News (1)
Second Chinese defector has PLA and WIV employment backgrounds
On 5 June 2021, StayGate edited the news of Nspirement on the second Chinese defector to the U.S. and on 2 May 2020, Miles Guo disclosed that the Chinese defector is a person from WIV at a higher position of Shi Zhengli.
The first Chinese defector is Yan Limeng from Hong Kong, China.
Based on both news articles, the second Chinese defector has both PLA and WIV employment backgrounds. This defector flew to the U.S. via France with confidential documents from the WIV in late April 2020.
Until now, nobody outside the U.S. intelligence circles knows who this defector is and whether the confidential documents consist of information on whether SARS-CoV-2 is a bioweapon or is accidentally spread from a Wuhan laboratory, except an incumbent head of state in Europe and an outgoing head of state. Guo said, "The two heads of state are stunned and frightened after reading the documents."
News (2)
Chinese defector ignites virus source investigations of WHO into Wuhan
Guo further disclosed that CCP China agreed with WHO to be the first country to be involved in the virus source investigations because of the defector's massive trove of confidential documents about the Wuhan P4 laboratory that were brought out of Wuhan.
Guo also mentioned that Stephen Bannon, the former chief strategy officer of the White House and the 45th US president’s adviser had already met the defector and was shocked too to learn the truth. WHO received the information and knew that high-level figure had arrived in the United States with confidential documents. So, WHO called on the CCP to accept international investigations into the origin of the virus.
News (3)
Chinese netizens hold the other key to the wrongdoings of WIV
After the defector left Wuhan and because of network security considerations, WIV removed many photographs and news articles involving bat coronavirus 'gain of function' research and internal information about its staff from its official web-site, and only a number of news articles cut and kept by Chinese netizens can still be found while the international scientific journals and external online sources have such articles such as the latest research article on laboratory mice with humanized lungs.
On 19 January 2021, StayGate reported that the American Chinese media Sound Of Hope has access to the public news articles.
The evidence cited by netizens includes: On 23 February 2017, The Paper reported that WIV is part of China's plan to build a P4 laboratory network, "to study the pathogens that are dangerous for world crimes"; Laboratory leader Shi Zhengli successfully hybridized SARS-CoV and bat coronavirus to create a new type of coronavirus that can effectively infect the human respiratory tract. Even as early as 21 February 2013, The Jinan Times published an article saying that the evolution of the novel coronavirus can infect humans. Hubei Daily reported on 26 September 2019 that the Executive Committee of the Wuhan Customs Joint Military Games held a drill at Wuhan Tianhe Airport to simulate the entire process of handling the novel coronavirus infection found in the airport port passage. Chinese netizens believe that these reports confirm that the WIV was established for the purpose of making money for the PLA and CCP, and also prove that the authorities conceal the SARS-CoV-2 (CCP virus) epidemic.
News (4)
WIV issues guidelines and regulations on P4 laboratory operations on 22 April 2019
Laboratory accidents are a topic of concern in CCP China before the covid outbreak.
On 22 April 2019, the WIV published on its web-site the news article entitled "Scientists design a training program for BSL-4 laboratory users". The article calls for strict adherence to P4 laboratory practices, highlighting that "infectious diseases pose serious threats to public health and global economies."
The paper disclosed that Yuan Zhiming of WIV of the Chinese Academy of Sciences designed a training program for P4 laboratory users to follow "local, national and international guidelines and regulations".
If the P4 workers of WIV had followed understood guidelines on working in the P4 laboratory since P4 laboratory operations started in 2015, there is no need for a set of "guidelines and regulations".
This suggests a likelihood of a laboratory accident that may result in virus leakage from WIV.
Going back to the topic on where the Chinese defector is and why he or she has not appeared to disclose the origins of COVID-19, U.S. rightist media RedState discloses on 4 June 2021 that the defector is under the protection of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) of the U.S. Below is the news extract.
Ref: http://english.whiov.cas.cn/Research2016/Research_Progress2016/201904/t20190422_208725.html
News (5)
High-ranking Chinese defector has 'direct knowledge' of special Chinese special weapons programme
Reporter : Jennifer Van Laar, RedState
A person believed to be among the highest-ranking defectors ever to the United States from the People’s Republic of China has been working with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) for months, sources inside the intelligence community have told RedState on condition of anonymity. The defector has direct knowledge of special weapons programs in China, including bioweapons programs, those sources say.
The information provided to RedState corroborates and clarifies Thursday evening’s reporting by journalist Adam Housley.
RedState’s sources say that is partially true. FBI Director Christopher Wray was “ambushed” with the information, they say, and Langley was also unaware. Sources say DIA leadership kept the defector within their Clandestine Services network to prevent Langley and the State Department from accessing the person, whose existence was kept from other agencies because DIA leadership believes there are Chinese spies or sources inside the FBI, CIA, and several other federal agencies.
More information will be published as it becomes available to RedState.
