The Other Lab in Wuhan: The German-Chinese “Laboratory for Virus Research”
By Robert Kogon | Brownstone Institute | December 19, 2022
The “lab-leak” theory is enjoying a strong revival at the moment, thanks in part to Elon Musk having obliquely endorsed it in a Tweet while clearly point the finger at Anthony Fauci: “As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people.”
This despite the fact that an article in Science appeared to have already put the theory to rest over a year ago by showing that the initial cluster of Covid-19 cases in Wuhan was located on the opposite (left) bank of the Yangtze River from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is commonly supposed to be the pandemic’s epicenter according to the “lab-leak” theory.
But unbeknownst to most observers, there was in fact another infectious diseases lab in Wuhan, the German-Chinese Joint Laboratory of Infection and Immunity, and it is located on the same side of the river in the cluster.
The below map from the Science article makes the distance of the cluster from the two campuses of the Wuhan Institute of Virology clear – although the article itself coyly refrains from referring to the Institute.
Instead, the article shows that even if many of the earliest known cases of Covid-19 in Wuhan did not have any “epidemiologic link” to the famous Huanan wet market, the great majority of them were clustered in the vicinity of the market. This suggests – as per the quasi-official account – that the epidemic started in the market by way of animal-to-human (zoonotic) transmission and then spread to the surrounding area via “community transmission.”
Ergo, the “lab-leak” theory is dead.
Except that there is also an infectious diseases lab in the area of the cluster: the aforementioned German-Chinese Joint Laboratory of Infection and Immunity at Union Hospital, Tongji Medical College. The laboratory is a joint project of Union Hospital, Tongji Medical College and the University Hospital of Essen in Germany. Prof. Ulf Dittmar, chair of the virology department in Essen, has also referred to the joint laboratory as the “Essen-Wuhan Laboratory for Virus Research.”
(See interview here [in German]. It should be noted that in the cited interview, conducted in January 2020, Dittmar downplays the dangerousness of the novel Coronavirus and warns against “hysterical” reactions.)
Helpfully, the map from the Science article also indicates the locations of the Chinese host institutions of the joint laboratory: the Union and Tongji hospitals. Per the legend, they are indicated by crosses 5 and 6: right next to the home location of what the article identifies as “cluster 1,” an elderly husband and wife who represent “the earliest known case cluster and the only cluster admitted by 26 December. They had no known connection to Huanan Market.” (Red dots on the map indicate cases with a known connection to the market; blue dots those that have no known connection.) The Tongji Hospital is the closest to “cluster 1.”
Astonishingly, in early September 2019, only three months before the allegedly initial outbreak of Covid-19 just a stone’s throw from Tongji Hospital in Wuhan, then German Chancellor Angela Merkel paid a visit to none other than…Tongji Hospital in Wuhan. The hospital is also known as the German-Chinese Friendship Hospital.
A photo of Chancellor Merkel being welcomed by nurses at the hospital reception can be seen here. The accompanying article in the German newspaper Die Süddeutsche Zeitung notes another highly intriguing fact: the Essen University Hospital is not the only German teaching hospital with which Tongji has a “close partnership.”
It also has a partnership with the Charité Hospital in Berlin of Germany’s “state virologist” Christian Drosten! Drosten is the chair of the virology department at the Charité.
Now, it was none other than Christian Drosten who in mid-January 2020 – just a couple of weeks after the initial outbreak of Covid-19 just a stone’s throw from Tongji Hospital – devised the notoriously oversensitive PCR test that would become the “gold standard” for detecting the virus. Since Drosten’s PCR would also and especially be used to test people with no symptoms of the illness, it thus paved the way for the outbreak to obtain pandemic status.
Before the PCR test was adopted by the WHO, Drosten’s paper on it would be rushed through the peer-review process of the EU-funded journal Eurosurveillance in record time: going from submission to acceptance in anywhere from three-and-a-half hours to 27-and-a-half hours per the calculations of Simon Goddek.
