World News
‘We are not afraid’: Wuhan residents say they hope WHO team finds virus origins
With investigators from the World Health Organization (WHO) set to visit China next year, residents of Wuhan are saying they want the team to come to the central city, hoping they could prove the virus did not originate there. An international team of investigators is expected to travel to China in January, the WHO said on Thursday, more than a year after the first identified cluster of COVID-19 infections was linked to the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan.
“I welcome them to come. We also want to know how it developed, specifically where it came from, if the source of the virus is here,” said a Wuhan resident surnamed Wan, as he walked to work on Thursday morning. “My feeling is that it is not from there,” he added, referring to the seafood market. The WHO did not confirm whether its team will go to Wuhan, saying that discussions on the itinerary were ongoing. A two-member WHO team visited China in July, but did not visit Wuhan.Reuters reported earlier, citing a member and diplomats, that a team of 12-15 international experts will visit Wuhan to examine evidence, including human and animal samples collected by Chinese researchers, and to build on their initial studies.
Russia’s Putin blames Washington for starting new arms race
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday blamed the United States for starting a new arms race, saying Moscow had been forced to develop hypersonic weapons in response.
Responding to a question about the risk of a new arms race, Putin told his annual news conference: “It happened already, and this is obvious.”
Putin earlier urged Washington to agree a one-year extension of the New START treaty, the last remaining agreement maintaining the nuclear balance between the two countries, which expires in February.
He said he believed U.S. President-elect Joe Biden was open to dialogue on the issue, but “we need some reaction from our American partners”.The New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) accord, signed in 2010, limits the numbers of strategic nuclear warheads, missiles and bombers that Russia and the United States can deploy.
Beijing has strongly opposed calls for an international inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus, but said it has been open to a WHO-led investigation.
China’s foreign ministry did not directly comment on the WHO visit during a daily media briefing on Thursday. “China stands ready to enhance its cooperation with WHO to advance the global tracing efforts and contribute our share in our early victory against the pandemic,” spokesman Wang Wenbin said. Many questions remain about the origins of COVID-19 and the role Wuhan’s exotic wildlife trade may have played in it.
Although authorities closed the Huanan market in January, there is a growing scientific consensus that the virus did not originate there. Some studies suggest it was already in circulation by the time it reached the market, with more than one transmission route.
U.S. News, Politics & Government
America’s toughest year? 3 in 4 say 2020 pushed the country into an ‘existential crisis’
Study Finds – From the pandemic to the presidential election, there’s no question 2020 has been a turning point moment in United States history. Unfortunately, most believe the year’s problems haven’t left them in a good position moving forward. A new survey finds nearly eight in 10 Americans say 2020 caused an existential crisis for the country.
The OnePoll survey asked 2,000 Americans about their experiences throughout this tumultuous year and finds that 77 percent agree 2020 has sent the U.S. into crisis over its identity. Baby boomers are the most likely to agree with this statement (82%), compared to 76 percent of Generation X and 75 percent of millennial respondents.
As America deals with its major issues, it’s no surprise that 65 percent of respondents feel like they’ve had their own personal crisis at some point during 2020. The survey, commissioned by Vejo, finds 68 percent of Americans said the year has left them feeling defeated.
The top event leaving 63 percent of respondents feeling defeated entering 2021 is, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic. Not being able to enjoy pre-COVID activities (45%) followed far between the virus. Another 45 percent of respondents cited the presidential election and 35 percent said the spread of misinformation relating to coronavirus is their top cause of exhaustion in 2020. Another three in 10 respondents add the 24/7 news cycle has taken a toll on them this year.
With all of these events adding up, over half of respondents have felt too overwhelmed throughout the year to take proper care of their health and wellness. Fifty-six percent said they’ve been struggling now more than ever to find a wellness routine that works for them.
Top Trump Fundraiser Asked the FBI for Help. Big Mistake
Mother Jones – In October, Elliott Broidy, once a top fundraiser for Donald Trump and the Republican Party, pleaded guilty to charges that he conspired to illegally lobby the Trump administration for a fugitive financier and the president of Malaysia. The plea continued the descent of a controversial businessman and political operative who stepped down from a top Republican National Committee job in 2018 after the news broke that he had agreed to pay $1.6 million in hush money to a Playboy model whom he had impregnated during an extramarital affair.
