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laburlasi · 3 years

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Coronavirus: China slams WHO's 'arrogance' over lab audit plan

Some WHO experts complained that did not get the proper level of access from the Chinese authorities

China angrily rejected a proposal by the World Health Organization (WHO) to let the agency's experts inspect China's biotech labs as they investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

On Thursday, Chinese vice health minister Zeng Yixin told journalists he was "extremely surprised" by the initiative.

The theory of the coronavirus originating in a Chinese lab had been repeatedly dismissed as a conspiracy by most public officials and reporters. But the stance on issue has shifted with United States urging a full investigation.

Volume 90% Watch video07:58

Wuhan lab leak theory a ‘wild goose chase’

Last week, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who leads the WHO, called for more access and transparency from China, as well as "raw data."

The WHO said any inquiry must include a full audit of research laboratories "operating in the area of the initial human cases." First cases were identified in December 2019 in the Chinese city of Wuhan, with proponents of the lab leak theory focusing on the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a possible origin point.

How has China responded?

Chinese vice health minister Zeng Yixin slammed the plan as showing "disrespect for common sense and arrogance towards science."

Zeng pointed to a joint WHO-China mission in January that failed to conclude that the virus leakedfrom the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

But that mission faced criticism after some members of the team complained about the level of access that was given to them by Chinese authorities, who closely monitored the investigation.

Zeng attacked the "rumors" about the lab, saying it has "never carried out gain-of-function research on coronaviruses."

China's state media has suggested an alternative theory, without providing any evidence, that coronavirus emerged from a US military research lab in Maryland.

Volume 90% Watch video02:00

What's to make of WHO probe into pandemic's origins?

The Global Times, a newspaper that's considered a mouthpiece for the Chinese government, claimed it had collected five million signatures for a petition to investigate the lab in Fort Detrick.

The same outlet said WHO chief Tedros had "succumbed to US-led West's political pressure" (sic).

What happens next?

The World Health Organization has no formal powers to force Beijing to cooperate.

But the United States is stepping up diplomatic pressure with US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman traveling to China this weekend for talks.

US President Joe Biden ordered intelligence officials to "redouble" efforts at the end of May to investigate the origins of Covid-19, including the theory that it came from a laboratory in China.

He said the US intelligence community was split on whether it came from a lab accident or emerged from human contact with an infected animal.

They are expected to report back to President Biden by the end of August.

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xtruss · 3 years

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US Intelligence Community’s Virus Origins Report Is “Artificial, Political Flavoring, Not Science”: Pakistani Scholar

Global Times | August 25, 2021

Illustration: Liu Rui

Editor's Note:

Ninety days have passed since US President Joe Biden ordered for a report probing into the origins of the still ravaging novel coronavirus. On Tuesday, Biden reportedly received a classified report from the US intelligence community that was inconclusive about the origins of the novel coronavirus. It included information about whether or not the virus jumped from an animal to a human, or escaped from a lab in Wuhan. What are the US' intentions behind its origins-tracing maneuver? Global Times (GT) reporter Wang Wenwen talked to Yasir Habib Khan (Khan), founder and president of the Institute of International Relations and Media Research in Pakistan, on these issues.

GT: What do you think are the US' intentions behind its origins-tracing maneuver? Why could a scientific investigation become so politicized?

Khan: Every intension has its deep-rooted history that gives foundation to spillover action. The reason behind the US' intention to manipulate origin-tracing efforts is never framed on the basis of logic and rationality. Instead, it originates out of fears of losing global dominance. Though China is not the claimant of superpower but the US is under threat that if China continues to spell its economic miracles with peace diplomacy, rule-based international law, equal-footed relations without any prejudice, America's lopsided world order will lose its steam soon.

Haunted by qualm, White House administration has come out with full-blown "malice and malign campaign" to demonize Beijing administration. It is already naked secret that even before the COVID-19 breakouts, former Trump regime had triggered trade war against China.

To my opinion, origins tracing is just a tip of iceberg. Roots of the US' anti-China feud are found since inception of the People's Republic of China in 1949.

Having leveled unfound allegations against China for stealing US intellectual property rights, the US Trade Representative prepared a report in 2017 which tried to establish that Chinese theft of American intellectual property cost between $225 billion and $600 billion annually. Former president Trump, in August 2018, signed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019 and banned Huawei and ZTE equipment from being used by the US federal government, citing security concerns. In 2019, the US Treasury designated China as a currency manipulator. In an attempt to subvert China's counter-terrorism and de-radicalizing efforts, US' bill "The Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020" was signed by Trump into law on June 17, 2020. Afflicting China's internal affairs, The Hong Kong Autonomy Act was passed by the US Congress. The US imposed sanctions and visa restrictions against several Chinese government officials on false allegations of a genocide against the Uygur population in Xinjiang and human rights abuses in Hong Kong and Tibet. The US also launched "The China Initiative" that also involved an aggressive outreach campaign, with federal prosecutors and FBI agents regularly meeting with academia and the private sector about the threat of Chinese espionage.

Above-mentioned points reveal conspicuously that origin-tracing moves are driven by ulterior agenda lacking scientific research and probe.

How did Biden's intelligence team concoct the 90-day report on coronavirus origins? US President Joe Biden turning to the intelligence community for a COVID-19 virus origins story. Photo: Xinhua

GT: Do you think it is reliable for the US intelligence agency, which is incapable of judging the situation in Afghanistan, to make the report on the origins of the virus?