According to accompanying tweets and Gettr posts in German, a photo that circulated on the two platforms earlier this year is supposed to show Drosten at a Tongji Medical College (or perhaps joint Tongji-Charité?) event. “What a coincidence,” some of the posts note ironically. (Here, for instance.) Many of the posts link a Charité webpage. But the link does not contain or no longer contains any such photo. It merely leads to generic information on a Charité-Tongji exchange program, thus leaving the source of the photo unclear.
Christian Drosten at Tongji Medical College event?
A Google search result from the Tongji website (see below) tantalizingly notes that a “Sino-German Disaster Medicine Institute, Charité University in Germay [sic.] and Tongji Hospital was officially opened in Tongji Hospital, Wuhan, China.” But the indexed Tongji news article is not available nor is it cached, and the URL is not archived by the Wayback Machine either. Could this be the event at which Drosten is pictured? Perhaps Drosten could clarify.
In any case, thanks to a FOIA request, we know that Drosten participated in February 2020 email exchanges with Anthony Fauci and other international scientists about the possibility of a lab leak and that he was in fact, in contrast to other participants, particularly irritated about the hypothesis. Several of the others – including, n.b., Anthony Fauci – are clearly willing to entertain the possibility of a lab leak, and Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust even says that he is split 50:50 between lab leak and natural origin and that Edward Holmes of the University of Sydney is even 60:40 lab leak.
The doubts and open-mindedness of the other participants elicits an obviously pissy response from Drosten. “Can someone help me with one question,” he asks, “didn’t we congregate to challenge a certain theory, and if we could, drop it? …Are we working on debunking our own conspiracy theory?”
As the journalist Milosz Matuschek has pointed out in an article for the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche, the FOIA release could prove to be a problem for Christian Drosten. For in a sworn statement to a German court, Drosten has insisted that he
had no interest in steering the suspicion about the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in a certain direction. In particular, I had and I have no personal interest in ruling out the so-called laboratory thesis as origin of the virus. If there were indications for the correctness of the laboratory thesis, I would vigorously defend it in the scientific and public discussion.
Prosecute/Drosten?
Robert Kogon is a pen name for a widely-published financial journalist, a translator, and researcher working in Europe. Follow him at Twitter here. He writes at edv1694.substack.com.
NYT, after deciding lockdowns are authoritarian and bad when China does them, now mildly terrified as Xi Jinping reopens & infections rise
You can take the New York Times out of lockdown, but you can’t take the lockdowns out of the New York Times.
eugyppius: a plague chronicle | December 19, 2022
“From Zero Covid to No Plan: Behind China’s Pandemic U-Turn” is the headline of the latest highly revealing Times reporting on the end of Zero Covid in China. “After micromanaging the coronavirus strategy for nearly three years,” we read, “… Xi Jinping has suddenly left the populace to improvise.”
The essence of the piece is that the Chinese have rightly regained their freedoms, but they’re now left to face a terrifying virus alone and undefended by their government, which is also very bad, and possibly worse than the lockdowns, as bad as they were.
China’s party-run media has cast the shift [from Zero Covid] as a stressful but well-considered exit, opening the way back to good economic times. Warnings about the dangers of the coronavirus have swiftly disappeared, replaced by official claims that the Omicron variant is generally mild. By holding off from easing until now, the government has saved many lives, the People’s Daily said on Thursday in a long article defending Mr. Xi’s pandemic strategy as “totally correct.”
In reality, an examination of how the shift unfolded in Chongqing and elsewhere reveals a government overtaken by a cascade of Covid outbreaks, confusion over directives, economic woes and then rare political protests. …
It’s almost like mass containment doesn’t do anything aside from wrecking the economy and ruining everyone’s lives. I’m glad the Times can finally come close to admitting this now, in the last weeks of 2022.