Sources tell RedState the defector has been with the DIA for three months and that he has provided an extensive, technically detailed debrief to US officials. In DIA’s assessment, the information provided by the defector is legitimate. Sources say the level of confidence in the defector’s information is what has led to a sudden crisis of confidence in Dr. Anthony Fauci, adding that U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) personnel detailed to DIA have corroborated very technical details of information provided by the defector.
Refs: https://staygate.blogspot.com/2021/06/ccp-scientist-filed-patent-right-for.html, https://staygate.blogspot.com/2021/01/chinese-netizens-chinese-communist.html, https://redstate.com/jenvanlaar/2021/06/04/exclusive-high-ranking-chinese-defector-has-direct-knowledge-of-several-chinese-special-weapons-programs-n391238, https://pjmedia.com/columns/paula-bolyard/2021/06/04/report-high-ranking-chinese-defector-working-with-dia-has-direct-knowledge-of-chinas-bioweapons-program-and-its-very-bad-n1452251
News (6)
Fauci does not care about CCP cover-up of the Wuhan epidemic
Original title : In Response to warning about COVID and China, Fauci Wrote Just 4 Words: 'Too Long For Me To Read'
Reporter : Lily Cooper / Editing : Gan Yung Chyan, KUCINTA SETIA
In one of the most stunning emails released this past week, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases apparently did not have the time to read a lengthy, but not cumbersome, email sent to him last March with a very important message.
That email was released this past week as others have, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act at the request of media outlets such as Buzzfeed News and The Washington Post.
Kudos to both of those organizations for subpoenaing that information, as it’s proved useful as a way to gauge where we are with regard to the public and mental health nightmare of the century. Those organizations were able to obtain a message to Fauci from a Texas-based physicist named Erik Nilsen, according to The Sun.
Those organizations also obtained Fauci’s response, which speaks volumes about him while he used minimal words.
In his 18 March 2020 message, Nilsen wrote to Fauci about his concerns that China was withholding its true COVID numbers. Subsequently, the physicist said he was concerned it was too late to expect anything but herd immunity here in the U.S.
“I’m writing to make sure you already know or at least suspect everything I’m about to tell you,” Nelson, the boss of Texas-based Bio-Signal Technologies, wrote. “I need to clear my conscience because it’s possible (albeit unlikely) that some of what tell you is new and possibly useful in, at least, saving lives in the USA.”
Nilsen warned Fauci that he felt China had been misleading other countries about its COVID death toll by offering case data that was “fabricated.”
“I’m confident that China stopped counting dead Covid-19 infected bodies since January 7, 2020,” Nelson told Fauci. “They’ve been adding fabricated data daily to show (to save face) the world and their own people an impressive flattening of China outbreak curve.”
“I want to emphasize that I do not believe China intentionally did this to harm the world,” Nilsen said. “China wanted the world to believe that their Herculean quarantining efforts contained the outbreak.”
The Texan added that he actually felt that covid had even been spreading in the U.S. since late 2019, and that many deaths from the illness were potentially being wrongly attributed to the flu.
“The spreading in the USA is almost certainly already homogeneous, because it’s been going on since last year without any containment whatsoever … I don’t think Italy is ahead of us. I think we’re ahead and by a large amount.”
That all seems like incredibly insightful information, and that in his position at that point in time, 15 months ago, Fauci might have wanted to read it as he sought out information about the virus that had upended life as it was known but Fauci did not read it, and he said as much in a response to the Nelson email.
How did Fauci respond? He wrote, “Too long for me to read” in a separate email in which he forwarded the message to a man named Robert Eisinger.
Fauci was the public face of the coronavirus pandemic and he did not have 90 seconds to read an email that found its way to him. Fauci was warned about Chinese communist government propaganda by a man with a scientific pedigree during a week in which ordinary people were still stunned that the NBA season had been suspended. His response to that information was that it was “too long” for him to bother with.
Fauci, since March 2020, has become synonymous with COVID-19 and a year that would forever alter lives. Fauci is synonymous with illness, suicide, joblessness, addiction, financial destitution and a never-ending carousel of bad advice.
The establishment media, magazines and Democrats have all along portrayed him as some sort of omnipotent being whose every word needed to be clung to as the gospel. Within the last week, emails from his government account obtained through the FOIA request paint him as a callus, uncaring and selfish individual — he appears to be.
If anything, these emails have only served to confirm what many of us have suspected about the doctor after having been forced to listen to him speak throughout a time which for so many people was a time of personal tragedy.
It was not a time of grief for Fauci, though. Fauci became a rockstar, finally, after botching the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s — early in his career. In March of last year, he was confronted with important information, back before he was posing for magazine covers and asking people to put multiple masks on their children.
Presumably, Fauci already had that information. He simply did not care.
