U.S. to Commit Up to 3,000 Troops to fight Ebola in Africa.
Ebola has affected the U.S troops that go to africa to help fight ebola and the citizens in Africa that are exposed to the disease.
WASHINGTON — Under pressure to do more to confront the Ebola outbreak sweeping across West Africa, President Obama on Tuesday is to announce an expansion of military and medical resources to combat the spread of the deadly virus, administration officials said.
The president will go beyond the 25-bed portable hospital that Pentagon officials said they would establish in Liberia, one of the three West African countries ravaged by the disease, officials said. Mr. Obama will offer help to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia in the construction of as many as 17 Ebola treatment centers in the region, with about 1,700 treatment beds.
Senior administration officials said Monday night that the Department of Defense would open a joint command operation in Monrovia, Liberia, to coordinate the international effort to combat the disease. The military will also provide engineers to help construct the additional treatment facilities and will send enough people to train up to 500 health care workers a week to deal with the crisis.
Officials said the military expected to send as many as 3,000 people to Africa to take charge of responding to the Ebola outbreak.
“We all recognize that this is such an extraordinary, serious epidemic,” a senior official told reporters, speaking on condition of anonymity ahead of Mr. Obama’s public remarks on Tuesday. The efforts should turn the tide from a high-transmission epidemic that continues to grow every day, other officials said.
The White House plan would increase the number of doctors and other health care workers being sent to West Africa from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other American agencies, officials said.
The American government will also provide 400,000 Ebola home health and treatment kits to Liberia, as well as tens of thousands of kits intended to test whether people have the disease. The Pentagon will provide some logistical equipment for health workers going to West Africa and what administration officials described as “command and control” organizational assistance on how to coordinate the overall relief work. The Army Corps of Engineers is expected to be part of the Defense Department effort.
Administration officials did not say how soon the 17 treatment centers would be built in Liberia; officials there, as well as international aid officials, have said that 1,000 beds are needed in Liberia in the next week alone to contain a disease that has been spreading exponentially.
Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease and public health expert at Vanderbilt University, praised the plan, calling it a “major commitment,” and said it was more extensive than he had expected.
“It seems coordinated and coherent,” Dr. Schaffner said. He added that “the real core” was the Defense Department’s logistical support “because the heart of any kind of epidemic containment concept is getting the goods to the right place, putting up the institution.”
Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said the plan was an important first step, “but it is clearly not enough.” The focus on Liberia, he said, is too limited, and more help should be extended to Sierra Leone and Guinea, the other countries at the center of the worst Ebola outbreak ever recorded.
“We should see all of West Africa now as one big outbreak,” Dr. Osterholm said. “It’s very clear we have to deal with all the areas with Ebola. If the U.S. is not able or not going to do it, that’s all the more reason to say the rest of the world has to do it.”
Dr. Jack Chow, a professor of global health at Carnegie Mellon University, also warned that “the virus does not recognize national borders and will continue to spread where health care is inadequate.”
Top White House aides on Monday rejected criticism from African officials, doctors and representatives from aid groups who said the United States had been slow to act in the face of the disease. Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said the government, including the C.D.C., had committed more than $100 million since the outbreak started in the early spring.
“The C.D.C. has responded commensurate to the seriousness” of the crisis, Mr. Earnest told reporters ahead of a trip Mr. Obama has planned to the agency’s headquarters in Atlanta on Tuesday afternoon. Mr. Earnest called the response “among the largest deployments of C.D.C. personnel ever.”
Senior administration officials conceded that the effort must expand further as the outbreak threatens to spread in Africa and, potentially, beyond the continent. Officials said medical experts in the government were genuinely worried about the possibility of a mutation that could turn the virus into a more contagious sickness that could threaten the United States.
The World Health Organization has issued a dire Ebola warning for Liberia, saying that the number of afflicted patients was increasing exponentially and that all new treatment facilities were overwhelmed, “pointing to a large but previously invisible caseload.” The description of the crisis in Liberia suggested an even more chaotic situation there than had been thought.
