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The 'China's Dream', the name by which China's Grand Political-Military Strategy is known, continues to incite the minds of theorists. But, most of them prefer to analyse China's actions at the tactical level, omitting to show the big picture of the strategy that coordinates all these actions. Actions that aim to put China back on the imperial pedestal from which it was lowered many hundreds of years ago, due to a combination of economic, political and military factors. So, this article aims to present the ends and ways of the Grand Hegemonic Strategy to transform China into a global maritime power. Status that comes to complete China's already existing continental power, in a new hegemonic, continental-maritime format. In this regard, the article uses the geopolitical research method, which combines analysis-synthesis with retrospective and inductive-deductive analysis. The data used are exclusively from open sources, and the research design is linear, starting with the formulation of the working hypothesis, continuing with data collection, analysis and synthesis, and ending with conclusions.

The unanticipated spike in international food prices in 2007-08 hit many developing countries hard. International prices for food and other agricultural products increased by more than 100 percent between early 2007 and mid-2008. Prices for food cereals more than doubled; and those for rice doubled in the space of just a few months. The food price increases were particularly hard on the poor and near-poor in developing countries, many of whom spend a large share of their income on food and have limited means to cope with price shocks. An estimated 1.29 billion people in 2008 lived on less than $1.25 a day, equivalent to 22.4 percent of the developing world population. In addition, the Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that 923 million people were undernourished in 2007. Simulation models suggested that poverty rose by 100-200 million people and the undernourished increased by 63 million in 2008. The World Bank organized rapidly for short-term support in the crisis, launching a fast-track program of loans and grants, the Global Food Crisis Response Program (GFRP). The GFRP mainly targeted low-income countries, and provided detailed policy advice to governments and its own staff on how to respond to the crisis. The Bank also scaled up lending for agriculture and social protection to support the building of medium-term resilience to future food price shocks. The International Finance Corporation responded by sharply increasing access to liquidity for agribusinesses and agricultural traders in the short and medium term, as well as new programs to improve incentives for agricultural market participants. This evaluation assesses the effectiveness of the World Bank Group response in addressing the short-term impacts of the food price crisis and in enhancing the resilience of countries to future shocks.

A sound grounding in ethics alone can prevent the use of research involving dangerous microbes with infective capability to damage or destroy crops, livestock, and human beings, from being used for malevolent purposes. International efforts such as the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972, as well as national laws, for example, the USA PATRIOT Act in the United States, ban the production, development, and stockpiling of dangerous microorganisms and toxins that could be used in terror attacks. Biosecurity measures require background checks on scientific personnel handling select agents and oversight in facilities handling or transferring these agents. Development of biodefense strategies in order to control the effects and protect soldiers and civilians from biothreats is essential. This, however, leads to a problem of Dual-Use Research (DUR), since information on pathogenesis necessary for finding means of controlling infection, could simplistically, be misused in the hands of a terrorist. Mandatory laboratory best practices and educating graduate students and science personnel on ethics could possibly prevent malevolent use of DUR.

Context: The International Health Regulations (IHR) have been the governing framework for global health security for the past decade and are a nearly universally recognized World Health Organization (WHO) treaty, with 196 States Parties. In the wake of the Ebola epidemic, major global commissions have cast doubt on the future effectiveness of the IHR and the leadership of the WHO. Methods: We conducted a review of the historical origins of the IHR and their performance over the past 10 years and analyzed all of the ongoing reform panel efforts to provide a series of politically feasible recommendations for fundamental reform. Findings: We propose a series of recommendations with realistic pathways for change. These recommendations focus on the development and strengthening of IHR core capacities; independently assessed metrics; new financing mechanisms; harmonization with the Global Health Security Agenda, Performance of Veterinary Services (PVS) Pathways, the Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Framework, and One Health strategies; public health and clinical workforce development; Emergency Committee transparency and governance; tiered public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) processes; enhanced compliance mechanisms; and an enhanced role for civil society. Conclusions: Empowering the WHO and realizing the IHR's potential will shore up global health security—a vital investment in human and animal health—while reducing the vast economic consequences of the next global health emergency.