By changing only a handful of words, you could make key sections of the article apply to Germany, or any western nation aside from Sweden or Belarus:
Even the Chinese Communist Party, a virtuoso at controlling the narrative, is finding it difficult to sell the policy lurch to anxious residents.
[Xi] turned China’s intense top-to-bottom mobilization against the pandemic into a showcase of the party’s organizational strength. For two years, his Covid war enjoyed widespread public acceptance, but eventually the effort exhausted staff, strained local finances, and appeared to drown out attempts to discuss, let alone devise, a measured transition.
Whereas in the West, we had totally open and honest discussions about the insane, enduring closures, that weren’t marked by massive censorship and government intimidation at all. Otherwise, Western nations were themselves locked in exactly this same international competition, eager to display the fruits of their superior pandemic planning to the world, and terrified that failure would cost them legitimacy. One of the reasons Germany locked down so hard during Fall 2020, was that the Merkel government had collected many international plaudits for their handling of the first wave — effectively taking credit for the seasonality of infections. They were unwilling to surrender the regard they had earned so easily.
Mr. Xi has no likely successor and could stay in power for at least another decade. But the scars from the abrupt change may feed distrust in his domineering style.
It’s not subjecting his whole country to absurd containment theatre over what is no more than an influenza-level risk that poses a political problem for Xi, but rather “the scars from the abrupt change” in policy.
Finally the reporters get around to discussing the protests.
In Zhengzhou in central China, thousands of workers clashed with police at an iPhone plant, angry about a delay in bonuses and the handling of an outbreak.
In Haizhu, a textile manufacturing district in southern China, laborers poured onto the streets over food shortages and hardships under lockdown. Migrant workers, who depend on daily work for their livelihoods, went weeks without jobs.
“I couldn’t make a living this year,” said Zhou Kaice, a street porter in Chongqing. “Some bosses I worked for started up for a few days but were then shut by lockdowns.”
Despite the strains, officials still insisted China must win its pandemic war. Provincial leaders throughout November declared their commitment to “zero Covid,” often citing Mr. Xi as their lodestone.
“If pandemic controls were loosened, that would inevitably create mass infections,” said a Xinhua editorial on Nov. 19. “Economic and social development and the public’s physical health and safety would be seriously hurt.”
How many times did we have to read that lockdowns were the ultimate way to grow the economy, because without them, the virus would somehow destroy all business activity?
It’s also interesting how anti-lockdown protestors in the West are thugs and stupid conspiracy-crazed Nazis, while in China they are “students, workers and homeowners.”
By [November], China’s most widespread protests since 1989 had begun. Students, workers and homeowners in Beijing, Shanghai and elsewhere vented against Covid controls, angered by a fire in western China that many believed, despite official denials, had killed residents trapped in their apartments by lockdowns.
“I tell you that in this world there’s only one sickness, and that’s poverty and having no freedom, and we’ve got plenty of that,” said a Chongqing man whose tirade went viral in China.
“Give me liberty or give me death,” he shouted, using the Chinese version of the American revolutionary battle cry.
Sounds like the Canadian trucker protests — you know, those guys who posed such a threat to freedom and democracy that it proved necessary to freeze their bank accounts.
At the end, the Times assures its heavily masked and vaccinated readership that “most people are staying home,” but that “if deaths rise sharply, public anger could revive” because “infections could hinder a quick economic rebound.”
Until we Decovidify the newsrooms, there will never be sane reporting on SARS-2 in any major press outlet, ever.
25 Peruvians Murdered in a Week of Intense Repression
“Terrorists are the lawmakers and the Lima City’s press.” | Photo: Twitter/ @mario_campa
teleSUR | December 19, 2022
On Sunday, Peru’s Health Ministry acknowledged that 25 people have died during the protests against President Dina Boluarte and in favor of an immediate call for general elections.
According to official data, the departments where these deaths occurred were Ayacucho (9), Apurimac (6), Cusco (3), Junin (3), La Libertad (3), and Arequipa (1).
