Research, editing : Gan Yung Chyan, KUCINTA SETIA
Just hours before Arizona’s
Republican-led state Senate is set to release the full results of the Maricopa
County 2020 election audit, a draft was leaked that potentially validates
claims that the election was indeed stolen.
Trump spokesperson Liz Harrington
tweeted out some of the early findings from the Maricopa County audit report
that will be released Friday afternoon (24 September 2021).
Here is what the
report has revealed thus far:
- None of Maricopa County’s election numbers “balance and
agree with each other,” and “in some cases, these differences were
significant.”
- 23,344 ballots were cast by “individuals who had moved
prior to the election.”
- Ballot images were “corrupt or missing.”
- Election data was missing from the Election Management
System Server, and logs “appeared to be intentionally rolled over.”
- Worse, “all the data in the database related to the
2020 General Election had been fully cleared.”
- Ballots were duplicated “more than once.”
- 10,342 voters “with the same first, middle, last name
and birth year” voted in multiple counties.
- The certified election results versus Maricopa County’s final records of who voted were off by 11,592 ballots.
Those are just a few of the most significant
discrepancies from the draft of the audit alone. The full report has yet to be
released.
To put the data aforementioned into perspective, this is an audit of just one county in one state. Joe Biden was certified as the winner of Arizona in the 2020 election by a slim margin of just 10,457 votes.
These discrepancies, which are now factually proven by the forensic audit, mean that Arizona’s election must be decertified, at the very least, and the legal votes must be re-tallied.
If that means that former President Donald Trump comes out as the victor, then the state’s 11 electors must be re-certified for him.
News (6)
How to identify real Korean KF face masks
Recently, the South Korean Embassy in Malaysia has been receiving increasing reports of fraud related to the Korea Filter (KF) face masks. KF face masks refer to filtering respirators which are manufactured in South Korea and they are classified as KF80, KF94 or KF99 masks according to the filtration efficiency.
Employees, contractors and vendors who are unable to work from home are "strongly encouraged" to self-test weekly via an antigen rapid test (ART) to keep infected employees from going to work and keep their workplace safe.
"Those who are able to work from home but need to return to the workplace for ad-hoc reasons may do so after testing negative via ART before returning onsite," added the Ministry of Health.
News (14)
Limit social gathering to once a day
David Robertson, a virologist at the University of Glasgow, UK, calls the find “fascinating, and quite terrifying”.
The results, which are not peer reviewed, have been posted on the preprint server Research Square1. Particularly concerning is that the new viruses contain receptor binding domains that are almost identical to that of SARS-CoV-2, and can therefore infect human cells. The receptor binding domain allows SARS-CoV-2 to attach to a receptor called ACE2 on the surface of human cells to enter them.
To make the discovery, Marc Eloit, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and his colleagues in France and Laos, took saliva, faeces and urine samples from 645 bats in caves in northern Laos. In three horseshoe (Rhinolophus) bat species, they found viruses that are each more than 95% identical to SARS-CoV-2, which they named BANAL-52, BANAL-103 and BANAL-236.
News (17)
Singaporean virologist convinced SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin
“When SARS-CoV-2 was first sequenced, the receptor binding domain didn’t really look like anything we’d seen before,” says Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney in Australia. This caused some people to speculate that the virus had been created in a laboratory. But the Laos coronaviruses confirm these parts of SARS-CoV-2 exist in nature, he says.
“I am more convinced than ever that SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin,” agrees Linfa Wang, a virologist at Duke–NUS Medical School in Singapore.
News (18)
Studies of bats in China and Laos show southeast Asia is a hotspot for potentially dangerous viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2
Together with relatives of SARS-CoV-2 discovered in Thailand2, Cambodia3 and Yunnan in southern China4, the study demonstrates that southeast Asia is a “hotspot of diversity for SARS-CoV-2 related viruses”, says Alice Latinne, an evolutionary biologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society Vietnam in Hanoi.
