Chinese authorities secretly investigated a lab at the heart of the row over Covid's origin after the pandemic began, an ex-insider sensationally revealed today.

President Xi Jinping's communist administration has repeatedly denied the lab leak hypothesis, labelling it a smear campaign by 'anti-China' forces and insisting the virus emerged naturally.

Yet Beijing considered the theory credible enough to instigate its own formal probe, according to the former chief of the country's own public health watchdog, the equivalent of the UK Health Security Agency or Center for Disease Control and Prevention in the US.

Professor George Gao, who ran the organisation when the pandemic began towards the end of 2019, claimed the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was 'double-checked' by government-backed experts.

The BBC says Professor Gao's explosive revelation — shared with them — is the first acknowledgement of any internal inquiry taking place over the lab leak theory.

Discussing the possibility himself in a new podcast aimed to exploring the origins of the virus, he said: 'You can always suspect anything. That's science. Don't rule out anything.'

At first, the overwhelming opinion, shared by the world's leading experts, was that Covid crossed naturally from animals infected with a bat coronavirus.

But consensus over how the pandemic began three years ago has slowly started to shift.

The lab leak theory centres around the fact that the virus first emerged miles away from the WIV, where researchers were known to be working on coronaviruses found in bats.

This comes after the US diplomatic mission in the African country released ads on social media platforms calling on the country's citizens to register to vote.

Zimbabwe's government summoned the US envoy to the country for meddling in internal affairs by calling on citizens to register to vote in the upcoming elections.

Livit Mugejo, a spokesperson for Zimbabwe's Foreign Ministry, said late Tuesday that the American Chargé d'Affaires at the US embassy, Elaine French, had been called in over social media ads posted this month by the diplomatic mission.

Leading contender in the GOP primary race, former President Donald Trump has announced a new policy initiative that would see the children of illegal immigrants born in the US not eligible for citizenship. Citing the "illegal foreign invasion of our country" under Joe Biden, Trump said that under current citizenship rules, all children of those illegal immigrants will be granted birthright citizenship. Trump wants to do away with that.

On the first day of his presidency, Trump promises to sign an Executive Order to prevent birthright citizenship for children of parents who are illegal immigrants.

Trump said in the campaign video.:

"This policy is a reward for breaking the laws of the United States and is obviously a magnet helping draw the flood of illegals across our borders. They come by the millions and millions and millions. They come from mental institutions, they come from jails, prisoners, some of the toughest, meanest people you'll ever see."

Illegal immigration under the Biden administration has become a problem not just for southern border states but for states across the country as migrants get shipped off on buses and planes.

Why do so many liberal climate-activist grandees fly on private jets? Or why do those who profited from Black Lives Matter have a propensity for estate living? Or why do the community-activist Obamas prefer to live in not one, but three mansions?

The answer is that calls for radical equity, "power for the people," and mandated equality are usually mostly sloganeering for those who enjoy power and the lucre it brings, and their wish is to augment both for themselves. The result is that the issue du jour of mandated equality often becomes secondary if not irrelevant. There is neither fear of inconstancy nor hypocrisy, given the central theme that governs a leftist party line is political utility — or the ends of power always more than justify the hypocritical means used to obtain it.

Spout racialist nonsense for 40 years? Harass women and young girls by blowing in their hair and squeezing them too tightly? Create a family grifting syndicate to leverage foreign cash in quid pro quo fashion? Praise racial segregationists?

Joe Biden did all those things and more. But he also did them in service to a supposed noble cause, sort of like the current board president of the NAACP promoting a black travel ban on Florida, while he lives — in Florida!

Keep political utility in mind and the baffling hypocrisy of the Left makes all too perfect sense.

British counter-terror police detained journalist Kit Klarenberg upon his arrival at London's Luton airport and subjected him to an extended interrogation about his political views and reporting for The Grayzone.

As soon as journalist Kit Klarenberg landed in his home country of Britain on May 17, 2023, six anonymous plainclothes counter-terror officers detained him. They quickly escorted him to a back room, where they grilled him for over five hours about his reporting for this outlet. They also inquired about his personal opinion on everything from the current British political leadership to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

At one point, Klarenberg's interrogators demanded to know whether The Grayzone had a special arrangement with Russia's Federal Security Bureau (FSB) to publish hacked material.

During Klarenberg's detention, police seized the journalist's electronic devices and SD cards, fingerprinted him, took DNA swabs, and photographed him intensively. They threatened to arrest him if he did not comply.

Klarenberg's interrogation appears to be London's way of retaliating for the journalist's blockbuster reports exposing major British and US intelligence intrigues. In the past year alone, Klarenberg revealed how a cabal of Tory national security hardliners violated the Official Secrets Act to exploit Brexit and install Boris Johnson as prime minister. In October 2022, he earned international headlines with his exposé of British plans to bomb the Kerch Bridge connecting Crimea to the Russian Federation. Then came his report on the CIA's recruitment of two 9/11 hijackers this April, a viral sensation that generated massive social media attention.

Among Klarenberg's most consequential exposés was his June 2022 report unmasking British journalist Paul Mason as a UK security state collaborator hellbent on destroying The Grayzone and other media outlets, academics, and activists critical of NATO's role in Ukraine.

