| Coronavirus expert says he knows when the virus 'will burn itself out,' according to leaked analysis Posted: 11 Feb 2020 01:28 PM PST  A traffic policeman adjusts his mask on a street in Beijing, Sunday, Feb. 9, 2020. China's coronavirus death toll on Sunday has surpassed the number of fatalities in the 2002-2003 SARS epidemic, but fewer new cases were reported in a possible sign its spread may be slowing as other nations step up efforts to block the disease. (AP Photo/Andy Wong) With the death toll climbing each day, fear and uncertainty have spread farther and farther around the globe as coronavirus continues to captivate the world's attention. However, John Nicholls, a pathology professor at the University of Hong Kong, says he knows when the virus will become inactive.In a private conference call organized last week by CLSA, a brokerage firm based in Hong Kong, investment analysts had a chance to ask Nicholls, one of the world's foremost experts on the topic, questions about the novel coronavirus. News of the private conference call was first reported by The Financial Times, and in the days since the call, more details of Nicholls' analysis have surfaced on social media and elsewhere online, including a transcript of the call.The transcript of the call showed Nicholls believes weather conditions will be a key factor in the demise of the novel coronavirus. Referencing the SARS outbreak from 2002 and 2003, Nicholls said he thinks similar weather factors will also shut down the spread of the novel coronavirus."Three things the virus does not like: 1. Sunlight, 2. Temperature, and 3. Humidity," Nicholls said in response to a question about when he thinks confirmed cases will peak, the transcript showed."Sunlight will cut the virus' ability to grow in half so the half-life will be 2.5 minutes and in the dark it's about 13 to 20 [minutes]," Nicholls said. "Sunlight is really good at killing viruses."For that reason, he also added that he doesn't expect areas such as Australia, Africa and the Southern hemisphere to see high rates of infection because they are in the middle of summer. Tourists wearing face masks line up to a departure gate at Bali airport, Indonesia, Saturday, Feb. 8, 2020. Thousands of Chinese tourists are reportedly stranded in Bali following suspending all flights to and from China amid growing concerns about the coronavirus outbreak. (AP Photo/Firdia Lisnawati) Regarding temperatures, Nicholls said the warmer the better for stopping the spread of the virus, according to the transcript of the conference call."The virus can remain intact at 4 degrees (39 degrees Fahrenheit) or 10 degrees (50 F) for a longer period of time," Nicholls said, referring to Celsius measurements, according to the transcript. "But at 30 degrees (86 degrees F) then you get inactivation. And high humidity -- the virus doesn't like it either," he added, the transcript of the call showed.However, Nicholls also said that he doesn't consider SARS or MERS, a Middle Eastern novel virus that spread in 2012, to be an accurate comparison for this year's outbreak. Rather, the novel coronavirus most closely relates to a severe case of the common cold.CLICK HERE FOR THE FREE ACCUWEATHER APP"Compared to SARS and MERS, we are talking about a coronavirus that has a mortality rate of eight to 10 times less deadly to SARS to MERS," Nicholls is quoted as having said on the conference call. "So, a correct comparison is not SARS or MERS but a severe cold. Basically, this is a severe form of the cold."Similar to a common cold, the surrounding environment of the outbreak plays an important role in determining the survivability and spreadability of the virus, he continued. Because of the impending shift in seasons, Nicholls said he expects the spread of the virus to be curbed in a matter of months."I think it will burn itself out in about six months," Nicholls said. A woman with a face protection mask walks along the high street in Brighton, Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2020. Britain has declared the new coronavirus that emerged from China a "serious and imminent threat to public health'' and announced new measures Monday to combat the spread of the disease.(AP Photo/Frank Augstein) According to the transcript, Nicholls elaborated on exactly when he expects the novel coronavirus to subside as investment analysts posed more questions."The environment is a crucial factor. The environment will be unfavorable for growth around May," Nicholls said. "The evidence is to look at the common cold -- it's always during winter. So the natural environment will not be favorable in Asia in about May."Average temperatures typically reach as high as 86 F in the outbreak's epicenter, Wuhan, on June 17.When asked about the probability of the novel coronavirus becoming endemic, Nicholls responded, "If it is like SARS it will not be endemic. It most likely will be a hit and run just like SARS," according to the transcript.Experts that AccuWeather have spoken to previously have stopped short of linking weather to the spread of the virus.Earlier in the month, Andrew Pekosz, Ph.D. Professor and Vice Chair W. Harry Feinstone Department of Molecular Microbiology & Immunology at Johns Hopkins University, told AccuWeather cooler weather provides more favorable conditions for the spread of most respiratory viruses."Many respiratory viruses transmit better at low temperature and humidity, but we have no data on how this might affect 2019-nCoV transmission," Pekosz said in an e-mail to AccuWeather on Feb. 4."Respiratory coronaviruses do appear more frequently in cooler months (late fall, winter). Since we don't know how this virus was transmitted within its natural host, it's difficult to predict if it will have the same pattern as human respiratory coronaviruses," Pekosz said at the time.Nicholls' comments, while made privately, represents the most definitive tie to the weather a health expert has made yet.At the University of Hong