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golin link was a false trail laid from China. Nature, however, rejected a submission from another key scientific dissident that showed how all four papers primarily used samples from the same batch of pangolins and that key data was inaccurately reported in two of these papers. Richard Ebright, a bio-security expert and professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, argues that such tolerance of “material omissions and material misstatements” expose a massive issue. “Nature and The Lancet played important roles in enabling, encouraging, and enforcing the false narrative that science evidence indicates Sars-CoV-2 had a natural-spillover origin points and the false narrative that this was the scientific consensus”.

Or as another well-placed observer put it: “The game seems to be for Nature and The Lancet to rush non-peer revised correspondences to set the tone and then delay critical papers and responses.”

But why would they do this? This is where things become even murkier. Allegations swirl that it was not down to editorial misjudgement, but something more sinister: a desire to appease China for commercial reasons. The Financial Times revealed four years ago that debt-laden Springer Nature, the German group that publishes Nature, was blocking access in China to hundreds of academic articles mentioning subjects deemed sensitive by Beijing such as Hong Kong, Taiwan or Tibet. China is also spending lavishly around the world to win supremacy in science — which includes becoming the biggest national sponsor of open access journals published by both Springer Nature and Elsevier, owner of The Lancet.

One source estimated that 49 sponsorship agreements between Springer Nature and Chinese institutions were worth at least $10m last year. These deals cover the publishing fees authors would normally pay in such journals, so they smooth the path for Chinese authors while creating a dependency culture. They have worked well for both sides: they offer the publishers access to the surging Chinese market and its well-resourced universities, while offering international recognition and status in return. But we know President Xi Jinping demands compliance with his world view, even from foreign-owned companies — and especially on an issue as sensitive as his nation’s possible role in unleashing a global catastrophe.

Critics fear these corporate links to China compromise output and distort agendas. “Scientific publishing has become a highly politicised business,” argues Petrovksy. “Clearly there needs to be an international investigation launched into the role of scientific publishers, their increasingly powerful influence as the major publishing houses buy out many of the smaller independent journals, together with their growing politicisation and susceptibility to overt influence. We need to examine what impact this may have had in the pandemic and what impact it could have on science in the future.”

Certainly it is valid to ask where was the real conspiracy in this tawdry saga that has stained so many reputations?

New York ca. 1900. "Italian bread peddlers, Mulberry Street."

[Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Photographic Company]

ly age can only lead to a more healthy and robust kid, and then adolescent and young adult. Healthy children includes their mental health, and their mental health includes seeing them as they are, and that might mean that your kid is trying on different pronouns and gender identities. Kids can be fluid, and moving with the child is going to be so much more beneficial to them, regardless of where they land with their gender and their pronouns, than trying to force them into a box that we scientifically know causes children damage.

Yes, the old canard about suicides if we don't let those poor trans kiddies go for hormone replacement therapy and surgical mutilation. There's even a coda at the end of the article: If you or someone you know may be contemplating suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline…

One thing it is definitely not crucial to talk to kids about is gender pronouns. It's insane. It's unconscionable. It's completely arse-fucking-backwards in its view of sex and gender. It's the sex, the biology, which is immutable. As for gender, be whatever the hell you want be. We used to know all this. 

The gender cult seems to be heading for the US mainstream.

ry into government bodies’ use of the Stonewall scheme, and their reliance on external lobby groups for training and accreditation around diversity and inclusion in general. 

But the first step for Monday morning is transparency and setting a new tone from the top. Let the sunlight in and declare a decisive end to the era of “no debate”.

Forstater's case against her former employer, meanwhile, rumbles on. She originally challenged her non-renewal of contract at the Central London Employment Tribunal, where Judge James Tayler ruled that her 'gender critical' views were "incompatible with human dignity and fundamental rights of others" and that they did "not have the protected characteristic of philosophical belief" under the UK Equality Act 2010. Forstater's appeal against the judgement was heard by the Employment Appeal Tribunal on 27 and 28 April 2021, for which judgement was reserved, and is expected later in the year.

William III that deeply impacted not just architecture but society as a whole.

On discovering this truth, Billman became fascinated by the bricked-up windows around London, realising that they reflect a time when a price was placed on light and air. He believes they have particular resonance with life during lockdown when our windows have been a crucial source of wellbeing, offering us sunlight, fresh air and a means to interact with the outside world.

[Photos © Andy Billman]

The project will be on display from 22 June at Bermondsey Project space as part of the London Festival of Architecture 2021.

Another interesting NYT Jewish tale, this time on the great Isaac Bashevis Singer.

In April, novelist Sigrid Nunez, in an essay about unexpected bonds between strangers in the Times’ style magazine, referred to Singer as a “Polish-American author.” Which seems wilfully obtuse, considering he wrote in Yiddish and his fictional world revolves entirely around Jewish themes and characters from European Jewry. And becomes deeply offensive when you consider what became of that world of the Polish Jews – often with the active connivance of the Poles themselves.

The various reactions featured words like “yikes,” “obscene,” “disgusting,” aghast” and “shanda.”

“Shame on @NYTIMES for erasing his identity and heritage,” one Twitter user wrote. 

It may be true that the Nobel laureate was born and raised in Poland, but Singer is, in fact, best described as a Jewish author, and any labeling that elevates the former while ignoring the latter will strike many Jews as tone-deaf at best. This sensitivity is understandable given that Singer’s hyphenated identities are the result of his immigration to the United States only a few years before the near annihilation of Polish Jewry.

