Mike Pompeo's explanation for the firing of State's inspector general doesn't make sense

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/19/politics/mike-pompeo-steve-linick-state-department/index.html

 In the wake of the removal of State Department Inspector General Steve Linick by President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tried to quell the controversy in an interview with The Washington Post on Monday. He did the opposite.

"I went to the President and made clear to him that Inspector General Linick wasn't performing a function in a way that we had tried to get him to, that was additive for the State Department, very consistent with what the statute says he's supposed to be doing," Pompeo told the Post by way of "explanation" for his push to have Linick fired by Trump. "The kinds of activities he's supposed to undertake to make us better, to improve us."

 

OK. So, Pompeo -- according to Bulatao's explanation -- asked Trump to fire Linick because of leaks to the media about ongoing IG investigations that they had absolutely no evidence that Linick had been involved in? Uh, what?

 

Medical journal says Trump is 'factually incorrect' about when it first published coronavirus reports

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/19/politics/trump-world-health-organization-lancet/index.html

In a letter Monday to the director-general of WHO, Trump said that his administration's review of WHO's response to the outbreak found that the organization ignored "credible reports of the virus spreading in Wuhan in early December 2019 or even earlier, including reports from the Lancet medical journal."

"The World Health Organization failed to independently investigate credible reports that conflicted directly with the Chinese government's official accounts, even those that came from sources within Wuhan itself," he wrote.

The Lancet, however, said Tuesday "this statement is factually incorrect" and that it "published no report in December, 2019, referring to a virus or outbreak in Wuhan or anywhere else in China."

The Lancet said it first published reports on January 24, 2020. The first report described the first 41 patients from Wuhan, China, diagnosed with Covid-19. The Lancet noted that the lead scientists and physicians on the study were from Chinese institutions and "worked with us to quickly make information about this new epidemic outbreak and the disease it caused fully and freely available to an international audience."

 

Housing Minister Yaakov Litzman blasts 'anti-Semitic' article on IKEA opening

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/280478

Former Health Minister blasts claims that IKEA stores were given special permission to open because of owner's donations to Hasidic movement

Turning to the charges that he permitted the opening of IKEA stores because of the owners’ donations to the Gur movement, Litzman said the link was based on a number of false points.

“One, I don’t know Fisher. I know who he is, but we’re not acquaintances. Two, he isn’t a Gur Hasid. Three, am I supposed to know who donates to what? Four, I didn’t even know about [the donations] until it was reported. Five, the Health Ministry didn’t request this [the reopening of IKEA stores], it was the Finance Ministry that requested it. That’s front-page news? What should I think about such a report?”

 

Trump Says Fox News Isn't the Same and He's 'Looking for a New Outlet' after Host Warns Against His Medical Advice

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-fox-news-hydroxychloroquine-neil-cavuto-1504977

Donald Trump believes Fox News is "no longer the same" after host Neil Cavuto urged caution over the use of hydroxychloroquine, which the president is taking as a preventative against COVID-19.

The president criticized the network and said he is "looking for a new outlet" after Cavuto's message, in which he warned of potential risks of taking the drug for vulnerable groups.

Cavuto cited a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) study of the drug on veterans hospitalized with COVID-19, which saw a higher mortality rate among those treated with the drug alone. He said: "Those with vulnerable conditions, respiratory conditions, heart ailments, they died."

 

Partly false claim: President Trump signed Executive Order 13769, temporarily barring foreigners from entering the U.S. if they had been to China

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-trump-executive-order/partly-false-claim-president-trump-signed-executive-order-13769-temporarily-barring-foreigners-from-entering-the-us-if-they-had-been-to-china-idUSKBN21739V

Reuters could not find evidence of major media outlets or Democrats calling the "Proclamation on Suspension of Entry as Immigrants and Nonimmigrants of Persons who Pose a Risk of Transmitting 2019 Novel Coronavirus" racist, xenophobic or bigoted. This line of criticism has been widely used to condemn the travel ban (Executive Order 13769) and its later iterations ( here ), but this travel ban never included China, supersedes the coronavirus outbreak, and its latest iteration issued in January 2020 was not part of Trump’s coronavirus response.

