‘Horrific, Hellish and Awful’: Ohio Man Treats Ebola in Africa, Helps Save U.S. Aid Workers

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Photo Credit: Newscom By Josh Siegel.

Dr. Kent Brantly, the American doctor infected with Ebola while working in West Africa, only saw Tim Mosher’s eyes.

As part of his mission in Liberia with the nonprofit aid group Samaritan’s Purse, Mosher treated Brantly, a colleague whom he had never formally met but whose life he was now helping save.

With six or so other aid workers, Mosher stayed at Brantly’s bedside and intravenously delivered him ZMapp, an experimental medicine that had never before been tested on humans.

“I thought he might die that night,” recalled Mosher, who was wearing a full-body suit, face mask, two pairs of gloves and goggles—only his eyes visible—to avoid contracting the illness that struck Brantly, a doctor with Samaritan’s Purse.

After spending 21 days in quarantine upon returning from Africa, Mosher spoke with The Daily Signal about his unplanned contact with Brantly, who ultimately survived Ebola after finishing his treatment in the United States.

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Photo Credit: Fox News Could the blood of Ebola survivors help patients?

By Associated Press.

As West Africa struggles to contain the biggest ever outbreak of Ebola, some experts say an unusual but simple treatment might help: the blood of survivors.

The evidence is mixed for using infection-fighting antibodies from survivors’ blood for Ebola, but without any licensed drugs or vaccines for the deadly disease, some say it’s worth a shot.

“This is something that’s fairly simple to do,” said Dr. Peter Piot, director of London’s School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the co-discoverer of the Ebola virus.

Using blood of survivors is one of the experimental Ebola treatments under discussion at a two-day meeting that began Thursday in Geneva. The more than 200 experts assembled by the World Health Organization are looking at issues of safety and effectiveness and considering which treatments should be prioritized for testing during the current outbreak.

There are about a half dozen medicines and vaccines in development. None has been rigorously tested in humans but early testing of one vaccine began this week in the United States.

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Spying Cell Towers May be Spread Across US

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Photo Credit: REUTERS / Kacper PempelThere are at least 19 bogus cellphone towers operating across the United States that could be used to spy upon, and even hijack, passing mobile phones.

So says Les Goldsmith, head of ESD America, a company that imports and sells tightly secured mobile phones that can detect “baseband” hacking attempts. Goldsmith calls fake cell towers “interceptors.”

“Interceptor use in the U.S. is much higher than people had anticipated,” Goldsmith told Popular Science in a piece posted online last week. “One of our customers took a road trip from Florida to North Carolina, and he found eight different interceptors on that trip.”

The better to spy on you with

Cellphones communicate with cellular-service towers using the baseband processor, a chip that controls some or all of the radio signals sent to and from the device. Baseband processors run their own operating systems and are made by a handful of companies that zealously protect their trade secrets; not even phone makers know exactly how the baseband processors work.

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Record 92,269,000 Not in Labor Force; Participation Rate Matches 36-Year Low

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Photo Credit: AP / Mike GrollA record 92,269,000 Americans 16 and older did not participate in the labor force in August, as the labor force participation rate matched a 36-year low of 62.8 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The labor force participation rate has been as low as 62.8 percent in six of the last twelve months, but prior to last October had not fallen that low since 1978.

BLS employment statistics are based on the civilian noninstitutional population, which consists of all people 16 or older who were not in the military or an institution such as a prison, mental hospital or nursing home.

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Al Qaeda Wasn’t ‘on the Run’

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Photo Credit: Weekly Standard In the early morning hours of May 2, 2011, an elite team of 25 American military and intelligence professionals landed inside the walls of a compound just outside the Pakistani city of Abbottabad. CIA analysts had painstakingly tracked a courier to the compound and spent months monitoring the activity inside the walls. They’d concluded, with varying levels of confidence, that the expansive white building at the center of the lot was the hideout of Osama bin Laden.

They were correct. And minutes after the team landed, the search for bin Laden ended with a shot to his head.

The primary objective of Operation Neptune Spear was to capture or kill the leader of al Qaeda. But a handful of those on the ground that night were part of a “Sensitive Site Exploitation” team that had a secondary mission: to gather as much intelligence from the compound as they could.

With bin Laden dead and the building secure, they got to work. Moving quickly—as locals began to gather outside the compound and before the Pakistani military, which had not been notified of the raid in advance, could scramble its response—they shoved armload after armload of bin Laden’s belongings into large canvas bags. The entire operation took less than 40 minutes.

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IRS: Five More Employees Lost Emails In Computer Crashes

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Photo Credit: Daily CallerThe Internal Revenue Service (IRS) lost emails from five more employees due to computer crashes, likely bringing the total number of computer crash victims tied to the IRS targeting scandal to more than 20.

