Is this an Extension of Red Flag Law(s) by DHS?

JTN: The Department of Homeland Security has launched a $500,000 grant program for research and data collection on insider threats in the country’s law enforcement agencies.

A blue banner displaying the U.S. Department of Homeland Security seal with the text National Terrorism Advisory System - Bulletin - www.dhs.gov/advisories

The premise for the grant, “Insider Threats in American Law Enforcement,” is that the U.S. is facing a rising number of internal threats and an understanding of the changing environment is needed.

“Due to the growing number of threats our nation is combating,” the grant synopsis explains, the DHS Science and Technology Directorate “supports the evolving threat landscape of a dynamic world with changing motivations, actors, communication models and weaponry.”

The grant prioritizes data collection and technological innovation as means to identify, understand and combat the purported threat of penetration of U.S. law enforcement agencies by violent extremists.

“Objectives of this effort will identify high quality data to understand the risks posed to the United States by the potential for violent extremist organizations or lone actors to infiltrate law enforcement agencies (LEAs) and other government institutions,” the synopsis states.

While billing U.S. taxpayers $500K for this initiative to understand these clandestine “extremist organizations” infiltrating law enforcement, the grant neglects to define what it means by “extremist organizations.”

The research and data collected under the grant is to be shared with a variety of agencies, including private organizations. Yet civil rights and liberties will not be violated in the combined public-private harvesting and sharing of data about undefined “extremists,” DHS insists.

“Knowledge and findings from this research will be transferred to federal, state, local, and private organizations to enable education and awareness to reinforce a whole-of-society prevention architecture while respecting civil rights and civil liberties,” according to the grant description. “These prevention efforts will equip and empower local efforts — including peers, teachers, community leaders, and law enforcement — to minimize a threat as it evolves while enhancing emergency preparedness and response.”

The grant will task the awardee with understanding law enforcement threats from the perspectives of numerous fields, including including economics, psychology, politics and criminology. “The awardee(s) will assist with a range of activities,” the grant specifies, including designing data collection strategies, collecting data from primary and secondary sources, and analyzing data while identifying subject matter experts to participate in interviews and/or focus groups.”

Analyzing research from these various fields and experts will help fill in the gaps in understanding the threat environment and help “counter the threats posed by violent extremists and violent ideologies to United States LEAs and the public,”

The closing date for the grant applications is May 16, a day after the country concludes National Police Week. The week of May 9-May 15 has been designated as National Police Week since 1962 to recognize the service and sacrifice of federal, state and local law enforcement.

As reported by Just the News this week, the DHS and the Department of Defense have announced internal investigations of “extremism” within their departments, raising alarms among conservative civil liberties watchdogs, as the agencies’ notions of “extremism” were  vague and appeared to omit from scrutiny far-left extremist groups implicated in widespread political violence in 2020.

***

Date Issued:  Friday, May 14, 2021 02:00 pm ET
View as PDF:  National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin – May 14, 2021 (pdf, 1 page, 359.67KB)

Summary of Terrorism Threat to the U.S. Homeland

 

The Secretary of Homeland Security has issued a new National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS) Bulletin regarding the current heightened threat environment across the United States.  The Homeland is facing threats that have evolved significantly and become increasingly complex and volatile in 2021. These threats include those posed by domestic terrorists, individuals and groups engaged in grievance-based violence, and those inspired or influenced by foreign terrorists and other malign foreign influences.  Social media and online forums are increasingly exploited by these actors to influence and spread violent extremist narratives and activity.  Such threats also are exacerbated by the impacts from the ongoing global pandemic.

