China has made good on its prior threats to retaliate and introduce “countermeasures” against the United States following the ‘spy’ balloon shootdown incident a week-and-a-half ago, and has done so in relation to Washington arming Taiwan.

On Thursday Beijing has unveiled new sanctions against Lockheed Martin Corporation and Raytheon Missiles & Defense, a subsidiary of Raytheon Technologies Corp – both of which are now banned from either importing, exporting and investing in China. 

They are now on China’s “unreliable entities list” of companies deemed a threat to national sovereignty and security, and so will have their activities restricted, along with punitive fines.

“Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Missiles will not be allowed to invest within China and they will be fined an amount equivalent to twice the value of their contracts related to the sale of arms to Taiwan island since the implementation of China’s Unreliable Entity List rules,” writes China Daily.

While the move is seen as most immediately connected with Raytheon and Lockheed’s major weapons contracts with the self-ruled island of Taiwan brokered under US government approval, the catalyst appears to be the US shootdown of the Chinese balloon off South Carolina on Feb.4 and ensuing war of words and accompanying accusations. 

While neither companies have done military equipment deals with China, especially since the US long ago banned such transfers with China, the sanctions might be felt to a limited degree by the civilian aviation industry in China: 

Raytheon Missiles and Defense, part of Raytheon Technologies Corp, was awarded a $412m contract in September to upgrade Taiwan’s military radar as part of a $1.1bn package of US arms sales to the island. Lockheed Martin has supplied Taiwan’s military with radar, helicopters and air traffic control equipment.

In China, Lockheed Martin has sold air traffic control equipment for civilian airports and helicopters for commercial use.

Last week, the US slapped punitive sanctions on six Chinese entities believed connected to the alleged Chinese spy balloon breaching American airspace.

China had promised to send a strong message back, while also pointing out that the US has breached Chinese airspace ten times in the last year with balloons. China’s foreign ministry has maintained the object was a weather balloon which blew off course, and that the situation is being exploited by the Biden administration to attack Beijing.

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The World Health Organization (WHO) convened an “urgent meeting” this week amid an outbreak of the Marburg virus, which causes one of the world’s deadliest diseases, in Africa.

Health officials say Marburg, first seen in the late 1960s, is related to Ebola. However, WHO officials say it’s far more deadly, killing upwards of 88 percent of people who contract it.

The virus has been detected in several African countries over the past several months, including recently in Equatorial Guinea. A small number of Marburg cases were found in Ghana late last year.

“WHO on Tuesday convened an urgent meeting of the Marburg virus vaccine consortium (MARVAC) to discuss the outbreak,” a news release from the United Nations-backed health agency said on Tuesday, adding that Equatorial Guinea has confirmed its first-ever case of the virus. WHO officials say the virus is responsible for nine deaths in the tiny African nation.

The Marburg outbreak was centered around Kie Ntem Province, located in western Equatorial Guinea. The deaths occurred between Jan. 7 and Feb. 7, WHO said, citing reports.

“Surveillance in the field has been intensified,” George Ameh, WHO’s country representative in Equatorial Guinea, was quoted as saying by the Daily Mail during Tuesday’s meeting. “Contact tracing, as you know, is a cornerstone of the response. We have … redeployed the COVID-19 teams that were there for contact tracing and quickly retrofitted them to really help us out.”

In its release, WHO said it sent “advance teams” to impacted districts in the West African country to provide medical care and perform contract tracing. “Health authorities sent samples to the Institut Pasteur reference laboratory in Senegal, with support from WHO, to determine the cause,” Tuesday’s release added. “Eight samples were tested, one of which turned out positive.”

Cases of the virus, however, are considered rare. Annual global figures released by WHO indicate that cases tend to be in the single digits worldwide.

And although it remains “a very rare disease in people,” says the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “when it occurs, it has the potential to spread,” and can be highly deadly. “Health care staff and family members who care for the patient” infected with the hemorrhagic fever are most at risk, the CDC says (pdf) in a fact sheet.

