China Refuses to Help WHO With Second Covid Origins Lab Leak Inquiry

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China refuses to participate in 2nd phase of WHO’s Covid origins probe,

says research into lab leak theory goes against ‘science’

22 Jul, 2021 07:54

Staff members in protective suits stand at Hubei Provincial Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine in Wuhan, Hubei province, China January 29, 2021. ©  REUTERS/Thomas

Beijing has put the brakes on its involvement in the World Health Organization’s (WHO) investigation into the origins of Covid-19, citing its disapproval of any inquiries into the possibility that the virus came from a lab.

The Chinese government will not take part in a second phase of the WHO’s probe into what caused the pandemic, Zeng Yixin, deputy head of China’s National Health Commission, said on Thursday. 

The senior health official said at a press conference in Beijing that he was “surprised” to see research into the lab leak theory – which was initially dismissed by the WHO as highly unlikely – as a listed objective for the organization’s proposed second visit to Wuhan and other locations in China. 

“In some aspects, the WHO’s plan for the next phase of investigation of the coronavirus origin doesn’t respect common sense, and it’s against science. It’s impossible for us to accept such a plan,” he said.

Liang Wannian, a senior scientist and the representative for the Chinese side of the WHO’s joint investigation, said during the same press briefing that, instead of returning to China, the team of experts should prioritize the “very likely” possibility that coronavirus originated in animals. He also pointed to reports of Covid-19 being found in wastewater from different countries around the same time that the disease was first detected in Wuhan, and suggested that investigators expand their research to locations outside China. 

Chinese officials also used the press conference to reiterate that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had no links to the outbreak. Yuan Zhiming, director of China’s National Biosafety Laboratory and professor at the Wuhan lab, stressed that, before December 30, 2019, he and his colleagues had never preserved or studied the novel coronavirus.

And I absolutely believe him. By the way, did I mention I have a tropical island off the coast of Labrador for sale?

After spending around four weeks in China early this year, the experts concluded in their initial report that the virus likely originated in an animal before spreading to humans in December 2019. But the findings have come under scrutiny from Western states, which claim the investigation lacked transparency. US President Joe Biden has since ordered US intelligence agencies to conduct their own assessment into how the health crisis began. 

The theory that Covid-19 may have leaked from a laboratory – possibly the Wuhan Institute of Virology – was embraced by Donald Trump’s administration in the early months of the health crisis. At the time, US media outlets rejected the idea as implausible and even dangerous misinformation. But, in recent months, the theory has gone mainstream, after Washington began to question the thoroughness of the WHO’s preliminary findings. 

The WHO has expressed similar concerns about China’s purported lack of openness. Last week, its director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, called on Beijing to be “transparent and open, and to cooperate” with the organization’s ongoing probe into Covid-19’s origins. 

Beijing has rejected such allegations, insisting it has cooperated fully with the international investigation. 

Not true, they were never allowed to question Wuhan staff without Chinese authorities being in the room.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said last week that the origin probe is a “scientific issue” and “all parties should respect the opinions of scientists and scientific conclusions, instead of politicizing the issue.”

Although Beijing has seemingly dismissed the idea that the virus could have come from a Chinese lab, it has remained open to the possibility that it may have leaked from an American facility. On Wednesday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry backed calls for an investigation into whether coronavirus came from Maryland’s Fort Detrick biolab, after 4.7 million Chinese petitioned the WHO to send experts to the US military facility. 

Seems fair enough to me! But it would be astonishing if the coronavirus was created in Maryland and became public down the street from China's only level4 lab, halfway around the world. Mind you, if some person, or some sample was shipped from Fort Detrick biolab to Wuhan in the fall of 2019, there might be a case. That should be easy enough to check-out, even for the Chinese, unless they have already destroyed any such files.

Truth Starting to Sink-In About the Origins of Covid-19

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The (very strong) case for COVID-19 leaking from a Chinese lab

If it wasn't a lab leak, the fact that a novel coronavirus just happened to emerge in Wuhan

would be one of history's greatest coincidences

Author of the article:Tristin Hopper

Publishing date:May 28, 2021

National Post

In this Feb. 3, 2021, file photo, a security person moves journalists away from the Wuhan Institute of Virology

after a World Health Organization team arrived for a field visit. PHOTO BY AP PHOTO/NG HAN GUAN

After months of being dismissed as a fringe conspiracy theory, official support is starting to build for the notion that the COVID-19 pandemic is not a freak accident of nature, but was rather the result of an accidental escape from a Chinese virology lab.

Anthony Fauci, one of the U.S.’s most visible infectious disease specialists during the COVID-19 pandemic, said this week that he was “not convinced” that the pandemic had natural origins — contradicting statements from a year prior where he dismissed any question of a lab leak as a “circular argument.”

At the time same time, U.S. president Joe Biden also confirmed that he has ordered an intelligence review into the theory that the pandemic was sparked by a “laboratory accident.”

Anthony Fauci at a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing on Wednesday, May 26, 2021.

PHOTO BY STEFANI REYNOLDS/BLOOMBERG

Global Times, one of the main English-language arms of Chinese state media, dismissed all of this week’s developments as a “blatant lie” trafficked by U.S. elites who have “festered further in morality.”

The SARS pandemic was sparked by the eating of wild meat in China’s Guangdong province. HIV leaped from apes to humans in 1920s Congo. But COVID-19, a pandemic that has thus far killed at least 3.5 million and cost the equivalent of several world wars, could well be the result of a single breach in laboratory hygiene.

A bad filter change, a faulty door seal or a specimen in the garbage instead of the incinerator could be the inciting incident for the costliest disaster of the 21st century. If true, it would be the most consequential single mistake ever made.

The National Post has been reporting since May 2020 that there was credence to the lab leak theory. The official line out of Beijing at the time — that COVID-19 spontaneously erupted at a Wuhan food market — was shown to be highly unlikely. China is still holding fast to the idea that the disease is purely natural in origin — and have repeatedly obfuscated international attempts to consider differently.

