Evidence that an Animal started the Pandemic

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After international scientists discovered a potential link between the origin of the covid-19 virus and raccoon dogs, medical experts in Western Pennsylvania said the animal could be where the virus began.

Samples collected from the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan, China — where the first human cases of covid-19 were found in late 2019 — contained genetic material from raccoon dogs, indicating the fox-like animals may have been infected with the virus.

Raccoon dogs were linked to the first SARS outbreak in 2003, said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a Pittsburgh-based infectious disease expert and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

“That put it on a list of animals that were susceptible to covid-related viruses,” he said, adding that they were known to have been sold at the Huanan seafood market, which is linked to the start of the pandemic…

Vaughn Cooper, a professor of microbiology and molecular genetics and director for the Center for Evolutionary Biology and Medicine at the UPMC School of Medicine, said he’s fairly convinced of the theory that the virus originated in an animal like the raccoon dog and spread to people.

The new evidence that shows the DNA of the raccoon dogs mixed with the RNA of the covid-19 virus is “quite strong,” he said.

Science marches on alongside intellectual honesty. Facts certainly appear to match opinions based on recent science. No doubt leading to confirmation of something like that propounded in this article.

No worry, though. The penny-ante pundits in the Republican Party will soon enough find some new thread to convince the dull-witted and bigoted that ignorance must rule.

Republican Party, America’s rightwing mouthpiece, restarts their campaign to Whitewash history

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25 May 2020, a man died after a “medical incident during police interaction” in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The man was suspected of forgery and “believed to be in his 40s”. He “physically resisted officers” and, after being handcuffed, “appeared to be suffering medical distress”. He was taken to the hospital “where he died a short time later”.

It is not difficult to imagine a version of reality where this, the first police account of George Floyd’s brutal death beneath the knee of an implacable police officer, remained the official narrative of what took place in Minneapolis one year ago. That version of reality unfolds every day. Police lies are accepted and endorsed by the press; press accounts are accepted and believed by the public.

That something else happened – that it is now possible for a news organization to say without caveat or qualification that Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd – required herculean effort and extraordinary bravery on the part of millions of people.

The laborious project of establishing truth in the face of official lies is one that Americans embraced during the racial reckoning of the summer of 2020, whether it was individuals speaking out about their experiences of racism at work, or institutions acknowledging their own complicity in racial injustice. For a time, it seemed that America was finally ready to tell a more honest, nuanced story of itself, one that acknowledged the blood at the root.

But alongside this reassessment, another American tradition re-emerged: a reactionary movement bent on reasserting a whitewashed American myth. These reactionary forces have taken aim at efforts to tell an honest version of American history and speak openly about racism by proposing laws in statehouses across the country that would ban the teaching of “critical race theory”, the New York Times’s 1619 Project, and, euphemistically, “divisive concepts”…

Legislation seeking to limit how teachers talk about race has been considered by at least 15 states…

Hoping to return America to our racist roots, the fascist clown show that owns the Republican Party marches off again on their favorite highway paved with bigotry, lies and deceit.

Watch live as asteroid passes Earth in ‘very close’ approach

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A newly discovered asteroid will make a “very close” approach to the Earth on Friday—and you can watch the space rock zooming through space live online…

The asteroid is estimated to measure around 56 feet across, NASA figures show, making it comparable in size to a house.

Despite the fact that it will fly past Earth on Friday, 2023 EY was only discovered on March 13—just four days before its encounter with our planet. The asteroid was spotted by a telescope at the Sutherland Observing Station in South Africa…

The Virtual Telescope Project (VTP) will be providing a live stream that will enable viewers to watch the asteroid as it zooms past the Earth. The director of the project, Gianluca Masi, described the approach as “very close” in an email to Newsweek.

WOOSH!