Most Americans view nuclear weapons as a relic of the Cold War. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev agreed in 1985 “that a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought.” That thinking has remained a “given” for the last 37 years. Unfortunately, Russian President Vladimir Putin may have other ideas.
Just five days before Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin personally oversaw nuclear exercises and issued subtle nuclear threats against the West should Ukraine become a part of NATO…
NEW YORK (AP) — Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, most of the world has seen a dramatic improvement in infections, hospitalizations and death rates in recent weeks, signaling the crisis appears to be winding down. But how will it end? Past epidemics may provide clues.
The ends of epidemics are not as thoroughly researched as their beginnings. But there are recurring themes that could offer lessons for the months ahead, said Erica Charters of the University of Oxford, who studies the issue.
“One thing we have learned is it’s a long, drawn-out process” that includes different types of endings that may not all occur at the same time, she said. That includes a “medical end,” when disease recedes, the “political end,” when government prevention measures cease…
In public statements and at international summits, Chinese officials have attempted to stake out a seemingly neutral position on the war in Ukraine, neither condemning Russian actions nor ruling out the possibility Beijing could act as a mediator in a push for peace.
But while its international messaging has kept many guessing as to Beijing’s true intentions, much of its domestic media coverage of Russia’s invasion tells a wholly different story.
There, an alternate reality is playing out for China’s 1.4 billion people, one in which the invasion is nothing more than a “special military operation,” according to its national broadcaster CCTV; the United States may be funding a biological weapons program in Ukraine, and Russian President Vladimir Putin is a victim standing up for a beleaguered Russia.
To tell that story, major state-run news media outlets — which dominate China’s highly censored media space — have been largely echoing Russian state media stories or information from Russian officials.
A CNN analysis reviewed nearly 5,000 social media posts from 14 Chinese state media outlets during the first eight days of Russia’s invasion posted onto China’s Twitter-like platform, Weibo. The analysis found that of the more than 300 most-shared posts about the events in Ukraine — which were each shared more than 1,000 times — almost half, about 140, were what CNN classified as distinctly pro-Russian, often containing information attributed to a Russian official or picked up directly from Russia’s state media.
The analysis, which focused on stories that got the most play on social media, may not be representative of all posts shared by state media outlets on Weibo. But it provides a snapshot of the state media-produced information that is most visible to the more than half a billion monthly users on the popular platform.
It’s not clear the extent to which these posts may be explicitly the result of a coordinated propaganda campaign between the two countries, but it is consistent with an ongoing pattern in which Russian and Chinese media have amplified and reinforced their often-interchangeable talking points on issues such as the treatment of Russian dissidents, Hong Kong pro-democracy protests, the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, or the supposed American role in fomenting “color revolutions” against authoritarian regimes.
Such mutual reinforcement has also spilled over into the extensive overseas and English-language propaganda operations that both countries have built to promote their views globally — a route made more important with Russia’s state media outlets being banned on air and online in parts of the West.
In China’s top-down government-controlled media environment, all state-affiliated content is vetted and issued in accordance with government directives. That China has chosen to follow Russia’s lead in deliberately mischaracterizing the war only serves to underline Beijing’s closeness to Moscow — and almost makes a mockery of China’s self-proclaimed impartiality in helping to engage with Russia and bring an end to the violence.
Russian assurances that civilian sites will not be targeted — despite extensive evidence to the contrary, descriptions of Ukrainian soldiers using “Nazi” tactics, and misinformation regarding the whereabouts of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky are all stories that have been funneled from Russian sources into China’s enclosed social media ecosystem — where many Western news outlets are blocked — by its state media outlets in recent days.
That dynamic was at play on Monday morning, when China’s state broadcaster CCTV released a package in its morning newscast highlighting Moscow’s erroneous claim that Washington had funded the development of biological weapons in Ukrainian labs. That insinuation is used to support the narrative that Ukraine — characterized by Moscow as an American puppet state — threatens Russia, and not the other way around.
