"Unknown" Viral Pneumonia Outbreak In China Has Hong Kong, Taiwan Worried About SARS

Hong Kong and Taiwan are on high alert following a notice from Chinese authorities on Dec. 31 that 27 people contracted an “unknown viral pneumonia” in the central city of Wuhan.

With some netizens likening the epidemic to the deadly outbreak of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus that killed almost 800 people in 2002-2003 after being covered up by Chinese authorities, the Hong Kong and Taiwan government have called for faster genetic testing after Chinese authorities said they were yet to confirm the cause of the outbreak.

As China has the technology to identify viruses within 48 hours, the authority’s slow response has led many to be suspicious as to why the disease has yet to be identified.

Emergency Notice for New Outbreak

On Dec. 30, Wuhan city Health Commission released an “Emergency Notice About Unknown Pneumonia.” The notice said that several Wuhan hospitals had received pneumonia patients with similar symptoms and that no further details were available.

The notice was soon spread by Chinese netizens via different social media platforms. Although the government soon censored this information, the notice was broadly spread among overseas Chinese communities.

On Dec. 31, state-run media confirmed the outbreak but also did not have any information about the cause of the infections.

The report said patients’ symptoms included fever, having difficulty breathing and invasive lesions in both lungs. 27 people from Wuhan had fallen ill, with seven of them in serious condition.

Most of the patients were sellers at the Huanan Seafood Market located close to Hankou Railway Station in the city’s Jianghan district. That same market was linked to all SARS cases seen in Wuhan in 2003. The market is not limited to selling seafood, netizens said, but also sees various animals including cats, snakes, and marmots.

The notice added that hospitals were planning to release two of the 27 infected people in the next few days after some more treatment, while 18 other patients are in a stable condition.

The state-run People’s Daily reported on the afternoon of Dec. 31 that the initial investigating team didn’t find an obvious human-to-human transmission, and that so far, no medical staff have been infected.

“The cause of the disease is not clear,” the newspaper said on the popular social media platform Weibo, citing unnamed hospital officials.

“We cannot confirm it is what’s being spread online, that it is SARS virus. Other severe pneumonia is more likely.”

The Chinese National Health Commission, a cabinet-level executive department for sanitation and health, said it has sent a group of experts to Wuhan on Dec. 31 to lead more tests and another investigation.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong and Taiwan have stepped up border screening and hospitals are on alert.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/unknown-viral-pneumonia-outbreak-china-has-hong-kong-taiwan-worried-about-sars

Hunter Biden’s Chinese Firm Invested in African ‘Blood Mine’

Bohai Harvest RST (BHR), a private equity firm bankrolled by the Chinese government that is tied to Hunter Biden, invested in an alleged African “blood mine.”

The Washington Free Beacon reported on Thursday that until September, BHR owned a stake in one of the largest cobalt and copper mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo—the Tenke Fungurume mine.

The Beacon noted:

BHR leveraged financial support from China Molybdenum, a Chinese resource company, to purchase a 24 percent stake in Congo’s Tenke Fungurume mine in 2017. The transaction gave China Molybdenum, which was already a majority stakeholder in the Congolese mine, the ‘exclusive right’ to purchase BHR’s stakes in the mine in the future.

BHR’s profit margin on the venture, however, was severally impacted by more than 10,000 illegal miners, many of whom used their residency near the Tenke Fungurume site to excavate resources for sale on the black market.

Illegal mining had long posed a problem for China Molybdenum, with the company even requesting help from the Congolese government to protect its investment.

In June 2019, the Congolese finally stepped in by deploying more than 600 troops to the mine in order to provide added security. The military’s presence, however, only exacerbated the situation, leading to a blood confrontation between the illegal miners.

“The armed forces burned down dozens of homes suspected of belonging to illegal miners, severely burning a 3-year-old girl and 14-month-old boy in the process,” the Beacon reported.

The confrontation continued throughout the summer, culminating in an August standoff wherein “soldiers fired ‘stray bullets’ into a mining camp that killed a woman and injured nine others.”

Shortly after the violence, BHR finalized the sale of its stake in the mine to China Molybdenum for the sum of $1.1 billion.

This is not the first time that BHR has made an investment in companies and regions with lackluster human rights records. BHR owns a stake in Megvii Technology, a Chinese company that designs image recognition and deep-learning software. Megvii, whose technology is in line with China’s efforts to use facial recognition systems to boost its civilian surveillance capacities, is also partially backed by the Chinese tech giant Alibaba.

In October 2019, the company was blacklisted by the Trump administration on the grounds that its technology had been used by the communist regime in Beijing to repress Muslim minorities in China’s Xinjiang Uighur region.

The revelations about BHR’s involvement in the Tenke Fungurume mine also come as Hunter Biden’s wheeling and dealing overseas has taken center stage in the 2020 presidential campaign. In October, BHR disclosed it was weighing if and how it should explain its working relationship with Biden, which was terminated that month. The controversy first started when President Donald Trump called on the Chinese government to investigate the company’s ties to the Biden family.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/01/02/report-hunter-bidens-chinese-firm-invested-in-african-blood-mine/

"Their Day Is Coming, I Promise You": Durham Probe To Contain "Very Problematic Findings", Meadows Warns

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) sat down with Steve Bannon on Thursday's War Room: Impeachment, where he suggested that US Attorney John Durham will uncover "very problematic findings" with the FBI's counterintelligence operation against the Trump campaign - both before and after the 2016 US election.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/their-day-coming-i-promise-you-warns-meadows-says-durham-probe-may-contain-very

This is what the Iranian state media is saying

Commander of Iran’s Quds Force, PMU deputy head martyred in US strike

Major General Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the second-in-command of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), have been killed in US airstrikes in the Iraqi capital Baghdad.

The IRGC announced in a statement on Friday morning that Major General Soleimani and al-Muhandis were martyred in the attack carried out by US helicopters.

The Iraqi pro-government group also confirmed the incident.

"The deputy head of the Hashed, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, and head of the Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani, were killed in a US strike that targeted their car on the Baghdad International Airport road," it a statement on Friday.

"The American and Israeli enemy is responsible for killing the mujahideen Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis and Qassem Soleimani," said Ahmed al-Assadi, a PMU spokesman.

The group had earlier said that its public relations director Mohammed Reza al-Jaberi and four other members of the group were also killed after three Katyusha rockets struck a military base next to Baghdad International Airport in the Iraqi capital.

The media bureau of the voluntary forces – better known by the Arabic word Hashd al-Shabai – described the early Friday morning attack as a "cowardly US bombing”.

The rockets landed near the air cargo terminal, burning two vehicles and injuring several people, the Iraqi Interior Ministry's Security Media Cell said in an earlier statement.

Shortly after the attack, US officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters that the strikes were carried out against two targets linked to Iran in Baghdad. The officials declined to give any further details.

Meanwhile, security sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AFP that eight people were killed in the attack.

The development came as the United States military said on Sunday it had carried out strikes in western Iraq against Kataib Hezbollah group, which is part of the pro-government Popular Mobilization Units – better known by the Arabic word Hashd al-Sha’abi.

https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2020/01/03/615224/Hashd-Sha%E2%80%99abi-public-relations-director-killed-in-rocket-attack-on-Baghdad-airport