Protesters gather near the shooting scene where a man accompanying his 5-year-old son was targeted by ICE agents in the Bronx borough of New York on October 8, 2026. (Photo by AFP)
Press TV
2026/10/09
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has demanded an immediate end to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations in the city after federal agents shot a man in the Bronx while a five-year-old child was inside his vehicle.
Mamdani issued a statement on Thursday evening, calling the shooting “unconscionable” and saying he had contacted President Donald Trump to demand an immediate end to all ICE enforcement operations in New York City.
“This is an unconscionable and incredibly serious situation,” Mamdani said. “I have called the President; when we speak I will demand that he ends all ICE enforcement actions in our city. I will not stand by while ICE agents terrorize our communities.”
The shooting occurred around 4 pm on Thursday in the Marble Hill neighborhood. Mamdani said several details remained unclear but condemned ICE for endangering families on a crowded street shortly after school had ended.
The mayor said ICE agents surrounded the man’s vehicle while wearing construction vests and masks that concealed their faces, making it difficult to identify them as federal officers.
“We know that ICE is rotten to its core,” he said, stating that the agency was operating with impunity and spreading “chaos and terror”.
Mamdani said he had spent two hours speaking with Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin in an unsuccessful attempt to secure the injured man’s release. He said ICE agents subsequently removed the man in an unmarked vehicle.
Anti-ICE demonstrators gathered outside NewYork-Presbyterian Allen Hospital, where the injured man was receiving treatment, the New York Post reported.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul joined mounting criticism of federal immigration agents following the shooting, condemning “a pattern of violence by ICE and demanding immediate answers from federal authorities.” Hochul, said she had also spoken with Trump over the incident.
“New Yorkers have witnessed far too many acts of violence by a rogue federal agency and untrained agents that operate with impunity,” Hochul said. “Federal authorities need to provide answers, and they must do so immediately.”
The man shot by ICE was identified as 28-year-old Oscar Belgal, a Dominican Republic national. He was in his car with a five-year-old boy, believed by police to be his son, when federal agents opened fire.
New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said a plainclothes ICE agent approached the driver’s-side window with his gun drawn, while another stood near the vehicle’s headlight. The car then moved forward. Evidence collected at the scene showed that at least one ICE agent fired seven rounds, Tisch said, striking Belgal in the neck below his left ear.
Federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officers had been involved in at least 30 shootings during Trump’s second administration, including several fatal incidents, a CBS News analysis found.
In January, federal agents shot and killed two US citizens, Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, in Minneapolis amid an intensified immigration crackdown. Last month, an ICE officer shot and wounded Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, a Venezuelan DoorDash delivery driver, in Austin, Texas.
People gather to stage protest against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government as they gather at Habima Square in Tel Aviv, Israel on June 6, 2026. [Gideon Markowicz – Anadolu Agency]
Middle East Monitor
Oct 6, 2026
US sources said a secret assessment by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) warned that Israel risks sliding into civil war or political collapse amid growing political, economic and social divisions after years of wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.
According to two sources who spoke to the US-based Drop Site News, the report was prepared in August under the title “Fracture From Within” by experts from the CIA’s Red Cell, a unit that conducts forward-looking assessments and analysis outside traditional frameworks.
The assessment appears to focus only on Jewish citizens in Israel and does not take into account Arab citizens, who make up about 20 per cent of the country’s population. The CIA did not respond to a request for comment.
CIA experts pointed to a volatile mix of pressures converging ahead of Israel’s 27th October election, including an economic crisis and increased military spending; the return of heavily armed veterans from prolonged fighting, many of whom are suffering from severe psychological trauma; growing anger over exemptions from military service for ultra-Orthodox men; rising settler violence in the occupied West Bank; and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s struggle to retain power, which the report said is fuelling a constitutional crisis.
The CIA’s Red Cells are tasked with producing analysis and ideas that challenge prevailing assumptions and expose groupthink or blind spots within the intelligence agency.
The Trump administration has barred OSCE election observers from the upcoming US midterm elections.
