Environment

While Donald Trump is tweeting his new year's greetings to his friends, and especially enemies, China is thinking three weeks ahead to the day the president-elect is officially inaugurated, and is worried what that could mean for a suddenly empowered Taiwan, whose outreach to Trump now means that the long-standing "One China" policy is now a topic of negotiation.  As a result, Reuters reports that China's military, alarmed by Trump's support of Taiwan, is considering strong measures to prevent the island from moving toward independence.

Millions of bees in South Carolina were quietly exterminated over the Christmas holidays as part of a Zika virus pesticide spraying campaign.  Farmers reported seeing millions of dead worker bees littering their farms, noting that the pattern of deaths matched acute pesticide poisoning. Blacklistednews.com reports: By one estimate, at a single Bee Farm in Summerville, 46 hives died on the spot, totaling around 2.5 million bees.

President Rodrigo Duterte says he once threw out a kidnapper from a helicopter when he was mayor of Davao and would not mind doing it again. The hard-man president of the Philippines has already admitted killing suspected criminals and now says he will impose the same punishment on corrupt officials. RT.com reports: “If you are corrupt, I will fetch you with a helicopter and I will throw you out on the way to Manila,” Duterte said, as cited by the Philippine Star newspaper.

One of the world’s leading scientists, Freeman Dyson, has gone on the recored to ‘debunk’ conventional man-made climate change research, which he says is “completely false”. Dyson worked on some of America’s greatest top secret projects, including the infamous Manhattan Project, and was closely connected  to the work of the scientist that created the Hydrogen bomb yet throughout his career he has never allowed politics to conflate the undermining science that defines his legacy. Dyson opposed the Vietnam War, the Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq.

Submitted by Leonard Hyman & William Tilles via OilPrice.com,