Truth has never stood in the way of Chinese progress.

While the world still has no smoking gun as to COVID-19’s origins, what we do have is an ever-lengthening record of circumstantial evidence tying the Wuhan lab to COVID-19, as well as a growing roster of official voices expressing doubt in the official Chinese origin story.

Below, why the lab leak theory has always been among the most plausible theories for the origin of COVID-19.

If it wasn’t a lab leak, COVID-19’s Wuhan origins would be one of the greatest coincidences in history

The world’s first cases of COVID-19 were confirmed in Wuhan, a city of 11 million located about a day’s drive west of Shanghai. Wuhan is also home to China’s first-ever BSL-4-certified laboratory; a rare classification given only to labs dealing with the world’s most dangerous pathogens.

For instance, Canada’s only BSL-4 lab — the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg — is where microbiologists deal directly with such viruses as Ebola, West Nile and the virus that caused the 1918 flu pandemic.

Opened in 2018, the BSL-4 campus of the Wuhan Institute of Virology is known to work with coronaviruses, and in particular bat coronaviruses, the likely origin of COVID-19. A January investigation by New York magazine is to date the most rigorous journalistic probe into the potential lab origins of COVID-19. Among other things, it noted that the Wuhan institute is home to the “most comprehensive inventory of sampled bat viruses in the world.”

The Wuhan Institute of Virology pictured in February. PHOTO BY THE YOMIURI SHIMBUN

The lab also engaged in gain-of-function experiments, wherein researchers would attempt to supercharge coronaviruses in order to infect lab mice or human cell samples. The idea with gain-of-function is to find ways to combat the emergence of new viruses from nature, as occurred with SARS in 2003. But gain-of-function is also “exactly the kind of experiment from which a SARS2-like virus could have emerged,” read a lengthy scientific breakdown of COVID-19’s origins by the Indian news site The Wire.

In other words, if the Wuhan Institute of Virology turns out to have no connection to the birth of the COVID-19 pandemic, then a novel coronavirus with likely origins in bats will have coincidentally started infecting humans within walking distance of a lab that just happens to be the world centre of studying highly infectious bat coronaviruses.

As I have pointed out before - the odds on this happening spontaneously are mathematically impossible.

Driving distance from the Wuhan Institute of Virology to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market,

site of the first recorded public outbreak of COVID-19.

Top Chinese viral laboratories, including the one in Wuhan, have a troubling track record of lax security

In 2018, long before any notion of COVID-19 existed, U.S. diplomats fresh from a visit to the Wuhan Institute of Virology drafted a cable to Washington warning that the facility’s lax standards risked sparking a pandemic. “The new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” the cable said, according to the Washington Post.

This week also saw the release of a U.S. intelligence report claiming that, in the fall of 2019, three workers at the Wuhan institute were hospitalized “with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness.”

An aerial view shows the P4 laboratory (C) at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan in China’s

central Hubei province on April 17, 2020. PHOTO BY HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP

Wuhan isn’t the only Chinese lab in recent years to have drawn international condemnation for potentially reckless microbiology work. In 2013, when it emerged that China’s Harbin Veterinary Research Institute was trying to synthesize a new superflu, it attracted accusations of “appalling irresponsibility” from top European virologists.

The Wuhan lab also had ties to a serious security breach at Canada’s own National Microbiology Laboratory. Although the incident has no known connection to COVID-19, in July 2019 researcher Xiangguo Qiu was escorted by RCMP from the Winnipeg facility allegedly due to questions surrounding an unauthorized shipment of Ebola and henipavirus samples to Wuhan in March 2019.

The WHO’s official probe into the virus’ origins were a farce

When Australia first called for an international probe into the true origins of COVID-19, Beijing lashed back with a threat of major sanctions on Australian grain imports.

A probe ultimately did come into being, but it ended up being a far cry from anything approaching Australia’s initial vision. Organized by the World Health Organization, the probe comprised a team of 17 Chinese scientists and 10 non-Chinese investigators who spent two weeks conducting interviews under the constant supervision of the People’s Republic of China. “The politics was always in the room with us on the other side of the table,” said team member Peter Ben Embarek in February.

Peter Daszak (R), Thea Fischer (L) and other members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus, arrive at the Wuhan Institute of Virology on February 3, 2021. PHOTO BY HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP

Researchers spent only a matter of hours at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where they requested no documents and performed no forensic examination of lab protocols. Rather, they only conducted a handful of supervised meetings wherein laboratory staff assured them that the institute saw “no disruptions or incidents” at the time of COVID-19’s emergence.

'Supervised meetings' mean those being questioned can only speak the accepted narrative, otherwise, they disappear that night and are never seen again.

The WHO investigation hadn’t even released its final report before more than a dozen international senior medical researchers signed an open letter calling for a more reliable investigation to definitively rule out the possibility of a “research-related accident.”

Then, in late March, the probe’s finding were directly questioned by WHO head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Tedros has often been criticized for a soft touch on China in regards to COVID-19. Regardless, he wrote in a March 30 statement “although the team has concluded that a laboratory leak is the least likely hypothesis, this requires further investigation.”

Lab leaks happen all the time

It’s not just Chinese virology labs that screw up the handling of potentially planet-altering pathogens. All over the world, virology labs have similarly overseen security breaches with the potential to infect millions.

In 2014 it emerged that labs connected to the U.S. Centres for Disease Control were guilty of, among other things, accidentally exposing a bunch of researchers to anthrax and losing vials of smallpox, the now-extinct virus that ranks as the deadliest disease in human history.

Lab leaks have caused several verified disease outbreaks. In 1977, a strange flu began surging through the Soviet Union and China. Subsequent analysis of the virus concluded that it was exactly the same as a 1949 flu strain, raising suspicions that the outbreak had been caused by an escape from a laboratory freezer. History’s last victim of smallpox, British woman Janet Parker, was killed by a 1978 lab screw-up at Birmingham University.