Ms. Johnson Sirleaf, who has implored Mr. Obama to do more to help her country battle the disease, traveled over the weekend through Monrovia, the Liberian capital, with the United States ambassador, Deborah R. Malac.
“What is needed is on a scale that is unprecedented,” a senior administration official said in an interview, speaking on the condition of anonymity because she was not allowed by the White House to talk on the record ahead of Mr. Obama’s announcement.
The United States, a second senior administration official said, also plans to send 400,000 home protective kits to the four counties in Liberia that have been hardest hit by Ebola. The kits will include protective gear for family members, gloves and masks, disinfectants, and fever-reducing drugs.
That is worrisome, Dr. Osterholm said, because it is difficult to care for Ebola patients without becoming infected, and there is no proof that the kits will work. “We are going to endanger family members more by providing the kits,” he said.
Human Interest:
Scots Are Told 'Painful' Split Would Follow a Yes Vote.If the people of Scotland split from the UK it would affect all the people around the world, but especially in Europe.
“There’s no going back from this, no rerun,” Mr. Cameron told supporters in the northeastern city of Aberdeen, the heart of Scotland’s oil industry. “If Scotland votes yes, the U.K. will split, and we will go our separate ways forever.”
He added, “Independence would not be a trial separation, it would be a painful divorce.”
His message came hours after the leader of the campaign for independence, Alex Salmond, Scotland’s first minister, told Scots that the vote would be their last say on their constitutional future for many years. Speaking in Edinburgh alongside business leaders, Mr. Salmond described the referendum as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Scotland.” He argued that, freed from London, Scotland would be able to pursue distinct, and more social-democratic, policies — one of his central messages to Scots, who in recent decades have tilted to the left of England, throughout the campaign.
Mr. Cameron, though, blended appeals not to “break this family apart” with emphasis on the economic risks of independence, saying that there would be no currency union with an independent Scotland. He pointed out that, after a yes vote, more than half of all mortgages in Scotland would be held by foreign banks. He also rejected the assertion that the yes campaign was more positive in tone, arguing that it was about “dividing people.”
David Beckham, a former captain of England’s national soccer team, announced support for pro-union campaigners who were planning to demonstrate in central London.
The British news media reported that the queen had told an onlooker after attending church near her Balmoral estate in the Scottish Highlands on Sunday that she hoped “people will think very carefully about the future.”
Shocked by opinion polls showing that the vote could go either way, the no campaign has been pushed into a drastic late change of tactics. Last week, the leaders of Britain’s three main political parties set aside parliamentary duties to campaign in Scotland.
They agreed on an accelerated timetable for giving Scotland more powers to govern itself if Scots reject independence. That was a striking reversal for Mr. Cameron, who prevented such an option from being placed on the ballot for the referendum.
But while the three parties have agreed in principle to move swiftly to give more power to the Scottish Parliament, they have yet to agree on the details.
Conflict:
This is a physical and emotional conflict worldwide but is focused towards the people of Africa because they don't have enough food.
UNITED NATIONS — More than 800 million people worldwide do not get enough to eat, even as the world produces more than twice as much food as it needs, according to new figures released Tuesday by the United Nations.
Hunger has declined slowly over the last decade: 11.3 percent of the world’s population was clinically undernourished in the 2012-14 period, down from 18.7 percent in the 1990-92 period. Hunger keeps its hold on a handful of countries. Chad, Central African Republic and Ethiopia have some of the highest rates of undernourished people. A relatively large percentage of the population remains hungry across South Asia.
And in Iraq, the share of hungry people has soared: Nearly one in four Iraqis are undernourished, according to the report, up from 7.9 percent of the population in the 1990-92 period.
The report defines hunger as having “insufficient food for an active and healthy life.”
Feeding the world is no longer a question of growing more food. The Food and Agriculture Organization, one of the three agencies that produced the report, says the world produces twice the amount of food that the population needs. The problem is poverty.
The report cautions that “increasing productivity may not sufficiently address problems of access for net food buyers and for other vulnerable groups who may require targeted policy interventions such as strengthening safety nets and other social protection.”
