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Aug 14, 2021 12 tweets 4 min read Read on X
An investigation by The Sunday Times today raises serious concerns that a major campaign by the Chinese state to secure influence over the WHO led the agency to blow the world’s only chance of stopping the Covid-19 pandemic

thetimes.co.uk/article/china-…
Financial and diplomatic pressure allegedly directed from Beijing has seen a body which took strong and successful action to suppress the Sars epidemic in 2003 transform into an organisation which praised North Korea’s health system and made Robert Mugabe a goodwill ambassador
When the Covid-19 pandemic began, the WHO’s leadership prioritised China’s economic interests over halting the spread of the virus with catastrophic results.

Why did the WHO malfunction so badly?
2017

Ethiopian foreign minister Tedros Adhanom – a close ally and friend to China – is propelled to power at the top of the WHO after Beijing uses its financial and diplomatic muscle to back his campaign
Jan 2020

China attempts to cover-up the Covid-19 outbreak by suppressing whistleblowers, scrubbing social media and withholding evidence about the virus. Tedros later praises Beijing for its openness and transparency
Jan 28 2020

Tedros travels to Beijing four weeks after first being warned about the pandemic and gives thanks to president Xi Jinping on behalf of the world for containing the Covid-19 virus in China. It is “rare leadership”, Tedros says
May-July 2020

Nations instruct Tedros to investigate the origins of Covid-19 but a secret deal in Beijing rules out a probe into the theory most hated by China: a lab leak. Instead, WHO will look at China’s pet theory that the virus was imported on frozen food
Aug-Nov 2020

The WHO allows China a veto over selection of the mission’s experts. US experts are rejected in favour of Peter Daszak, a fierce opponent of the laboratory theory who is a described as a “collaborator” with the Wuhan Institute of Virology

thetimes.co.uk/article/china-…
Jan 2021

The US government discloses intelligence that three WIV researchers fell ill with Covid-19-like symptoms in autumn of 2019. It urges the WHO inquiry team, now in Wuhan, to investigate the lab’s experiments which made coronaviruses more infectious to humans
Feb 2021

Tedros arranges for the joint mission - with no expertise to audit labs - to question Wuhan institute bosses. They are given no access to records and have to accept the word of those they question. The team concludes that the lab leak theory is “extremely unlikely”
March 2021 onwards

After the US raises “deep concerns” about the team’s findings, Tedros changes his approach and declares all origin theories should remain on the table. China, however, refuses to participate in further inquiries on its soil
China’s interference with the WHO over more than a decade is claimed to have blown the only chance the world had of avoiding the pandemic and now means we may never know how the virus started

thetimes.co.uk/article/china-…

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More from @timespolitics

Nov 2, 2022
Millions of middle earners will be more than £3,500 poorer thanks to plans by Rishi Sunak for a stealth raid on income tax that will last at least six years, an analysis for The Times has shown thetimes.co.uk/article/how-wi…
The prime minister and Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, are thought to have agreed to extend until 2028 a freeze on income tax thresholds that had been due to end two years earlier
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Oct 1, 2022
Kwasi Kwarteng attended a private champagne reception hours after delivering his mini-budget where hedge fund managers who would gain from a crash in the pound egged him on to commit to his plans thetimes.co.uk/article/kwasi-…
The chancellor also gave guests insights about forthcoming government spending cuts during the event, which took place at the Chelsea home of Andrew Law, a financier and Conservative Party donor, on the evening of Friday, September 23
Law is worth about £750m and has donated £3.6m to the Tories since 2004. He has acknowledged taking short positions on the pound over recent years, meaning he has profited from the currency’s decline in value
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Aug 16, 2022
Boris Johnson may never return to live in Downing Street, after a removal firm favoured by past prime ministers was seen outside No 10 while he holidayed in Greece thetimes.co.uk/article/boris-…
Workers from Bishop’s Move were stationed there yesterday, prompting questions over what would happen to the furnishings inside, bought during a controversial luxury refurbishment
Prime ministers can use up to £30k a year of taxpayers’ money to revamp their residence
Read 10 tweets
Aug 15, 2022
Three quarters of Tory voters back Sir Keir Starmer’s plan to freeze energy bills as ministers come under pressure to do more to address the “national emergency” of living costs thetimes.co.uk/article/three-…
The Labour leader will set out a £29bn plan today to prevent energy bills rising for six months, as polling indicates big majorities in favour of this idea and windfall taxes that Liz Truss’s team said would raise the risk of recession
Dozens of charities also warned yesterday that children would go hungry if ministers did not double their existing support package to cover energy bills
Read 11 tweets
Aug 9, 2022
FBI agents searched Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in a dramatic escalation of the criminal investigations swirling around the former president

But how many lawsuits and investigations does Donald Trump face?
thetimes.co.uk/article/trumps…
Missing national records 📜

The US National Archives and Records Administration notified Congress in February that it had recovered about 15 boxes of White House documents from Trump’s Florida home, some of which contained classified material
The US House of Representatives oversight committee said at that time it was expanding an investigation into Trump’s actions and asked the archives to turn over additional information
Read 12 tweets
Aug 7, 2022
Since the former Tory MP’s House of Commons porn scandal, many of us can’t look at farm vehicles in the same way. @camillalong meets him and his very understanding wife
thetimes.co.uk/article/neil-p…
In April 2021, Parish was fiddling on his phone in the House of Commons. “I genuinely was looking at tractors,” he insists. When typing the tractor’s name into Google, one autocomplete suggestion was porn. “And I went into it,” he says
🗣️ “I have watched porn in the past. But not this type of stuff”.

Parish won’t say what type of tractor it was: “I’m not going there.” But it wasn’t a Dominator as rumoured, he says: the Dominator is a “combine — all right?”
Read 10 tweets

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