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Imran Khan blames Pakistan establishment for plot to assassinate him


Islamabad, Pakistan
CNN
 — 

Tensions escalated in Pakistan on Friday as former Prime Minister Imran Khan blamed establishment figures for a plot to kill him – a claim strenuously denied by governing and security officials.

A day after after he survived a shooting at a political rally outside the town of Gujranwala, Punjab province, Khan gave a rambling speech at a hospital in the city of Lahore where he was recovering from the injuries he sustained. While sitting in a wheelchair, the cricket star-turned-politician cited three senior figures as being behind the attack.

The former Pakistan leader sustained a fracture to his right leg due to stray bullet wounds, Dr. Faisal Sultan told reporters. Sultan displayed X-rays showing the fracture in Khan’s right leg, and bullet fragments that were lodged in two sides of his thigh.

Without offering evidence, Khan blamed Prime Minister Shabaz Sharif, interior minister Rana Sanaullah and Major General Faisal, who is a senior intelligence official. CNN is reaching out to the three men for comment.

Khan first alleged on Thursday that the trio were responsible for the plot, in a statement shared by PTI senior leader Asad Umar, who said he had recently spoke to Khan.

In a televised address on Thursday, Sanaullah rejected the accusation, calling it “grievous.”

The media wing of the Pakistani military condemned Khan’s claims on Friday, calling them “baseless and irresponsible allegations” and threatened legal action.

“No one will be allowed to defame the institution or its soldiers with impunity. Keeping this in view, the government of Pakistan has been requested to investigate the matter and initiate legal action against those responsible for defamation and false accusations against the institution and its officials without any evidence whatsoever,” the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) said.

Pakistan’s intelligence agency also rebutted Khan’s claims that a senior intelligence official was behind the shooting, with the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) telling CNN in a statement that the accusations are “baseless.”

“This is an attempt to prejudice the investigation from the very beginning. The organization had already sensitized the federal government about the threat to the former prime minister, who had communicated this to the Punjab provincial government,” the statement read.

The ISI also said that Khan’s security was under the authority of the provincial government of Punjab, which is led by Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party.

“The incident of the shooting is a security lapse on behalf of the government of Punjab and cannot be attributed to any individual or any security agency. The need of the hour is for calm in the country and not for irresponsible statements,” the ISI said in a statement.

Khan had said he knew about the plot to kill him a day before it happened, and claimed there were two shooters involved in his attack.

“There was a burst from one side, and another coming from the front. There were two people,” Khan said when talking about the attack.

Khan has locked horns with the government since his dramatic ouster in a no-confidence vote in April. During that time, he’s repeatedly claimed, without any evidence, that the United States was behind his loss of power.

One person died in Thursday’s attack which injured several others and prompted protests among Khan’s supporters.

Video of the alleged attack shows Khan waving from an open-topped truck, when shots rang out, sending his party members ducking for cover.

A bullet hit Khan in the leg, said Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) senior leader Asad Umar, who later added: “Yes, he has been shot, there are pellets lodged in his leg, his bone has been chipped, he has also been shot in his thigh.”

A man suspected of firing shots at the rally was detained on Thursday, according to police.

On Thursday, Pakistan’s Ministry of Information released a video of a confession from an unnamed man who it claims carried out the attack.

Khan called on citizens to protest against the three officials he alleges planned his attack until they resign.

“As long as these three men don’t resign, you have to protest, against unfairness, you must do a jihad against them, jihad means to stand against injustice,” Khan said Friday.

Khan said as soon as he recovers from his shooting attack he will resume his so-called Long March to Islamabad calling for early elections. He was on the seventh day of the nationwide tour, which started in Lahore on October 28 and was due to finish in Islamabad after winding through several Pakistani cities.

It’s among a number of rallies the former Pakistani cricket captain has held since his ousting in April.

Thursday’s incident is not the first time that Pakistani politicians have been attacked.

Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated on December 27, 2007, and then-Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani survived an assassination attempt in 2008.

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GOP establishment steps up push to block Trump ally in Ariz.

TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey has already helped block one of former President Donald Trump’s allies from winning the Republican nomination for governor in a crucial battleground state. Now he’s hoping for a repeat in his own backyard.