 

Duration

Issued:  May 14, 2021 02:00 pm
Expires:  August 13, 2021 02:00 pm

Additional Details

  • Violent extremists may seek to exploit the easing of COVID-19-related restrictions across the United States to conduct attacks against a broader range of targets after previous public capacity limits reduced opportunities for lethal attacks.
  • Historically, mass-casualty Domestic Violent Extremist (DVE) attacks linked to racially- or ethnically-motivated violent extremists (RMVEs) have targeted houses of worship and crowded commercial facilities or gatherings. Some RMVEs advocate via social media and online platforms for a race war and have stated that civil disorder provides opportunities to engage in violence in furtherance of ideological objectives.
  • Through 2020 and into 2021, government facilities and personnel have been common targets of DVEs, and opportunistic violent criminals are likely to exploit Constitutionally-protected freedom of speech activity linked to racial justice grievances and police use of force concerns, potentially targeting protestors perceived to be ideological opponents.
  • Ideologically-motivated violent extremists fueled by perceived grievances, false narratives, and conspiracy theories continue to share information online with the intent to incite violence. Online narratives across sites known to be frequented by individuals who hold violent extremist ideologies have called for violence against elected officials, political representatives, government facilities, law enforcement, religious or commercial facilities, and perceived ideologically-opposed individuals.
  • The use of encrypted messaging by lone offenders and small violent extremist cells may obscure operational indicators that provide specific warning of a pending act of violence.
  • Messaging from foreign terrorist organizations, including al-Qa‘ida and ISIS, intended to inspire U.S.-based homegrown violent extremists (HVEs) continues to amplify narratives related to exploiting protests. HVEs, who have typically conducted attacks against soft targets, mass gatherings, and law enforcement, remain a threat to the Homeland.
  • Nation-state adversaries have increased efforts to sow discord. For example, Russian, Chinese and Iranian government-linked media outlets have repeatedly amplified conspiracy theories concerning the origins of COVID-19 and effectiveness of vaccines; in some cases, amplifying calls for violence targeting persons of Asian descent.
  • DHS encourages law enforcement and homeland security partners to be alert to these developments and prepared for any effects to public safety. Consistent with applicable law, state, local, tribal, and territorial (SLTT) law enforcement organizations should maintain situational awareness of online and physical activities that may be related to an evolving threat of violence.

How We Are Responding

  • DHS and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) continue to provide guidance to SLTT partners about the current threat environment. Specifically, DHS has issued numerous intelligence assessments to SLTT officials on the evolving threat.
  • DHS is collaborating with industry partners to identify and respond to those individuals encouraging violence and attempting to radicalize others through spreading disinformation, conspiracy theories, and false narratives on social media and other online platforms.
  • DHS has prioritized combatting DVE threats within its FEMA grants as a National Priority Area.
  • DHS remains committed to identifying and preventing domestic terrorism.

How You Can Help

Be Prepared and Stay Informed

  • Be prepared for any emergency situations and remain aware of circumstances that may place your personal safety at risk.
  • Maintain digital media literacy to recognize and build resilience to false and harmful narratives.
  • Make note of your surroundings and the nearest security personnel.
  • Business owners should consider the safety and security of customers, employees, facilities, infrastructure, and cyber networks.
  • Government agencies will provide details about emerging threats as information is identified. The public is encouraged to listen to local authorities and public safety officials.

If You See Something, Say Something®. Report suspicious activity to local law enforcement or call 911.

 

Organized Crime in San Francisco Forces Retailers to Close

It all escalated with Prop 47…you remember that right? Going back to 2019, in part from the Federalist:

Rachel Michelin, who currently serves as President of the California Retailers Association, explained to Fox News the crude savviness of the latest generation of shoplifters. “[Shoplifters] know what they’re doing. They will bring in calculators and get all the way up to the $950 limit.” She continued. “One person will go into a store, fill up their backpack, come out, dump it out and go right back in and do it all over again.”

Retailers tried to work through the shoplifting with higher training for employees and more security systems and officers…due to the volume, the retailers just lost the battle. Residents in the area of San Francisco and actually around the state live in lawlessness….

No one is above the law unless it is the woke crowd and there is a value threshold….

*** Slide 1 of 3: Walgreens throughout Sam Francisco have been hit hard during the pandemic.

© Lea Suzuki/The Chronicle 2020// Mallory Moench is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer

That changed in March when the Walgreens, ravaged by shoplifting, closed. Susoeff, 77, who sometimes uses a cane, now goes six blocks for medication and other necessities.

“It’s terrible,” he said. On his last visit before the store closed, even beef jerky was behind lock and key. A CVS nearby shuttered in 2019, with similar reports of rampant shoplifting.

