The U.S. federal government should have stopped funding research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2015 when China reduced its cooperation with the French in building and operating the lab, according to the leader of an investigation into COVID-19's origins by the State Department under the Trump administration.

In 2015, French intelligence officials warned the U.S. State Department and their own foreign ministry that China was cutting back on agreed collaboration at the lab, former State official David Asher, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute think tank, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

By 2017, the French "were kicked out" of the lab and cooperation ceased, leading French officials to warn the State Department that they had grave concerns as to Chinese motivations, according to Asher.

The State Department alleged in January 2021, at the end of the Trump administration, that the Wuhan lab had engaged in classified research on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017. The State Department did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation's request for comment.

On Thursday, China said it would not allow the World Health Organization to inspect the lab further. China has blocked the WHO from accessing important records at the lab.

On Monday, Sky News published a story suggesting that Iran has been conducting clandestine research on the possible impact of cyber attacks on civilian infrastructure, including petrol stations, cargo ships and programmable logic controllers, citing what the media outlet claimed were "classified" documents compiled by Iranian intelligence.

The authenticity of the alleged "Iranian secret cyber files" cited by Sky News, on how cyber attacks could be used against civilian infrastructure objects, is debatable, experts said, shortly after the UK media outlet published so-called 'classified documents' said to have been acquired from Iranian intelligence.

Fans of the first neocon president, known for starting unwinnable wars and turning the world against the US, have long tried to secure him a more favorable place in history. Now they think they have one: Covid-19 vaccine envoy.

Bush, oped columnist James Harding admits, is remembered by "the world" for Iraq - the war Americans were promised would be a "cakewalk," in which kids would rush to welcome US troops with flowers - which turned out to be IEDs, planted less by kids than by Iraqis who wanted us to stop stealing their country's oil and priceless artifacts. But that's enough of a stroll down memory lane for Harding - he wants us to remember that Bush was "also the first global health president."

Prime Minister Boris Johnson is set to launch a communist China-style social credit score app that will reward families based on government-approved choices at the grocery store.

The supposedly Conservative government will launch an app by the end of the year to monitor the supermarket spending habits of families in the UK. Those who choose "healthier" options such as fruits and vegetables or engage in exercise will be rewarded with "loyalty points" in the app, which will translate into discounts and other incentives.

"There is a whole team in Downing Street working on this, and the Prime Minister thinks that we simply cannot go on as before and that we must now tackle it head-on," a White Hall source told The Telegraph.

"He has been on a very rigorous diet and exercise programme and it is likely he will play a leading role in fronting this whole campaign."

The outgoing head of the NHS, Lord Stevens said that the UK's socialised healthcare system will be weighed down in the future if the government failed to tackle the rising obesity in the country.

"The layers of the onion... stretch out to things that are obviously beyond a healthcare system's direct control, including the obesogenic food environment that children and poorer communities are exposed to.

"Countries, where more than half the population are overweight, have had 10 times more Covid death," Lord Stevens noted.

The Private Member's Bill to legalise assisted suicide and euthanasia, proposed by Deputy Gino Kenny, has been rejected by the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Justice as it contains serious flaws and it was criticised by the majority of the public submissions, particularly by doctors.

The Committee has recommended that a Special Oireachtas Committee should be established to undertake an examination of the topics raised by the report on the proposed Bill.

Major legal concerns had been raised by the Office of Parliamentary Legal Advisers, which found errors in all sections of the Bill. One section would be vulnerable to a constitutional challenge as it delegates too much to the Minister for Justice, while the ambiguities and serious drafting errors in other sections, they said, could potentially render the Bill vulnerable to a challenge before courts.

Dr. Anthony Fauci announced on Sunday that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is assessing new COVID-19 guidelines that would require face masks for those who are already vaccinated. Fauci, who is the chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden, said the change in mask guidance may be necessary because the United States is "going in the wrong direction" as far as COVID-19 cases.