The source? Russian Defense Ministry Spokesman Igor Konashenkov, who on Sunday said Russian forces uncovered “evidence” of the “hasty measures to conceal any traces of the military biological program finance(d) by the US Department of Defense,” and referenced documents he said detailed the destruction of hazardous pathogens at these facilities on the order of the Ukrainian Health Ministry.
In a statement on Twitter Wednesday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki pushed back on “Russia’s false claims about alleged US biological weapons labs and chemical weapons development in Ukraine” and noted the “echoing” of those “conspiracy theories” by Chinese officials.
“This is preposterous. It’s the kind of disinformation operation we’ve seen repeatedly from the Russians over the years in Ukraine and in other countries, which have been debunked, and an example of the types of false pretexts we have been warning the Russians would invent,” Psaki said, adding that the US was “in full compliance” with its obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Biological Weapons Convention and “does not develop or possess such weapons anywhere.”
“Now that Russia has made these false claims, and China has seemingly endorsed this propaganda, we should all be on the lookout for Russia to possibly use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine, or to create a false flag operation using them. It’s a clear pattern,” Psaki said.
The subject was also raised in a Senate hearing on Tuesday, when Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, asked if Ukraine had biological weapons, said it has biological research facilities, which the US was concerned Russian forces may be seeking to control.
“We are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces, should they approach,” Nuland said.
Minutes after the CCTV report aired, an affiliated news outlet released an online post repeating the claims from Russia’s Defense Ministry and started a related hashtag on Weibo, which began trending. The hashtag was viewed more than 45 million times over a period of hours that day.
The next day, after Russia doubled down on the biological weapons claims with further statements, without evidence, CCTV released a new television segment, which was again shared by prominent state media outlets on Weibo, gaining further traction.
The story then moved into the narrative of China’s officials when a state media reporter at a regular Foreign Ministry press briefing asked a question about the laboratories, prompting the spokesperson to read a lengthy prepared response that repeated Russian disinformation.
“We once again urge the US to fully clarify its biological militarization activities both inside and outside its borders and accept multilateral verification,” spokesperson Zhao Lijian said.
Within hours, at least 17 state media outlets, including CCTV, Xinhua, and the People’s Daily, posted Zhao’s response on Weibo, where the topic racked up more than 210 million views. A related hashtag rose to be the top trending topic on Weibo by the following afternoon.
The pattern is just one example of a playbook that enables China to cover the war through the lens of Russian rhetoric and disinformation. Other examples include stories, such as repeated false claims that Zelensky fled the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv — sourced to a single Russian lawmaker, which were picked up and amplified by both Chinese and Russian state media outlets on their domestic and international platforms.
A CNN analysis sought to understand how large a role such stories play in China’s tightly controlled media ecosystem, first by combing through nearly 5,000 social media posts from the Weibo accounts of 14 of China’s most influential state media outlets, focusing on the first eight days of the invasion and news about the events in Ukraine.
Next, CNN analyzed which of those posts were the most highly engaged with, identifying more than 300 posts shared on Weibo more than 1,000 times. Of those more than 300 posts, an analysis found that nearly half showed Russia in a positive light — a category CNN defined as news sourced solely from Russian officials or Russian media, content that describes Ukraine negatively, misinformation about Zelensky, or pro-Putin coverage.
While about 140 posts showed Russia in a positive light, the analysis identified fewer than 15 posts that portrayed Ukraine positively.
A look at other characterizations showed only around 90 of these posts were neutral — for example, purely factual reports from reliable sources, news about humanitarian aid or updates on the evacuation of Chinese citizens from Ukraine.
Just over a third were what CNN classified as anti-West or anti-US, for example: stories airing views that Russia was pushed to action in Ukraine by the expansion of NATO, or criticizing Western media coverage of the crisis.
CNN reporters classified some posts into more than one category. A look at the distribution shows posts that depicted Russia in a positive light were more frequent than any other category.
Because CNN only studied posts with high engagement, the findings may not be representative of all posts produced by state media.
In response to CNN’s request for comment, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said Thursday the country is a victim of disinformation.