“I don’t blame them for closing,” Susoeff said.

Last year, burglaries increased in most San Francisco neighborhoods. Shoplifting decreased under pandemic lockdown and dropped slightly the year before, but incidents are often underreported and have become more violent and brazen, police said.

Retailers attributed a majority of losses to professional thieves instead of opportunistic shoplifters who may be driven by poverty, with one CVS leader calling San Francisco a hub of organized retail crime. Losses have shuttered drugstores providing vital services, even more critical during the pandemic as some stores give out vaccines.

“This has been out of control,” said Supervisor Ahsha Safaí, who held a hearing Thursday with retailers, police, the district attorney and probation departments. “People are scared to go into these stores — seniors, people with disabilities, children. It’s just happening brazenly. We can’t just as a city throw up our hands and say this is OK. We have to come up with solutions.”

The cost of business and shoplifting led Walgreens to shut 17 locations in San Francisco in the past five years — an “unpopular and difficult decision,” Jason Cunningham, regional vice president for pharmacy and retail operations in California and Hawaii, said at the hearing. The company still has 53 stores in the city.

Theft in Walgreens’ San Francisco stores is four times the average for stores elsewhere in the country, and the chain spends 35 times more on security guards in the city than elsewhere, Cunningham said.

At CVS, 42% of losses in the Bay Area came from 12 stores in San Francisco, which are only 8% of the market share, Brendan Dugan, director of organized retail crime and corporate investigations, said at the hearing.

CVS and Walgreens said they train employees to be engaged and visible to prevent theft, but to not confront thieves directly when it could turn violent. CVS security guards in San Francisco have been assaulted, especially at the now-closed Seventh and Market streets location, Dugan said. Some businesses instead hire costly off-duty police officers.

Although the majority of CVS shoplifting incidents in the city are by opportunists, Dugan said, professional crime accounts for 85% of the company’s dollar losses. He said San Francisco is one of the “epicenters” of organized retail crime, pointing to an $8 million state bust in the Bay Area last year.

Officials agreed that different responses were needed depending on why someone was committing a crime. San Francisco Deputy Public Defender Doug Welch called in to the hearing to say his clients charged with shoplifting are not part of organized crime, but are homeless or struggling with substance abuse and need more services.

The San Francisco police burglary unit focuses on investigating serial shoplifters, especially if they’re violent, police said. Beat officers patrol known shoplifting areas. Last year, around 31% of shoplifting incidents resulted in arrest, a percentage that declined over the past couple years, police said.

A statement from Safeway read at Thursday’s hearing blamed Proposition 47, which lowered penalties for thefts under $950, for “dramatic increases” in shoplifting losses. Safaí said he is proud of Prop. 47 and supports criminal justice reform and rehabilitation, but also urges prosecution for organized crime and community ambassadors to prevent opportunistic shoplifting.

Professional shoplifters can work the system by stealing items under the threshold from one store and hitting several retailers in the same day. To prosecute, the district attorney has pursued aggregated charges for multiple petty theft incidents by the same person, such as a recent case of stolen scooters. Police said a person could also be charged with possession of stolen property worth more than $950.

As officials try to stave off crime, San Franciscans suffer from shuttered stores. Residents tried to save the Walgreens at Bush and Larkin in March, circulating a petition and arguing that the next closest store was not handicapped-accessible.

“This has become a lifeline for many seniors, people with disabilities, and low income residents who cannot go further out to other stores to get what they need,” the petition said.

The store still wound up closing.

 

 

Looks Like Law Enforcement Actually Shutdown DarkSide

A big hat tip to the work of law enforcement but which agency remains unknown at this point.

Shutting down the servers of DarkSide is a great achievement but not before there were other victims such as Toshiba.

A Toshiba Corp (6502.T) unit said it was hacked by the DarkSide ransomware group, overshadowing an announcement of a strategic review for the Japanese conglomerate under pressure from activist shareholders to seek out suitors.

Toshiba Tec Corp (6588.T), which makes products such as bar code printers and is valued at $2.3 billion, was hacked by DarkSide – the group widely believed to be behind the recent Colonial Pipeline attack, its French subsidiary said.

