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COVID-19 Blame and Shame on Duke NUS Medical School

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This is a very long read but since we are all sheltering in place, take the time to read it in full as it is jammed with fascinating facts. We have learned minute by minute due to media reporting all kinds of things about coronavirus but some REAL key facts have been omitted. Gotta ask why. We should start with Duke NUS Medical School/Singapore and domino from there. Doctors, scientists, lab techs, researchers and hunters all know very well the genesis of all potential 5000 strains of coronavirus and they collaborate and read published reports and discuss in seminars and educational events.

Lil Miss Shi knew as she is known as the bat-hunter in Wuhan. Beijing knew and kept quiet but Miss Shi did not. She warned for years and years and Duke University collaborated and likely the CDC and John Hopkins did also. Domestic biolabs and pharma all participate in the volumes of published reports and research.

Okay, read slowly and even take notes and list your questions.

Here we go.

Wuhan-based virologist Shi Zhengli has identified dozens of deadly SARS-like viruses in bat caves, and she warns there are more out there

By Jane Qiu

How China's "Bat Woman" Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus Shi Zhengli, known as China’s “bat woman” for her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves, releases a fruit bat after taking blood and swab samples from it in 2004. Credit: Wuhan Institute of Virology

BEIJING—The mysterious patient samples arrived at Wuhan Institute of Virology at 7 P.M. on December 30, 2019. Moments later, Shi Zhengli’s cell phone rang. It was her boss, the institute’s director. The Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention had detected a novel coronavirus in two hospital patients with atypical pneumonia, and it wanted Shi’s renowned laboratory to investigate. If the finding was confirmed, the new pathogen could pose a serious public health threat—because it belonged to the same family of bat-borne viruses as the one that caused severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), a disease that plagued 8,100 people and killed nearly 800 of them between 2002 and 2003. “Drop whatever you are doing and deal with it now,” she recalls the director saying.

Shi—a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years—walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical areas of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir for many viruses. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “could they have come from our lab?”

While Shi’s team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences institute raced to uncover the identity and origin of the contagion, the mysterious disease spread like wildfire. As of this writing, about 81,000 people in China have been infected. Of that number, 84 percent live in the province of Hubei, of which Wuhan is the capital, and more than 3,100 have died. Outside of China, about 41,000 people across more than 100 countries and territories in all of the continents except Antarctica have caught the new virus, and more than 1,200 have perished.

The epidemic is one of the worst to afflict the world in recent decades. Scientists have long warned that the rate of emergence of new infectious diseases is accelerating—especially in developing countries where high densities of people and animals increasingly mingle and move about.

“It’s incredibly important to pinpoint the source of infection and the chain of cross-species transmission,” says disease ecologist Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York City–based nonprofit research organization that collaborates with scientists, such as Shi, around the world to discover new viruses in wildlife. An equally important task, he adds, is hunting down other related pathogens—the “known unknowns”—in order to “prevent similar incidents from happening again.”

Tracing the Virus at Its Source

To Shi, her first virus-discovery expedition felt like a vacation. On a breezy, sunny spring day in 2004, she joined an international team of researchers to collect samples from bat colonies in caves near Nanning, the capital of Guangxi. Her inaugural cave was typical of the region: large, rich in limestone columns and—being a popular tourist destination—easily accessible. “It was spellbinding,” Shi recalls, with milky-white stalactites hanging from the ceiling like icicles, glistening with moisture.

But the holidaylike atmosphere soon dissipated. Many bats—including several insect-eating species of horseshoe bats that are abundant in southern Asia—roost in deep, narrow caves on steep terrain. Often guided by tips from local villagers, Shi and her colleagues had to hike for hours to potential sites and inch through tight rock crevasses on their stomach. And the flying mammals can be elusive. In one frustrating week, the team explored more than 30 caves and saw only a dozen bats.

These expeditions were part of the effort to catch the culprit in the SARS outbreak, the first major epidemic of the 21st century. A Hong Kong team had reported that wildlife traders in Guangdong first caught the SARS coronavirus from civets, mongooselike mammals that are native to tropical and subtropical Asia and Africa.

Before SARS, the world had little inkling of coronaviruses—named because, seen under a microscope, their spiky surface resembles a crown—says Linfa Wang, who directs the emerging infectious diseases program at Singapore’s Duke-NUS Medical School. Coronavirues were mostly known for causing common colds. “The SARS outbreak was a game changer,” says Wang, whose work on bat-borne coronaviruses got a swift mention in the 2011 Hollywood blockbuster Contagion. It was the first time a deadly coronavirus with pandemic potential emerged. This discovery helped to jump-start a global search for animal viruses that could find their way into humans.

Shi was an early recruit of that worldwide effort, and both Daszak and Wang have since been her long-term collaborators. But how the civets got the virus remained a mystery. Two previous incidents were telling: Australia’s 1994 Hendra virus infections, in which the contagion jumped from horses to humans, and Malaysia’s 1998 Nipah virus outbreak, in which it moved from pigs to people. Both diseases were found to be caused by pathogens that originated in fruit-eating bats. Horses and pigs were merely the intermediate hosts.

In those first virus-hunting months in 2004, whenever Shi’s team located a bat cave, it would put a net at the opening before dusk—and then wait for the nocturnal creatures to venture out to feed for the night. Once the bats were trapped, the researchers took blood and saliva samples, as well as fecal swabs, often working into the small hours. After catching up on some sleep, they would return to the cave in the morning to collect urine and fecal pellets.

But sample after sample turned up no trace of genetic material from coronaviruses. It was a heavy blow. “Eight months of hard work seemed to have gone down the drain,” Shi says. “We thought coronaviruses probably did not like Chinese bats.” The team was about to give up when a research group in a neighboring lab handed it a diagnostic kit for testing antibodies produced by people with SARS.

There was no guarantee the test would work for bat antibodies, but Shi gave it a go anyway. “What did we have to lose?” she says. The results exceeded her expectations. Samples from three horseshoe bat species contained antibodies against the SARS virus. “It was a turning point for the project,” Shi says. The researchers learned that the presence of the coronavirus in bats was ephemeral and seasonal—but an antibody reaction could last from weeks to years. So the diagnostic kit offered a valuable pointer as to how to hunt down viral genomic sequences.