There have even been two lab leaks of SARS in the months after the disease’s 2003 outbreak had been contained. One was a student who accidentally picked up the disease in August, 2003 at a lab at the National University of Singapore. The other was a SARS researcher who fell ill after handling biohazardous waste without gloves or a mask.

In March, Robert Redfield, former director of the Centres for Disease Control, became one of the most prominent early backers of the “lab leak” theory when he told CNN that “the most likely etiology of this pathology in Wuhan was from a laboratory.”

A career virologist, Redfield added, “it’s not unusual for respiratory pathogens that are being worked on in a laboratory to infect a laboratory worker.”

Covid19 Origins - Another CDC Director Suggests Wuhan Virus Leak a Possibility

Coronavirus: Dossier Lays Out Case Against China Bat Virus Program; Designer Virus

Surely it's madness to 'supercharge' viruses so they can be studied as to how to respond to them. The odds of leaking a supercharged virus have to be higher than that supercharging happening in nature. What an insane world we live in!

More Clues About the Origins of Covid-19

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Fury is often the response when someone is caught out in a lie.

China furious as new report suggests Wuhan lab staff sought hospital care

weeks before Covid-19 outbreak was disclosed

24 May, 2021 08:51

Researchers from China's Wuhan Institute of Virology became so ill in November 2019 that they required hospital treatment, the Wall Street Journal has reported as the international community continues to probe Covid-19's origins.

According to a US intelligence report cited by the paper, three staff members from the institute became so ill that they required hospital care weeks before Beijing acknowledged the outbreak of the novel coronavirus.

One source told the Wall Street Journal that the intelligence was provided by a foreign ally and could be significant but required further verification. Another person familiar with the matter described the information as coming from various sources, adding that the intelligence was of “exquisite quality” and “very precise.” However, the individual acknowledged that the intelligence did not reveal why the researchers fell ill. Notably, a State Department document issued during the final days of Donald Trump’s administration said several researchers from the institute became sick in the fall of 2019 with symptoms associated with Covid-19, as well as more common seasonal illnesses. 

According to the Journal, President Joe Biden’s administration hasn’t disputed the claim that Wuhan researchers fell ill weeks before the Covid-19 outbreak was made public. But one administration official told the paper that Trump’s government had “put spin on the ball” by interpreting the intelligence as clear evidence that the virus came from the laboratory. Several other current US officials said the information was “circumstantial” but worthy of further investigation. 

China’s Foreign Ministry issued a response to the report on Monday, insisting that there were no reported Covid-19 cases among staff and students at the virology institute. 

The previously undisclosed report comes amid growing debate over how the pandemic began.

Beijing has strenuously denied that the laboratory played any role in the international health crisis. In March, a team of experts from the World Health Organization (WHO) published a report after visiting Wuhan which effectively ruled out the possibility that the pandemic was the result of a laboratory accident. The team did not identify the origin of the virus, but said that the introduction of the disease through an intermediate host followed by zoonotic transmission – from animals to humans – was “likely to very likely." The report also said it was possible that the virus was introduced to residents in Wuhan through the food supply. 

The Chinese city reported the first cases of the illness on December 31, 2019, and shut down a market that authorities initially believed was linked to the disease’s spread. 

Following the release of the WHO’s findings, 14 nations, including the US and UK, issued a joint statement expressing concerns that the investigation was not thorough enough. The states called for “transparent” further analysis of the outbreak that is “free from interference” and “unimpeded.”

In fact, the investigation was a farce and its conclusions were not based on any evidence whatsoever.

How scientists at Wuhan lab helped Chinese army in secret project to find animal viruses

Covid19 Origins - Another CDC Director Suggests Wuhan Virus Leak a Possibility

Coronavirus: Dossier Lays Out Case Against China Bat Virus Program; Designer Virus

During the early months of the pandemic, Washington accused China of not doing enough to contain the virus and even suggested the disease may have leaked from the Wuhan lab. The Trump administration never provided evidence for the claim, however. 

China’s Foreign Ministry noted the WHO’s conclusion that a lab leak was highly unlikely and accused Washington of continuing to “hype the lab leak theory.” 

"Is [Washington] actually concerned about tracing the source or trying to divert attention?” it said in a statement to the Journal. 

The WHO is scheduled to outline the next phase of its investigation into Covid-19’s origins, with the new report potentially fueling speculation that the lab-leak theory requires further consideration. 

Covid19 Origins - Another CDC Director Suggests Wuhan Virus Leak a Possibility

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Biden’s CDC Director seemingly gives credence to Wuhan lab leak theory,

says ‘lab-based’ Covid-19 origin a ‘possibility’

20 May, 2021 05:11

FILE PHOTO: Security personnel keep watch outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology during a visit by a World Health Organization team, in Wuhan, China, February 3, 2021. ©  Reuters / Thomas Peter

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky suggested that Covid-19 may have originated in a laboratory, acknowledging a lab leak as one among several possibilities during testimony to lawmakers.

Asked about how the Covid-19 pandemic began at a Wednesday hearing, Walensky initially said that while she lacks the data to comment, most known coronaviruses have an “animal origin.” But pressed by Senator John Kennedy (R-Louisiana) on “other possibilities,” the agency head accepted that the virus may have escaped from a laboratory. 

Republicans have taken particular interest in the lab-leak hypothesis, with party members on the House Intelligence Committee releasing a report on Wednesday claiming the theory is supported by “significant circumstantial evidence.” The report also argues that experts “have failed to identify the original species that allegedly spread the virus to humans, which is critical to their zoonotic transfer theory.”

The lab in Wuhan – the Chinese city where Covid-19 was first detected in December 2019 – is China’s sole fully operational Biosafety Level-4 facility, making it one of only a few laboratories in China equipped to study the most dangerous pathogens. 

Though the World Health Organization deemed the lab theory “extremely unlikely” in a report released in March, an open letter by 18 infectious disease experts published in the journal Science last week argued that “accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable [theories].” 

