Good morning friends. We’ll keep it short today. Let’s get to it.
News Briefing
•There were some reports two weeks ago that Russian soldiers stationed around Chernobyl had dug trenches and were suffering high radiation levels. Three buses with soldiers were taken to Belarussian hospitals. Well now, it seems that they really dug trenches. Here’s video footage of it:
•Hungary's PM breaks with the EU, saying he'll pay for Russian gas in rubles. More on this here.
•Deutsche Bank Predicts U.S. Recession in ‘23 as Fed Boosts Rates. The U.S. will tumble into a recession next year as the Federal Reserve jacks up interest rates to combat high and widening inflation, according to Deutsche Bank economist David Folkerts-Landau. More on this here.
•Chinese authorities extended a lockdown in Shanghai to cover all of the financial centre's 26 million people, despite growing anger over quarantine rules in the city, where latest results show only 268 symptomatic daily COVID-19 cases. Here are residents singing and protesting lack of supplies:
Shanghai residents go to their balconies to sing & protest lack of supplies. A drone appears: “Please comply w covid restrictions. Control your soul’s desire for freedom. Do not open the window or sing.” #Shangailockdown•Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez invites Elon Musk to visit the country after the world’s richest man tweeted that Spain could power all of Europe with solar energy. More on this here.
•Twitter has confirmed that it is working on an edit button that would allow users to change tweets after they have been posted. It comes after new board member, Tesla boss Elon Musk, asked his followers in a Twitter poll whether they wanted the feature. Many users have long called for an edit button but there are concerns about how to execute it.
The Origin of Covid-19: The Lancet (part 3)
The Lancet is a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal. It is among the world's oldest and best-known general medical journals.On February 19, in a letter published in the influential medical journal The Lancet, Peter Daszak joined 26 scientists in asserting, “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” Nine months later, emails released by a freedom of information request showed that Daszak had orchestrated the Lancet statement with the intention of concealing his role and creating the impression of scientific unanimity.
Under the subject line, “No need for you to sign the ‘Statement’ Ralph!!,” he wrote to Ralph Baric (who had collaborated with him and Shi Zhengli): “you, me and him should not sign this statement, so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a counterproductive way.” Daszak added, “We’ll then put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice.” Baric agreed, writing back, “Otherwise it looks self-serving and we lose impact.”
The Lancet statement ended with a declaration of objectivity: “We declare no competing interests.” Among its signatories were Jeremy Farrar and one other participant in the confidential huddle with Fauci.
Reading the Lancet letter, with Farrar’s name attached to it, Robert Redfield (the head of the CDC) had a dawning realization. He concluded there’d been a concerted effort not just to suppress the lab-leak theory but to manufacture the appearance of a scientific consensus in favor of a natural origin. “They made a decision, almost a P.R. decision, that they were going to push one point of view only” and suppress rigorous debate, said Redfield. “They argued they did it in defense of science, but it was antithetical to science.”
Later on, Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University economist who oversees the Lancet’s COVID-19 commission, dismissed Daszak from the helm of a task force investigating the virus’s genesis, after he flatly refused to share progress reports from his contested research grant.
Pics, vids & memes
Finally the Koreans said it:
Peace out
That was it for today folks. Have a great rest of the day. Peace