ISIS Becomes Richest Terror Group in the World
Click on the link below to watch the video.
http://www.nbcnews.com/watch/nightly-news/isis-becomes-richest-terror-group-in-the-world-280624707806
Saturday, June 14, 2014
Friday, June 13, 2014
Obama: We Will 'Do Our Part' in Iraq, But Won't Send Troops
VIET NAM REPEATING ITSELF. WHEN WILL WE LEARN?
Click on Link below to read the full story.
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/iraq-turmoil/obama-we-will-do-our-part-iraq-wont-send-troops-n130536
U.S. contractors in Iraq relocated due to security concerns
![Fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant stand guard at a checkpoint in the northern Iraq city of Mosul, June 11, 2014.]({"default":"http://newsbcpcol.stb.s-msn.com/amnews/i/9d/3aacd0d07bcbc2c120b1875df612f7/_h353_w628_m6_otrue_lfalse.jpg"})
REUTERS: Stringer![Reuters]({"default":"http://newsbcpcol.stb.s-msn.com/amnews/i/4a/e07b8dadb83df2faa22fa8d5ea4068/_h17_w0_m6_otrue_lfalse.gif"})
By Reuters
"We can confirm that U.S. citizens, under contract to the Government of , in support of the U.S. Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program in Iraq, are being temporarily relocated by their companies due to security concerns in the area," spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in a statement.
She declined to say how many contractors were being relocated and their location, but said the U.S. Embassy and consulates were still operating normally.
"The U.S. Embassy and consulates in Iraq remain open and continue to operate on a normal status," Psaki said.
Lockheed spokesman Michael Rein said about 25 Lockheed employees were being evacuated from the Balad area in northern Iraq as part of a larger effort to ensure their safety given growing violence in the region.He said the employees were in Iraq working with the Iraqi air force as it prepared for the arrival of the first of 36 fighter jets, which are to be ferried to Iraq later this year.
Rein said it was too soon to say if shipments of the F-16 warplanes would be delayed as a result of the violence.Iraqi Ambassador Lukman Faily was at Lockheed's Fort Worth, Texas, plant last week to accept delivery of the first of the F-16s that will form the centerpiece of the country's first air force since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
Faily told that Iraq was completing work on the air base in Balad where the new jets will be housed. He said some Iraqi pilots had already been trained to fly the new planes, and more were in training now.
Insurgents from an splinter group, the (ISIL) which operates in Iraq and neighboring Syria, overran the city of on Wednesday after capturing the country's second city, Mosul, and were moving towards Baghdad.
(Reporting by Lesley Wroughton and Andrea Shalal; Editing by Sandra Maler and Eric Walsh)
Thursday, June 12, 2014
Check out the link below. Is this another Viet Nam?
Who are the militants plundering Iraq?
ISIS Militants Rampage Across Iraq: What You Need to Know
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/isis-militants-rampage-across-iraq-what-you-need-know-n129436
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
Scientist Makes Mutant, Infectious Flu Virus in Lab
By Maggie Fox
Flu experts have made a mutant version of the 1918 “Spanish flu” virus that killed tens of millions of people, sparking a new debate over whether such work is too dangerous.
Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin says the experiments are important for helping scientists understand how new pandemics start, and for designing better flu vaccines.
"Because avian influenza viruses in nature require only a few changes to adapt to humans and cause a pandemic, it is important to understand the mechanisms involved in adaptation and identify the key mutations so we can be better prepared," Kawaoka said in a statement.
PHILIPPE LOPEZ / AFP - Getty Images
The moratorium was lifted in 2012 and researchers started their work again last year.
“The risk exists in nature already, and not doing the research is really putting us in danger,” Kawaoka said at the time.
“The worst-case scenario is the emergence of a novel avian influenza virus that exhibits high pathogenicity in human, like highly pathogenic avian H5N1 viruses, and efficient transmissibility in humans, like seasonal influenza viruses,” Kawaoka’s team wrote in the journal Cell Host & Microbe.
H1N1 has shown up again — it caused the so-called swine flu pandemic in 2009. It wasn’t nearly as deadly as other new flu viruses that cause pandemics, probably because it was a mutated form that included bits and pieces of flu viruses that had been infecting people for decades.
But other circulating influenza viruses worry experts.
H5N1 has infected 665 people in 15 countries, killing 392 of them, since 2003.
The H7N9 virus appeared a year ago in China, infecting more than 440 people and killing more than 122 of them.
Flu viruses are very prone to mutation and experts say any of the various bird flus could evolve into a strain that infects people easily, causing a pandemic that could kill millions of people.
To understand what this might look like, Kawaoka’s team first searched a giant database of known bird flu viruses, taken mostly from ducks, to find those whose genetic elements most closely matched those seen in the 1918 flu.
They found plenty. “Our study demonstrates the continued circulation of avian influenza viruses that possess 1918 virus-like proteins and may acquire 1918 virus-like properties,” they wrote.
They made a few genetic tweaks to create a version that easily passed in small, airborne droplets to infect ferrets in different cages. Ferrets are the animals that are most like humans when it comes to catching flu.
Dr. Marc Lipsitch of the Harvard School of Public Health and Dr. Alison Galvani of the Yale School of Public Health called for limits on such experiments last month.
“Potential pandemic pathogen experimentation poses a significant risk to public health, arguably the highest level of risk posed by any biomedical research,” they wrote in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Medicine.
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