The WHO's investigation was severely limited by Chinese authorities. Their assumption is nothing more than a guess, with no data to support it.

Walensky is not the first US official – nor the first CDC director – to acknowledge the lab theory. In March, her predecessor Robert Redfield (2nd story on link), who served under President Donald Trump, outright endorsed the idea in an interview with CNN, saying he believes it is the “most likely” explanation.

Other ex-Trump officials have also continued to discuss the lab-leak theory, with former secretary of state Mike Pompeo stating that “every piece of evidence” he had seen “points to a leak from this laboratory” during an appearance on Fox this week, though he added that he “can’t prove it.”

A tiny bit of common sense is enough to 'prove it'. There were probably only a very few virology labs in the entire world that were studying the coronavirus at a Level 4 capability. That Covid19 happened to break out just down the street from one such lab is so far beyond a mathematical probability as to be absurd. It takes some kind of stupid to not make the correlation.

Coronavirus: Chinese CDC Now Says The Wuhan Wet Market Wasn't The Origin of The Virus

Coronavirus: Dossier Lays Out Case Against China Bat Virus Program; Designer Virus

Wuhan P4 Lab ‘Had Emergency Shutdown’ Last October; People Disappear

Military Madness: Worrying New Clues About the Origins of Covid

Chinese citizen journalist under 'constant torment' after Wuhan, lawyer says

Coronavirus: Chinese CDC Now Says The Wuhan Wet Market Wasn't The Origin of The Virus

AYLIN WOODWARD, BUSINESS INSIDER

Experts still don't know where the new coronavirus came from.

Genetic evidence has all but confirmed that the virus originated in Chinese bats before it jumped to humans via an intermediary animal host. But where and how that spillover first happened is still up for debate.

Initially, authorities in Wuhan, China, reported that the first cases of the virus emerged at the local Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.

But following an investigation of the animals sold there, the Chinese Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said this week that it has ruled the site out as the origin point of the outbreak.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Gao Fu, the director of the Chinese CDC, told Chinese state media: "It now turns out that the market is one of the victims."

Samples collected from animals at the market came back negative for the new coronavirus, suggesting that they couldn't have infected shoppers.

Wuhan authorities first informed the World Health Organisation (WHO) about the unknown, pneumonia-like illness that would later be identified as the new coronavirus on December 31.

A majority of the initial 41 cases were linked to the wet market, which was shut down on January 1.

Given that the SARS outbreak in 2002 and 2003 started at a similar venue in Guangdong, China, the wet market seemed like a logical origin. (The SARS coronavirus jumped from bats to civet cats to people.)

But none of the animals at the market tested positive for the virus, Colin Carlson, a zoologist at Georgetown University told Live Science. If they were never infected, they couldn't have been the intermediary host that facilitated the spillover.

A growing body of research supports the Chinese CDC's conclusion that the outbreak's origins were unrelated to the market.

The virus seems to have been circulating in Wuhan before those 41 cases were reported: Research published in January showed that the first person to test positive for the coronavirus was likely exposed to it on December 1, then showed symptoms on December 8.

The researchers behind the study also found that 13 of the 41 original cases showed no link to the wet market.

Similarly, an April study suggested that the coronavirus had already established itself and begun spreading in the Wuhan community by early January.

The identity of "patient zero" hasn't been confirmed, but it may have been a 55-year-old man from China's Hubei province who was infected on November 17, according to the South China Morning Post (SCMP), which reviewed government documents.

Or, it might have been a scientist, Yanling Huang, working at the lab, who disappeared, and her name was removed from the lab's website:

A dossier prepared by concerned Western governments on the COVID-19 contagion >

The 15-page research document, obtained by The Saturday Telegraph, lays the foundation for the case of negligence being mounted against China.

It states that to the “endangerment of other countries” the Chinese government:

covered-up news of the virus by silencing or “disappearing” doctors who spoke out, 

destroying evidence of it in laboratories and 

refusing to provide live samples to international scientists who were working on a vaccine.

The wet market could have been the site of a super-spreader event

Carlson told Live Science that the Wuhan wet market may simply have been the site of an early super-spreader event – an instance in which one sick person infects an atypically large number of others.

Other super-spreader events around the world have also created clusters of infections that cropped up almost overnight. In Daegu, South Korea, for example, one churchgoer infected at least 43 people.

These instances don't necessarily involve a person who is more contagious than others or sheds more viral particles. Rather, the infected person has access to a greater number of people in spaces that facilitate infection. A market, in which shoppers interact with one another and vendors in close quarters, is one such risky place.

The coronavirus also probably did not leak from a lab

Lingering questions about the pandemic's origin have given rise to a range of unsubstantiated theories. One suggests the coronavirus may have accidentally leaked from a local laboratory, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), in which scientists were researching coronaviruses.

Amazing! It started down the street from a lab where they were working on that very thing, but I'm sure that was just a coincidence.

But both Chinese and US researchers said there's no evidence to support that theory. The high-security lab says it has no record of the novel coronavirus' genome, and it follows strict safety measures.

The director of the WIV, Wang Yanyi, told China Central Television last weekend that the new coronavirus is genetically different from any kind of live virus that has been studied at the institute.

Prior to that, WIV virologist Shi Zhengli – who collects, samples, and studies coronaviruses in Chinese bats – told Scientific American that she cross-referenced the new coronavirus' genome with the genetic information of other bat coronaviruses her team had collected. They didn't find a match.

"That really took a load off my mind," Shi said in March, adding, "I had not slept a wink for days."

Debunking the Claim That “Palestinians” Are the Indigenous People of Israel

By DANIEL GRYNGLAS
JPOST STAFF)

The wars between Israel and its Arab neighbors were fought for many years on the battlefield between armies. In recent decades the arena of conflict has shifted from hand-to-hand combat to a war of narratives.