News (19)
BANAL-52, BANAL-103 and BANAL-236 could attach to the ACE2 receptor on human cells
In an extra step in their study, Eloit and his team showed in the laboratory that the receptor binding domains of these viruses could attach to the ACE2 receptor on human cells as efficiently as some early variants of SARS-CoV-2. The researchers also cultured BANAL-236 in cells, which Eloit says they will now use to study how pathogenic the virus is in animal models.
News (20)
BANAL-52 is 96.8% identical to SARS-CoV-2
Last year, researchers described another close relative of SARS-CoV-2, called RaTG13, which was found in bats in Yunnan5. It is 96.1% identical to SARS-CoV-2 overall and the two viruses probably shared a common ancestor 40–70 years ago6. BANAL-52 is 96.8% identical to SARS-CoV-2, says Eloit — and all three newly discovered viruses have individual sections that are more similar to sections of SARS CoV-2 than seen in any other viruses.
Viruses swap chunks of RNA with one another through a process called recombination, and one section in BANAL-103 and BANAL-52 could have shared an ancestor with sections of SARS-CoV-2 less than a decade ago, says Spyros Lytras, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Glasgow. “These viruses recombine so much that different bits of the genome have different evolutionary histories,” he says.
News (21)
The three bat coronaviruses in Laos have no furin cleavage site on the spike protein
The Laos study offers insight into the origins of the pandemic, but there are still missing links, say researchers. For example, the Laos viruses don’t contain the so-called furin cleavage site on the spike protein that further aids the entry of SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses into human cells.
The study also does not clarify how a progenitor of the virus could have travelled to Wuhan, in central China, where the first known cases of COVID-19 were identified — or whether the virus hitched a ride on an intermediate animal.
Answers might come from sampling more bats and other wildlife in southeast Asia, which many groups are doing.
News (22)
Dispute over lack of close relatives of SARS-CoV-2 in China
Another preprint, also posted on Research Square and not yet peer reviewed, sheds light on the work under way in China7. For that study, researchers sampled some 13,000 bats between 2016 and 2021 across China. But they did not find any close relatives of SARS-CoV-2, and conclude that these are “extremely rare in bats in China”.
But other researchers question this claim. “I strongly disagree with the suggestion that relatives of SARS-CoV-2 may not be circulating in Chinese bats, as such viruses have already been described in Yunnan,” says Holmes.
The corresponding author of the study declined to respond to Nature’s questions about the findings, because the paper is still under review.
Wang says that both studies highlight the importance of ramping up sampling in regions outside China to help uncover the origins of the pandemic.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02596-2
News (23)
Coronaviruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 discovered in Cambodia and Japan
The viruses are the first known relatives of SARS-CoV-2 to be found outside China, which supports the World Health Organization’s search across Asia for the pandemic’s animal origin. Strong evidence suggests that SARS-CoV-2 originated in horseshoe bats, but whether it passed directly from bats to people, or through an intermediate host, remains a mystery.
News (24)
Viral genome of Cambodian horseshoe bats not fully sequenced
The virus in Cambodia was found in two Shamel’s horseshoe bats (Rhinolophus shameli) captured in the country’s north in 2010. The virus’s genome has not yet been fully sequenced — nor its discovery published — making its full significance to the pandemic hard to ascertain.
If the virus is very closely related to — or even an ancestor of — the pandemic virus, it could provide crucial information about how SARS-CoV-2 passed from bats to people, and inform the search for the pandemic’s origin, says Veasna Duong, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Cambodia in Phnom Penh, who led the search of the old samples in Cambodia and alerted Nature to the discovery in early November. To provide such insights, the virus would have to share more than 97% of its genome with SARS-CoV-2, which is more than its closest known relative, say researchers.
But the new virus might be more distantly related, in which case, studying it will help scientists to learn more about the diversity in this virus family, says Etienne Simon-Loriere, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, who plans to sequence the virus, after which it will be shared publicly.
News (25)
Rc-o319 is 81% similar to SARS-CoV-2 in genome
That is the case with the other virus, called Rc-o319, identified in a little Japanese horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus cornutus) captured in 2013. That virus shares 81% of its genome with SARS-CoV-2, according to a paper1 published on 2 November — which makes it too distant to provide insights into the pandemic’s origin, says Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney in Australia.