For the first time in more than two decades, the administration of US President Donald Trump has declined to invite international election observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) to monitor the upcoming midterm elections, drawing criticism from election experts and human rights groups.
The decision means OSCE observers will be absent from the US midterm elections — scheduled to be held in November — for the first time since 2002.
The move comes as Democrats and election-integrity experts have expressed worries about potential election meddling, particularly after the Justice Department announced plans to deploy its own poll monitors.
The OSCE has already described the decision “regrettable,” stressing that it “is not in line” with existing US commitments to other participating countries, which have agreed to invite election observers.
Human rights organizations have warned the move fuels fears of serious human rights concerns around the upcoming elections.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also alerted that the decision by the White House “risks undermining public trust in America’s safe and secure election system.”
“The Trump administration’s decision not to invite international observers to the United States is deeply antithetical to the spirit of freedom, democracy and transparency that defines our elections,” she stressed.
Shaheen added that the US should hold “itself to the same standards that we would expect of any other democracy.”
This is while a State Department spokesperson defended the decision, saying the OSCE “should focus its limited resources on elections where it can have the greatest impact.”
The OSCE has monitored every US federal election since 2002, including the 2018 midterms during Trump’s first term and the 2024 election, which it deemed “well-run” with candidates campaigning “freely across the country.”
Its observers typically visit polling stations and report on how elections are conducted, without interfering or having enforcement powers.
“Refusing election observers is usually something that countries in a position of weakness do, when they know that they have corrupt or unfair elections,” said Dan Baer, a former US ambassador to the OSCE during the administration of former American president Barak Obama.
“It’s very strange for the United States, which has been historically a standard setter in free and fair elections, to refuse observers,” he noted.
Trump has been campaigning across the country for Republican candidates as the party seeks to maintain its political advantage.
Republicans in some traditionally conservative areas have also faced signs of weakening support, while some members of the party have sought to distance themselves from Trump on issues such as immigration.
With the midterm elections approaching, the extent to which Trump’s declining approval translates into voting behavior could have significant consequences for the balance of power in Washington.
Turkish media reports that Syrian army fighters have also been deployed to back Saudi Arabia’s proxies inside Yemen
Pakistani fighter jets have been attacking Ansarallah-led Yemeni army forces following the activation this week of a defense pact between Riyadh, Islamabad, and Ankara, reports on 7 and 8 October said.
“Pakistan Air Force fighter jets were being used in strikes” this week against the Yemeni Armed Forces (YAF), a senior Pakistani military official told the New York Times(NYT) on Wednesday.
Pakistani military spokesman Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry told CNN that Islamabad’s forces are in the kingdom. “The forces of Pakistan are already there. That I can share with you,” he said.
At least 8,000 Pakistani troops have been deployed to Saudi Arabia this year as part of the defense pact, as well as fighter jets, Reuters reporting from earlier this year had already confirmed.
The New Arabcited experts as saying this week that “Pakistan could concentrate on territorial defense and military support inside Saudi Arabia, while Turkey provides capabilities including surveillance, air defense and drones.”
According to the Turkiye Gazetesi, more than 200 military personnel, along with significant quantities of Turkish electronic warfare systems and ground- and air-defense missiles, have been transferred to Saudi Arabia since the Mecca pact was formed.
Turkish defense systems are reportedly being used extensively against Ansarallah and enhance the Saudi-backed Yemeni army’s combat capabilities.
The Turkish report also says hundreds of Syrian army fighters have been deployed to the Saudi-backed side in Yemen.
Meanwhile, it claims the “Shia front has become active,” and that fighters from Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran have been entering Yemen to join the Ansarallah-led side.
The report coincides with a heavy Yemeni Armed Forces (YAF) retaliatory campaign of missile and drone strikes against Saudi Arabia’s military and energy sites.
Aramco infrastructure, including refineries and storage sites, as well as military bases and sites inside the kingdom that are used to attack Yemen, have been repeatedly targeted in recent days.
Heavy clashes inside Yemen are ongoing as well, as Ansarallah-led forces clash with the kingdom’s proxies in a bid to expel the Saudi-led coalition from the country.