Everybody agrees that the current affluence of Israel, its modern infrastructure and economy were developed by the Jews. The Palestinian Arab narrative is that as the ancient, indigenous people of Palestine they feel dispossessed and they deserve to take over Israel’s riches. Jewish claims to their heritage in the land of Israel are supported by abundant archaeological artifacts and historical records.

Meanwhile, there are no records to support the Palestinian narrative. In history, art and literature there is no trace at all of any Muslim people referred to by anybody as “Palestinians.”

Records show that it was 19th and 20th century Jewish settlement and the resulting employment opportunities that drew successive waves of Arab immigrants to Palestine. “The Arab population shows a remarkable increase ….. partly due to the import of Jewish capital into Palestine and other factors associated with the growth of the [Jewish] National Home..” (The Peel Commission Report - 1937)

“..in the Jewish settlement Rishon l’Tsion founded in 1882, by the year 1889, the forty Jewish families settled there, had attracted more than four hundred Arab families.... Many other Arab villages had sprouted in the same fashion.” (Joan Peters - From Time Immemorial p. 252 - referenced further as: FTI)

British PM Winston Churchill said in 1939: “.. far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country [Palestine]..”

Jericho 19th century

Palestinian nation not invented yet

Before the Six-Day War in 1967, when Jordan controlled the West Bank and Egypt ruled in Gaza, there was never any suggestion on the part of the "Palestinians" that they wanted independence in their ancestral homeland. The reason was that the "Palestinian" nation hadn't been invented yet.

In fact, before the State of Israel was born, the term "Palestinians" was used by the Jews to refer to themselves and their organizations. “The Palestine Post”, the Palestine Foundation Fund, Palestine Airways, and the Palestine Symphony Orchestra were all purely Jewish enterprises.

We first hear of Arabs referred to as "Palestinians" when Egypt’s President Nasser, with help from the Russian KGB, established the "Palestine Liberation Organization" in 1964. It was only during the 1970s that the newly minted “Palestinians” began to promote their narrative through murder and assassination. The Arabs have justified their attacks as acts of the indigenous people struggling for national liberation.

Birket, Israel - 19th century

Joan Peter’s research has exposed the truth about Arab claims

Many individual authors have challenged the “Palestinian” narrative. Among these, one of the most ambitious was Joan Peters, who in 1984 published her thoroughly researched study of Arab immigration into Palestine, From Time Immemorial (FTI). Peters assembled many accounts of 19th century travelers’ journeys through the Holy Land that paint the picture of a forsaken and almost uninhabited land.

Mark Twain’s comments in 1867 are probably the best known: “….. A desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds… a silent mournful expanse…. a desolation…. we never saw a human being on the whole route…. hardly a tree or shrub anywhere.”

And if the Jews were to disappear from the Holy Land, that is what it will return to within a few generations.

Peters documents how the current land of Israel with its millions of Arabs and Jews gradually emerged from its desolate 19th century beginnings. She analyzes the respective populations of Muslims, Christians and Jews based on data available from existing sources including Ottoman census figures, government documents, old publications, scientific research, etc.

Peters’ work was received with accolades and praise in most quarters and with predictable outrage by the supporters of the “Palestinian” narrative The vehemence with which Peters was attacked was very telling. She had undermined the basis for the delegitimization of Israel. She had shown that the vast majority of “Palestinians” are not indigenous to Palestine but rather descendants of the Arab economic migrants who arrived in the late 19th and 20th centuries.

Peter’s thorough analysis consists of 410 pages of text and 190 pages of documentary appendices. The general public could hardly be expected to wade through the 600-page tome full of data tables and quotes from hundreds of sources. Thus the book was unable to reverse the continuing fiction of the indigenous “Palestinian” people whose lands have been stolen by the Jews.

A simple new way to prove Peters’ key conclusion

In the midst of various arguments, what has been overlooked is a simple and incontrovertible way to prove that the vast majority of “Palestinians” are the descendants of the relatively recent Arab immigrants.

Peters calculated that in 1882, just the non-nomadic, settled Muslims in Palestine numbered 141,000. Among them, those that resided in Palestine before the 1831 Egyptian invasion numbered 75 percent, or 105,700 (FTI page 197). By 2015, descendants of these 105,700 persons can trace their linage in Palestine for almost 200 years. Therefore, one might consider them to be the indigenous residents. The date 1831 is important, because this was the beginning of the war with Arab Egypt, during which many thousands of Arabs settled in Palestine and changed its demographics.

The number of 105,700 thousand settled Muslims is in general agreement with other important data. 

Walter Lowdermilk gives the total number of 200,000 people residing in Palestine in 1850 (page 76 – Palestine Land of Promise 1944). Lowdermilk's number includes Jews, Christians, travelling nomadic Bedouins and settled Muslims. It also includes Arabs that immigrated after the war of 1831. 

Arthur Ruppin estimates the total population in year 1882 as 300,000 Palestinian inhabitants, including nomadic and settled Muslims, Christians and Jews (The Jews in the Modern World, MacMillan - 1934 page 368).

If these 105,700 indigenous Muslims were to increase in numbers only through natural population growth, how many would they number today in 2015? This would represent the size of this population as if there were no Muslim immigration at all.

We can calculate the estimated 2015 native population, based on natural rates of population growth. I assume that the post-1882 Muslim population in Palestine -- apart from immigration — grew at approximately the same rate as the populations of neighboring Syria, Egypt and Lebanon for which rates we have reliable data. That rate of growth was 1.1% per annum. (FTI page 529 table in note 78) **

I used the compounded interest formula to do the math. Applying the 1.1% growth rate to the Muslim population resident in Palestine in 1882 yields a total number of 453,000 Muslim descendants in 2015 of these original 105,700 native people.

According to the 2015 World Almanac, the current “Palestinian” population, including Israeli Arabs, and Arab residents of Gaza, Golan, Judea and Samaria totals 10,523,715 people. 453,000 descendants of indigenous Muslim residents constitute only 4.3% of the current “Palestinian” population. Therefore the other 95.7% of present-day “Palestinians” are clearly those Arabs and their descendants who migrated to Israel between 1831 and 2015.