Shi’s team used the antibody test to narrow down locations and bat species to pursue in the quest for these genomic clues. After roaming mountainous terrain in the majority of China’s dozens of provinces, the researchers turned their attention to one spot: Shitou Cave on the outskirts of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan—where they conducted intense sampling during different seasons throughout five consecutive years.

The efforts paid off. The pathogen hunters discovered hundreds of bat-borne coronaviruses with incredible genetic diversity. “The majority of them are harmless,” Shi says. But dozens belong to the same group as SARS. They can infect human lung cells in a petri dish, cause SARS-like diseases in mice, and evade vaccines and drugs that work against SARS.

In Shitou Cave—where painstaking scrutiny has yielded a natural genetic library of bat viruses—the team discovered a coronavirus strain in 2013 that came from horseshoe bats and had a genomic sequence that was 97 percent identical to the one found in civets in Guangdong. The finding concluded a decade-long search for the natural reservoir of the SARS coronavirus.

Viral Melting Pots

In many bat dwellings Shi has sampled, including Shitou Cave, “constant mixing of different viruses creates a great opportunity for dangerous new pathogens to emerge,” says Ralph Baric, a virologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And in the vicinity of such viral melting pots, Shi says, “you don’t need to be a wildlife trader to be infected.”

Near Shitou Cave, for example, many villages sprawl among the lush hillsides in a region known for its roses, oranges, walnuts and hawthorn berries. In October 2015 Shi’s team collected blood samples from more than 200 residents in four of those villages. It found that six people, or nearly 3 percent, carried antibodies against SARS-like coronaviruses from bats—even though none of them had handled wildlife or reported SARS-like or other pneumonia-like symptoms. Only one had travelled outside of Yunnan prior to sampling, and all said they had seen bats flying in their village.

Three years earlier, Shi’s team had been called in to investigate the virus profile of a mineshaft in Yunnan’s mountainous Mojiang County—famous for its fermented Pu’er tea—where six miners suffered from pneumonialike diseases (two of them died). After sampling the cave for a year the researchers discovered a diverse group of coronaviruses in six bat species. In many cases, multiple viral strains had infected a single animal, turning it into a flying factory of new viruses.

“The mineshaft stunk like hell,” says Shi, who went in with her colleagues wearing a protective mask and clothing. “Bat guano, covered in fungus, littered the cave.” Although the fungus turned out to be the pathogen that had sickened the miners, she says it would only have been a matter of time before they caught the coronaviruses if the mine had not been promptly shut.

With growing human populations increasingly encroaching on wildlife habitats, with unprecedented changes in land use, with wildlife and livestock transported across countries and their products around the world, and with a sharp increase in both domestic and international travel, new disease outbreaks of pandemic scale are a near mathematical certainty. This had been keeping Shi and many other researchers awake at night—long before the mysterious samples landed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology on that ominous evening last December.

About a year ago, Shi’s team published two comprehensive reviews about coronaviruses in Viruses and Nature Reviews Microbiology. Drawing evidence from her own studies—many of which were published in top academic journals—and from others, Shi and her co-authors warned of the risk of future outbreaks of bat-borne coronaviruses.

Racing against a Deadly Pathogen

On the train back to Wuhan on December 30 last year, Shi and her colleagues discussed ways to immediately start testing the patient samples. In the following weeks—the most intense and the most stressful time of her life—China’s bat woman felt she was fighting a battle in her worst nightmare, even though it was one she had been preparing for over the past 16 years. Using a technique called polymerase chain reaction, which can detect a virus by amplifying its genetic material, the first round of tests showed that samples from five of seven patients contained genetic sequences known to be present in all coronaviruses.

Shi instructed her team to repeat the tests and, at the same time, sent the samples to another laboratory to sequence the full viral genomes. Meanwhile she frantically went through her own laboratory’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.”

By January 7 the Wuhan team determined that the new virus had indeed caused the disease those patients suffered—a conclusion based on results from polymerase chain reaction analysis, full genome sequencing, antibody tests of blood samples and the virus’s ability to infect human lung cells in a petri dish. The genomic sequence of the virus—now officially called SARS-CoV-2 because it is related to the SARS pathogen—was 96 percent identical to that of a coronavirus the researchers had identified in horseshoe bats in Yunnan, they reported in a paper published last month in Nature. “It’s crystal clear that bats, once again, are the natural reservoir,” says Daszak, who was not involved in the study.

In 2004, an international team of scientists takes blood and swab samples from bats at night in order to discover potential bat-borne pathogens. Credit: Wuhan Institute of Virology

The genomic sequences of the viral strains from patients are, in fact, very similar to one another, with no significant changes since late last December, based on analyses of 326  published viral sequences. “This suggests the viruses share a common ancestor,” Baric says. The data also point to a single introduction into humans followed by sustained human-to-human transmission, researchers say.

Given that the virus seems fairly stable and that many infected individuals appear to have mild symptoms, scientists suspect the pathogen might have been around for weeks or even months before the first severe cases raised alarm. “There might have been mini outbreaks, but the virus burned out” before causing havoc, Baric says. “The Wuhan outbreak is by no means incidental.” In other words, there was an element of inevitability to it.

To many, the region’s burgeoning wildlife markets—which sell a wide range of animals such as bats, civets, pangolins, badgers and crocodiles—are perfect viral melting pots. Although humans could have caught the deadly virus from bats directly (according to several studies, including those by Shi and her colleagues), independent teams have suggested in preprint studies that pangolins may have been an intermediate host. These teams have reportedly uncovered SARS-CoV-2–like coronaviruses in these animals, which were seized in antismuggling operations in southern China.

On February 24 the nation announced a permanent ban on wildlife consumption and trade except for research or medicinal or display purposes—which will stamp out an industry worth $76 billion and put approximately 14 million people out of jobs, according to a 2017 report commissioned by the Chinese Academy of Engineering. Some welcome the initiative, whereas others, such as Daszak, worry that without efforts to change people’s traditional beliefs or provide alternative livelihoods, a blanket ban may push the business underground. This could make disease detection even more challenging. “Eating wildlife has been part of the cultural tradition in southern China” for thousands of years, Daszak says. “It won’t change overnight.”