Khan: Technically speaking, if we look into professional acumen and integrity, the US intelligence agency stands exposed. Over the last many decades, on home ground to international spheres ranging from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, Arab Spring, Syrian crisis and recently Afghanistan mayhem, US national intelligence agencies have been losing steam for inept calculations and flawed assessment reports. Given the disrepute, their report on origin-tracing of COVID-19 is another fiasco.

US public's own faith on professionalism of CIA and FBI went into tailspin when a special 11-member investigative body traced abuses of power by the nation's intelligence agencies in 1975.

The worst episodes of unbalanced judgments by the US intelligence agencies came to fore when the US-led invasion destroyed Iraq in 2003 on the wrong plea of weapons of mass destruction. In October of 2002, nine months before the US-led invasion of Iraq, the CIA produced a document summarizing relevant intelligence on Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological weapons programs. On March 31, 2005, the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction reported that the intelligence community was "dead wrong" in its assessments of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities before the US invasion.

A new book by former CIA deputy director Michael Morell spilled the beans that not only did the intelligence community fail to predict the advent of the series of popular uprisings starting in 2011 known as the "Arab Spring," but also deemed that the movement would "take a heavy toll on Al Qaeda by undermining the group's narrative." The Arab Spring intelligence failure led by the US is an eye-opener when touching upon other issues requiring objective assessments, such as Iran's intentions regarding nuclear weapons, Russia's next moves in Eastern Europe or China's expansion. It encapsulates how policymakers can be in a position to command virtually unlimited information and yet know so very little.

Origin-Tracing: Has Biden been set up by politicized intelligence agencies with absurd virus origins tracing? Gao Lei

Failure of the US intelligence system has many other glaring examples. One of them is poor assessment on the rise of the Islamic State (IS), an offshoot of Al Qaeda in Iraq, which sprang to life during the US occupation in Iraq. The US garrisoned and occupied for eight years, in which it had assumedly developed countless sources of information and recruited agents of all sorts. And yet, by all accounts, when IS' militants suddenly swept across northern Iraq, the CIA in particular found itself high and dry.

So much so, on the basis of comprehensive information compiled by US intelligence community, the Biden administration had complacent that Afghan forces were capable to defend their territories and even it could take at least three weeks to reach Kabul by Taliban. All assessment proved wrong.

Given the detailed evidences substantiating US intelligence judgments rife with errors and omission, if produced a report on origins tracing will suffer validity and public trust.

GT: Mainstream media in the US have largely reported the report of US intelligence is going to reveal more about the virus' origins. But when a scientist pushed back the idea that the virus was leaked from the Wuhan lab, few US mainstream media reported that. Why is the case? What is the role of the US media in pushing the origins tracing probe?

Khan: It is irony that leaving aside some, US media freedom and integrity are compromised to greater extent. On the issue of virus origin-traceability, US media is polarized. Some feel dictated by authorities at helm of affairs. Some are funded. Many toe the line propagated by the US government in order to show their solidarity with national narrative. Among them there are media outlets that do not practice impartiality and objectivity. Broadly speaking, the reputation of the news media is under siege. According to the General Social Survey, the number of Americans with some or a great deal of trust in the press has dropped 30 percentage points since the late 1970s. Even Trump used to call mainstream media as "fake media."

If looked into behavior of US media to see how it report, it is evident what is being published and aired on origins tracing investigation is not the result of unbiased evidences but ulterior motives.

However I am still optimistic that there might be some US media that will uphold the supremacy of truthfulness. Recently media also published a study on the issue. A new antibody testing study examining samples originally collected through the National Institutes of Health's All of Us Research Program found evidence of SARS-CoV-2 infections in five states earlier than had initially been reported. These findings were published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. The results expand on findings from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study that suggested SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was present in the US as far back as December 2019. This report is one of evidences to debunk Wuhan lab leak theory.

GT: From your perspective, what impact will the report have on China and China-US relations?

Khan: As far as the report's impact on China, it is obvious that so far investigation is completed to fathom origin-traceability, China has come clean. First, the joint WHO-China investigation did not drop a hint about China's laxity or criminal oblivion in Wuhan lab leak propaganda. World knows very well that The COVID-19 virus was first publicly reported in December 2019 in Wuhan, China, but that does not necessarily mean China must be the origin of the virus. As we know, the first patient of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) epidemic was identified in the US in 1981, but scientists later traced the origin of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) back to chimpanzees and simian immunodeficiency virus in Africa. On February 9 this year, the joint WHO-China investigation team held a press conference to present the preliminary findings from its four-week field trip study. The 319-page joint research report supported the natural outbreak theory and clearly stressed it was "extremely unlikely" that the COVID-19 virus was leaked from a Chinese lab.

Undoubtedly, report that seems to be declaring China's hand in lab leak theory will add fuel to fire flaring up China-US brawl. It will make situation highly tense as Biden administration has decided to restrain China at all costs.

On the pretext of origin-tracing report destined to accuse China, President Biden has started disengaging US from various countries to shift complete focus on China. US' drawdown from Afghanistan despite massive criticism had to digest to get recharged for preparation of final battle against China. Meanwhile the US is ending its combat mission in Iraq by the end of year. At a defense industry event, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Hyten said the drawdown in Iraq is necessary to ensure the military is prepared for a fight with China, if that day comes. However, there is also an opinion that conflict will not be as tense as witnessed in Trump era. Contrary to Trump, Biden desires to use anti-China outrage for political mileage.

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covid19updater · 3 years

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COVID19 Updates: 06/22/2021

RUMINT (UK): Massive out break at NMUK (Nissan) one shift has been sent home. Nothing in the news yet.