News (7) to (10) / Editing : Gan Yung Chyan, KUCINTA SETIA
Daszak boasted about gain of function research in email to Fauci
According to The National File report on 5 June 2021, a team scientist of Peter Daszak, EcoHealth Alliance, asked Fauci to co-author a thesis which dismissed the "lab leak" theory of the origins of COVID-19. Fauci declined. Before he declined, Daszak boasted the usefulness of gain of function research and is very open with the research conducted at WIV, which is a potential source for the covid outbreak.
The National File reports that a YouTube video of Daszak from December 2019 reveals that he boasts about manipulating coronaviruses in the laboratory, "Coronaviruses are pretty good… you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily. The spiked proteins drive a lot about what happens. You can get the sequence you can build the protein. We work with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this, insert into the backbone of another virus and do some work in a lab."
Daszak is confident that gain of function research is carried out at the laboratory. He opposed the lab leak theory but that does not mean gain of function research is not carried out in WIV and the virus is accidentally released. In fact, he supports another round of virus investigations into Wuhan.
News (8)
Daszak invited scientists to co-author thesis dismissing the lab leak theory
The National File reported that Daszak coerced several scientists to dismiss the lab leak theory, "In February 2020, he was behind a letter from multiple scientists rubbishing the theory, and only one week later, coauthored a paper from the NEJM which stated that “scientists tell us that SARS-CoV-2 did not escape from a jar,” contrasting the outbreak to the Greek myth of Pandora’s Box."
News (9)
Fauci was invited to co-author paper but he refused
A recently published email shows that Fauci was given access to the paper beforehand by Daszak's team scientist Greg Folkers, who asked Fauci if he wanted to coauthor the paper.
The first part of the email from Greg Folkers, Fauci’s Chief of Staff at the NIAID, is redacted, but likely contains some discussion regarding the upcoming paper. “So the question to you – do you want to be a part of this? ie [sic] be a coauthor,” Folkers asks Fauci. “I would vote no – it wud [sic] look weird to add you as a coauthor now. Plus, plate too full,” he continues. “I agree,” Fauci curtly replied. “I will not be a co-author.”
News (10)
Fauci was concerned about the lab leak theory but dismissed it
According to The National File, Daszak had praised Fauci for dismissing the lab leak theory, despite further emails showing that he was initially concerned about such an event having occurred.
Daszak said, “As the PI of the R01 grant publicly targeted by Fox News reporters at the Presidential press briefing last night, I just wanted to say a personal thankyou [sic] on behalf of our staff and collaborators, for publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19 from a bat-to-human spillover, not a lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology."
He continued and thanked Fauci, "From my perspective, your comments are brave, and coming from your trusted voice, will help dispel the myths being spun around the virus’ origins.”
Only a few months after that email, Fauci helped restore funding to Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, which President Trump’s administration had cut off over fears that the organization had indulged in the potentially deadly “gain of function” experiments that led to the covid epidemic.
News (11) to (12) / Reporter : Sharri Markson, The New York Post / Editing : Gan Yung Chyan, KUCINTA SETIA
News (11)
Trump wanted to publicly grill Fauci on Wuhan lab funding and bill China for pandemic
Trump’s senior advisers talked him out of the idea as it was about to be announced, according to insider accounts detailed in a soon-to-be-released book on the origins of COVID-19, “What Really Happened in Wuhan.”
In another bombshell revelation from the book, United States officials suspected China had developed a vaccine for COVID-19 prior to the outbreak, with the claims included in a “sensitive but unclassified” internal report.
The book also reveals President Biden scrapped a push by the State Department’s Arms, Control, Verification and Compliance Unit to formally confront China in Geneva over its cover-up of COVID-19 and potential breaches of the biological weapon convention in the Wuhan lab.
And in a revelation set to embarrass the intelligence community, United States intelligence agencies sought advice on whether the virus was zoonotic — derived from bats — or could have a laboratory origin from the very scientists who had spent 15 years working closely with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, including EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak and University of North Carolina’s Ralph Baric.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence later published a statement saying SARS-CoV-2 was not man-made and could not have been genetically manipulated.
That conclusion is now in doubt, and Biden last week ordered US intelligence agencies to probe COVID-19’s origins and report back in 90 days.
Trump was “enthusiastic” about creating a presidential commission similar to those which probed the the 9/11 terror attacks and the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
A White House executive order was drafted in August 2020 stating: “By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows: The National Commission on the Origins and Costs of COVID-19 is hereby established.”
It was the brainchild of Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro, who said he had the support of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
In meetings in the Oval Office, Trump kicked around names who would be best to lead the commission.
The draft executive order named Sen. Tom Cotton as the commissioner, while Pompeo’s senior policy adviser Mary Kissel and his China adviser Miles Yu were to act as co-chair and vice co-chair or executive director. Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert Spalding would lead the sessions on the geo-politics, and a general from Fort Detrick, the US biological weapons defense program in Maryland, would run the virology portion of the inquiry to investigate whether the virus had been manipulated in a lab.
In a highly controversial move, Trump’s top adviser on the coronavirus, Fauci, would be hauled in to explain why he funded risky coronavirus research in China and the not-for-profit EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak would be grilled on the missing virus database from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, among other topics.