News (26)
Coronaviruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 common in Rhinolophus bats
No matter what the Cambodian team finds, both discoveries are exciting because they confirm that viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 are relatively common in Rhinolophus bats, and even in bats found outside China, says Alice Latinne, an evolutionary biologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society Vietnam in Hanoi, who has seen some of the Cambodian team’s analysis but was not involved in the investigation.
“This is what we were looking for, and we found it,” says Duong. “It was exciting and surprising at the same time.”
The findings also suggest that other as-yet undiscovered SARS-CoV-2 relatives could be stored in lab freezers, says Aaron Irving, an infectious-diseases researcher at Zhejiang University in Haining, China, who also plans to test stored samples of bats and other mammals for antibodies against SARS-CoV-2.
“I did not expect to find a relative of SARS-CoV-2,” says virologist Shin Murakami at the University of Tokyo, who was part of the team that decided to retest frozen animal samples for viruses in the wake of the pandemic.
Only a handful of known coronaviruses are closely related to SARS-CoV-2, including its closest known relative, RaTG13. That was discovered in intermediate horseshoe bats (Rhinolophus affinis) in the Chinese province of Yunnan in 2013, and was published2 only earlier this year. There are also several other coronaviruses, found in other Rhinolophus bats and pangolins captured between 2015 and 2019, that scientists now know to be closely related to SARS-CoV-2.
“SARS-CoV-2 probably wasn’t a brand new virus that popped up all of a sudden. Viruses in this group existed before we became aware of them in 2019,” says Tracey Goldstein, associate director of the One Health Institute at the University of California, Davis, who is involved with the Cambodian team.
Latinne says the discoveries confirm that Rhinolophus bats are the reservoir of these viruses.
Virus in Cambodia
Duong’s team tested the Shamel’s horseshoe bats in Cambodia for coronaviruses as part of the US-government-funded PREDICT project, which surveyed wildlife worldwide for viruses with pandemic potential for decades and ended earlier this year. A team, including researchers from the French National Museum of Natural History in Paris and the Pasteur Institute in Cambodia originally collected the bats in 2010.
In April, the US Agency for International Development gave the programme an additional US$3 million and a 6-month extension to look for evidence of SARS-CoV-2 in animal samples — mostly bats, as well as pangolins and other animals — that were sitting in laboratory freezers in Laos, Malaysia, Nepal, Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia. A full report of these investigations is expected in the coming weeks.
Duong says preliminary genome sequencing of a short fragment of the new bat virus — 324 base pairs long — showed that it was similar to the same region in SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG-13, suggesting that the three are closely related. That region is highly conserved in coronaviruses, says Latinne, and is often used to quickly identify whether a virus is new or known. But it’s not yet clear whether RaTG-13 or the new virus is more closely related to SARS-CoV-2.
It is difficult to say with such a small fragment, says Vibol Hul, a virologist also at the Institute Pasteur in Cambodia, who was part of the team that trapped the Shamel’s horseshoe bats at the entrance to a cave in 2010. The genomes of most known coronaviruses contain about 30,000 base pairs.
In a separate analysis, the Cambodia team sequenced some 70% of the new virus’s genome using the technology available locally, says Erik Karlsson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Cambodia, who helped to analyse the bats. Missing from that sequence were the instructions for crucial parts of the virus, such as the genes that encode the spike protein that coronaviruses typically use to enter cells. Sequencing that section will indicate whether this virus can infect human cells, says Duong.
The new coronavirus would have to be at least 99% similar to SARS-CoV-2 to be an immediate ancestor of the current pandemic virus, says Irving. The genomes of RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 differ by only 4%, but that divergence represents between 40 and 70 years of evolution since they shared a common ancestor. Although decades apart, the viruses are similar enough to use the same receptor to enter cells. Cell studies suggest that RaTG13 could infect people3.