Ducey is part of a burgeoning effort among establishment Republicans to lift up little-known housing developer Karrin Taylor Robson against former television news anchor Kari Lake, who is backed by Trump. Other prominent Republicans, including former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, have also lined up behind Robson in recent days.

The push is reminiscent of how many leading Republicans rallied around Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp in the final stretch of his ultimately successful bid to fend off a Trump-endorsed primary challenger.

Few states have been as central to Trump’s election lies as Georgia and Arizona, the two closest 2020 battlegrounds where he pushed aggressively to overturn the results and fumed when Kemp and Ducey refused to go along. Trump has already faced a setback in Georgia, and the Aug. 2 race in Arizona is among his last opportunities to settle scores and install allies to lead states that may prove decisive if he decides to run again in 2024.

“In Arizona, people are independent minded, much like they are in Georgia, and they pick the person that they think will be best for the responsibility,” Ducey told The Associated Press. “In Georgia, the voters said Brian Kemp, and I’m hopeful in Arizona, they’ll say Karen Taylor Robson.”

As an incumbent seeking reelection, Kemp had an advantage over his primary rival, David Perdue, and ultimately defeated him by nearly 52 percentage points. Without an incumbent on the ballot — Ducey faces term limits — the GOP contest in Arizona will likely be much closer.

But what once looked like an insurmountable lead for Lake could end in a more competitive finish. With early voting already underway, Robson is drawing on her family’s vast fortune to drown out Lake who, despite Trump’s endorsement, has lagged in fundraising. Robson had outspent Lake more than 5 to 1 as of the end of June.

The final maneuvering by some leading GOP figures could prove significant in a close race. Beyond Ducey and Christie, Robson has lined up support from former U.S. Rep. Matt Salmon, who dropped out of the governor’s race and endorsed her. The Border Patrol union, meanwhile, broke with Trump and backed Robson, citing in part Lake’s prior statements supporting a pathway to citizenship for people living in the country illegally.

Former Vice President Mike Pence, who notably split with Trump in Georgia and campaigned alongside Kemp, has yet to pick a side in Arizona.

For her part, Lake is an unlikely MAGA champion.

A well-known former local news anchor who donated to Barack Obama and for years hung around with drag queens at a gay bar near the television station, Lake once was the antithesis of Trump’s brand of politics.

Yet she rocketed to the top of the field since she walked away from her three-decade television career, declared “journalism is dead” and took a sledgehammer to a pile of TVs.

She built on the powerful connection she’d formed with viewers in the Phoenix media market over 27 years with the local Fox affiliate and created a uniquely strong bond with the base that propelled Trump to the White House in 2016 and still doesn’t believe he lost in 2020.

Even Trump seemed impressed by the ovation her name inspired when he mentioned it during a rally in Phoenix last year. He endorsed her a short time later.

She, in turn, has adopted his combative style, his narrative about the 2020 election — she falsely says it was corrupt and stolen — and his get-tough approach to border security. She’s walked away from her close ties with John McCain’s family and now feuds with the late U.S. senator’s children.

“We’re either gonna go the way of the past, which is the McCain mafia running the show, or we’re gonna go with America first,” Lake told a crowd of hundreds at a country western bar in Tucson last week. Many arrived well over an hour early and waited in the Southern Arizona heat for a chance to get inside.

Lake, 52, routinely berates journalists trying to question her and releases the footage on social media.

Last year, she said she wants to put cameras in classrooms to monitor teachers, nodding to the backlash on the right to teachings on race and history in public schools.

If elected, she says, she’d immediately invoke an untested legal theory that illegal immigration constitutes an “invasion” of the United States and gives the governor war powers to remove people from the country without proceedings in immigration courts.

Since Robson and her allies began their full-court press, Lake has claimed without evidence that “they might be trying to set the stage for another steal.”

“They have been such RINOs for so long, and I don’t trust that they have our country as a priority,” said Rosa Alfonso, a 60-year-old speech language pathologist in Tucson. “That’s a big deal.”

Robson, 57, is making her first run for office, though she has lifelong ties to GOP politics. He father and brother both held elected office as Republicans.

An attorney for real estate developers, she has been at the center of the suburban sprawl that has propelled the Phoenix area’s prodigious growth. Ducey appointed her to the board overseeing Arizona’s three public universities, her most high-profile public role before she quit to run for governor.