From Krebs:

The DarkSide ransomware affiliate program responsible for the six-day outage at Colonial Pipeline this week that led to fuel shortages and price spikes across the country is running for the hills. The crime gang announced it was closing up shop after its servers were seized and someone drained the cryptocurrency from an account the group uses to pay affiliates.

“Servers were seized (country not named), money of advertisers and founders was transferred to an unknown account,” reads a message from a cybercrime forum reposted to the Russian OSINT Telegram channel.

“A few hours ago, we lost access to the public part of our infrastructure,” the message continues, explaining the outage affected its victim shaming blog where stolen data is published from victims who refuse to pay a ransom.

“Hosting support, apart from information ‘at the request of law enforcement agencies,’ does not provide any other information,” the DarkSide admin says. “Also, a few hours after the withdrawal, funds from the payment server (ours and clients’) were withdrawn to an unknown address.”

DarkSide organizers also said they were releasing decryption tools for all of the companies that have been ransomed but which haven’t yet paid.

“After that, you will be free to communicate with them wherever you want in any way you want,” the instructions read.

The DarkSide message includes passages apparently penned by a leader of the REvil ransomware-as-a-service platform. This is interesting because security experts have posited that many of DarkSide’s core members are closely tied to the REvil gang.

The REvil representative said its program was introducing new restrictions on the kinds of organizations that affiliates could hold for ransom, and that henceforth it would be forbidden to attack those in the “social sector” (defined as healthcare and educational institutions) and organizations in the “gov-sector” (state) of any country. Affiliates also will be required to get approval before infecting victims.

The new restrictions came as some Russian cybercrime forums began distancing themselves from ransomware operations altogether. On Thursday, the administrator of the popular Russian forum XSS announced the community would no longer allow discussion threads about ransomware moneymaking programs.

“There’s too much publicity,” the XSS administrator explained. “Ransomware has gathered a critical mass of nonsense, bullshit, hype, and fuss around it. The word ‘ransomware’ has been put on a par with a number of unpleasant phenomena, such as geopolitical tensions, extortion, and government-backed hacks. This word has become dangerous and toxic.”

In a blog post on the DarkSide closure, cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 said it believes all of these actions can be tied directly to the reaction related to the high-profile ransomware attacks covered by the media this week.

“However, a strong caveat should be applied to these developments: it’s likely that these ransomware operators are trying to retreat from the spotlight more than suddenly discovering the error of their ways,” Intel 471 wrote. “A number of the operators will most likely operate in their own closed-knit groups, resurfacing under new names and updated ransomware variants. Additionally, the operators will have to find a new way to ‘wash’ the cryptocurrency they earn from ransoms. Intel 471 has observed that BitMix, a popular cryptocurrency mixing service used by Avaddon, DarkSide and REvil has allegedly ceased operations. Several apparent customers of the service reported they were unable to access BitMix in the last week.”

***

“The funds, which the Darkside gang was supposed to split between itself and its affiliates (the threat actors who breach networks and deploy the ransomware), were transferred to an unknown wallet, Darksupp said.” reported TheRecord.

The news was revealed by a member of REvil ransomware gang, known as ‘UNKN,’ in a forum post on the Exploit hacking forum. The post was first spotted by Recorded Future researcher Dmitry Smilyanets, it includes a message allegedly from DarkSide explaining how the gang lost access to their blog, payment servers, and DDoS servers as a result of an action conducted by law enforcement action. source

Darkside

“Since the first version, we have promised to speak honestly and openly about problems. A few hours ago, we lost access to the public part of our infrastructure, namely:

  • Blog.
  • Payment server.
  • DOS servers.”

reads the post from UNKN. “Now these servers are unavailable via SSH, the hosting panels are blocked. Hosting support, apart from information “at the request of law enfocement agencies”, does not provide any other information.”

 

Retired Flag Officers’ Letter to Biden Challenging his Presidency

Primer: As the Democrats are aggressively fighting for election reform with the most disgusting legislation known as H.R. 1, it should also be noted that Liz Cheney (R-WY) was essentially removed from Republican leadership over what she calls the ‘big lie’ But then Mollie Hemmingway, Senior Editor at The Federalist has just released her new book titled Rigged. Her book discussed how media, big tech and the Democrats seized the elections.

