According to a firm that handles US expatriate affairs, 2020 is shaping up to be a record year for Americans renouncing their US citizenship, going by data from the year’s first nine months. The news is all the more notable, since US consulates have truncated their affairs since March when the COVID-19 pandemic went global. Bambridge Accountants of New York said in a Wednesday report th [...]

Here is an excerpt from the Guardian... The local television station London Live is facing sanctions after the media regulator, Ofcom, found it had posed a threat to the public’s health by showing a lengthy interview with David Icke about the coronavirus pandemic. The little-watched channel, owned by Evening Standard boss Evgeny Lebedev, broadcast an 80-minute interview with the former f [...]

Officials argue that social distancing rules and the pressure brought by the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic may be contributing to the rise in the number of suicides among US military service members. US military suicide rates have increased by at least 20% this year, in comparison to the same period last year, with Defence Department officials considering the COVID-19 pandemic a potentia [...]

As part of this Republican outsourcing push, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper is now trying to cut Pentagon spending in the one place where it's actually needed—the Military Health System (MHS). Esper wants to trim $2 billion allocated for direct care for 9.5 million active-duty personnel, military retirees, and dependents over the next five years. This will force more service members and their f [...]

Nearly 130 Austrians have been stunned to receive $1,200 cheques signed by none other than US President Donald Trump. Washington’s sudden generosity appears to be a result of a mistake in its Covid-19 relief package system. Citizens of the small Alpine nation, located thousands of miles away from America, were baffled by the envelopes containing what was described as economic relief money from t [...]

While the world’s second-largest economy, China, has suffered its first contraction on record due to the Covid-19 pandemic, some experts argue the country has been preparing for a possible crisis for a long time. RT talked to economists to find out if Beijing may have foreseen the economic crash and about the Chinese government’s response to it. “Nobody, including Beijing, could have [...]

Since the launch on August 11 of the Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine, developed by Gamaleya Center scientists, Russia has seen immense interest and expressions of hope from many countries and has received requests for 1 billion doses of the vaccine. However, it has also faced criticism and questions from some Western countries and companies, especially those developing their own vaccines—oft [...]

Production disruptions caused by the Covid-19 outbreak could cost the global economy twice as much as a hypothetical global military conflict, according to figures cited in a recent research by the McKinsey Global Institute. In a report headlined ‘Risk, resilience, and rebalancing in global value chains’, the analysts of US-based consulting firm McKinsey evaluated various risks of a manuf [...]

Americans are ditching their US citizenship in droves thanks to an unbearable political atmosphere and the ongoing Covid-19 crisis, new research shows, indicating that both residents and expats are cutting ties in record numbers. More than 5,800 Americans [...]

On Oct. 24, 2019—45 days before the world’s first suspected case of COVID-19 was announced—a new “scorecard” was published called the Global Health Security Index. The scorecard ranked countries on how prepared they were to tackle a serious outbreak, based on a range of measures, including how quickly a country was likely to respond and how well its health care system would “treat the [...]

The currency markets are currently facing “multiple cross-currents” on rising global concerns over a potential second wave of Covid-19, said Deutsche Bank’s chief Asia macro strategist Sameer Goel. According to him, the “big question” for investors right now is whether the US dollar should be trading at a safe-haven risk premium. [...]

The staggering increase in wealth inequality comes despite, or perhaps in part because of, several rounds of cash injections by the federal government to corporations, big banks and to a lesser extent, ordinary Americans which have added trillions of dollars to the US national debt. The wealthiest 600+ Americans saw their total wealth increase by $434 billion between March 18, when the go [...]

The head of Wuhan’s virology institute has debunked the evolving US ‘Wuhan virus’ theory, saying Covid-19 couldn’t have artificially leaked. She said her lab didn’t have the first virus samples until as late as the end of 2019. Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) director Wang Yanyi described the theory – that Covid-19 was a creature of her laboratory – as “pure fabrication.” She e [...]

Scientists in Russia have carried out the first unofficial trial of a Covid-19 vaccine – and they say it’s effective. Epidemiologists in Moscow took the unorthodox step of injecting themselves and examining their own results. The test, conducted by employees at the National Research Center for Epidemiology and Microbiology, reportedly saw the participants gaining immunity to the virus with no [...]

The US has repeatedly blamed China for failing to contain the spread of the virus from Wuhan and for reporting the disease to the World Health Organisation too late. US President Donald Trump took to Twitter to reiterate his position concerning China's role in the coronavirus outbreak. Earlier this week, Chinese Ambassador to the United Nations Zhang Jun said that the US should stop using scapegoa [...]

First known US coronavirus deaths occurred far earlier than previously thought. Up until recently, the first COVID-19 death in the US was thought to have occurred in Washington state on Feb. 29. But autopsies have revealed two earlier coronavirus deaths in California, one on Feb. 6 and the other on Feb. 17, the AP reports. The San Francisco Chronicle calls it "a stunning discovery" that radically [...]

There is no evidence to substantiate the Trump administration’s claims that Covid-19 came from a Chinese laboratory, according to intelligence sources, raising questions about a leaked dossier blaming Beijing for the pandemic.  Sources that spoke to the Guardian said that a 15-page dossier which accused China of carrying out a cover-up to hide its role in the global health crisis was not based [...]

The Covid-19 pandemic should be a rallying call to change an economic system that spends billions each year on the tools of war but can't produce a decent healthcare system, bestselling author John Perkins told RT. Perkins is best known for his book 'Confessions of an Economic Hit Man,' in which he describes how American corporate elites plunder other nations to enrich themselves. [...]

The rapid proliferation of nuclear and conventional weapons post-Cold War indicates that governments continue to think of ‘security’ largely in military terms – but Covid-19 has exposed the fallacies in this way of thinking. Evidently, for world leaders, military power is regarded as a vital instrument of state policy and many countries have amassed huge destructive arsenals in a bid to acqu [...]

President Donald Trump could end up starting a war – either a civil war at home or an international one with China. Such is this president’s demagogic knack for wriggling out of responsibility for problems. Blame others and to hell with consequences. Let’s start from the premise that America’s grim experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has Trump’s ownership written all over it. Trum [...]

The European Union urgently requires financial injections to stay afloat and survive the coronavirus epidemic currently ravaging the continent, the European commissioner for economy, Paolo Gentiloni, has warned. A whopping €1.5 trillion ($ 1.63 trillion) could be needed to “deal with this crisis,” Gentiloni told Der Spiegel ahead of the EU leaders summit on the crisis sparked by the outbreak [...]

The coronavirus epidemic had scarcely arrived on US shores when the Trump administration declared “war” on it, in the grand tradition of the ‘War on Cancer’ or the ‘War on Drugs’. But these invisible wars don't end well. President Donald Trump declared war on the “invisible enemy” – Covid-19 – last month, pivoting on a dime from downplaying the pandemic to doing his best Church [...]