One of the Millennium Development Goals, a set of objectives agreed upon by all United Nations members and the world’s leading development institutions, was to reduce by half the proportion of hungry people in developing countries by 2015.
Novelty:
A ten year old goldfish gets surgery for a tumor around its head, it is very rare for a pet goldfish to live for 10 years but George is still ok.
MELBOURNE, Australia (NBC/RTV) — An Australian man decided to try and save his 10-year-old goldfish after it developed a tumor around its head. George the goldfish was starting to really suffer from a tumor near his head. His owner said he was quite attached to George.
“The fish was having trouble eating, getting around, getting bullied by the other fish,” said veterinarian Dr. Tristan Rich.
“You know, we love George,” said his owner, Pip Joyce. “He’s been great company, and we’ve had some good laughs out of him.”
So George was sedated in a bucket, and the operation to remove his tumor took 45 minutes.
“And then closing up did prove quite difficult because there wasn’t much skin to work with, so managed to close half of it up with some sutures, just your standard sutures, — really small ones — and then had to seal it off with some tissue glue,” said Rich.
He was returned to the bucket, this time with painkillers.
“He was meant to stay in his own separate bucket for a few days, but he was jumping up and trying to get out of that, yeah, which was a good sign,” said Joyce.
Good old George is expected to live 20 more years.
Austin Police Patrol
I chose this article because it talks about Austin police investigating crimes, which is local.
AUSTIN -- Police are patrolling one of Austin's high crime neighborhoods on foot, and results show it's making a big difference there.
"It's been really good, and I think it's only going to get better," said Austin Police Officer Taber White.
The officers are part of the Austin Police Mobile Walking beat. Several times a week eight officers and a supervisor work each shift in the Rundberg neighborhood in Northeast Austin.
"We want to make this area feel safer, we want it to look safer, feel safer and be safer," Officer White explained.
Officers in this area typically run from call to call in their squad cars, giving them little opportunity to get out and get to know the people who live here.
The neighborhood includes about six square miles, or 2 percent of the city. It's home to only 5 percent of the city's population, but it makes up for 11 percent of Austin's violent crime.
Since APD started the foot patrol in April, there has been zero violent crime during the times these officers are working.
"We would ask them, you know, 'What makes you feel unsafe? What kind of issues do you think there are in the neighborhood?'" Officer White said. "Some of the top things that came up in this hot spot were drugs, prostitution and some homeless issues."
Officer White said they reach out to the homeless and provide information and services to get them the help they need.
"Sometimes we can have a little bit bigger impact by giving information than by giving a ticket," said White.
They also pay visits to businesses.
"Having them around, it has cleaned up tremendously," said Generations Child Development Center Director Roxana Rodriguez. "Our main priority is to keep the families and the children safe here, and having the officers come in and around just gives us a great peace of mind."
Rodriguez said her neighborhood day care has been vandalized several times, but since the officers started coming around it's stopped.
"It's way better now," said another business owner. "I'm not scared to take out the trash anymore."
Prominence:
I chose this article because it is newsworthy if people eat a significant amount of artificial sweeteners, it could give them diabetes.
Reaching for artificial sweeteners to avoid sugar may be trading one evil for another, a new study suggests.
For some people, artificial sweeteners may lead to type 2 diabetes as directly as eating sugar does, according to the research, published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
The benefits and risks of artificial sweeteners have been debated for decades. Some studies show no link to diabetes and others suggest there is one. The new research, from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, finds that differences in gut microbes may explain why some people can handle artificial sweeteners just fine while in an unknown percentage of others the sweeteners lead to diabetes.
The human digestive system is home to millions of microbes, largely bacteria, that help digest food and may play a role in health.
The researchers were quick to note that their work needs to be repeated before it's clear whether artificial sweeteners truly can trigger diabetes.
"I think this issue is far from being resolved," said Eran Elinav, who studies the link between an individual's immune system, gut microbes and health at the Weizmann Institute.
