Why do fishermen hide their information when fishing ships turn their identification systems off? An environmental impact assessment of illegal fishing on ships in the gulf of the world
Some ships carry automatic identification systems (AIS), which pinpoint their locations and help to prevent collisions, but can be turned off. Heather Welch is a spatial ecologist at Santa Cruz and she and her team analysed more than 3 billion signals from vessels during the course of two years. They identified gaps in the data to find hotspots where fishing vessels frequently disabled their devices on purpose. Over the course of 3 years, vessels hid up to 6% of their activity. Some of these gaps were probably legitimate but others could mask illegal fishing, according to the study. Illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing costs the global economy up to US$25 billion each year. It is harmful to the marine life.
On ships from Spain, the USA, Taiwan and the Chinese mainland, most of the time was lost to AIS disabling. Middle and upper income countries make up most of the vessels that use AIS.
The 2011-2019 global population of the world had reached 7 billion, 12 years after it reached 2billion, according to the World One Health Congress
In an analysis presented at the 7th World One Health Congress in Singapore on 8 November, scientists compared fragments of coronavirus genomes. The results suggest that some sections of bat coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2 shared a common ancestor as recently as 2016 — just three years before the virus emerged in people in late 2019. The work hasn’t been peer reviewed.
On November 15th, 2002, the world’s population reached 7 billion, a mere 12 years after it hit 2billion, according to models from the UN.
This estimate could be the most reliable that the UN has ever come up with. The organization has changed how it analyses data, switching from five-yearly to annual intervals. And there has been a steady improvement in recent decades in the ability and capacity of many countries to collect statistics.
The most significant factor behind the UN’s updated forecast is that data from China have been more reliable since the end of the country’s one-child policy in 2015. The UN predicted that China’s population will shrink year on year until the end of the century, and that it has already peaked.
There are blind spots for countries that are experiencing conflicts and humanitarian crises.
Towards a national investigation of the Covid-19 pandemic, but no consensus on the origin of the virus or its connection with an international laboratory leak
Eight U.S. government agencies are investigating the source of COVID-19, and they remain very divided on the issue. None of them is certain about the cause. Natural causes are what four lean toward. Two haven’t taken a position.
Already this term, congressional Republicans have begun an investigation into the origins of the pandemic, with hearings reviving the heated investigation we’ve seen previewed in the Senate. It is happening despite that the National Science Advisory Board lab safety recommendations are on the president’s desk.
But those inquiries are partisan. The independent commission would have a panel of experts that were appointed by congressional leaders from both parties. The Sept. 11 panel had subpoena power and it would hold public hearings. It would be tasked with looking at the origins of the swine flu and the responses from the Trump and Biden administrations.
“There’s no substitute for showing the vision that we showed in the early 2000s at creating an architecture that fixes things that we got wrong then, that addresses things that we didn’t think of then that we’ve learned, having gone through it,” said Senator Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, the health committee’s top Republican, who is sponsoring the measure with Ms. Murray.
Mr. Zelikow now leads the Covid Commission Planning Group, a privately funded effort involving about three dozen independent experts who have spent the better part of the past two years conducting research to lay the groundwork for a national inquiry. The group, which has held several hundred interviews, grew tired of waiting for Congress and plans to publish its findings in a book this spring, Mr. Zelikow said. He declined to discuss details.
In the midst of simmering hostility between the two superpowers, WHO member states requested in May 2020 that the agency put together a science-led effort to identify how the pandemic started. Engagement with China quickly faded after the group returned, and despite the fact that China agreed to the mission, tensions were high when the group left.
The US Department of Energy has assessed that the Covid-19 pandemic most likely came from a laboratory leak in China, according to a newly updated classified intelligence report.
The World Health Organization sent a circular to member states detailing how it would advance origins studies. There were proposed steps to be taken, such as audits of labs in the area where the first cases were identified, as well as assessing wild- animal markets.
The proposal to investigate lab breeches was rejected by Chinese officials. Zhao Lijian, the spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, said the WHO proposal was not agreed by all member states, and that the second phase should not focus on pathways the mission report had already deemed extremely unlikely.
CNN’s chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta did a long-form report in 2021 about all of the available evidence and talked to multiple people who had assessed the available evidence. A. Chris Gajilan has an extensive report on how the WHO assessment was flawed due to a lack of cooperation from the Chinese government.
For some lab-leak theorists, the fact that so many prominent experts converged so rapidly on a declaration of natural origin so soon after expressing their doubts is proof of a “zoonotic conspiracy” — a coordinated effort to suppress discussion of the possible lab origins of SARS-CoV-2. The conference call was described by participants as a honest exchange of perspectives and “consensus” that emerged from genuine scientific reflection and debate.