Washington refuted the report and claimed Tehran ‘does not have money’ to support its allies in the Axis of Resistance
Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah has received $200 million from Iran to help alleviate the suffering of displaced civilians uprooted from their homes by Israel’s brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing in Lebanon,Reuters reported exclusively on 7 October.
“Hezbollah has received $200 million from Iran to help Lebanese displaced by [Israel’s war] … Hezbollah received the cash last month despite a tightening US economic chokehold on Iran and increasing difficulties in getting funds to Tehran’s [allies],” sources said.
“Intermediaries who moved the money charged a 20 percent fee, reflecting the risks of dealing with [Hezbollah],” they added.
This is reportedly four times the normal fee.
Reuters, citing what it said was a “Hezbollah official,” said that “an amount had been secured and a plan for distributing it would be announced in the coming days.”
The Iranian Foreign Ministry, Iran’s UN mission, and the Lebanese state did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Washington refuted the report. The money is “not there,” a State Department spokesman said.
Hezbollah is “trying to save face with fake stories about cash influxes from Iran,” the spokesman went on to claim.
“The US will continue to strangle Hezbollah’s finances through sanctions while supporting the ability of Lebanon’s legitimate government to rebuild the south.”
Iran is “running out of money and ways to move money” and “does not have money to fund its campaign of terror,” said a Treasury spokesperson.
Hezbollah’s leader Naim Qassem had said last month that the resistance would soon help provide housing to displaced civilians using “available resources and donations.”
Israel’s brutal war on Lebanon has resulted in the killing of thousands, the displacement of hundreds of thousands, and the destruction of entire villages along the border.
Tel Aviv has vowed to continue its occupation, ethnic cleansing, and destruction of civilian infrastructure – and openly threatens to prevent the displaced from returning to their towns.
Reconstruction funds from regional countries have been contingent on Hezbollah’s disarmament, which the resistance movement rejects.
In June this year, the Lebanese government agreed to an unconstitutional framework agreement during direct talks with Israel, brokered by Washington and carried out in violation of Lebanon’s laws.
The deal stipulates that Hezbollah must surrender its arms before occupation forces withdraw. Hezbollah, its allies, and other segments of Lebanese society have rejected it.
Reports on slain Palestinian US citizens and rampant settler violence were buried or rewritten to praise Netanyahu instead
A senior aide to US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has been blocking and rewriting embassy reports to Washington to whitewash Israeli crimes in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, the New York Timesreported on 8 October.
David Milstein, who joined the US embassy in Jerusalem in April 2025 and serves as a de facto chief of staff to Huckabee, oversees much of the mission’s work on the West Bank and Gaza.
According to a dozen people who deal with him in Jerusalem and Washington, he has used that role to repeatedly suppress or doctor cables on illegal Israeli settlement expansion, settler attacks, the killings of Palestinian US citizens, and deadly aid distribution in Gaza.
Among the reports Milstein buried was a March embassy review of the killings of nine Palestinian US citizens by Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank over four years. The latest, 19-year-old Nasrallah Abu Siyam, was shot dead by a settler in February as he tried to stop the theft of his village’s livestock.
The review was compiled after 30 members of Congress, led by Senator Chris Van Hollen, pressed Secretary of State Marco Rubio for answers. It found that most investigations had gone nowhere, some had been closed, and not one person had been charged.
Rather than send it, Milstein pushed for a reply assuring lawmakers that Israel was handling the cases properly. The State Department letter that reached Van Hollen on 4 May withheld the findings, pointing instead to the embassy’s wartime focus on security cooperation with Israel.
“If you don’t get accountability, you endanger more American citizens,” Van Hollen said.
In the summer of 2025, Palestinians seeking food were being shot dead en masse at the sites of the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a US-Israeli scheme that turned aid distribution into a death trap and killed at least 1,400 aid seekers.
As the killing went on, embassy diplomats warned Washington that the operation risked further mass casualties; however, Milstein rewrote the cable to hail it as a success, erasing the dead from the record entirely.
