Free Republic

Billions of desert locusts have descended again on East Africa. Crawling first, then sprouting wings and flying in hungry hoards of 40-150 million or more, they are devastating crops and threatening tens of millions of people with lost livelihoods and starvation. This year’s plague, says the United Nations, is the worst in 70 years for Kenya, the worst in a quarter-century for Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Somalia.  Locust swarms can blanket scores or hundreds of square miles at a time, travel 80 miles a day, and consume more than 400 million pounds of vegetation daily, Africa Fighting Malaria cofounder Richard...

This is an interesting find though it’s not clear how significant it is yet. A Chinese virologist submitted a complete genetic sequence for the coronavirus to a US database two weeks before China turned over a nearly identical sequence to the world. At the time, no one recognized the significance of the submission and it was deleted because some technical information was not included in the submission.The sequence was submitted by Dr. Lili Ren, an accomplished virologist at the Institute of Pathogen Biology of Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in Beijing, China, which has ties to the Chinese Communist Party...

The United Nations’ World Health Organization on Jan. 9 announced an outbreak of a new—or novel—coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in Wuhan, China. In the three weeks since the announcement, the virus has intensified in China, infecting thousands there and is now spreading across the globe, far beyond its origin in Hubei province. Indeed, this new coronavirus has taken nearly 200 lives in China. As Chinese public health officials strive to contain the virus, it’s important to identify three early lessons that can be drawn from the outbreak and the initial response to it to prevent this Chinese epidemic—and others that will undoubtedly...