Army Can't Track Spending on $4.3b System to Track Spending, IG Finds

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Photo Credit: iStockMore than $725 million was spent by the Army on a high-tech network for tracking supplies and expenses that failed to comply with federal financial reporting rules meant to allow auditors to track spending, according to an inspector general’s report issued Wednesday.

The Global Combat Support System-Army, a logistical support system meant to track supplies, spare parts and other equipment, was launched in 1997. In 2003, the program switched from custom software to a web-based commercial software system.

About $95 million was spent before the switch was made, according to the report from the Department of Defense IG.

As of this February, the Army had spent $725.7 million on the system, which is ultimately expected to cost about $4.3 billion.

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Keystone Showdown: Battle Over Pipeline Lands Before Nebraska High Court

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Photo Credit: ReutersThe national debate on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline will concentrate on Lincoln, Nebraska Friday as that state’s Supreme Court hears arguments in a case examining whether lawmakers short-circuited the regular approval process in an attempt to expedite the pipeline’s construction.

The court’s ruling – not expected for several months — could force President Obama’s hand in making a final decision whether to green light the oft-stalled project.

Protests and political outrage have accompanied the proposed pipeline for years, but quieted down in recent months because of the Nebraska litigation and the Obama administration’s decision to wait for a ruling in the case before moving forward.

“The issue never goes away if you’re dealing with the pipeline on a local level,” anti-pipeline activist Jane Kleeb told Fox News. “While it may not be on the front page of newspapers nationwide, we’re dealing with it on a daily basis.”

Friday’s case before the seven-member court does not examine whether the pipeline should be built in Nebraska – or anywhere else — but rather if the state’s unicameral legislature improperly passed a law giving the governor authority to approve the project rather than the state’s Public Service Commission. It will take a supermajority of five justices to invalidate the law.

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Global Crisis: Calls Intensify for International Military Response to Ebola

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As the Ebola epidemic threatens to overwhelm response efforts in West Africa, calls for international military assistance are picking up. The medical charity Doctors Without Borders called on world leaders to send military units with expertise in biohazard containment to combat the worst outbreak of the virus on record. The European Commission’s humanitarian arm (ECHO) is also calling for military medical intervention to combat the epidemic, including U.S. Army and Navy Seal protection teams. But ECHO health adviser Jorge Castilla-Echenique warned of the high financial costs involved in a “M.A.S.H. like operation” in an interview with Thomson Reuters Foundation. U.S. Army mobile surgical hospitals have the capacity to serve as fully functional health facilities, but they do not come cheap, he said…

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Grim Ebola prediction: outbreak is ‘unstoppable’ for now, says U.S. virologist

A doctor who just returned from treating Ebola patients in West Africa predicts the current Ebola outbreak will go on for more than a year, and will continue to spread unless a vaccine or other drugs that prevent or treat the disease are developed. Dr. Daniel Lucey, an expert on viral outbreaks and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Medical Center, recently spent three weeks in Sierra Leone, one of the countries affected by the Ebola outbreak. While there, Lucey evaluated and treated Ebola patients, and trained other doctors and nurses on how to use protective equipment. The current Ebola outbreak, which is mainly in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, has so far killed at least 1,552 of the more than 3,000 people infected, making it the largest and deadliest Ebola outbreak in history. It is also the first outbreak to spread from rural areas to cities. Strategies that have worked in the past to stop Ebola outbreaks in rural areas may not, by themselves, be enough to halt this outbreak, Lucey said. “I don’t believe that our traditional methods of being able to control and stop outbreaks in rural areas … is going to be effective in most of the cities,” Lucey said yesterday (Sept. 3) in a discussion held at Georgetown University Law Center that was streamed online.

While the World Health Organization has released a plan to stop Ebola transmission within six to nine months, “I think that this outbreak is going to go on even longer than a year,” Lucey said. In addition, without vaccines or drugs for Ebola, “I’m not confident we will be able to stop it,” Lucey said. There are a few studies of Ebola treatments and prevention methods under way, but more research is needed to show whether they are safe and effective against the disease. One strategy that could help with the current outbreak is to implement public health “command centers” whose job it is to make sure that tools and equipment sent to the affected regions are properly distributed to places that need them, Lucey said…

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Maine Mom Fights State to Keep Baby Daughter Alive after She Emerges from Coma

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsA teenage mother from Maine has the governor on her side in a legal battle to keep her ailing baby alive, even though the state now has custody and previously sought to enforce a “Do Not Resuscitate” order.