He admitted that his research has soured him on sweetening the coffee he needs to get through his day.
"I've consumed very large amounts of coffee and extensively used sweeteners, thinking that they were at least not harmful and perhaps even beneficial," Elinav said at a telephone news conference Tuesday. "Given the surprising result we got in our study, I made a decision to stop using" artificial sweeteners.
George King, chief scientific officer at the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, who wrote the forthcoming book The Diabetes Reset, said he may start cutting back on his diet soda habit, too.
"I think I will recommend that people not drink more than one or two cans a day," said King, who was not involved in the new research.
Artificial sweeteners cannot be digested, so it was assumed that there would be no way for them to lead to diabetes. Microbes seem to provide the missing link.
In a series of experiments in mice and people, the researchers examined the interaction between gut microbes and consumption of the sweeteners aspartame, sucralose and saccharine. Depending on the types of microbes they had in their intestines, some people and mice saw a two- to fourfold increase in blood sugars after consuming the artificial sweeteners for a short time. Over time, high blood sugar levels can lead to diabetes.
"The magnitude of the differences were not just a few percentages. These were actually very dramatic differences we saw both in the mice and in the human settings," said Eran Segal, a study co-author who is a computational biologist at the Weizmann Institute.
The study involved several parts:
• A diet study of 400 people found that those who consumed the most artificial sweeteners were more likely to have problems controlling blood sugar.
• Seven people who did not normally consume artificial sweeteners were followed intensively over a week as they were fed controlled amounts of saccharine. Four of the seven showed significant increases in blood sugar levels.
• Mice fed the sweetener saccharine saw dramatic increases in their blood sugar levels.
• Mice with no gut microbes did not see increases in blood sugar levels when they ate artificial sweeteners. Once these bug-free mice were treated with the feces of normal mice that had eaten artificial sweeteners, their blood sugar levels spiked upon eating artificial sweeteners, suggesting that the gut bugs were the driving force in the reaction.
The mouse research in particular was "beautifully performed and elegantly done," said Cathryn Nagler, who researches the connection between gut bugs and food allergies at the University of Chicago and wrote a commentary about the study inNature. The one piece the study was missing, Nagler said, was an explanation for how different gut bug populations might change someone's ability to process artificial sweeteners.
In trying to understand why certain diseases like food allergies and diabetes have been increasing, Nagler said she looks to things that change gut microbes, such as the introduction of antibiotics, changes in diet, Cesarean-section births, the introduction of formula and the elimination of infectious diseases.
"Now," she said, "I would add artificial sweeteners to this list."
Timeliness:
I chose this article because it happened recently and is affecting us nationwide.
GEORGETOWN, Calif. — Cooler temperatures and higher humidity may help firefighters begin controlling the rapidly growing King Fire east of Sacramento.
The 111-square-mile wildfire, which increased 1.5 times in size overnight, has been burning in steep canyons since Saturday and exploded in size Wednesday and early Thursday after 90-degree temperatures helped fuel its spread. On Monday, it was less than 4,000 acres and remained relatively close to the small mountain town of Pollock Pines, Calif., along U.S. 50.
More than 2,100 people have been forced to evacuate their homes even though the fire has not yet destroyed a single structure, firefighters say. Nearly 3,700 personnel are battling the blaze.
The fire, now more than half the size of Lake Tahoe about 40 miles to the northeast, is burning in canyon country, where thousands of people live spread out among the rough terrain and pine trees. Because leaving the area through twisty, steep roads takes far longer than the distances would suggest, firefighters are erring on the side of caution in removing residents from the fire's path.
WEDNESDAY: Calif. wildfire continues to grow; no structures damaged
TUESDAY: California fights 12 wildfires; little relief in sight
MONDAY: California's King Fire doubles as wildfires spread
TUESDAY: California fights 12 wildfires; little relief in sight
MONDAY: California's King Fire doubles as wildfires spread
Standing before 500 evacuees and area residents in a sweltering public school gymnasium, Mike Webb, the fire manager and a Georgetown, Calif., native said the roughly 3,600 firefighters on the blaze are ready to take advantage of the weather forecast. The fire was just 5% contained Thursday morning, sending up a column of smoke visible for more than 100 miles away as the setting sun Wednesday turned it a golden red.