We also cannot ignore former Ambassador and former DNI Director Ric Grenell when he asserts that Susan Rice is the shadow president. In fact, he has said it often and rightly so.

Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized ... source

This is all going on while many state legislatures are passing more secure and stringent election laws.

Meanwhile, enter former flag officers…..

  • A group named “Flag Officers 4 America” released a letter signed by 124 former military leaders.
  • The letter questioned the 2020 election result and Biden’s physical and mental health.
  • One serving Navy leader told Politico the letter was “disturbing and reckless.”

BusinessInsider: More than 120 retired US military leaders have signed an open letter appearing to advance a false conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was rigged, and questioning President Joe Biden’s mental capacity to rule.

“Without fair and honest elections that accurately reflect the ‘will of the people’ our Constitutional Republic is lost,” said the letter released Tuesday by “Flag Officers 4 America,” and signed by 124 former admirals and generals.

“The FBI and Supreme Court must act swiftly when election irregularities are surfaced and not ignore them as was done in 2020.”

On its website, Flag Officers 4 America says it is a collection of “retired military leaders who pledged to support and defend the Constitution of the US against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

In the letter, the signatories, many of whom have been out of active service for decades, also addressed concerns over Biden’s health.

“The mental and physical condition of the Commander in Chief cannot be ignored. He must be able to quickly make accurate national security decisions involving life and limb anywhere, day or night,” the letter said.

Insider has contacted the Department of Defense for comment.

Throughout the 2020 election campaign former President Donald Trump regularly cast doubts on Biden’s health and suitability to rule, calling him “Sleepy Joe” and saying in March 2020 that there was “something going on” with Biden’s mental abilities.

Earlier this month Biden’s personal doctor, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, released a report on the president’s health, in which he called him a “healthy, vigorous, 77-year-old male, who is fit to successfully execute the duties of the Presidency.”

Biden is the oldest serving US president in history, and the White House said this week that the president will undergo a full check-up this year.

© Melina Mara/The Washington Post via AP, Pool Biden addresses a joint session of Congress on April 28, 2021. Melina Mara/The Washington Post via AP, Pool

In the Tuesday letter, the Flag Officers 4 America signatories also laid out what they deem to be the major threats facing the US, namely the rise of China, the rejoining of the Iran nuclear deal, immigration, and the ending of the Keystone Pipeline project.

The signatories also called for the removal of Section 230, a part of US law that shields tech companies from legal liability. Trump called for the section to be removed last year after Twitter flagged two of his tweets about mail-in voting.

“Our Nation is in deep peril,” the signatories wrote in the introduction to the letter.

“We are in a fight for our survival as a Constitutional Republic like no other time since our founding in 1776. The conflict is between supporters of Socialism and Marxism vs. supporters of Constitutional freedom and liberty.”

Several military experts told Politico the letter was an outright partisan attack and dangerous.

One serving Navy officer told Politico the letter was “disturbing and reckless” while Jim Golby, an expert in civil-military relations, told the outlet it was a “shameful effort to use their rank and the military’s reputation for such a gross and blatant partisan attack.”

The letter’s organizer, Maj. Gen. Joe Arbuckle, told Politico: “Retired generals and admirals normally do not engage in political actions.”

“But the situation facing our nation today is dire … We are facing threats greater than at any other time since our country was founded. To remain silent would be a dereliction of duty.”

Read the original article on Business Insider

A Chinese Freeze Dried Virus Part of Warfare?

“The PLA is engaging in irregular warfare today,” the West Point paper asserts. “China is employing lawfare to achieve strategic aims. The maritime militia is enforcing China’s sovereignty claims in the East and South China Seas against US partners and allies.”

And it has already weaponised international information flows and channels of influence, along with cyber, economic – and psychological – tactics. Source

Primer: Chinese scientists have been preparing for a Third World War fought with biological and genetic weapons including coronavirus for the last six years, according to a document obtained by US investigators.

The bombshell paper, accessed by the US State Department, insists they will be ‘the core weapon for victory’ in such a conflict, even outlining the perfect conditions to release a bioweapon, and documenting the impact it would have on ‘the enemy’s medical system’.