The Health ministry also reported 287 injured people who have already been discharged. They are distributed as follows: Apurimac (56), Ayacucho (45), Lima (37), La Libertad (36), Arequipa (35) , Junin (35), Cusco (16), Puno (15), and Huancavelica (12).
Nevertheless, 69 people remain hospitalized in Ayacucho (20), Junin (17), La Libertad (12), Ucayali (6), Apurimac (5), Lima (4), Arequipa (4), and Huancavelica (1).
Boluarte announced that the Public Ministry and the Military Justice would investigate the death of civilians during the social protests.
On Tuesday, she will appoint new officials to replace the president of the Council of Ministers and the ministers of education and culture, who resigned on Dec. 16 after stating their disagreement with the violent repression of the population.
Peruvians have been staging huge protests since Dec. 7, when Congress appointed Dina Boluarte as president after removing Pedro Castillo, who is currently sentenced to 18 months in preventive prison for rebellion. Mexico will grant political asylum to his family.
January 6 committee recommends charges for Trump
RT | December 19, 2022
The Democrat-led January 6 committee agreed on Monday to make criminal referrals against former President Donald Trump. The panel recommended that Trump be charged with defrauding the US, making false statements, obstruction, and inciting an “insurrection” on Capitol Hill last January.
The committee, made up of seven Democratic members of Congress and two Republican opponents of the former president, voted unanimously to adopt a report recommending the charges.
The report is the culmination of 18 months of investigation by the panel, which was convened to investigate Trump’s alleged role in inciting the riot by his supporters that interrupted the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory last year. Trump has accused the committee of orchestrating a “witch hunt” against him, calling its members “partisan hacks.”
Referring to the “insurrection” charge, Rep. Jamie Raskin said before the vote that the committee believes “that more than sufficient evidence exists for a criminal referral” of Trump for “assisting or aiding and comforting those at the Capitol who engaged in a violent attack on the United States.”
“The Committee has developed significant evidence that President Trump intended to disrupt the peaceful transition of power,” Raskin continued.
Shortly before the riot, Trump urged his supporters to protest “peacefully and patriotically” at the Capitol. The riot that followed led to the deaths of five people, but only one of these deaths has been conclusively linked to the actions of another person: that of Ashli Babbitt, a Trump supporter who was shot by a police officer.
It is now up to the Justice Department to decide whether to prosecute Trump. The former president said in September that he “can’t imagine” being indicted, but added that charges wouldn’t prevent him from seeking a return to office in 2024. Trump announced his candidacy in November.
In a tweet after the committee’s vote, Rep. Adam Kinzinger, one of the panel’s two Republicans, linked the criminal referral to Trump’s political future. “We now turn to the criminal justice system to ensure Justice under the law,” he wrote. “The American people can ensure he’s never elected again.”
Elevated Living Standards Contradict Climate Doomsayers
By Vijay Jayaraj | RealClear Energy | December 14, 2022
Climate protestors destroying artworks and gluing themselves to roads without offering a shred of evidence for their alarm exhibit a malicious stupidity that is blind to the actual state of the world.
Why do these activists not hold up placards with graphs, histograms, and Venn diagrams? Because actual data show that life today is much better than at any time in human history. Ignored is the fact that the change in climate has made Earth better and helped to advance humanity.
Much of the progress in the last three centuries hinged on one important event in the 17th century: the waning of the Little Ice Age, which finally ended in the 1800s. Contrary to popular media and the politically correct, climate change has aided in the unprecedented growth of human civilization.
The Little Ice Age disrupted global plant growth and fostered periods of famine, disease and mass depopulation. However, since the advent of modern warming there has been an overall greening of the planet, more bountiful crop harvests and an eight-fold increase in humanity’s numbers. Contributing to the bounty has been the fertilization effect of carbon dioxide, whose atmospheric concentration has increased in recent decades.