The journal The Lancet recently published a countdown on health and climate change. Attention was focused solely on humans. However, animals, including wildlife, livestock and pets, may also be impacted by climate change. Complementary to the high relevance of awareness rising for protecting humans against climate change, here we present a One Health approach, which aims at the simultaneous protection of humans, animals and the environment from climate change impacts (climate change adaptation). We postulate that integrated approaches save human and animal lives and reduce costs when compared to public and animal health sectors working separately. A One Health approach to climate change adaptation may significantly contribute to food security with emphasis on animal source foods, extensive livestock systems, particularly ruminant livestock, environmental sanitation, and steps towards regional and global integrated syndromic surveillance and response systems. The cost of outbreaks of emerging vector-borne zoonotic pathogens may be much lower if they are detected early in the vector or in livestock rather than later in humans. Therefore, integrated community-based surveillance of zoonoses is a promising avenue to reduce health effects of climate change.

Natural history museums are unique spaces for interdisciplinary research and educational innovation. Through extensive exhibits and public programming and by hosting rich communities of amateurs, students, and researchers at all stages of their careers, they can provide a place-based window to focus on integration of science and discovery, as well as a locus for community engagement. At the same time, like a synthesis radio telescope, when joined together through emerging digital resources, the global community of museums (the ‘Global Museum’) is more than the sum of its parts, allowing insights and answers to diverse biological, environmental, and societal questions at the global scale, across eons of time, and spanning vast diversity across the Tree of Life. We argue that, whereas natural history collections and museums began with a focus on describing the diversity and peculiarities of species on Earth, they are now increasingly leveraged in new ways that significantly expand their impact and relevance. These new directions include the possibility to ask new, often interdisciplinary questions in basic and applied science, such as in biomimetic design, and by contributing to solutions to climate change, global health and food security challenges. As institutions, they have long been incubators for cutting-edge research in biology while simultaneously providing core infrastructure for research on present and future societal needs. Here we explore how the intersection between pressing issues in environmental and human health and rapid technological innovation have reinforced the relevance of museum collections. We do this by providing examples as food for thought for both the broader academic community and museum scientists on the evolving role of museums. We also identify challenges to the realization of the full potential of natural history collections and the Global Museum to science and society and discuss the critical need to grow these collections. We then focus on mapping and modelling of museum data (including place-based approaches and discovery), and explore the main projects, platforms and databases enabling this growth. Finally, we aim to improve relevant protocols for the long-term storage of specimens and tissues, ensuring proper connection with tomorrow’s technologies and hence further increasing the relevance of natural history museums.

In China, many firms advertise that they follow environmentally friendly practices to cover their true activities, a practice called greenwashing, which can cause the public to doubt the sincerity of greenization messages. In this study, I investigate how the market values greenwashing and further examine whether corporate environmental performance can explain different and asymmetric market reactions to environmentally friendly and unfriendly firms. Using a sample from the Chinese stock market, I provide strong evidence to show that greenwashing is significantly negatively associated with cumulative abnormal returns (CAR) around the exposure of greenwashing. In addition, corporate environmental performance is significantly positively associated with CAR around the exposure of greenwashing. Furthermore, my findings suggest that corporate environmental performance has two distinct effects on CAR around the exposure of greenwashing: the competitive effect for environmentally friendly firms and the contagious effect for potential environmental wrongdoers, respectively. The results are robust to various sensitivity tests.

We analyze the factors that increase the likelihood that other nations will follow China's global economic leadership. While our theoretical framework incorporates the conventional argument that China pulls in followers with economic benefits, we focus on grievances with the current global order that have the effect of pushing countries toward the rising new leader. We find that grievances about global financial instability are particularly important push factors. Our results show that countries that have experienced more financial crises, more variable capital account policies, more volatile portfolio capital outflows, and more social unrest during IMF programs are more likely to support China's global leadership than leaders of nations that have been less exposed to these problems. We find no evidence that grievances about global governance, or grievances about discriminatory US trade policies, are related to foreign support for China's global economic leadership. Overall, our evidence is consistent with the interpretation that leaders want to reform and preserve the WTO and the IMF, which have worked reasonably well for them under US leadership. At the same time, they have incentives to follow China's economic leadership on global capital flows, emphasizing long-term infrastructure and development finance over short-term flows which, under the current order, have imposed large costs on many economies.

A new approach to pandemic and epidemic intelligence is needed that includes modern approaches to surveillance and risk assessment, as well as improved trust and cooperation between stakeholders and society.

Global and national initiatives focused on health systems strengthening, universal health coverage, health security, and resilience suffer when these terms are not well understood or believed to be different ways of saying the same thing. Conceptual clarity is essential for a systematic approach to policy-making. Confusion and inefficiency arise when health system strengthening is defined as an objective and also when universal health coverage, health security or resilience are described as separate programmes to be implemented. So here is a simple guide: health system strengthening is what they do; universal health coverage, health security and resilience are what they want.