Propaganda, Lies, Human Rights Atrocities, Israel, Gaza - Who's Responsible?

There Used to be Nine Species of Human. What Happened to Them?

The disappearance of these other species resembles a mass extinction. But there’s no obvious environmental catastrophe, except for the rise of Homo Sapiens

There is a lot of imagination in anthropology. Take what you want from this, but remember, these theories will continue to evolve for some time.

The spread of modern humans out of Africa has caused a sixth mass extinction, a greater than 40,000-year event extending from the disappearance of Ice Age mammals to the destruction of rainforests by civilisation today.Getty Images

The Conversation

Nine human species walked the Earth 300,000 years ago. Now there is just one. The Neanderthals, Homo Neanderthalensis, were stocky hunters adapted to Europe’s cold steppes. The related Denisovans inhabited Asia, while the more primitive Homo Erectus lived in Indonesia, and Homo Rhodesiensis in central Africa.

Several short, small-brained species survived alongside them: Homo Naledi in South Africa, Homo Luzonensis in the Philippines, Homo Floresiensis (“hobbits”) in Indonesia, and the mysterious Red Deer Cave People in China. Given how quickly we’re discovering new species, more are likely waiting to be found.

By 10,000 years ago, they were all gone. The disappearance of these other species resembles a mass extinction. But there’s no obvious environmental catastrophe – volcanic eruptions, climate change, asteroid impact – driving it. Instead, the extinctions’ timing suggests they were caused by the spread of a new species, evolving 260,000-350,000 years ago in Southern Africa: Homo sapiens.

Unless there was a global flood!

The spread of modern humans out of Africa has caused a sixth mass extinction, a greater than 40,000-year event extending from the disappearance of Ice Age mammals to the destruction of rainforests by civilisation today. 

But were other humans the first casualties?

We are a uniquely dangerous species. We hunted wooly mammoths, ground sloths and moas to extinction. We destroyed plains and forests for farming, modifying over half the planet’s land area. We altered the planet’s climate. But we are most dangerous to other human populations, because we compete for resources and land.

History is full of examples of people warring, displacing and wiping out other groups over territory, from Rome’s destruction of Carthage, to the American conquest of the West and the British colonisation of Australia. There have also been recent genocides and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq, Darfur and Myanmar. Like language or tool use, a capacity for and tendency to engage in genocide is arguably an intrinsic, instinctive part of human nature. There’s little reason to think that early Homo sapiens were less territorial, less violent, less intolerant – less human.

History is full of examples of people warring, displacing and wiping out other groups over territory

Optimists have painted early hunter-gatherers as peaceful, noble savages, and have argued that our culture, not our nature, creates violence. But field studies, historical accounts, and archaeology all show that war in primitive cultures was intense, pervasive and lethal. Neolithic weapons such as clubs, spears, axes and bows, combined with guerrilla tactics like raids and ambushes, were devastatingly effective. Violence was the leading cause of death among men in these societies, and wars saw higher casualty levels per person than World Wars I and II.

Old bones and artefacts show this violence is ancient. The 9,000-year-old Kennewick Man, from North America, has a spear point embedded in his pelvis. The 10,000-year-old Nataruk site in Kenya documents the brutal massacre of at least 27 men, women, and children.

It’s unlikely that the other human species were much more peaceful. The existence of cooperative violence in male chimps suggests that war predates the evolution of humans. Neanderthal skeletons show patterns of trauma consistent with warfare. But sophisticated weapons likely gave Homo sapiens a military advantage. The arsenal of early Homo sapiens probably included projectile weapons like javelins and spear-throwers, throwing sticks and clubs.

Complex tools and culture would also have helped us efficiently harvest a wider range of animals and plants, feeding larger tribes, and giving our species a strategic advantage in numbers.

The ultimate weapon

But cave paintings, carvings, and musical instruments hint at something far more dangerous: a sophisticated capacity for abstract thought and communication. The ability to cooperate, plan, strategise, manipulate and deceive may have been our ultimate weapon.

The incompleteness of the fossil record makes it hard to test these ideas. But in Europe, the only place with a relatively complete archaeological record, fossils show that within a few thousand years of our arrival , Neanderthals vanished. Traces of Neanderthal DNA in some Eurasian people prove we didn’t just replace them after they went extinct. We met, and we mated.

Elsewhere, DNA tells of other encounters with archaic humans. East Asian, Polynesian and Australian groups have DNA from Denisovans. DNA from another species, possibly Homo erectus, occurs in many Asian people. African genomes show traces of DNA from yet another archaic species. The fact that we interbred with these other species proves that they disappeared only after encountering us.

But why would our ancestors wipe out their relatives, causing a mass extinction – or, perhaps more accurately, a mass genocide?

The answer lies in population growth. Humans reproduce exponentially, like all species. Unchecked, we historically doubled our numbers every 25 years. And once humans became cooperative hunters, we had no predators. Without predation controlling our numbers, and little family planning beyond delayed marriage and infanticide, populations grew to exploit the available resources.

Further growth, or food shortages caused by drought, harsh winters or overharvesting resources would inevitably lead tribes into conflict over food and foraging territory. Warfare became a check on population growth, perhaps the most important one.

Our elimination of other species probably wasn’t a planned, coordinated effort of the sort practised by civilisations, but a war of attrition. The end result, however, was just as final. Raid by raid, ambush by ambush, valley by valley, modern humans would have worn down their enemies and taken their land.

Yet the extinction of Neanderthals, at least, took a long time – thousands of years. This was partly because early Homo sapiens lacked the advantages of later conquering civilisations: large numbers, supported by farming, and epidemic diseases like smallpox, flu, and measles that devastated their opponents. But while Neanderthals lost the war, to hold on so long they must have fought and won many battles against us, suggesting a level of intelligence close to our own.

