A little more than a year ago, Canada’s spy agency went into overdrive in an effort to warn universities and researchers that they could be the targets of international espionage.
Starting in April, 2020, CSIS met with more than 230 Canadian research and industry groups and briefed more than 2,000 individuals, according to the organization’s tally.
Too late, our universities are full up with communists already.
Republican Senator Rand Paul alleges that US money was used to fund research there that made some viruses (not the coronavirus) more infectious and more deadly, known as “gain-of-function”.
But his assertion has been firmly rejected by Dr Anthony Fauci, the US infectious diseases chief.
… US researcher and biologist Alina Chan at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has highlighted issues with the wording of the government’s pause to funding in 2014.
It says that it would stop funding research that “may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route.”
This could imply that research on viruses may not intend to produce “gain-of-function”, although that could be the end result of it.
Related … House Democrats Block Bipartisan Bill Declassifying COVID-19 Origins
House Democrats blocked consideration of legislation that would require the U.S. Director of National Intelligence to declassify information and data related to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and that namely targeted what role the Wuhan Institute of Virology played in the outbreak.
In May, the Senate Republican-backed COVID-19 Origin Act was passed unanimously in the Senate. Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) brought the Senate bill to the House floor on Tuesday night before Democrats voted it down.
What if they knew all along that the virus originated in the Wuhan lab but kept that information secret?
Standing on a podium on Saturday to take an oath of office, Bashar al-Assad declared himself the only man who could rebuild Syria.
His first foreign guest, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, seemed to enhance his claim, endorsing the president’s win in a May poll described by Britain and Europe as “neither free nor fair” and laying a marker to help get the job started.
China’s high-visibility stake in postwar Syria was straight from its playbook elsewhere in the Middle East, as well as in Asia and Africa: windfall investments in return for local access and global cover. Analysts and diplomats, however, say that even in relative calm, Syria will offer poor returns for years to come.
DABANCHENG, China (AP) — The Uyghur inmates sat in uniform rows with their legs crossed in lotus position and their backs ramrod straight, numbered and tagged, gazing at a television playing grainy black-and-white images of Chinese Communist Party history.
This is one of an estimated 240 cells in just one section of Urumqi No. 3 Detention Center in Dabancheng, seen by Associated Press journalists granted extraordinary access during a state-led tour to China’s far west Xinjiang region. The detention center is the largest in the country and possibly the world, with a complex that sprawls over 220 acres — making it twice as large as Vatican City. A sign at the front identified it as a “kanshousuo,” a pre-trial detention facility.
In late June, former acting Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Mike Morell interviewed John Culver on his CBS News podcast.
That should interest you because Culver was a career CIA analyst (like Morell, retired) who ended up as the intelligence community’s top officer for East Asia. Culver is extremely well regarded at the CIA. He was seen as a leader committed to his people and to speaking truth to power, especially on matters concerning China. That makes him worth listening to.
The Biden administration has revealed new details of Chinese cyberattacks on American critical infrastructure starting nearly a decade ago, amid an ongoing effort to expose what the U.S. and its allies say is the extent of China’s malicious cyber actions aimed at the U.S. and other foreign targets.
China-sponsored attackers targeted U.S. oil and gas companies from December 2011 to 2013 in order to develop the cyberattack capabilities needed to disrupt and damage U.S. pipeline operations, according to an alert issued Tuesday from FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The federal government said it previously informed victims and others of the cyberattacks in 2012 but had not made public the full details until this week.
As most people know by now Senator Rand Paul and Dr. Anthony Fauci got into a heated exchange yesterday in which Fauci called Rand Paul a “liar” for claiming the NIH funded gain of function experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Paul then said he sent a letter to the DOJ asking for a criminal referral against Fauci for contempt of Congress.
The reaction to Fauci’s outburst and Paul’s subsequent referral to the DOJ is pretty much as you would expect. Mainstream media outlets praise Fauci for standing up to Paul, while conservative news outlets express outrage that Fauci would call a sitting US Senator who was also a medical doctor a “liar.”
The Chinese foreign ministry has backed calls for an investigation into the Fort Detrick biolab as an origin of the Covid-19 pandemic after 4.7 million Chinese petitioned the WHO to send experts to the Maryland facility.
Speaking on Wednesday, foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said that the Chinese people had delivered a clear message in signing a petition, created by state-run news agency The Global Times, calling for a World Health Organization (WHO) investigation into the Fort Detrick biolab.
What is the biggest threat to the West right now — China or inflation? Stupid question, you might think. One is a country, the other an economic indicator. They belong to different categories, so comparing them is ridiculous.
Except there’s a very deep connection between the two. Right up until Covid, we’ve enjoyed a twenty years of miraculously low inflation. Over the last decade, we’ve really pushed our luck — forcing interest rates down to zero and instructing our central banks to turn on the printing presses…
“What do investors need to understand, for those investors that are thinking maybe I want to dip my toe in investing in Chinese companies?” asked Maria Bartiromo on July 14, during her Fox Business show, “Mornings with Maria.”
The answer is that Beijing is on the road to expropriating the shares held by foreigners in China’s tech companies. The complicated financial structures these companies have used to attract foreign investment are questionable under Chinese law and give Xi Jinping, the Chinese ruler, an excuse now to begin a confiscation campaign.
The UK and EU have accused China of carrying out a major cyber attack earlier this year.
The attack targeted Microsoft Exchange servers, affecting over a quarter of a million servers around the world.
The EU was the first to put out a statement saying the attack came from “the territory of China”, while the UK said Chinese state-backed actors were responsible. The US is expected to follow suit.
The countries have also said the Chinese Ministry of State Security was responsible for other espionage activity.
h/t DM
The possibility that the COVID-19 epidemic will have been found to have originated in a Wuhan lab is becoming increasingly likely. At any rate, it is no longer impossible. CNN says “Senior Biden officials finding that Covid lab leak theory as credible as natural origins explanation”.
In her column (What does the Chinese military want with your unborn baby’s genetic data?, 10 July), Arwa Mahdawi suggested that the alleged involvement of the People’s Liberation Army (which is directly answerable to the Chinese Communist party) with BGI’s data-gathering (likewise answerable as a China-based company) is essentially equivalent to data-gathering by western companies. To suggest that the former case is worse, she argued, “smacks of Sinophobia”.
As a scholar of China, I cannot agree.
President Joe Biden inherited an America that was a net energy exporter, something that had not been achieved even once in his 44 years in federal office. The GOP’s energy strategy was, quite simply, working. The results were not just lower energy prices and independence from unstable or adversarial countries; this also helped us lower carbon emissions.
As the International Energy Agency reported last year, the United States in 2019 led the world with the biggest one-year reduction in energy-related CO2 emissions, and since 2000 (our peak emissions year), we have had the greatest absolute drop in emissions reductions of any nation.
Labelling of virus lab leak theory as a conspiracy was shaped by influential figures with a conflict of interest; some see that as a lesson for other scientific debates
The way the discussion on the origin of COVID-19 was derailed by conspiracy labelling reminds environmental economist Ross McKitrick of the debate around climate change.
“There are ideas that were never disproven and actually have a lot of evidence to support them, but for political reasons and cultural reasons within the university they just aren’t looked at,” McKitrick, a professor at the University of Guelph, said in an interview.