Virus in Japan
Of the known coronaviruses related to SARS-CoV-2, the newly discovered Rc-o319 seems to be the most distantly related, says Duong.
In cell studies, the Japan team found that the virus can not bind to the receptor that SARS-CoV-2 uses to enter human cells, suggesting that it could not easily infect people.
Shin says his colleagues captured more bats in Japan earlier this year, and plan to test them for coronaviruses. And in October, Hul returned to the cave in northern Cambodia to catch more bats.
More SARS-CoV-2-related coronaviruses probably exist in Rhinolophus bat populations, which live across the region, says Holmes. “Hopefully, one or more of these will be so closely related to SARS-CoV-2 that we can regard it as the true ancestor.”
Nature 588, 15-16 (2020)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-03217-0
News (27)
Doug Logan, the CEO of Cyber Ninjas, the firm who led the forensic audit of Maricopa County’s 2020 election results, revealed serious problems with the ballot forms, votes, and others, and as pro-Trump State Senator Wendy Rogers noted, the number of errors discovered is “way more than 10K votes needed to flip the election.”
Logan first explained that duplicate ballots, which are not the same as duplicated ballot envelopes, were co-mingled with original ballots. Many of these ballots had incorrect and missing serial numbers. However, these were very small numbers, which eventually corrected gave few hundred votes back to Biden, as the mainstream media originally mentioned before the Senate hearing – Logan attributed these to simple human error.
He confirmed that ballot form numbers did not match up. EV32 voting forms, which match with votes sent, did not match the number of EV33 forms, for early votes returned. 9,041 more mail-in voters were shown as being returned than having been sent out with the EV32s. 397 mail-in ballots were never sent, and do not have a corresponding EV32. 255,326 early votes did not have a complimentary EV33.
Many issues were also seen with voters who were registered as having moved. 23,344 voters voted via a mail-in ballot where nobody else of the same name was at the address, eliminating students and other people in similar family situations from the potential mix. Mail-in ballots cannot be forwarded, meaning the only legal way for these Maricopa voters to have received their ballot was to have picked it up in person, something the audit team considered unlikely. 2,081 voters even moved out of state and received a full ballot, not a “federal only” ballot.
Logan claimed that potentially up to 5,047 individuals voted in more than one county, with voters having the same names and same birth year – 393 voters also had an incomplete name. 198 voters registered after the October 18th cutoff and still voted. Issues were also seen with the voter roll, where there were 2,681 unique AFSEQ numbers, which are supposed to be applied to voters for a singular transaction, being shared between voters. The Maricopa audit team said this suggested an election integrity issue with the ballot data itself. Other claims included 282 potentially dead voters and 186 people with potential duplicate IDs.
Maricopa County attempted to fact check a number of the claims from Logan in a Twitter thread, but severely ignored a significant number of points brought up in the Senate hearing, including: the fact that those who moved out of state should have only received a “federal only” ballot, but received a full ballot; that names that matched up including first, middle and last names; voters with multiple IDs and AFSEQ number problems.
As National File reported, earlier in the presentation, Logan confirmed that Cyber Ninjas was not given key information from Maricopa County until the day before the hearing, making it impossible for the group to verify the accuracy of Maricopa County’s claims:
“We finally heard back from Maricopa County,” said Logan, who said that the auditors “asked them about this discrepancy, I think at least a week ago.” He added, “The day before we present our results, they decide to tell us that those were actually for the protected voters” who need to have their addresses concealed.
According to Maricopa County, a small subsection of the total presentation from Cyber Ninjas included “protected voters,” which includes judges, battered women, and people concerned about having their addresses made public. Logan apparently requested clarification as recently as a week prior to the hearing, but was not given a timely response.
“I can’t validate whether that’s accurate or not accurate, this is information that we just, just received. What I can say is that this sort of stuff is exactly why, with audits, usually the organization you’re in the process of auditing cooperates and works with you. This would have been extremely helpful,” Logan explained.
