Photo Credit: IJ Review
From The Wall Street Journal:
White House and State Department officials who were leading U.S. efforts to rein in Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip were caught off guard last month when they learned that the Israeli military had been quietly securing supplies of ammunition from the Pentagon without their approval.
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Photo Credit: Fox News
Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said the convoy would not be allowed to pass because it had not been certified by the Red Cross. Lysenko also showed a covertly filmed video appearing to show vehicles similar to the white-canopied trucks dispatched from Moscow on Tuesday parked at a military base in Russia.
One frame displayed by Lysenko shows uniformed troops lined up in front of one of the trucks.
Russian television reported early Tuesday that trucks carrying 2,000 tons of humanitarian aid were headed to Ukraine. NTV television showed hundreds of white trucks gathered at a depot outside Moscow, and said they were carrying everything from baby food to sleeping bags. A Russian Orthodox Priest sprinkled holy water on the trucks, some of which bore a red cross, before their departure.
However, Andre Loersch, a spokesman for the Red Cross in Kiev, told The Associated Press by phone that despite the general agreement among all parties, he had “no information about the content” of the trucks and did not know where they were headed.
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Photo Credit: AFP
“We have striking evidence obtained from Yazidis fleeing Sinjar and some who escaped death, and also crime scene images that show indisputably that the gangs of the Islamic State have executed at least 500 Yazidis after seizing Sinjar,” said human rights minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani. “Some of the victims, including women and children were buried alive in scattered mass graves in and around Sinjar.”
“In some of the images we have obtained there are lines of dead Yazidis who have been shot in the head while the Islamic State fighters cheer and wave their weapons over the corpses,” he said. “This is a vicious atrocity.”
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Photo Credit: Will Wintercross
But when she died of an unspecified illness on Thursday, her family in St Paul’s Bridge, a slum district of the capital, Monrovia, ignored government edicts to hand her body over for cremation.
Instead, fearing the prospect of being quarantined themselves if they reported it, they sneaked it to the cemetery in neighbouring Tyre Shop Community for burial the following morning.
The problem was that nobody wanted it there. Halfway through the burial, they were confronted by an angry crowd of Tyre Shop residents, demanding to know why a potentially-infected corpse was going in “their” cemetery. A scuffle ensued, and eight hours later, Ms Johnson’s corpse lay parked by the roadside in a rusting, mud-spattered wheelbarrow, covered by a piece of carpet and still seeking a final resting place.
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Photo Credit: a katz / Shutterstock.com
The Israeli commander described the attack on a Hebrew-language website:
A missile was fired from Gaza. Iron Dome precisely calculated [its trajectory]. We know where these missiles are going to land down to a radius of 200 meters. This particular missile was going to hit either the Azrieli Towers, the Kirya (Israel’s equivalent of the Pentagon) or [a central Tel Aviv railway station]. Hundreds could have died.
We fired the first [interceptor]. It missed. Second [interceptor]. It missed. This is very rare. I was in shock. At this point we had just four seconds until the missile lands. We had already notified emergency services to converge on the target location and had warned of a mass-casualty incident.
Suddenly, Iron Dome (which calculates wind speeds, among other things) shows a major wind coming from the east, a strong wind that … sends the missile into the sea. We were all stunned. I stood up and shouted, ‘There is a God!’
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It’s been dubbed the “most important video about Israel ever made” — and it’s being widely circulated on the Internet amid the recent Gaza conflict.
Featuring nationally syndicated radio talk show host Dennis Prager, who is known for his strong conservative views, the pro-Israel YouTube video aims to explain the Middle East conflict in under six minutes.
“The Middle East conflict is framed as one of the most complex problems in the world,” the video claims. “But, in reality, it’s very simple.”
“In a nutshell, it’s this: one side wants the other side dead.”
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Photo Credit: U.S. Air Force
The encounters come amid Russian war games along the border with eastern Ukraine, raising Western concerns that Moscow might invade to support pro-Moscow separatists battling the Kiev government since spring.
A U.S. air command official acknowledged at least 16 Russian forays around Alaska and northern Canada in the past 10 days, describing them as routine training missions. One intercept spotted a Russian spy plane among the Tupolev Tu-95 “Bear” bombers and Tu-142 reconnaissance and anti-submarine aircraft.
“Over the past week, NORAD has visually identified Russian aircraft operating in and around the U.S. air defense identification zones,” Maj. Beth Smith, of the U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, toldThe Washington Free Beacon.
