The strongest evidence yet that COVID started with an animal

Yesterday, President Biden signed legislation pertaining to the first theory, a lab leak. He's declassifying information related to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The bill was introduced by Republicans, who've accused Biden of not being tough enough on China. A number of government agencies have conducted their own investigations but haven't reached confident conclusions. China has disputed that the virus could have leaked from one of their labs.

While lawmakers play political football with COVID origin theories, scientists around the world have been working tirelessly for over three years now, trying to find answers. It can be hard to know which theories to pay attention to, which ones are grounded in facts or obscured in politics. So you might've missed this recent one from "The Atlantic" about new findings that some scientists are calling the strongest evidence so far in support of the second theory, the wild-animal hypothesis, that the virus jumped from animals to humans.

This is based on genetic data that only became public a few weeks ago. The Chinese equivalent of the CDC posted it on a global forum, and researchers outside of the country noticed and ran their own analysis of the data. They say it shows that raccoon dogs being illegally sold at a wholesale market in Wuhan at the beginning of the pandemic could have been carrying the virus. Raccoon dogs are sort of like foxes. They're sold for their meat and fur in markets like this.

As one researcher put it, this isn't perfectly definitive proof, but it's like finding the DNA of your main suspect at the scene of the crime. And it still leaves open the possibility that other animals may have been carrying the virus too.

At this point, it's not clear why this data was so recently posted to the public database. And Chinese researchers appeared to take it off the database shortly after. One researcher in China called this latest analysis "nothing new." The World Health Organization has renewed its calls for China to be more transparent and to share all of the data it's collected on the origin of the pandemic.

It only took about a month for Western forces to topple Saddam Hussein's government, but the war continued for another nine years, killing an estimated 270,000 Iraqis and 4,600 U.S. service members. It's hard to know exactly how much the war cost, but one estimate from Brown University puts it around $2 trillion. Ultimately, weapons of mass destruction were never found and early claims that Hussein may have been linked to Al Qaeda also turned out to be false.

There's been a lot written about how American lawmakers and media failed the accountability test by bullishly supporting the war. And that criticism is important. But I want to focus today on some stories that center the lives of Iraqis, what they've lost, and the future that they see for themselves.

One man who had been given a camera, Tariq Raheem, told "CNN," "I want the world to have a different image of Iraq, rather than seeing scenes of destruction and killing. I want to send a message to the world that Iraqi people love peace and want to live in peace."

In other words, when the price of something so fundamental is swinging like a pendulum, the entire system is under pressure. There are a few reasons why experts think that we're in for more turbulence. A big reason, here in the U.S., is we just don't have many alternatives. As more coal power plants have closed, Uberti says there haven't been enough wind and solar farms to replace them.

Emily Hodge from Colorado told Uberti this has created a lot of stress for her family of four. Their gas bill recently jumped up to $900 a month, almost double where it was a year ago. She said it's officially their biggest bill now, more than their mortgage or insurance.

Emily told me she's basically now living paycheck to paycheck, and for many of the people that we spoke to, if their gas bill jumps $100 per month or $500, it really puts a strain on overall spending in the economy and really, you know, makes people's day-to-day lives much more difficult.

Now, you might be thinking, what's a couple of paint chips in the scheme of the universe? Well, you gotta know how fast these objects are actually orbiting the Earth. They're whizzing around at about 17,000 miles per hour, which means that if a paint chip hits a spacecraft, it's like a bullet. Astronauts regularly have to shelter in place to wait out passing storms of junk. It's a real danger.

This team of scientists is saying it's time to come up with some kind of international agreement. A global treaty on how we can curb the amount of stuff that we throw into space. They're saying the mess that we've made up there is similar, in a lot of ways, to how we've polluted our oceans. And similarly, it's gonna take international cooperation to figure out how to solve the problem and hold everyone accountable. As "TIME" puts it, a species that was smart enough to get itself to space now needs to be smart enough to keep it clean.