Read more here…

NORAD on Thursday has belatedly acknowledged a second Russian aircraft intercept incident this week, after earlier confirming the initial one involving four inbound Russian planes, which happened Monday.

“For the second time this week, NORAD has scrambled fighter jets on Valentine’s Day to intercept Russian Tu-95 Bear bombers off the coast of Alaska, it claimed”, according to fresh reports.

Like in first incident, NORAD dispatched a pair of fighter jets, both F-35s, to intercept the Russian planes as they they approached Alaska’s Air Defense Identification Zone, officials said Thursday.

“This is the second intercept of Russian aircraft over two days. This Russian activity near the North American ADIZ occurs regularly and is not seen as a threat, nor is the activity seen as provocative,” NORAD added in the fresh statement.

Interestingly, NORAD called both of this week’s incidents “routine” – given it has happened an estimated six to seven times a year on average over the past decade or more. Additionally, no breach of actual US airspace was reported by the Russian planes, just the outlying ADIZ.

But such breaches coming twice within a 48 hour period has been extremely rare. Also, Russian state media appears to be actively publicizing these maneuvers off Alaska, including with videos.

Monday’s statement had emphasized that “Russian aircraft remained in international airspace and did not enter American or Canadian sovereign airspace. This Russian activity in the North American ADIZ occurs regularly and is not seen as a threat, nor is the activity seen as provocative,” it continued.

If anyone is wondering about Russia’s resolve, Russia is sending nuke-capable ‘Bear’ bombers over Alaska and has ‘deployed nuclear-armed ships in Baltic for first time in 30 years. https://t.co/szbL9nSA0v pic.twitter.com/HP8kFWqS3y

— Geopolitics.wiki (@GeopoliticsW) February 15, 2023

Heightened tensions are ongoing with Russia related to the Ukraine war, but the intercepts also come following the unusual spate of ‘unidentified object’ shootdowns by US fighters over the past week-and-a-half, two of which were in far northern regions, including northeastern Alaska and Canada’s Yukon territory.

Authored by Andrew Thornebrooke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Audio recordings of radio chatter taken during the United States’ shoot down of a Chinese spy balloon earlier this month may provide insights into how the military later shot down an unidentified object over Lake Huron.

In over 20 minutes of radio chatter, U.S. pilots and ground teams can be heard discussing their approach and shoot down of the Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina.

The audio was captured by aviation radio enthusiast Ken Harrell and first published by The Drive. The Air Force declined to share its own audio files but confirmed the authenticity of the recordings to The Epoch Times.

In one exchange, the lead fighter pilot and his wingman can both be heard preparing their missiles to fire on the balloon, suggesting that the wingman was prepared to take down the balloon immediately following a failed attempt by the lead pilot.

The primary players you will see in the transcript and hear in the audio are:

FRANK01 is the lead F-22 that took the kill shot. FRANK02 is its wingman. As we reported Saturday, those call signs were an homage to World War One flying ace and U.S. Army Air Service First Lieutenant Frank Luke Jr, a Medal of Honor recipient better known as the “Arizona Balloon Buster” who destroyed 14 German balloons and four aircraft.

HUNTRESS is the U.S. Air Force’s Eastern Air Defense Sector, or EADS, part of the U.S.-Canadian North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), which was controlling the operation from the ground in Rome, New York.

EAGLE01 is an F-15C and EAGLE02 is its wingman. The Eagles backed-up the F-22s and used their SNIPER targeting pods to record the shootdown and mark areas of debris for recovery.

TIGER09 is a Navy P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft. 

TOI is Target Of Interest, in this case the Chinese spy balloon.

Author’s notes are seen in italics. -The Drive

“FRANK01 is switches hot,” the lead pilot says.

“FREANK02 is switches hot,” the wingman follows.

The two F-22 stealth fighters’ call signs, FRANK01 and FRANK02, were named after World War I flying ace Frank Luke Jr., who earned the epithet of “Arizona Balloon Buster” for his successful shootdowns of 14 German balloons during the conflict.