Global maize (corn) production was approximately 205 million tons in 1961. Today the world produces five times more maize, — 1.16 billion tons. There have been similar increases for all major food crops, including rice, wheat, soybeans, cereals, nuts and vegetables.
Captures of marine fish during 1961–2018 increased from 34 million tons to 84 million tons. During the period, aquaculture production increased from two million tons to 82 million tons.
Meanwhile, malnourishment in developing countries reduced drastically from 34 percent in 1970 to 13 percent in 2015, despite a rapidly growing population.
Improved nutrition and technological advancements have combined to make life not only better but also longer. In Oman, for example, the mortality rate for children under 5 dropped from 38 deaths per 100 births in 1950 to less than one. Similar progress has been registered across the world.
Transportation has become more affordable to the general population. Nominal prices for roundtrip airfare almost halved in the 2010s compared to 1980.
Electricity has become more available to households and businesses. In China alone, power generation increased by 18 times between 1950 and 2015, enabling 1.3 billion people to have greater access to electricity and experience remarkable economic growth.
People are better protected against nature’s fury than ever before. The annual death rate from natural disasters has plummeted globally since the 1920s and 1930s. This is because greater prosperity supported by cheap, abundant energy resources has provided sturdier infrastructure to withstand weather extremes and modern reporting systems to warn of dangers. Media reports of a world ransacked to an unprecedented extent by storms and floods are as false as the predictions of an overheated globe.
Species that were hunted to near extinction have been making a comeback, including the Arctic’s polar bears and India’s Bengal tigers. The number of humpback whales in the western South Atlantic doubled between 2006 and 2022. In Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin, gray wolves increased from 1,100 in 1975 to 3,600 in 2018.
In all of the U.S., there were merely 487 bald eagle pairs in 1963. By 2006, there were approximately 10,000. Today, wind turbines remain the only major threat to bald eagles, with the government dismayingly allocating “bald eagle-killing quotas” for each machine.
So, notions of a climate emergency and a planet in terminal decline are fallacious. The numbers do not lie no matter how much art is despoiled or how many commuters are delayed by the misguided.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Virginia. He holds a master’s degree in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, UK and resides in India.
Will nuclear fusion power save us?
By Dr David Whitehouse | Net Zero Watch | December 14, 2022
“Nuclear fusion breakthrough,” are the world’s headlines today. Eventually we will have free, pollution-free energy. No CO2 emissions, we will be saved. I have lived with the promise of nuclear fusion all my life and it has always been decades away. It’s become something of a bad joke amongst the science community that fusion is always decades away.
Nuclear fusion liberates energy by combining light atoms – isotopes of hydrogen – rather than by using the radioactive decay of large atoms such as uranium and plutonium – nuclear fission. It could have many advantages; the reaction can be switched off (not possible with fission), it uses water as a fuel and produces very little waste. The question is how do you fuse atoms?
Obviously it isn’t easy. Every star in the Universe generates its energy this way but stars are big and places of great pressure and temperature, unlike the Earth. One way is to generate a hot gas of hydrogen isotopes – 100 million degrees or so – and confine it so that the hydrogen nuclei (for it will be ionised) fuse. The heating is done by microwaves and the confinement by a magnetic field, for anything physical would melt. The problem is that the plasma is unstable and so far the reactions are fleeting.
This is the basis of the major multi-national project to develop fusion, the $22 billion International Thermal Experimental Reactor (ITER)project (China, India, Japan, Korea, Europe, US) which is under construction in France and hopes to start tests in 2035 as part of developing the expertise to build a commercial fusion reactor presumably in the unspecified following decades.
Flash and Burn
Yesterday’s announcement involves a different technique. The US National Ignition Facility focuses a burst from a multitude of high-powered lasers on a grain-sized target that compresses to initiate fusion. The announcement by US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm was hailed by the world’s media as a great breakthrough in the developing technique of fusing atoms together, limitless, cheap, green were the adjectives used.