“These are serious times,” Robson said during a recent debate. “We need a serious candidate with a record of accomplishment.”

Her husband, housing developer Ed Robson, 91, is one of the state’s richest residents, amassing a fortune building master planned retirement communities. She says the 2020 election was “unfair” but has stopped short of calling it fraudulent. Like Lake, she’s running as a border hawk.

She brands her rival “Fake Lake,” highlighting a $350 donation she gave to Obama’s 2008 campaign, though Robson has herself contributed large sums to Democrats.

“It’s all an act,” Ducey said of Lake. “The campaign she’s been running bears no resemblance to the life she’s lived for the past three decades, nor to the interactions that she’s had with me. She’s putting on a show. We’ll see how many people buy it.”

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Costa Rica elects maverick Chaves as president in break with establishment

SAN JOSE, April 3 (Reuters) – Anti-establishment economist Rodrigo Chaves clinched Costa Rica’s presidency on Sunday, upending decades of political consensus in the Central American country that is grappling with growing social discontent and mounting national debt.

Chaves, a veteran former official of the World Bank, was projected to win about 52.9% of the vote in the run-off ballot, a preliminary tally by the electoral tribunal showed, based on returns from some 97% of polling stations.

Rival candidate and former Costa Rican president Jose Maria Figueres was seen securing about 47.1%.

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Speaking to supporters in San Jose, the capital, the 60-year-old Chaves said he accepted his victory with humility, and urged Figueres to help him move the country forward.

“I humbly beg Jose Maria and his party to work together to make possible what Don Jose Maria himself called the Costa Rican miracle,” he said, referring to Figueres’ father, Jose Figueres Ferrer, who served as president three times.

“Let’s put aside pettiness and vanity. Tonight we will begin together to serve our country,” added Chaves, who is set to assume office on May 8.

Figueres quickly conceded defeat after results came in.

“I congratulate Rodrigo Chaves, and I wish him the best,” he told supporters.

Caravans of cars sporting the flag of Chaves’ Social Democratic Progress Party (PPSD) crowded the streets of downtown San Jose in celebration.

Polls had shown Chaves to be a slight favorite heading into the election after he unexpectedly finished runner-up to Figueres in an indecisive first round of voting in February.

Chaves, who briefly served as finance minister for outgoing President Carlos Alvarado, ran as a maverick. He has vowed to shake up the political elite, even pledging to use referendums to bypass Congress to bring change. read more

“If the people go out to vote, this is going to be a sweep, a tsunami,” Chaves said after casting his ballot on Sunday.

Figueres campaigned on his experience and family political legacy in Costa Rica, a tourist destination and bastion of environmentalism long regarded as one of the most stable democracies in Latin America.

On Twitter, Alvarado said he had called to congratulate Chaves and pledged an orderly handover of power.

Turnout was 57.3%, the electoral tribunal said, less than the 60% who cast ballots in the first round.

Going into Sunday’s vote, some voters said they were lukewarm on both candidates, whose political careers have been tainted by accusations of wrongdoing.

Chaves faced accusations of sexual harassment during his World Bank tenure, which he denied. Figueres resigned as executive director of the World Economic Forum in 2004 amid accusations that he had influenced state contracts with Alcatel, a telecoms company. That case was never tried in court.

David Diaz, 33, said he was not enthused by Chaves or Figueres. He left home early to vote by 7 a.m. in the rural town of Tacacori, about 30 km (19 miles) from San Jose.

“I see very little movement, there is a lot of apathy,” said Diaz, a mechanic at a medical device factory.

Chaves faces the challenges of reviving an economy battered by the COVID-19 pandemic, and alleviating the poverty in which about 23% of a population of 5.1 million live.

Growing income disparity makes Costa Rica one of the world’s most unequal countries, with unemployment of almost 15%. read more

In January 2021, the country agreed to $1.78 billion in financial assistance from the International Monetary Fund.

In return, the government vowed to adopt a raft of fiscal changes and austerity measures, but lawmakers have only passed a law to make savings on public sector workers’ benefits.

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Reporting by Diego Ore and Alvaro Murillo, writing by Cassandra Garrison; Editing by Clarence Fernandez

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Biden praised for Ukraine strategy by Republicans, establishment

Republican senators and establishment columnists who brutalized President Biden for the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal are now praising his handling of Russia’s threatened invasion of Ukraine.