In any case, Shi says, “wildlife trade and consumption are only part of problem.” In late 2016 pigs across four farms in Qingyuan county in Guangdong—60 miles from the site where the SARS outbreak originated—suffered from acute vomiting and diarrhea, and nearly 25,000 of the animals died. Local veterinarians could not detect any known pathogen and called Shi for help. The cause of the illness, called swine acute diarrhea syndrome (SADS), turned out to be a virus whose genomic sequence was 98 percent identical to a coronavirus found in horseshoe bats in a nearby cave.

“This is a serious cause for concern,” says Gregory Gray, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Duke University. Pigs and humans have very similar immune systems, making it easy for viruses to cross between the two species. Moreover a team at Zhejiang University in the Chinese city of Hangzhou found the SADS virus could infect cells from many organisms in a petri dish, including rodents, chickens, nonhuman primates and humans. Given the scale of swine farming in many countries, such as China and the U.S., Gray says, looking for novel coronaviruses in pigs should be a top priority.

Although the Wuhan outbreak is the sixth one caused by bat-borne viruses in the past 26 years —the other five being Hendra in 1994, Nipah in 1998, SARS in 2002, MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) in 2012, and Ebola in 2014—“the animals [themselves] are not the problem,” Wang says. In fact, bats help promote biodiversity and the health of their ecosystems by eating insects and pollinating plants. “The problem arises when we get in contact with them,” he says.

Fending Off Future Outbreaks

More than two months into the epidemic—and seven weeks after the Chinese government imposed citywide transportation restrictions in Wuhan, a megacity of 11 million—life feels almost normal, Shi says, laughing. “Maybe we are getting used to it. The worst days are certainly over.” The institute staffers have a special pass to travel from home to their laboratory, but they cannot go anywhere else. For more than a month, they had to subsist on instant noodles during their long hours in the lab because the institute’s canteen was closed.

The researchers found that the new coronavirus enters human lung cells using a receptor called angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2). The scientists have since been screening for drugs that can block it. They, as well as other research groups, are also racing to develop vaccines and test promising candidates. In the long run, the team plans to develop broad-spectrum vaccines and drugs against coronaviruses deemed risky to humans. “The Wuhan outbreak is a wake-up call,” Shi says.

Many scientists say the world should move beyond merely responding to deadly pathogens when they arise. “The best way forward is prevention,” Daszak says. Because 70 percent of animal-borne emerging infectious diseases come from wild creatures, “where we should start is to find all those viruses in wildlife globally and develop better diagnostic tests,” he adds. Doing so would essentially mean rolling out what researchers such as Daszak and Shi have been doing on a much bigger scale.

Such efforts should focus on high-risk viral groups in certain mammals prone to coronavirus infections, such as bats, rodents, badgers, civets, pangolins, and nonhuman primates, Daszak says. He adds that developing countries in the tropics, where wildlife diversity is greatest, should be the front line of this battle against viruses.

In recent decades, Daszak and his colleagues analyzed approximately 500 human infectious diseases from the past century. They found that the emergence of new pathogens tended to happen in places where a dense population had been changing the landscape—by building roads and mines, cutting down forests and intensifying agriculture. “China is not the only hotspot,” he says, noting that other major emerging economies, such as India, Nigeria and Brazil, are also at great risk.

Once potential pathogens are mapped out, scientists and public health officials can regularly check for possible infections by analyzing blood and swab samples from livestock, wild animals that are farmed and traded, and high-risk human populations, such as farmers, miners, villagers who live near bats, and people who hunt or handle wildlife, Gray says. This approach, known as “One Health,”, aims to integrate the management of wildlife health, livestock health, and human health. “Only then can we catch an outbreak before it turns into an epidemic,” he says, adding that the approach could potentially save the hundreds of billions of dollars such an epidemic can cost.

Back in Wuhan, China’s bat woman has decided to retire from the front line of virus-hunting expeditions. “But the mission must go on,” says Shi, who will continue to lead research programs. “What we have uncovered is just the tip of an iceberg.” Daszak’s team has estimated that there are as many as 5,000 coronavirus strains waiting to be discovered in bats globally. Shi is planning a national project to systematically sample viruses in bat caves—with much greater scope and intensity than her team’s previous attempts.

“Bat-borne coronaviruses will cause more outbreaks,” she says with a tone of brooding certainty. “We must find them before they find us.”

 

 

FCC Investigates Adam Schiff for Subpoena Abuse

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Okay cool, but what could be the consequence in the end is the real question.

During the House impeachment proceedings, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) released a report which included the phone records that included calls made or received by Rep. Devin Nunes(R-CA), journalist John Solomon, Rudy Giuliani, and others. The records in the report didn’t contain the content of the conversations but included who called who and how long the call lasted.

Devin Nunes Responds To Adam Schiff “Subpoenaing” Private ... source

The belief was that the records were obtained through subpoenas to the phone companies of records related to Giuliani and Lev Parnas, with the obvious purpose meant to try to impugn the people whose records were included without reason or cause.

What made it especially troubling was Schiff wouldn’t explain who was subpoenaed or how, and if it was a Congressional subpoena straight to the companies, it was a troubling abuse of power.

 

Now, as Kim Strassel at the Wall Street Journal is reporting, the FCC Commissioner, Brendan Carr, is calling Schiff out over what he believes are abuses of his subpoena power and Carr wants answers. Strassel called it an “incredible abuse” with Schiff publishing call records of his political rivals including Nunes, even the President’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani. Schiff even smeared Nunes during a press conference with the records, trying to suggest that Nunes was somehow “complicit.”


While Carr acknowledged that there might be instances in which Schiff could subpoena call records, Carr said the problem was that Schiff did this in secret, without giving the people whose records were grabbed the opportunity to respond or fight the request.

If that’s allowed, that’s a tremendous abuse of power if members of Congress can just demand phone records from the phone company about any American without any court and without any check.

Carr sent Schiff’s House Intel Committee a formal letter not only calling out their prior actions, but indicating that Schiff/the Committee may still be getting people’s records.