One-year-old Aleah Peaslee, who was left in a coma last December after allegedly being shaken by her 21-year-old father, miraculously emerged from the state not long after being placed in the arms of her mother, Virginia Trask, according to court papers. But by then, Trask, told by doctors the baby’s brain damage was severe, had signed off on a DNR order and the baby had been taken into custody by the state due to the alleged abuse at the hands of Kevin Peaslee.

What has ensued is a legal battle over who has the right to rescind the order, the state or the parent. And although a state court ruled in favor of the Maine Department of Health and Human Development, Gov. Paul LePage made clear to FoxNews.com on Thursday that he will not allow state bureaucrats to usurp a parent’s rights regardless of how the appellate court, which has the case on its docket Sept. 23, comes down.

“This case is disturbing and is not reflective of my Administration’s position that a parent who is the legal guardian of their child should have final say in medical decisions about life-sustaining treatment,” said LePage. “The existing law violates the sanctity of parental rights, and I cannot support it. Unless a parent is deemed unfit and parental rights are severed, the state should not override a parent’s right to make medical decisions for their own child.”

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Obama’s Approval Rating Drops To All-Time Low … Again

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Obama-worried-1109President Obama’s approval rating returned to his record low Thursday, following his admission last week that the White House “has no strategy” to deal with the growing threat of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

Just 38 percent of Americans approve of the job the president is doing, according to Gallup’s Daily Tracking Poll. His rating has declined steadily since December of last year, when the 50 percent of Americans approved of his work, and the newest number ties his all-time low.

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Sudanese Woman Who Faced Death Sentence Rather Than Renounce Christ to be Honored in D.C.

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Photo Credit: AP / Al Fajer

Photo Credit: AP / Al Fajer

Meriam Ibrahim–the Sudanese woman married to a naturalized U.S. citizen who refused to renounce her Christian faith even while facing a death sentence for it–will be honored later this month in Washington, D.C., at the Family Research Council’s Values Voter Summit.

“Meriam’s bold stand for Jesus Christ as she faced death has touched the hearts of people in every nation,” said FRC President Tony Perkins. “Her incredible example of courage should inspire Christians in America to be bold and courageous in their faith as we witness growing religious hostility here in our country.”

Meriam, who was raised in Sudan as a Christian by her Christian mother after her Muslim father abandoned her family, married Daniel Wani in Khartoum in December 2011. Wani had moved to the United States from Sudan in 1998 and was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 2005.

In November 2012, eleven months after they were married, Daniel and Meriam had their first child, Martin, in Sudan.

In May of this year, a Sudanese court convicted Ibrahim of “apostasy,” because her father had been a Muslim and she professed Christianity. The court also convicted her of “adultery” because it refused to recognize her marriage to a Christian as legitimate. The court sentenced her to die for her alleged “apostasy” and to be whipped for her purported “adultery.”

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'We're a Movement Now': Fast Food Workers Strike in 150 Cities

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Photo Credit: SETH FREED WESSLER / NBC NEWS

Photo Credit: SETH FREED WESSLER / NBC NEWS

Fast food workers walked off the job nationwide on Thursday, as police arrested dozens who engaged in civil disobedience.

Organizers said workers in an estimated 150 cities were expected to take part in the strike, which they said marked an intensification of their two-year campaign to raise hourly pay in the industry to $15 and to win workers’ right to form a union. Organizers said dozens of workers had been arrested in cities including Kansas City, Detroit, and New York.

In Kansas City, workers were expected to walk out of 60 restaurants, and more than 50 workers were arrested. Ten minutes after they sat down and linked arms in an intersection in front of a McDonald’s, police arrived with vans and plastic cuffs and arrested the protesters one by one. They were joined by more than 100 other fast food workers, clergy members and other allies who stood on the sidewalk across the street and chanted “15 and a union,” and sang spirituals.

Latoya Caldwell, a Wendy’s worker, sat near the edge of the group in the street wearing a t-shirt that read “Stand Up KC” and beside a woman holding a sign bearing the face of Rosa Parks. Caldwell was arrested and loaded into a van.

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One Person Commits Suicide Every 40 Seconds: WHO

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Photo Credit: AFP / Pedro Ugarte

Photo Credit: AFP / Pedro Ugarte

One person commits suicide every 40 seconds — more than all the yearly victims of wars and natural disaster — with the highest toll among the elderly, the United Nations said Thursday.

In its first report on suicide, the UN’s World Health Organisation blamed intense media coverage when celebrities kill themselves for fuelling the problem.

