US Intelligence community releases full declassified report that does not determine origin of Covid-19
CNN
The US intelligence community released a declassified report on Friday that confirmed that it has not reached a conclusion on the origins of Covid-19, though it offered fresh details on how the intelligence community approached its 90-day investigation into the matter.
The 17-page report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence offered no new conclusions — the intelligence community remains split about whether the virus originated naturally or escaped from a lab — but it did address specific open-source theories that proponents have argued proved one of the two theories. In every case, the intelligence community concluded either that the data was insufficient to reach a conclusion or that the theory was patently wrong.
The intelligence community in August released a two-page summary of the findings of the review; this release is the full, declassified report. Many of the intelligence community's specific methods and findings remain classified, but the summary did reveal that overall, four agencies in the intelligence community assessed with low confidence that the virus likely jumped from animals to humans naturally in the wild, while one element assessed with moderate confidence that the pandemic was the result of a laboratory accident, "probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling" by a lab in Wuhan, where the first known outbreak was recorded.
The US began pulling military equipment and additional personnel out of Niger on Friday after waiting months for the ruling military junta to approve US military flights into the country, two sources familiar with the matter said Saturday, ahead of a September 15 withdrawal deadline agreed to by the two countries.
The judge who oversaw Donald Trump’s criminal hush money trial in New York on Friday informed the former president’s defense team and prosecutors with the Manhattan district attorney’s office that a comment was posted on the New York State Unified Court Systems’ public Facebook page last week by a poster who claimed to be a cousin of a juror, saying that Trump would be convicted.