 

Coronavirus quarantine, travel ban could backfire, experts fear

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/04/coronavirus-quaratine-travel-110750

"This is a virus that happened to pop up in China. But the virus doesn’t discriminate between Asian versus non-Asian,” said Rep. Ami Bera (D-Calif.), a former emergency room physician who will preside over Congress' first hearing on the outbreak on Wednesday. “In our response we can’t create prejudices and harbor anxieties toward one population."

World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Tuesday that widespread travel bans and restrictions weren’t needed to stop the outbreak and could "have the effect of increasing fear and stigma, with little public health benefit." Union leaders separately called for a coordinated government response and warned authorities against profiling people of Asian descent while addressing the threat.

Trump, Biden Spin China Travel Restrictions

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/trump-biden-spin-china-travel-restrictions/

 

Trump has repeatedly boasted, as he did on April 4, that “I stopped people from China very early — very, very early — from coming into our country.” On April 1, Trump said that “banning dangerous foreign travel that threatens the health of our people” was one of the actions his administration took that was “far earlier than anyone would have thought and way ahead of anybody else.”

ThinkGlobalHealth, a project of the Council on Foreign Relations, has been tracking the travel restrictions on China due to COVID-19. Its country-by-country analysis of the date and type of travel restrictions shows that in the days after the World Health Organization on Jan. 30 declared the coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency of international concern, 36 countries imposed travel restrictions, including the U.S., by Feb. 2.

“What this data shows is that the United States was neither behind nor ahead of the curve in terms of imposing travel restrictions against China,” a co-author of the tracker, Samantha Kiernan, a research associate on global health, economics, and development at the Council on Foreign Relations, told us via email.

“Taking this all together, what this data shows is that the United States was neither behind nor ahead of the curve in terms of imposing travel restrictions against China,” Kiernan said.

The United States announced its restrictions the day after the WHO declared a public health emergency, “and those restrictions came into effect two days later. However, to say the United States was one of the first countries to impose an entry ban on travelers from China would be incorrect,” she said. “By my count, roughly twenty countries and territories (Hong Kong) imposed entry bans similar if not more stringent than the U.S. ban prior to the United States imposing its restrictions.”

That contradicts the narratives of both Trump and Biden.

What are President Trump's charges against the WHO?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52294623

US President Donald Trump says the World Health Organization (WHO) has mismanaged and helped to cover up the spread of the coronavirus after it emerged in China.

But the WHO has defended its handling of the early stages of the pandemic.

We've been looking at some of the charges President Trump has levelled against the WHO.

Claim 4

"One of the most dangerous decisions... from the WHO was... to oppose travel restrictions. They actually fought us."

The US restricted travel from China and other countries from 2 February.

But there is no record of the WHO publicly criticising this move.

And it would have been highly unusual for it to do so.

 

Trump's claim he takes hydroxychloroquine prompts warnings from health experts

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/media-health-experts-reactions-trump-taking-hydroxychloroquine

The malaria drug hydroxychloroquine can cause heart rhythm problems and other side effects. The Food and Drug Administration has said hydroxychloroquine should only be used for coronavirus in formal studies.

Two large observational studies, each involving around 1,400 patients in New York, recently found no benefit from the drug. Two new studies published Thursday in the medical journal BMJ reached the same conclusion.

 

Fox News can't get its message straight on hydroxychloroquine

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/19/media/fox-news-hydroxychloroquine-reliable-sources/index.html

That was one side of the Fox News coin. The other painted a starkly different picture. On Tucker Carlson's program, Fox News contributor Dr. Marc Siegel hyped the drug and said the media was going to "politicize" the issue. "I think it's reasonable," Siegel said of Trump taking it. In the next hour, Sean Hannity also attacked the news media, saying "predictably the mob in the media are hyperventilating" over Trump's announcement. Hannity decried journalists who he said have been "waging an unhinged, non-stop never-ending PR campaign against" the drug.