Carr points out in his letter that Schiff isn’t allowed to get the records from the phone company without consent from the citizen or in accordance with the law — that there has to be judicial review. Nor did they establish any legitimate legislative purpose in subpoenaing the records.

Moreover, as Carr notes, the recent decision involving the subpoena to former White House Counsel Don McGahn has now established that the subpoena power of the Congress as to such things might be questionable, without a court check on possible abuse of power.

Yes, please. It’s about time. Carr mentions substantial fines in his letter but there may be further action that could be taken.

ImageView image on Twitter

 

China Says Immoral of US Officials to Blame China for Virus

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FNC: If you listened to Chinese state-run media, you’d think President Trump went to China and released vials of COVID-19 on groups of unsuspecting men, women and children.

Beijing has been bending over backward trying to convince the world that the United States is the real culprit behind the quickly spreading virus that’s already claimed more than 4,600 lives across the globe.

It’s a high-stakes strategy for the Asian nation fighting to keep its superpower status amid a national lockdown and palpable anger over claims that Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the coronavirus, at first covered it up, triggering a worldwide health and economic crisis.

The Chinese government has already published a book in English — with translations in the works in French, Spanish, Russian and Arabic — touting its handling of the deadly disease.

“A Battle Against Epidemic: China Combatting COVID-19 in 2020” is a mishmash of glowing state media reports on the accomplishments of President Xi Jinping, the Communist Party and the dominance of the Chinese system in fighting the crisis.

biosafety-level-IV (P4) opened in 2017 in Wuhan

At best, China’s aggressive new campaign can be chalked up to ambitious propaganda.  At its worst, it’s a reckless display from a country that has actively misled the world while working overtime to save its own skin, foreign affairs expert Gordon G. Chang told Fox News.

Chang believes Beijing has been laying the groundwork for a PR attack against the United States for more than a month, first by throwing doubt on the origin of COVID-19 and second, by slamming America’s handling of previous diseases like the swine flu, which decimated China’s pork industry.

On Sunday, Lin Songtian, China’s ambassador to South Africa, said: “Although the epidemic first broke out in China, it did not necessarily mean that the virus is originated from China, let alone ‘made in China.’

 

Vague and misleading statements like the one from Lin are ripped right out of China’s propaganda playbook and attempt to sow doubt about the global crisis.

Chinese officials have also pushed back on the expression “Wuhan coronavirus” — saying the name used frequently by U.S. conservative commentators unfairly stigmatizes the world’s most populous country.

Chang said it’s just another tactic in China’s playbook, carefully choreographed to make Americans look petty and racist.

“This an all-out assault on the United States,” Chang said.

In December, when the coronavirus was first detected in Wuhan, many media around the world began referring to it as the “Wuhan virus.” But last month, the World Health Organization renamed the illness COVID-19 so as not to link it to a specific location or group of people.

The name change didn’t stop some, like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who blew past warnings and deliberately referred to it as the “Wuhan virus” after China’s foreign ministry called it “highly irresponsible” to do so.

President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, went even further Wednesday.

“Unfortunately, rather than using best practices, this outbreak in Wuhan was covered up,” O’Brien said at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative-leaning think tank in Washington. “There’s lots of open-source reporting from China, from Chinese nationals, that the doctors involved were either silenced or put in isolation, or that sort of thing, so that the word of this virus could not get out. It probably cost the world community two months.”

O’Brien said if experts would have had those two months to get ahead of the spread of the virus, “I think we could have dramatically curtailed what happened both in China and what’s now happening across the world.”

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said the Communist Party is pointing the finger at the U.S. so it can dampen discontent back home.

“The Chinese military portal Xilu.com recently published an article baselessly claiming that the virus is ‘a biochemical weapon produced by the U.S. to target China,’” Rubio said.

Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, has frequently used the term “Wuhan virus” on the Senate floor.

Earlier this week, several social media users took House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., to task when he referred to it as “the Chinese coronavirus.”

Instead of backing down, Chang believes officials should keep calling COVID-19 the “Wuhan virus” and push back on accusations of racism.

“This isn’t a Republican thing. We all need to unite and for people to say, ‘this is racist’ is irresponsible,” Chang said. “There is no race known as Wuhanese.”

Chang also said calling COVID-19 the “Wuhan virus” or “Chinese coronavirus” keeps pressure on the Chinese government and forces it to be held accountable by the rest of the world for its initial response to the global crisis, which was widely regarded as abysmal.

China, though, is using everything in its arsenal to paint itself as a global hero, rewriting history and going so far as to demand a thank you for containing the virus as long as it did.

“We should say righteously that the U.S. owes China an apology, the world owes China a thank you,” an editorial on state news agency Xinhua read.

Also peculiar is that Beijing — which is normally quick to censor news — has refused to step in as a wave of anti-American conspiracy theories flood the internet. Among the rumors is that the U.S. created the coronavirus to make China look bad as well as one that accuses the government of covering up thousands of deaths by classifying them as the regular flu.

“It’s more than just some disinformation or an official narrative,” Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s Schools of Information, told The Washington Post. “It’s an orchestrated, all-out campaign by the Chinese government through every channel at a level you rarely see. It’s a counteroffensive.”

Hey Amb. Yovanovitch and Adam Schiff, Call Holding Line 3

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Remember the accusations during the Trump impeachment trial that Ukraine had cleaned up corruption? President Trump withheld aid for a couple of very legitimate reasons including corruption in the Ukraine military, corruption in the banking system and money-laundering. The Democrats continued to place guilt of dying Ukrainians because of the military conflict with Russia in the lap of President Trump. Then there was that pesky Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg that spread propaganda across the world.

Ladies and gentlemen…it is still happening over there…where is the media? Where is Shifty Schiff and Nasty Nadler? Maria Yovanovitch is retired but gotta wonder what she knew.

Anyway read on….this is yet but only part of what continues to go on in Ukraine…Rudy Giuliani is working many other channels.

Hat tip to the REAL investigative reporters on the case…well done.

Image result for milton group kiev source

Luxury cars line the parking lot of the upscale Mandarin Plaza mall in Kyiv, while their well-heeled owners flaunt their wealth in its jewellery and designer clothes stores.

But hidden on its upper floors, protected by armed guards and under the constant surveillance of security cameras, a very different product is being sold.

