At least one bundle of U.S. weapons airdropped in Syria appears to have fallen into the hands of ISIS, a dangerous misfire in the American mission to speed aid to Kurdish forces making their stand in Kobani.
Experts warn Japan’s medical system is not ready for an invasion of potentially deadly redback spiders, with limited supplies of the anti-venom available to authorities. About a dozen of the venomous Australian spiders were found in a small park in a residential area of Mitaka in Tokyo, terrifying local parents. The redbacks were quickly captured and exterminated by authorities but government official Motosugu Tanaka said they would not be able to stop them from spreading.
President Barack Obama’s new ‘Ebola Czar’ Ron Klain is an enthusiastic advocate of population control who thinks that there are too many people in Africa. Klain’s role in overseeing the United States’ response to a virus that has killed thousands of Africans and threatens to infect up to 10,000 a week by December 1st is somewhat disconcerting given his views on overpopulation. In a recent interview, Klain said the top leadership issue challenging the world today was “how to deal with the continuing growing population in the world” including “burgeoning populations in Africa and Asia.
Ebola can spread by air in cold, dry weather common to the U.S. but not West Africa, presenting a “possible, serious threat” to the public, according to two studies by U.
Sao Paulo residents were warned by a top government regulator today to brace for more severe water shortages as President Dilma Rousseff makes the crisis a key campaign issue ahead of this weekend’s runoff vote. “If the drought continues, residents will face more dramatic water shortages in the short term,” Vicente Andreu, president of Brazil’s National Water Agency and a member of Rousseff’s Workers’ Party, told reporters in Sao Paulo. “If it doesn’t rain, we run the risk that the region will have a collapse like we’ve never seen before,” he later told state lawmakers.
Do you feel like you truly understand men? Much has been written about how men don’t understand women, but the truth is that there is a whole lot about men that women don’t understand as well. The point is not to spark a debate about “the battle of the sexes” or anything like that.
Barack Obama and the Federal Reserve are lying to you. The “economic recovery” that we all keep hearing about is mostly just a mirage. The percentage of Americans that are employed has barely budged since the depths of the last recession, the labor force participation rate is at a 36 year low, the overall rate of homeownership is the lowest that it has been in nearly 20 years and approximately 49 percent of all Americans are financially dependent on the government at this point.
On Saturday–one day after a bus that had departed from the Pentagon was quarantined on Capitol Hill in an Ebola false alarm–President Barack Obama issued a video message to Americans telling them that “you cannot get it [Ebola] from just riding on a plane or a bus.” “Ebola is actually a difficult disease to catch. It’s not transmitted through the air like the flu,” Obama said in his weekly video message.
Even as Jerusalem and Washington locked horns earlier this month in a very public spat over construction in Jerusalem, more than three-fourths of the Jewish-Israeli public is opposed to the establishment of a Palestinian state if it means dividing Jerusalem, according to a poll released on Sunday. The poll, sponsored by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, and conducted by the Shvakim Panorama research institute, found that 76 percent of the Jewish public opposed a Palestinian state if it meant dividing the capital, indicating that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took no political risks – and indeed reflected a wide consensus opinion – when he publicly sparred with the White House earlier this month over plans to build in Givat Hamatos and allow Jews to move into Silwan. Faced with sharp censure of the move, Netanyahu said that Jerusalem was not a settlement and that not only would Israel continue to build there, but that Jews would be able to buy property throughout the city, just as Arabs are allowed to do.
At Scientific American, Clara Moskowitz has the transcript from a recent interview with Weintraub, in which they discuss the implications of extraterrestrial life on humanity’s assorted religious sensibilities. Here’s Weintraub on the difficulties that could be faced by religions that see humans as “the sole focus of God’s attention”: The religions that see the world through that viewpoint tend to be some of the Christian evangelicals.
Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys filed a federal lawsuit and a motion for a temporary restraining order Friday to stop officials in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, from forcing two ordained Christian ministers to perform wedding ceremonies for same-sex couples. City officials told Donald Knapp that he and his wife, Evelyn—both ordained ministers who run Hitching Post Wedding Chapel—are required to perform such ceremonies or face months in jail and/or thousands of dollars in fines. The city claims its “non-discrimination” ordinance requires the Knapps to perform same-sex wedding ceremonies now that the courts have overridden Idaho’s voter-approved constitutional amendment that affirmed marriage as the union of a man and a woman.
The White House recently deleted a petition demanding President Obama do more to stop the spread of Ebola in the U.S. The Obama administration said the petition, which urged the White House to take proper action to fight Ebola, was removed from Whitehouse.
A devastating new Politico poll reveals voters believe America has spun off its axis and is “out of control.” “An overwhelming majority of voters in the most competitive 2014 elections say it feels as if events in the United States are ‘out of control’ and expressed mounting alarm about terrorism, anxiety about Ebola and harsh skepticism of both political parties only three weeks before the Nov. 4 midterms,” reports Politico.
Pope Francis on Sunday, as he beatified Pope Paul VI who implemented the Second Vatican Council’s vast changes, called on the church to adapt to “changing conditions of society.” His remarks took on added meaning as the bishops ended a two-week conference by rejecting landmark wording that would soften the church’s stance toward homosexuality and divorce. “God is not afraid of new things,” Francis pointedly said during the beatification Mass.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services plans to seek a vendor to produce as many as 34 million blank work permits and ‘green cards’ – the paperwork that authorizes illegal immigrants to live in the United States – as the White House prepares to issue an executive order after the Nov.
Considering the CDC’s conflicting and confusing statements – I’m not sure which is more dangerous – government incompetence or Ebola. Aside from being a grave threat to human life, an Ebola epidemic in the US would have serious consequences for our economy, inhibiting Americans from flying, going out to restaurants or to see a movie, or just going out in public in general. Just look at the public fear incurred in the past couple of days, with only one infected person (Amber Joy Vinson) travelling on a commercial airline.
The two nurses that caught Ebola while caring for Thomas Duncan in Texas Presbytarian hospitals didn’t have a chance. Not only were protocols not followed, but the hospital couldn’t follow them even if they tried. That’s because the Ebola virus is a Biosafety Level 4 microbe, requiring the highest level of biosafety possible.
Barack Obama and the head of the CDC need to quit saying that we know exactly how Ebola spreads. Because the truth is that there is much about this virus that we simply do not know. For example, a top Ebola scientist that is working in the heart of the outbreak in Liberia says that this version of Ebola looks like it could be “a very different bug” from past versions.
A Christian woman who was given the death penalty last year for drinking water from a well reserved for Muslims in Pakistan has had her appeal against the sentence rejected by the Lahore high court. Breitbart reported on the original case last year, which arose after Aasiya Noreen, a fruit picker, stopped to refresh herself during the course of her day’s work. After she was caught drinking from the same cup used by Muslim women, the well was declared “Haram”, and Noreen was beaten for the offence, before being arrested.
Islamic State militants have publicly crucified and murdered a teenager they accused of taking photographs of the terror group’s headquarters in Syria. Sickening images purportedly taken in the central square of the extremists’ de facto capital Raqqa show the battered and bloodstained body of an unnamed 17-year-old boy strapped to a cross. A handwritten placard hangs around the teenager’s neck, accusing him of ‘apostasy’ – the abandonment of his religion – and says he had been crucified for three days after being caught receiving 500 Turkish lira for every photograph he took of an Islamic State military base.