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When did the coronavirus first appear and begin spreading? Did it emerge in December in the Huanan wet market, or did it leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in November, or was it intentionally released at the World Military Games in October? Was it spreading internationally during autumn 2019? Has it been around for years? Here I’ll present evidence that the coronavirus appeared at some point in the second half of 2019 and was spreading globally during that autumn and winter.

As the mournful notes of the cello brought the four minutes of The Dying Swan to a close at The Hague on January 24, 1931, the audience was in tears. Throughout the performance, there had been no dancer — only a moving spotlight emphasizing the absence of Anna Pavlova, the ballerina the world loved. She had died the day before, of a mysterious lung infection that began almost immediately after her train had left Paris. She'd told doctors she suspected she'd been poisoned. Unable to reach a diagnosis, they treated her symptoms but failed to save her. For Soviet émigrés...

Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus' health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled. The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that...

DANAOSHAN, China—On the outskirts of a village deep in the mountains of southwest China, a lone surveillance camera peers down toward a disused copper mine smothered in dense bamboo. As night approaches, bats swoop overhead. This is the subterranean home of the closest known virus on Earth to the one that causes Covid-19. It is also now a touchpoint for escalating calls for a more thorough probe into whether the pandemic could have stemmed from a Chinese laboratory. In April 2012, six miners here fell sick with a mysterious illness after entering the mine to clear bat guano. Three of...

The shadowy figure who funneled information to Christopher Steele for his notorious election-year dossier is Igor Danchenko, a Ukraine-born, Russian-educated researcher who worked in the U.S. and traveled to Moscow to find supposed dirt on candidate Donald Trump. Washington lawyer Mark E. Schamel told The New York Times that Mr. Danchenko is his client. “Igor Danchenko has been identified as one of the sources who provided data and analysis,” he said. A number of online activists had identified Mr. Danchenko, as did Real Clear Investigations. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican, released a 60-page declassified FBI report...

In June of 2017, then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein decried leaks and said “Americans should exercise caution before accepting as true any stories attributed to anonymous ‘officials’ …” “Americans should be skeptical about anonymous allegations,”Rosenstein warned in a June 2017 statement. “The Department of Justice has a long-established policy to neither confirm nor deny such allegations.” BuzzFeed obtained through FOIA a tranche of emails from the Justice Department showing Rosenstein offering to be one of the ‘anonymous officials.’ About two weeks before Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel, he emailed a reporter [named redacted by BuzzFeed] and told them...

Asteroids delivered half of Earth's water, new sample suggests New analysis of grains from asteroid Itokawa, returned by Hayabusa in 2010, suggest our planet may have gotten a significant portion of its liquid from such bodies. By Korey Haynes  |  Published: Wednesday, May 01, 2019 RELATED TOPICS: ASTEORIDS | ROBOTIC MISSIONS The Japanese Space Agency, JAXA, reached asteroid Itokawa in 2005 and returned a sample to Earth in 2010. JAXA In 2010, a Japanese mission called Hayabusa returned to Earth from a seven-year space journey. It brought back not only images and data from its adventure, but also actual samples,...

CNN chief political analyst Gloria Borger on Thursday said a source close to Michael Cohen told her that Cohen has "the goods" on his former boss, President Trump. "'Michael has the goods,'" Borger said on CNN, reading her source's quote. "'He has extremely valuable information.'" Cohen, Trump's longtime fixer and attorney, pleaded guilty Thursday for misstatements he made to Congress while testifying about his contacts with Russians during the 2016 presidential campaign. Cohen appeared in a federal court in Manhattan after reaching a plea deal with special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating ties between Trump's presidential campaign and Russia....

The Department of Justice lost its latest battle... when it allowed House Intelligence Committee members to view classified documents about a top-secret intelligence source that was part of the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign. Even without official confirmation of that source’s name, the news so far holds some stunning implications... Among them is that the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation outright hid critical information from a congressional investigation... The bureau already has some explaining to do. Thanks to the... leakers, we know Mr. Nunes’s request deals with a “top secret intelligence source”... who is a U.S. citizen...