During an interview on CNN's "State of the Union, Fauci cautioned, "And I have said, it is really a pandemic among the unvaccinated, so this is an issue predominantly among the unvaccinated, which is the reason why we're out there, practically pleading with the unvaccinated people to go out and get vaccinated."

Fauci expressed concern about the outbreak of the virulent delta variant, "And since we have 50 percent of the country [that] is not fully vaccinated, that's a problem, particularly when you have a variant like Delta, which has this extraordinary characteristic of being able to spread very efficiently and very easily from person to person."

On August 23, 1973, an attempted bank raid at Stockholm's Norrmalmstorg Square went badly wrong.

Four hostages were taken and the drama ended only five days later when tear gas forced the robbers to surrender.

The hold-up would doubtless have been forgotten but for the odd reaction of the hostages, who formed a close bond with their jailers.

And it was the events of those few days that gave their name to something now commonly described as Stockholm Syndrome.

This phenomenon has often been identified in the half-century since Norrmalmstorg Square.

But it has been remarkable to see it exhibited by whole swathes of the British public over the past year.

After 16 months of being told by the state when we could leave our homes, whether we could see our families, with whom we were allowed to have sex, or what kinds of sports we were permitted to play, many of us are eager to regain the human dignity that comes with the exercise of our own free will.

Others react differently.

With many focusing on tomorrow's Cyber Polygon exercise, less attention has been paid to the World Economic Forum's real ambitions in cybersecurity - to create a global organization aimed at gutting even the possibility of anonymity online. With the governments of the US, UK and Israel on board, along with some of the world's most powerful corporations, it is important to pay attention to their endgame, not just the simulations.

Amid a series of warnings and simulations in the past year regarding a massive cyber attack that could soon bring down the global financial system, the "information sharing group" of the largest banks and private financial organizations in the United States warned earlier this year that banks "will encounter growing danger" from "converging" nation-state and criminal hackers over the course of 2021 and in the years that follow.

The organization, called the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC), made the claim in its 2021 "Navigating Cyber" report, which assesses the events of 2020 and provides a forecast for the current year. That forecast, which casts a devastating cyber attack on the financial system through third parties as practically inevitable, also makes the case for a "global fincyber [financial-cyber] utility" as the main solution to the catastrophic scenarios it predicts.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, an organization close to top FS-ISAC members has recently been involved in laying the groundwork for that very "global fincyber utility" — the World Economic Forum, which recently produced the model for such a utility through its Partnership against Cybercrime (WEF-PAC) project. Not only are top individuals at FS-ISAC involved in WEF cybersecurity projects like Cyber Polygon, but FS-ISAC's CEO was also an adviser to the WEF-Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report that warned that the global financial system was increasingly vulnerable to cyber attacks and was the subject of the first article in this 2-part series.

Beirut: Leading Lebanese businessman Najib Mikati secured enough votes in parliamentary consultations on Monday to be designated the next prime minister, raising hopes for an urgently needed viable government to tackle a crippling financial crisis.

Mikati, who has been prime minister twice before and unlike many Lebanese leaders does not hail from a political bloc or dynasty, received 72 votes out of a total of 118 members of parliament.

No wonder Washington wanted to block it

The US and Germany came to a historic agreement last week over the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, as a compromise between the hawks who have sought to sink the project and those who want to do business with Russia.

However, efforts to draw a line under the debate over the almost-finished energy link have clearly not pacified Ukraine's foreign minister. Dmytro Kuleba was quick to reply to the news on Wednesday, saying in a joint statement with Poland's foreign minister that the proposals put forward to alleviate the "security deficit" caused by Nord Stream 2 "cannot be considered sufficient."

The pipeline, which stretches through the Baltic Sea and connects the gas fields of Siberia directly to Germany, is already 98% complete, with the final stretches set to be laid in August. Though US President Joe Biden's White House has sought to portray the new settlement with Berlin as the final word on the matter, some American lawmakers are still pushing to see the US impose sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 project.