Amid such hard times, we’d like to briefly interrupt your daily news with a video showing adorable koalas being released back into the wild after being rescued from the fires in Australia. Enjoy! 🌱🐨💕 pic.twitter.com/38TJoriG9o
This interview with Kevin Lin explains how medical personnel in Wuhan, China sounded the alarm in late December as the coronavirus began to spread. After an initial period of denial and scapegoating, Chinese leaders took decisive actions to contain the virus, even as some of those actions produced unintended consequences. As Covid-19 deaths spike around the world, China faces a potential resurgence of the pandemic and a mounting ecomonic crisis that will test the Communist Party. And although civil society in mainland China and street protests in Hong Kong have been quashed, the crisis may open a path for labor, feminist, and democratic organizing to spread among the youth, even as nationalist tensions rise between the US and China.
Kevin Lin is an activist and researcher in the Chinese labor movement and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America’s International Committee. He is a contributor to Jacobin,Labor…
The scene where 80,000 N95 face masks were confiscated during an FBI raid at a warehouse in New Jersey. Christopher Sadowski
The scene where 80,000 N95 face masks were confiscated during an FBI raid at a warehouse in New Jersey. Christopher Sadowski
The scene where 80,000 N95 face masks were confiscated during an FBI raid at a warehouse in New Jersey. Christopher Sadowski
The scene where 80,000 N95 face masks were confiscated during an FBI raid at a warehouse in New Jersey. Christopher Sadowski
The scene where 80,000 N95 face masks were confiscated during an FBI raid at a warehouse in New Jersey. Christopher Sadowski
A Brooklyn man claiming to be infected with the coronavirus coughed on FBI agents who were investigating him for hoarding medical supplies, the US Attorney’s Office said Monday.
Baruch Feldheim, 43, is facing charges of assault and making false statements to the feds on Sunday outside his Borough Park home where he allegedly peddled and stored massive amounts of N95 respirator masks, federal officials said.
Feldheim is also accused of price-gouging. On March 18, he’s suspected of selling a New Jersey doctor about 1,000 of the masks for $12,000, a markup of roughly 700 percent, authorities said.
The accused fraudster also directed another doctor to an Irvington, NJ, auto repair shop to pick up another order. There, the doctor reported to investigators that Feldheim was allegedly hoarding enough medical supplies “to outfit an entire hospital.”
The materials included hand sanitizers, Clorox wipes, chemical cleaning agents and surgical supplies.
By last Monday, Feldheim was operating from his Brooklyn home, offering to push surgical gowns to a nurse, the feds said.
Two days later, the suspected hoarder received a gigantic shipment at his home of about eight pallets of face masks.
FBI agents then staked out his house, first noticing empty boxes of N95 masks outside.
On Sunday, they said they witnessed “multiple instances” of people approaching Feldheim’s residence and walking away with what appeared to be medical supplies.
The agents confronted Feldheim outside his house, keeping a safe social distance over coronavirus fears.
“When the agents were within four to five feet of him, Feldheim allegedly coughed in their direction without covering his mouth,” the US attorney’s release said. “At that point, Feldheim told the FBI agents that that he had the Coronavirus,” the statement said.
Feldheim then allegedly lied to FBI agents regarding his possession and sale of medical supplies.
He falsely told the agents that he worked for a company that bought and sold PPE and that he never took physical custody of the materials.
Following Feldheim’s arrest, the FBI on Monday night raided a warehouse on Pennsylvania Avenue in an industrial section of Linden, NJ, that housed Feldhim’s suspected stash of 80,000 masks, a source said.
Mask-wearing agents and other workers placed the eight pallets of medical supplies into a box truck.
The arrest comes after President Trump claimed that some medical supplies were being swiped from New York City hospitals, which Mayor Bill de Blasio dismissed as insulting.
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