Sitting elbow-to-elbow under fluorescent lights, a multi-lingual army of call center staff hawk get-rich-quick dreams across the world in the form of cryptocurrency and stock investments for a company called Milton Group.

Now, a cache of documents handed to the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter by a whistleblower from inside the call center, and shared with OCCRP, exposes the inner workings of this type of fraud: an old-fashioned boiler-room scam that leverages the power of social media to operate on a global scale.

Armed with a list of over 1,000 people targeted by the call center, reporters from 21 countries and dozens of media outlets spoke to more than 180 victims, revealing a trail of ruined lives from Sweden’s Arctic Circle to the Ecuadorian Amazon, passing through small industrial towns in the Balkans and major world cities like London and Sydney.

The stories were strikingly similar. Many first came into contact with the scam through Facebook ads promising remarkable returns on investments. After entering their contact details to find out more, victims would be deluged with high-pressure sales calls. They would make a small “investment” that quickly yielded impressive — but fake — profits. But requests to withdraw the full funds were not honored.

Those worst affected were preyed upon by the call center’s “retention” desk, whose job was to conjure up new ways to extract more money, often through brutal psychological pressure. Some were harassed into taking out huge loans, threatened by forged letters from UK financial regulators demanding taxes, or contacted by fake lawyers offering to help get their money back — for yet another fee. In the most extreme cases, Milton Group’s retention specialists would convince victims to install software on their computers that allowed the scammers to control them remotely, and steal more money in the process. Some lost more than $200,000.

The victims, fooled by foreign names and addresses, and assurances of sky-high returns, believed they were on the phone with a legitimate investment business based in Western Europe. They had no inkling that the people on the other end of the line were largely young Ukrainians or Middle Eastern and African migrants in Kyiv.

Ukrainian Milton Group scheme source

Some tried to report their losses to police in their countries, but law enforcement largely failed to connect the dots. Cyber-crime units in multiple countries affected by the call center, including Spain and Italy, told OCCRP and its partners that they were aware of such cross-border frauds, but that they are hard to detect, often go unreported, and require cooperation between law enforcement bodies across many jurisdictions.

However, Swedish authorities have now opened an investigation based on the whistleblower’s extensive evidence, and have been in touch with Europol about the allegations.

“This company what they do, everything is fake,” said Alexey, the whistleblower. (His real name cannot be used to protect his safety.) “They just steal money from people.”

He said staff were told the Kyiv center took in a massive 65 million euros in sales in 2019. To celebrate, the company’s leaders threw a lavish New Year’s party themed around the novel “The Great Gatsby,” about a Jazz-Age bootlegger and con artist. Under neon lights, hundreds of Milton staffers watched contortionists and fire-dancers perform, and were awarded prizes, including cars, cash, and free lodging, for especially good salesmanship.

Milton is apparently tied to other call centers in Albania, Georgia, and North Macedonia employing hundreds more staff.

While it is impossible to determine whether every investment that passed through the Kyiv center was fraudulent, reporters from DN and across OCCRP’s network spoke to more than 180 victims listed in Milton’s client database who confirmed they had lost their money in investment scams. A few had been able to withdraw some funds, likely in an attempt to encourage further investments, or remained hopeful they would be able to cash out their “earnings” one day.

The supposed investments were made by transferring funds through Western Union, bank accounts, credit cards, and cryptocurrencies. Milton salespeople received a higher commission if they could convince their clients to pay in bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies, since they are harder to trace. Many of the bank-to-bank transfers were routed through the private accounts of individuals with a UK financial company, with clear instructions not to indicate the money was for investing.

In many cases identified by OCCRP, online credit-card payments were handled by a Cyprus-based company called Naspay, which bills itself as a “state-of-the-art payment gateway” and is owned by David Todua — the same Georgian-Israeli man the whistleblower identified to law enforcement as the person behind Milton Group. (Todua vigorously denies holding any “formal or informal position” in the company, although he conceded that he had attended Milton Group’s New Year’s party as a guest. He also said that Naspay does not process payments, but merely “transfers information” between websites that accept payments and financial institutions. OCCRP did not find evidence Todua has any ownership of Milton.)

After their initial investments, some victims were told they needed to send additional fees in cash to individuals in far-flung countries such as Colombia and Uganda rather than company bank accounts.

Leif Nixon, a Swedish cryptocurrency expert who helps law enforcement investigate bitcoin-related crime, analyzed the bitcoin addresses used by Milton Group to accept payments from its customers. He said the set-up did not appear to be that of a legitimate operator.

He noted several indications that clients’ money was not being invested as promised, including the fact that many different people were told to send their bitcoins to the same few addresses. Clients were also given different addresses each time they made a payment.

“It’s like opening a bank account, but you don’t get an account number; instead, for every deposit you make you get a different account number,” Nixon explained.

Ultimately, he said, $5.9 million in bitcoins from seven of Milton Group’s addresses disappeared into East Asian exchanges in 2019.

“I can’t see why a legitimate operation would make these kinds of transactions,” he said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

Call center staff were well aware that their job was to steal, the whistleblower says. Alexey told DN that on one of his first days at Milton, the sales manager joked that even when she was as young as six, she dreamed of being a “motherfucker and stealing people’s money.”

At a training session for new staff at a Tbilisi call center linked to the Milton Group, attended by an undercover reporter last month, a trainer explained that the company’s goal was for customers “to lose their money in a realistic way.” Asked why, she laughed: “It’s naive to ask, to be honest. When they lose the money, it stays with us.”

An internal customer database reviewed by reporters is laced with expletives about “fucking” clients out of money, as well as highlighting their vulnerabilities and how they might best be targeted. In one note from October 2019, a Milton staff member wrote of a 67-year-old Swedish woman: “Sold her home to pay, no money, crying.”

That woman, reached by Dagens Nyheter in a rural part of central Sweden, told journalists she was tricked into investing over $100,000 by Milton staff who took out loans on her behalf.

She, like many other victims, was initially sucked in by the illusion that she was making huge profits: “You become hypnotized and brainwashed.”

