or decent wages. Then, said organizer Ari Wijayanto, they fanned out to distribute 400 bottles of hand sanitizers and 30 bottles of hand soaps to pedicab drivers. As of Thursday, the government said there were 893 confirmed cases in Indonesia, including 16 in Yogyakarta.
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| Joseph Lowery, civil rights leader and MLK aide, dies at 98 Posted: 27 Mar 2020 09:55 PM PDT  The Rev. Joseph E. Lowery fought to end segregation, lived to see the election of the country's first black president and echoed the call for "justice to roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream" in America. For more than four decades after the death of his friend and civil rights icon, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the fiery Alabama preacher was on the front line of the battle for equality, with an unforgettable delivery that rivaled King's — and was often more unpredictable. Lowery had a knack for cutting to the core of the country's conscience with commentary steeped in scripture, refusing to back down whether the audience was a Jim Crow racist or a U.S. president.
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| Civil rights leader, MLK aide Joseph Lowery dies at 98 Posted: 27 Mar 2020 09:54 PM PDT  The Rev. Joseph E. Lowery, a veteran civil rights leader who helped the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and fought against racial discrimination, died Friday, a family statement said. A charismatic and fiery preacher, Lowery led the SCLC for two decades — restoring the organization's financial stability and pressuring businesses not to trade with South Africa's apartheid-era regime — before retiring in 1997. Lowery, considered the dean of civil rights veterans, lived to celebrate a November 2008 milestone that few of his movement colleagues thought they would ever witness — the election of an African American president.
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| Virus coordinator Birx is Trump's data-whisperer Posted: 27 Mar 2020 09:38 PM PDT  For many in the public health and political worlds, Dr. Deborah Birx is the sober scientist advising an unpredictable president. Others worry that Birx, who stepped away from her job as the U.S. global AIDS coordinator to help lead the White House coronavirus response, may be offering Trump cover to follow some of his worst instincts as he considers whether to have people packing the pews by Easter Sunday. In coming days, immunologist Birx will be front and center in that debate along with the U.S. government's foremost infection disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, as well as Vice President Mike Pence.
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| Virus delays review of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Posted: 27 Mar 2020 09:37 PM PDT |
| UN chief says misinformation about COVID-19 is new enemy Posted: 27 Mar 2020 08:58 PM PDT  U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Friday the world is not only fighting the "common enemy" of the coronavirus "but our enemy is also the growing surge of misinformation" about COVID-19 disease. Guterres said the U.N. is launching a COVID-19 Communications for Solidarity Initiative to rapidly inform people about the facts and science, "and promote and inspire acts of humanity around the world." The U.N. chief also urged all nations "to stand up against the increase in hate crimes targeting individuals and groups perceived to be associated with the coronavirus."
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| Dour Moscow mayor сomes to fore as 'PM for coronavirus' Posted: 27 Mar 2020 06:36 PM PDT  At a televised meeting with Vladimir Putin, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin flatly told the President that official figures on COVID-19 cases were far from the reality. After that reality check, the official narrative changed swiftly: Putin, who had called the situation "under control", on Wednesday gave a grim-faced address to the nation. "Putin signed up to Sobyanin's position," opposition politician Vladimir Ryzhkov said on the popular Echo of Moscow radio station.