Notably, the brief exchange may reveal exactly what happened during the United States shoot down of an unidentified object over Lake Huron on Feb. 12.

During that encounter, the lead pilot fired an AIM-9X missile at the object, the same type of missile used on the Chinese spy balloon and two other unidentified objects this month.

In one portion of the recording, an F-15C pilot can be heard expressing frustration over actually locking onto the balloon.

“I’m having trouble keeping a radar lock for any more than a second on him,” said the pilot, adding “I will keep trying.“

Read the entire transcript here via The Drive.

With the one-year anniversary of Russia’s Feb.24, 2022 invasion of Ukraine just around the corner, NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg this week issued some surprising words regarding the history and origin of the conflict. In essence he finally admitted an important truth, which is of course extremely rare among top Western officials these days.

Whereas prior to these fresh remarks by Stoltenberg, US and NATO officials including major media, have framed the invasion exclusively as merely one man’s (Putin) ‘unprovoked’ naked aggression bent on enlarging an ‘expansionist Russia’, Stoltenberg now much belatedly admits “the war didn’t start in February last year. The war started in 2014.“

🇺🇸🇪🇺🇺🇦🇷🇺”NATO has been training the Ukrainian military since 2014, NATO partners have been supplying the Ukrainian armed forces with the necessary weapons and training since 2014″ — Jens Stoltenbergs admits again

“Unprovoked invasion”… pic.twitter.com/Qa8shKSWXx

— AZ 🛰🌏🌍🌎 (@AZgeopolitics) February 14, 2023

Here’s what the NATO chief said during a briefing to reporters, and in front of cameras, as also transcribed and published to NATO’s official website…

“The other thing I will say is that the war didn’t start in February last year. The war started in 2014. And since 2014, NATO Allies have provided support to Ukraine, with training, with equipment, so the Ukrainian Armed Forces were much stronger in 2022, than they were in 2020, and 2014. And of course, that made a huge difference when President Putin decided to attack Ukraine,” Stoltenberg said.

And of course, a central reason for the war articulated by President Putin both in the lead-up to the invasion and after has consistently been that the West was waging an anti-Russia proxy war right at its doorstep, namely in the war-torn Donbass. 

It also bears recalling that throughout last year, and especially in the opening months of the major Russian invasion, any independent voice daring to point out that the conflict in fact originated in 2014 – and that the current fighting is an extension and escalation of the ‘long war’ – was denounced as somehow ‘pro-Kremlin’ or else a ‘Putin puppet’ in mainstream discourse. 

Below are some essential facts and a much-needed trip down memory lane concerning the lead-up to Feb 2022 to understand what we and other independent voices have been saying for years, and what Stoltenberg has just now very belatedly and reluctantly admitted:

• The current Ukrainian government was created in 2014 after a violent, American-backed coup against the elected President Viktor Yanukovich. The so-called “Maidan Revolution” painted itself as pro-EU and liberal, but relied on ultranationalist terror militias such as Right Sector for its muscle. 
  • Profile: Ukraine’s ultra-nationalist Right Sector – BBC News
• Ukraine’s new government has banned the Russian language in schools and businesses, even though it is spoken by most of the residents in the Donbas region as their first language (and throughout other parts of the country as well): 
  • New law stokes Ukraine language tensions – France 24
• Pre-February 2022, Ukraine had already lost about 14,000 lives fighting to prevent the ethnically Russian provinces of Lugansk and Donetsk from permanently seceding (the 14,000 figure includes deaths from both sides of the civil war in eastern Ukraine). The unpopular war has been going on since 2014. 
  • The Russia-Ukraine conflict: a look back at the human toll of fighting since 2014 – The Washington Post
• Few Western journalists are willing to show the misery this conflict has brought to the residents of the Donbas, or the war crimes that have been inflicted upon them. Patrick Lancaster has been one of the few reporting on this: 
  • Patrick Lancaster – YouTube
• The Ukrainian government has frequently shut off water to the disputed territories, including Crimea, even while they claim sovereignty over them. 
  • Water supply to 345,000 people in eastern Ukraine at risk as Donetsk Filter Station stops operations | OCHA (unocha.org)
  • Russia vs Ukraine: Crimea’s Water Crisis Is an Impossible Problem for Putin – Bloomberg. 
  • Conflict cuts water supply for thousands in eastern Ukraine | OCHA (unocha.org)
• It’s now ok to praise Nazis on Facebook– as long as they’re “our Nazis”: 
  • Facebook Allows Praise of Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion (theintercept.com)
• Ukrainian President Zelensky suggested last year that if the country could not join NATO, he would pursue re-arming the country with nuclear weapons. 
  • UAWire – Zelensky: Ukraine may reconsider its nuclear status
  • The New York Times calls this “Putin’s conspiracy theory”, as if the words didn’t come straight from the Ukrainian President’s mouth on multiple occasions.

