THE BIG STORY
Activists fueled the COVID "lab leak" conspiracy to channel right-wing anger and pursue its goal of defunding animal experiments | Israel Vargas for BuzzFeed News | As the world buckled under the pandemic in April 2020, a tiny group that campaigns against federal funding for animal experiments spotted an opportunity. The White Coat Waste Project, an organization founded with the mission of getting conservatives into animal activism, persuaded DailyMail.com to run a story saying the US government had funded a lab in Wuhan, China which — according to right-leaning media speculation at the time — was suspected of starting the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Two years on, and with the scientific trail going cold, it's possible that the mystery of the virus origins may never be conclusively solved. But thousands of pages of NIH emails and other documents released to BuzzFeed News show how the White Coat Waste Project rode the wave of partisan pandemic politics to serve its cause, and in the process triggered a storm that engulfed EcoHealth Alliance, one of the world's largest groups studying potentially dangerous animal viruses. They also show how the National Institutes of Health, the country's premier health research agency, stumbled under the political pressure the White Coat Waste Project brought to bear. Since then, Republicans in Congress have leaned hard into the lab leak theory and the related idea that the NIH funded EcoHealth and the Wuhan institute to conduct "gain-of-function" research — when scientists deliberately make viruses more dangerous in order to study pandemic risks. The White Coat Waste Project is writing a controversial new activist playbook — and it's unclear whether anyone can control the forces that it has helped to unleash. "If you would have told me that this chain of events was going to happen, I would have said, 'No way, this is absolutely impossible,'" the president of EcoHealth told BuzzFeed News. | | | STAYING ON TOP OF THIS Tracking lives lost in Ukraine | - Some civilians have evacuated the Mariupol steel mill. The remaining Ukrainian troops face a difficult choice. The troops have the right to fight to their death, but if they surrender, Russia can detain them as prisoners of war, international humanitarian law experts told AP News.
- Over 3,000 civilian deaths have been reported since war broke out on February 24. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights believes the real toll is much higher.
| | | The WHO announced that COVID has killed an estimated 14.9 million people across the world in 2020 and 2021. That's nearly three times the official count of COVID deaths over the same period, underlining the severity of a pandemic that still has not been curbed after over two years. An armed man has been booked on suspicion of assault after he attacked Dave Chappelle onstage. After wrestling with the attacker, Chappelle broke free and continued the show as security cornered the attacker and began beating him while members of the crowd watched, stunned. Amber Heard described the first time Johnny Depp allegedly hit her as she testified about the abusive relationship. "I remember thinking, How could this happen to me again?" This story contains descriptions of physical and sexual abuse. Leaving behind a life sentence in prison and starting over. "It's hard to put into words that feeling of going from 'you're never going home, you're going out in a pine box' to having a panel of two commissioners saying, 'We do not feel you pose a risk to public safety.'" | AFTER THE LEAK Can protests impact the future of abortion rights in America? | Abortion rights campaigners march through downtown after demonstrating outside the US Federal Courthouse in Tucson, Arizona, on May 3, 2022. Stringer / Reuters | People around the country gathered in protest of a recently leaked draft opinion from the US Supreme Court, which would overturn the federal precedent for abortion access. The leak of a draft opinion from the famously secretive court is unprecedented, and it is unclear what impact the leak, or the protests themselves, will have on the final ruling. The overturning of Roe would result in millions of people across the country losing access to abortion care overnight. At this time, the ruling is not official, and nothing has changed for abortion rights. The final ruling from the court is expected later this summer. At a demonstration in DC late Monday night, protesters told BuzzFeed News they wanted to see reforms to the court, such as adding new seats or instituting term limits. But the most common demand was for Congress to pass a law codifying abortion access as a right nationwide. President Joe Biden has also called on lawmakers in Congress to codify Roe, even using the word "abortion" in his Tuesday speech for what appeared to be the first time in his presidency. But Republican senators remain overwhelmingly in favor of repealing Roe v. Wade and can use the Senate filibuster — the threshold that requires 60 votes to pass a bill instead of a simple majority — to block any abortion rights bill. And at this time, Democrats don't have enough votes to change Senate rules and abolish the filibuster. If legal action is going to affect abortion rights between now and the Supreme Court's final ruling, it likely won't come from Congress. | Jeanne Chow and her daughter Isabella Casado hug during a protest in support of abortion rights in Boston on May 3, 2022. Brian Snyder / Reuters | Abortion rights demonstrators and anti-abortion protesters outside the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, May 3, 2022. Anadolu Agency via Getty Images | PSA You can use multiple slurp juices on an ape | GraphicaArtis/Getty Images | BuzzFeed News is committed to providing clear and useful information about crypto, Web3, and the NFT information that you need to know. That's why we need to clear up some confusion. You can use multiple slurp juices on a single ape. That's right — multiple slurp juices on the same ape. Let's say you own only one Astro Ape, but you have, say, three slurp juices. Yes, you can use each slurp juice on that same ape! That means you now have three new apes. Hope this helps! P.S. This post was intended to demonstrate the absurdity of the current NFT market. After publication, BuzzFeed News learned the account promoting "slurp juice" appears to be associated with another account that has posted extremist hate. We have removed any links to the account so as not to promote the project. If none of this made any sense to you to begin with, don't sweat it. | | | "The only thing I do know is that we have to be kind," Alexa | | | BuzzFeed, Inc. 111 E. 18th St. New York, NY 10003
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