The announcement itself is a puzzle and had the feeling of being some much needed good news to announce. In reality although the experiments referred to took place a few months ago the “breakthrough” results were reported a year ago with the major advance being published in the Journal Nature in 2014. By one analysis 2.05 MJ of energy pumped into the pellet produced 3.15 MJ of energy. This does not include the 322 MJ needed to run the 192 lasers. So the story wasn’t a real breakthrough, just an advance. In any commercial development of this laser technique millions of fuel pellets would be needed for each reactor a year. At present they are tailor-made and cost almost $1 million each.
So why did the story lead some news bulletins? Given the announcement by Granholm it was clearly a story and in the main its coverage was good though some specialist correspondents clearly didn’t know the background and one science editor’s analysis of the event was puerile. I’ll leave it for an exercise for the reader to decide who I refer to.
Green Energy
But should nuclear fusion be part of the green energy debate? It is certainly not going to rescue us anytime soon. But I suppose linking fusion to green energy and the climate debate will help funds flowing.
Some would disagree with me and point to the many small, private companies that want to develop smaller-scale fusion reactors much sooner. They have acquired significant investment, some 30 firms have raised a total of $2.4 billion and General Fusion of Canada says it hopes for a viable reactor in the 2030s. CEOs of such companies see a payoff within a decade but to me it sounds like a sales pitch to attract further investment. Experts will privately say this is very wishful thinking.
In the mid-1990s I gave an after-dinner speech to a society of nuclear fusion scientists. I wondered out loud if the arrival of the first commercial fusion power would be as far in the future as the first hits of the Beatles were in the past. It took 50 years from the steam engine to trains and the same time between the internal combustion engine and cars. Nuclear fusion is a lot more difficult than such simple thermodynamic engines. Perhaps the desire for this energy coupled with advances in artificial intelligence analysis and control systems will speed up its development and the equations of history will be superseded.
A modern society needs high energy density power production systems. Without energy storage renewables are limited. We need fusion energy which has been promised for so long but I think humans will have walked on Mars long before we get commercial fusion power.
Commenter Rick Will says:
They spent $3.5 billion to produce the heating power of 10 grams of coal
They have spent USD3.5bn on the reactor to get a gain of 0.4MJ. Enough to vaporise 100 grams of water. Or equivalent to 10 grams of coal. Baby steps comes to mind. Power was impressive though. It appears the laser is rated at 1PW. Civilisation’s entire electrical generation averages 0.003PW. So the laser would not need to fire often to get a decent power output. But then it only produced a gain [of] 20%. So it would need 5 times the internal generation to that sent out.
I guess they say that these reactions can make big gains once the conditions are right but USD3.5bn to produce what you get out of half a cents worth of coal suggests it is still a big mountain to climb. Maybe within 30 years. Just as the last of the die-hard CO2 demonisers shuffle off.
French energy crisis deepens – Bloomberg
RT | December 19, 2022
France faces a greater risk of running short on electricity this winter after the nation’s grid operator, Electricite de France (EDF), extended maintenance halts for several nuclear reactors, Bloomberg has reported.
The utility announced on Monday that the restart of its Penly-2 unit has been delayed from January 29 until June 11, while the reopening of the Golfech-1 unit has been pushed back to June 11 from February 18, according to the outlet.
The halt of the Chattenom-3 reactor has reportedly been prolonged by one month until March 26, and the restart of Civaux-2 has been postponed by more than a month until February 19.
On Friday, EDF announced it would delay the startup of a new nuclear reactor in western France by several months into 2024 due to construction work having been extended. That project is already more than a decade late, according to Bloomberg.
France produces roughly 70% of its electricity from 56 nuclear reactors, of which over 20 are currently shut down, causing a sharp drop in power generation.