But when she wanted to withdraw her supposed earnings, “they disappeared.” Today she cannot afford to buy food or pay her rent. “I have nothing to live for,” she said. While Milton Group’s fake investments have brought its victims financial ruin, the picture is very different for the firm’s alleged managers.

A review of their social media profiles shows that they have a penchant for expensive cars, foreign holidays, and guns. Some also have high-level political connections.

The CEO of Milton Group is Jacob Keselman, who declares himself “the Wolf of Kiev” on his Instagram account, a nod to “The Wolf of Wall Street,” the Hollywood film about a notorious penny-stock scammer. His social media profiles are replete with photos of luxury cars, foreign holidays, and the occasional gun. In one photo he can be seen working in a room with a spectacular view of the Eiffel Tower. He writes: “The one who loves his job is truly happy.”

OCCRP could not obtain official information about Keselman’s national origin, but on his LinkedIn profile he writes that his native language is Russian, he attended university in Kyiv, and he did two stints in sales in Israel before joining Milton Group.

Contacted for comment, Keselman denied that Milton Group had defrauded anyone. “You know how it is working, investment and forex brands … a lot of clients lose money because they don’t understand how it’s working,” he said. He went on to claim that Milton only provided IT support for companies selling investments. He did not respond to follow-up questions.

David Todua, a 38-year-old Georgian-born Israeli citizen, is a frequent visitor to the call center office in Mandarin Plaza, where according to Alexey the staff knew him as one of Milton Group’s owners.

Alexey said he saw Todua there at least six times, including once in November 2019, when he congratulated the staff on their performance and said Milton had brought in $50 million that year to date. The whistleblower said Todua always travelled with multiple bodyguards.

No official documents connect Todua to the scam call center, which on paper is owned by a different Georgian, Irakli Dadivadze. OCCRP was unable to track down any information about him.

However, Todua does own Naspay, a Cyprus-based payment platform through which Milton processes many of its “investments,” internal documents show.

At the firm’s New Year’s party, a man named David was called up to the stage by Keselman, the CEO, identified as the company’s “father,” and presented with a cake with three candles in it, representing the three years Milton Group had been in operation. The whistleblower identified this “father” as David Todua.

“In December, the company turned three years old,” Keselman said, according to an audio recording of the event obtained by OCCRP. “We are big kids, and our father is proud of us, while we are proud of him. And firstly [we] want to say a big thank you, David. And we want to give a cake, because what birthday is without a cake? And David will blow out the candle today.”

Todua told OCCRP he had been at the firm’s New Year’s party as a guest of Keselman, but denied holding any role in the company. “I am not father of any company, I am a proud father of 5 children,” he said.

On Instagram, he calls himself david_todua_007 and poses with a golden Kalashnikov, shoots with a sniper rifle, celebrates birthdays with a champagne tower, and posts photos of expensive cars parked outside his home. (“Hunting is indeed one of my hobbies,” he told OCCRP.)

He also has business ties with a surprising number of politicians from several countries, including ministers and other figures from the United National Movement party, which governed Georgia under President Mikheil Saakashvili for almost a decade until 2012. Saakashvili later became a Ukrainian citizen and forged a political career in the country.

Little is known about Todua’s life in Israel, where he migrated with his family in 1993, but court records and posts from his social media accounts show that he lived until recently in a villa near Tel Aviv. Today he lives in Cyprus.

In Albania, which boasts a 400-strong call center that also appears to be linked to Milton Group, the company operating it is owned by an adviser to a senior minister.

?The Georgian Connections

Although David Todua’s family left Georgia for Israel when he was just 11, as an adult he has ties to a surprising number of prominent political figures from his home country.

Most notably, his business partner in two Ukrainian companies is Davit Kezerashvili, an ex-defense minister and former chief of Georgia’s financial police under Saakashvili.

Todua and Kezerashivili co-own Project Partners, a real-estate and construction firm that is based out of a neighboring office building in Kyiv as Milton Group. Its head is Gia Getsadze, a former deputy justice minister in both Georgia and Ukraine.

Project Partners, in turn, co-owns a construction and civil engineering firm, Elitekomfortbud, with another former Georgian official, Petre Tsiskarishvili, a minister of agriculture under Saakashvili and a former leader of his United National Movement party.

Kezerashvili was charged in 2013 with accepting some $12 million in bribes to turn a blind eye to massive smuggling of alcohol from Ukraine to Georgia. He was ultimately cleared of the charges, which he says were politically motivated, but continues to live outside Georgia.

OCCRP has found no evidence that any of the former ministers are involved in the call center. In an email, Kezerashvili said he had never heard of Milton Group and had no knowledge of its activities, but confirmed that he was a business partner of Todua.

“You Will Never Regret This Decision”

Milton Group’s Kyiv call center does not appear unusual at first glance: Hundreds of phone sellers sit side by side, headsets on, using modern telephone and customer management systems.

Workers make up to 300 calls a day to clients around the world in an attempt to reach their monthly sales targets and secure bonuses.

The center is split into different sales desks by language — including Russian, English, Italian, and Spanish — each targeting their own areas of the world. Sellers use so-called “stage names” to build trust with the person on the other end of the call: A Senegalese man on the German desk goes by the name “Todd Kaiser,” while a Ukrainian woman whose real name is Daria calls herself “Diana Swan” or “Kira Lively.”

But undercover footage from inside Mandarin Plaza, as well as leaked internal documents, confirm that Milton was no ordinary call center.”

It is protected by burly guards and personal mobile phones are forbidden.

On the walls, next to posters of sports cars, a whiteboard sets out sellers’ monthly targets: $40,000 for the Russian market; $60,000 for Spanish, and $100,000 for those working the English-speaking desk.

The staffers in the sales department are provided with a set of notes explaining exactly how to target “clients” by nationality.

Scandinavians, the notes say, are mostly “old people and they really need someone to talk to.”

People from the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, on the other hand, like to believe they know everything and are certain that their countries are the best in the world, so call center workers are advised to pump them up.

“The only way to Handle [sic] such people is not to argue with them on whatever direction they take and make them feel that they are intelligent,” the notes explain.

“Later talk to them about how important the financial market has become because of great countries like Australia, UK, and New Zealand.”

“You will never regret this decision” is another line suggested to entice customers.