“Suicide is an amazing public health problem. There is one suicide every 40 seconds — it is a huge number,” said Shekhar Saxena, director of WHO’s mental health department, at the presentation of the report in Geneva.

“Suicide kills more than conflicts, wars and natural catastrophes,” he said. “There are 1.5 million violent deaths every year in the world, of which 800,000 are suicides.”

Some of the highest rates of suicide are found in central and eastern Europe and in Asia, with 25 percent occurring in rich countries, the report says.

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CDC CONFIRMS: EBOLA IS NOW IN THE UNITED STATES, SILENT ON WHETHER CARRIER IS FOREIGN

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Italy EbolaBy Julie Steenhuysen and Sharon Begley. U.S. health officials said on Tuesday the first patient infected with the deadly Ebola virus had been diagnosed in the country after flying from Liberia to Texas, in a new sign of how the outbreak ravaging West Africa can spread globally.

The patient sought treatment six days after arriving in Texas on Sept. 20, Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told reporters on Tuesday. He was admitted two days later to an isolation room at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas.

U.S. health officials and lawmakers have been bracing for the eventuality that a patient would arrive on U.S. shores undetected, testing the preparedness of the nation’s healthcare system.

Frieden said a handful of people, mostly family members, may have been exposed to the patient after he fell ill. He said there was likely no threat to any passengers who had traveled with the patient. Asked whether the patient was a U.S. citizen, Frieden described the person as a visitor to family in the country.

“It is certainly possible someone who had contact with this individual could develop Ebola in the coming weeks,” Frieden told a news conference. “I have no doubt we will stop this in its tracks in the United States.”

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Readying for Ebola: How U.S. Hospitals Are Gearing Up

By Eric Niiler.

Federal health-care officials, hospital administrators and emergency-care doctors are preparing for the first cases of Ebola here in the United States. Experts say it’s not a question of if, but rather when it will happen.

The good news is that the public health infrastructure in the United States — from the epidemiologists at the Centers for Disease Control to the weekend physician at the local doc-in-a-box — has been mobilized for this very eventuality. Many hospitals, even those in many rural areas, are prepared with virus-proof protective gear and isolation units for sick patients.

The bad news is that the disease continues to grow unabated in West Africa, and that containing the spread is getting tougher every day.

“We will see cases,” said Alessandro Vespignani, a physics professor at Northeastern University who has developed a biological model of the worldwide spread of Ebola based on current infection rates, population trends and air traffic from the affected zone. “The good news from our modeling is the size of the outbreak is very limited. Even in the worse case, the size of the outbreak in the United States is just two or three individuals.”

Vespignani’s model estimates probability of an infected Ebola patient — not an infected health care worker — showing up on a given day currently in the United States at 3 or 4 percent. That number jumps to 20 percent by the end of October.

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Photo Credit: CBS46

Photo Credit: CBS46

CDC issues Ebola guidelines for U.S. funeral homes

By Jocelyn Connell.

CBS46 News has confirmed the Centers for Disease Control has issued guidelines to U.S. funeral homes on how to handle the remains of Ebola patients. If the outbreak of the potentially deadly virus is in West Africa, why are funeral homes in America being given guidelines?

The three-page list of recommendations include instructing funeral workers to wear protective equipment when dealing with the remains since Ebola can be transmitted in postmortem care. It also instructs to avoid autopsies and embalming.

Click here for complete coverage on the Ebola outbreak.

Alysia English is Executive Director of the Georgia Funeral Directors Association, the oldest and largest funeral association in Georgia.

Georgia is comprised of 700 funeral homes and 2,000 funeral directors.

CBS46 News

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Mark Levin’s Simple Plan to Put a Conservative in the White House

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Photo Credit: The Heritage Foundation

Photo Credit: The Heritage Foundation

Hard-charging radio commentator Mark Levin is sick of waiting for the Republican Party to nominate a conservative for president, and today he outlined his plan to accomplish just that.

Speaking at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, the talk radio giant and bestselling author issued a call to action to the crowd of social conservatives, prescribing a grassroots movement to elect a conservative to the White House in 2016.

Levin lamented that Americans under age 50 haven’t yet had the chance to vote for a true conservative such as Ronald Reagan for president and called on conference attendees to spend the next six months laying the groundwork for the 2016 election.

“From an election perspective, it keeps happening,” Levin said. “The Republican establishment picks off conservatives.”

To prevent this from happening during the presidential primaries, Levin called on conservatives to rally behind one or two candidates who are “articulate, intelligent, charismatic.”

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