In the Russian view, the United States has the ability and willingness to unilaterally destroy or overthrow any government that does not do its bidding. The experience of Serbia (1999), Iraq (2003), Syria (2011), Libya (2011), and most recently Ukraine (2014) and the attempt in Belarus (2021) seem to support their perspective.

Those who are going on about Russia’s “imperial ambitions” under “Communist dictator Vladimir Putin” have little knowledge about any of this, or why the Russians might feel legitimately threatened by having a US-sponsored and NATO-aligned regime for a neighbor.

Below: a rare past instance of what real journalism looks like, often completely missing in the administration’s press briefing rooms…

Pentagon bullshitter John Kirby confronted with persistent journalist….. pic.twitter.com/Q69lglv43y

— Richard (@ricwe123) February 16, 2023

Consider: for over two hundred years, the American “Monroe Doctrine” has stated that no foreign power will be allowed to form a military alliance with any nation in the entire Western Hemisphere. This is the bedrock principle of American foreign policy.

Compare this to Europe. Kiev and Moscow are separated by a mere 470 miles of flat land. What Russian leader in their right mind would allow an “anti-Russia” to be created and then armed in its own back yard? 

It’s not like any of this is a new concern. The Russians have been straight forward about this concern for thirty years, right up to the last ditch public appeal they delivered in December. Recall that ideological fanatics occupying our foreign service responded by sending massive shipments full of weapons into Ukraine, and then tweeted out photos of the cargo aircraft flying them in.

Well, as the last year of horrific death and destruction in Ukraine has shown, the necons and wokesters finally got their war. Now they’re making sure it gets fought down to the last Ukrainian, resulting in very sad and tragic spectacles like the following…

I find this video particularly morbid. An American asking a Ukrainian teenager what it will be like, going to the front to fight in an American proxy war… pic.twitter.com/mmG05UriwQ

— Johnny miller (@johnnyjmils) February 16, 2023

Authored by Joseph Lord via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) says he has subpoenaed the CEOs of top U.S. Big Tech firms as part of Republicans’ ongoing investigation into the weaponization of the federal government.

In November, House Republicans unveiled a 1,050-page report detailing whistleblower findings from FBI agents.

Since then, the House majority authorized the creation of the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which held its inaugural hearing on Feb. 9.

Now, Jordan has sent subpoena requests to several major tech executives asking for documents and testimony.

“Today, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan subpoenaed the chief executive officers of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft for documents and communications relating to the federal government’s reported collusion with Big Tech to suppress free speech,” Jordan’s office said in a statement emailed to the Epoch Times.

“The House Judiciary Committee has repeatedly attempted to engage with the five companies since last December,” the release continues. “Unfortunately, the companies have not adequately complied with our requests.”

Jordan was referencing a series of Dec. 14, 2022, letters his office sent to various tech executives.

The CEOs—Alphabet’s (Google) Sundar Pichai, Amazon’s Andy Jassy, Apple’s Tim Cook, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella—have until March 23 to provide any communications between them and the federal government’s executive branch on the subject.