The executive order states the commission would investigate “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic; the economic, political, social, human, and other costs of the pandemic borne by the United States; and whether the People’s Republic of China or the Chinese Communist Party have used the pandemic to advance their own economic, geopolitical, military, or territorial agendas.”
The Commission would have also tallied a bill to send to Beijing “to recover any damages as well as all costs estimated.”
Such a commission, determined to hold the Communist Party to account and ask it to pay repatriations for the economic and human damage from the pandemic, would have been explosive, and significantly corrode already-strained China-US relations.
Yu had an office set up in the White House to run the commission and Navarro says, “We almost got to the finish line.”
However, the presidential commission was killed off during a meeting in the Oval Office where Trump’s economic advisers argued fiercely against it.
Other officials were concerned the commission would be seen as a political maneuver so close to the November election and be derided by the media.
One senior White House official said, “It was actually an excellent idea, just floated way too late.”
The push to Confront China
There were other attempts to hold China accountable for the pandemic that also were shut down.
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Tom DiNanno led a push to demarche the Chinese ambassador in Geneva. Demarche is a formal diplomatic representation from one government to another.
DiNanno wanted to have a senior administration official, perhaps Secretary Pompeo or himself, stand up in a formal setting and confront Beijing over its cover-up of the virus, its gain-of-function research in the Wuhan labs, and potential breaches of the Biological Weapons Convention.
DiNanno wrote a memo on 5 December 2020 to senior figures in the State Department attaching a “sensitive but unclassified” document which outlined the case for the demarche.
He wrote, “The research the Chinese were doing on Gain of Function (GOF) was for potential military offensive purposes, they hid it and did not/have not shared what they knew and know.
“We believe this behavior violates the spirit, object, and purpose of the BWC.”
The idea met with heavy pushback internally.
When DiNanno called one of the State Department’s top weapons experts into his office to discuss the demarche, she told him she had not read his memo and said, “Your attitude is anti-science.”
DiNanno lost his temper at the official’s intransigence and admits to yelling at her in fury: “I’m the boss and when I ask you to do something, I expect you to do it.”
The official repeatedly said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
“She didn’t want China to have a biological weapon that got out of a lab. It’s too horrible a thing to contemplate,” DiNanno said in hindsight.
“But then maybe you should work for another department. If you’re in the biological weapons [agency] you have to deal with biological weapons.”
Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Non-Proliferation Christopher Ford said he agreed with the plan to demarche China as long as the US had solid cause to do so. He was concerned that DiNanno’s claim that the virus may have been the product of human manipulation had not yet been evaluated by scientific experts, however, and Ford wanted to wait until DiNanno had convened a panel of third-party experts to assess it. In the meantime, he directed DiNanno to “draw up a list of tough questions for China for a possible demarche.”
“If we were going to surface this publicly with an adversary power, we needed to be on very solid factual and analytical ground,” Ford said in an interview for the book “What Really Happened In Wuhan.”
After several months of negotiations, the State Department eventually won interagency clearance on several questions to demarche China, but they did not include claims about COVID-19 being genetically manipulated. By then Biden was President and the move was ditched.
The White House did not respond to messages seeking comment.
News (12)
WIV searched for covi vaccine before reporting the covid outbreak
Senior US Government officials were highly concerned with how early China had developed a vaccine for COVID-19.
The officials investigated the possibility vaccine development began prior to the time Beijing admitted to the World Health Organization there was an outbreak on 31 December 2019. They raised the explosive issue in an internal report without forming any conclusions.
“It may seem likely that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been researching a vaccine before the outbreak,” the State Department analysis authored by Miles Yu stated.
Patent applications “may give credence to the following possibility: prior to the surprise outbreak in its close vicinity, WIV had possessed the novel coronavirus in its lab and had known of its lethality and pathogenicity for a while. It had been actively researching a vaccine before anyone else could succeed, thus giving China the sole patent right.”
In mid-January 2020, Fauci donated free Remdesivir samples to China for an experimental clinical trial to see if it was effective against COVID-19.
Remdesivir was an American invention, developed by Fort Detrick scientists and the American pharmaceutical company GILEAD, using taxpayer funds.
After Fauci donated the samples, the WIV compiled a commercial patent for the same treatment on 19 January 2020 before it had even acknowledged human-to-human transmission in a case of likely intellectual property theft.
“It raises the possibility that WIV has been researching a COVID-19 vaccine of its own all along, and would like to prevent GILEAD’s Remdesivir from entering the Chinese market,” the State Department analysis prepared for Pompeo states.
“Filing a patent requires lengthy documentation, clinical statistics and international national legal opinions. It normally would take months or even years to prepare and compile the application, rather than a few days.”
The investigation for the book discovered that Chinese military scientists also filed a patent application for a covi vaccine, different from the duplicative Remdesivir treatment, on 24 February 2020.
