Trump campaign sues a Rhinelander, Wisconsin, TV station over commercial criticizing president's coronavirus response

From JSOnline:

Laura Schulte, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

President Donald Trump speaks at the UW-Milwaukee Panther Arena where the president held a campaign rally in Milwaukee on Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2020. Photo by Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ORG XMIT: DBY1 (Photo: Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

The Trump campaign has filed a lawsuit against a Rhinelander television station over a commercial criticizing the president's response to the coronavirus crisis. 

According to court documents filed in Price County Circuit Court, the campaign filed a lawsuit Monday against WJFW TV-12, an NBC affiliate station. The commercial, aired by Democratic super PAC Priorities USA, has been playing on stations across the state since late March. 

In the court documents, lawyers say the commercial contains false and dangerous statements about Trump. The documents also say the station was sent a cease and desist letter on March 25 but continued to run the ads. 

The ad features audio and video of Trump's response to the appearance of the coronavirus in the United States, including a clip of him seemingly calling the virus a "new hoax."

The 30-second commercial features a graph showing the increasing number of cases in the U.S. since the new year, with the president's face in the background. While audio of his voice is played, a ticking sound seemingly representing the growing number of cases, can also be heard.

The Trump campaign contends that the statements in the video were strung together from different instances, making them seem like one sentence, the documents said. 

PolitiFact, a fact-checking organization, has previously checked Trump's "new hoax" statement, after presidential candidate Joe Biden tweeted out a video also featuring the clip. PolitiFact rated the video as "false," and said that the splicing done by the Biden campaign fundamentally alters the story being told. In context, the "new hoax" comment was in reference to the politicization of the coronavirus by Democrats.  

In a release, Guy Cecil, Priorities USA chairman, said in a release Monday that Trump is attempting to hide the truth from Americans, putting them at risk. 

"The truth is that Trump ignored warnings from experts and his own team and downplayed the coronavirus even as it spread unchecked across the country and the world," Cecil said. "Americans are now suffering as a result of his inaction. We will never stop airing the facts and holding the president accountable for his actions."

WJFW TV-12 did not return a request for comment on Monday morning. 

From: https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/04/13/trump-campaign-files-lawsuit-wisconsin-over-priorities-usa-ad/2982598001/

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'Elbow to elbow:' North America meat plant workers fall ill, walk off jobs

CHICAGO/WINNIPEG, Manitoba (Reuters) - At a Wayne Farms chicken processing plant in Alabama, workers recently had to pay the company 10 cents a day to buy masks to protect themselves from the new coronavirus, according to a meat inspector.

FILE PHOTO: Employees wear face masks at the JBS USA meat packing plant, where two members of the staff have died of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), as it remains operational in Greeley, Colorado, U.S. April 8, 2020. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart

In Colorado, nearly a third of the workers at a JBS USA beef plant stayed home amid safety concerns for the last two weeks as a 30-year employee of the facility died following complications from the virus.

And since an Olymel pork plant in Quebec shut on March 29, the number of workers who tested positive for the coronavirus quintupled to more than 50, according to their union. The facility and at least 10 others in North America have temporarily closed or reduced production in about the last two weeks because of the pandemic, disrupting food supply chains that have struggled to keep pace with surging demand at grocery stores.

According to more than a dozen interviews with U.S and Canadian plant workers, union leaders and industry analysts, a lack of protective equipment and the nature of “elbow to elbow” work required to debone chickens, chop beef and slice hams are highlighting risks for employees and limiting output as some forego the low-paying work. Companies that added protections, such as enhanced cleaning or spacing out workers, say the moves are further slowing meat production.

Smithfield Foods, the world’s biggest pork processor, on Sunday said it is shutting a pork plant indefinitely and warned that plant shutdowns are pushing the United States “perilously close to the edge” in meat supplies for grocers.

Lockdowns that aim to stop the spread of the coronavirus have prevented farmers across the globe from delivering produce to consumers. Millions of laborers also cannot get to the fields for harvesting and planting, and there are too few truckers to keep goods moving.

The United States and Canada are among the world’s biggest shippers of beef and pork. Food production has continued as governments try to ensure adequate supplies, even as they close broad swathes of the economy.

The closures and increased absenteeism among workers have contributed to drops in the price of livestock, as farmers find fewer places for slaughter. Since March 25, nearby lean hog futures LHc1 have plunged 35%, and live cattle prices LCc1 shed 15%, straining the U.S. farm economy.