This latest evidence that Beijing considered the military potential of SARS coronaviruses from as early as 2015 has also raised fresh fears over the cause of Covid-19, with some officials still believing the virus could have escaped from a Chinese lab.

***

Before Covid-19, did we actually know who Anthony Fauci was and what he is about? Since 1984, he has been the Director of NIAID. His portfolio says is complete with prevention, diagnosis and treatment(s) of infectious diseases. Remember the Ebola crisis? Did we hear his name back then and did the Obama administration hire Fauci for guidance on the Ebola outbreak? Nah. What about Zika? Remember that one? Still we did not hear from Dr. Fauci. According to his professional profile, Fauci advised and served seven presidents. Really? Did Dr. Fauci even advise presidents on all things pandemic, virus or risks from Wuhan? If so….where is the evidence?

According to the National Institute of Health website going back to 2018, there is a profound ‘Serological Evidence of Bat SARS-Related Coronavirus Infections in Humans, China dissertation complete with references and footnotes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notice this is a partial screen shot in case it gets deleted by NIH. But note the dates in the summary. Further in the summary –> We conducted a virus neutralization test for the six positive samples targeting two SARSr-CoVs, WIV1 and WIV16 (Ge et al. ; Yang et al. ). None of them were able to neutralize either virus. These sera also failed to react by Western blot with any of the recombinant RBD proteins from SARS-CoV or the three bat SARSr-CoVs Rp3, WIV1, and SHC014. We also performed viral nucleic acid detection in oral and fecal swabs and blood cells, and none of these were positive.

Further in the study is this notation:

Acknowledgements

This study was jointly funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China Grant (81290341) to ZLS; the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health (Award Number R01AI110964) to PD and ZLS, United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Emerging Pandemic Threats PREDICT project Grant (Cooperative Agreement No. AID-OAA-A-14-00102) to PD; and Singapore NRF-CRP Grant (NRF2012NRF-CRP001–056) and CD-PHRG Grant (CDPHRG/0006/2014) to LFW.

We have some harder questions to ask of Dr. Fauci and a few other U.S. agencies…right? YES.

So, back to the paper originally released by the Australian and the DailyMail:

The authors of the document insist that a third world war ‘will be biological’, unlike the first two wars which were described as chemical and nuclear respectively.

Referencing research which suggested the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan forced them to surrender, and bringing about the end of WWII, they claim bioweapons will be ‘the core weapon for victory’ in a third world war.

The document also outlines the ideal conditions to release a bioweapon and cause maximum damage.

The scientists say such attacks should not be carried out in the middle of a clear day, as intense sunlight can damage the pathogens, while rain or snow can affect the aerosol particles.

Instead, it should be released at night, or at dawn, dusk, or under cloudy weather, with ‘a stable wind direction…so that the aerosol can float into the target area’.

Meanwhile, the research also notes that such an attack would result in a surge of patients requiring hospital treatment, which then ‘could cause the enemy’s medical system to collapse’.

Other concerns include China’s ‘Gain of Function’ research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology – near where the first Covid outbreak was discovered – at which virologists are creating new viruses said to be more transmissible and more lethal.

MP Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the foreign affairs committee, said: ‘This document raises major concerns about the ambitions of some of those who advise the top party leadership. Even under the tightest controls these weapons are dangerous.’

Chemical weapons expert Hamish de Bretton-Gordon said: ‘China has thwarted all attempts to regulate and police its laboratories where such experimentation may have taken place.’

The revelation from the book What Really Happened in Wuhan was reported yesterday.

The document, New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bioweapons, says: ‘Following developments in other scientific fields, there have been major advances in the delivery of biological agents.

‘For example, the new-found ability to freeze-dry micro-organisms has made it possible to store biological agents and aerosolise them during attacks.’

It has 18 authors who were working at ‘high-risk’ labs, analysts say.

Australian Strategic Policy ­Institute executive director Peter Jennings also raised concerns over China’s biological research into coronaviruses potentially being weaponised in future.

Additionally in the article :

Only this week, Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro appeared to strongly criticise China by accusing it of creating Covid to spark a chemical ‘warfare.’

