AFP 2018 / Thomas WATKINS A US Department of Defense research program to protect crops by changing the genes of insects could possibly violate the international Biological Weapons Convention, according to five European researchers who warned in a research paper published in the journal Science on October 4 th ,  as reported by Sputnik . “If successful, the technique could be used by malicious actors to help spread diseases to almost any crop species and devastate harvests,” said the paper, which was authored by the French and German researchers including geneticist Robert Guy Reeves of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Germany and evolutionary biologist Christophe Boete of the Institute of Research for Development in France. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launched the project, called “Insect Allies,” in Arlington, Virginia in 2016, with the goal of using insects such as aphids to infect crops with tailor-made viruses that can delive

Meng Hongwei. IMAGE: AP French police have opened an investigation into the disappearance of the president of international police cooperation agency Interpol, after his wife reported he had gone missing after visiting his family in China last week. According to reports, Meng Hongwei’s wife contacted police in Lyon, the French city where Interpol HQ is located, after not hearing from her husband since he travelled to China on September 29. Meng was elected president of Interpol in November 2016 and his term was set to end in 2020. Previously, he held several senior positions in China including vice minister of public security, vice chairman of the national narcotics control commission and the director of the National Counter-Terrorism Office for China.

FILE PHOTO: Dmitriy Vinogradov / Sputnik Originally appeared on  iz.ru ; Translated by  AlexD  exclusively for  SouthFront Three years ago, on September 30, 2015, the Russian operation in Syrian began. On this day, the Federation Council unanimously approved the use of Russian Armed Forces in the Syrian Arab Republic. And the next day, October 1, the Aerospace Forces carried out strikes on militants’ positions. These events were preceded by careful preparation: the Russian military created in Syria the Khmeimim base with all the necessary infrastructure, deployed security posts and transferred the aviation group. The main task of the Russian group in Syria was to fight against international terrorism, in particular, the al-Nusra and Islamic State groups (banned in Russia). The goal was the destruction of extremists on the “far abroad”. In December 2017, President Vladimir Putin said that all the tasks set for the Russian Armed Forces had been fulfilled. By the third anniversa