North Korea: North Korea has told the WHO it tested more than 30,000 people for the COVID through June 10 but has yet to find a single infection. (That is right up there with Kim Jong Un has never pooped)

Colombia: ‘Everything is collapsing’: Colombia battles third Covid wave amid unrest LINK

World: Soviets Once Denied a Deadly Anthrax Lab Leak. U.S. Scientists Backed the Story.The accident and a subsequent cover-up have renewed relevance as scientists search for the origins of Covid-19 LINK

World: Mass infection prevention and mass vaccination with leaky Covid-19 vaccines in the midst of the pandemic can only breed highly infectious variants. Why the ongoing mass vaccination experiment drives a rapid evolutionary response of SARS-CoV-2. LINK

UK: Wembley to be allowed at least 60,000 fans for Euro 2020 semi-finals and final (What could go wrong?)

Massachusetts: Nearly 4,000 People in Massachusetts Have Tested Positive for Coronavirus After Being Fully Vaccinated LINK

Israel: Daily COVID cases surge to 125, the highest figure in months LINK

Israel: Israel faces Covid surge as virus circulates even among vaccinated LINK

Australia: #BREAKING Bondi COVID-19 cluster rises to 21 after NSW Health records 10 cases LINK

US: U.S. COVID update: - New cases: 15,870 - Average: 11,490 (+230) - Positivity rate: 1.9% (+0.8) - In hospital: 15,898 (-248) - In ICU: 4,024 (-57) - New deaths: 283

World: Echoes of neurodegenerative disease in fatal COVID-19; sleep woes may add risk LINK

Israel: #Israel: Prime Minister Naftali Bennett addresses spike in COVID-19 cases, Delta variant: "Everyone who enters the airport will wear a mask, period. 100 percent of the people who enter Israel will be tested."

World: Coronavirus: no certainty on herd immunity until we know more about vaccines and variants LINK

Iowa: Iowa reported 70 COVID+ Iowans today, while Minnesota reported 79 COVID+ Minnesotans. Iowa's population is 55.91% that of Minnesota. All things equal, Iowa should have reported only 44 positives. However, mitigation and attempted containment has ended for most Iowans.

World: Pollen helps Covid spread further and faster, scientists find LINK

US: New Johns Hopkins model projects COVID-19 resurgence in 3 months LINK

UK: Scotland: This is a bit of a disaster The backlog only makes up 15 of the cases so that’s still 2152 cases And it isn’t just more testing 9.1% of tests were positive,another big jump

UK: BREAKING Booster jabs will be 'needed for 10 years' after Covid says NHS LINK

Israel: JUST IN - Israel's PM Bennett: "There are indications that the so-called Delta coronavirus variant has begun spreading in Israel," calls citizens not to travel abroad and everyone aged 12+ to be vaccinated.

World: Recovery of deleted deep sequencing data sheds more light on the early Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 epidemic LINK

World: Update: President Biden's national security adviser on Sunday warned China it would face international isolation if it did not cooperate with investigators probing the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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newsmatters · 3 years

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China disease expert says Covid-19 origins probe should shift to US

A senior Chinese epidemiologist said the United States should be the priority in the next phase of investigations into the origin of Covid-19 after a study showed the disease could have been circulating there as early as December 2019, state media said on Thursday. The study, published this week by the US National Institutes for Health (NIH), showed that at least seven people in five US States…

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focusinsite · 3 years

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Improving Virtual Qualitative Market Research Studies

With our work lives disrupted due to COVID-19 shutdowns, we’ve written a number of blogs about how to continue with market research by shifting to online focus groups. Even though it isn’t currently possible to conduct in-person studies, many qualitative methodologies can easily be shifted to online platforms. With many companies scrambling to better understand how shopping behavior has changed in a pandemic, there is no better time to commission a market study. Qualitative research methodologies such as focus groups and in-depth interviews can easily be done virtually, but to get the most out of online formats, research consultants and market research recruitment consultants need to do additional work to get maximum value. While there are a number of online platforms that researchers can use, many researchers opt for Zoom, because so many people are now familiar with this platform. Hosting online market research studies can be frustrating given the inevitable technical glitches or the extra energy required to get participants to be comfortable sharing insights over an online platform. To get the most out of virtual market studies, researchers are adding an additional layer to online qualitative research studies and paid online surveys legit to better understand the ‘how’ and ‘why’ behind consumers’ behaviors. Before hosting an online focus group, participants may be asked to participate in a mobile ethnography study. Adding a mobile ethnography layer to the study is a great way to capture ‘in the moment’ thinking giving moderators more to explore and probe during a virtual focus group or in-depth interview. The benefits of including a mobile ethnography layer to a qualitative study includes: ● With more data being captured over a number of days, researchers have more time to get to know the research participants ● Because participants record what they do as they do it, there are minimal post-rationalization biases. ● The data captured is contextualized. Participants may be tasked with recording a video on their smartphone while they are engaged in the activity being focused on in the study. Capturing behaviors in real-time reduces the self-censoring that people inadvertently do when asked to recall an action after the fact. With this additional information, participant recruitment agency have a deeper and more contextualized understanding of what drives consumers’ behaviors and they can focus on these areas during an online focus group or in-depth interview. Looking to Fill a Study? Request a Proposal Today! Original Reference: https://bit.ly/319VOEb

#participant recruitment agency

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ladystylestores · 4 years

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Astronomers have finally measured the distance of first observed Einstein ring

Enlarge / A radio image of MG 1131+0456, the first observed Einstein ring, taken with the Very Large Array network of radio telescopes.

