Free Republic

The conservative watchdog group Protect the People's Trust on Friday announced a lawsuit against the Interior Department over allegedly withholding documents in connection with its alleged involvement with EcoHealth Alliance and research by the Wuhan Institute of Virology. COVID-19 was first detected in the China city of Wuhan. Some people believe the virus leaked from the lab. The National Institutes of Health has given grant money to the nonprofit alliance, which has reportedly worked with the virology lab on bat coronavirus research. Public documents and published reports show evidence of possible connections between officials and actions of the U.S. Geological...

A simple visit to an obscure factory by Chinese President Xi on Monday is all it took to raise the specter that China could be contemplating cutting off supply of critical materials to the U.S. and potentially crippling large swathes of its industries. Also, fueled by political innuendo in Xi’s recent call for a new “Long March” in reference to a key founding tenet of the Chinese Communist Party, speculators are growing increasingly wary of Chinese export restrictions to the U.S., including rare earth minerals. As the world’s largest producer, the Middle Kingdom has a vice-like grip on rare earths...

Products based on NASA Earth observations and a new Internet-based decision tool are providing information to help land and water managers combat tamarisk (saltcedar), an invasive plant species damaging precious water supplies in the western United States. This decision tool, called the Invasive Species Forecasting System (ISFS), is being used at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Institute of Invasive Species Science in Fort Collins, Colo. It is the result of combining USGS science and NASA Earth observations, software engineering and high- performance computing expertise. "The ISFS combines NASA satellite data with tens of thousands of field sampling measurements, which...

U.S. researching N Korea's geological structure Wednesday, May 21, 2003 at 06:51 JST BEIJING — The U.S. Defense Department dispatched a research team to Japan and South Korea from late last year through early this year to collect information on the geological structure of North Korea, Japanese government sources said Tuesday. Team members told Japanese and South Korean officials their purpose was to investigate the North's mineral resources, but experts said it is possible the United States began the geological survey with limited air strikes on North Korea in mind, given that it has important military facilities underground. (Kyodo News)