Kong, Nicholls has spent the past 25 years studying coronavirus and he served as a key member of the team that characterized SARS. The Hong Kong University Faculty of Medicine's Clinical Research Centre also created the world's first lab-grown copy of coronavirus, according to CNN correspondent Kristie Lu Stout, giving researchers a major breakthrough in understanding the behavior of the virus.However, in an interview with Lu Stout, Nicholls said there is one key difference between prior outbreaks and the current spread of the novel coronavirus. Unlike previous versions of coronavirus, the novel coronavirus has been able to be spread before symptoms present themselves in patients. A personnel wearing protective suit waits near an entrance at the Cheung Hong Estate, a public housing estate during evacuation of residents in Hong Kong, Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2020. The Centre for Health Protection of the Department of Health evacuated some residents from the public housing estate after two cases of novel coronavirus infection to stop the potential risk of further spread of the virus. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung) But despite that frightening trait, Nicholls' long-term optimism hasn't changed in other public remarks that he's made recently."My feeling is that this is going to be just like SARS, that the world is going to get a very bad cold for about five months," Nicholls told CNN last week.AccuWeather reached out to Nicholls on Tuesday for comment and is waiting to hear back.The World Health Organization (WHO) officially designated the virus COVID-19 on Tuesday, adding that the first vaccine could be available in 18 months, according to Reuters.Keep checking back on AccuWeather.com and stay tuned to the AccuWeather Network on DirecTV, Frontier and Verizon Fios
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| At least five dead in suicide attack on Afghan military academy Posted: 11 Feb 2020 01:25 AM PST  No group immediately claimed responsibility for the dawn attack, which comes after nearly three months of relative calm in Kabul. The interior ministry, however, said six people died -- two civilians and four military personnel -- after the suicide bomber detonated the device at around 7:00 am (0230 GMT). The blast happened near the Marshal Fahim military academy, where the country's security officers are trained.
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| The FBI Makes a Bizarre Claim About Pro-Choice Terrorism Posted: 10 Feb 2020 07:17 PM PST  The FBI is expanding its focus on domestic terrorism, and that includes pro-choice violence — even though such violence is so vanishingly rare, it's all but nonexistent. In testimony before the House judiciary committee on Wednesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray disclosed that the bureau has recently "changed our terminology as part of a broader reorganization of the way in which we categorize our domestic terrorism efforts." It's part of a much-heralded reinvigoration of the bureau's domestic terrorism focus after a rising tide of mostly white-supremacist terrorism.Among four broad categories of domestic terrorism that the FBI confronts, Wray said, is "abortion violent extremism." But Wray wasn't only talking about the pro-life extremism that murders abortion providers in their churches, he hastened to add, but "people on either side of that issue who commit violence on behalf of different views on that topic."His questioner, Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.), was puzzled at Wray's seeming equivalence: "People on either side of that issue don't commit violence." In fact, the FBI pointed The Daily Beast to just one episode of pro-choice-inspired terrorism – one that did not involve an actual act of violence, but rather a threat in an online comments section.But Wray persisted: "Well, we've actually had a variety of kinds of violence under that, believe it or not. But at the end of the day." Bass asked, "Really, that blow up buildings and threaten doctors?" Rather than responding, Wray moved on to detailing the FBI's next domestic-terrorism category, one about "animal rights and environmental extremism."Wray's comments weren't the first instance of the bureau promoting the idea of pro-choice violence as a real threat. In 2017, the FBI distributed a brief "Abortion Extremism Reference Guide" at a counterterrorism training for local law enforcement, listing "pro-choice extremists" as a group of domestic terrorists. The document, first reported by Jezebel, claimed that these extremists "believe it is their moral duty to protect those who provide or receive abortion services"—though even this document noted that only one "pro-choice extremist" had ever been prosecuted. Additionally, an earlier FBI training document obtained by the ACLU in 2012 referenced pro-choice violence but did not "provide a single example of violence against abortion opponents," the ACLU wrote. "Abortion violent extremism" of any sort accounts for a only small percentage of FBI domestic terrorism cases. Wray on Wednesday that the "top threat" of domestic terrorism comes from what he called "racially/ethnically motivated violent extremists." Out of approximately 850 current cases that a senior FBI official cited in congressional testimony last May, about half concern anti-government extremism and another 40 percent concern racist terrorism. That leaves around 85 cases of violence motivated by animal rights, ecological degradation, abortion and miscellaneous cases. An FBI spokesperson confirmed the total caseload and the breakdown are still current.But abortion extremism doesn't have an "either side." The primary case of pro-choice violent extremism that the FBI pointed The Daily Beast toward – the same one cited in the 2017 FBI document – is the 2012 conviction of Theodore Schulman, who had a long history of threatening anti-abortion activists. Schulman's ultimate downfall was