The comments were made during a press conference on Wednesday as the hardline leader sought to further distance himself from the growing attacks over his domestic handling of a pandemic that has produced the second-highest death toll in the world.

‘It’s a new virus. Nobody knows whether it was born in a laboratory or because a human ate some animal they shouldn’t have,’ Bolsonaro said.

‘But it is there. The military knows what chemical, bacteriological and radiological warfare. Are we not facing a new war? Which country has grown its GDP the most? I will not tell you.’

Since we can no longer get reliable information from our current government officials, perhaps we should ask Brazil or Australia, right?

Scientists studying bat diseases at China‘s maximum-security laboratory in Wuhan were engaged in a massive project to investigate animal viruses alongside leading military officials – despite their denials of any such links.

Documents obtained by The Mail on Sunday reveal that a nationwide scheme, directed by a leading state body, was launched nine years ago to discover new viruses and detect the ‘dark matter’ of biology involved in spreading diseases.

One leading Chinese scientist, who published the first genetic sequence of the Covid-19 virus in January last year, found 143 new diseases in the first three years of the project alone.

The fact that such a virus-detection project is led by both civilian and military scientists appears to confirm incendiary claims from the United States alleging collaboration between the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and the country’s 2.1 million-strong armed forces. Continue reading in full here.

What does Canada know?

National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg gets $5M to expand ...

In part:

In July 2019, a rare event occurred in Canada, whereby a group of Chinese virologists were forcibly dispatched from the Canadian National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg, a facility they worked in, running parts of the Special Pathogen Programme of Canada’s Public Health Agency.1 Experimental infections – including aerogenic ones – of monkeys with the most lethal viruses found on Planet Earth comprise nearly a routine therein. Four months earlier, a shipment of two exceptionally virulent viruses dealt with in the NML – Ebola and Nipah viruses – was on its way from NML, ended in China, and has thereafter been traced and regarded to be improper, specifically put as “possible policy breaches”, or rather but an “administrative issue”, ostensibly.2

Yet the scope of this incident is much wider, in actuality. The main culprit seems to be Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, an outstanding Chinese scientist, born in Tianjin. Heading until recently the Vaccine Development and Antiviral Therapies section of the Special Pathogens Programme, she primarily received her medical doctor degree from Hebei Medical University in China in 1985 and came to Canada for graduate studies in 1996.3 Later on, she was affiliated with the Institute of Cell Biology and the Department of Pediatrics and Child Health of the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, not engaged with studying pathogens.4 But a shift took place, somehow. Since 2006,5 she has been studying powerful viruses, Ebola virus foremost, in the NML. The two viruses shipped from the NML to China – Ebola and Nipah – were studied by her in 2014, for instance (together with the viruses Machupo, Junin, Rift Valley Fever, Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever and Hendra).6 Yet utmost attention has been paid to Ebola, with the highly legitimate aim of developing effective prophylaxis and treatment for infected people. Inevitably, her works included a variety of Ebola wild strains – among them the most virulent one, with 80% lethality rate – and much relied on experimental infections of monkeys, including via the airways.7 Remarkable achievements were attained, indeed, and Dr. Qiu accepted the Governor General’s Innovation Award in 2018. More here.

Even media in India is asking for the same transparency on the Canadian component:

Source: China has been a signatory to the Biological Weapons Convention since 1984, and has repeatedly insisted it is abiding by the treaty that bans developing bio-weapons.

But suspicions have persisted, with the U.S. State Department and other agencies stating publicly as recently as 2009 that they believe China has offensive biological agents.

Though no details have appeared in the open literature, China is “commonly considered to have an active biological warfare program,” says the Federation of American Scientists. An official with the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Chemical Defence charged last month China is the world leader in toxin “threats.”

In a 2015 academic paper, Shoham – of Bar-Ilan’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies – asserts that more than 40 Chinese facilities are involved in bio-weapon production.

China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences actually developed an Ebola drug – called JK-05 — but little has been divulged about it or the defence facility’s possession of the virus, prompting speculation its Ebola cells are part of China’s bio-warfare arsenal, Shoham told the National Post.