In April – after senior Israeli commanders warned that surging Israeli settler attacks across the occupied West Bank could spark a new Palestinian uprising – Milstein blocked staff reports relaying the warning, and Washington instead received a cable under his name crediting Netanyahu with cracking down on the violence.
In February, when Israel revoked long-standing legal barriers to Israeli land purchases in the occupied West Bank, a move condemned internationally as fast-tracking annexation, the embassy told Washington the policy served settlers’ “humanitarian needs,” without explaining further.
Milstein also reportedly subjected colleagues to loyalty tests, demanding to know whether they were “pro-Israel” or “pro-Hamas,” four officials said, leaving staff afraid to speak.
Under his watch, some stopped writing reports altogether rather than see them censored, and cables on Palestinian affairs dwindled from several a week to a handful a month.
The US senator accuses the Pentagon of concealing the costs and consequences of the US-Israeli war on Iran.
Democratic US Senator Chris Murphy said Tuesday that the Pentagon had denied him access to a US military base in Qatar and refused to arrange a briefing on the US-Israeli war on Iran during his regional tour.
Speaking to journalists in Riyadh, Murphy accused the department of deliberately obstructing congressional scrutiny of the war and concealing its consequences from the American public.
“This trip confirmed for me that there is an active, unprecedented, unconstitutional effort underway to hide the costs of this war and the implications of this war from Congress and the American people,” he said, as quoted by Reuters.
Murphy urges Republicans to challenge Pentagon secrecy
Murphy called on Republican senators to confront the deliberate obstruction by the Department of War.
“I’ve never encountered anything like this in my time in the Senate and it’s part of a deliberate campaign of obfuscation that my Republican colleagues in Congress should demand an end to,” he said.
The senator said the Pentagon had denied him access to Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the largest US military base in the region. The installation has come under repeated Iranian retaliatory strikes since the US-Israeli aggression against Iran began in February.
He also said the department had declined to organize a briefing on the war while he was visiting the region.
Diplomatic meetings proceed despite military restrictions
Murphy contrasted the Pentagon’s conduct with that of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whom he credited with helping organize the trip and facilitating meetings with diplomats.
His regional discussions included talks with Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, alongside other senior Gulf officials.
Riyadh was the second stop on the senator’s tour, following his visit to Qatar.
Why were governments and military biodefense programs already investing so heavily in plague vaccines before the current plague hysteria erupted?
As plague hysteria begins spreading across headlines around the world, there is one detail almost nobody is talking about: governments and military biodefense programs have already poured major resources into developing dozens of plague vaccines.
UK — SELF-AMPLIFYING RNA (saRNA-LNP): Researchers at Imperial College London, Institut Pasteur de Madagascar, and Dstl Porton Down published a self-amplifying RNA plague vaccine in 2023. The vaccine used two saRNA constructs encoding the F1 and V antigens of Y. pestis, delivered in lipid nanoparticles. The authors described it as the first RNA plague-vaccine approach using self-amplifying technology. It remains preclinical.
U.S. MILITARY — rF1V-1018: The Department of Defense is funding development of a plague vaccine whose clinical-trial protocol explicitly states that its proposed indication is pre-exposure protection of military personnel against pneumonic plague resulting from aerosol exposure to Y. pestis. The original rF1V candidate was developed at USAMRIID at Fort Detrick. The newer program combines it with Dynavax’s CpG 1018 adjuvant and has advanced through Phase 2 testing.
U.S. MILITARY FUNDING: Dynavax states that the program is fully funded by the U.S. Department of Defense. A new agreement worth approximately $30 million was signed in late 2024 to support additional clinical and manufacturing work through the first half of 2027, followed by another approximately $14 million in 2025 for additional nonhuman-primate studies.
OXFORD — ChAdOx1 PLAGUE VACCINE: Oxford launched a human Phase 1 trial in 2021 using the ChAdOx1 adenovirus platform—the same vaccine-platform technology used for the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. Forty healthy adults were enrolled in the initial trial.
CHINA — F1+rV: Chinese researchers advanced an F1+rV subunit plague vaccine into human trials. A Phase 2a program included 240 healthy adults, and the international plague-vaccine pipeline subsequently listed the Chinese candidate in Phase 2b development.