Why it matters: The endorsements give the president and his team more political space to pursue diplomacy. They also allow a president who ran on his competence and foreign policy experience to reclaim some of that mantle.

  • The challenge is maintaining support if the situation deteriorates as both sides pour more arms and personnel into the area.

The big picture: The Biden administration has made transatlantic unity its top priority throughout the crisis.

It’s engaged European allies during over 200 phone calls and meetings to coordinate red lines and prepare crushing sanctions if Russia invades Ukraine.

  • Biden’s straddled a fine line between supporting Ukraine with military aid and limiting the deployment of U.S. troops exclusively to NATO allies — well aware there’s no public appetite for direct involvement in another war.
  • The two-track “diplomacy-and-deterrence” approach has won support from Americans across the political spectrum, according to a recent Morning Consult poll.
  • It’s also earned plaudits from “the Blob,” a term coined by former Obama deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes to describe old-guard foreign-policy types.
  • They believe U.S. power should be used to uphold the rules-based international order.

What they’re saying: “The U.S. has organized a comprehensive response,” Richard Haass, the Council on Foreign Relations leader who’s been called the “Pope” of the Blob, wrote this month.

  • “Policy has been clearly framed and communicated to allies and adversaries alike — blunting Russia’s ability to manipulate events,” decreed the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, whose scoops and analysis drive coverage in foreign policy circles, on Feb. 1.
  • “Mr. Biden has a few flaws but he was a child of the Cold War and, unless I’m mistaken, has surprised and discombobulated Vladimir Putin with his un-Obama-like response to renewed tensions over Ukraine,” Holman Jenkins, a conservative columnist, wrote Tuesday in the Wall Street Journal.
  • Even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell seems willing to give his former Senate colleague credit, even when he hasn’t adopted policies as quickly as he’d like: “I was glad to hear that U.S. forces are finally moving to reinforce our Eastern flank allies,” McConnell said on Feb. 2.

Flashback: After Biden’s Aug. 31 speech on Afghanistan, Haass called parts of it “unbecoming,” and deemed the overall approach “a questionable policy terribly executed.”

  • In mid-August, before the suicide blast at Kabul’s airport that killed 13 Americans and at least 170 Afghans, Ignatius called the situation a “disaster,” and concluded, “Biden owns the final decision, for better or worse.”
  • The title of Jenkins’s Aug. 17 Afghanistan column: “Biden’s Eyes-Open Debacle.”
  • McConnell called the withdrawal “one of the worst foreign policy decisions in American history.”

The other side: Biden still has plenty of critics on Ukraine — including some unlikely bedfellows.

  • Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has called on Biden to drop long-standing support for Ukraine’s eventual membership in NATO. He argues a binding commitment to defend the country would undermine efforts to counter China.
  • Senate Republicans also have continued to hammer Biden for his decision to waive sanctions on Nord Stream 2, the Russia-to-Germany natural gas pipeline Ukraine has called an “existential threat” to its security.
  • Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has warned new sanctions on Russia could cause “massive economic upheaval,” and Russia’s concerns about NATO expansion “were not just invented yesterday by Putin out of thin air.”
  • But Sanders praised Biden’s approach on the Senate floor on Thursday.

Between the lines: Even Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a reliable Biden critic, has voiced his support on Ukraine.

  • “I completely support the Biden Administration’s decision to send more U.S. troops to bolster NATO allies in the face of Russian aggression,” he tweeted Feb. 2.



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Omicron coverage reveals how the establishment, media keep us scared

In March 2020, a profile of the typical COVID victim emerged from Italy. The average decedent was 80 years old, with approximately three comorbidities, such as heart disease, obesity or diabetes. The young had little to worry about; the survival rate for the vast majority of the population was well over 99 percent.

That portrait never significantly changed. The early assessments of COVID out of Italy have remained valid through today. And so it will prove with the Omicron variant.

The data out of South Africa, after five weeks of Omicron spread, suggest that Omicron should be a cause for celebration, not fear. Its symptoms are mild to nonexistent in the majority of the infected, especially the vaccinated; hospitalization rates are over nine times lower than for previous COVID strains; deaths are negligible. That assessment will only be confirmed as the United States and other Western countries gather their own data on Omicron.