“Some anti-China forces and media have fabricated too many lies, rumors and disinformation about China on issues that include the situation in Ukraine,” it said in a statement. “They have smeared the image of China, poisoned the media environment and misled public worldwide. Such actions are hypocritical and despicable.”
The backdrop
The findings contrast the apparent middle line that China has tried to walk in its international diplomacy.
Though Beijing has stood apart from the Western response to Russia’s invasion, with its diplomats refusing to condemn the invasion, or even call it such, and decrying Western sanctions, it has also frequently repeated that “all countries’ legitimate security concerns” should be addressed.
In a virtual summit with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Tuesday, Chinese leader Xi Jinping called for negotiations to bring about “peaceful outcomes” and stressed China’s promises to contribute humanitarian aid to Ukraine.
“There is a difference between the way China talks to the international audience and the way it talks to the domestic audience … for the domestic audience, it’s important to preserve this partnership with Russia, because that’s a political priority for Xi,” said Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow and the chair of the Russia in the Asia-Pacific Program at the Carnegie Moscow Center.
He points to the increasingly close relationship between China and Russia in recent years, a strategic partnership strengthened, in part, by shared friction with the West.
“So (China’s leaders) need to shape public perceptions about this, and explain why dealing with Russia is morally justified or is the right thing to do — and (China’s media coverage) serves this purpose,” he said.
A glimpse into how China may seek to control its coverage was given in the days prior to the invasion, when an internal directive that was apparently accidentally shared on social media showed Chinese state media outlet Beijing News ordered its employees not to publish news reports that were “negative about Russia or pro-West.” Beijing News did not respond to requests for comment.
Maria Repnikova, director of the Center for Global Information Studies at Georgia State University, said Russia-leaning coverage was in line with historical precedent: “Stories that are critical of Russia or are portraying Russia in an unfavorable manner are generally censored,” she said.
“As a result of that, it is expedient to use Russian state media sources because they’re the ones portraying the (Ukraine) conflict with a more favorable eye or view from the Russian perspective,” she said.
Another sign of this has been which voices have been allowed to thrive on China’s heavily censored social media platforms in the wake of the invasion. There, pro-Russia and anti-Western, nationalistic voices have also dominated, while there has been a suppression of pro-Ukrainian or anti-war messages on platforms and across the media landscape.
One glaring example came Friday, when CCTV broadcast a speech from International Paralympic Committee President Andrew Parsons, at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Paralympic Games, in which many parts of the speech were muffled and were not translated.
The offending context? Parsons’ “message of peace,” in which he did not name Russia or Ukraine but said he was “horrified at what is taking place in the world.”
Those voices from within China who have tried to speak up — including five history professors who penned an open letter voicing their strong opposition to “Russia’s war against Ukraine” — have seen their posts swiftly deleted or social accounts suspended.
“We have seen alternative, critical voices — some subtle critique or attempts to present scenes from the war zone and talk about humanity and empathy toward Ukraine — (but) a lot of these messages have been censored,” said Repnikova.
Social media platforms in China have taken action against extremist nationalist voices in recent weeks, with Sina Weibo “punishing” around 75 accounts and screening out more than 1,500 posts and video-streaming platform Douyin removing over 6,000 illegal videos, according to the state-owned Global Times. But the nationalistic voices that have dominated social media platforms fall in line with what Repnikova describes as “a significant spike in digital nationalism, (with) the US and the West (as) the key target of this nationalistic sentiment.”
Break the monopoly
That nationalist sentiment — fueled by a deep distrust of the US and concern about its role as the leading global power — are a critical part of the glue that has firmed up the Russian and Chinese relationship in recent years.
It’s also filtered in the kinds of media coverage that each have shared overseas, as both Russia and China have sought to deepen their propaganda efforts, launching social media-friendly news brands in English and other languages, like China’s CGTN and RT (formerly Russia Today).
While experts say it’s unclear if top media officials from the two countries are discussing news coverage at an operational level and some official coordination is more symbolic in nature, there is a growing push in recent years for alignment and content-sharing.
A number of content-sharing arrangements exist between Chinese and Russian media outlets, and the shared vision is clear: these outlets together can “break the monopoly of Western media,” as a Global Times report on a China-Russia media forum in 2015 put it.
