Mystery Illness in Texas Kills Half of Those Infected (+video)

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Photo Credit: Thinkstock

Photo Credit: Thinkstock

Mystery illness claims 4 lives in Montgomery County

Officials with the Montgomery County Health Department are on a mission to find out more about a mystery flu-like illness.

So far, half of the people who have come down with it have died.

According to the health department, all of the patients have had flu-like and/or pneumonia like symptoms. However, all of them have tested negative for the flu.

There have been eight confirmed patients ranging in age from 41 to 68. Four of those patients have died.

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Mother says mystery illness transformed son into dying patient in days

The mother of the youngest of eight confirmed cases of a mystery illness in Montgomery County is sharing her son’s story.

Dathany Reed, 41, wasn’t feeling well on Thanksgiving. He called out sick from his job at the Golden Corral and went to see doctors at Conroe Regional Medical Center.

Odessa Reed says doctors sent her son home with several prescriptions.

She said her son was admitted to the hospital’s emergency room the next day and ended up on life support.

“It doesn’t make sense,” said Odessa Reed. “How can you talk to a person one day, and they say, I’m not feeling good, and the next day, that person is on life support.”

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Soros Claims Broken Leg, Wants Delay in Court Tiff with Ex

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

Due to a broken leg, George Soros has asked for a delay in giving a deposition in his long-running legal battle with his former Brazilian girlfriend.

The billionaire investor’s lawyers were in court Tuesday to seek a postponement in the case brought by Adriana Ferreyr, the former actress who is suing Soros for $50 million, claiming he reneged on a promise to buy her a $1.9 million apartment on the Upper East Side. ­

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‘Superbugs’ Found Breeding in Sewage Plants

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Photo Credit: Yi Luo/Nankai University

Photo Credit: Yi Luo/Nankai University

Tests at two wastewater treatment plants in northern China revealed antibiotic-resistant bacteria were not only escaping purification but also breeding and spreading their dangerous cargo. Joint research by scientists from Rice, Nankai and Tianjin universities found “superbugs” carrying New Delhi Metallo-beta-lactamase (NDM-1), a multidrug-resistant gene first identified in India in 2010, in wastewater disinfected by chlorination.

They found significant levels of NDM-1 in the effluent released to the environment and even higher levels in dewatered sludge applied to soils. The study, led by Rice University environmental engineer Pedro Alvarez, appeared this month in the American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters. “It’s scary,” Alvarez said.

“There’s no antibiotic that can kill them. We only realized they exist just a little while ago when a Swedish man got infected in India, in New Delhi. Now, people are beginning to realize that more and more tourists trying to go to the upper waters of the Ganges River are getting these infections that cannot be treated. “We often think about sewage treatment plants as a way to protect us, to get rid of all of these disease-causing constituents in wastewater.

But it turns out these microbes are growing. They’re eating sewage, so they proliferate. In one wastewater treatment plant, we had four to five of these superbugs coming out for every one that came in.” Antibiotic-resistant bacteria have been raising alarms for years, particularly in hospital environments where public health officials fear they can be transferred from patient to patient and are very difficult to treat.

Bacteria harboring the encoding gene that makes them resistant have been found on every continent except for Antarctica, the researchers wrote. NDM-1 is able to make such common bacteria as E. coli, salmonella and K. pneumonias resistant to even the strongest available antibiotics. The only way to know one is infected is when symptoms associated with these bacteria fail to respond to antibiotics.

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Price of Beef Hits All-Time High, But Feds Say Consumer Price Index is Unchanged

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Photo Credit: CNSNews.com/Ali Meyer

Photo Credit: CNSNews.com/Ali Meyer

The average price for a pound of ground beef hit its all-time in the United States in November, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In January 1980, when BLS started tracking the average price of 100-percent beef ground chuck, a pound cost $1.82. By this November, the same pound of ground beef cost $3.61 per pound. That was up from $3.49 per pound in October.

A decade ago, in November 2003, a pound of ground chuck cost $2.49. Since then, the price has gone up 45 percent.

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Veterans Take the Hit – Senate Votes for $6 Billion in Military Pension Cuts

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Photo Credit: JTF Guantanamo

Photo Credit: JTF Guantanamo

A final effort by Senate Republicans to halt cuts to pensions of military retirees failed late Tuesday, after Democrats blocked an amendment to the controversial budget bill.

The two-year budget agreement, which cleared a key test vote earlier in the day, was expected to get a final vote no later than Wednesday.