EDF warned earlier that longer than planned maintenance halts and repairs on almost half of the nation’s nuclear plants may turn France, which has traditionally been a power exporter, into an importer. The grid operator has also warned of a potential electricity shortfall in the colder months as heating demand rises while the utility grapples with reactor repairs.
This will also add to rising concerns over power supplies to neighboring countries, as France has long been Europe’s largest producer of nuclear energy.
Qatar warns EU of consequences amid graft probe
RT | December 19, 2022
The European Parliament’s decision to suspend Qatar-linked legislation and deny the country’s officials access to the legislature could negatively affect gas supplies to EU member states, Doha has announced. The bloc’s move comes amid a Belgian probe into alleged graft by MEPs that may have involved Qatar.
The parliament’s decision is “discriminatory,” according to a statement by a diplomat with the Qatari mission to the EU on Sunday, as quoted by news agencies. It will “negatively affect regional and global security cooperation, as well as ongoing discussions around global energy poverty and security,” the diplomat added.
He stressed Qatar’s cooperation with the EU, particularly Belgium, on issues related to Covid-19 and its role as a key supplier of liquified natural gas to the country, expressing disappointment that Brussels is making “no effort to engage with our government to establish the facts once they became aware of the allegations.”
Qatari liquified natural gas plays a key role in the EU’s strategy to compensate for the loss of Russian fossils fuels, which it decided to stop purchasing over the conflict in Ukraine.
In November, Germany secured a 15-year deal for around 2 million tons annually. Berlin is leading a pan-EU effort to secure better terms from Doha, which is pressuring the bloc into signing long-term contracts that prohibit resale to other parts of the world, which would undermine the EU’s goal of phasing out fossil fuels, according to Bloomberg.
Last week, MEPs voted to suspend all work linked to Qatar and cut off “representatives of Qatari interests” from access to the legislature. The decision affects an EU-Qatar aviation agreement and an EU visa waiver for Qatari and Kuwaiti nationals. MEPs denounced “Qatar’s alleged attempts” to buy influence in the EU.
Belgian law enforcement announced earlier this month that it had charged four individuals linked to the European Parliament in an alleged corruption case. They are suspected of being influenced by lavish presents and cash originating from a foreign government.
The local press identified the unnamed Gulf nation as Qatar, which denied any involvement. The European Parliament’s now-former vice president, Eva Kaili, who was among those charged, was stripped of her senior EU office over the probe last week.
Russia’s parallel imports soar – customs data
RT | December 19, 2022
The volume of goods supplied to Russia via the parallel imports mechanism has exceeded $20 billion so far this year, according to the head of the Federal Customs Service, Vladimir Bulavin.
Parallel imports, sometimes called ‘gray imports’, refer to the practice in which a non-counterfeit product is imported without the permission of the intellectual property owner via alternative supply channels.
Bulavin told Russia 24 TV on Monday that 2.4 million tons of goods, mainly cars, machine tools, and equipment, as well as light industry goods, have been imported since May. This has helped to stabilize prices in the Russian market, he noted.
In March, the Russian government authorized retailers to import products from abroad without the trademark owner’s permission. The decision came after many global brands halted sales or stopped exports to Russia due to pressure from their governments to comply with sanctions. Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin stated that parallel imports were needed to ensure that certain goods could continue to be shipped to Russia.
According to Bulavin, the legalization of parallel imports did not lead to an increase in counterfeit goods.
“We [customs service] have fought and will continue to fight against counterfeit goods,” he said, adding that over 7 million units of counterfeit products have been seized this year.
Putin and Modi deepen “privileged strategic partnership” despite Western pressure
By Ahmed Adel | December 19, 2022
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently discussed cooperation in investment, energy, agriculture, and transport and logistics. Yet, despite this positive step in relations building, the CIA is attempting to disrupt Russian-Indian relations by implanting fake news, something it has done for the entirety of 2022.