The FoxNews.com reporter who broke the exclusive story about a notebook that Colorado shooter James Holmes sent to his psychiatrist, then refused to reveal her sources under threat of jail, was ordered to return to the Aurora courtroom April 10, in a case experts say has chilling ramifications for the First Amendment.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will investigate whether or not the student NAACP chapter violated UNC’s non-discrimination policy in dismissing senior Billy Thomas, Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Winston Crisp said. On Sunday, members of the NAACP unanimously voted to remove Thomas, who is a segregationist, for his views on race relations. Billy had been a member of the group since his freshman year. “We are on notice that there is a question as to whether or not a student organization has acted in compliance with the policy or not,” Crisp said. “We take that very seriously...

WASHINGTON (AP) - A senior administration official says President Barack Obama is ready to announce an administration plan to recover Wall Street bailout shortfalls with a bank fee on the country's biggest financial firms. The announcement is expected Thursday. The official was not authorized to discuss the fee publicly. The official said the fee would be designed to recoup as much as $120 billion. That's the most administration officials expect to lose from the government's $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program that bailed out banks, automakers and other financial firms.

Jerusalem — Saudi Arabia has been identified as the source of the growing Islamization in the U.S. military. A leading analyst asserted that Saudi Arabia spent millions of dollars in its effort to convert U.S. soldiers to Islam. Dr. Gal Luft, co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security in Washington, said the campaign pioneered by the Saudis began during the 1991 war against Iraq, which involved the deployment of nearly 500,000 U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. "Nearly two decades have passed since the Saudi conversion campaign, and most of the converts may no longer be in uniforms,"...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Congressional aides say the Obama administration has chosen a Colorado natural resources official to be the new agriculture undersecretary in charge of the U.S. Forest Service. Harris Sherman, executive director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, is to be nominated as soon as Thursday. The congressional aides familiar with the decision spoke on condition of anonymity because the White House had yet to announce it.

WASHINGTON — The White House plans to announce the federal deficit is about $262 billion less than officials predicted earlier this year — in part because the administration has provided less aid than expected to Wall Street. The federal deficit this year will total $1.58 trillion, a senior White House official said late Wednesday. That's three times more red ink than last year. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the report before its release next Tuesday while President Barack Obama will be on vacation in Massachusetts.

I'm just curious. Does it matter that to anyone that I don't fill in the "source" part of posts? Is it not enough that I give the URL? Does anyone except pissant give a damn? Get off my back, pissant! Just trying to do my part to save conservatism and fight Obamunism. Your pettiness about formatting gives this whole site a bad name. Not trying to start a fight; but get over yourself with the "proper posting" crap already!

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama was briefed Saturday by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen about the drug wars in Mexico and wanted to know how the United States can help. "Clearly one of the things the president was interested in was the U.S military capability that may or may not apply to our cooperation with the Mexicans," said a U.S. military official who requested anonymity because the discussions were private. "He was very interested in what kind of military capabilities may be applied." Mullen briefed Obama Saturday morning about discussions with Mexican military leaders about the drug...

CHICAGO (AFP) - An Illinois sheriff filed a lawsuit against Craigslist on Thursday calling the popular website the largest clearing house for prostitution in the United States. Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart sued the owners of the classified ad site in US District Court for facilitating prostitution by failing to block blatant offers to trade sex for money. "Craigslist is the single largest source of prostitution in the nation," Dart said at a press conference in Chicago. "Missing children, runaways, abused women and women trafficked in from foreign countries are routinely forced to have sex with strangers because they're being...

Friends, The days are dark right now. The Obama Administration, composed of some of the most anti-American, anti-freedom, and anti-Constitutional leaders we have ever seen, are busy daily deconstructing a free society that took 232 years to build. For those that are perceptive, it can readily be seen that there is brewing on the horizon a battle of epic proportions in the political realm. Like the test Abraham Lincoln referred to in his Gettysburg Address in November,1863, we are met on a great political battlefield which will determine whether a nation founded in liberty will survive, or whether a nation...

2008 will be seen as a landmark year in global communications in the textbooks of 2100 – it was the year that the internet finally surpassed what was once considered an unassailable bastion of main media, newspapers, as the leading source of national and international news in America. The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press is an independent opinion research group that studies attitudes toward the press, politics and public policy issues. This year, for the first time in a Pew survey, more people said they relied mostly on the internet for news than those that cited...