Those targeted by Milton Group are offered the chance to invest in cryptocurrency, stocks, or foreign currencies through a variety of different “brands,” all of which have generic-sounding names and similar websites, and are moved out of the rotation over time. Recently, Milton Group’s brands have included CryptoMB, Cryptobase, and VetoroBanc. All have been subject to recent investor warnings from regulators in the UK, Italy, and Spain.

The precise relationship between the call center and the brands they market is not always clear. Brands are sometimes not associated with any legal entity; when they are, they hide behind offshore secrecy. CryptoMB and VetoroBanc are run by offshore firms in the Marshall Islands and St. Vincent & Grenadines, respectively, while OCCRP could find no evidence that Cryptobase was tied to any specific company.

Alexey told journalists that the supposed VetoroBanc was entirely fabricated inside the Milton offices, with the name chosen by the Italian retention manager because it sounded “like one of the Italian banks.” The VetoroBanc website uses stock images for its staff that appear to have been taken from the internet. “Sylvia Moreno,” a supposed market analyst, is in fact an American pediatrician.

Alexey explained that staff had no specific expertise in financial products, but were carefully taught to sell “emotions.”

“It doesn’t matter which emotions, positive or negative: You can sell those fake products if people are really thinking about that,” he explained.

Clients were often shown huge profits to encourage them to invest further funds, but the money was always just numbers on a screen, the whistleblower explained. The only time victims were allowed to receive any of their funds back was in order to encourage an even bigger investment.

The most promising — and vulnerable — investors were passed on to the “retention team,” where the top salesmen work.

Their job is to “squeeze the money from the clients to the last cent,” Alexey explained, pushing them to borrow money and sell their cars and apartments. In one case, he said, a heavily pregnant Russian woman was convinced to hand over the small nest egg she had scraped together for her baby.

The most prolific and ingenious scammer at Milton Group is a man on the retention team who tells prospective investors his name is “William Bradley.”

In fact, he is a young Iranian who uses images of well-known US salesman and motivational speaker Marc Wayshak — who dubs himself “America’s sales strategist” — to disguise his identity on video calls.

OCCRP was unable to verify his real name, but at work and on social media he goes by “Hamze” and speaks fluent Farsi. Alexey claimed he takes in a massive $450,000 a month.

The call center’s internal customer database tracks how much each client has “invested,” as well as the potential to extract more money from them. Comments seen by OCCRP are laced with profanities and details of clients’ vulnerabilities.

One reads: “I saw 800 EUR in his bank and he is sick, he have problem and he told me I want someone fuck me and I said Foster [another call center operator] will fuck you.”

Another reads: “Getting fucked every month for at least 1000 EUR. Gets pension on the 20th/works every tuesday.”

Notes from the Milton Group’s internal customer database describing the situation of one of their victims, Östen Morian. Credit: Alexander Mahmoud/DN

Of another man, a call center staffer wrote: “Very Old man/pushed him to get the commission payment, hoping he can sort that out today, should call back at 3pm Sweden time.”

A month later, another note appears: “He is at his friend’s home because he doesn’t have money for food. Call him back on Monday, lost 400 k.”

That client was 75-year-old Östen Morian, a retired carpenter who lives close to the Arctic Circle in remote northern Sweden.

Contacted by DN, Morian confirmed he had lost around 400,000 Swedish krona (about $41,000) to the scammers after taking out loans, at 39 percent interest, to make what turned out to be fake investments. He was left heavily indebted.

“I don’t know what I can do,” he said. “Wait to die only.”

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California Bullet Train, Shut-up About Fleecing the Government