the result of posting a threat in the comments section of religious conservative outlet First Things: "if Roeder is acquitted, someone will respond by killing" Princeton's Robert George and Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life, he wrote. That itself spoke to the discrepancy in violence between the two sides. "Roeder" was a reference to Scott Roeder, who murdered abortion provider George Tiller in the foyer of a Wichita church in 2009. Other instances of anti-abortion violence include a trio of bombings at Florida abortion clinics in 1985, a string of arson attacks on a Washington clinic in 1983, and a 2015 shooting at a Colorado Planned Parenthood that killed three. Between 1993 and today, anti-abortion activists murdered 11 people and attempted to kill another 26, according to the National Abortion Federation."Anti-choice violence as we know it is constant, pervasive, and escalating dramatically, and it threatens the civil liberties as well as the lives of our patents, our members, our society," NAF President Katherine Ragsdale told The Daily Beast. Wray's comments, she added, are a "danger to public perception.""It tars everyone with the same brush when in fact pro-choice folks simply are not doing this," she said.The Daily Beast has filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI to document the extent of its focus on alleged pro-choice violent extremism.Mila Johns, a domestic-terrorism researcher affiliated with the University of Maryland's Global Terrorism Database, said violence was "very much lopsided in the other direction," the anti-abortion side, and called Wray's equivalence "a very political statement." The database, which tracks terrorist attacks across the world since 1970, records about 300 incidents related to anti-abortion violence and none for pro-choice violence. However, an Austin woman in 2016 was charged with throwing a crude Molotov cocktail at anti-abortion protesters. And last year, an 85-year old anti-abortion protester in San Francisco was knocked to the ground after he attempted jamming the bicycle spokes of a man who appears to have stolen a pro-life group's banner. Troy Newman, the president of Operation Rescue — a radical anti-abortion group that moved its headquarters to Wichita, Kansas specifically to target Dr. Tiller — said his movement has been on the receiving end of threats. He estimated he had made between 20 and 50 complaints to federal law enforcement over the last two decades, for everything from anthrax scares to online intimidation. Wichita resident Christopher Thompson, he noted, was sentenced to 12 months in jail last year for making menacing calls to Operation Rescue's office and employees.But when as asked about specific instances of pro-choice violence, Newman cited only the murder of James Pouillon, an Operation Save America activist who was shot while protesting abortion outside a high school in 2009. (The judge in that case said the killer's motivations were not tied to abortion.) Newman declined to give examples of abortion-rights violence of the scale and magnitude of that enacted by the anti-abortion movement. "You got your scorecard and I got mine," he said. "All of them are terrible."The FBI's position is that pro-choice activists and groups not concerned with violence don't need to worry about the new domestic terrorism categorization. "We don't investigate ideology or rhetoric or anything of that sort," Wray testified. An FBI spokesperson declined to comment, but pointed to comments from the bureau's former assistant director for counterterrorism, Mike McGarrity, from last June. "It is important to remember that in line with our mission to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States, no FBI investigation can be opened solely on the basis of First Amendment-protected activity," McGarrity testified to a House panel in June. "Rather, domestic terrorism investigations on individuals are opened on the basis of information concerning the occurrence or threat of violent criminal actions by the individual in furtherance of an ideology."However, prior episodes during the 18-year-old war on terror show the FBI does not always hold a rigid distinction between ideology that isn't to be investigated and violence that is. In 2011, its counterterrorism training at Quantico included instructional material that held Islam was an ideology, rather than a religion, with violence baked into its doctrines. The point of the training was to portray Islam itself as a threat to national security – which, for an investigative entity with broad domestic powers, was ominous enough for the Obama administration to order the training materials removed. Michael German, a former FBI special agent who investigated domestic terrorism, said the FBI was not only engaging in a false equivalence but "the manufacturing of an imaginary violent movement," reminiscent of its now-discarded "black identity extremism" category. Anti-Abortion Violence at All-Time HighThe bureau "seems to be grasping a tiny number of unrelated incidents that are not part of any organized effort to falsely imply that such a 'domestic terrorist' movement exists," said German, now with the Brennan Center for Justice. "This is a misleading analysis of dubious purpose, apparently to satisfy some political constituency, which is not what an objective law enforcement agency should be doing." But for some in the reproductive rights space, the threat posed by anti-abortion violence is enough that they are willing to accept dubious FBI categorization to ensure it gets investigated."Those of us in this movement have lost friends and family," Ragsdale said. "By all means, investigate the escalating violence.""And if politics requires you to have a category that says pro-choice violence, go right ahead," she added. "I'd be interested to see if anything ever pops up."Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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