In a First on FOX Business interview, Media Research Center President and founder Brent Bozell discussed the "astonishing" findings that the Biden administration is allegedly using taxpayer money to wage a covert war on conservative and Christian groups.

Bozell told host Maria Bartiromo Thursday:

"You're a terrorist, I'm a terrorist. Anybody with the RNC is a terrorist. Anyone supporting or reading Breitbart, the Christian Broadcasting Network, for the love of God, the Heritage Foundation, the most prestigious conservative think tank in America, all have now been targeted as associated to one degree or another with terrorism."

On Mornings with Maria, the head of the conservative watchdog group detailed their new report which found an Obama-era domestic terror prevention program reinstated by Biden has allegedly given $40 million to 80 recipients who put organizations like the Republican National Committee, Heritage Foundation, Turning Point USA in the same category as militant terror groups.

Biden's Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, former Senator John Kerry, has declared that it's time to follow in the Netherland's footsteps and make U.S. farmers go extinct in order to save the planet.

"A lot of people have no clue that agriculture contributes about 33 percent of all the emissions of the world," Kerry declared earlier this month.

"Depending a little bit on how you count it, but it's anywhere from 26 to 33. And we can't get to net zero, we don't get this job done, unless agriculture is front and center as part of the solution. So all of us understand here. The depths of this mission."

Kerry insists that America must follow the WEF blueprint for eradicating farming to meet the "green agenda" goals laid out by the globalist elites.

It's not that Erdogan has a scheme to head east at the west's expense. It's just that the world's grandest infrastructure, development, and geopolitical projects are all in the east today.

The collective west was dying to bury him - yet another strategic mistake that did not take into account the mood of Turkish voters in deep Anatolia.

In the end, Recep Tayyip Erdogan did it - again. Against all his shortcomings, like an aging neo-Ottoman Sinatra, he did it "my way," comfortably retaining Turkiye's presidency after naysayers had all but buried him.

The first order of geopolitical priority is who will be named Minister of Foreign Affairs. The prime candidate is Ibrahim Kalin - the current all-powerful Erdogan press secretary cum top adviser.

Compared to incumbent Cavusoglu, Kalin, in theory, may be qualified as more pro-west. Yet it's the Sultan who calls the shots. It will be fascinating to watch how Turkiye under Erdogan 2.0 will navigate the strengthening of ties with West Asia and the accelerating process of Eurasia integration.

The first immediate priority, from Erdogan's point of view, is to get rid of the "terrorist corridor" in Syria. This means, in practice, reigning in the US-backed Kurdish YPG/PYD, who are effectively Syrian affiliates of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) - which is also the issue at the heart of a possible normalization of relations with Damascus.

Now that Syria has been enthusiastically welcomed back to the Arab League after a 12-year freeze, a Moscow-brokered entente between the Turkish and Syrian presidents, already in progress, may represent the ultimate win-win for Erdogan: allowing control of Kurds in north Syria while facilitating the repatriation of roughly 4 million refugees (tens of thousands will stay, as a source of cheap labor).

The Sultan is at his prime when it comes to hedging his bets between east and west. He knows well how to profit from Turkiye's status as a key NATO member - complete with one of its largest armies, veto power, and control of the entry to the uber-strategic Black Sea.

And all that while exercising real foreign policy independence, from West Asia to the Eastern Mediterranean.

So expect Erdogan 2.0 to remain an inextinguishable source of irritation for the neocons and neoliberals in charge of US foreign policy, along with their EU vassals, who will never refrain from trying to subdue Ankara to fight the Russia-China-Iran Eurasia integration entente. The Sultan, though, knows how to play this game beautifully.

The raid involved eight drones, all of which have been neutralized, Russia's Ministry of Defense has said

Tuesday morning's drone attack on Moscow, in which several buildings were hit, was orchestrated by Ukraine, the Russian Defense Ministry has claimed.

"The Kiev regime launched a terrorist attack with unmanned aerial vehicles on targets in the city of Moscow," a statement from the ministry said. The raid involved eight aircraft-type UAVs, all of which were hit; three drones that were suppressed by electronic warfare measures went out of control and deviated from their intended targets, the statement added.

The European Commission has systematically blocked scrutiny of its COVID-19 vaccine deal with Pfizer. This week's update to the contract is no different.

It's as if Pfizer's massive COVID-19 vaccine deal with the European Commission were written with disappearing ink: the more time passes, the more details seem to vanish.

For a while now controversy has raged around the text messages supposedly exchanged between Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Pfizer Chief Executive Albert Bourla in the run-up to the April 2021 deal for 1.1 billion doses of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine. The content and even existence of the messages has been shrouded in secrecy, with requests for clarification met with a fat "no comment."

On Friday, the Commission said it had reached a long sought-after deal with Pfizer to revise the terms of the contract. The new deal cuts down the 450 million doses that were still due to be delivered in 2023, and spreads them out over the next four years.

That's all the information you get. The Commission isn't revealing the new number of doses that member countries must buy, nor any of the financial terms of the amended contract.