The research found traces of COVID-194 at a fish market in China in January and February 2020, but did not mention if it was related to the discovery of the disease in January and February 2020. Samples were taken from sewage, drains, the surfaces of doors and market stalls, and from the ground, among other places. The researchers believe that the virus was probably shed by Humans, but they want to take a closer look at the data to see if they can identify animal species.
Michael Worobey, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, says the work is an important contribution from Chinese scientists, supporting earlier genomic analyses2 showing that the virus probably had not emerged as early as September and was not widespread in Wuhan in late 2019.
Thea Fischer, who is part of the mission to Wuhan and is a public-health specialist at the University of Danes, still hopes that progress will be made.
FOIA’s latest intelligence assessment: Thanking the Department of Energy, Senator Mike McCaul, and the Senate Armed Services Committee
The agency based their conclusion on classified evidence that isn’t available to the public. According to the federal government, low confidence means “the information used in the analysis is less than perfect, or the conclusion cannot be inferred from the information.”
It’s not clear what exactly changed things for the officials involved in the assessment for the Department of Energy, but whatever it was has not convinced the majority of intelligence agencies.
The Department of Energy supports the work of our intelligence professionals, who continue to investigate the origins of COVID-19, according to a statement from the department.
The Department of Energy’s Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence is one of 18 government agencies that make up the intelligence community, which are under the umbrella of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The latest intelligence assessment was given to congress as Republicans on Capitol Hill accused the Biden administration of playing down the lab leak theory.
House Foreign Affairs Chairman Mike McCaul said Sunday he was “pleased” that the Department of Energy “has finally reached the same conclusion that I had already come to.”
The Texas Republican requested a full and thorough explanation from the Administration of the report and evidence behind it.
McCaul said it was important the administration begin to work with partners and allies around the world to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again.
We need to have lengthy hearings. I hope our colleagues in Congress support that. I know the Republicans in the House are certainly supportive of that,” the Senate Armed Services Committee member said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Where is the Covid-19 virus? Why the Chinese haven’t responded to CNN, but the U.S. is listening to a pandemic
Over the last three years, we have had one of the largest epidemics in a century. A lot of evidence indicates that it is coming from the Chinese.
A spokesperson for House Oversight Chairman James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, said in a statement that the committee was “reviewing the classified information provided” by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in response to a letter requesting information earlier this month.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that the intelligence community remains divided on the matter, while noting that President Joe Biden has put resources into getting to the bottom of the origin question.
Where is Covid-19 coming from? As Relman, the Stanford microbiologist, previously noted to CNN, finding the answer can help prevent the next pandemic.
The US Energy Department assessment is adding to the confusion about what really happened in China after a year after the start of a flu epidemic that still affects daily life.
A letter from public health experts published in February 2020 in The Lancet, an influential scientific journal, also set the tone early by declaring the virus to have a natural origin.
The intelligence community elements were not able to work out a common explanation without additional information.
For the better part of 2020, advocates of the lab leak theory had to fight against claims they were being xenophobic or racist — in part thanks to anti-Chinese rhetoric from then-President Donald Trump, who embraced the theory.
State Department spokesman Ned Price, in separate comments to reporters, accused China of “blocking from the beginning international investigators and members of the global health community from accessing information that they need to understand the origins of Covid-19.”
What Do We Want to Know About the US-China Relationships? The American Perspective on Covid-19, the Wisconsin Republican, and the Global Perspective
She said that it is important to take the entire analysis of the intelligence community into account. And the evidence does not conclusively point to any one theory.
Past pandemics have emerged from natural transmission through animals, and it often takes months or years to discover the host that the virus passed through as it adapted to infect humans.
This increasingly adversarial relationship touches multiple areas of American life – from the economy to public health. It covers the challenges faced by the US military, which are in the middle of a great geopolitical conflict in the early 21st century, and the risks posed by Chinese-designed apps on the electronic devices everyone carries everywhere. It’s fueling the dangerous possibility that the US and China are locked into a potentially disastrous slide toward conflict. It poses serious challenges for the US political system that struggles to have a rational debate on these issues without gettingbogged down in a partisan game of who can be tougher on China. Such one-upmanship only deepens a self-perpetuating cycle of escalation between the two sides.
rising tensions between US and Chinese forces in Asia and escalating standoffs with Taiwan are dramatizing a long-building and once theoretical superpower rivalry that is now a daily reality.
The new select committee must break the cycle of politics if they are to provide an effective examination of US-China relations that can lead to policy recommendations down the road.