Today we look up at the stars and wonder if we’re alone in the universe. In fantasy and science fiction, we wonder what it might be like to meet other intelligent species, like us, but not us. It’s profoundly sad to think that we once did, and now, because of it, they’re gone.

Nick Longrich, Senior Lecturer, Paleontology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Bath.

Denisovans, Mysterious Human Relatives, Looked Just Like Us in At Least 1 Way

Rediscovery of missing finger bone shows slender fingertips

unlike knobby Neanderthal finger bones

Some human groups have more than five per cent Denisovan DNA

Emily Chung · CBC News 

Denisovans were originally identified from DNA in a bone from the base of the pinky finger of a young girl, shown above. Now the rest of that bone has been rediscovered, showing the entire bone is similar to that of modern humans and different from the fingertip of Neanderthals, which are more closely related to Denisovans.

They may have had huge, brutish-looking teeth, but Denisovans — ancient cousins of humans and Neanderthals — had slender, delicate fingertips like ours, a new study shows.

After rediscovering a missing piece of one of only five Denisovan fossils ever discovered, researchers from France, Russia and Canada digitally reconnected the two halves from the tip of the pinky finger from a Denisovan girl. 

The reconstruction showed it was indistinguishable from a human fingertip and different from the knobbed or clubbed fingertip bones of Neanderthals, they reported Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.

The finding is a small piece of the puzzle in figuring out who the mysterious Denisovans were, given that only five small fossils of the hominin species have ever been found.

"Until now, all we knew was how their teeth looked," said Bence Viola, a University of Toronto anthropologist who co-authored the paper. "All these little pieces allow us to build a picture of who the Denisovans were."

The image above shows the bone from the tip of the pinky finger from, left to right, a Neanderthal, modern human and Denisovan. (Bennett et al./Science Advances, licensed under CC BY NC)

The new finding suggests researchers looking for Denisovan fossils might have to be more open-minded about what to look for, and that some fossils previously identified as modern humans may, in fact, be Denisovans, said Eva-Maria Geigl, an anthropologist at the Institut Jacques Monod at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and the University of Paris who also co-authored the report.

More closely related to Neanderthals

Denisovans were first identified in 2010 as a new species of hominin using DNA extracted from the bottom half of the finger bone. Genetic analysis showed Denisovans were more closely related to Neanderthals than modern humans, but Denisovans interbred widely with modern humans, and some human groups have more than five per cent Denisovan DNA.

Re-writing Early History of Mankind - Again

Neanderthals - Incest, Interbreeding and Possibly Pedophilia

Complex Human DNA Trail Provides Some Interesting Surprises - Neanderthals & humans interbred 100,000 years ago

However, scientists know little about what they looked like, other than the fact they had massive molars similar to those of a more ancient hominin, Homo erectus.

Viola was a postdoctoral researcher at the lab Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig that analyzed the DNA from the bone from the base of the fingertip. What the researchers didn't know at the time was that after the bone was excavated from Denisova Cave in Siberia in 2008, it was cut in half.

The finger bone was excavated at Denisova Cave in 2008. (Bence Viola)

They only learned a couple of years ago that the other half had been sent to a different lab in the U.S. for analysis.

That half was subsequently photographed and measured by Geigl, who noticed that it had been cut. After she analyzed it genetically, she realized that it had exactly the same DNA as the bone that identified the Denisovans as a new species, and therefore must be part of the same bone.

But because the DNA analysis had already been published by the German researchers, and she was asked to return the bone to the U.S., she set the project aside.

2 halves reunited

Some years later, she said, she spoke to the Viola and the German researchers about the bone, which they didn't know about.

"It was a shock to us that somebody had the other half," Viola said in a phone interview from Kyrgyzstan, where he was doing field work.

Geigl offered to show the bone to them and suggested they find some way to publish the information.

"It's pity that nobody knows the no one knows that I'm the only one who has the pictures of this bone in my computer," she recalled telling them.

Viola was keen to see the photos, but quite surprised when he received them.

"This looks very different than what I expected," he recalled, writing in response.

The Denisovans had large, unusual teeth unlike those of humans or Neanderthals. (Bence Viola/University of Toronto)

Based on their huge teeth and a small fragment of skull, he had the impression Denisovans were even heftier and therefore less human-like than Neanderthals: "All of those are very large and robust. They come from huge individuals."

Geigl said the fact the bone looked more human than Neanderthal wasn't really a surprise for her. "Evolution is not something linear. Some features evolve faster than others."

The new finding suggests the knobs on the ends of Neanderthals' fingertips evolved relatively late.

Knobs on the fingertips suggest devolution, not evolution.

Viola combined the images of the two halves to reconstruct of the entire finger. That allowed the researchers to see that based on the growth of the bone, the girl it belonged to was likely a couple of years older than previously thought — about 14 or 15.

Matthew Tocheri, who holds a Canada Research Chair in Human Origins at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ont., and was not involved in the study, said he thought the results were "kind of neat."

Like Geigl, he thought the similarity to humans was not that surprising. He noted modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans are all closely related, and, in fact, many Neanderthal and human features are indistinguishable. The fingertips just happen to be one difference.

Similarly, many Denisovans characteristics will likely be very human-like, and we don't yet know their "distinguishing" features, he said.

Tocheri said it was nice to have a bone that could be compared in modern humans, Denisovans and Neanderthals. But he added, "That's one bone out of over 200 elements to the skeleton. So we've got another 199 or so to go."

No Single 'Gay Gene' Contributes to Same-Sex Behaviour, Study Finds

There is a significant pro-gay slant to this article which
I attempt to temper with truth

'Effectively impossible' to predict sexual behaviour from one's genome, researcher says

The Associated Press 

Research published in the journal Science has identified five genetic variants not previously linked with gay or lesbian sexuality. (Ann Wang/Reuters)

The largest study of its kind found new evidence that genes contribute to same-sex sexual behaviour, but it echoes research that says there are no specific genes that make people gay.