Now there’s a new wrinkle to the Broidy case. He faces up to five years in prison in part because of what in retrospect seems to have been a dumb mistake. Broidy voluntarily gave the FBI emails from his and his wife’s accounts while seeking the bureau’s assistance in pursuing hackers who he claimed had stolen this material and leaked damaging details about his business dealings to the press. According to a just-unsealed ruling issued in June 2018 by Beryl Howell, the chief US District Judge in Washington, DC, nearly 1,400 pages of emails that Broidy provided to the FBI were subsequently used by the bureau in the investigation that led to Broidy’s guilty plea. Following a secretive legal process, Howell ruled that Broidy had surrendered the material to the FBI and after doing that—when the bureau wanted to exploit the documents for an investigation of Broidy himself—could no longer claim the information was covered by attorney-client privilege or spousal privilege.
A Broidy spokesman did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
Here’s what happened. Broidy owns a company, Circinus, that sells what it calls “open-source” intelligence services to foreign governments. In 2017, while the firm pursued a contract with the United Arab Emirates, which it later landed, Broidy emerged as an outspoken critic of Qatar, a regional rival of the UAE. Broidy helped to finance conferences and opinion pieces attacking Qatar as a sponsor of terrorism. That criticism dovetailed with attacks on Qatar by the UAE and its close ally, Saudi Arabia, which resulted in those and other Gulf nations imposing a blockade on Qatar in June 2017.
Why Are Americans So Distrustful of Each Other?
WSJ – Social trust, the faith that strangers will abide by established norms, is one of society’s most fundamental building blocks. It underlies economic growth, political consensus and effective law enforcement.
But social trust is difficult to restore once lost, and the U.S. is losing it. According to the General Social Survey and the American National Election Survey, in the early 1970s half of Americans said that most people can be trusted; today that figure is less than one-third. And a recent Pew poll found that social trust declines sharply from generation to generation. In 2018, around 29% of Americans over 65 said that most people can’t be trusted, while 60% of Americans 18 to 29 agree. Recent research suggests that social trust levels harden with age, meaning that trust will continue to fall as trusting generations are replaced by mistrustful ones.
Strikingly, the U.S. is the only established democracy to see a major decline in social trust. In other nations the trend was in the opposite direction. From 1998 to 2014, social trust increased in Sweden from 56.5% to 67%, in Australia from 40% to 54%, and in Germany from 32% to 42%. Meanwhile, the U.S. is becoming more like Brazil, where trust is around 5%. What makes America unique?
Research has found that three important factors behind a country’s level of social trust are corruption, ethnic segregation and economic inequality.
Social science research has found that three important factors behind a country’s level of social trust are corruption, ethnic segregation and economic inequality. Each of these plays some role in the U.S., yet none seems to fully explain our loss of trust.
But as trust theorists have dug deeper, they’ve found that this negative effect is largely correlated not with diversity itself but with segregation. When ethnic groups are concentrated in small geographical areas and have little contact with one another, distrust is high; with greater contact, the effect shrinks. And while ethnic diversity has increased in the U.S. considerably since 1980—around a 50% increase as measured by the National Equity Atlas Diversity Index—ethnic segregation has decreased somewhat.
Social trust has also been found to correlate strongly with economic inequality in over 100 countries, leading many trust theorists to conclude that increasing inequality lowers social trust. Among rich nations, the U.S. has seen the greatest increase in inequality in recent decades. In 1980, the top 1% of the population took home 10.9% of total pretax income; that share increased to 14.4% in 1989, 17.5% in 1999 and 19.6% in 2007.
This rising inequality likely contributed to the decline of social trust over the same period. But 2007 marked the peak of inequality in the U.S. The next year it dropped due to the financial crisis, and it has not exceeded 2007 levels since; yet social trust continues to decline. This may be because the perception of inequality has increased even as the actual level of inequality remained high and stable.
Democratic governor encourages people to stay home, gets caught out at wine bar
While the governor didn’t technically break any rules, some thought she had set a bad example.
Fox – The governor of Rhode Island is facing backlash this week after she was photographed at a wine and paint night just days after she had discouraged inessential activities to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
The picture, taken by Erica Oliveras last Friday, shows Democratic Gov. Gina Raimondo sitting at table in Barnaby’s Public House in Providence without a mask, WLNE reported.
