Prc

Tuesday

Michael Sobolik

China targets US citizens with biowarfare weapons

On June 3 the Department of Justice announced charges against two nationals of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The offenses ranged from conspiracy and false statements to visa fraud and smuggling. The final charge was the most concerning, as the item in question was a fungus called Fusarium graminearum. According to DOJ, this fungus is “a potential agroterrorism weapon” responsible for head blight, a disease that targets multiple crops from wheat and maize to barley and rice. It causes billions of dollars in economic losses worldwide each year, and its effects are pronounced: vomiting, liver damage, and reproductive disruptions in both humans and livestock. Welcome to the newest front in the Chinese Communist party’s (CCP) cold war against Americans.

Biowarfare

Friday

Joshua S. Treviño and Joseph Humire

The case for moving SOUTHCOM back to Panama

The recent American interest in the Panama Canal is grounded and rational — contrary to media characterizations of the renewed focus as a byproduct of the president’s impulsive fixations. The Canal, as President Trump has correctly noted, was an American development in a nation that existed mostly as a consequence of American intervention. Panama provided the setting for the Canal — and America provided the Canal itself, having taken on, in 1903, the project France failed to complete in 1890. In the 1960s, when the United States began preparing its handover — not its return — to the Panamanian state, the concession was understood as the price of peace with an ascendant Third World.