Russian bombers have regularly flown along the sensitive airspace between Russia, Alaska and Arctic Canada, but Smith called the latest missions “a spike in activity.”
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The terror group President Barack Obama threatened to strike in Iraq Thursday evening is itself threatening to strike the American homeland.
“I say to America that the Islamic Caliphate has been established,” Abu Mosa, a spokesman for the terror group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), told VICE Media in a video interview posted online Thursday. “Don’t be cowards and attack us with drones. Instead send your soldiers, the ones we humiliated in Iraq.”
“We will humiliate them everywhere, God willing, and we will raise the flag of Allah in the White House,” he added.
The video is the first of a multipart series on ISIS VICE Media says it plans to release. VICE Media reporter Medyan Dairieh recently spent three weeks in the ISIS-controlled Syrian city of Raqqa, which the terror group has proclaimed the capital of their newly declared Islamic caliphate.
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Photo Credit: AP / Susan Walsh
President Barack Obama authorized targeted airstrikes and emergency assistance missions in northern Iraq, saying Thursday the U.S. must act to protect American personnel and prevent a humanitarian catastrophe in the face of advances by violent Islamist militants.
The U.S. military said it completed a delivery of meals and water to thousands of members of a religious minority who fled the town of Sinjar and are trapped in nearby mountains by the group calling itself the Islamic State.
Mr. Obama said he ordered the use of U.S. airstrikes if necessary either to stop militants from closing in on the northern city of Erbil or to allow local forces to aid the Yazidis, the religious minority. No U.S. strikes had been conducted by late Thursday, officials said.
His remarks at the White House capped a day of soaring concern about militant advances in Iraq, where extremist fighters seized control of areas long considered safe and took over the Mosul Dam, the country’s largest, according to local reports.
But Mr. Obama also acknowledged domestic jitters about renewed military involvement in Iraq, where America fought an eight-year war.
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Obama: Tonight I Authorized “Military” and “Humanitarian” Operations in Iraq
By Daniel Doherty.
Speaking from the State Dining Room on Thurday evening, President Obama announced that he had authorized two separate operations in Iraq: a “humanitarian mission” to bring food and supplies to ethnic minorities trapped and fearing for their lives on an isolated mountain in northern Iraq, and “limited military airstrikes” to prevent ISIS from slaughtering more innocents.
“They’re without food, without water, people are starving and children are dying of thirst,” he said.
Many too, he continued, have been indiscriminately massacred or even enslaved by ISIS forces in recent weeks. It was therefore, he argued, the responsibility of the US to intervene militarily.
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Photo Credit: The Extinction Protocol
CDC issues highest alert level: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday ramped up its response to the expanding Ebola outbreak, a move that frees up hundreds of employees and signals the agency sees the health emergency as a potentially long and serious one. The CDC’s “level 1 activation” is reserved for the most serious public health emergencies, and the agency said the move was appropriate considering the outbreak’s “potential to affect many lives.” The CDC took a similar move in 2005 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and again in 2009 during the bird-flu threat…
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Several Britons quarantined for Ebola amidst claims the virus may be airborne
Several British nationals have been voluntarily quarantined with suspected Ebola, according to the Daily Telegraph. The admission came from public health officials and follows revelations an individual in Cardiff had expressed fears they had contracted the disease. The exact number of people quarantined and their exact location have not been confirmed, but they are believed to be spread across the UK. The problem faced by public health authorities is that tests for Ebola are ineffective until the patients show symptoms. This means that they have to wait up to 21 days, which is the maximum incubation period. The World Health Organization has also claimed that the virus is spreading faster than they can control. This may be because of a misunderstanding about how the virus is transmitted; in 2012 a study suggested that Ebola may be transmitted through the air. Whilst the study was not conclusive the BBC reported that Canadian scientists had found that Ebola had been transmitted between animals that had never come into direct contact. This suggests that the current theory that it is only transmitted by exchange of bodily fluids may be wrong. However it is known that the individual in Cardiff has been confined to their home for the past week, after they returned from West Africa. The person visited West Africa where more than 1,600 people have been infected with the virus in recent months, resulting in 887 deaths. Public Health Wales said the person is “currently staying away from work and limiting contact with other people voluntarily.” A health official admitted there were “several cases” across the UK, but stressed the quarantines were purely a precaution as none of them had developed any symptoms of Ebola.
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