Logan’s presentation was preceeded by a presentation from Dr Shiva Ayyadurai, who explained that the audit examined the signature area of the ballots, and compared them to the official canvass results that Maricopa County gave in their report. When using signature presence detection analysis, the audit found an excess of 9,589 votes with signatures that were either blank or were “scribbles.” Photos shown in the presentation included totally blank ballots being stamped “approved.”
Senate President Karen Fann has referred the forensic audit’s findings to Attorney General Mark Brnovich, and asked him to determine whether his office should continue investigation into the potential legal issues raised by the audit.
News (28)
Trump joins call to decertify Arizona's 2020 Election results
Reporter : Tom Pappert, National File
“It is not even believable the dishonesty of the Fake News Media on the Arizona Audit results,” wrote President Trump, referring to several establishment media outlets suggesting that the audit’s finding that the total vote count provided by Maricopa County is accurate means the rest of the audit’s explosive findings are somehow invalidated.
President Trump noted that the audit “shows incomprehensible Fraud at an Election Changing level, many times more votes than is needed. The Fake News Media refuses to write the facts, thereby being complicit in the Crime of the Century. They are so dishonest, but Patriots know the truth!” The 45th President added, “Arizona must immediately decertify their 2020 Presidential Election Results.”
Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers has previously called for the results to be decertified in anticipation of the audit results. Last month, Rogers began gathering signatures calling for the Arizona legislature to begin the process of decertification, and ultimately secured over 1 million signatures prior to the hearing earlier today.
Ref: https://nationalfile.com/trump-joins-call-to-decertify-arizonas-2020-election-results/
News (29)
HNA is over, Chairman Chen Feng and CEO Tan Xiangdong were arrested
HNA Group suddenly issued an announcement on Friday (24 September 2021) that its chairman Chen Feng and CEO Tan Xiangdong were arrested in accordance with the law on suspicion of illegal crimes, but the bankruptcy and reorganization of HNA went smoothly.
The HNA Group of China stated in an announcement on 24 September that it received a notice from the Hainan Public Security Bureau that its “Chairman Chen Feng and CEO Tan Xiangdong were taken compulsory measures in accordance with the law for suspected violations of the law.” Smooth progress, production and operation will not be affected in any way". The announcement did not disclose the specific crimes and related details of Chen Feng and Tan Xiangdong suspected of committing.
HNA was once an important shareholder of "Hilton Global Holdings" and "Deutsche Bank". In recent years, it has fallen into serious financial crisis. It was taken over by the Hainan Provincial Government in February last year and officially declared bankruptcy in January this year. The parent company and several listed subsidiaries started Asset restructuring. In September of this year, Liaoning Fangda Group and Hainan Development Holdings formally took over as strategic investors in the aviation and airport business of HNA Group.
News (30)
More than 20,000 employees collectively reported Chen Feng on the Internet
News (31)
After HNA's reorganization, the equity of the old shareholder team is all cleared
On 18 September 2021, Gu Gang, the leader of the joint working group of Hainan HNA Group and Secretary of the Party Committee of HNA Group, presided over the 39th week of 2021 safety production and operation regular meeting. Gu Gang pointed out:
After the reorganization, the old shareholder team and the Cihang Foundation will have all their rights and interests in the HNA Group and member companies cleared, and no longer own the relevant equity. After the reorganization is completed, the equity of the old shareholder team will be cleared in accordance with the law. This is not only a legal requirement for the rule of law and market-based bankruptcy reorganization, it is the basic responsibility that shareholders must bear, and it is also an inevitable consequence of the brutal growth of private enterprises. HNA must deeply reflect on the development of HNA's private enterprises in the past 28 years, and continue to learn the lessons of blind expansion and no awe in the past.
After the reorganization of HNA, it will be split into four sections to operate independently, and each will return to its main business for healthy development. If the bankruptcy reorganization is successfully completed, HNA will split the reorganization into four completely independently operated sectors-aviation sector, airport sector, financial sector, commercial sector and other sectors, each led by a new actual controller shareholder to move forward, thus completing independence to ensure that each sector returns to its main business and develops healthily.
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