RUSSIA — NEW MOLECULAR PLAGUE VACCINE: In April 2024, Russian regulators granted marketing authorization to a new single-dose microencapsulated molecular plague vaccine (PMMM) containing recombinant F1 and rV antigens.
Needless to say, I would NOT take an experimental plague vaccine. I’d rather take my chances with doxycycline and its documented 97% SURVIVAL RATE:
That number comes from an actual randomized human clinical trial. Researchers enrolled 65 patients with plague and randomized 30 to doxycycline and 35 to gentamicin. Among the doxycycline-treated patients, 29 of 30 survived (97%). The only doxycycline-treated patient who died did so during the first two days of treatment after presenting with advanced disease.
Even if a modified plague strain were released and was resistant to doxycycline, that would not suddenly make it resistant to every other antibiotic. We still have numerous treatment options spanning multiple antibiotic classes. And in the highly unlikely scenario that none of the standard drugs worked, researchers could rapidly screen the strain against large libraries of approved, investigational, and repurposed antibacterial compounds to identify agents that could still stop it.
According to Russian authorities, there is currently no plague outbreak, and reports of a laboratory accident are false. But the scale of the response does not match those claims. Nearly 200 contacts were reportedly placed under observation, more than 60 institute employees were isolated, access was restricted at multiple hospitals, and the FSB was reportedly involved.
Nevertheless, a classical plague pandemic in modern times would be almost impossible, as we are not living in the Middle Ages. The only possible exception would be a deliberately engineered, military-grade Yersinia pestis strain designed to spread more efficiently between people, cause more severe disease, and evade existing treatments. Even that would likely not become a pandemic.
Only time will reveal what actually happened in Irkutsk.
In 2021, Murphy wrote a letter to the DoD Inspector General, calling SARS-CoV-2 an American-created bat vaccine
By Jim Haslam
October 4, 2026
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) serves as a venture capital arm of the world’s largest bureaucracy: the Department of Defense. It funds high-risk academic research to protect US troops from future threats.
One team proposed modifying bat coronaviruses to spread more effectively—not among humans, but mammalian bats. Testing would occur in Wuhan, where the right bat colonies existed. This was not a fringe idea. It was a biodefense concept encouraged by DARPA under the first Trump administration.
Taken together, the 2018 DEFUSE proposal, plus FOIA documents, emails, and peer-reviewed papers, support Murphy’s hypothesis: SARS-CoV-2 was created in US labs but tested in Wuhan, where it accidentally leaked. This theory has since been debated in the scientific literature, includingNature.
[…]
The 2018 Blueprint
The very agencies that claimed to be searching for answers had the facts all along, stored in a top-secret folder. They knew that Peter Daszak (EcoHealth), Zhengli Shi (WIV), Linfa Wang (Duke), and Ralph Baric (UNC) had proposed inserting furin cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses and testing them on Chinese bats in Wuhan.
Snowden took on the NSA. His leaks revealed that US intelligence treated global pandemics as surveillance targets, explicitly searching for “SARS in China.” Murphy confronted something far more entrenched: what he called the “biodefense oligarchy,” a network spanning DARPA, intelligence agencies, academia, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
January 10, 2020: An Honorable Resignation
One node of that system was already in Wuhan. A NIAID-linked contractor, Danielle Anderson, was stationed at the maximum-security BSL4 lab. She previously told Bloomberg she worked on Ebola, but her name appears alongside Baric’s in the classified DEFUSE files.
Her Duke supervisor, Linfa Wang, resigned on January 10, 2020—the same day the SARS-CoV-2 genome was published. After Murphy leaked DEFUSE, Wang identified Baric as its author.
After Zhengli Shi published the closest known bat sample, RaTG13, she told the New York Times that “my” lab was not involved in gain-of-function research and that “I” did nothing wrong, so “I” had nothing to fear.
Privately, Baric warned UNC colleagues that Shi could be “arrested” for releasing the embargoed sequence. RaTG13 highlighted what made SARS-CoV-2 unique: the furin cleavage site (PRRAR), which Baric would “introduce” in DEFUSE documents.