“Big Tech is out to get conservatives, and is increasingly willing to undermine First Amendment values by complying with the Biden Administration’s directives that suppress freedom of speech online,” Jordan wrote, in excerpts from the letter to the executives posted to his website.

“This approach undermines fundamental American principles and allows powerful government actors to silence political opponents and stifle opposing viewpoints,” he continued. “Publicly available information suggests that your companies’ treatment of certain speakers and content may stem from government directives or guidance designed to suppress dissenting views.

“Big Tech’s role in shaping national and international public discourse today is well-known. In some cases, Big Tech’s ‘heavy-handed censorship’ has been ‘use[d] to silence prominent voices’ and to ‘stifle views that disagree with the prevailing progressive consensus.’

“Because of Big Tech’s wide reach, it can serve as a powerful and effective partisan arm of the ‘woke speech police.’ Although the full extent of Big Tech’s collusion with the Biden Administration is unknown, there are prominent examples and strong indications of Big Tech censorship following directives or pressure from executive branch entities.

“These examples raise serious concerns about how and why tech companies suppress, silence, or reduce the reach of certain political speech and speakers. The collusion of Big Tech and Big Government to advance censorship undeniably undermines liberty and jeopardizes our country’s First Amendment values and protections.”

Jordan cited long-held concerns among conservatives that their viewpoints are disproportionately stifled on social media platforms through outright bans, removal of certain posts, and “shadow banning,” which dramatically reduce a person’s reach on most social media platforms.

President Donald Trump considered the issue a concern as early as 2019, and attempted at the end of his presidency to gut the legal liability protections currently enjoyed by Big Tech platforms.

With Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and the release of documents from the platform’s previous management, it’s become clear that these concerns were well-founded, and have been proven that the firms were engaging in censorship of certain viewpoints.

Read more here…

Authored by Andrew Thornebrooke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Over eight days and using five missiles, U.S. forces shot down four objects flying above U.S. and Canadian airspace.

Those objects include a Chinese spy balloon and three unidentified objects, one roughly the size of a Volkswagen Beetle and another an octagonal black-metallic object.

It’s a historic time for the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the joint American–Canadian organization responsible for overseeing North American airspace and its defense, which in its 65-year history had never before shot down an aerial object over North America.

The United States’ encounters with unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) over the past two weeks, as well as pilots’ hardships in identifying and engaging with them, highlight glaring weaknesses in U.S. military readiness, according to several defense and security experts.

Such shortcomings included an apparent inability to detect one of the objects until it had already entered U.S. airspace, as well as a failure to track and engage another object that lingered near sensitive U.S. nuclear silos in Montana before evading further detection by fighter jets.

Paul Crespo, a former Marine officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency and now president of the Center for American Defense Studies, believes that the problem is largely due to the size, heat, and speed of the UAPs encountered in recent weeks, all of which factor into the ease with which they could be seen on radar.

“The recent flurry of unidentifiable aerial phenomena over the United States and Canada underscores our weakness in detecting and identifying nontraditional aerial threats,” Crespo told The Epoch Times in an email.

“If it isn’t made of metal, super hot, and traveling hundreds if not thousands of miles an hour, our air surveillance and defense systems appear stymied.”

Crespo’s comments highlight a problem addressed by the White House, which has acknowledged that the three UAPs had very small radar cross sections and were difficult to spot. It’s a small problem with big consequences.

US in ‘New Strategic Era’

The problem has been years in the making, according to Sam Kessler, a national security and geopolitical analyst with risk management firm North Star Support Group.

Because U.S. forces are trained to use radar primarily to detect other fighter craft, much-related technology and intelligence gathering hasn’t been honed to find objects that otherwise look either benign on radar or don’t appear at all.

“The detection issues are complicated since the sensing and radar technologies typically used for surveillance and detection purposes are usually set up under a different system of threats, such as the use of objects and vehicles that are typically fast-moving and carry a significant heat signature,” Kessler said.