Fast-forward to the crisis in Ukraine and the upside of that collaboration, for one partner anyway, is clear.
In the European Union, Kremlin-backed media outlets RT and Sputnik were officially banned as of last Wednesday, with companies like Meta, parent of Facebook and Instagram, and Google’s YouTube stepping in to block their content.
But, on China’s channels like CGTN and Global Times, which continue to operate, those Russian talking points are still getting through.
Already this week, posts from those accounts have suggested Ukraine and the US have pro-Nazi leanings, repeated Russian misinformation on the laboratories, and cited Russia denying that it plans to overthrow the existing government in its “special military operation” in Ukraine.
Officials announced they have identified bird flu in a commercial flock of 50,000 turkeys in northwest Iowa, the state’s second case of a virus that has been identified in multiple states
ByDAVID PITT Associated Press
March 7, 2022, 12:49 PM
•4 min read
3:23
On Location: March 9, 2022
Catch up on the developing stories making headlines.
ABCNews.com
DES MOINES, Iowa — Officials announced Monday that they have identified bird flu in a commercial flock of 50,000 turkeys in northwest Iowa, the state’s second case of a virus that has been identified in multiple U.S. states.
Iowa agriculture officials and the U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed the case in Buena Vista County, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) north of the case identified March 1 in a backyard flock of 42 ducks and chickens in Pottawattamie County.
Yellowstone National Park officials say the first grizzly bear of 2022 was spotted in the park on Monday. Photo: Sinclair Nitz
MISSOULA, Mont. —Yellowstone National Park officials say the first grizzly bear of 2022 was spotted in the park on Monday.
The park released the following information Tuesday:
On Monday, March 7, a pilot supporting Yellowstone National Park wildlife research observed the first grizzly bear of 2022. The adult bear was seen walking in a meadow in the west-central part of the park.
The first bear sighting of2021occurred on March 13.
Male grizzlies come out of hibernation in early March. Females with cubs emerge in April and early May. When bears emerge from hibernation, they look for food and often feed on elk and bison that died over the winter. Sometimes, bears will react aggressively to encounters with people when feeding…
With a warming climate, bears are emerging from hibernation early (or not hibernating at all), at times when their typical foods may not be available, possibly leading them to seek out human food more and more.Silviu Matei
The black bear affectionately known as Hank the Tank, whom authorities once thought responsible for 28 home invasions and 152 reports of conflict behavior in South Lake Tahoe, will be spared. DNA analysis of the scenes showed that at least two other bears had broken into some of the homes, and California wildlife officials will neither kill Hank nor place him in a sanctuary. Instead,they’re going to intensify hazing and mitigation efforts designed to keep Hank and the other bears out of people’s yards and homes, and importantly, out of harm’s way.
People are dying from more intense heat waves, hurricanes and flooding. Forests are disappearing because of worsening wildfires, droughts and pest invasions. Rising sea levels are imperiling coastal communities and ecosystems.
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For China, the speed and severity with which the U.S. and its allies sanctioned Russia is a warning sign that could guide future economic and foreign policy.
“This is a very multilateral moment,” said Reva Goujon, senior manager for the China corporate advisory team at Rhodium Group.
Beijing has refused to call Russia’s attack on Ukraine an invasion. China has focused on promoting negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, and it opposes the economic measures that have been taken against Russia.
Ukrainian authorities said Wednesday that a power cut caused by Russian attacks on Kyiv could deprive the Chernobyl nuclear site of power within 48 hours, leading to a potential meltdown of spent nuclear fuel.
The International Atomic Energy Agency on Wednesday played down risks of an imminent problem at Chernobyl, the site of the world’s biggest nuclear accident, in 1986, which contaminated large areas of surrounding countryside and sent a plume of radioactive dust that spread across Europe. They and other experts say Ukraine’s nuclear facilities are on the whole modernized and robust.
Never before has such an intense conflict taken place around so many nuclear power facilities.
Last week, a Russian projectile caused a fire at a building in the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, the Zaporizhzhia facility in Ukraine, around 340 miles southeast of Kyiv, which contains six reactors.