The genome-wide research on DNA from nearly half a million U.S. and U.K. adults identified five genetic variants not previously linked with gay or lesbian sexuality. The variants were more common in people who reported ever having had a same-sex sexual partner. That includes people whose partners were exclusively of the same sex and those who mostly reported heterosexual behaviour.

None cause the behaviour; it cannot be predicted

The researchers said thousands more genetic variants likely are involved and interact with factors that aren't inherited, but that none of them cause the behaviour nor can predict whether someone will be gay.

The research "provides the clearest glimpse yet into the genetic underpinnings of same-sex sexual behaviour," said co-author Benjamin Neale, a psychiatric geneticist at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass.

Genetics - less than half the story

"We also found that it's effectively impossible to predict an individual's sexual behaviour from their genome. Genetics is less than half of this story for sexual behaviour but it's still a very important contributing factor," Neale said.

The study was released Thursday by the journal Science. Results are based on genetic testing and survey responses.

Some of the genetic variants found were present in both men and women. Two in men were located near genes involved in male-pattern baldness and sense of smell, raising intriguing questions about how regulation of sex hormones and smell may influence same-sex behaviour.

Importantly, most participants were asked about frequency of same-sex sexual behaviour but not if they self-identified as gay or lesbian. Fewer than five per cent of U.K. participants and about 19 per cent of U.S. participants reported ever having a same-sex sexual experience.

The researchers acknowledged that limitation and emphasized that the study's focus was on behaviour, not sexual identity or orientation. They also note that the study only involved people of European ancestry and can't answer whether similar results would be found in other groups.

Origins unknown

Origins of same-sex behaviour are uncertain. Some of the strongest evidence of a genetic link comes from studies in identical twins. Many scientists believe that social, cultural, family and other biological factors are also involved, while some religious groups and skeptics consider it a choice or behaviour that can be changed.

The father of sexual research in America, Alfred Kinsey, determined that 89% of gays could associate their behaviour, or preference, to specific events or environmental situations from their childhood. That was in the 1940s. The study was repeated in 1970 by the Kinsey Institute and found the same results.

Variants very weak

A Science commentary notes that the five identified variants had such a weak effect on behaviour that using the results "for prediction, intervention or a supposed 'cure' is wholly and unreservedly impossible."

"Future work should investigate how genetic predispositions are altered by environmental factors," University of Oxford sociologist Melinda Mills said in the commentary.

And, perhaps, how genes themselves are altered by environmental factors.

Other experts not involved in the study had varied reactions.

Dr. Kenneth Kendler a specialist in psychiatric genetics at Virginia Commonwealth University, called it "a very important paper that advances the study of the genetics of human sexual preference substantially. The results are broadly consistent with those obtained from the earlier technologies of twin and family studies suggesting that sexual orientation runs in families and is moderately heritable."

If that were so, then you would think that it would be moderately predictable, yet the study says, quite emphatically, that it is not.

Gay gene?

Former National Institutes of Health geneticist Dean Hamer said the study confirms "that sexuality is complex and there are a lot of genes involved," but it isn't really about gay people. "Having just a single same sex experience is completely different than actually being gay or lesbian," Hamer said. His research in the 1990s linked a marker on the X chromosome with male homosexuality. Some subsequent studies had similar results but the new one found no such link.

He didn't actually link them except in his mind. He stated he was on the verge of linking them and that was good enough for Science journal and mainstream media. He still hasn't found that link he was on the verge of finding in 1990.

This is the reason why homosexuality suddenly became quite acceptable in the early 1990s. Hamer's study, published as a cover story in the same Science journal, spread like lightening across the news media of the world and has never been brought into question by most in the 28 years since. 

The journal Science edition that published Hamer's study put the two words, "Gay Gene?" on the cover. The media appears to have not noticed the question mark, for they simply decided then that gays were born that way and there's nothing they can do about it. They never pursued Hamer to find out if the question mark had ever been removed. 

The very next year, Science published an article from an eminent geneticist, who, unlike Hamer, was not gay, in which he trashed Hamer's study as being completely false. Other geneticists agreed with him, but that made no difference to the news media who had heard what they wanted to hear.

Hamer, and other gay or pro-gay geneticists have been looking for a gay gene for more than 50 years. Hamer admits he has not found it, neither has anyone else.

May have little to do with homosexuality

Doug Vanderlaan, a University of Toronto psychologist who studies sexual orientation, said the absence of information on sexual orientation is a drawback and makes it unclear what the identified genetic links might signify. They "might be links to other traits, like openness to experience," Vanderlaan said.

In other words, the 5 weak variants may have almost nothing to do with sexual preference but rather reveal one's character traits which may make him more likely to act in a manner conducive to sexual experimentation.

The study was a collaboration among scientists including psychologists, sociologists and statisticians from the United States, United Kingdom, Europe and Australia. They did entire human genome scanning, using blood samples from the U.K. Biobank and saliva samples from customers of the U.S.-based ancestry and biotech company 23andMe who had agreed to participate in research.

Fake science

There is a lot of garbage floating around the internet and 'science journals' on both sides of this issue. However, gay, or pro-gay researchers have a motive for finding a gay gene whether it is there or not. The journal Science, in Dec 2014 reported that 'one brief conversation with a gay rights canvasser could change someone's mind about same-sex marriage'. 

As unlikely as that theory seems, the writer had data to back it up. However, the UCLA grad's dissertation adviser questioned him on his data and eventually confirmed that there were no data; none. He made it all up. Meanwhile NYT, WaPo, and other media outlets ran with the story. The retraction didn't get nearly as much coverage as the fake news. 

Media bias

That I have had to insert a half-dozen comments in order to bring some truth and reality to this article is an example of the far-left bias in the media today. Anything that is pro-LGBTQ2S is quickly, and without careful examination, shuffled to the top of the pile. Any news that is fervently anti-Christian is good news in most mainstream media newsrooms.

Mainstream media is into social engineering, and our children are the animals it's experimenting on. Their willful blindness to the truth is confirmation of that. A Christian man once said, "Morality dictates theology"!