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Rumors swirl of U.S. secretly harboring top China security official Dong Jingwei

Rumors swirl of U.S. secretly harboring top China security official Dong Jingwei

The Daily Beast reports: Chinese-language anti-communist media and Twitter are abuzz this week with rumors that a vice minister of State Security, Dong Jingwei defected in mid-February, flying from Hong Kong to the United States with his daughter, Dong Yang. Dong Jingwei supposedly gave the U.S. information about the Wuhan Institute of Virology that changed the stance of the Biden Administration concerning the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. Dong is, or was, a longtime official in China’s Ministry of State…

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Putin hails Biden after Russian senator questions U.S. president’s fitness

Putin hails Biden after Russian senator questions U.S. president’s fitness

Bloomberg reports: Russian President Vladimir Putin slammed the door on state-media speculation that his U.S. counterpart Joe Biden was too old to go toe-to-toe with him after the two met Wednesday for their first summit. “The image of President Biden that our, and even American, media present has nothing to do with reality,” Putin said in response to a Russian senator’s question if the U.S. president was suffering from what she called “dementia.” “Biden’s a professional, you have to be…

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New $3.2 billion program will support the development of drug to treat Covid-19

New $3.2 billion program will support the development of drug to treat Covid-19

The New York Times reports: The U.S. government spent more than $18 billion last year funding drugmakers to make a Covid vaccine, an effort that led to at least five highly effective shots in record time. Now it’s pouring more than $3 billion on a neglected area of research: developing pills to fight the virus early in the course of infection, potentially saving many lives in the years to come. The new program, announced on Thursday by the Department of…

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Racial bias makes white Americans more likely to support wars in nonwhite foreign countries – new study

Racial bias makes white Americans more likely to support wars in nonwhite foreign countries – new study

White Americans who hold racist attitudes are likely to prefer military action over diplomacy in foreign countries like Iran and, in particular, China. Frank Rossoto Stocktrek via Getty By Vladimir Enrique Medenica, University of Delaware and David Ebner, University of Delaware The effects of American racial bias and anti-Asian sentiment do not end at the nation’s borders. The racial attitudes of white people also influence their support for American military intervention abroad, according to our working paper on U.S. foreign…

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In secret recording, Florida Republican threatens to send Russian-Ukrainian ‘hit squad’ to make rival ‘disappear’

In secret recording, Florida Republican threatens to send Russian-Ukrainian ‘hit squad’ to make rival ‘disappear’

Politico reports: A little-known GOP candidate in one of Florida’s most competitive congressional seats was secretly recorded threatening to send “a Russian and Ukrainian hit squad” to a fellow Republican opponent to make her “disappear.” During a 30-minute call with a conservative activist that was recorded before he became a candidate, William Braddock repeatedly warned the activist to not support GOP candidate Anna Paulina Luna in the Republican primary for a Tampa Bay-area congressional seat because he had access to…

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Netanyahu ordered papers shredded before leaving office, report claims

Netanyahu ordered papers shredded before leaving office, report claims

The Times of Israel reports: A report Thursday claimed that just before former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu left the Prime Minister’s Office on Sunday, his staff shredded documents that were being stored in safes. A spokesperson for Netanyahu called the report “total lies. No such thing ever happened.” If true, the allegations detailed by the Haaretz daily would represent an ignominious and likely illegal final act by the Likud leader, as his efforts to hold on to power reached their…

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Loyalty to Trump? ‘It’s all about the money’

Loyalty to Trump? ‘It’s all about the money’

Andy Kroll writes: A week after the January 6th insurrection, House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy rebuked Trump. McCarthy, nicknamed “my Kevin” by Trump, had been one of the many Republicans in thrall to Trump. He held his tongue when asked about the latest Trump scandal, and parroted Trump’s baseless attacks on the integrity of the 2020 election. McCarthy was forced into hiding in the Capitol complex during the insurrection, during which Trump reportedly called him to complain that the rioters…

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Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, forceful on January 6, now privately in turmoil

Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, forceful on January 6, now privately in turmoil

The Wall Street Journal reports: The far-right group the Oath Keepers is splintering after board members accused the founder of spending its money on hair dye, steaks and guns. The leader of the Proud Boys, choked off from the financial system, is printing “Black Lives Matter” T-shirts to make money. The finances of the two most visible groups with members involved in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol are sputtering. Leaders are low on cash, struggling with defections…

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Putin has nothing to fear from Biden

Putin has nothing to fear from Biden

Elena Chernenko writes: Ahead of September’s legislative elections, the authorities have disbanded the opposition and docked the media, closing down the space for dissent. But a majority of Russians, consumed by the concerns of everyday life and long inured to Mr. Putin’s rule, don’t seem to care much. With them, Mr. Biden’s message about the inviolability of human rights and the sanctity of democracy — both of which are slipping away in Russia, to no general uproar — is likely…

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Rocky Mountain forests burning more now than any time in the past 2,000 years

Rocky Mountain forests burning more now than any time in the past 2,000 years

Colorado’s East Troublesome Fire jumped the Continental Divide on Oct. 22, 2020, and eventually became Colorado’s second-largest fire on record. Lauren Dauphin/NASA Earth Observatory By Philip Higuera, The University of Montana; Bryan Shuman, University of Wyoming, and Kyra Wolf, The University of Montana The exceptional drought in the U.S. West has people across the region on edge after the record-setting fires of 2020. Last year, Colorado alone saw its three largest fires in recorded state history, one burning late in…

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What Covid-19’s long tail is revealing about chronic disease

What Covid-19’s long tail is revealing about chronic disease

David Cox writes: One of the major challenges for doctors attempting to treat long Covid is that there are likely to be a variety of underlying triggers or causes, depending on the patient. Recent epidemics have provided one way of gaining crucial clues about what these underlying causes might be. Far from being unique to Sars-CoV-2 – the virus that causes Covid-19 – some scientists believe almost all infectious outbreaks leave behind a proportion of patients who remain chronically unwell…

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The FDA should be our toughest regulatory body, but the pharmaceutical lobby has torn it to shreds

The FDA should be our toughest regulatory body, but the pharmaceutical lobby has torn it to shreds

Natalie Shure writes: Last week the Food and Drug Administration approved Aduhelm—the first new Alzheimer’s drug in 18 years—an event that, at first blush, heralds the amazing news of a medical advance. Perhaps it might have been, had the whole process leading up to the agency giving its nod to the medication played out in a functional health care system. But that’s not what happened. Far from hailing the advent of a transformative breakthrough for the six million Americans suffering…

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When graphs are a matter of life and death

When graphs are a matter of life and death

Hannah Fry writes: In “A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication” (Harvard), Michael Friendly and Howard Wainer, a psychologist and a statistician, argue that visual thinking, by revealing what would otherwise remain invisible, has had a profound effect on the way we approach problems. The book begins with what might be the first statistical graph in history, devised by the Dutch cartographer Michael Florent van Langren in the sixteen-twenties. This was well into the Age of Discovery, and Europeans…

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Attorney General Garland confronts long-building crisis over leak inquiries and journalism

Attorney General Garland confronts long-building crisis over leak inquiries and journalism

Charlie Savage writes: Government leak hunters have been ratcheting up pressure on the ability of journalists to do their jobs for a generation — a push fueled by changing technology and fraught national-security issues that arose after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Now, those tensions have reached an inflection point. Recent disclosures about aggressive steps that the Justice Department secretly took under President Donald J. Trump while hunting for the confidential sources of reporters — at The New York Times,…

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