Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist.

I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Long before he waited into politics, Britain's Prime Minister drove fast cars for GQ magazine.

Now there's an environmental imperative to clamp down on non-electric vehicles and he

faces a reckoning with the petrol heads aligned with his party.

And the history of food is filled with both evolution and appropriation.

Few foods though have conquered the globe as completely as fried chicken has.

We look into how it got its start in America and how its first cooks have disappeared

from the story.

But first, the delta strain of the coronavirus is completing its journey around the world.

Today cases in New Zealand spiked after it hitched a ride from Australia.

But what about the original variant, the Patient Zero, what geneticists call the wild type,

before mutations made it more infectious.

Its origins are still a mystery, probably a jumped from an animal to a human, but the

alternatives simply haven't been ruled out.

This week the leader of the World Health Organization's mission to China said the answer could

be research work gone wrong.

The WHO has asked China for permission to examine two coronavirus labs in the city of Wuhan.

China refused.

It's a question that won't go away and the answer isn't just about this pandemic.

It's crucial for navigating or even avoiding the next one.

...