According to a Kremlin statement, Putin and Modi expressed in a phone conversation on December 16 their “satisfaction with the high level of bilateral cooperation that has been developing on the basis of the Russian-Indian privileged strategic partnership.” They also noted the importance of maintaining close coordination on international platforms, including the G20 and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.
At Modi’s own request, Putin briefed him on Russia’s policy regarding Ukraine. The Indian leader reiterated his call for dialogue and diplomacy as the only way forward regarding the Ukraine crisis, according to a statement on his official website.
Western media and officials are attempting to link Modi’s call for diplomacy as a potential rift in relations with Putin, but official statements from the Russian and Indian sides make it clear that bilateral relations dominated the conversation and not the war in Ukraine. Despite the facts, it did not stop CIA Chief William Burns from claiming only days later that Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping had impacted the Russian decision on whether to use nuclear weapons or not.
“I think it has also been very useful that Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Modi in India have also raised their concerns about the use of nuclear weapons as well. I think that’s also having an impact on the Russians,” William Burns said during an interview with PBS, adding that he does not see any clear evidence today of Russia’s plans to use tactical nuclear weapons and that it was only intimidation through sabre-rattling.
This comes as Putin acknowledged that the war in Ukraine could continue for a while and said that Moscow will not “brandish” nuclear weapons “like a razor.”
Speaking at a meeting of Russia’s Human Rights Council at the Kremlin, the Russian president said: “With regard to the protracted nature of the special military operation and its results, of course, it’s going to take a while, perhaps.”
He also alleged that the US placed a large number of its nuclear weapons on European soil, while Russia had no such plan to transfer nuclear weapons outside of its territory. Putin also stressed that Russia “will protect its allies with all the means at its disposal, if necessary.”
The Russian president added that his country possesses more modern and advanced weapons compared to other nuclear nations, but emphasised that Russia will only strike with nuclear weapons in response, “That is, when we are struck, we strike in response. But we are not going to brandish these weapons like a razor, running around the world.”
Although it has long been established that Russia never planned to use nuclear weapons on the Ukrainian battlefield, except in cases of retaliation and existential threats, the Western disinformation apparatus, including the CIA, are naively believing that conjuring fake news and attributing them to India can change the facts and reality on the ground – Moscow and New Delhi are seeing a revitalisation in their already strong relations.
None-the-less, there is a medium- and long-term view for the Russian-Indian relationship that obviously goes far beyond the current conflict in Ukraine. For this reason, New Delhi’s long-standing ties with Moscow will not be derailed by Western sanctions and pressure.
Russia has been forced to reorientate its economy towards the Asian region because of Western sanctions, and this presents huge opportunities for India. It was never expected in 2021 that Russia would overtake Iraq and Saudi Arabia to become the largest supplier of oil to India, but as said, Western sanctions have created opportunities for India as Russian crude is now at advantageous prices and terms.
Reuters reported that India purchased about 40% of all export volumes of Russian Urals grade oil transported by sea in November – European countries accounted for 25%, Turkey 15% and China 5%. In November, Russia supplied 909,000.4 barrels of crude oil to India per day, Iraq supplied 861,000.4 barrels and Saudi Arabia supplied 570,000.9 barrels.
Russia has also emerged as India’s seventh largest trading partner, rising from a paltry 25th place. This means that the imbalance in bilateral trade is widening. However, to alleviate this, Indian Foreign Minister Jaishankar recently visited Moscow to discuss a list of 500 items that Russia would be keen to source from India. Given the supply chain challenges Russian industry has faced since the imposition of sanctions, Jaishankar reportedly stressed India’s readiness to supply spare parts for airplanes, cars and trains.
In this way, Russia and India work collectively to develop their economies and provide the best opportunities and deals for their citizens. This was once again demonstrated by Modi’s recent conversation with Putin. However, it also shows the desperation the West has in dismantling this relationship, with the CIA chief being the latest protagonist to disseminate fake news, this time by claiming that Modi discouraged Putin from plans to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, plans that the Russian president never had to begin with.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
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