The applicant is listed as the Institute of Military Medicine, Academy of Military Sciences of the PLA and the lead inventor is military scientist, Zhou Yusen, now dead.
Australia Flinders University Professor Nikolai Petrovsky, who has developed a covi vaccine, said the early timeframe left open the possibility the Chinese scientists were working on a vaccine before authorities admitted there was a covid outbreak.
Ref: https://nypost.com/2021/06/05/trump-wanted-to-publicly-grill-fauci-on-wuhan-lab-funding/
News (13)
Trump rips Biden in return speech, vows 'tremendous 2022'
Reporter : Jesse O'Neill, The New York Post
After a nearly four-month break from public speaking, Trump took the stage as “God Bless the USA” by Lee Greenwood blared from speakers, praising local and federal officials and candidates — and blasting “radical Democrats.”
“As we gather tonight, our country is being destroyed before our very own eyes. Crime is exploding, police departments are being ripped apart and defunded,” he told his devotees in the city of Greenville.
“Drugs are pouring in, gas prices are soaring, our industries are being pillaged by foreign cyberattacks.
“That’s a lack of respect for our country and our leaders.”
Trump, 74, struck a more subdued tone than the one that marked his more than five years of political rallies, though he still went after the country’s current leadership, assailing rising inflation rates, the cancelation of the Keystone pipeline and foreign relations.
“America’s being demeaned and humiliated on the world stage, our freedom is being overtaken by toxic cancel culture. Our border is wide open, illegal immigration is skyrocketing at a level that we’ve never seen before,” the former president said.
Trump also went after President Biden’s family connections to China, first made public in a series of reports by The Post in October 2020.
“Sadly, the current administration is very timid and frankly corrupt when you look at all the money they’ve been given as a family by China. And instead of holding China accountable, the Biden administration shut down the US government’s investigation into the origins of the virus shortly after taking office. What’s going on?” Trump said.
“We must never forget that Joe Biden and his family took millions of dollars from the Chinese Communist Party, they bought him off, he flagrantly lied about it to the American voters. If you remember it was a big deal at the time and all of a sudden it was canceled. They didn’t want to talk about it. The big tech and the fake news media didn’t want to talk about it.”
Regarding Dr. Anthony Fauci, Trump said he was vindicated when the chief White House medical adviser conceded its possible the coronavirus could have originated in a Chinese lab.
“The media, the Democrats and the so-called experts are now finally admitting what I first said 13 months ago, the evidence demonstrates that the virus originated in a Chinese government lab. You couldn’t say it,” Trump said.
“He’s [Fauci] been wrong on almost every issue, he was wrong on Wuhan, very wrong.”
Spinning his 2020 election defeat as a positive, Trump told the welcoming crowd that the “survival of America” hinges on GOP victories in the midterm elections.
“We are going to have a tremendous 2022 like we did frankly in 2020, more votes than any sitting president in the history of the US. We had a great election. Bad things happened, but we had a great election.”
The ex-president also invited his daughter-in-law Lara Trump on stage, who said she would not seek a Senate seat in North Carolina despite recent speculation.
Trump then gave the nod to North Carolina Rep. Ted Budd, who is running for the open US Senate seat to be vacated by retiring Republican Sen. Richard Burr next year.
Since leaving the White House, Trump has been in political exile at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida and more recently his golf club in Bedminster, NJ.
Though he remains totally banned on US social media, he continues to exert enormous sway over the Republican Party and frequently receives the GOP’s highest officials, who regularly come to pay homage.
Trump’s long-term plans continue to remain a mystery, and he has still not ruled out a 2024 run for the White House.
The Republican is reportedly planning to resume political rallies across the country in coming months, leaving party officials to grapple with his rule in the GOP’s future.
While some Republicans in the Pennsylvania legislature support an audit of the 2020 election, others do not, making the prospect that a review happens unclear.
State Sens. Doug Mastriano and Cris Dush, along with state Rep. Rob Kauffman, traveled to Maricopa County, Arizona this week to tour the forensic audit taking place there. Afterward, Mastriano and Dush expressed support for an audit and said they’d take what they learned to the Pennsylvania Senate GOP leadership.
Sen. Kim Ward, the Pennsylvania Senate GOP’s floor leader, and Sen. Jake Corman, the Pennsylvania Senate’s president pro tempore, have not responded to requests for comment. Neither has remarked publicly on the matter.
State Sen. Dave Argall, a Republican who chairs the Senate’s State Government Committee, told the Pennsylvania Capital-Star that “we are still reviewing the pros and cons” of a possible audit.
An Arizona Senate panel last year subpoenaed ballots and election machines from Maricopa County. After a court battle over the scope of the subpoenas was resolved, an audit started in Phoenix in April.
Republicans control the Pennsylvania Senate. The GOP has seven members on the Senate’s State Government Committee, compared to four for Democrats. Both Mastriano and Dush sit on the panel.
“When a state does an audit, it needs to be modeled after this,” Mastriano told One America News at the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum after touring the facility.