VLA

Astronomers around the world may have lost access to their telescopes during the coronavirus pandemic, sheltering in place along with the rest of us, but that hasn’t kept them from advancing their field. Two astronomers used the shutdown to comb through existing datasets to hunt for a rare type of quasar and wound up rediscovering a so-called “Einstein ring” first observed back in 1987. They became the first to officially measure its distance from Earth, as reported in a recent paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

An Einstein ring is a direct consequence of the general theory of relativity; mass bends and warps spacetime, and light must follow that curvature. (An Einstein cross is an even rarer effect.) As Matthew Francis reported for Ars back in 2012:

For a sufficiently large mass, the light’s shift may be sufficiently large that we can measure it, and it can produce lensed images of the original light source. In gravitational lensing, the lens is a galaxy or galaxy cluster lying between Earth and a distant source, itself typically a galaxy. If the lens is directly in the line of sight, the image of the source galaxy can be distorted into an Einstein ring, a circular image of the source. By studying the shape and other characteristics of the image, observers can reconstruct details about both the lens and the source galaxies.

Einstein himself thought an Einstein ring would be impossible to observe, but he was thinking of rings formed by stars, noting that it would be highly improbable to get stars to align in just the right way to produce the “halo” effect. A single star would also form too small of a lens, thereby defying, as Einstein observed in a 1936 paper, “the resolving power of our instruments.” (The angular size of an Einstein ring increases with the mass of the lens.) But galaxies (and galaxy clusters) do make for a sufficiently massive lens.

Quasars are a type of active galactic nuclei—compact regions near a galaxy’s center that give off huge amounts of energy because the supermassive black holes at their centers are greedily devouring matter. They were first discovered by astronomers in the 1950s. It can be challenging to spot quasars because they are so distant, but gravitational lensing can help, since another galaxy closer to Earth can act as the lens, warping the light of the quasar behind it and making it brighter.

There are some 200 known gravitationally lensed quasars, but others are even harder to spot because they are obscured by all the gas and dust stirred up by the black hole as it feeds. Those were the objects of interest for Daniel Stern of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and his co-author, Dominic Walton of the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy.

Examples of Einstein ring gravitational lenses taken with the Hubble Space Telescope.

NASA/ESA/SLACS Survey team

Adhering to social distancing amid the COVID-19 pandemic, astronomers Dominic Walton (left) and Daniel Stern (right) collaborated remotely via Zoom to conduct their study of the lensed, obscured quasar, MG 1131+0456 and determine its distance.

D. Stern, NASA JPL/D. Walton, University of Cambridge IoA

They combed through old public data collected by the W.M. Keck Observatory, as well as by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The WISE data in particular proved useful, since the gas and dust that obscures these objects when hunting for them using visible light are much easier to spot in infrared surveys.

Lurking in that data was the very first Einstein ring discovered by astronomers in 1987, known as MG 1131+0456, using the Very Large Array radio telescope network. “As we dug deeper, we were surprised that such a famous and bright source never had a distance measured for it,” said Stern. “Having a distance is a necessary first step for all sorts of additional studies, such as using the lens as a tool to measure the expansion history of the Universe and as a probe for dark matter.”

To rectify that oversight, Stern and Walton noted that the Keck Observatory had made several observations of the quasar between 1997 and 2007. That enabled them to calculate the distance of the object: 10 billion light years from Earth. Next, they determined the galaxy’s mass and used the Chandra X-ray data from 2000 to figure out just how much gas and dust there is between Earth and the quasar near its center.

“Our next step is to find lensed quasars that are even more heavily obscured than MG 1131+0456,” said Walton. “Finding those needles is going to be even harder, but they’re out there waiting to be discovered. These cosmic gems can give us a deeper understanding of the Universe, including further insight into how supermassive black holes grow and influence their surroundings.” Among other followup studies, the James Webb Space Telescope, slated for launch in March 2021, could be used to study the dark matter in the lensing galaxy.

“This whole paper was a bit nostalgic for me, making me look at papers from the early days of my career, when I was still in graduate school,” Stern said. “The Berlin Wall was still up when this Einstein ring was first discovered, and all the data presented in our paper are from the last millennium.”

DOI: Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2020. 10.3847/2041-8213/ab922c (About DOIs).

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laburlasi · 3 years

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Coronavirus: China slams WHO's 'arrogance' over lab audit plan

Some WHO experts complained that did not get the proper level of access from the Chinese authorities

China angrily rejected a proposal by the World Health Organization (WHO) to let the agency's experts inspect China's biotech labs as they investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

On Thursday, Chinese vice health minister Zeng Yixin told journalists he was "extremely surprised" by the initiative.

Volume 90% Watch video07:58

Wuhan lab leak theory a ‘wild goose chase’

Last week, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who leads the WHO, called for more access and transparency from China, as well as "raw data."

How has China responded?

Chinese vice health minister Zeng Yixin slammed the plan as showing "disrespect for common sense and arrogance towards science."

Zeng pointed to a joint WHO-China mission in January that failed to conclude that the virus leakedfrom the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

But that mission faced criticism after some members of the team complained about the level of access that was given to them by Chinese authorities, who closely monitored the investigation.

Zeng attacked the "rumors" about the lab, saying it has "never carried out gain-of-function research on coronaviruses."

China's state media has suggested an alternative theory, without providing any evidence, that coronavirus emerged from a US military research lab in Maryland.

