Trump Administration (FEMA) Seized Masks for Health Workers, Without Giving Us an Explanation

Unprecedented federal interference  On April 11, during the peak of COVID-19 cases and deaths in New York City, the Federal Emergency Management Agency intervened and demanded orders of medical equipment allocated to our relief efforts be redirected to the federal government. FEMA then seized 50,000 N95 respirators we had ordered without giving us an explanation or telling us where those respirators were going.  In my 15 years of working in the manufacturing industry with international and domestic supply chains, I have never — never — had the federal government interfere like this.  It wasn’t long before I realized it wasn’t only happening in New York and New Jersey. FEMA confiscated San Francisco’s PPE order as it went through Customs, even as the Trump administration told states and cities to procure their own equipment rather than rely on the federal government. Since those reports of FEMA quietly seizing materials, at least six states have…

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The Us and Iran Are Having a Debate on the Chinese Internet

And Facebook and Its Fellow Silicon Valley Titans Have Banned From the American Internet. Isn’t It Ironic…? BEIJING — They accuse each other of inciting violence. They denounce one another as corrupt. They call each other terrorists. As tensions between the United States and Iran persist after the American killing of a top Iranian general this month, the two countries are waging a heated battle in an unlikely forum: the Chinese internet. The embassies of the United States and Iran in Beijing have published a series of barbed posts in recent days on Weibo, a popular Chinese social media site, attacking each other in Chinese and in plain view of the country’s hundreds of millions of internet users. It looks the US and Iran are on the verge of an all-out meme war. Over the past few days, as the aftermath of the…

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The War With Iran Has Just Begun, They Raise the Blood Red Flag

For the Assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani and Other Prominent Iranian and Iraqi Officers in Baghdad on January 3… ILLUSTRATIVE: A US servicemen is at the Ayn al-Assad airbase that was targeted by Iranian missiles on January 8 Unguided rockets targeted the Iraqi military camp Taji that hosts US troops, the Iraqi military said in a statement on January 14. The Taji military camp is located near Baghdad. According to reports, the strike caused no casualties. No group has claimed responsibility for the attack. The January 14 strike became the second attack of this kind during the past 3 days. On January 12, four Iraqi personnel were wounded after eight rockets were fired at the Balad airbase, another facility that houses U.S. forces. This base is located about 80 km north of Baghdad. The tensions in Iraq have been growing…

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