Ahead of the final vote, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., tried unsuccessfully to use a parliamentary tactic to force a vote on the amendment, which he wrote to undo the cuts for military retirees.

A provision in the already House-passed bill would cut retirement benefits for military retirees by $6 billion over 10 years.

Sessions wanted to instead eliminate an estimated $4.2 billion in annual spending by reining in an IRS credit that illegal immigrants have claimed.

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Snowden Believed to Have ‘Doomsday Cache’ – DOD Official: ‘He Stole Everything — Literally Everything’

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden stole vastly more information than previously speculated, and is holding it at ransom for his own protection.

“What’s floating is so dangerous, we’d be behind for twenty years in terms of access (if it were to be leaked),” a ranking Department of Defense official told the Daily Caller.

“He stole everything — literally everything,” the official said.

Last month British and U.S. intelligence officials speculated Snowden had in his possession a “doomsday cache” of intelligence information, including the names of undercover intelligence personnel stationed around the world.

“Sources briefed on the matter” told Reuters that such a cache could be used as an insurance policy in the event Snowden was captured, and that, “the worst was yet to come.”

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‘Troubling’: Federal Judge Orders Obama Admin. to Disclose Document it’s Been Trying to Keep Hidden

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Photo Credit: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

Photo Credit: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

A federal judge Tuesday ordered the disclosure of a government-wide foreign aid directive President Barack Obama signed in 2010 but wanted to keep hidden from the public, Politico reports. The judge called the scope of the government’s argument for “presidential communications privilege” rather “troubling.”

The Department of Justice has argued that the Presidential Policy Directive on Global Development was covered by executive privilege, even though the information is “non-classified” and sends directives to agencies not to the president of the United States.

“Acting on a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the Center for Effective Government, U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle concluded that the presidential order is not properly within the bounds of the so-called ‘presidential communications privilege,’” Politico’s Josh Gerstein reports.

In her opinion, Huvelle wrote there is “no evidence that the [directive] was intended to be, or has been treated as, a confidential presidential communication.”

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Merkel Compared NSA to Stasi in Heated Encounter with Obama

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Photo Credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Photo Credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

In an angry exchange with Barack Obama, Angela Merkel has compared the snooping practices of the US with those of the Stasi, the ubiquitous and all-powerful secret police of the communist dictatorship in East Germany, where she grew up.

The German chancellor also told the US president that America’s National Security Agency cannot be trusted because of the volume of material it had allowed to leak to the whistleblower Edward Snowden, according to the New York Times.

Livid after learning from Der Spiegel magazine that the Americans were listening in to her personal mobile phone, Merkel confronted Obama with the accusation: “This is like the Stasi.”

The newspaper also reported that Merkel was particularly angry that, based on the disclosures, “the NSA clearly couldn’t be trusted with private information, because they let Snowden clean them out.”

Snowden is to testify on the NSA scandal to a European parliament inquiry next month, to the anger of Washington which is pressuring the EU to stop the testimony.

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Poll: Americans’ Belief in God Is Strong–But Declining

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Photo Credit: CNS News

Photo Credit: CNS News

A new Harris Poll finds that a strong majority (74 percent) of U.S. adults say they believe in God, but that’s down from the 82 percent who expressed such a belief in earlier years.

Belief in miracles, heaven and other religious teachings also declined in the latest poll, as follows:

–72 percent believe in miracles, down from 79 percent in 2005;

–68 percent believe in heaven, down from 75 percent;

–68 percent believe that Jesus is God or the Son of God, down from 72 percent…

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Levin: U.S. Chamber of Commerce Is About Cronyism, Not Capitalism (+audio)

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levin_roveMark Levin said Monday on his syndicated radio program Monday that the United States Chamber of Commerce is “not about capitalism, they’re about cronyism,” continuing with the theme of the divide between “establishment Republicans” and “conservatives.”

Levin discussed an Opensecrets.org report showing that, in the 2012 election cycle, the Chamber gave $6,275,199 in campaign contributions to candidates, Leadership Political Action Committees (PACs), parties, and 527 committees.

The top individual recipients were Mitt Romney, Senate Candidate Laura Lingle (R-Hawaii), Senate Candidate George Allen (R-Va.), Senate Candidate Heather Wilson (R-NM), and Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.). The Republican Governors Association (RGA) received $1.25 million, while the Democratic Governors Association (DGA) and the Democratic Attorneys General Association (DAGA) received a combined $130,000 from the Chamber.

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