Volume 90% Watch video02:00

What's to make of WHO probe into pandemic's origins?

The Global Times, a newspaper that's considered a mouthpiece for the Chinese government, claimed it had collected five million signatures for a petition to investigate the lab in Fort Detrick.

The same outlet said WHO chief Tedros had "succumbed to US-led West's political pressure" (sic).

What happens next?

The World Health Organization has no formal powers to force Beijing to cooperate.

But the United States is stepping up diplomatic pressure with US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman traveling to China this weekend for talks.

US President Joe Biden ordered intelligence officials to "redouble" efforts at the end of May to investigate the origins of Covid-19, including the theory that it came from a laboratory in China.

He said the US intelligence community was split on whether it came from a lab accident or emerged from human contact with an infected animal.

They are expected to report back to President Biden by the end of August.

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covid19updater · 3 years

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COVID19 Updates: 04/09/2021

Cambodia: Cambodia sees daily record COVID-19 cases

Poland: 'This is war': Polish medics just taking naps between COVID shifts LINK

India: the rate of increase of cases is the worst it has been and it's not even peaked yet. This is concerning as more #variants could develop and further affect the trajectory of this pandemic.

Brazil: BREAKING: Brazil reports record 4,249 new coronavirus deaths. Brazil sets new daily COVID-19 death record as hospital supplies run low (This is roughly a death every 20 seconds)

India: BREAKING: India reports 131,878 new coronavirus cases, by far the biggest one-day increase on record

Argentina: Argentina reports 23,683 new coronavirus cases, the biggest one-day increase on record

Turkey: Turkey reports 55,941 new coronavirus cases, the biggest one-day increase on record

Canada: B.C. registers record-breaking 1,293 new COVID19 cases Thursday, and 2 deaths; 336 pandemic patients hospitalized, 101 in intensive care. Province administered 34,040 vaccine doses Wednesday.

Michigan: Michigan coronavirus data for Wednesday, April 7: Hospitalizations up by 1,000 plus in past week LINK

World: Scientists call for new probe into COVID-19 origins - with or without China LINK

South Korea: South Korea reported 700 new coronavirus cases, its highest daily figure since early January, and the Prime Minister reiterated warnings on Thursday that new social distancing rules would likely be needed. LINK

Japan: JAPAN IS CONSIDERING STRONGER COVID CONTROLS IN TOKYO AND OTHER CITIES - SANKEI.

Australia: ASTRAZENECA VACCINATION FOR ALL AGES HAS BEEN TEMPORARILY HALTED IN NEW SOUTH WALES - SIDNEY MORNING HERALD, READ HERE LINK

Philippines: In a bid to slow covid spread & decongest hospitals, Philippines authorities ordered 24M+ people in Manila & four neighboring provinces to stay home unless they are essential workers. A week after imposing LD, 70-80% of covid H beds full & ICU beds at almost 100%;

Michigan: Breaking: Gov. Whitmer is calling on all high schools to go remote for two weeks after spring break. Also says all sports should voluntarily suspend actions for two weeks. Also encourages all people to *not eat indoors* at restaurants for the next two weeks. Whitmer: We still have a mask mandate. There are still limits on indoor gatherings. There are testing requirements for youth sports. "We all need to go above and beyond the rules that we already have in place." MICHIGAN GOV: YOUTH SPORTS A SIGNIFICANT FACTOR IN VIRUS SPREAD

World: Johnson & Johnson: J&J vaccine is now under scrutiny too for blood clotting events. The clotting syndrome may be related to adenovirus vector, which is the system used by J&J as well as AZ. Serious cases of blood clots have been identified after people took the J&J vax LINK

US: CDC’s WALENSKY: COVID CASES AND ER VISITS UP FOR YOUNGER ADULTS

US: variant watch USA: P1 (Brazil variant) reported cases increasing more quickly now... nearly doubled in a week...Apr. 1, 2021-P.1 reported cases = 224. Apr. 8, 2021-P.1 reported cases = 434. For the first time P.1 has overtaken the South Africa variant (B.1.351) in the # of total reported cases in the U.S.

UK: Soccer player Marco Stiepermann opens up about health problems after COVID. LINK

US: Devastating Covid-19 Variant In Brazil Now One Of The Most Reported Variants In U.S., CDC Data Shows LINK

US: BREAKING: Pfizer files with the FDA to expand emergency use authorization for its Covid-19 vaccine to people between 12 and 15 years of age.

Canada: Hospitals running out of key drug for COVID-19 patients LINK

Italy: 18,938 CASES, 718 DEATHS IN ITALY

Greece: Covid-19 Patient in Greece Kills Roommate by Unplugging Ventilator LINK

NYC: *NEW YORK DAILY SUBWAY RIDERSHIP TOPS 2M, 1ST TIME SINCE COVID (rolling petri dishes)

RUMINT (Shelby County, TN): We now have 23 kids positive and out sick. 14 just two days ago. I dont know which variant but we had four confirmed P1 cases about 10-14 days ago in Shelby County, Tennessee. Of the 23 kids, half have symptoms and 1 went to the hospital this morning. The school board can not get custodial staff to come to work (and apparently, the job fair held by the custodial contractor yielded less than 50 people over a two day event). Our school is supposed to have a staff of 8 custodial staff for after hours sanitizing. We have ONE. She does her best but she cannot keep up. I have started going in after classes and helping the teacher scrub everything down. Wearing respirators and using bleach water. Sorry, that drifted a little but its related. The spread is happening quickly and kids are getting sick now. Doing some deductive reasoning, I figure it is a variant of some flavor as none of the kids were becoming symptomatic a year ago with OG Sars CoV-19