The IRS added five more employees to its computer crash list Friday, the Associated Press reported. The new computer crash victims are linked to congressional investigations into the IRS scandal and include two more Cincinnati-based tax exempt agents who worked under Lois Lerner.

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WATCH: Is the White House’s Benghazi Narrative Falling Apart?

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As the fallout from Benghazi intensifies, Washington officials are continuing to hide information and are intentionally deceiving the public…

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FBI: Cuban Intelligence Aggressively Recruiting Leftist American Academics as Spies, Influence Agents

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Photo Credit: APCuba’s communist-led intelligence services are aggressively recruiting leftist American academics and university professors as spies and influence agents, according to an internal FBI report published this week.

Cuban intelligence services “have perfected the work of placing agents, that includes aggressively targeting U.S. universities under the assumption that a percentage of students will eventually move on to positions within the U.S. government that can provide access to information of use to the [Cuban intelligence service],” the five-page unclassified FBI report says. It notes that the Cubans “devote a significant amount of resources to targeting and exploiting U.S. academia.”

“Academia has been and remains a key target of foreign intelligence services, including the [Cuban intelligence service],” the report concludes.

One recruitment method used by the Cubans is to appeal to American leftists’ ideology. “For instance, someone who is allied with communist or leftist ideology may assist the [Cuban intelligence service] because of his/her personal beliefs,” the FBI report, dated Sept. 2, said.

Others are offered lucrative business deals in Cuba in a future post-U.S. embargo environment, and are treated to extravagant, all-expense paid visits to the island.

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California Drought: El Niño Chances Fall Again

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Photo Credit: Brian MurphyHopes of an almighty El Niño bringing rain to a drought-stricken California – with its fallow fields, depleted streams and parched lawns – were further dashed Thursday. The National Weather Service, in its monthly El Niño report, again downgraded the chances of the influential weather pattern occurring in the fall or winter.

The odds were 80 percent in May, but were placed between 60 and 65 percent this week.

Meanwhile, the agency also announced that the much-needed weather event is likely to be weak instead of moderate in strength – another retreat from the more robust projections made earlier this year that fueled speculation that California’s three-year dry spell might be snapped.

El Niños, defined by warming Pacific Ocean waters that release enough energy to shape worldwide weather, have been associated with wet winters in the Golden State. The strong 1997-98 event correlated with San Francisco’s biggest recorded rain year: a whopping 47.2 inches of rain.

But the correlation doesn’t always hold up. While El Niños carry the potential to bring quenching showers, this week’s climate report doesn’t necessarily doom the state to another year of drought.

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An Ugly Word That Hurts Thousands of Children is Called Out by Beautiful Little Girl Who Has a Name

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Photo Credit: IJ Review In this photo, a little girl named Isabella wants people to know that she is a person, with a name, like anyone else. She is not defined by any word, especially not one that tries to belittle or degrade others.

Please don’t use the word retarded. I am a beautiful person. I am Isabella!

The website R-word.org, whose aim is to end the use of the term ‘retarded,’ explains how the word “retardation” went from a clinical description to a word of derision.

“When they were originally introduced, the terms ‘mental retardation’ or ‘mentally retarded’ were medical terms with a specifically clinical connotation, however, the pejorative forms… have been used widely in today’s society to degrade and insult people with intellectual disabilities…

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Alaska Leads Nation with Welfare Recipients

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Photo Credit: blmiers2 / Creative CommonsBy Associated Press.

Alaska has the highest number of families on public assistance in the nation, and the state’s rate is more than twice the national average of 2.9 percent, according to new figures from the U.S. Census Bureau.

A state-by-state tally of public assistance rates shows nearly 7 percent of Alaska families receive government help, the Alaska Dispatch News reported (https://is.gd/K6hRAZ). The figures are from 2012, the most recent data available.

Health department spokesman Clay Butcher said seasonal tourism and fishing jobs play a role, as do 140 villages in the state that are exempt from public assistance time limits because of few job opportunities. Most people are limited to receiving public assistance for 60 months.

“We also have a lot of transient types, people who come up in tourism jobs or oil jobs,” Butcher said.

Besides Alaska, 17 states saw an increase in the number of residents who receive public assistance. However, none have a higher percentage of recipients than Alaska, a trend that has held steady since at least 2000, the newspaper reported.

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Photo Credit: iStockAlaska, West Coast lead U.S. in receiving welfare

By Joseph Lawler.

Alaska has the highest rate of residents receiving welfare of any state.

The Census Bureau reported Tuesday that almost 7 percent of people in the Frontier State receive public assistance from the federal or state government, more than a percentage point more than the state with the next highest rate.

West Coast states lead the rest of the country in the share of residents receiving welfare. More than half a million people got public benefits in California in 2012, the most recent year for which welfare data from the Census’ American Community Survey is available.

Read more from this story HERE.