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| Coronavirus Comes to the Kremlin Posted: 27 Mar 2020 06:04 PM PDT  After months of denials, Russia is facing a new reality with respect to the rapid spread of the coronavirus in the country. Friday's statistics officially acknowledge 1,036 diagnosed cases of COVID-19, including four deaths. The real numbers are undoubtedly much higher, as testing for the potentially deadly disease is only starting to pick up steam and some coronavirus deaths are being attributed to other causes.The highly contagious virus has already penetrated the walls of the Kremlin. Russian media reported that two Kremlin officials may have tested positive for the coronavirus. President Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed he was aware of one of those cases, but claimed no knowledge of the second. State media outlet TASS speculated that one of the infected persons may have been a staffer responsible for awards, who traveled to Spain and later attended Putin's presidential awards ceremony in occupied Crimea.Putin's own spokesman couldn't avoid the handshake of the disease, having been present at a star-studded birthday party attended by pop singer Lev Leshchenko, who recently tested positive for coronavirus. Peskov claimed that attendees at the fancy affair maintained proper distancing and "barely even shook hands" in light of the coronavirus advisories. However, video clips aired by the Russian state media TV show 60 Minutes demonstrated that celebrity partiers hugged, kissed and made silly gestures mocking the coronavirus precautions. Peskov denied interacting with the infected singer at the party.Russia Swore It Whipped the Virus, and Fox and CNN Bought ItRussia's State Duma, the lower house of the Federal Assembly of Russia that consists of 450 members, said it will require all of its deputies to take coronavirus tests on Monday.Putin expressed near certainty that Russia could defeat the coronavirus "in two or three months time… maybe even earlier." Taking an obvious jab at the United States, he added: "In some countries, it is said that the war with the virus (they call it a 'war') will be a very long one."State media outlet RT hinted at the upcoming unrest in the United States: predicting that "a people deprived of their myths will not remain complacent forever." RT opined: "With no brawls or ballgames to watch, and the fear of potential hunger gnawing at their bloated bellies and brains… Americans will now find it harder and harder to ignore the truth about their country and its deplorably corrupt media, financial, government, education and health care systems… The crisis is going to get worse before it gets better… America, on the other hand, will only get much worse, with no hope that it is ever going to get better."Moscow's Mayor Sergey Sobyanin expressed his hope that Russia's fight against the coronavirus will be "more smooth and painless than in other countries." He ordered Moscow's restaurants and most stores to shut down for eight days and noted: "The restrictions introduced today are unprecedented in the modern history of Moscow and will create many inconveniences for the everyday life of every person," but argued that "they are absolutely necessary in order to slow the spread of coronavirus infection and reduce the number of cases."Meanwhile, during his Thursday telephone call with reporters, Peskov insisted that in Russia "there is de facto no epidemic" and the Kremlin hopes "to be able to avoid one."Kremlin-controlled Russian state media are using the crisis to promote the view that democratic, progressive countries' inability to curtail the pandemic demonstrated the superiority of Russia's paternalistic government. Russian state media argued that the failure of the United States to prepare for coronavirus, even with a two-month advance notice, also demonstrates the loss of America's global leadership.Appearing on The Evening with Vladimir Soloviev, Political scientist Sergey Mikheyev said that he was very happy to report: "Things are better in Russia than in Europe or America." Mikheyev pointed out that the United States failed to extend a helping hand to Europe, after decades of transatlantic solidarity. He attributed the failure of the Trump administration to help America's European allies to "stupidity, greed," or the overt manifestation of total disregard.The host, Vladimir Soloviev, asserted that overcoming the pandemic "with minimal losses" would cement Putin's success in securing the upcoming nationwide vote on the constitutional amendments designed to maintain the Russian leader's grip on power. In anticipation of the inevitable suffering, Russian state media have been promoting outlandish conspiracy theories that blame the United States—and even their alleged "secret bio-laboratories in Ukraine"—for the creation of the coronavirus.Fiona Hill: Trump's Coronavirus Talk Sounds a Lot Like Russia'sThe ongoing spread of the coronavirus in Russia will be accompanied by the inevitable escalation of anti-Western propaganda. When push comes to shove, the Kremlin frequently resorts to its traditional methods of assigning the blame to evil external forces (most frequently, the United States) and portraying Putin as Russia's only hope and savior of the Motherland.The scope of the pandemic, suddenly extending to the Russian president's inner circle, caused obvious nervousness on Russian state television. Appearing on Russia's 60 Minutes, unsettled pundits traded insults and practically screamed at each other. In spite of the Kremlin's initial claims of successfully controlling the spread of the virus, many are realizing that the worst is yet to come.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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| AP Sources: Alleged Maduro co-conspirator is in DEA custody Posted: 27 Mar 2020 03:29 PM PDT  A retired Venezuelan army general indicted alongside Nicolás Maduro has surrendered in Colombia and is being taken by Drug Enforcement Administration agents to New York for arraignment, four people familiar with the situation said Friday. Cliver Alcalá has been an outspoken critic of Maduro for years.
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