Pennsylvania lawmakers, including House Speaker Bryan Cutler, have previously pushed for an audit, but were unable to get enough support to order one.
Pennsylvania House State Government Chairman Seth Grove, a Republican, does not want an audit to be done.
“On November 19, 2020 the Pa [sic] House of Representatives authorized an audit of the 2020 General Election through the General Assembly’s audit arm, the Legislative Budget and Finance Committee (LBFC) through HR 1100. The LBFC rejected taking up the audit on a party line vote,” he wrote in a statement on Twitter.
“The PA House of Representatives will not be authorizing any further audits on any previous election. We are focused on fixing our broken election law to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat,” he added.
Pennsylvania’s former secretary of state, Kathy Boockvar, a Democrat, in February announced that a statewide risk-limiting audit pilot, which featured a review of over 45,000 randomly-selected ballots, showed “strong evidence” that the ballot count was correct. Pennsylvania Democrats have largely opposed other audit efforts.
“This has been litigated and relitigated; there was no widespread fraud in Pennsylvania,” state Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa told the Capital-Star. “Let’s move on and make it easier for folks to vote and counties to process those votes.”
Former President Donald Trump earlier Friday expressed support for the Pennsylvania lawmakers who do want an audit.
Mastriano, Dush, and Kauffman went to Arizona “to learn the best practices for conducting a full Forensic Audit of the 2020 General Election,” he said in a statement.
“Now the Pennsylvania Senate needs to act. Senate President Jake Corman needs to fulfill his promise to his constituents to conduct a full Forensic Audit. Senator Dave Argall, Chairman of the State Government Committee, has to authorize the subpoenas, if necessary,” he added. “The people of Pennsylvania and America deserve to know the truth. If the Pennsylvania Senate leadership doesn’t act, there is no way they will ever get re-elected!”
A delegation from Pennsylvania will try to convince legislative leaders in the state to back an audit of the 2020 election after visiting an election review taking place in Arizona’s largest county.
“I’m 100 percent for us having one, and I think our leadership is starting to lean that way,” Pennsylvania Sen. Cris Dush told reporters at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, where the Maricopa County audit has been taking place since April 23.
Dush was joined by Pennsylvania Sen. Doug Mastriano and Pennsylvania Rep. Rob Kauffman.
Dush said he was impressed by how the Arizona audit was being done, including how the firms hired by the Arizona Senate are handling chain of custody issues.
“I’ve never seen anything like it, to be quite honest with you. It’s fantastic. I’d like to encourage other state legislatures to get down here and take a look at it as well, especially if you’ve had situations like we experienced in Pennsylvania that really have our citizens in an uproar,” he said.
Mastriano told a pool reporter that he supports Pennsylvania conducting an audit such as the one being executed in Arizona.
“I’m not about overturning anything. I’m just trying to find out what went right, what went wrong, and how do we have better elections in the future?” he said.
That’s the same reasoning Arizona senators have put forth when explaining why they ordered the Maricopa County audit.
One poll showed roughly 40 percent of voters in Pennsylvania have concerns about the integrity of the election, the state senator noted.
“For the sake of our … constitutional republic, and for the sake of people’s peace of mind, let’s just do it. Let’s pick a few counties and put people’s minds at rest,” he said.
A majority of the Pennsylvania legislature would need to support an audit, Mastriano said.
A spokesman for Pennsylvania House Speaker Bryan Cutler, a Republican, noted in an email that Cutler has recently introduced legislation to establish a bureau of election audits. The House speaker previously pushed for an independent audit of the 2020 election. Other Pennsylvania legislative leaders didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Pennsylvania delegation plan to take the information they learned while in Arizona back to Republican leaders.
Auditors hired by the Arizona Senate, led by Florida-based Cyber Ninjas, are reviewing the nearly 2.1 million ballots cast in the county during the 2020 presidential election. They have also examined tabulators and other machines used during the contest.
Republicans control the Arizona Senate. Democrats have largely opposed the audit, arguing that voter information could be at risk of being compromised.
Observers sent to the arena by Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, said they saw a security gate left unattended and a procedure manual marked “confidential” left on a counter. They also learned that copies of voting system data were sent to a laboratory in Montana and claimed quality control practices to ensure data are entered correctly aren’t in place, “rendering all of the data and findings unreliable.”
The Arizona Senate’s liaison didn’t immediately respond when asked about the observers’ notes.
Kauffman told The Epoch Times before the tour that he wanted to see firsthand how the audit was being run.
“The Arizona forensic audit is really one of the talks of America, and there’s a lot of stuff being thrown around about how it’s being conducted, and I kind of see this as a fact-finding to see what’s happening on the ground in Arizona, how it’s happening, and if it’s something that should be done in other states,” he said.
Taxpayer money wasn’t used for the trip, the lawmakers said.