Yet the public health establishment and the media are working overtime to gin up Omicron hysteria. The official response to the Omicron variant provides a case study in the deliberate manufacture of fear. The following strategies are key:

1. Create a group norm of fear 

The media want you to believe that everyone around you is scared out of his mind, and thus you should be, too. Man-on-the-street interviews quote Nervous Nellies exclusively. A Dec. 17 New York Times article headlined “As Virus Cases Surge, New Yorkers Feel a Familiar Anxiety” trotted out a parade of paralyzed city residents:

“Monday I wasn’t even thinking about [Omicron], and Thursday I’m in a panic,” said a 59-year-old woman on the Upper West Side. A teacher at Manhattan’s New School confessed: “It’s literally all I’ve been thinking about. I’m really heartsick and worried.” A 36-year-old woman in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, said: “It’s scary — it feels like we’ve been here before.” A 62-year- old woman in Queens reported that her travel and outing days were over: “I’m going to go home, I’m going to stay home and just keep to myself.”

The official response to the Omicron variant provides a case study in the deliberate manufacture of fear.
Getty Images/iStockphoto

Are there any New Yorkers who are not panicked? Presumably, but you would not know it from the Times’ and other outlets’ coverage. Needless to say, dissenters from Omicron fear in the rest of the country are beneath notice. The point of these one-sided quotes is to spread and normalize panic as the only reasonable reaction to the variant.

2. Buttress group fear with expert opinion 

The only public-health experts that the media quote are those determined to put the most dire spin on Omicron. They stress worst-case hypothetical scenarios and dismiss actual good-case evidence. At best, they may grudgingly admit that Omicron symptoms are disproportionately mild, but rush to assert that there are still many as-yet-unrealized grounds for worry.

“Even if Omicron causes less severe cases, the sheer number of cases could once again overwhelm unprepared health systems,” the director-general of the World Health Organization said. “I’m not counting [Omicron’s lack of severity] as good news just yet,” a disease ecologist at Georgetown University said. “Even if infection is mild in many individuals, it’s not going to be mild in everyone.”

But that 100 percent mildness standard is unrealistic. There are outliers in any disease and any treatment; the question is: What is the predominant reality? The zero-risk, zero-harm standard for public policy adopted for the first time with COVID has proven a social, economic and public-health disaster.

An 11-year-old receives her second dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.
AP / Nam Y. Huh

At worst, the favored experts do not even pay lip service to the evidence militating against panic. An epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill told The New York Times: “I think we need to be prepared for the possibility that this could be at least as bad as any previous wave that we’ve seen.”

There are apparently no circumstances which would warrant a less-than-totalitarian response in advance of any actual disaster. The yearning for more draconian lockdowns and more control over the private sector is palpable.

3. Manufacture epistemological uncertainty and insist on that uncertainty as long as possible 

The media intone repeatedly that much remains uncertain about Omicron, including how likely it is to cause severe disease. But we already have a good picture of that likelihood from the South Africa experience: very unlikely. Nevertheless, the director of the influential Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, Christopher Murray, is determined to assert that we know little to nothing yet: “The most challenging question is severity,” he told the Times.

4. Bury both good news and dissenters from the bad news

The South African data should lead any coverage of Omicron, yet it has barely been reported. Though only 27 percent of that country is fully vaccinated, less than 2 percent of new cases are requiring hospitalization. And that number is undoubtedly too high, since many reported COVID hospitalizations were admitted for reasons other than COVID. 

In countries such as the United States, with much higher rates of vaccination, the breakthrough infections from Omicron will be even milder. Omicron will be an ideal vehicle for achieving herd immunity, conferring protection without tears on the vast majority of the infected.

The South African doctor who first reported the Omicron variant has declared herself “astonished” by the world’s reaction to the new strain, which is “out of all proportion to its risks.” 

Scientists at the Africa Health Research Institute in Durban, South Africa, work on the omicron variant of the COVID-19 virus.
AP / Jerome Delay

“Patients typically present with muscle pain, body aches, a headache and a bit of fatigue,” Angelique Coetzee wrote in the Daily Mail on Dec. 13. “After about five days [those symptoms] clear up, and that’s it.” 