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newsmatters · 3 years

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China Expert Says COVID-19 Origins Probe Should Shift To US

New Delhi: After a study showed that the virus could be circulating in the U.S. in December 2019, a senior Chinese expert has said that the next phase of investigation on the origin of Covid-19 should be done in the United States. A study was published by the U.S. National Institutes for Health (NIH) which said that at least 7 people were infected with the SARS-CoV-2 weeks before the first…

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xtruss · 3 years

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Joe Biden Believes China Hiding COVID-19 Origin Info, China Warns 'Political Virus' Spreading

— BZy Tom O'Connor And Naveed Jamali | May 28, 2021

President Joe Biden and his officials believe China is hiding information regarding the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, a contentious issue that the U.S. administration warns it will pursue in spite of protests from Beijing, which has accused Washington of politicizing the investigation.

"This virus originated in China and China has information that it has not shared with the global community about its origins," a senior administration official told Newsweek, "and that is information that we all need access to in order to prevent the next pandemic."

The remarks came two days after Biden issued a statement in which he offered an update on a U.S. Intelligence Community report he commissioned in March on the origins of COVID-19, "including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident."

In a rare insight to the ongoing probe, the president said Wednesday that the U.S. Intelligence Community "has 'coalesced around two likely scenarios' but has not reached a definitive conclusion on this question." Out of the possibilities of an animal-to-human transmission or a laboratory accident, he revealed the latest analysis as determining: "while two elements in the IC leans toward the former scenario and one leans more toward the latter – each with low or moderate confidence – the majority of elements do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other."

The comments marked the most dramatic shift yet in the administration's narrative on the theory that the novel coronavirus escaped from a scientific institution, most usually cited as the Wuhan Institute of Virology, an esteemed facility that deals with coronavirus research and is located in the city where the disease was first detected late last year. Most experts had previously dismissed the scenario as far-fetched, and many still do.

In Beijing, Biden's announcement sparked anger as Chinese officials have downplayed the lab leak hypothesis as unfounded, and accused those promoting it of bearing ill-intentions.

"Lately, some people have played the old trick of political hype on the origin tracing of COVID-19 in the world," a spokesperson at China's embassy in the United States said in a statement sent to Newsweek. "Smear campaign and blame shifting are making a comeback, and the conspiracy theory of 'lab leak' is resurfacing."

The spokesperson pointed to what was perceived to be a plot to assign fault to Beijing as the disease first ravaged the world, hitting the U.S. worst of all as China managed to curb the spread relatively quickly.

"Since the outbreak of COVID-19 last year, some political forces have been fixated on political manipulation and blame game, while ignoring their people's urgent need to fight the pandemic and the international demand for cooperation on this front, which has caused a tragic loss of many lives," the spokesperson said.

As the pandemic continues to inflict sickness and death globally, the Chinese embassy spokesperson reflected on the "lesson" learned from last year's geopolitical battle launched against China by Biden's predecessor, former President Donald Trump, over the handling of the disease.

"We cannot but wonder, have they already put that bitter lesson behind them, so soon? Or do they want to see a replay of tragedies?" the spokesperson asked rhetorically "With such irresponsible behaviors, how can they face up to their own people? How can they face up to the international community? And how can they face up to human conscience?"

The Chinese embassy spokesperson said Beijing has called "for international cooperation on the basis of respecting facts and science, with a view to better coping with unexpected epidemics in the future." Such an investigation would examine "all early cases of COVID-19 found worldwide and a thorough investigation into some secretive bases and biological laboratories all over the world," suggesting an effort to explore the possibility that the disease did not originate in China.

On the other hand, "To politicize origin tracing, a matter of science, will not only make it hard to find the origin of the virus, but give free rein to the 'political virus' and seriously hamper international cooperation on the pandemic," the Chinese embassy spokesperson said.

But despite China's messaging, the Biden administration intended to press on with its investigation that's set to conclude in 88 days.

"We are not going to allow Chinese obfuscation to dictate the work that we need to do to protect the public health of the American people," the senior administration official told Newsweek.

Members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus, wearing protective gear are seen during their visit to the Hubei Center for animal disease control and prevention in Wuhan, China's central Hubei province on February 2. Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images

The international spat plays out after the World Health Organization conducted its own investigation into the origins of COVID-19, an effort that included a visit to China roughly coinciding with the anniversary of the disease being declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. The joint WHO-China mission determined in March—the same month Biden was briefed on U.S. intelligence findings—that the lab leak theory was "extremely unlikely" and called for a focus on the hypothesis that the disease was transferred to humans through contact with a bat, an animal known to carry coronaviruses.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus later affirmed in April the lab leak theory was the least likely, but broke with the findings in saying that more evidence was needed to entirely rule out the lab leak theory.

Tedros' comments drew the ire of Chinese officials. Earlier this month, WHO representative in China Gauden Galea told Sky News that the agency had "not been invited to join" China's national investigation into the origins of COVID-19.

As the Biden administration pursues its own probe, the White House has so far declined to release any more preliminary findings.

"Look, we do not comment on intelligence, as you can imagine," White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Friday. "We're going to continue to look at the intelligence. We believe there's more work to do, hence the 90-day review."

Meanwhile, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian assailed the Biden administration's latest comments surrounding efforts to get to the bottom of where COVID-19 truly came from.