45th President Donald Trump released a short video this afternoon stating that the Republican Party will take back both chambers of the U.S. Congress and the White House “sooner than you think” and thanked supporters for their continued “love” and “affection” following his departure from Washington, D.C. on 20 January 2021, according to a video posted by Disclose.tv to the news outlet’s Telegram channel.
“I want to thank everybody for the tremendous support you’ve shown. We’re going to take back the Senate, take back the House, take back the White House, and sooner than you think, it’s going to be really something special,” said President Trump. “But the love and the affection and the respect that you’ve given all of us, it’s really important, the Republican Party is stronger than it’s ever been, and it’s going to be a lot stronger than it’s been right now. We’re going to turn it around, we’re going to turn it around fast, that support has been really incredible. Thank you.”
News (20)
Myanmar’s parallel National Unity Government (NUG) said it no longer has any expectation that ASEAN can help Myanmar, as the regional bloc has only engaged with the regime while neglecting it.
The comment came on Friday as two regional envoys visited the country as part of a five-point consensus agreed at the Jakarta meeting in late April, and met the junta leader, Min Aung Hlaing.
To help resolve the crisis caused by the military coup in February, the regional bloc has led the main international diplomatic effort. Four months on, the country is still reeling from the resulting chaos, such as the regime troops’ deadly crackdowns on protesters, economic stalemate and instability issues. The junta has been facing deadly resistance from ethnic armed groups as well as guerrilla-style civilian resistance forces across the country.
In April, the ASEAN leaders reached a five-point consensus, including urging Myanmar to accept the appointment of a special envoy to engage with all the parties and to grant access to humanitarian assistance from ASEAN.
After the Jakarta meeting, the Myanmar coup leader said the agreements will be carried out only when stability has returned to Myanmar.
During an online press conference on Friday, the NUG’s Deputy Foreign Minister U Moe Zaw Oo said the NUG had asked the ASEAN secretariat “many times” what ASEAN would do if the coup leader, who had consented to the bloc’s five-points consensus, does not comply with the agreement. The NUG was not invited to the April meeting despite its request.
“But there has been no response yet,” he said.
The deputy minister said ASEAN must engage with both sides, saying ASEAN at the moment is not engaging with the NUG, but only with the junta leaders.
“Frankly speaking, we no longer have any faith in ASEAN’s efforts, and we have no expectation,” he said, adding that it looks like “ASEAN does not have a solid plan for their credibility.”
On the same day in Naypyitaw, ASEAN Secretary-General Lim Jock Hoi and Erywan Yusof, Brunei’s foreign affairs minister, met with Myanmar coup leader Min Aung Hlaing. They discussed cooperating with Myanmar on humanitarian issues, according to the military’s mouthpiece Myawady TV.
The junta also raised the issue of violence in the country and blamed the NUG and the Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (Union Parliament) (CRPH), both of which it has declared treasonous.
During the press conference, the NUG stressed that it had nothing to do with ongoing explosions at schools or the killing of junta-appointed general administrative officials in urban areas.
U Moe Zaw Oo said, “We disagree with violent acts, and we don’t commit such terror acts against civilians. The NUG is not related to such violence.”
The NUG’s deputy minister of defense, Daw Khin Ma Ma Myo, said the NUG and CRPH are being accused of destructive acts that are believed to have been committed by military thugs.
After seeing the rapid covi spread in the region, the junta-controlled Ministry of Health and Sports (MOHS) on 4 June imposed stay-at-home orders upon four Chin State townships Hakha, Tedim, Falam and Thantlang.
On 28 May 2021, Tonzang Township of Chin State was also placed under stay-at-home orders due to the COVID-19 spike. As of Friday, five out of a total of nine townships in the state have been locked down. Chin State is one of Myanmar’s least developed regions.
Under the stay-at-home order, only government staff and employees of companies and factories are allowed to go work. Only one person from each household is allowed to go shopping.
Residents must ask for official permission if they have to leave their homes on urgent matters or if more than one person has to leave home, said MOHS.
Since 31 May 2021, about 30 to more than 50 covid cases were reported in two Chin State townships—Tonzang and Falam.
Tonzang Township, bordering India, is seeing the rapid spread of SARS-CoV-2, reporting 20 to 52 covid cases daily in recent days.
Amid the covid spike, the township is facing a lack of medicine and ventilators for covid patients, said Dr. Htan Shin Khaing, Head of the Tonzang Township Health Department.
“We don’t even have vitamin supplements to give to the patients. The medicines we requested from the health ministry have not arrived due to instability,” he said.
In the last six days, the COVID-19 death toll reached six in the township after three more patients died in a single day on Thursday and a 36-year-old covid patient died on Saturday.
Meanwhile, Myanmar has seen an outbreak of COVID-19 in Sagaing Region’s Kale Township, which has been placed under stay-at-home orders on Wednesday after reporting 34 covid cases in a single day.
On Friday alone, about six people died of covid in the township.
Myanmar reported 212 new cases of COVID-19 cases across the country on Friday, the largest jump in cases since the military coup.
