The 73-year-old told the Telegraph he is prepared to be arrested if authorities try to intervene in his reopening plans.

Dr Eddy Betterman

New video footage has surfaced to show that back in 2016, EcoHealth Alliance head Peter Daszak, a friend of Tony Fauci, was openly admitting that his “colleagues in China” were developing “killer” SARS-like coronaviruses as bioweapons.

At a forum on “emerging infectious diseases and the next pandemic,” Daszak confessed that illegal gain of function research was taking place at the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), defying continued claims by Fauci that no such research has ever taken place there.

According to Daszak, mad scientists have for years been “insert[ing] spike proteins” into viruses to see if they could “bind to human cells.” Such research, we now know, is what ultimately led to the creation and unleashing of the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19).

“Then you get a sequence of a virus, and it looks like a relative of a known nasty pathogen, just like we did with SARS,” Daszak further stated, his revelations back then exposing Fauci as a liar today.

“We found other coronaviruses in bats, a whole host of them, some of them looked very similar to SARS. So we sequenced the spike protein: the protein that attaches to cells. Then we … Well, I didn’t do this work, but my colleagues in China did the work.”

Daszak went on to talk about “pseudo particles,” also known as spike proteins, that he admitted can be genetically engineered into viruses to make them infectious in humans.

“At each step of this you move closer and closer to this virus, which could really become pathogenic in people,” Daszak stated. “You end up with a small number of viruses that really do look like killers.”

[…]

Via https://dreddymd.com/2021/06/13/in-2016-peter-daszak-admitted-colleagues-in-china-were-developing-killer-coronaviruses/

Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal

The GrayZone

A PBS Frontline special is the latest vehicle in a PR campaign to legitimize rebranded Syrian al-Qaeda, HTS, and market its leader Mohammad Jolani as a competent American “asset.”

March 2021 marked the 10th anniversary of the Western regime-change war on Syria. And after a decade of grueling conflict, Washington is still maneuvering to extend its longstanding relationship with the Salafi-jihadist militants fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

With the northeastern province of Idlib under the control of a self-proclaimed “Syrian Salvation Government” led by the rebranded version of Syria’s al-Qaeda franchise, and protected under the military aegis of NATO member state Turkey, powerful elements from Brussels to Washington have been working to legitimize its leader.

This June, PBS Frontline aired a special, “The Jihadist,” featuring a sit-down interview with Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, de facto president of the “Syrian Salvation Government” and founder of the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda originally called Jabhat al-Nusra, today re-branded as Hay-at Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS.

Having traded in his battlefield garb for a freshly pressed suit, Jolani was presented with the once unthinkable opportunity to market himself to a Western audience and pledge that his forces pose no threat to the US homeland because they were merely focused on waging war against Syria’s “loyalist” population.

The PBS correspondent who conducted the interview, Martin Smith, previously starred in a 2015 PBS special, “Inside Assad’s Syria,” which presented a US audience with a rare and relatively objective look at life inside Syrian government-controlled territory, as insurgents backed by NATO and Gulf monarchies encircled and terrorized its population.

Whether or not he realized it, when Smith returned to Syria this March to meet Jolani, he was on more than a journalistic field expedition. A network of think tanks and Beltway foreign policy veterans were engaged in a simultaneous push to remove Jolani and his militant faction HTS from the State Department’s list of designated terrorist groups.

This would open the door for international acceptance of his de facto government in Idlib, which regime-change advocates view as an important piece of leverage against Damascus, and as a human warehouse for the millions of refugees languishing there.

In turn, the audacious PR campaign would consolidate a branch of the organization responsible for the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States into a de facto US asset.

The campaign to normalize Jolani was publicly initiated by the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank with close ties to the Biden administration and NATO. By the time of Smith’s interview, operatives from a network of Gulf-funded, pro-Israel think tanks had spent years quietly lobbying for Washington to support al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, and succeeded in securing shipments of weapons from the CIA to some of its battlefield allies.

Though figures involved in this coordinated lobbying push were featured in Smith’s PBS Frontline report, they were presented to viewers as dispassionate analysts or former officials with no ulterior interests.

Framed as hard news yet shaped by one of the most insidious public relations campaigns in recent history, the nationally broadcast PBS special provided an effective vehicle for rehabilitating a jihadist leader and perpetuating the decades-long dirty war against Syria.

Whitewashing US and foreign support for Syria’s extremist insurgency

When Muhammad Jolani first crossed the Syrian-Iraqi border in 2012 with a small detachment of fighters, he belonged officially to al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, an extremist group responsible for countless attacks on US military occupiers and Shia civilians across Iraq.

Upon their thrust into Syria, Jolani’s forces enabled the late self-proclaimed leader of the caliphate, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, to establish his Islamic State, or ISIS, in the northeastern city of Raqqa. A feud over strategy and finances soon prompted Jolani to split from the Islamic State and establish Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian franchise of al-Qaeda, with the explicit blessing of the jihadist group’s global leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Martin Smith recounted this history in his PBS Frontline report, albeit briefly, while neglecting any mention of the scandalous covert US operation that made Nusra’s rise possible.

[…]

Via  https://thegrayzone.com/2021/06/09/washington-positioning-syrian-al-qaeda-mohammad-jolani-asset/

By Jon Miltimore, Foundation for Economic Education

More than a dozen states have passed or advanced legislation to place new checks on the powers of public health agencies in the wake of the pandemic.

Mike Fratantuono grew up in a restaurant. Literally.

For decades, Sunset Restaurant in Glen Burnie, Maryland, was the family business. Over the years, he’d done seemingly every job imaginable: busboy, bartender, and butcher; prep cook and plumber; handyman and manager.

Fratantuono says that’s what made it so hard to watch the family’s legacy become a COVID casualty in 2020.

“It kills me. We were supposed to be getting ready to celebrate our 60th anniversary this year, and instead we’re packing up and closing at the end of this month,” Fratantuono told the Washington Post last year. “I try not to get too sentimental about it, because it won’t change a damn thing, but sometimes the stress hits me and my heart starts going like crazy. I get frustrated. It makes me angry.”

Fratantuono is just one of the countless business owners across America who saw their dreams vanish before their eyes in the wake of government lockdowns that crushed their businesses. Now, in the wake of the pandemic, states across the country are advancing legislation to curb the powers of public health departments following one of the most destructive and contentious years in American history.

[…]

Via  15 States Are Moving to Curb Public Health Agency Powers Following Lockdown Carnage — Attack the System