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Post by Admin on Mar 26, 2021 21:08:25 GMT
Robert Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said he believed the virus that causes Covid-19 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China — contradicting the assessment of the World Health Organization and most public health experts. In an interview with CNN’s Sanjay Gupta that aired Friday, the former Trump administration official also speculated that the virus began transmitting within central China’s Hubei province in September or October 2019, a potential time frame more in line with mainstream scientific views. “That’s my own view. It’s only an opinion. I’m allowed to have opinions now,” said Redfield, who served as CDC director from 2018 until the end of former President Donald Trump’s term. He is now a senior adviser for public health to Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan on the state’s pandemic response. Regarding the origins of the virus, Redfield went on to say: “I am of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory. Escaped. Other people don’t believe that. That’s fine. Science will eventually figure it out. It’s not unusual for respiratory pathogens that are being worked on in a laboratory to infect the laboratory worker.” Redfield’s remarks come after a WHO team concluded last month the virus was “extremely unlikely” to have leaked from a Chinese lab — specifically, the Wuhan Institute of Virology — and more likely first transmitted to humans from an animal. The WHO team is expected to release a final report on their findings in the near future, although questions remain about whether its investigation was sufficiently free and open. Most scientists also believe the virus developed naturally and, at some unknown point, jumped from an animal to a human — just as two related viruses, SARS and MERS, have done within the last two decades. But many experts say they cannot completely rule out the possibility that the virus escaped from a lab, although they consider such a scenario unlikely. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, addressed Redfield’s interview later Friday at a news briefing by members of the White House Covid-19 Response Team. He said his former colleague “was just expressing an opinion” about the possible origins of the virus.
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Post by Admin on Apr 3, 2021 3:13:46 GMT
Donald Trump loves him some McDonald's, but ain't so keen on paying for it ... at least according to a former bodyguard who claims he's still $130 in the red, thanks to DT. Kevin McKay says he worked as Trump's bodyguard for 5 years ... and one time in 2008, after visiting one of his golf courses in Scotland, their convoy of 6 Range Rovers hit up Mickey D's before flying home. Thing is ... McKay says Trump didn't have any UK currency, "so he asked me if I could front him the cash." McKay says he did, and ordered 20 cheeseburgers and fries and around 10 to 15 Cokes. McKay told the Daily Mail ... Trump ate his usual fave -- 2 cheeseburgers with fries and a diet coke. McKay says $130 at the time was kind of a big deal to him, especially because he only made around $2,700 a month while working for Trump. McKay says he should have asked for the money, but kept blowing it off ... and Trump never brought it up either. Trump's McDonald's obsession is widely known. You'll recall he served a McDonald's buffet to Clemson and North Dakota State after they won football national championships. McKay was fired in 2012, and he claims the stress of working for Trump ultimately cost him his 23-year marriage. And, $130 too ... allegedly.
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Post by Admin on Apr 4, 2021 4:13:13 GMT
Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign used pre-checked boxes and obscure design on fundraising emails to wring millions of dollars out of unwitting supporters, detonating a “money bomb” which allowed the Republican to compete against Joe Biden in the last months of the race.
The practice, pursued by the campaign and WinRed, a for-profit company, was detailed in an extensive report by the New York Times on Saturday. It is legal, but Ira Rheingold, executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates, told the paper it was “unfair, unethical and inappropriate”.
Another expert quoted by the Times said such “dark pattern” digital marketing “should be in textbooks of what you shouldn’t do” in politics.
The “money bomb” did not bring victory, as Trump lost the electoral college by 306 votes to 232. He also lost the popular vote by more than 7m ballots.
But, the Times said, “the recurring donations swelled Mr Trump’s treasury in September and October, just as his finances were deteriorating. He was then able to use tens of millions of dollars he raised after the election, under the guise of fighting his unfounded fraud claims, to help cover the refunds he owed.”