"Origin-tracing is a serious scientific issue, and yet the U.S. intends to let its intelligence service play a leading role in conducting the research," Zhao told a press briefing on Friday. "This only shows that facts and truth is the last thing the US side cares about. It has zero interest in scientific research, but is only seeking political manipulation for the purpose of scapegoating."

Zhao highlighted the findings of the joint WHO-China team's initial report as well as what he referred to as the U.S.' own possession of "the largest scale and the highest number of bio-labs in the world with media coverage of virus leak at the bio-chemical research base Fort Detrick."

The Maryland military base historically hosted the U.S. biological weapons program from World War II through 1969, but a lab dealing in sensitive diseases remains and two breaches were reported in 2019, forcing the facilities to temporarily halt work.

Zhao also called for U.S. explanations and international investigations regarding "the unexplained respiratory diseases in Northern Virginia in July 2019 and large-scale EVALI [E-cigarette or Vaping Use-Associated Lung Injury] outbreaks in Wisconsin" around this same time.

No evidence has yet been produced to suggest a link between any of these three events and COVID-19.

In China, a number of officials have been fired, demoted or otherwise disciplined for negligence over the initial outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan and subsequent infections that have occasionally emerged elsewhere throughout the country over the past year.

Earlier this month, Chinese embassy in the United Kingdom Minister Ma Hui revealed "an incomplete list of positions" affected by the blowback, whose former occupants were then identified by Newsweek through gathering public reports.

The Chinese diplomat said this demonstrated the country had handled the crisis in an "accountable" matter rather than "authoritarian" as critics have alleged.

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bentonpena · 4 years

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How a Hacker Launched a Decentralized Network to Track Internet Censorship

How a Hacker Launched a Decentralized Network to Track Internet Censorship https://bit.ly/32yt4Gg

Political and social upheaval around the world can lead to internet censorship and interference by powerful actors.

The Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) is allowing people around the world to monitor internet censorship and interference in their countries in a decentralized manner for free.

It has created the world's largest open dataset on internet censorship, with millions of measurements collected from more than 200 countries since 2012.

Belarus residents are fighting back against the alleged illegitimate re-election of leader Alexander Lukashenko, otherwise known as the “last dictator of Europe,” since the election occurred Aug. 9. Lukashenko’s contested victory has led to widespread protests and violence against protestors by the military, and caused Lukashenko’s opponent to flee the country.

Amid the protests, which have been ongoing, various parts of the internet were also shut down across the country including social networks and message sites such as Telegram and Facebook, as well as some news outlets. Lukashenko has denied shutting down the internet, blaming foreign interference, but further reporting suggests the government is, in fact, responsible.

In a new report shared exclusively with CoinDesk, the decentralized internet censorship testing network Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), found 86 websites were blocked in Belarus in August, including 19 communications platforms such as Telegram and encrypted email services.

“These include news media, political opposition, pro-democracy, and election related websites, as well as communication and circumvention tool sites,” the report found.

The origins of OONI

OONI has been working as a global community to document internet censorship and interference since 2012. Using a free and open source software it developed called OONI Probe, the organization has built a “decentralized, citizen-led, Internet censorship observatory.” It publishes measurements in order to develop a public archive on network interference and increase transparency about censorship. The data for the Belarus report, for example, was gathered from OONI probe users on the ground in the country.

With rising authoritarianism around the world, information crackdowns due to COVID-19 and states constantly developing more advanced methods of suppressing information and engaging in censorship, the work OONI and the network using its software are doing has a renewed sense of urgency.

“A lot of our principles and ideas come from being cypherpunks basically,” said Arturo Filastò, a Rome-based hacker who founded and leads OONI. “The concept is that we can build tools and technology that empower people to take actions and bring about change. A core concept of that is decentralization and the fact that everybody should be able to use our tool.”

Filastò was a hacker from his teen years. In a recent call with CoinDesk over Signal, he made it clear he espoused the ideas of, and aligned himself with, the cypherpunk mentality.

The original idea for OONI, which Filastò now describes as more a manifesto than an academic paper, was written while he was still at the Tor Project, which maintains the Tor browser.

Filastò said OONI definitely doesn’t want to be a central authority declaring how bad internet censorship is around the world. Rather, they want to empower people to document internet abuse wherever they see it.

“We want to build tools that empower anybody who wants to go out and say, ‘Okay, in my country there’s something wrong with respect to how the internet is being filtered and how it’s being interfered with,’” said Filastò.

A hard-data approach

The OONI probes focus not on anecdotal evidence but rather on hard, quantitative data. This approach prevents governments from claiming ignorance when they do, in fact, block something.

As a result, OONI has become the world’s largest open dataset on internet censorship with millions of measurements collected from more than 200 countries since 2012. There are tens of thousands of volunteers using it on the ground in authoritarian states such as Iran, Venezuela and Malaysia, according to Filastò.

“We intend to apply the scientific method to the realm of network surveillance and filtering detection,” read that initial paper. “In order to ensure reproducibility, all experiments conducted shall be properly documented and all data collected made available to the public in a timely manner. The same observations should be possible to reproduce independently, in line with standard full disclosure practice.”

How OONI’s tech works

The OONI probe runs a number of preprogrammed tests on the network. A user can decide which ones to run and how extensive they can be. Sometimes a single test can take hours, but tests can also be broken down among a network of users in a country to be run faster. Alternatively multiple devices could be set up to run them.

The OONI probe can test a wide array of factors.