Oliveras told the station that backlash over the photo was blown out of proportion because Raimondo had only taken off the mask to drink her wine.
Still, others felt that Raimondo’s actions were hypocritical, given that four days prior she urged Rhode Islanders in a tweet to “stay home except for essential activities & wear a mask anytime you’re with people you don’t live with.”
Susan Goodman, a Providence resident, told WLNE that the governor “shouldn’t even be at an event like that.”
“You can drink wine at home. I’m an experienced wine drinker Gina, do it at home,” Goodman said.
Reports: Hunter Biden Due ‘Significant’ Pay from China Business in 2019; Sought $10M in 2017
Breitbart – A series of emails released Wednesday allegedly credited to President-elect Joe Biden’s son Hunter shine a light on his deep business connections in communist China.
The revelation comes just four days after an email reportedly from the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop called his father Joe and a Chinese business partner “new office mates,” as Breitbart News reported.
The latest email tranche, reported by the Daily Caller News Foundation, reveal communications which set out Hunter Biden was informed in 2018 by one of his business partners he would start to receive “significant” payments the following year from a firm in China that was co-owned by the Bank of China, which is owned by the communist Chinese government.
The foundation continued:
The emails, which were located on a copy of Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop, show that he took out a $150,000 capital loan with one of BHR’s Chinese-based partners in July 2017 to help fund his $420,000 investment into the firm that year. When the loan came due in December 2018, Schwerin advised Hunter Biden to extend the loan for another year so he could pay it back with future distributions.
The remainder of the email set out the terms and conditions of the agreement and it continues to shine a light on the business dealings between Biden father and son and China as previously noted.
Elsewhere Fox News reported another exchange claiming Hunter Biden extended “best wishes from the entire Biden family” to the chairman of CEFC, a Chinese energy firm, and urged them to send $10 million to “properly fund and operate” a commercial endeavour Hunter Biden had with them.
In a separate communication, Fox News reports Hunter Biden sent a wire request on June 18, 2017, to Zhao Runlong at CEFC, seeking that they “translate my letter to Chairman Ye, please extend my warmest best wishes and that I hope to see the Chairman soon.”
“I hope my letter finds you well. I regret missing you on your last visit to the United States,” Hunter Biden wrote in the attached letter, dated June 17, 2017. “Please accept the best wishes from the entire Biden family as well as my partners.”
He added: “We are all hoping to see you here again soon, or in Shanghai.”
The report noted the $10 million request did not transpire.
Economy & Business
45 of 50 biggest U.S. companies turned profit since March
Axios – 2020 has been an awesome year for Corporate America, but not so much for Working America.
The big picture: 45 of America’s 50 biggest publicly traded companies have turned profits since March, while nearly 8 million Americans have fallen into poverty since June, the WashPost reports in a pair of striking stories.
- “At least 27 of the 50 largest firms held layoffs this year, collectively cutting more than 100,000 workers,” according to a WashPost analysis.
- “[T]he increase in poverty this year … is the biggest jump in a single year since the government began tracking poverty 60 years ago. It is nearly double the next-largest rise, which occurred in 1979-1980 during the oil crisis,” reports WashPost’s Heather Long.
That gap extends to CEOs versus regular consumers, Axios’ Dion Rabouin reported earlier this week.
- CEO confidence in Q3 was 48% higher than at the beginning of 2019.
- Consumer confidence was 16% lower than in January 2019.
Between the lines: The expiration of enhanced unemployment benefits played a big part in the poverty spike, economists told The Post.
The bottom line: “These are times when the strong can get stronger,” Nike CEO John Donahoe said in September.
Energy & Environment
Antarctica rocked by 30,000 tremors in 3 months, Chilean scientists say
Reuters – More than 30,000 tremors have rocked Antarctica since the end of August, according to the University of Chile, a spike in seismic activity that has intrigued researchers who study the remote, snowbound continent.
Scientists with the university’s National Seismological Center said the small quakes – including one stronger shake of magnitude 6 – were detected in the Bransfield Strait, a 60-mile wide (96-km) ocean channel between the South Shetland Islands and the Antarctic Peninsula.
