Free Republic

Some doctors call it “walking Ebola” – symptoms of the rare Bundibugyo strain appear to worsen slowly, leaving patients sick enough to spread the virus but not so unwell to stop them moving through their communities. The pattern emerging in the Democratic Republic of Congo resonated with virologist Corri Levine, who devoted her doctoral research to Bundibugyo years before it caused the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak on record. Studying the virus in a biocontainment laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch, Levine found it replicated more slowly than the Zaire strain responsible for a devastating epidemic that swept West Africa...

NEW YORK - International Business Machines shares plunged on Feb 23, after the artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic said its Claude Code tool can help with modernising COBOL, a dated programming language that’s mainly run on IBM computers. Shares sank 13 per cent in their biggest one-day percentage loss since October 2000. With the decline, the stock is now down 27 per cent in February, on track for its biggest one-month percentage decline since at least 1968, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. “Modernizing a COBOL system once required armies of consultants spending years mapping workflows” but “tools like Claude Code...

Chinese President Xi Jinping meeting Alibaba founder Jack Ma in a Beijing meeting on Feb 17.PHOTO: SCREENGRAB FROM CCTV BEIJING - As Chinese head honchos gathered for a meeting at the Great Hall of the People stood up to applaud the arrival of Chinese President Xi Jinping, a man clad in a black Mao suit looked especially cheerful. Mr Jack Ma, the co-founder of Alibaba, had every reason to smile. His very appearance at this rare meeting on Feb 17 between Chinese leaders and the heads of China’s biggest technology firms signals a rehabilitation of sorts for him, and...