In Belarus, blocking by internet service providers appeared to be implemented during the TLS handshake, which OONI attributes to either Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), an advanced method of tracking and managing traffic on a network, or that all traffic was going through a “proxy that blocks undesired connections,” according to the report.

The Server Name Indication (SNI) is seemingly being used to decide whether to block or let connections go through, according to OONI. The SNI is the method through which you’re able to make sure you end up on the proper domain by allowing you to specify it during the TLS handshake, or when a client (your device) and a server acknowledge and verify each other before establishing a connection.

It’s not just things like political or media sites that are blocked. Connections to things like virtual privacy networks (VPN) or encrypted email are also often disrupted, as these are the very tools that can be used to circumvent government censorship. Numerous proxies for the encrypted messaging app Telegram served as an organization and communication platform amid the ongoing protests in Belarus, particularly as other parts of the web were shut down. A number of privacy-preserving email providers were also blocked.

A global effort

OONI has a global testing website list, and country-specific lists in collaboration with Citizen Lab, a research group from the University of Toronto that studies the intersection of information and communication technologies, human rights, and global security, as well as other projects to develop metric measurements.

The tests are run on the users network and the control to check it is run on an OONI server in a location known not to be facing censorship. Users can also choose what websites, or categories of websites they don’t want to test if they so choose. Filastò said OONI is dedicated to informed consent, and lets users really shape tests how they see fit.

At a high level, Filastò said when it comes to websites, users test DNS resolution and compare for consistency. A DNS (Domain Name Server) resolution is the system by which an IP address is translated to domain names.

“This is a huge rabbit hole; it’s not so trivial as just matching IP addresses because of geolocation, timing, load balancing and a lot of other things,” said Filastò. “I won’t go into details, but the basic tactic is a DNS resolution and then check for consistency.”

This helps determine whether they’re consistently reachable or unreachable because tests also want to eliminate the cases in which there are false positives due to the website being down for reasons other than interference or manipulation.

Censorship on the ground in Malaysia

Khairil Yusof is the coordinator for the Sinar Project in Malaysia, which started out as a volunteer effort with a few tech activists who were at the Bersih 2.0 pro-democracy rally in 2011. The group’s focus was on open government and civic tech, but under an increasingly authoritarian government they also needed to pay attention to the possibility of online censorship.

They started seeing instances of censorship prior to Malaysia’s 2013 general election, and since then it’s only continued. As part of their efforts, Yusof said, they tried to build a monitoring site backed by data and tests.

“We ran into problems, and that’s when we discovered that OONI was also working on the same idea and at a global scale,” said Yusof. “It was an open project [that] had done much more research into this, and we were like, ‘Great, let’s work with them and then shift our efforts to working with OONI and the OONI community.’”

Many censorship reports in the media are anecdotal, said Yusof. These anecdotal reports are then used to generate various “Internet Freedom” indices. The problem with anecdotal evidence is that it’s easy to brush off or dismiss by saying, for example, a person’s internet was slow or the site was probably down. The purpose of the Sinar Project is to verify and support anecdotal claims with hard evidence that cannot be refuted.

The project focuses both on long-term data collection to track trends as well as on real-time data collection during key events like general elections.

“Our testing efforts, for example, allowed us to prove that election results sites were being blocked, and which was later used by journalists to track down the official [government] request to ISPs leading to the resignation of a few people at the Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC),” said Yusof.

Yusof noted he hasn’t seen any rise in censorship since the onset of the global pandemic but says sometimes, when the technical challenges of censorship are too high, Malaysia is resorting to more “analog” methods of silencing people, such as throwing them into prison.

“Mostly when the technical and economic costs of online censorship are too high, what we’ve seen in Southeast Asia is that offline actions such as arrests and jailing of activists or media for comments or reporting online has far more chilling effects on self-censorship than technical measures,” said Yusof.

Phishing in Venezuela

When Juan Guaido formed an interim legislative administration in Venezuela, he and his party were challenged by incumbent president Nicolás Maduro and labeled the “opposition party.” (Guaido is recognized as Venezuela’s legitimate leader by more than 50 countries.)

Health care is a state-run industry in Venezuela. The “Héroes de la Salud” platform was created in 2020 by Guaido’s disputed interim administration so that members of the public health-care system could share their information on its website and receive monthly financial assistance at a time of difficult working conditions and low wages.

However, visitors to the site were being inadvertently redirected by a state-run ISP to a different one: a phishing site cloned from the original ““Héroes de la Salud” by malicious actors opposed to Guaido, according to a late April report from Venezuela Inteligente, an organization that tracks network interference and censorship on the internet in Venezuela.

The users were rerouted through a domain name system (DNS) redirect, which is an attack that shows a web page to a user that is different from the one requested.

The phishing site was gathering personal information (including the Venezuelan equivalent of U.S. Social Security numbers) of public health workers, who could then face backlash if they were known to have asked for financial assistance from the “opposition.”

“These were public health workers redirected to a website designed with the sole purpose of tricking them and collecting their data,” said head of Venezuela Inteligente Andres E. Azpurua. “I don’t have any specifics on what has happened to some of those people. But we do know that that data was collected and published online. So there’s a list of highly sensitive information that’s just out there.”

Using OONI’s software, Azpurua was able to help document the discovery in a standardized and open fashion.

Going forward, OONI is hoping to continue to expand its network and build on the progress it has seen since 2012.

“Our real goal is empowering decentralized efforts of uncovering network interference around the world,” said Filastò. “That’s really what we strive for at the end of the day.”

Trading via CoinDesk https://bit.ly/35KxIA1 September 15, 2020 at 04:32PM

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