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China jails citizen-journalist for 4 years over Wuhan virus reporting
Zhang Zhan went to Wuhan, interviewed residents and uploaded clips to YouTube
Thomson Reuters ·
Posted: Dec 28, 2020 2:33 AM ET
Police attempt to stop journalists from recording footage outside the Shanghai Pudong New District People's Court — where Chinese citizen journalist Zhang Zhan, who reported on Wuhan's COVID-19 outbreak and was detained in May, was sentenced to four years in prison on Monday. (Leo Ramirez/AFP/Getty Images)
A Chinese court handed a four-year jail term on Monday to a citizen-journalist who reported from the central city of Wuhan at the peak of last year's coronavirus outbreak, on grounds of "picking quarrels and provoking trouble," her lawyer said.
"We will probably appeal," the lawyer, Ren Quanniu, told Reuters, adding that the trial at a court in Pudong, a district of China's business hub of Shanghai, ended at 12.30 p.m. local time, with Zhang being sentenced to four years.
"Ms Zhang believes she is being persecuted for exercising her freedom of speech," he had said before the trial.
She knows she is in China, right?
Criticism of China's early handling of the crisis has been censored, and whistle-blowers, such as doctors, warned. State media have credited success in reining in the virus to the leadership of President Xi Jinping.
The virus has spread worldwide to infect more than 80 million people and kill over 1.76 million, paralyzing air travel as nations threw up barriers against it that have disrupted industries and livelihoods.
The United Nations Human Rights office voiced concern at the sentence imposed on Zhang.
"We raised her case with the authorities throughout 2020 as an example of the excessive clampdown on freedom of expression linked to #COVID19 & continue to call for her release," it said in a tweet.
In Shanghai, police enforced tight security outside the court where the trial opened seven months after Zhang's detention, although some supporters were undeterred.
A man in a wheelchair, who told Reuters he came from the central province of Henan to demonstrate support for Zhang as a fellow Christian, wrote her name on a poster before police arrived to escort him away.
Entry denied
Foreign journalists were denied entry to the court "due to the epidemic," court security officials said.
A former lawyer, Zhang arrived in Wuhan on Feb. 1 from her home in Shanghai.
Her short video clips uploaded to YouTube consist of interviews with residents, commentary and footage of a crematorium, train stations, hospitals and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Detained in mid-May, she went on a hunger strike in late June, court documents seen by Reuters say. Her lawyers told the court that police strapped her hands and force-fed her with a tube. By December, she was suffering headaches, giddiness, stomach ache, low blood pressure and a throat infection.
Requests to the court to release Zhang on bail before the trial and live stream the trial went ignored, her lawyer said.
Other citizen-journalists who had disappeared without explanation included Fang Bin, Chen Qiushi and Li Zehua.
While there has been no news of Fang, Li re-emerged in a YouTube video in April to say he was forcibly quarantined, while Chen, although released, is under surveillance and has not spoken publicly, a friend has said.
That's free speech in China!
Study says at least 50 journalists killed in 2020;
hundreds detained or missing
By Clyde Hughes
Journalists cover a news conference from Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Novo-Ogaryovo state residence in Moscow, Russia, on December 17. Photo by Maxim Shipenkov/EPA-EFE
Dec. 29 (UPI) -- At least 50 journalists have died worldwide this year, according to new data -- a slight decline from 2019.
Advocacy group Reporters Without Borders said in its report that the share of journalists who died in war zones, like Syria and Yemen, declined to 32% of the total number.
Conversely, the number of reporters killed outside war zones increased to 68%.
The five deadliest nations for journalists this year were Mexico (8 deaths), Iraq (6), Afghanistan (5), Pakistan (4) and India (4). Three died in the Philippines and Honduras.
Mexico - the Narco-State, is followed by 3 Muslim states. Curiously, neither Russia nor China are on top of the list.
The report said 84% of journalists who died this year were knowingly targeted and deliberately killed, a 21% increase over 2019.
Last year, RWB said 53 journalists were killed worldwide. Almost 1,000 have died over the past decade.
The data noted that the number of those who went missing, were detained, or held hostage in 2020 remained at a historically high 387.
"[This year] has also seen a 35% increase in the number of women journalists arbitrarily detained and a fourfold increase in arrests of journalists during the first three months of COVID-19's spread around the world," the report added. "Fourteen journalists who were arrested in connection with their coverage of the pandemic are still being held."