The only patient with severe symptoms whom she has seen over the last month had HIV, pneumonia and other comorbidities.

Coetzee has been nonexistent in the non-conservative press. Just as we are supposed to believe that everyone around us is universally spooked, so we should believe that there is an unbroken expert consensus about the likely disaster that is Omicron. European health officials are warning of an Omicron spike, we are told. State and local health officials are urging that holiday gatherings be held outdoors and that all participants get vaccinated, boosted and tested; partygoers should wear masks. 

Are there no experts who think that Omicron is not an emerging threat? Apparently not, if you read the mainstream media. If any dissenters do break through, they will be as demonized and silenced by Big Tech as the lockdown skeptics in the scientific community were at the start of the COVID era.

5. Omit relevant context 

We hear constantly that 1,300 people are dying a day from COVID. By comparison, about 2,000 people die each day from cancer and 1,600 from heart disease. Their deaths get no coverage. COVID was the leading cause of death in the United States only in January 2021, even among those 85 and older. Since then, it has ranked as the third-most-frequent cause of death both in the overall population and in the elderly.

To read the press coverage, however, you would think that nothing approaches COVID in fierce lethality and that all public resources should be directed to stopping its spread, no matter the costs to the education and socialization of children, to physical and psychological health, and to economic opportunity. Restrictive COVID policies exacerbated sickness in the highest-ranking categories of mortality, a toll that will only grow. Patients put off lifesaving cancer screenings, having been spooked away from medical facilities. Obesity worsened, as gyms were shut down and people barricaded themselves at home, packing on the pounds. Those ever-bigger fatties will be tomorrow’s coronary casualties and COVID victims.

Respiratory therapist Frans Oudenaar replaces an oxygen tube for Linda Calderon in a COVID-19 unit at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Los Angeles.
AP / Jae C. Hong

Even those 1,300 daily COVID deaths are an overcount, since public-health reporting counts deaths with COVID as deaths from COVID. Someone who was dying already from cancer will be deemed a COVID death if he happens to contract that more newsworthy disease at the end of his life. Someone who dies of old age will also be counted as a COVID fatality if infected at death.

The average life expectancy in 2019 was less than 79 years. But The New York Times’ maudlin COVID obituaries report the deaths of nonagenarians as COVID fatalities, as if those oldsters would have otherwise lived indefinitely. A 91-year-old jazz pianist was included last week in the “Those We’ve Lost” series, even though he was a stroke victim with numerous long-standing health problems that the COVID virus merely exacerbated.

6. Flog the case count 

If the media is obsessing about case count, it means that COVID deaths have been a terrible disappointment. COVID death rates have plunged over the last year and are barely budging in the post-Omicron era. But case counts are a particularly deceptive measure of pandemic severity, when so many of the new cases are mild to asymptomatic. And despite the concerted effort to generate hospital horror stories, hospitalization rates in New York City, the leading wedge of Omicron, remain comparatively low. COVID hospitalization numbers are themselves deceptive for the same reason as COVID death counts: Being admitted to a hospital with COVID is treated as being admitted for COVID.

Nevertheless, the fear-mongering is paying big dividends. Like clockwork, events and businesses in New York City are shutting down, extending the demand for and dependency on government handouts.

Radio City has canceled its entire Christmas run of the Rockettes; expect Mayor de Blasio to pull the plug on the Times Square New Year’s celebration.

Biden announced a plan to distribute via mail 500 million free at-home rapid tests.
AP

Return-to-work schedules are being shelved and entire offices put back on remote work, another severe setback to the revival of Midtown Manhattan.

Outdoor mask-wearing in Manhattan is back up to about 90 percent, based on informal observation. Masked residents of buildings where virtually everyone is vaccinated are refusing entry to the elevator to their fellow residents (also masked), as if a three-second ride to the lobby will provide enough viral dose to be infectious. Grown men are using their knuckles to press elevator buttons.

Perhaps the rest of the country, particularly in red states, will act more rationally toward Omicron. But here in the epicenter of blue-state dominance, we have turned the equivalent of the common cold into a potent weapon against the resumption of civil society.

From The Spectator

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Apple M1 silicon upsets the establishment by skipping past the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X and coming close to Intel Core i7-11700K single-thread performance on PassMark

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