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Coronavirus probe gains momentum ahead of World Health Assembly
Many join call for independent probe into pandemic, as world health body faces questions over Taiwan's participation.
More than 100 countries, including 50 African nations and all European Union member states, are backing a resolution calling for an independent probe into the coronavirus pandemic, Australia said in the run-up to a key meeting of the World Health Assembly (WHA).
Australian Health Minister Greg Hunt was quoted by news reports as saying the motion was "expected to be endorsed" at the assembly as early as Tuesday. Hunt is representing his country in the virtual WHA meeting, which is set to begin later on Monday.
At least 116 countries have now signed up as co-sponsors of the draft motion calling for an investigation, according to Australia's TV network ABC news.
Britain, Canada, India, Indonesia, Japan, New Zealand and Russia have also indicated their support.
While the coronavirus motion does not single-out China by name, it has angered officials with Beijing threatening economic countermeasures against Australia, which first pushed for an investigation.
Aside from the pandemic, World Health Organization (WHO) officials are also expected to raise the question of Taiwan's participation as an observer at the WHA - a move that is also expected to anger China.
Taiwan, which Beijing considers part of China, is one of the few places to have successfully contained the spread of coronavirus, also known as COVID-19.
The coronavirus pandemic was first reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late December. It has since spread around the world with some 4.7 million cases confirmed by Monday and at least 315,000 deaths.
Although Taiwan lost its place at the United Nations and on many UN bodies when countries began to normalise relations the People's Republic of China in the early 1970s, it remained an observer at the WHA until 2016 when Tsai Ing-wen was elected the island's president. China claims Tsai, who was returned for a second term in a landslide in January is a separatist.
The US has given its backing to Taiwan's campaign to participate in the assembly, while China has been stepping up its attacks on the self-ruled island and countries that support it.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/05/coronavirus-probe-gains-momentum-world-health-assembly-200518015350869.html
This 'man' published a book with Simon and Schuster falsely accusing me extramarital affair with President Trump's National Security Advisor and of links with Russian intelligence. When I challenged him, instead of apologizing, he called me a liar. And then blocked me.
Coward!
https://twitter.com/RealSLokhova/status/1262387837606952960
Is Ronan Farrow Too Good to Be True?
It was a breathtaking story, written by The New Yorker’s marquee reporter and published with an attention-grabbing headline: “Missing Files Motivated the Leak of Michael Cohen’s Financial Records.”
In it, the reporter, Ronan Farrow, suggests something suspicious unfolding inside the Treasury Department: A civil servant had noticed that records about Mr. Cohen, the personal lawyer for President Trump, mysteriously vanished from a government database in the spring of 2018. Mr. Farrow quotes the anonymous public servant as saying he was so concerned about the records’ disappearance that he leaked other financial reports to the media to sound a public alarm about Mr. Cohen’s financial activities.
The story set off a frenzied reaction, with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes calling it “an amazing shocking story about a whistle-blower” and his colleague Rachel Maddow describing it as “a meteor strike.” Congressional Democrats demanded answers, and the Treasury Department promised to investigate.
Two years after publication, little of Mr. Farrow’s article holds up, according to prosecutors and court documents. The Treasury Department records on Michael Cohen never went “missing.” That was merely the story put forward by the civil servant, an Internal Revenue Service analyst named John Fry, who later pleaded guilty to illegally leaking confidential information.
The records were simply put on restricted access, a longstanding practice to prevent leaks, a possibility Mr. Farrow briefly allows for in his story, but minimizes. And Mr. Fry’s leaks had been encouraged and circulated by a man who was barely mentioned in Mr. Farrow’s article, the now-disgraced lawyer Michael Avenatti, a passionate antagonist of Mr. Cohen.
Mr. Farrow may now be the most famous investigative reporter in America, a rare celebrity-journalist who followed the opposite path of most in the profession: He began as a boy-wonder talk show host and worked his way downward to the coal face of hard investigative reporting. The child of the actress Mia Farrow and the director Woody Allen, he has delivered stories of stunning and lasting impact, especially his revelations about powerful men who preyed on young women in the worlds of Hollywood, television and politics, which won him a Pulitzer Prize.
I’ve been watching Mr. Farrow’s astonishing rise over the past few years, marveling at his ability to shine a light on some of the defining stories of our time, especially the sexual misconduct of the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, which culminated with Mr. Weinstein’s conviction in February just before the pandemic took hold. But some aspects of his work made me wonder if Mr. Farrow didn’t, at times, fly a little too close to the sun.
Because if you scratch at Mr. Farrow’s reporting in The New Yorker and in his 2019 best seller, “Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators,” you start to see some shakiness at its foundation. He delivers narratives that are irresistibly cinematic — with unmistakable heroes and villains — and often omits the complicating facts and inconvenient details that may make them less dramatic. At times, he does not always follow the typical journalistic imperatives of corroboration and rigorous disclosure, or he suggests conspiracies that are tantalizing but he cannot prove.
Mr. Farrow, 32, is not a fabulist. His reporting can be misleading but he does not make things up. His work, though, reveals the weakness of a kind of resistance journalism that has thrived in the age of Donald Trump: That if reporters swim ably along with the tides of social media and produce damaging reporting about public figures most disliked by the loudest voices, the old rules of fairness and open-mindedness can seem more like impediments than essential journalistic imperatives.
That can be a dangerous approach, particularly in a moment when the idea of truth and a shared set of facts is under assault.
The New Yorker has made Mr. Farrow a highly visible, generational star for its brand. And Mr. Farrow’s supporters there point out the undeniable impact of his reporting — which ousted abusers like New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, and helped rewrite the rules of sex and power in the workplace, sometimes with his colleague Jane Mayer. Ken Auletta, The New Yorker writer who helped Mr. Farrow take his work from NBC to the magazine, said that the important thing is that Mr. Farrow helped reveal Mr. Weinstein’s predatory behavior to the world and bring him down.
“Are all the Ts crossed and the Is dotted? No,” Mr. Auletta said of some of Mr. Farrow’s most sweeping claims of a conspiracy between Mr. Weinstein and NBC to suppress his work.
Cont.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/17/business/media/ronan-farrow.html