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Exactly how come Senators Kamala Harris and Dianne Feinstein have nothing to say? Pelosi? Nah….
When Mark Styles was hired in October 2018 to help oversee Central Valley scheduling for the California bullet train, he soon learned he had walked into a mess.
Over the previous half decade the project had repeatedly fallen behind schedule, and the cost by 2018 had jumped from $64 billion to $77 billion in two years.
California is Building High-Speed Rail | High Speed Rail ...
A core problem was the project’s operating culture, in which managers for WSP, the bullet train’s lead consultant, threatened to punish or terminate employees if they failed to toe the company line, Styles said.
“I was told to shut up and not say anything,” said Styles, a career construction manager who was hired as WSP’s senior supervisory scheduler in the project’s Fresno office. “I was told that I didn’t understand the political arena the project was in. I told them I am not going to shut up. This is my job.”
The atmosphere described by Styles has been corroborated by a half dozen current and former senior officials knowledgeable about the project’s Fresno office.
The officials say it helps explain why California’s high-speed rail endeavor has barreled ahead for more than a decade, despite warnings it was structured on risky assumptions and could run out of money before any trains operate.
WSP spokeswoman Denise Turner Roth rejected Styles’ claims. “We always work carefully with our client to evaluate the demands of each project and to prepare realistic and transparent recommendations regarding schedule and budget,” she said.
But other ex-WSP employees in the Fresno office, including engineer Vera Lovejoy and project controls coordinator Todd Bilstein, say they were also discouraged from sharing bad news with bosses.
“I wanted the project to succeed,” said Lovejoy, who left the project in 2019 after one year. “I was eager to help deliver it. But I couldn’t stay. If you rock the boat, you are labeled as not a team player.”
Bilstein also left in 2019 after a nine-month tenure.
“If I was to give a talk at a construction conference, I would say they were not following generally accepted project management principles,” he said. The company’s failures, he said, ran the gamut of estimating costs, scheduling construction and managing change orders.
“Revealing bad news was discouraged,” he added. “I just couldn’t continue to work there. I don’t work that way. American professionals don’t work that way.”
Styles, who has no lawsuit or other legal claims, is also no longer with WSP. He left in November, calling it “the worst job of my career,” and moved to a new construction job out of state.
Brian Kelly, chief executive of the California High-Speed Rail Authority, said in a statement that the agency “takes seriously any claim of wrongdoing by an employee or contractor. We have procedures in place for any such claim to be raised and reviewed. We have an expectation that all employees act within the law and that our contractors meet the requirements of state and federal law.”
He added in an interview, “Our focus is on the mission in front of us.”
In the last half year, Kelly has moved to make changes in his organization’s culture, replacing numerous middle-level management officials, orchestrating more documentation for its plans and vowing to improve transparency in the agency operations.
WSP and Parsons Brinckerhoff, which merged in 2014, have been on the project since the 1990s. The Montreal firm, one of the largest infrastructure engineering organizations, is working under a $666-million contract. When he arrived at the project’s Fresno office, Styles said, he found a dysfunctional operation like he had never seen before — a pressured environment that aimed to contain bad news that could damage the project’s fortunes.
At the time, the rail authority was confronting delay claims, resulting from its slow acquisition of land, and change orders — both amounting to millions of dollars in higher costs.
Within days, he asked to see the detailed justification documents for the change orders. He said he wanted to understand the delays and how they would affect future construction, a routine part of a scheduler’s job.
WSP management, he said, told him that he didn’t need to see the documents. WSP was pushing to “keep the numbers looking good,” which in some cases involved altering reports written by its staff to make construction progress look better, he alleges.
Styles and other sources speaking off the record say that the bullet train schedule, which calls for installing 119 miles of track and a complex signal system from Madera to Wasco by 2022, is “impossible,” even though the project’s budget is predicated on the completion date.
To install track by 2022 would normally require all of the bridges, viaducts, trenches and other structures to be completed beforehand. As a stopgap measure, the rail authority now plans to install track in five-mile discontinuous segments, which the Federal Railroad Administration has criticized as illogical.
A more likely scenario would have the current construction completed between 2025 and 2028, which would drive costs up and force the state to either find new money or curtail the project, Styles and others said.
Rail authority spokeswoman Annie Parker said the agency has acknowledged repeatedly that “the deadline is a challenge.” It will require boosting monthly construction spending from the current $46 million to $70 million, said chief financial officer Brian Annis, who added that its construction pace is improving.
Sylmar-based Tutor Perini, which is building rail structures in Madera and Fresno counties, said a week ago it will complete its work in 2023. The company’s contract was initially $1 billion, but delay claims and change orders have doubled the amount.
Chief Executive Ron Tutor told security analysts in a recorded telephone call on Feb. 26, “With our extending the completion date from the end of ’21 to the first quarter of ’23, once again, we are in discussions with the owner to resolve payment for that further delay. However, it seems certain that given all of the results and resolves over the last 90 days that that should be the final end date for high-speed rail.”
It would mean that the rail authority could not begin to install track and signals until after that construction is completed.
When The Times asked the rail authority if it had comment on Tutor’s statement, it received an email Friday from Tutor saying his statement to investors had caused “some confusion.” He said that he hopes that “substantial completion” of his company’s work would occur in early 2022, leaving “paperwork, acceptances and contractual documentation” to be completed in early in 2023.
Turning around the multibillion-dollar project has proved difficult for years, given California’s complex governance structure, flawed contracts and past decisions, officials close to the project say. Executives in civil engineering firms say the rail authority lacks technical resources.
“They have all these people in top jobs with no technical background,” said a top executive at a major European engineering firm, who worked on the project. “They are politicians. They never disclose the full cost. They give you incremental truth. They believe that is a successful business model. They should cancel the contracts and start over.”
The Federal Railroad Administration, which oversees billions of dollars in grants, has long warned the rail authority it risked missing deadlines and was headed for big cost overruns. In December 2016, the FRA warned the statethat the cost of the Central Valley construction could jump by $3.6 billion. After The Times obtained a copy of the confidential report and published its findings, the rail authority denied the legitimacy of the analysis. Today, the cost is even higher than the FRA projected.
WSP said it stands by the job it is doing for the bullet train. “To the extent WSP prepares cost and schedule estimates for the program as a whole, WSP brings world-class talent to the project that prepare professional estimates based on client needs and the information available when generated,” Turner Roth said.
Styles said he was shut out of work not long after taking the job at WSP, though the company did not fire him. Over many months, Styles, who was being paid $170,000 annually, said he kept advising management about the problems and writing procedures for contract compliance.
In a Facebook posting in June, Styles wrote that he had been warned by a co-worker “to be careful” and “you know too much” and to take a lower profile. “I’d rather be dead than a coward,” he wrote.
Styles filed an ethics complaint against his former employer in June, which was examined by a management committee in Chicago. “The committee concluded there was no proof that WSP violated ethics with the state,” he said.
Turner Roth said, “In 2019, an employee — who has since left the company — raised a question about the schedule data submitted to WSP by the construction managers and construction contractors. In response to this question, WSP thoroughly investigated the matter, and concluded there was no wrongful conduct by WSP employees in their review of contractor submissions.”
As for Lovejoy, whose career includes engineering jobs at major public agencies and corporations, she said problems started more a decade ago when the Obama administration issued a $2.5-billion grant from its economic stimulus program, intended for “shovel-ready projects.”
The grant came about four years before the first construction contract was issued, and actual work did not begin for two more years. “It was so far from shovel-ready,” Lovejoy said.
Another former WSP employee, who spoke anonymously out of concern that he would face retribution, supported Styles’ assertion that monthly and annual reports submitted by staff often were changed by WSP management before they were reviewed in meetings and sent to state executives.
“We gave them the bad news and they wouldn’t accept it,” he said.
The Times has previously reported that the project has struggled to relocate pipes, electrical lines and other infrastructure that stands in the way of securing parcels and laying track. Today, the rail authority is short by 497 of the 2,042 parcels it needs, according to its most recent progress report. In December, the authority acquired only five parcels.
In late 2018, Hemanth Kundeti, a database manager, was hired into the project to help improve property records, but he lasted only several months.
Kundeti, an employee of a subconsultant to WSP, said he developed his own software tool that could track the work more accurately. It would have allowed the state to replace a subcontractor that was charging $2 million annually to maintain the records, he said.
When he proposed the tool to WSP and state officials, it was rejected. In February 2019, he was twice reprimanded for “insubordination” for continuing to promote his software, according to a copy of the reprimand. In response, he wrote on his warning letter that management “without healthy debate is dangerous for any organization.” He was terminated a few weeks later.
“I am still reeling from the after-effects of being terminated for trying to save taxpayers’ money from being wasted,” said Kundeti, who has found a new job.