The previous biggest rise in Myanmar’s COVID-19 tally was 122, which was reported on Thursday.
As of 4 June 2021, Myanmar had reported a total of 144,157 covid cases including 3,221 deaths and 132,412 people who have recovered.
Myanmar saw a decline in daily cases from December 2020.
Around 400 to 500 new covid cases were being reported per day in December, down from a peak of more than 1,400 daily cases. The then ruling NLD government had also planned to start the nationwide covi vaccination in the first week of February 2021.
However, the vaccination plan was interrupted after the military regime seized state power from the NLD government on 1 February. Besides, the country’s public health care system has collapsed after thousands of health care workers went on strike to protest the military regime.
Myanmar has seen increasing numbers of covid cases again since late May after the military regime has eased covid-related restrictions including reopening religious sites, and allowing interstate visits among others since they came to power in February. On 1 June 2021, they re-opened schools across the country.
News (32) to (33) / Editor : Qiu Zhian / Extract translation, editing : Gan Yung Chyan, KUCINTA SETIA
News (32)
The cumulative number of cases in Taiwan exceeds 10,000, and the traditional market is restricted to one hour of shopping
Image : The epidemic situation in Taiwan is severe. The government urged people to reduce the frequency of shopping and avoid gatherings. The Taipei City Police on 6 June taught the people how to use mobile phones to complete the implementation of the system when conducting control and related propaganda at the entrance of the traditional market. (Central News Agency)
Chen Shizhong, commander of the Central Epidemic Command Centre, announced the news at a press conference in the afternoon. The newly added 335 local cases are 189 males and 146 females, aged between 5 and 90 years old, and the onset date is between 24 May and 5 June.
Among the 8 cases of corrected regression, 3 were males and 5 were females, aged in their 20s to 60s, and the onset date was between 1 and 2 June.
To sum up, there are 343 cases in all local cases. New Taipei has the most 160 cases, followed by Miaoli County with 75 cases, Taipei with 64 cases, Taoyuan with 16 cases, Yilan with 9 cases, 3 cases in Yunlin, Kaohsiung, Changhua and Hsinchu, 2 cases in Keelung, Taichung and Tainan, and 1 case in Chiayi.
The number of new cases in Miaoli has become the second highest in Taiwan. Chen Shizhong said that the increase in the epidemic in Miaoli is due to the cluster of migrant workers in electronics factories, and the number of cases has increased. It deserves special attention. Large-scale screening has been launched to find out cases early in the past two days.
According to statistics from the command center, so far, a total of 11,298 confirmed cases have been confirmed in China, including 1,145 overseas immigration, 10,100 local cases, 36 Dunmu fleet, 2 aircraft infections, 1 unknown case, and 14 cases under investigation. Among the confirmed cases, 260 have died.
The command center once again called on the public to implement personal protective measures such as hand hygiene, cough etiquette, and wearing masks, to reduce unnecessary movement, activities or gatherings, avoid entering and exiting crowded places or areas with a high risk of infection transmission, and be proactive to cooperate with various epidemic prevention measures and jointly strictly guard the community's defense line.
As the epidemic heats up, the Taoyuan Government urges people to go to traditional markets to buy goods according to the odd and even numbers of their ID numbers. People in Taoyuan went to the vegetable market on the 6th to buy and wear masks to prevent the epidemic. (Central News Agency)
News (33)
5 major controls in the Taiwan traditional market
Taiwan’s epidemic is severe. Lin Quanneng, Deputy Minister of Economic Affairs, announced at a press conference at the Command Center today that five major control measures will be taken in response to crowds in traditional markets and night markets.
First, it is hoped that local governments will expand control to surrounding vendors. The Ministry of Economic Affairs will clearly determine the core business hours and control the flow of people inside and outside the control zone during the time.
Second, limit people's consumption time in traditional markets and night markets to one hour. People are requested to cooperate and think about which ingredients and items to buy before going out. Cooperate with local governments to advise people not to stay and avoid gatherings.
Third, strengthen the control of entrances and exits, such as adopting measures to accommodate the number of people, requiring the implementation of a solid connection system, maintaining social distancing, and temporarily blocking traffic when necessary, so as to improve epidemic prevention.
Fourth, it is hoped that the local government will mobilize and expand the mobilization of the manpower of the public office, send staff to be stationed, and invest in the inspection work to ensure that the people abide by various control measures.
Fifth, the police will also be go out to ban mobile vendors outside the traditional market and deal with them in accordance with relevant regulations.
Lin Quanneng sincerely urges people to go to traditional markets and night markets to implement relevant measures to diversify purchases, purchase all at one time, do not stay to avoid gatherings, and take into account daily consumption needs and epidemic prevention measures under severe epidemic conditions.
News (34)
During the pandemic, countries have worked hard to implement various epidemic prevention measures, which has also caused a rapid decline in global influenza cases. Scientists said that after a year of observation, it was found that there were no cases of two influenza viruses, and they may have disappeared.
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