Several tectonic plates and microplates meet near the strait, leading to frequent rumbling, but the past three months have been unusual, according to the center.
“Most of the seismicity is concentrated at the beginning of the sequence, mainly during the month of September, with more than a thousand earthquakes a day,” the center said.
The shakes have become so frequent that the strait itself, once increasing in width at a rate of about 7 or 8 mm (0.30 inch) a year is now expanding 15 cm (6 inches) a year, the center said.
“It’s a 20-fold increase … which suggests that right this minute … the Shetland Islands are separating more quickly from the Antarctic peninsula,” said Sergio Barrientos, the center’s director.
The peninsula is one of the fastest-warming places on Earth, and scientists closely monitor the changing climate’s impact on its icebergs and glaciers.
But climate scientist Raul Cordero of the University of Santiago said it was not yet clear how the tremors might be affecting the region’s ice.
“There’s no evidence that this kind of seismic activity … has significant effects on the stability of polar ice caps,” Cordero told Reuters. (Reporting by Fabian Cambero and Reuters TV; Writing by Dave Sherwood; Editing by Peter Cooney)
Science & Technology
Chinese capsule returns to Earth carrying moon rocks
A Chinese lunar capsule returned to Earth on Thursday with the first fresh rock samples from the moon in more than 40 years, offering the possibility of new insights into the history of the solar system and marking a new landmark for China’s rapidly advancing space program.
The capsule of the Chang’e 5 probe landed just before 2 a.m. (1800 GMT Wednesday) in the Siziwang district of the Inner Mongolia region, the China National Space Administration reported.
The capsule had earlier separated from its orbiter module and performed a bounce off Earth’s atmosphere to reduce its speed before passing through and floating to the ground on parachutes. Following recovery, the capsule and its cargo of samples were flown to the space program’s campus in Beijing to begin the process of disassembly and analysis, the space administration said.
The mission achieved new firsts for the lunar exploration program in collecting samples, launching a vehicle from the moon’s surface and docking it with the capsule to return the samples to Earth, the administration said.
“As our nation’s mostly complex and technically groundbreaking space mission, Chang’e 5 has achieved multiple technical breakthroughs … and represents a landmark achievement,” it said.
Two of the Chang’e 5’s four modules set down on the moon on Dec. 1 and collected about 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of samples by scooping them from the surface and drilling 2 meters (about 6 feet) into the moon’s crust. The samples were deposited in a sealed container that was carried back to the return module by an ascent vehicle.
A New Satellite Can Peer Inside Buildings, Day or Night
A few months ago, a company called Capella Space launched a satellite capable of taking clear radar images of anywhere in the world, with incredible resolution — even through the walls of some buildings.
And unlike most of the huge array of surveillance and observational satellites orbiting the Earth, its satellite Capella 2 can snap a clear picture during night or day, rain or shine.
“It turns out that half of the world is in nighttime, and half of the world, on average, is cloudy,” CEO Payam Banazadeh, a former system engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion laboratory, told Futurism. “When you combine those two together, about 75 percent of Earth, at any given time, is going to be cloudy, nighttime, or it’s going to be both. It’s invisible to you, and that portion is moving around.”
On Wednesday, Capella launched a platform allowing governmental or private customers to request images of anything in the world — a capability that will only get more powerful with the deployment of six additional satellites next year. Is that creepy from a privacy point of view? Sure. But Banazadeh says that it also plugs numerous holes in the ways scientists and government agencies are currently able to monitor the planet.
“There’s a bunch of gaps in how we’re currently observing Earth from space — the majority of the sensors we use to observe earth are optical imaging sensors,” he said. “If it’s cloudy, you’re going to see the clouds, not what’s happening under the clouds. And if there’s not much light, you’re going to have a really hard time getting an image that is useful.”
Health
COVID-19 Creating Mental Health Crisis For Children, Experts Say
Educators and therapists say the pandemic has created a serious mental health crisis for students. For nine months, Dr. Veronica Brown, principal of Manchester Avenue Elementary School in South L.A., has been unable to hug her students or even see them in person.
“I thought about the kids,” Brown told CBSLA Tuesday. “I thought about, oh my goodness, who are they gonna turn to now? Because they turn to us for everything.”
She says that over the past several months, she has seen more stress and pain in their lives.