Read more here…

Crypto exchange giant Binance, which has come under scrutiny since the implosion of FTX and the resultant “crypto winter” that followed, now looks like it may be able to escape its current regulatory scrutiny by paying fines. The news, which broke late in the day on Wednesday, appeared to help fuel a charge in the price of bitcoin, which was already rallying mid-week. 

Among the regulators that are investigating the crypto outfit are the Department of Justice, Internal Revenue Service, the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Chief Strategy Officer Patrick Hillmann told the Wall Street Journal this week that the outcome of settlement discussions with U.S. regulators would result in “likely a fine, could be more….We just don’t know. That is for regulators to decide.”

Binance is “working with regulators to figure out what are the remediations we have to go through now to make amends for that,” he said. 

He also said in an interview with BNN that the company had regulatory “gaps” that it has since closed. He blamed the initial gaps on a thin staff and little compliance, stating on Wednesday of this week: “It’s a tremendous burden. As a result, there were some gaps in our compliance system in the first two years.”

He called “ongoing conversations” with regulators “very collaborative” and said the discussions and compliance fixes are “greatly to the benefit of users.” He said Binance is “highly confident and feeling really good about where those discussions are going.”

All the while, regulators in the U.S. have been on a tear in going after other crypto-associated firms, as BNN notes:

In January, Binance was named among counterparties to digital-asset platform Bitzlato, which has been accused of processing millions of dollars in illegal funds. 

This month, a New York regulator told Binance’s partner Paxos Trust Co. to stop minting a Binance-branded stablecoin known as BUSD. The regulator told Paxos to halt new issuance over unresolved issues tied to Paxos’s oversight of its relationship with Binance. The SEC separately has sent Paxos a notice alleging that BUSD, the third-largest stablecoin, is an unregistered security.

The company’s compliance department now numbers more than 750 employees, the BNN report noted. 

“It will be a good moment for our company because it allows us to put it behind us,” Hillmann said. “We just want to put it behind us.”

Authored by Bill Pan via The Epoch Times,

More than three years after COVID-19 emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the World Health Organization (WHO) has shelved its plan for the second phase of a study into the virus’ origins, Nature reported Tuesday.

In January 2021, a year after the initial outbreak, the WHO dispatched an international team of scientists and doctors from various disciplines to Wuhan, where they worked with Chinese experts to examine evidence about the virus. The phase one investigation yielded a report that only spawned more questions over the hypothesis that the virus might have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which was tinkering with bat coronaviruses. It was also criticized for ignoring China’s failure to hand over complete, original data and samples.

In response to those concerns, the United Nations agency in July 2021 announced a plan for a more extensive second phase investigation. Specifically, it promised to find and review more data on “relevant laboratories and research institutions” in Wuhan, as well as data on wild animals sold at the city’s live animal markets in late 2019, to better understand whether it’s more likely that the pandemic began with human contact with an infected animal, or from a lab escape.

The proposed probe never materialized.

Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, an epidemiologist at the WHO in Geneva, Switzerland, told Nature that the plan “has changed.”

“There is no phase two,” Van Kerkhove told the scientific journal.

“The politics across the world of this really hampered progress on understanding the origins,” she said.

In response to The Epoch Times’ request for further comments, a spokesperson for Van Kerkhove said Nature’s report was “incorrect” and that she has asked the publication for correction.

Nature has yet to issue any correction at the point of this publication.

CCP Pushback

The mere discussion of a lab escape as a possible scenario in the first phase report irritated the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime, which turned it into an excuse not to allow another WHO mission into Wuhan.

Just days after the WHO proposed a second phase investigation, the regime mounted a pushback, claiming that the lab breach hypothesis shouldn’t even be talked about, let alone be the focus of further scrutiny.

Security personnel keep watch outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology during the visit by the World Health Organization (WHO) team tasked with investigating the origins of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, on Feb. 3, 2021. (Thomas Peter/Reuters)

The proposal, according to vice minister of China’s National Health Commission, Zeng Yixin, “did not respect common sense and violated science.” He also insisted that there wasn’t any “man-made virus” at the WIV, nor had the institute ever conducted gain-of-function experiments on the novel coronavirus.

