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Texas mayoral candidate arrested for alleged voter fraud

A Democratic candidate for mayor of Carrollton, Texas has been arrested on over 100 counts of alleged voter fraud.

The Denton County Sheriff’s Office arrested Zul Mirza Mohamed on Wednesday night, with the help of the Texas Attorney General’s Election Fraud Unit.

Mohamed was charged with 84 counts of mail ballot application fraud and 25 counts of unlawful possession of an official mail ballot.

“I strongly commend the Denton County Sheriff’s Office, the Lewisville Police Department, and Texas Department of Public Safety as well as the Denton Elections and District Attorney’s offices for their outstanding work on this case and their commitment to ensuring a free and fair Presidential election in the face of unprecedented voter fraud,” Attorney General Paxton said in a statement.

“Mail ballots are inherently insecure and vulnerable to fraud, and I am committed to safeguarding the integrity of our elections,” Paxton added. “My office is prepared to assist any Texas county in combating this form of fraud.”

Mohamed allegedly obtained a mailbox using a false identity, forged at least 84 voter registration applications for Denton residents unbeknownst to them, and had the applications sent to a fraudulent location. At the time of his arrest, Mohamed was in the process of stuffing envelopes with additional mail ballot applications for neighboring Dallas County, the Attorney General’s Office said.

Mohamed was running against the incumbent Republican Mayor Kevin Falconer, who was already expected to win reelection in Carrollton, a city located roughly one hour north of Dallas.

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Massive WHO Study Shows Remdesivir Doesn’t Lower COVID-19 Mortality

Another speedbump has emerged in the drive to produce reliable COVID-19 therapeutics as a highly anticipated WHO drug trial called Solidarity found that Gilead’s COVID-19 treatment, remdesivir, had no substantial effect on a COVID-19 patient’s chances of survival. It also found that three other therapeutics were similarly ineffective.

The FT called the data a “significant blow” to efforts to find a drug that could help save late-stage COVID-19 patients. What’s more, none of the drugs “substantially affected mortality” or reduce the need to ventilate patients.

Other drugs examined in the trial included hydroxychloroquine, lopnavir and interferon regimes. All of them had “little effect” on hospitalized patients.

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C-SPAN suspends Scully after he admits to lie about hack

C-SPAN suspended its political editor Steve Scully indefinitely Thursday after he admitted to lying about his Twitter feed being hacked when he was confronted about a questionable exchange with former Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci.

The news came on the day of what was supposed to be a career highlight for the 30-year C-SPAN veteran. Scully was to moderate the second debate between President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden, which was canceled after Trump would not agree to a virtual format because of his COVID-19 diagnosis.

A week ago, after Trump had criticized him as a “never Trumper,” Scully tweeted “@Scaramucci should I respond to Trump.” Scaramucci, a former Trump communications director and now a critic of the president, advised Scully to ignore him.

Scully said that when he saw his tweet had created a controversy, “I falsely claimed that my Twitter account had been hacked.”

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New York hospitals ‘were never overwhelmed’ at peak of COVID-19, Cuomo claims

New York’s hospitals “were never overwhelmed” at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Gov. Andrew Cuomo claimed Wednesday, continuing his apparent rewrite of history in defense of a state Health Department mandate that barred nursing homes from turning away sickly seniors.

Cuomo made the claim during an interview on CNN promoting his new memoir “American Crisis,” which touches in large part on New York’s pandemic response.

“Hospitals were never overwhelmed,” the governor told host Alisyn Camerota. “We always had excess capacity in hospitals, we always had excess capacity in emergency hospitals that we built. So we were never in a situation where we had to have a nursing home accept a COVID-positive person.”

But in the five boroughs, hospital capacity was a daily source of worry at the pandemic’s height in the spring, with Cuomo telling facilities to prepare to cram in 50 percent more patients than normal and beseeching the federal government for additional beds, including a field hospital in the Javits Center.

While the Javits Center and the USNS Comfort hospital ship sent by the feds were largely underutilized, traditional hospitals were often short on beds and even shorter on ventilators and personal protective equipment.

As for nursing homes, the state Department of Health in March issued a mandate prohibiting the facilities from turning away patients on the basis of a positive coronavirus test, even as Cuomo publicly acknowledged that seniors are among the most susceptible to the disease.

Several homes reported interpreting the guidance as leaving them with no option but to accept sick patients.

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Twitter, Biden and the New York Post – Social Media Censorship Kicks up a Gear

Yesterday, the New York Post published several articles claiming to show evidence of corruption on the part of Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

The charges are varied but not really surprising. One article claims Hunter introduced his father to a Ukrainian energy magnate who asked the family to use their influence to shut down an investigation into his company.

Another story suggests Hunter Biden used his family name to secure a high-paid job and stock interests in a Chinese company.

The NYP evidence these claims with emails and documents allegedly retrieved from a laptop left at a computer repair store in Delaware. The owner of the store alerted the FBI to the computer’s existence when no one came forward to pay for the repairs and he could not contact the owner.

According to the NYP, both the hard drive and laptop were then seized by the FBI. They have a copy of the grand jury subpoena, which is certainly solid evidence, if genuine.

The owner of the store claims he, prior to it being seized, made a copy of the hard drive and sent it to Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s lawyer.

While this is potentially intriguing, if true, it’s not really “news”. Biden’s corruption in Ukraine has been evident since his son was appointed to the board of the largest energy company in Ukraine within weeks of the US-backed coup in 2014 (a decision so obviously dodgy even the Guardian made a joke out of it). Joe Biden himself has even admitted to applying financial pressure to get a Ukrainian State Prosecutor removed from office.

None of this is really “big news”. Corruption is rampant in the halls of power, that is as certain as death and taxes, and will continue to be so, whether or not these specific allegations are accurate.

The big news, the part of this story that should concern everyone, is that Twitter has completely blocked this material on their platform.

And we’re not talking a “soft block”, we at OffG are more than familiar with twitter’s use of “warnings”, no they literally made it impossible to share the links, even in DMs. If you try, you get his warning:

We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful. Visit our Help Center to learn more.”

We’ve talked about twitter’s “partners” before, and they are suspect. As for being “potentially harmful”, well isn’t that subjective? Fire is vital at times, but certainly “potentially harmful” at others. Water, in sufficient quantity, is “potentially harmful”.

If you’re a liar, the truth is “potentially harmful”.

Facebook has followed suit, if in less sweeping fashion. The social media giant’s spokesperson Andy Stone announced that they would be:

“…reducing its distribution on our platform. This is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation.

This decision is pending approval by their “independent fact-checkers”, which we have also covered in detail before.

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So what are the social media companies’ excuses reasons for blocking this content?

Well, it depends who you ask.

Twitter claims that since the emails are potentially “hacked”, posting them violates their policy regarding illegally gathered material. (Interestingly this policy was never applied to Trump’s leaked tax returns.)

Facebook, on the other hand, claim to have blocked these stories because they might be “misinformation”. A truly ludicrous precedent to set. You can’t block something that might not be true, because that applies to literally almost everything.

You do have to admire the strategy though. The pincer movement is brilliant.

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