"It's been a tough couple of days," said Webb of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, also known as Cal Fire. "We need something to change to our benefit."
Firefighters working the blaze have been using bulldozers and hand tools to cut away underbrush and chop fire lines through vegetation. Those steps make it harder for the fire to spread quickly, as have continuous drops of flame retardant and water from helicopters and large airplane tankers.
"To date, we've flown 455,000 gallons of retardant to the King Fire," Nick Pimlott of CalFire said Wednesday evening.
Seven air tankers holding as little as 2,100 gallons of fire retardant and as much as 12,000 gallons used the former McClellan Air Force Base, a decommissioned U.S. Air Force base near Sacramento, to refuel and reload retardant into their tanks, making a total of 40 trips Wednesday.
It's tremendous how much help these planes are. That DC-10 can lay as much retardant as 10 of the smaller planes we still use today," said Lynn Tolmachoff of Cal Fire.
The fire Wednesday made a run to the northwest into an area known as Stumpy Meadows, alarming residents who have been watching the fire spread closer to their homes.
Retiree Michael Wilson said he and his wife moved to the Georgetown area last year expecting a life of peace, quiet and natural beauty. Wilson plans to stay in spite of of any evacuation orders, counting on cleared space around his home and access to a pond from which firefighters can dip water.
Looking out at smoke moving closer to his house, Wilson said he made the right decision in moving to the mountains and credited firefighters with protecting homes so successfully. Despite the fire's growth near populated areas, not a single house has been reported lost.
"That's a miracle," he said.
The King Fire is one of a dozen major wildfires burning in California. Gov. Edmund "Jerry" Brown Jr. declared a state of emergency Wednesday for El Dorado County, where the King Fire is burning, along with Siskiyou County near the Oregon border, where the Boles Fire earlier this week destroyed about 200 structures.
The frequent fires have prompted air-quality advisories and forced schools as far away as Nevada to temporarily cancel outdoor sports.
The King Fire alone sent up a column of smoke and accompanying clouds that were visible in 140 miles away in Palo Alto, near the heart of Silicon Valley, a meteorologist reported via Twitter. Fire managers said they recognized the urgency under which they were operating, given the smoke also could be seen from the state capitol more than 50 miles away.
The fire on Wednesday afternoon raced into Stumpy Meadows, torching trees along a reservoir's edge. The tower of smoke served as an all-too-visible reminder to residents who hurriedly packed up livestock, clothing and power equipment in advance of the blaze. The fire has not yet destroyed any structures, fire officials say.
Meanwhile, further north in the town of Weed, Calif., where the Boles Fire began Monday, teams of firefighters were going house to house to pin down damage in the wildfire about half a square mile in area that officials estimated had destroyed 110 homes and damaged another 90.
The new figures were a marked increase from the initial estimate that a total of 150 structures had been destroyed or damaged in the blaze that rapidly swept across the town. Four firefighters lost their homes.
Two churches, a community center and the library also burned to the ground while an elementary school and the city's only remaining wood-products mill were damaged in flames that had been pushed by 40-mph winds.
Insurance companies worked to find places to live for the people who lost their homes.
The cause of the blaze was under investigation. It was 65% contained Thursday.
Burned neighborhoods remained off limits, but people have been finding ways in.
The Rev. Bill Hofer, pastor of Weed Berean Church, said power was back on in his home, which was still standing on the edge of the devastation zone. He returned Wednesday night despite the evacuation order to deter vandalism.
"The more people home with the lights on, the better," he said.
About 200 miles to the southeast in Georgetown, Wilson said he sent his wife and mother-in-law to another town for a few days while the King Fire rages.
"Man, it's scary," he said. "We thought we were in heaven. And it is. Well, until things like this."
Contributing: Suzanne Phan, KXTV-TV, Sacramento, Calif.; The Associated Press
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