 

And in the 10pm hour, Laura Ingraham, who has been one of the top promoters of hydroxychloroquine, asked, "Why is the media freaking out about the President taking hydroxy?" She said the "medical establishment went crazy" over his announcement, playing clips of doctors on CNN and MSNBC while ignoring what Fox's own coverage just a few hours before.

The contradictory coverage from Fox News isn't unprecedented. But it continues to be remarkable that on a basic issue of health and safety, one in which Ingraham even acknowledged that the medical establishment is in general agreement on, Fox News can't get its message straight...

 

 

Trump himself tweeted, "[Fox News] is no longer the same. We miss the great Roger Ailes. You have more anti-Trump people, by far, than ever before. Looking for a new outlet!" Of course, Fox News has over the years become more pro-Trump, not less supportive.

>> Paul Farhi's point: "The 'great' Roger Ailes was credibly accused of sexual harassment by multiple women. He was fired by Rupert Murdoch and sons for his alleged behavior. He died in disgrace in 2017..."

 

Facial recognition helps reunite kidnapped toddler with family after 32 years

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/19/asia/china-kidnapped-son-reunited-intl-hnk/index.html

 

There is no official tally on how many children are kidnapped in China each year. On the website "Baby Come Home," a widely-used platform for Chinese parents to post missing child notices, more than 51,000 registered families are searching for their children.

According to Xinhua, police have found and reunited more than 6,300 abducted children with their families since the Ministry of Public Security set up a nationwide DNA database in 2009 to match parents with missing children.

Trump, Flynn and Barr: A Corruption Update

Taiwan Says It Tried to Warn the World About Coronavirus. Here’s What It Really Knew and When

https://time.com/5826025/taiwan-who-trump-coronavirus-covid19/

 

When they heard about patients falling sick with a mysterious pneumonia in the Chinese city of Wuhan on Dec. 31, Taiwan’s health officials fired off an email to the World Health Organization asking for more information.

This four-sentence inquiry has since become fodder for the political brawl between China and the U.S. and threatens to bruise the reputation of the U.N.’s health agency as it leads the fight against an unprecedented global pandemic.

Taiwanese and U.S. officials have seized on the email to argue the WHO ignored an early warning that the coronavirus could likely be transmitted between people. In the weeks following the Dec. 31 note, the WHO echoed Chinese officials that there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission”— even as cases began cropping up that raised suspicion of contagion.

In an interview with TIME, Dr. Lo Yi-chun, the deputy director-general of Taiwan’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC), says the WHO should have acted on Taiwan’s query by conducting its own investigation. Instead, he says the WHO “provided a false sense of security to the world.”

The WHO has defended its handling of the outbreak and says it relies on member countries like China to accurately report their findings. It also notes that Taiwan’s email did not explicitly mention human-to-human transmission, and that the self-governing island was not the first nor the only one to contact the organization about the disease.

 

Trump Says He Fired Inspector General Because He Was Appointed by Obama: We Should 'Get Rid' of Obama IGs

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-says-he-fired-inspector-general-because-he-was-appointed-obama-we-should-get-rid-obama-1504931

Pompeo told The Washington Post earlier today that he urged Linick's firing because the IG was "undermining" the agency's mission by failing to act in ways to improve the State Department, but declined to mention any specifics. "I went to the president and made clear to him that Inspector General Linick wasn't performing a function in a way that we had tried to get him to," he said, "that was additive for the State Department, very consistent with what the statute says he's supposed to be doing."

 

The Secretary of State's remarks came after Trump faced days of criticism from both sides of the aisle over his decision to dismiss Linick on Friday evening. It was the president's fourth watchdog dismissal in recent weeks. Trump told reporters on Monday that he followed Pompeo's suggestion because he has long supported firing IGs appointed by Obama.