Wray’s comments come just days after news of the Department of Energy’s “low-confidence” assessment that Covid-19 most likely originated from a laboratory leak in China, underscoring a divide in the US government as the majority of the intelligence community still believes that Covid either emerged naturally in the wild, or that there is still too little evidence to make a judgment one way or another.
“We want to understand what we got wrong about the Chinese Communist Party and what we need to understand about it going forward in order to get our policy right,” the Wisconsin Republican said.
On CBS News on Sunday, Gallagher warned: “We may call this a strategic competition, but it’s not a tennis match. This is about what type of world we want to live in. Do we want to live in Xinjiang-lite or do we want to live in the free world?” He mentioned the Chinese region where the US has alleged that China is trying to cause a genocide on the Uyghur minority.
The committee may be one of the few areas where a divided Congress – and potentially the White House – can find common ground. Donald Trump’s presidency brought about a tough stance towards China by the Biden administration. President Joe Biden, for instance, last year signed a new law that will allow the government to spend $200 billion in a bid to claim the leadership of the semiconductor chips industry – a critical sector that could decide the economic race between the US and China in decades to come.
Why Science Matters in the Age of Infomercy: An Analysis of Covid-19 and a Key Issue in Washington’s Laboratory Safety Debate
“There is a bottom line here, which is that neither lab leak, nor spillover – i.e. animal origin – can be ruled out. Tom Frieden, the former director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told CNN on Monday that they didn’t have definitive information.
But it didn’t take long for Republicans to claim political victory in the wake of Sunday’s Wall Street Journal report about new intelligence causing the Department of Energy to believe with low confidence that a lab leak was to blame. Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is accused of spreading conspiracy theories about the flu, but she did not give a reason for her actions.
Tom Cotton is a Republican from Arkansas. Being proven correct does not matter for China’s lab leak. What matters is holding the Chinese Communist Party accountable so this doesn’t happen again.”
Filippa Lentzos of King’s College London and Gregory Koblentz of GeorgeMason University are two of the leaders in a discussion of lab safety. There is a proposal at the Nuclear Threat Initiative that would automatically investigate the origins of a novel outbreak. The disgraced former crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried briefly managed to elevate lab safety into a significant preoccupation on Capitol Hill, but even then, it barely captured a sliver of public attention. What is perhaps most striking is that all this has happened when, according to the most recent reliable polling, more than half of Americans seem to believe that the virus did indeed emerge from a lab.
The issue in Washington this week has become an excuse for Republicans to target scientists and health care professionals, and twist the narrative that Covid-19 has huge gaps.
U.S. Intelligence: Russia is a Cold War, But Does China Really Matter? Reply to the Sen. Kamala-Salpeter
“China has never had to incur any costs for its support for Russia. This would be the first time that it would be an important crossroads, according to a former deputy National Intelligence officer for Russia.
There is a new front between US and China that is starting to trickle into US politics. Being tough on Beijing is a bipartisan position, but the idea of broadening the conflict to include other countries undermines the more limited view of US power projection abroad. The Senate Republican leader supports the additional US aid for Ukraine, but some conservatives, like the Florida governor, are against it. He mentioned the possibility of Chinese involvement in a foreign policy comment last week.
His comments made it clear that Washington is a political place. And few issues are as politicized as tortured US relations with China.
Most of the intelligence community is leaning on the natural occurrence theory that scientific investigations have concluded as most likely. No one has ever been able to completely reject the lab leak theory.
US lawmakers who have pushed the lab leak theory seized on reporting about the new Department of Energy assessment, although the details of what led to the assessment are not yet public.
Josh Hawley demanded more information about the assessment and promised to push for more reports to be classified.
The Science of H1N1: Why does it still matter where the virus came from? A CNN interview with Fauci, MD, director of the FBI, and an interview with Beth Sanner
Dr. Anthony Fauci – the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases whom Republicans have told they will call before Congress to testify about the origins of the disease – has consistently repeated he believes the virus most likely occurred naturally, since other, similar viruses have evolved that way.
He mentioned that the 9/11 Commission was the first ever Covid commission. “I think we desperately need it. Because more Americans have died of Covid than have died in every American war since the American Revolution, which is an astonishing number; that is a major national security issue.”
John King asked Megan Ranney, deputy Dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University, if it mattered where the virus came from.
We know what the next step is. We are not spending time about how to keep America from having to go through the last three years again, while we are focusing on where Covid-19 started.
King also talked to Beth Sanner, the former deputy director of national intelligence for mission integration during the Trump administration, about the report.