As the Times reported, refunds to donors are not unusual and can be made when individuals give more than the legal limit. The paper said that at the end of 2020, after Trump’s defeat, the Biden campaign and Democratic bodies made 37,000 online refunds worth $5.6m.
The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee made more than 530,000 refunds, returning $64.3m.
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Post by Admin on Apr 4, 2021 20:33:03 GMT
When Donald Trump and his allies pushed the “big lie” of voter fraud and a stolen election, it seemed nothing could stop them spreading disinformation with impunity.
But now a little-known tech company, founded 18 years ago in Canada, has the conspiracy theorists running scared. The key: suing them for defamation, potentially for billions of dollars.
“Libel laws may prove to be a very old mechanism to deal with a very new phenomenon of massive disinformation,” said Bob Shrum, a Democratic strategist. “We have all these fact checkers but lots of people don’t care. Nothing else seems to work, so maybe this will.”
The David in this David and Goliath story is Dominion Voting Systems, an election machine company named after Canada’s Dominion Elections Act of 1920. Its main offices are in Toronto and Denver and it describes itself as the leading supplier of US election technology. It says it serves more than 40% of American voters, with customers in 28 states.
But the 2020 election put a target on its back. As the White House slipped away and Trump desperately pushed groundless claims of voter fraud, his lawyers and cheerleaders falsely alleged Dominion had rigged the polls in favour of Joe Biden.
Among the more baroque conspiracy theories was that Dominion changed votes through algorithms in its voting machines that were created in Venezuela to rig elections for the late dictator Hugo Chávez.
It was laughable but also potentially devastating to Dominion’s reputation and ruinous to its business. It also fed a cocktail of conspiracy theories that fuelled Trump supporters who stormed the US Capitol on 6 January, as Congress moved to certify the election results. Five people died, including an officer of the Capitol police.
The company is fighting back. It filed $1.3bn defamation lawsuits against Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, and MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell, for pushing the allegations without evidence.
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Post by Admin on Apr 6, 2021 2:05:59 GMT
Former President Trump on Monday pushed back against a story published by The New York Times detailing questionable fundraising practices by his presidential campaign, accusing the newspaper of seeking to “disparage” his campaign’s grassroots financial support.
“In yet another highly partisan story, the failing New York Times wrote a completely misleading, one-sided attack piece this weekend that tried to disparage our record-setting grassroots fundraising operation during the 2020 campaign,” Trump said in a statement through his leadership political action committee (PAC) Save America.
“Except for massive voter fraud, this was a campaign that was easily won by your favorite Republican President, me!” he added, repeating the false claim that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from him through widespread fraud.
Trump’s comments come on the heels of a story published by The Times on Saturday highlighting how the Trump campaign had issued tens of millions of dollars in refunds to donors in the final months of 2020, a number that far exceeded the $5.6 million refunded by President Biden’s campaign.
The unusual number of refunds was reportedly driven in part by online donors who in some cases had unwittingly agreed to weekly recurring payments to Trump’s political operation.
At issue was a fine-print disclaimer in campaign communications that guided online donors to give weekly or double their contribution size.
In his statement on Monday, Trump claimed that his “support in 2020 was so big” that The Times felt compelled to “defend” Democrats by calling the former president’s fundraising practices into question.
He said that his campaign’s fundraising success was due to voter enthusiasm and the fact that his supporters were motivated to donate repeatedly to his campaign. He did appear to acknowledge, however, that his campaign had issued refunds to donors who “would give too much.”
“Before our two campaigns, 2016 and 2020, Republicans would always lose small dollar donations,” he said. “Now we win, or do very well, because we are the Party of Working Americans, and we beat the Democrats at their own game.”
“We learned from liberal ActBlue – and now we’re better than they are! In fact, many people were so enthusiastic that they gave over and over, and in certain cases where they would give too much, we would promptly refund their contributions,” Trump continued, referencing the Democratic online fundraising clearinghouse ActBlue. “Our overall dispute rate was less than 1% of total online donations, a very low number.”
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