Germany pushes again for European army

GERMANY is again pressing for a European army to protect the continent at a time of rising international tensions.

Defence minister Ursula von der Leyen last week spelled out her wishes for a continental force capable of swift reaction anywhere in the world.

The strange case of the air marshal who was stabbed by a needle during the Ebola outbreak

Someone jabbed him with a needle in an airport in Nigeria. Was it the beginning of a new type of terrorism?

The terminal at Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos, Nigeria, was packed. Inside, a small team of U.S. air marshals wormed its way through the crowd. They had a plane to catch: United Flight 143 to Houston. It was Sunday, Sept. 7, and that was the day’s mission.

The exact size of this group of air marshals is an operational secret. Even how many people are employed by the federal air marshal service is not shared. But the number has certainly grown since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, renewed fear of hijacked planes.

The air marshals in Lagos were following an expediter – a Nigerian airport worker charged with guiding them through the terminal and helping them get through security, said Jon Adler, president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association. But the air marshals were having trouble keeping up. They kept losing sight of the expediter. He was moving too fast. The air marshals were walking through the airport, nearly to the security checkpoint, other travelers passing them in every direction, jostling for space, when two men approached from the opposite direction. These two men didn’t stand out, until they brushed past the U.S. agents.

It happened in a flash, Adler said. One of the men jabbed a hypodermic needle into the arm of an air marshal and then melted into the crowd, he said. No shouting. No fighting. It took a moment to even realize what had occurred. By then, the two passing men had disappeared.

Anti-quarantine nurse Hickox was trained as intelligence officer by the CDC

On rare occasion will an article in its full entirety be posted here. Due to its nature, in how things don’t add up (or finally add up), this is one such occasion.

 

 

(NaturalNews) Nurse Kaci Hickox, who has made headlines over the last few days by refusing to quarantine herself after returning from the Ebola front lines in Africa, turns out to have been trained as an “intelligence officer” under a two-year CDC program modeled after the U.S. military.

As you can see from the document below, Hickox graduated from a two-year CDC intelligence officer training program in 2012. This is the same nurse whose LinkedIn page was recently scrubbed to hide her ties to the CDC, an agency that stands to benefit tremendously in both political power and budgets if an Ebola outbreak sweeps across America.

The official intelligence designation granted to Nurse Hickox by the CDC was “Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer,” and she is a graduate of the 2012 EIS programEIS according to this CDC document (PDF). (See page 138 – 139 for her name and photo, or view photo below.)

Ebola escalation could trigger major food crisis

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The global famine warning system is predicting a major food crisis if the Ebola outbreak continues to grow exponentially over the coming months, and the United Nations still hasn’t reached over 750,000 people in need of food in West Africa as prices spiral and farms are abandoned.

On the eve of World Food Day on Thursday, U.N agencies and non-governmental organizations are scrambling to scale up efforts to avert widespread hunger.

“The world is mobilizing and we need to reach the smallest villages in the most remote locations,” Denise Brown, the U.N. World Food Program’s regional director for West Africa, said in a statement Wednesday. “Indications are that things will get worse before they improve. How much worse depends on us all.”

Sixty Days To Beat Ebola, United Nations Warns

The UN says the ebola outbreak must be controlled within 60 days or else the world faces an “unprecedented” situation for which there is no plan.

The United Nations made the stark warning as it warned that the disease “is running faster than us and it is winning the race”.

Nearly 9,000 cases of ebola have been reported so far in West Africa, including 4,447 deaths.

“The WHO advises within 60 days we must ensure 70% of infected people are in a care facility and 70% of burials are done without causing further infection,” said Anthony Banbury, the UN’s deputy ebola coordinator.

Genomic sequencing reveals more than 300 mutations in 2014 Ebola virus

Rapid sequencing and analysis of 99 genomes have enabled researchers to identify more than 300 genetic changes in the Ebola virus genome, according to results published in Science.

With collaboration with the Sierra Leone Ministry of Health and Sanitation, Pardis Sabeti, MD, DPhil, of the Broad Institute and Harvard University, and colleagues sequenced Ebola virus genomes collected from 78 patients with the virus in Sierra Leone during the first 24 days of the outbreak. Along with the mutations, which make the 2014 Ebola virus distinct from the viral genomes tied to previous Ebola outbreaks, the researchers found sequence variations indicating that the outbreak started from a single introduction into humans.

To accelerate response efforts, the research team released the full-length sequences on the National Center for Biotechnology Information’s DNA sequence database in advance of publication.