RaTG13 mattered not because it was closest, but because it exposed what Baric proposed to add. Notice the PRRAR insertion, which Baric referenced in 2019. He would even “provide” his novel genomes to Wang and Shi “for immune boosting of bats.”
[…]
Why Wuhan Made Sense
[…]
[Following its destruction in World War II], the city was rebuilt into a modern research hub. During the debate over the Wuhan wet market, one question lingered: why Wuhan? In 2017, DARPA’s program manager Jim Gimlett told Daszak he wanted to vaccinate Chinese bats against SARS-like viruses. Daszak responded, “Interesting idea.”
Daszak and Shi even visited Gimlett at DARPA headquarters in Washington, DC. They invited Baric to join their team, who called it a “marvelous opportunity.”
While drafting DEFUSE in 2018, Baric wrote, “I have no bat colony, no way for me to do the experiment, which I definitely think needs to be done, or we have no credibility. My understanding [is] another bat colony exists in China.”
Unlike most R&D projects, which can be tested in US labs, Baric’s biotechnology had to be tested in Chinese labs. His biotech is so advanced that it can be shipped worldwide in 1-mL tubes packed on dry ice.
Daszak later admitted that Danielle Anderson was working with Chinese bats in the Wuhan BSL4. Weibo social media posts indicate the BSL4 dormitory was an early transmission hotspot. Notably, Chinese journalist Zhang Zhan was arrested for videotaping the remote BSL4 facility, not Shi’s downtown BSL2 lab.
The Genome Matched the Proposal
In addition to the “peculiar” furin cleavage site, more evidence emerged. In March 2020, US government biodefense officials asked Baric in the Red Dawn emails whether SARS-CoV-2 contained “any restriction sites.” He replied, “No, there is absolutely no evidence of genetic engineering.”
In June 2020, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which is like the CIA but for the Pentagon, analyzed the genome. They identified five restriction sites, yielding six pieces, but labeled the DIA report “secret.”
[…]
Murphy’s Conclusion
In August 2021, Murphy wrote to the DoD Inspector General:
“SARS-CoV-2 is an American-created recombinant bat vaccine or its precursor virus.”
This was an unintended consequence of good intentions. The genome was engineered to resemble a natural Chinese bat virus. Why? To better infect Chinese bats. If Baric’s synthetic genome leaked from a Wuhan lab, it would appear to originate from a Wuhan wet market.
[…]
Following the Money
When the New York Timesreported on DEFUSE, it claimed the project “was never funded by the United States,” implying Chinese funding. Yet the proposal invokes the American “warfighter.” Unless China is now a Pentagon ally, the funding logic points back to US agencies.
Murphy attached the unfunded $14 million DARPA DEFUSE proposal to “inoculate” Chinese bats and added:
“As is known, Dr. Fauci with NIAID did not reject the proposal. The work took place at the WIV and several U.S. sites, which are identified in detail in the proposal.”
When confronted about DEFUSE funding, Fauci issued a narrowly worded denial: “We have never seen that (DEFUSE) grant, and we have never funded that grant.” The emphasis mattered. Partial funding through revised or renamed proposals remained an option.
After 9/11, Fauci’s biodefense portfolio at NIAID rivaled DARPA’s annual budget. In 2021, The Interceptsued NIAID to obtain two 2019 grants to EcoHealth:
$3.2 million “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” grant
Those two grants, plus a later $3 million Laos grant, totaled the same $14 million budget as DEFUSE. Personnel, experiments, and even the language were recycled. DEFUSE was not rejected. It was rerouted through NIAID under different grant names. When asked directly, Daszak, Baric, and Fauci never denied this.
All were also asked to deny that a novel genome listed in 2019 NIAID documents, called HKU3r-CoVs, could be SARS-CoV-2. Baric described his “chimeric spike” as an unnatural combination of genomes from China and Southeast Asia, differing by 25% from SARS-CoV-1. SARS-CoV-2’s spike differs by the same margin.
