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South China Morning Post
23-05-2025
- Health
- South China Morning Post
Global study debunks ‘lab leak' theory, finds Covid-19 virus didn't originate in Wuhan
A landmark international study has offered compelling evidence that the coronavirus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic did not originate in Wuhan, China, challenging US President Donald Trump's laboratory leak theory Advertisement The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Cell on May 7, was led by the University of Edinburgh and involved researchers from 20 institutions across the US, Europe, and Asia, including China. The team analysed 167 bat coronavirus genomes and traced the origins of the virus that causes Covid-19 to bat populations in northern Laos and southwest China's Yunnan province, where its most recent ancestor circulated five to seven years before the pandemic emerged. The findings counter assertions by the White House, which claimed on a revamped government website in April that a Chinese lab leak was the 'real source' of the Covid-19 pandemic. The website continues to display the headings 'LAB LEAK', 'TRUTH', and 'ORIGIN' in bold capital letters. Specifically, the researchers looked at the genomes of sarbecoviruses – coronaviruses that can cause severe respiratory illness. They include Sars-CoV-1, which was responsible for the 2002–2004 severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) outbreak, and Sars-CoV-2, which caused the Covid-19 pandemic Advertisement Lead author Jonathan Pekar said the study showed that the original Sars-CoV-1 was circulating in western China just a year or two before Sars emerged in the southern province of Guangdong in late 2002.
Telegraph
18-05-2025
- General
- Telegraph
The truth about Europe's ancient hatred of the Roma
As a Roma woman with a doctorate from a British university, Madeline Potter often notices that the outside world can perceive her as 'one of the good ones – someone who's somehow managed to make something of myself despite being Roma'. By way of riposte, she has produced a book, The Roma, that is part narrative history, part memoir and part cultural celebration, hoping it might 'offer a model of resistance' for those 'forced into poverty, precarious living conditions and socio-political vulnerability' . Born in a post-industrial town in the foothills of Romania's Carpathian mountains in 1989, the year history caught up with the Ceaușescus, Potter never saw her people roaming the land in bowtop wagons. The long-travelling tradition had vanished. Her great-grandparents, however, had lived as nomads; their vitsa, or subgroup, the Kalderash, was and still is among the largest in the region, its men traditionally coppersmiths. Although her grandfather told her stories of the old days, Potter didn't discover much Romani history until she was in her 20s. Nonetheless, she always 'felt a strange sense of belonging to a past from which I had been cut off'. Now an academic at the University of Edinburgh, Potter clarifies her terminology at the outset. She uses 'Roma' as a plural noun to refer broadly to all subgroups of the Romani people; 'Rom' is the singular masculine, 'Romni' the singular feminine. 'Romani' is an adjective. 'Gypsy', short for Egyptian and therefore a misnomer, barely comes into it. As for the origin story, there is, Potter says, 'no written account of our migration westwards from the territory of present-day Rajasthan in India, and there are no exact dates, but most historians agree that it probably happened in waves during the sixth or seventh centuries.' The book is arranged geographically, following the author's travels through 10 countries in pursuit of both cultural roots and present-day Roma (hence the subtitle, 'A Travelling History'). Some lands Potter already knows well, such as Germany, home to between 170,000 and 300,000 Roma; others, such as Bulgaria, she has never visited before. The story of the US Roma, a million strong today, didn't follow the overall pattern of migration (the ancestors of Roma there came from Europe). A fifth of American Roma live in California. The mass deportations of Roma by the Nazis in the Second World War, the Porrajmos or Samudaripen, was 'a genocide rarely given the same status and attention as the Holocaust'. Some of Potter's relatives from eastern Slovakia perished in Dachau. Estimates used put the number of murdered Roma between 200,000 and 500,000: according to the author, 'historians now think the figure might have been much higher, perhaps reaching one-and-a-half million.' The book is at its strongest when it compares the experiences of these various national groups, and, of course, it's the specificities that hit home. At an anti-Roma protest in Bulgaria in 2011 (where the Roma population is about 800,000), chants of 'Gypsies into soap' persisted; later, an MEP called on Facebook for euthanasia for alleged criminals. To a certain extent, The Roma presents a digest of this marginalisation, persecution and the erasure of history, all reflected in Potter's own experience as she moves around as an observer. In France, she reads blogs and public safety bulletins warning tourists of 'Gypsy scams'. In Spain, where she enrols for the Madrid marathon, she quickly feels stereotyped. She notes, everywhere, the widespread sentiment 'that our culture is inherently bad and harmful to society'. Potter is a clear-headed witness to racism and abuse. And yet I would have liked more on why the endemic hatred and prejudice first took root, and went so deep. Beyond slightly vague talk of fear of the Other, and the information that a negative status clung to Roma from almost the minute they led their horses out of Asia, Potter doesn't tackle the issue. It's a mightily complex subject. But The Roma begs the question. Despite, or perhaps because of that prejudice, Potter defiantly honours the spirit of Roma culture wherever she finds it. Music comes up a lot, and she describes the first feminist Romani theatre company in Romania and the first ever Roma Pride (in Bulgaria). On the other side, the 'fetishisation' of the Roma by artists outside the community gets an airing. In 1867 the composer Franz Liszt published an essay on 'The Gipsy in Music', she writes, which was blind to the history of the subjugation. The author cites a range of sources from Romani scholars to the memoir of Philomena Franz, from the Sinti sub-group found mainly in Bavaria, and poetry by Jo Clements, whose collection Outlandish appeared to acclaim in the UK in 2022. Potter's prose, however, often deployed in the narrative present tense, tends to be flat ('I soak up the atmosphere'), and at times one senses the dead hand of the academic; her first book was a specialist monograph, and she tells the reader three times she is 'a scholar of Gothic literature'. She wants to celebrate, as well as memorialise, but although one hears that 'all vitsi are beautiful, each one a voice in a polyphonous Romani choir', not many pages really sing. Potter's excursion to the famous Appleby Horse Fair in Cumbria conjures a lively scene, but her overall portrait of Romani Britain is bleak. Roma arrived in the United Kingdom when Henry VIII was on the throne; there are about 200,000 Roma Britons now, including the Welsh Kale. And yet, as Potter puts it, Roma face a 'hostile reality'. Since the 2022 Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act entered the statute books, 'trespassing in the United Kingdom has become a criminal offence.' The law, therefore, Potter firmly believes, now 'poses an existential threat. At the risk of having their property confiscated by police, [the Roma] are in danger of being left – paradoxically – homeless, and pushed further into the black hole of precarity and vulnerability.' Again and again, contemplating dark times, Potter celebrates 'resilience and survival'; she wants her book to be seen 'not as a history of victimhood, but of resistance'. And this it is. 'Our bodies', she writes with spirit, 'speak of that survival: we are here, alive, singing and dancing, and still carrying on, and nobody can take that away.' As she concludes: 'The road goes on.'