North American meat demand has dropped some 30% in the past month as declining sales of restaurant meats like steaks and chicken wings outweighed a spike in retail demand for ground beef, said Christine McCracken, Rabobank’s animal protein analyst.

Read more: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-meat-focus/elbow-to-elbow-north-america-meat-plant-workers-fall-ill-walk-off-jobs-idUSKCN21V0WM

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Open Blog - Monday

Hello.

Explosive Report: Wuhan Biolab Captured Bats From Caves Traced To COVID-19 Outbreak, Had US Funding

From ZeroHedge:

by Tyler Durden

Sun, 04/12/2020 - 13:00

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Recent findings regarding the origin of COVID-19 continue to support our January reporting that the disease may have originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology - which was experimenting with bat coronavirus found to be 96% genetically identical to COVID-19.

On Saturday, the Daily Mail added an important piece to the puzzle; the institute was experimenting on mammals captured over 1,000 miles away in Yunnan - which is particularly notable because genetic analysis of COVID-19's genome has traced it to horseshoe bats found in Yunnan's caves.

Horseshoe Bat

Also disturbing is that the lab had been operating in part on a $3.7 million grant from the US government.

The Mail on Sunday has learned that scientists there experimented on bats as part of a project funded by the US National Institutes of Health, which continues to licence the Wuhan laboratory to receive American money for experiments.

Results of the research were published in November 2017 under the heading: 'Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus.'

The exercise was summarised as: 'Bats in a cave in Yunnan, China were captured and sampled for coronaviruses used for lab experiments. All sampling procedures were performed by veterinarians with approval from the Animal Ethics Committee of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.' -Daily Mail

"Bat samplings were conducted ten times from April 2011 to October 2015 at different seasons in their natural habitat at a single location (cave) in Kunming, Yunnan Province, China. Bats were trapped and faecal swab samples were collected," the paper continues.

In April, 2018, a similar study was published by the institute titled "fatal swine acute diarrhoea syndrome caused by an HKU2-related coronavirus of bat origin," which reveals "Following a 2016 bat-related coronavirus outbreak on Chinese pig farms, bats were captured in a cave and samples were taken. Experimenters grew the virus in a lab and injected it into three-day-old piglets. Intestinal samples from sick piglets were ground up and fed to other piglets as well."

Via he Daily Mail

According to the Mail, Senior Ministers can no longer rule out that the virus first spread to humans after leaking from a Wuhan laboratory.

It comes after this newspaper revealed last week that Ministers here now fear that the pandemic could have been caused by a virus leaking from the institute.

Senior Government sources said that while 'the balance of scientific advice' was still that the deadly virus was first transmitted to humans from a live animal market in Wuhan, an accident at the laboratory in the Chinese city was 'no longer being discounted'.

According to one unverified claim, scientists at the institute could have become infected after being sprayed with blood containing the virus, and then passed it on to the local community. -Daily Mail

Meanwhile, Cao Bin, a soon-to-be-disappeared doctor at the Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital has highlighted research showing that 13 of the first 41 patients diagnosed in Wuhan had zero contact with the 'wet market' commonly described as ground zero for the outbreak. "It seems clear that the seafood market is not the only origin of the virus," he said.

In response to news that the US was partially funding the institute, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-CA) said "I'm disgusted to learn that for years the US government has been funding dangerous and cruel animal experiments at the Wuhan Institute, which may have contributed to the global spread of coronavirus, and research at other labs in China that have virtually no oversight from US authorities."

We're sure the Daily Mail will be banned from Twitter any moment now.

From: https://www.zerohedge.com/health/explosive-report-wuhan-biolab-captured-bats-caves-traced-covid-19-outbreak-had-us-funding

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Some Churches Will Open for Easter Sunday: “God Will Shield Us From All Harm And Sickness”

Archbishop Jose Gomez (L) stands before a cross during Good Friday service with Father Brian Nunez (R) inside the nearly empty Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels on April 10, 2020 in Los Angeles.

BRIAN VAN DER BRUG/Getty Images

Most churches across the United States will remain closed on Sunday amid the coronavirus crisis. For many, it will be a markedly different Easter Sunday as they will worship via livestream. But some are defiant and ignoring calls from authorities to limit congregations to avoid the spread of COVID-19.

One church near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for example, expects more than 2,000 people to attend its services Sunday. “Satan and a virus will not stop us,” Rev. Tony Spell, 42, pastor of the evangelical Life Tabernacle Church near Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He expects a crowd of more than 2,000 to gather at his megachurch on Sunday. “God will shield us from all harm and sickness,” Spell told Reuters. “We are not afraid. We are called by God to stand against the Antichrist creeping into America’s borders. We will spread the Gospel.”