“I will just make the observation that the Chinese government, it seems to me, has been doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate the work here,” the bureau director said. “The work that our US government and close foreign partners are doing. That is unfortunate for everyone.
“We don’t just take information or just take a feeling and turn it into analysis,” she said. “We’re actually doing a rigorous process and that’s why we don’t know yet. The evidence is not there.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that a leak in a Chinese lab may have been to blame for the H1N1 outbreak. It was said that it was low confidence.
In an interview, FBI director is reported to have said that they have a team of experts focused on the risk of biological threats that come into the wrong hands.
Wray said that most details of the FBI’s investigation remain classified, and that it has been difficult to work with the Chinese government on investigating the pandemic’s origin.
The Department of Energy’s assessment was pushed against by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who wanted the parties concerned to stop making arguments, stop attacking China and stop politicizing the issue of the virus origin.
When the studies were first published online, NPR talked to a University of Arizona professor who believes the data may shift the debate about the lab-leak theory. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
“Many other [news] outlets are presenting this as new conclusive proof that the lab origin hypothesis is equally as plausible as the zoonotic origin hypothesis,” Rasmussen wrote in an email to NPR, “and that is a misrepresentation of the evidence for either.”
But they come close. They provide photographic evidence of wild animals such as raccoon dogs and a red fox, which can be infected with and shed SARS-CoV-2, sitting in cages in the market in late 2019. In the stall where scientists found the virus on the surfaces, cages, carts and machines that process the animals after they are slaughtered can be found.
The data in the 2022. studies paints an incredibly detailed picture of the early days of the epidemic. A specific stall at a market may be where the coronaviruses were transmitted. Within a few weeks, when not just one but two spillovers occur, a genetic analysis estimates the time. It calculates that the coronavirus jumped into people once in late November or early December and then again few weeks later.
Our new genetic analysis indicates that the virus wasn’t around long when the cases occurred at the market. The earliest known patient at the market was diagnosed on Dec. 10, 2019. As of that time, there were not many people in the world who had contracted the illness and probably fewer than 70.
The animals in the market were wild and live. We have photographic evidence from December 2019. The market had been taken over by a concerned customer who posted photos and videos of the market on Weibo, which is a social networking site. The photos were wiped clean. The person who took the photos had communicated directly with the CNN reporter. I was able to talk to the reporter who gave me the photos from the source. We do not verify the photos completely.
We found out that one stall actually had five positive samples — five surfaces in that stall had virus on them. And even better, in that particular stall, the samples were very animal-y. A virus on a feather/hair remover, a cart of the sort we see in photographs that are used for transporting cages and a metal cage are all examples of things scientists have found.
And at the end of our sleuth work, we checked the GPS coordinates on his camera, and we find that he took the photo at the same stall, where five samples tested positive for SARS-CoV-2.
With a virus, such as SARS-CoV-2, that causes no symptoms or mild symptoms in most people, you don’t have any chance of linking all the early cases to the site where the outbreak started. Because the virus is going to quickly spread to people outside of wherever it started.
Half of the earliest known COVID cases were people directly linked to the seafood market. And the other cases, which aren’t linked through epidemiological data, have an even closer geographical association to the market. That’s what we put in our paper.
There are thousands, perhaps 10,000, other places at least as likely, or even more likely, to be the place where a new pathogen shows up. And yet, in Wuhan, the first cluster of cases happens to be one of the four places that sells live animals, out of 10,000 other places. If you aren’t surprised by that, you won’t understand the unlikelihood that it presents.
Step back and think, “Where is the first cluster of a new respiratory infection going to appear in this city?” It could appear at a market. It could also show up in a meatpacking plant, a university or a school.
The odds would be 1 in 10,000. But it’s interesting. We show in one analysis that there is a 1 in 10 million chance of this happening around the market. If the market isn’t the source of the virus. We consider that strong evidence in science.
The data is as compelling as the data that led to John Snow’s conclusions that the water pump was poisoning people who used it. John Snow, a doctor who was in London in the mid-19th century, was credited with figuring out the cause of a cholera outbreak in the city.
Sometimes you have these rare moments where you’re maybe the only person on Earth who has access to this kind of crucial information. I felt like there were more cases around the market that I didn’t think would happen randomly. Those kinds of moments bring a tear to your eye.
COVID – A Phenomenological Test of Cosmic Evolution in the U.S. Observed by the National Intelligence Council
“I will just make the observation that the Chinese government seems to me has been doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate the work here … and that’s unfortunate for everybody.”
And the FBI’s assessment is far from universal. According to the National Intelligence Council and four other U.S. intelligence agencies, COVID came from natural transmission.