Undoubtedly, most, if not all, are being held in China, which this report curiously neglects to point out.
The Committee to Protect Journalists reported earlier this month that at least 274 reporters worldwide were in prison on Dec. 1, the highest figure since the committee started tracking data in the early 1990s.
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As I suggested last week, 'Big Pharma will fight this all the way to the bank'.
Twitter blacklists European MEDICAL JOURNAL after it published study
on Ivermectin treatment for Covid-19
31 Dec 2020 20:15
© Reuters / Kacper Pempel
Twitter has blocked a link to an article in a peer-reviewed scientific journal that suggested the antiparasitic drug ivermectin could be useful against Covid-19. The platform claims the journal's website is “potentially unsafe.”
Twitter user Karl Denninger (@TickerGuy) posted a link to an observational study in the European Journal of Medical and Health Sciences that found healthcare workers in Dhaka, Bangladesh who were treated with ivermectin as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PreP) were markedly less likely to become infected with Covid-19. Just 6.9 percent of those given the drug tested positive for Covid-19, while a whopping 73.3 percent of those who did not became infected.
No sooner had his tweet slamming the “GHOULS” in charge of the US response to the pandemic (and telling doubters to stick the study where the sun doesn’t shine) gone live on Thursday morning, however, than Denninger discovered Twitter had blocked the link with a warning screen advising users “this site may be unsafe.”
Users who attempted to access the peer-reviewed journal were confronted with an alert that the link was “identified by Twitter or [its] partners as being potentially spammy or unsafe” and could potentially “steal personal information or harm electronic devices.” This would be quite an accomplishment for a static text-only page with no links or scripts running.
The absurdity of the warning is striking as the ejmd is peer-reviewed (therefore rigorously scientific) and I think we can assume that Twitters editors are not such scientific authorities. Their 'partners', on the other hand, may have some expertise, and, may actually be Big Pharma, itself, since they stand to lose billions of dollars if word gets out that there is a cheap, effective, and proven safe alternative to the experimental treatments being rushed through the approval process.
Twitter’s fondness for blocking traffic to “wrongthink” sites with spurious warning pages is a well-established headache for the alternative media, but ejmed.org is no ZeroHedge or BitChute. Indeed, it’s not political at all, let alone pro- or anti-establishment. Nevertheless, the social media behemoth saw fit to block not just that one article, but the whole ejmed.org site.
Even in the face of such a significant difference between the experimental and control trial group, the authors were tentative in their conclusions, stating only that ivermectin “should be subjected to large-scale trials all over the world to ascertain its effectiveness as pre-exposure prophylaxis for Covid-19.”
While the off-patent drug is best known as a deworming medicine, it also has an established reputation as an antiviral drug. Over two dozen trials have suggested it is effective in treating even late-stage Covid-19, including one successful study by the same Bangladeshi researchers who published the ivermectin-as-PreP paper.
Big Pharma's fears
Were such a drug to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration for treatment of Covid-19, however, it could jeopardize the newly-released vaccines’ emergency use authorization, which requires there be no safe and approved treatments for a disease before a vaccine can be deployed on an emergency basis. Ivermectin is FDA-approved – like another controversial drug, hydroxychloroquine, it’s been on the market for decades for use treating other conditions. However, the agency has thus far refused to consider approving ivermectin to treat coronavirus.
While Twitter has not explained its decision to block the entire website of the European Journal of Medical and Health Sciences, the platform declared earlier this month that it would be removing all “misleading” tweets about vaccines. Any post that suggests vaccines intentionally cause harm, “control populations,” or have side effects is fair game, as is any tweet that suggests Covid-19 is not serious. While most of these guidelines are subjective, Twitter plans to double down on them in the new year, adding warning labels to tweets with “disputed” claims about vaccines.
For now, however, Denninger seems to have found a way around Twitter’s mysterious outburst of anti-academic bigotry, posting a screen-cap of another study that came to similar conclusions as the censored paper in addition to the link.
While it is possible Ivermectin may be the miracle drug that could save millions of lives, we may never know. Big Pharma will do, and probably is doing, everything it can to keep it from ever being approved. Big Pharma, of course, is not interested in saving lives or reducing suffering, it's interested in profits, and that's all.
Controlling social media is the first thing to do; keeping it out of the news is the next. Let me know if you actually see a story on Ivermectin on mainstream news.
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