“Sometimes, they’ll tell us that such-and-such passed away, and then there’s that moment where we say, ‘oh my goodness, let’s give him a big hug everybody,’” Brown said.
Brown has tried to implement virtual programs to help. One of those, Tiger Talk Mondays, is named after the school’s mascot.
“Our teachers are actually talking to our students, just about life, like what did they do for the weekend, do they want to share any thoughts,” Brown said.
In a recent study from the American Psychological Association, 70% of parents said family responsibilities were a significant source of stress during the pandemic, and 63% of parents said their child’s schooling was extremely stressful.
“Mental health issues are at a crisis level, and they already were at a crisis level,” Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge, a Connecticut-based pediatric mental health expert told CBSLA.
Capanna-Hodge says it’s even more difficult for students now, since many had to return to virtual learning for a second time with the recent surge in cases.
“We are seeing kids that have an exacerbation of preexisting conditions like anxiety, ADHD, depression, OCD,” she said. “But we’re also seeing kids struggle with mental health for the first time in their life.” Brown said she’ll keep smiling and encouraging her students to do the same.
“I know we’re gonna all make it through,” Brown said.
The new strain of Covid-19 has 17 mutations, scientists have discovered.
UK experts have been analysing the new variant of coronavirus and say they have uncovered 17 alterations from the original strain of the killer disease, which they described as “a lot”.
Many of the changes have happened to the virus’s spike protein, which it uses to latch onto human cells and cause illness.
This is significant because most Covid-19 vaccines being developed, including the Pfizer jab that has already begun to be rolled out in the UK, are effective by targeting this protein.
It is feared this could stop people becoming immune to coronavirus if they have beScientists including England’s chief medical officer Chris Whitty have said there is “currently no evidence” that the new variant will stop the vaccine from working. The strain has also been spotted in Denmark and Australia.
Professor Nick Loman, from the Institute of Microbiology and Infection at the University of Birmingham, is a member of the UK’s Covid-19 Genomics UK Consortium which is studying the mutations.He said: “There are actually 17 changes that would affect the protein structure in some way that distinguishes this variant from its kind of common ancestor of other variants that are circulating, which is a lot. “It’s striking. There’s a really long branch going back to the common ancestor, and it’s a matter of great interest as to why that is the case.”Most vaccines work by training the immune system to recognise the virus’s spike proteins and attack them when the virus tries to infect them.
California – the country’s largest and richest state – is the new epicenter of America’s coronavirus crisis, with unprecedented surges of seriously infected patients threatening to overwhelm hospitals and overflow morgues.
The state is reporting unnerving numbers: California has set nationwide records for new cases again and again in the past week – most recently on Wednesday, when it posted more than 41,000 infections. If California were a country, it would be among the world leaders in new covid-19 cases, ahead of India, Germany and Britain.
The number of available beds in intensive care units is plummeting. In the San Joaquin Valley, hospitals ran out over the weekend, resorting to “surge capacity.” And in Southern California, a region that includes Los Angeles and San Diego, ICU capacity dipped to just 0.5% Wednesday.
“I want to be very clear: our hospitals are under siege and our model shows no end in sight,” Christina Ghaly, director of LA County’s Department of Health Services, said at a dire news briefing that day.
Because it takes, on average, more than a week for people to get sick enough to be hospitalized, today’s capacity numbers actually reflect case numbers that are roughly 10 days old, when the state was reporting 10,000 fewer infections.
“The worst,” Ghaly promised, “is still before us.”
Russia’s coronavirus vaccine met with wariness, skepticism as studies continue
While excitement and enthusiasm greeted the Western-developed coronavirus vaccine when it was rolled out, the Russian-made version has received a mixed response, with reports of empty Moscow clinics that offered the shot to health care workers and teachers — the first members of the public designated to receive it.
Kremlin officials and state-controlled media touted the Sputnik V vaccine as a major achievement after it was approved Aug. 11. But among Russians, hope that the shot would reverse the course of the COVID-19 crisis has become mixed with wariness and skepticism, reflecting concerns about how it was rushed out while still in its late-stage testing to ensure its effectiveness and safety.
Russia faced international criticism for approving a vaccine that hasn’t completed advanced trials among tens of thousands of people, and experts both at home and abroad warned against its wider use until the studies are completed.
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