At least 4,877 people have died in the world’s worst recorded outbreak of Ebola as of Oct. 19, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday, but the true toll may be three times as much. At least 9,936 cases of the disease had been recorded, according to the WHO, but the actual numbers may be three times higher.
The London-based pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat reported on Thursday that the Palestinian Authority has agreed to delay by two months its plan to seek a Security Council resolution calling for an Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines within three years. The paper quoted Palestinian sources in Ramallah as saying that the PA leadership will give US Secretary of State John Kerry a two-month window to present his own plan for peace. The sources said that the PA leadership was nevertheless determined to proceed with the Security Council bid.
President Obama told reporters Wednesday he is “cautiously more optimistic” that the chances of additional infections from Liberian traveler Thomas Eric Duncan are ebbing. However, amid Obama’s optimism, Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, announced the CDC is placing on the honor system travelers to the U.
Tesco’s results are out Thursday for the first half of the year, and a breakdown of the results shows just how badly the company is being hammered. Shares are down by 6.39% well into London’s trading day Thursday, adding to the last month’s brutal sell-off.
Dr. Peter Jahrling has been on the ground in the Liberian capital of Monrovia, studying the disease with a team of researchers, which is also helping to care for and treat patients. He says the viral loads that his team is witnessing exceed what has been observed during previous outbreaks, suggesting that, this time, the disease is far more deadly.
Canadian authorities have identified the shooter who killed a soldier in Ottawa Wednesday as Michael Zehaf-Bibeau — a recent convert to Islam. Zehaf-Bibeau shot a soldier, 24-year-old Corporal Nathan Cirillo, at Ottawa’s National War Memorial, then entered the Canadian Parliament and fired several more rounds before the House of Commons Sergeant-At-Arms, Kevin Vickers, shot and killed him. (Read the rest of the story here…)
It probably seemed like a bright idea at the time: Let the police seize the ill-gotten gains of alleged drug dealers and other suspected criminals and sell it, using the proceeds to buy much-needed crime-fighting gear. Unfortunately, the process—civil asset forfeiture—did not require convicting anybody of a crime.
Defenders of lax election laws say it rarely happens — but apparently it’s happening again. In what critics describe as a shocking example of likely vote fraud, a surveillance video (see below) from a Maricopa County, Arizona, polling place shows a man stuffing hundreds of ballots into a ballot box. The act was observed by A.
For 18 years, thousands of students at the prestigious University of North Carolina took fake “paper classes,” and advisers funneled athletes into the program to keep them eligible, according to a scathing independent report released Wednesday. “These counselors saw the paper classes and the artificially high grades they yielded as key to helping some student-athletes remain eligible,” Kenneth Wainstein wrote in his report. He conducted an eight-month investigation into the scandal, which has plagued the university for nearly five years.
The current debt level of over $17.9 trillion would thus take more than 398 million years of working at the average wage to pay off. This means that even if every man, woman and child in the United States would work for one year just to help pay off the debt the government has piled on in their name, it still wouldn’t be enough.
One case where that is especially prevalent is with durum wheat, the key ingredient in most pasta making. The 2014 harvest looks to be weak in 2014, putting heavy pressure on a market that has shown consistent price movement higher. David Maloni, president of the American Restaurant Association, explained Wednesday in his daily note titled, “Pasta buyers beware”:
In its discussion of historical middle class societies, The Economist reports, “Their members are neither rich nor poor but somewhere in-between…’Middle-class’ describes an income category but also a set of attitudes…An essential characteristic is the possession of a reasonable amount of discretionary income. Middle-class people do not live from hand to mouth, job to job, season to season, as the poor do.” Some argue that the most sensible income amount to attach to the middle class would be the median household income, of around $54,000.
Thanks to the Federal Reserve, the middle class is slowly being suffocated by rising food prices. Every single dollar in your wallet is constantly becoming less valuable because of the inflation the Fed systematically creates. And if you try to build wealth by saving money and earning interest on it, you still lose because thanks to the Federal Reserve’s near zero interest rate policies banks pay next to nothing on savings accounts.
The United States is in a perpetual state of national emergency. Thirty separate emergencies, in fact. An emergency declared by President Jimmy Carter on the 10th day of the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979 remains in effect almost 35 years later.
If you are a resident of Lenoir City, Tennessee, you might want to remember to mow your lawn — otherwise, you will be spending the night in jail. Karen Holloway just spent six hours in a jail cell for failing to maintain her yard in accordance with the standards set by the city. The saga began last summer, when Holloway was sent a citation for her overgrown grass and shrubbery.
After emerging months ago in eastern Sierra Leone, Ebola is now hitting the western edges of the country where the capital is located with dozens of people falling sick each day, the government said Tuesday. So many people are dying that removing bodies is reportedly a problem. Forty-nine confirmed cases of Ebola emerged in just one day, Monday, in two Ebola zones in and around the capital, the National Ebola Response Center, or NERC, said.
Johnson & Johnson is to start testing its Ebola vaccine candidate in January after the World Health Organisation (WHO) and world leaders asked it and other companies to accelerate their research programmes. GlaxoSmithKline, which is at a more advanced stage of vaccine development, separately said it would have the first doses of its serum available by the end of the year. The US drug giant said healthy volunteers in America, Africa and Europe would start receiving the vaccine, which has already shown “promise” in animal testing, early in the new year.
Once a lesbian porn star, Teresa Carey’s transformation from purveyor of smut to devout evangelical Christian speaker is a story ripe to captivate and intrigue audiences. Carey, 36, who is expecting her first child with husband Scott Carey, opened up in a recent interview with Barcroft TV about her religious conversion five years ago and the reasons she willingly left her porn past behind. “The way I became a Christian is not kind of the usual way someone becomes a Christian,” she said, highlighting her uncommon path toward biblical understanding.
The Hot Zone was written by Richard Preston after he conducted dozens of interviews with virologists, scientists and doctors, many of which spent time on the front lines in Africa, hunting for the origins of Ebola. One scientist spent so much time looking for Ebola carriers in caves that he was jokingly called “Dr. Bat S#!