The Independent
15-05-2025
- Science
- The Independent
Long-term drought could cause ‘profound change' in Amazon rainforest
The Amazon rainforest may be able to survive long-term drought caused by climate change but could experience 'profound changes' including the death of large trees and a diminished ability to absorb carbon, researchers have warned. A study by the University of Edinburgh and the Universidade Federal do Para in Brazil suggests adjusting to a drier, warmer climate will have major consequences for the tropical rainforest which spans more than two million square miles. Findings from the study – which was the longest-running on the impact of drought on tropical rainforest – suggest the Amazon could experience 'excess tree deaths' and 'vast' carbon release, also reducing its immediate capacity to act as a carbon sink for human activity. Parts of the Amazon are expected to become drier and warmer, but the long-term effects are poorly understood and previous research suggested climate change and deforestation could lead to a sparser forest or savanna. An area of rainforest in north-eastern Amazonian Brazil, roughly the size of Trafalgar Square, was subjected to drought conditions for 22 years in an experiment, with more than a third loss of biomass recorded. The experiment began in 2002 with thousands of transparent panels installed above the ground to redirect roughly half of the rainfall to a system of gutters, taking it away from the trees in the one-hectare region. Analysis by the researchers showed most of the largest trees in the study area died during the first 15 years, and the forest stabilised. For seven years after the large initial biomass losses, the availability of water increased for the surviving trees, research showed, and tests on these trees found they were no more drought-stressed than neighbouring trees not subjected to drought. Overall, the area lost more than a third of biomass – tree trunks, branches, stems and roots where carbon is stored in vegetation. Excess tree deaths during the first 15 years of the study caused carbon loss, but surviving trees in the area are now making slight carbon gains, according to a report published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. The study region has less woody biomass than typical Amazon rainforests but more than many dry forests and savannas – suggesting the rainforest has some long-term resilience to drier conditions but at a high cost, scientists said. The biomass the Amazon could lose and the time required to stabilise may be underestimated, as the study only assessed the effects of soil drought, while further research is needed to assess changes to moisture in the air, temperature and storms or fires, according to researchers. The study was led by professors Patrick Meir of the University of Edinburgh and Antonio Carlos Lola Da Costa of the Universidade Federal do Para and the Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi, Brazil. It also involved researchers from the universities of Exeter and Cardiff, and Creaf in Spain, and was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council, the Royal Society and the UK Met Office Newton Fund. Dr Pablo Sanchez Martinez, of the University of Edinburgh's School of GeoSciences, said: 'Our findings suggest that while some rainforests may be able to survive prolonged droughts brought on by climate change, their capacity to act as both a vital carbon store and carbon sink could be greatly diminished.' Prof Meir added: 'Ecological responses to climate can have very large impacts on our environment, locally and globally. 'We cannot understand and predict them without long-term collaborative research of this sort.'
New York Times
07-05-2025
- Health
- New York Times
Genetic Study Retraces Covid's Origins in Bats
In the early 2000s, a coronavirus infecting bats jumped into raccoon dogs and other wild mammals in southwestern China. Some of those animals were sold in markets, where the coronavirus jumped again, into humans. The result was the SARS pandemic, which spread to 33 countries and claimed 774 lives. A few months into it, scientists discovered the coronavirus in mammals known as palm civets sold in a market at the center of the outbreak. In a study published on Wednesday, a team of researchers compared the evolutionary story of SARS with that of Covid 17 years later. The researchers analyzed the genomes of the two coronaviruses that caused the pandemics, along with 248 related coronaviruses in bats and other mammals. Jonathan Pekar, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Edinburgh and an author of the new study, said that the histories of the two coronaviruses followed parallel paths. 'In my mind, they are extraordinarily similar,' he said. In both cases, Dr. Pekar and his colleagues argue, a coronavirus jumped from bats to wild mammals in southwestern China. In a short period of time, wildlife traders took the infected animals hundreds of miles to city markets, and the virus wreaked havoc in humans.