“It is impossible for us to accept such an origin-tracing plan,” Zeng said at that time.

“We are opposed to politicizing the tracing work.”

Zeng’s comments prompted Washington to call out Beijing for its “dangerous” and “irresponsible” behavior.

“We are deeply disappointed,” said White House press secretary Jen Psaki said. “Their position is irresponsible, and frankly, dangerous. It’s not a time to be stonewalling.”

Amid the tension between China and the United States, the WHO was still seeking “directly engage” with Chinese officials and trying to establish collaborations with Chinese scientists, according to Van Kerkhove.

“We really, really want to be able to work with our colleagues there,” she told Nature. “It’s really a deep frustration.”

WHO Leadership Change

Nature’s report comes as Jeremy Farrar, a British pharmaceutical trust director involved in producing a paper arguing against the lab breach hypothesis, is set to take the helm of WHO’s science division.

According to emails obtained and publicized by independent journalist James Tobias via a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, Farrar had been working on a draft of the paper with Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in as early as January 2020. At one point, the two appeared to discuss whether the virus could have been put in a serial passage between animals in lab experiments and then escaped.

The paper in question, titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” was published in Nature Medicine in March 2020. It has since been widely cited by government officials—Fauci himself included—and mainstream media outlets as the scientific basis for dismissing the possibility that COVID-19 might have come out of a lab.

Don’t expect to see any more random, headscratching tweet from SBF ever again.

On Thursday, the federal judge overseeing Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraud trial threatened to revoke the FTX co-founder’s $250 million bail package and throw him in prison if severe restrictions weren’t placed on his use of electronic devices and apps.

As Bloomberg reports, US District Judge Lewis Kaplan said at a Thursday hearing on his bail conditions in downtown Manhattan that he didn’t think a government proposal that would limit Bankman-Fried to one monitored cell phone and laptop and restrict his use of Zoom to communicating with counsel was sufficient.

WATCH: Sam Bankman-Fried arrives for a hearing on his bail conditions in federal court in Manhattan. pic.twitter.com/wWLmswBEz2

— Bloomberg TV (@BloombergTV) February 16, 2023

The hearing follows concern over Bankman-Fried’s reported use of encrypted messaging app Signal to contact FTX’s US general counsel, a potential witness in the case, and his use of virtual private networks. Both technologies could allow him to shield his communications from the government.

Bankman-Fried’s lawyer, Mark Cohen, who has argued his client’s use of apps and VPNs was “innocent” called the government proposal “Draconian” on Thursday, prompting a fiery response from the judge.

“It isn’t the government who contacted the witness,” Kaplan admonished Cohen. The judge added that, though the hearing wasn’t over bail revocation, “it could get there eventually.”

Kaplan also expressed skepticism about Bankman-Fried’s laughable claim that he used a VPN to watch football, including the Superbowl, while out on bail at his parents’ house in Palo Alto, California.

“So what he was doing was sitting in California in the United States using the VPN to create the impression that he was going to use this international subscription from outside the US,” the judge suggested. Cohen responded that he had wished he had bought his client a television from Best Buy because “there isn’t a television in the house.”

Also, the judge appears to share our sense of humor: two days ago we suggested that billionaire SBF was using VPNs to download bittorents movies.

*BANKMAN-FRIED BANNED FROM USING VPN’S WHILE OUT ON BAIL

so he won’t download bittorrent movies any more?

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 14, 2023

Cohen said Bankman-Fried understood what was at stake and that he was “on trial for his life” and added “There is no margin for error,” even though SBF has repeatedly and clearly showed he believes his Democratic donations and political connections give him a mile-wide margin for not only error but to do whatever he wants. “If there is any violation of whatever order the court fashions, we’ll deal with an entirely different proceeding.”

Kaplan gave the parties until the end of next week to submit proposals for how to modify the bail package, suggesting that the defense hire a consultant who can advise the judge on how to handle the issues.