Communications between Ukraine’s regulator and some of the nuclear facilities has been reduced and on Tuesday, the IAEA said it had lost contact with monitoring systems that send the agency data and information on activities at Chernobyl.
The irradiated fuel ponds of the type Ukrainian authorities warned about at Chernobyl on Wednesday contain radioactive substances like iodine, cesium and plutonium. However, they are usually built out of concrete and buried underground.
At Chernobyl, the nuclear waste has been stored for over two decades, making it potentially hazardous to staff but unlikely to cause a major accident.
“The Chernobyl Power Plant has been shut down since 2000, and therefore the spent fuel rods stored on the site have been cooled for 22 years. Therefore they will not be producing significant amounts of heat, making a release of radiation very unlikely,” said Prof. Geraldine Thomas of Imperial College London.
Related video: Ukraine nuclear agency says Chernobyl has lost power, warns of potential radiation leak (MSNBC)
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John Roberts: When will Putin pull the nuclear card?
Steve Nesbit, president of the American Nuclear Society, sees the chances of an explosion or meltdown at Ukraine’s nuclear facilities being relatively low.
One risk is a hydrogen explosion at Ukraine’s pressurized water reactors of the type that happened in the 1979 Three Mile Island accident in the U.S. If a reactor was knocked off the power grid and the backup system failed, there could be damage to the core of the reactor within hours, which could lead to a buildup of hydrogen outside the reactor. However, as was the case at Three Mile Island, a hydrogen explosion shouldn’t pierce through the concrete containment structure shielding the reactor, built to design major shocks, Mr. Nesbit said.
The IAEA has said there has been no turnover of the more than 200 staff at Chernobyl since Feb. 23, raising worries about their well-being and ability to do their jobs. Missiles have struck two other nuclear-related facilities, although none of the incidents has yet caused any radioactive release, the agency said.
“The situation in Ukraine is unprecedented and I continue to be gravely concerned,” International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Grossi said last week.
Ukraine has four nuclear plants dotted around the country, plus the Chernobyl site near the Belarus border, supplying around half of the country’s electricity supply. The facilities, which include 15 reactors, are generally considered safe and reasonably modernized, including being outfitted with safety procedures recommended after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, experts say.
Only Zaporizhzhia and Chernobyl have so far been taken over by Russian forces, following fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces.
Senior Ukrainian officials have spoken in alarming terms about the fate of the country’s nuclear facilities. President Volodymyr Zelensky said after the Zaporizhzhia fire it could have caused an accident six times as large as Chernobyl, and on Wednesday, his foreign minister said the risks to Ukraine’s nuclear facilities from Russia’s invasion is putting the whole of Europe in danger. On the other side, the U.N. atomic agency has dismissed Russian claims in recent days that Ukraine is working on nuclear weapons.
Mr. Grossi is in discussions with Ukraine about sending a team of experts to help deal with safety risks. He has also proposed mediating negotiations between Ukraine and Russia to agree on a framework to keep fighting away from nuclear facilities. Neither idea has yet got off the ground.
For now, Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia are both being run by their Ukrainian staff, although the IAEA reported that at Zaporizhzhia, plant management have been ordered to check decisions on running the facilities with the Russian commander at the site.
Mark Zheleznyak, a professor at the Fukushima Institute of Environmental Radioactivity, who is from Ukraine, said that were Russia to put its own staff in charge of the Ukrainian sites, they could do so with relative ease. Ukraine’s water pressurized reactors are based on designs that remain common in Russia, he said.
“It was a Soviet design. For sure, Russian knowledge about these reactors is no better or worse than Ukrainians,” he said.
Given the intensity of conflict in Ukraine, experts say they can’t exclude the risk of a major accident. But their greatest concerns are human error by staff who are working in stressful conditions and not getting proper rest, food or medicine; the difficulty emergency repair teams could face in reaching facilities amid the war; and nuclear facilities running short of vital spare equipment—from diesel for backup power systems to cooling water for spent waste pools.
Write to Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com
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