Only after The Intercept exposed the NIAID grants did Murphy come forward. He stated what the bureaucracy would not: NIAID funded DEFUSE in practice, if not in name. Lab-leak researchers, known as DRASTIC, later confirmed this in Daszak’s emails marked “not to be shared with Congress.”
The Republican-led Congressional committee concluded that the US funded dangerous gain-of-function research at the WIV. But Shi was paid to ship samples (such as RaTG13) to Baric, who could modify Chinese pathogens into live-attenuated vaccines. The dangerous gain-of-function research took place in North Carolina and Montana, not in Wuhan.
From North Carolina to Montana
[…]
Scientists have not identified a reservoir host in the Wuhan wet market; however, SARS-CoV-2 infects and transmits among American lab bats. The reservoir host is the Egyptian fruit bat, an American surrogate for developing global bat vaccines.
This is where the Wuhan narrative collapses. Egyptian fruit bats do not live in China. They are housed at Fauci’s “satellite campus” in Montana, called Rocky Mountain Laboratory (RML), an original DEFUSE vendor. Vincent Munster, who would later be arrested for monkeypox smuggling, ran the Egyptian fruit bat colony at RML and controlled the samples shipped to Wuhan. Brownstone asked, Is this the man who created COVID-19 in Fauci’s lab? Yes, it is!
Early 2018 draft of DEFUSE forwarded RML created bat vaccines to Linfa Wang
We know the above details only because Murphy told us where to look. Fauci later funded a Chinese (Rhinolophus) bat-breeding facility in America so they wouldn’t have to test in China.
The Congressional committee interviewed everyone except Murphy, who wasn’t mentioned in their 557-page report. Murphy added:
“The asymptomatic nature is also explained by the bat vaccine’s creators’ intention (a good vaccine does not generate symptoms).”
Designed to Spread
What many assumed was a Chinese bioweapon, owing to Covid’s asymptomatic spread, appeared to be an academic creation. Self-spreading vaccines “evade the immune response” because any “pre-existing immunity to the vaccine vector will slow vaccine spread.” Gimlett testified that “self-disseminating vaccines” were under DARPA consideration.
Former CDC Director Robert Redfield echoed a similar theory, calling Baric the “scientific mastermind” while citing aerosolization and immune evasion. But Redfield, like Murphy, claimed SARS-CoV-2 does not infect bats.
In COVID-19 Mystery Solved, the CDC’s Atlanta bat lab confirmed that Egyptian fruit bats are a “non-natural” reservoir host for SARS-CoV-2. These bats are housed in only one other BSL4 facility: Fauci’s Rocky Mountain Lab in Montana.
Fauci called this: Dual-Use Research of Concern. What appeared to be a Chinese virus was actually a contagious animal vaccine, designed to mimic a natural virus and created by a military-academic complex of scientists.
The Military Connection
Covid was not a Chinese creation. It was the culmination of a decades-long US biodefense effort that began after SARS-CoV-1 in 2003, when US military bases in Asia were quarantined. In the DEFUSE draft, Baric noted that tens of thousands of US troops were deployed across East Asia.
Since SARS-CoV-1 emerged from Chinese horseshoe bats in 2003, the US government has funded several projects in the area. The US military even collected the closest progenitor to SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic.
During World War II, the Pentagon developed Project X-Ray: bat bombs armed with napalm, designed to exploit bats’ roosting behavior to ignite enemy cities. Eighty years later, DARPA scientists revived the same principle—not as a weapon, but as a delivery system for self-spreading vaccines.
If you were infected with Covid, your body has antibodies to a bat virus collected by a Pentagon agency in Laos in 2017.
[…]
The SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site (PRRVR, RRAR, RXXR, or intracellular proteases) wasn’t inserted to infect humans; it was inserted to infect bats, whose cells also express furin. To date, no other SARS-like virus has this feature.
The cover-up
In 2024 testimony, Baric admitted the 2018 furin cleavage site idea “was clearly mine,” but said DEFUSE was drafted in response to the 2018 National Biodefense Strategy, which called for a more “active posture” to detect and contain emerging biological threats.
