agriculture definition

�Employees of the scientific research arm at the Agriculture Department were ordered Monday to cease publication of �outward facing� documents and news releases, raising concerns that the Trump administration was seeking to influence distribution of their findings.   � Starting immediately and until further notice, [the Agricultural Research Service (ARS)] will not release any public-facing documents. This includes, but is not limited to, news releases, photos, fact sheets, news feeds, and social media content, � wrote ARS chief Sharon Drumm in an email to employees. Department officials scrambled to clarify the memo Tuesday afternoon, after intense public scrutiny and media requests, stating that ARS had not �blacked out public information� and adding that scientific articles published through professional peer-reviewed journals have not been banned. Such a decree would have conflicted with established scientific integrity standards and previous media guidance �encouraging, but not

The first members of a team of Cuban doctors and health workers unload boxes of medicines and medical material at the Freetown airport . Sierra Leone: October 2, 2014 (Photograph by Florian Plaucheur/AFP/Getty).  At the moment I cannot post anything substantive on this material, but I thought some readers of this blog might be interested in a few items (see too the suggested reading below) I recently came across, prompted in the first place by an intriguing (if not provocative) article in the recent New Left Review , 102 (Nov/Dec 2016): � Ebola�s Ecologies: Agro-Economics and Epidemiology in West Africa ,� by Rob Wallace and Rodrick Wallace . Unfortunately, the piece is available only to subscribers (or by purchase), but I highly recommend it in any case. The following t hree paragraph s � sa ns notes � are from the introduction to the article:   �Disease epidemics are as much markers of modern civilization as they are threats to it. What successfully evolves and spreads depends o