In this case the fault may lie not so much with the NYT's shameful history with the Jews but with Wikipedia, where Singer at the time was indeed referred to as Polish-American.

Now the Isaac Bashevis Singer Wikipedia entry states that the great man was a "Polish-born Jewish-American". But that only happened after a long struggle between those Jews determined to set the record straight, and a young Polish student who, while claiming to be merely following Wikipedia protocol, seems to have been motivated more by the kind of regressive Polish nationalism which has been on the rise recently, and seeks to downplay or erase any Polish involvement in the Holocaust.

A tale for our times, then. The good guys won in the end, though.

’s impossible to report objectively on any story when your editorial line has been decided in advance. The latest Israeli campaign was more accurate than any recent war, with combatants accounting for the vast majority of the dead. All of this is lost when you sacrifice the facts for emotive photographs of children.

Don’t get me wrong. Emotive photographs have their place, and we must never lose touch with the tragic cost of war. But from the point of view of the victims, there is a certain indignity in the fact that they have been used to further a political agenda. And from the point of view of the Times, it is troubling that its journalists have participated in doing so….

It has long been an aphorism of journalism that if one man says it’s raining and another says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both, but to look out of the window and see for yourself.

If the Times journalists had followed the basic tenets of their profession, America’s paper of record would not have become a pawn in the chess game of Hamas. To have the Gray Lady contribute towards Hamas' war aims was a major boon for the terror group – and another dark day for journalism.

Interestingly, the NYT has history in siding with the enemies of Jews. Last week Laurel Leff in Tablet unearthed the story of Guido Enderis, their Berlin bureau chief, and his unashamedly pro-Nazi reporting through the Thirties and into the Forties…

“padding-left: 40px”>It’s encouraging that the conversation is opening up, but concerning that it has taken this long.

Had there been a lively, open scientific debate all along, the international community, including the WHO, may have felt emboldened to demand more from China: more data, more access, the truth. In the absence of such debate they’ve lacked the justification to do so.

But even though this past year has been a lost opportunity, there is still a great deal we can and must do to understand how this terrible pandemic began. For all we know, the next one is just around the corner. Shame on us if we aren’t doing everything humanly possible to prevent and prepare for that.

It's tempting to mutter something about how they're all coming out of the woodwork now that it's safe, these lab leak proponents….but where were they earlier on, when they were needed? I think it's more a case though of no media outlets being willing to publish this kind of thinking in the early days of the pandemic, after the Daszak letter in the Lancet and Trump's intervention. Now the mood's changed.

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Capitol Reef National Park, Utah – Bryony Richards

Helmos Observatory, Greece – Constantine Themelis

Mungo, NSW, Australia – Daniel Thomas Gum

Bisti Badlands, New Mexico – Christine Kenyon

Hormozgan Province, Persian Gulf, Iran – Mohammad Hayati

Riaño, Spain – Pablo Ruiz

Fanthams Peak, Mt. Taranaki, New Zealand – Larryn Rae

Tenerife, Canary Islands – Lorenzo Ranieri Tenti

Zion National Park, Utah – Brandt Ryder

at creates that danger. If, on the other hand, Covid-19 is Mother Nature’s handiwork, then logically we are condemned to a sequence of pandemics; some natural, others accidental, some better and others far more deadly. Not a happy scenario by any stretch….

For ultimately, in order to create a human pandemic, an animal virus has to accomplish two very difficult things. First, it has to successfully infect a person, and then it needs to jump from one person to the next rapidly enough to get ahead of the rate at which sufferers recover or die. SARS2 is a master of this trick, but the closest wild relatives seem to be neutralised, with spike proteins built to invade horseshoe bat cells, not human cells. To trigger a pandemic in people they need substantial evolutionary retooling.

SARS2 did, of course, get that retooling. The question now is where did that rewiring happen? Is it more likely that it occurred in a lab, with researchers altering the spike protein to make a human pathogen, and then passaging that modified virus through ferrets or “humanised mice” with the aim of creating a vaccine or a model for pandemic research? Or did it infect some wild animal or remote human population, circulate for a while, eventually evolving into a more infectious virus?

Either is possible. Yet despite incredible pressure for the Chinese government to find it, so far there is no evidence of a plausible ancestor virus having circulated in an intermediate population. When SARS2 first appeared in Wuhan in late 2019, it was, from the very first moment, pre-adapted to spread through the human body and from one person to another. That’s all but impossible — a major evolutionary mystery.  […]

This failure of the scientific community would be easier to fathom if it were built on actual lies. But I don’t believe that is the case. In order to win at the funding and prestige game — in order to deliver a really great pitch – -you have to be a true believer. Indeed, I suspect the “Gain of Function” research community really thought they were racing against the clock to save the world; experimenting in a reckless manner was a risk they were willing to take. But they were like drunks behind the wheel, with the rest of the world unwittingly along for the ride. […]

But the biggest danger exposed by Covid-19 comes from our universally corrupted institutions. If SARS2 emerged from the lab, then the failure of our institutions is the root cause, and fixing them should be our top priority.

That will no doubt be a Herculean task. Our virologists, the press, the international regulatory bodies and all the major social media platforms are already dragging their feet, doing everything in their power to avoid learning the lesson the virus’s likely origin. And in doing so, they are preventing us from learning it, too. In the coming years, if the world needs saving from anything, it is surely that.