“SARS” was cited in that strategy, issued during the first Trump administration. Recall Trump’s April 2020 press conference, when he canceled the Obama-era grant to Wuhan.
That NIAID grant was renewed in July 2019 during his administration—a $3.2 million investment by Trump in the DARPA DEFUSE project.
DEFUSE was pursued under Trump and buried under Biden. The Pentagon later acknowledged the proposal was moved into a classified system for sharing with intelligence agencies, but not with the public. Murphy added:
“A technological challenge as difficult as inoculating bats in China would be tried at DARPA first. The massive “Manhattan Project”-level of information suppression executed by the government and the Trusted News Initiative indicates that it would be covered up if something bad happened. The lab leak hypothesis and squabbling between Senator Paul and Dr. Fauci indicated that the cover-up was more localized. Further, an actual cover-up would be more disciplined with its paperwork. So, I presumed that unclassified files would be concealed on a higher network and found them where I expected them. I understood what they were and their content, pushed the files off-site, and compiled this [Inspector General] report.”
Murphy’s actions mirror those of Daniel Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers. Like Ellsberg, Murphy did not seek fame. Murphy’s modesty is buried in a Brownstone footnote, since he “uncovered the possible blueprint for SARS-CoV-2, called Project DEFUSE, while a Marine Corps fellow at DARPA in 2021.”
What Murphy found was extraordinary. A 2018 blueprint described the kind of virus that would later appear in Wuhan—trained for transmission in American bats. Leading virologists have been challenged to disprove this hypothesis. None have.
AFP via Getty Images.One of Google’s data centres is being built in Muhos, Finland
Florence Freeman
Finnish authorities have ordered a halt to building work at two planned Google data centres amid concerns over the clearance of more than 300 hectares of forest.
The sites form part of Google’s record €13bn (£11bn; $15bn) investment in Finland, announced less than a month ago and described by the company as its largest single investment in Europe.
The Finnish Supervisory Agency (LVV) said work at one site was carried out without a mandatory environmental impact assessment and ordered measures that would “significantly alter the environment” to be suspended by 23 October.
Google said it had “fallen short of our own high standards in this instance” and would follow the agency’s guidance.
The orders relate to preparatory work carried out at the planned data centre sites in Muhos and Kajaani.
According to LVV’s head of environment Tommi Muilu, work at the sites included the removal of trees and topsoil, the construction of site roads and storage areas, and changes to ditches.
Tuike Finland, the company behind Google’s data centre projects, has been asked to provide an explanation and set out how it intends to proceed by 14 October. The agency said it could begin “enforcement proceedings” if the company failed to comply with its demand.
Hanna Halmeenpaa, chair of the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation, had previously told the AFP news agency that “nature sites which should be preserved” had been felled. The conservation group had previously called for work to be halted while the environmental requirements were examined.
In a statement to the BBC, Google said: “We understand the concerns and have fallen short of our own high standards in this instance.”
It said it had “acted in good faith under the Forestry Act”, carried out nature surveys and put measures in place to protect areas of high environmental value.
“As we continue our long-term work in the region, we are advancing our landscaping and biodiversity plans, which include tree planting across 130 hectares at Muhos,” the company added.
Google announced last month that it would invest at least €13bn (£11bn; $15bn) in Finland over 2027 and 2028. Its plans included new data centres in Kajaani, Muhos and Vaala, alongside investment in its existing facility in Hamina.
The company said the infrastructure would help it meet growing demand for services including Search, Maps and its AI assistant Gemini.
Google said the construction phase in 2027 and 2028 would support more than 37,000 jobs and contribute an average of €3.6bn a year to Finland’s economy.
As part of its expansion, Google also signed a 22-year power purchasing agreement with Finnish energy company Fortum covering up to half the capacity of the Loviisa nuclear power plant. Fortum said the agreement would help support the plant’s continued operation until 2050.
Finland has attracted growing interest in data centres, with its cool climate and low-carbon electricity among the factors making it attractive to developers. Lower temperatures can also reduce the energy required to cool facilities filled with computer servers.
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