The outbreak of Ebola Virus in seven west African countries has broken through all containment efforts and is spreading like wildfire. According to Christian Relief groups working in Guinea and Liberia, the number of confirmed infections jumped 15% in just the last 24 hours. In addition, 40 illegal alien migrant workers from the outbreak area, who came ashore in Pisa, Italy, are showing signs of Ebola infection and are being isolated in Pisa Italy because of fever and “conjunctivitis” (bloody around the eyes). According to the World Health Organization, this strain of Ebola is entirely new and although it is close to the Zaire strain, it is different, thus accounting for false-negative test results . . . . . for weeks!
Those false-negative results meant people who were actually infected with Ebola, were returned to their families and neighborhoods to recover from what they believed was the Flu or a case of food poisoning, only to spread the Ebola further.
The result has been a complete loss of containment of this Ebola outbreak.
With the likely arrival of Ebola in Pisa, Italy, the European continent is now at severe risk.
The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq, by Hassan Blasim, is the most important book to come out of the Iraq War. Blasim, whom I met with last week in Princeton, N.J., has a faultless eye for revealing detail, a ribald black humor and a psychological brilliance that makes every story in his book a depth charge. In this collection of short stories he explores through fiction the culture of violence unleashed under the bloody dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and exacerbated by an American occupation that has destroyed the damaged social cohesion and civil life that survived Saddam's regime. His prose, courtesy of a brilliant translation by Jonathan Wright, is lyrical, taut, and riveting.
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Militarism and violence are diseases. It does not matter under what guise they appear. Renegade jihadists, Shiite death squads, Sunni militias, Saddam's Baathists and secret police, Kurdish Peshmerga rebels, al-Qaida cells, gangs of kidnappers and the U.S. Army 101st Airborne are all infected with the same virus. And it is a virus Blasim fearlessly inspects. By the end of this short-story collection the reader grasps, in a way no soldier's memoir or journalistic account from Iraq can explicate, the crucible of war and the unmitigated horror of violence itself. The book is a masterpiece.
“When I was 6, during my first year at school, the Iran-Iraq War erupted,” Blasim told me in a mixture of English and Arabic. “We were living in Kirkuk. We were taught in school to draw tanks or the face of Ayatollah Khomeini as the enemy. The city of Kirkuk was beautiful. There were flowers everywhere. But we were never taught the names of the flowers. Even today I do not know the names of these flowers. I tried to learn their names as an adult.”
“There was a culture of violence that predated the occupation,” he said…
Chinese firm China Precision Machinery Export-Import Corp. (CPMIEC) has made its first public statement on Turkey’s $3.4 billion long-range air and missile defense system, claiming that the finalization of the tender “is almost done.”
Wu Yang, the coordinator of the project, spoke at DIMDEX 2014 International Maritime Defence Exhibition in Doha, saying: “It’s almost done. We are also approaching the end in the evaluation of Turkey’s requests.”
In September 2013, NATO member Turkey chose CPMIEC, a firm that has been sanctioned by Washington, to co-produce the system, rejecting rival bids from Russian, United States, French and Italian firms.
BANGKOK – It is by no mere coincidence, when telltale evidence of a Mossad role in the MH370 hijack was starting to snowball, that Israel's embassies and consulates were suddenly shut down due to a “strike by diplomatic staff”. This fork-tongued alibi was obviously meant to prevent law enforcement agencies across Asia and the Western world from questioning Israeli intelligence agents and military attaches about the whereabouts and fate of the hundreds of passengers.
The Jewish state's diplomatic corps has retreated further into a tortoise shell, perhaps because of the hammer blow from investigative journalist Christopher Bollyn, who previously exposed Israel's hand behind the 911 attacks. Based on eyewitness reports from a network of plane watchers in Europe and in Israel, Bollyn reports that an identical production model of the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 is being kept out of regular service inside a hangar at Tel Aviv Airport.
Seattle-based Boeing assembles aircraft in pairs as its standard practice, but the question is how one jet was leased by Malaysia's national carrier while the matching plane was secretly turned over to the Israeli government without a purchase order from state-run El Al airlines.
Bollyn uncovered the fact that the two jets were delivered to a third-party company, whose top manager has a longtime connection with the George Soros. From the timeline of events, it is obvious that the plane transfers and subsequent electronic hijacking were part of a larger strategy, which was aimed at:
According to reports from plane-spotters, Israel has an identical Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200 in storage in Tel Aviv since November 2013. The only visible difference between the missing plane and the one in Tel Aviv would be its serial number. What do the Israelis have planned with the twin Malaysia Airlines plane?
A little publicity might stop any nefarious plans they may have.
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Are the Israelis Planning Another 9-11 Using the Missing Boeing 777?
Why would Israel have a plane identical to the missing Malaysia Airlines plane in storage in Tel Aviv? The plane in this photo is Boeing 777 2H6(ER) – 28416/155, an identical twin of the missing plane, which has been in Israel since November 2013. What are the Israelis doing with this plane in a hanger in Tel Aviv? Could it be part of a false-flag terror plot in the making? Where is this plane today?
Between 1964 and 1973, the United States dropped around 2.5 million tons of bombs on Laos. While the American public was focused on the war in neighboring Vietnam, the US military was waging a devastating covert campaign to cut off North Vietnamese supply lines through the small Southeast Asian country.
The nearly 600,000 bombing runs delivered a staggering amount of explosives: The equivalent of a planeload of bombs every eight minutes for nine years, or a ton of bombs for every personin the country—more than what American planes unloaded on Germany and Japan combined during World War II. Laos remains, per capita, the most heavily bombed country on earth.
The map above, created by photographer Jerry Redfern, provides another view of the massive scale of the bombing. Each point on the map corresponds to one US bombing mission starting in October 1965; multiple planes often flew on missions.
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The unfinished aftermath of the air campaign is the subject of Redfern and Karen Coates' new book, Eternal Harvest: The Legacy of American Bombs in Laos. This stunning book, seven years in the making, documents how the secret air war is still claiming lives more than four decades after it ended.
More than 100 Laotians fall victim to unexploded cluster bombs annually, delayed casualties of Operation Barrel Roll and Operation Steel Tiger, which dropped 270 million cluster bomblets. Packed by the dozens or hundreds in canisters, cluster bombs are designed to open in midair, scattering small explosives across a wide radius. Yet not all of them detonated, and today, 80 million live bomblets lurk under Laos' soil.
Cleaning up the unexploded ordnance (UXO) has been agonizingly slow. In January, Congress approved $12 million for UXO clearance and related aid in Laos. In comparison, the bombing cost the United States spent $17 milliona day in inflation-adjusted dollars.
Below, a selection of Redfern's photographs from Eternal Harvest. Learn more about his and Coates' work at their website.