When BuzzFeed called Spell, he “almost immediately began reciting the Declaration of Independence.” Spell has been charged with six misdemeanors for continuing to open his church to worshippers. “The president did not give me my rights to worship God and to assemble in church, and no socialist government or godless president can take that right away,” he said.

Some churches tried the livestream option but said that Easter is simply too big of a holiday to do over the Internet. “If it’s a crisis, the church should be able to dispel fear and panic and not join in with the fear and panic. We can’t really make a difference in our world just online. We’re one power failure away from being shut down,” Pastor John Greiner of The Glorious Way Church in Houston said. Greiner says he will protect the faithful by removing several rows of chairs and offering hand sanitizer.

Read more: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/04/some-churches-open-easter-sunday-coronavirus.html

See, all that Trump has to do is pray and we'll be all right.

TOOL - Ænema

What 'The Expanse' Tells Us About The COVID-19 Pandemic And Gain-Of-Function Research

From ZeroHedge:

by Tyler Durden

Sun, 04/12/2020 - 00:00

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Submitted by Harvard to the Big House

An accessible YouTube summary of much of the report below below by a Professor of Neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh’s Medical School is available here.

“You can tell you’ve found a really interesting question when no one wants you to answer it.” 

Over the past several months thousands of humans have lost their lives since COVID-19 kicked-off its killing spree in Wuhan, and barring an absolute miracle millions more all across the planet will join them in the months to come. Comparisons to the pandemic caused by the Spanish Flu earlier in the twentieth century abound, however one thing is clear: Whether due to globalization or to internal differences between the viruses, while the Spanish Flu was a slow-moving miasma that took years to unfurl across the globe, the Wuhan strain of coronavirus, COVID-19, has blanketed the entire planet in just a few months.

Factories all across the planet have ground to a halt, stores are shuttered, tens of millions are quarantined across multiple continents, and supply chains are disintegrating.

And oddly, even though there is nothing even beginning to approach conclusive evidence that COVID-19 was a naturally emergent strain that made its way out of an intermediate animal host and into humans, the general consensus in the media and the public seems to be that exploring its origins is something only done by people who’ve yet to buy that the Earth is in fact round and that we actually did land on the moon. And everyone seems to be okay with the fact that the scientists crowing the loudest about a natural origin, are the ones directly involved with the type of research that likely spawned this virus: Gain-of-function, or “dual-use” research that meant to push Nature past her limits, so that humans can harness her to create monsters that would never occur naturally.

Why the concentrated push to marginalize anyone asking for conclusive proof about where COVID-19 came from? Who benefits?

“We modified our science team to remove ethical restraints.”

Back in 1977 a very peculiar disease began to sweep across Russia, and once scientists had isolated it they discovered it was a rather unique strain of the H1N1 Swine Flu. In the years that followed genetic analysis looking to determine where it might’ve come from found something rather odd: It was very similar to strains of H1N1 that hadn’t been in circulation for decades, and seemed to be the product of “sequential passage in an animal reservoir” which was determined by its vast genetic distance from any other present strain of flu, just like COVID-19 which also appears so distant from any related coronavirus that it’s been placed in its own clade, an isolated branch way out on its own in the viral family tree – meaning it’s the lone example of its kind, and doesn’t clump together with all the other known coronaviruses.

At the time, the Soviet Union was employing tens of thousands of scientists designing every possible flavor of biological weapon, a rabidly immoral weapons program with a spotty safety record – pathogens were known to leak out of Soviet labs almost regularly. Which has happened at plenty of biological weapons labs since, but especially China’s, which have leaked the SARS virus four times just in recent years. And Soviet scientists were reported to bring dead research animals home for dinner, meat wasn’t exactly readily available in the USSR at that time, which parallels the reports of scientists in Wuhan smuggling dead lab animals out to sell for a few extra bucks on the street.

Earlier in the 70’s prior to the leak, “the swine flu scare… [had] prompted the international community to reexamine their stocks of the latest previously circulating H1N1 strains to attempt to develop a vaccine,” which was seen to have increased the odds that someone, somewhere would make a mistake and leak an altered strain of the flu out of their lab. This increased pace of research mirrors recent times, when scientists have been investigating and trying to understand the supposedly impending threat posed by coronaviruses for years, capturing as many unique strains from the wild as they could, and mixing and matching their genomes in the lab.

Read more: https://www.zerohedge.com/health/what-expanse-tells-us-about-covid-19-pandemic-and-gain-function-research