MOST have taken note that the year 2020 has gotten off to an unusually stressful start, with the month of January and the first few days of February being filled with memorable, and mostly calamitous events.
The year began with historic bushfires raging across large parts of Australia; an act of war by the United States against Iran, which Iran fortunately has responded to with remarkable restraint; the beginning of the 2019-nCoV coronavirus epidemic (the first death was recorded on January 9); and the unexpected eruption of Taal Volcano. A plague of locusts, said to be the worst in 70 years, has blanketed East Africa; the impeachment of US President Donald Trump, only the third US president to face that ignominious rite (and the third acquitted by the US Senate) in the country’s long history was held; the African Swine Flu made an unexpected and apparently widespread appearance in Mindanao; and on the first day of February, a spectacular fire in Manila that destroyed a San Miguel packaging warehouse also destroyed about a half-kilometer of the still-unfinished Skyway Stage 3, pushing the completion date of the already long overdue and vastly over-budget project to at least July, and probably much later.