ISIS militants execute Iraqi journalist, 12 other people

A woman reporter runs with a rebel fighter to avoid snipers at the frontline against the Islamic State fighters in Aleppo's northern countryside October 10, 2014. (Reuters) 

By Agence France-Presse | Samarra, Iraq
Saturday, 11 October 2014
Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militants executed an Iraqi news cameraman and 12 other people on Friday in several towns and villages north of Baghdad, officials, relatives and witnesses said.
The militants shot dead Raad al-Azzawi, a 37-year-old cameraman for local news channel Sama Salaheddin, his brother and two other civilians in the village of Samra, east of the city of Tikrit, relatives of the journalist said.
“ISIS executed him, his brother and two other people in public today,” one relative said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the militant organization.
According to the media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the father of three was detained by ISIS on September 7.
“They came to his home and took him and his brother,” the relative said. “He did nothing wrong, his only crime was to be a cameraman, he was just doing his job.”
“There must have been some people in the village who accused him of working for the government and tipped him off to the militants... He always had his camera with him,” he said.
According to an RSF statement issued last month, ISIS had threatened to execute Azzawi on the grounds that he had refused to work for them.
After targeting religious and ethnic minorities in the areas it took control during its broad Iraqi offensive four months ago, ISIS has recently executed dozens of people it suspects of any connection with the Shiite-dominated government.
ISIS executed nine other people north of Tikrit on Friday, all of them on suspicion of ties to anti-militant Sunni grassroots organizations, according to security officials and witnesses.
In the town of Az-Zab, 90 kilo meters west of the oil hub of Kirkuk, six people were executed in public.
“ISIS executed four residents of the lower part of Az-Zab and two from villages near Az-Zwiya,” a few miles further to the west, a local security official said.
Witnesses said the six were accused of being involved in efforts to organize Sunni resistance to IS in the Hawija region. They were executed on a marketplace, they said.
It was in the same area that residents of the village of Tel Ali burned an ISIS flag last month.
In retaliation, the militants abducted 50 residents and put up flags across the region, even booby-trapping some of them to stop locals from removing them.
In Baiji, about 35 kilo meters to the south, three men were beheaded on Friday, a security official in the region said.
The official said the three men had been abducted a few days earlier and were former members of the Sahwa organization funded by the U.S. military to combat Al-Qaeda in 2007-08.

Here’s The Moment When Nobel Peace Prize Winner Malala Yousafzai Left Jon Stewart Speechless

 "In this exclusive, unedited interview, "I Am Malala" author Malala Yousafzai remembers the Taliban's rise to power in her Pakistani hometown and discusses her efforts to campaign for equal access to education for girls. Malala Yousafzai also offers suggestions for people looking to help out overseas and stresses the importance of education."

Malala Yousafzai, 17, won the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday along with the Indian children’s rights activist Kailash Satyarthi, 60, for “their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education.”
Yousafzai first caught the media’s attention at age 14, after she was shot in the head by a Taliban fighter for criticizing the organization’s tactics.
The young campaigner for women’s rights, who was favored to win the peace prize last year, memorably left Jon Stewart speechless during an interview on the Daily Show, a few days before the 2013 awards were announced.
At the time, former Business Insider reporter Brian Jones noted that Yousafzai gave a remarkable answer when asked by Stewart how she reacted to learning that the Taliban wanted her dead.
Here’s the response:
I started thinking about that, and I used to think that the Talib would come, and he would just kill me. But then I said, ‘If he comes, what would you do Malala?’ then I would reply to myself, ‘Malala, just take a shoe and hit him.’ But then I said, ‘If you hit a Talib with your shoe, then there would be no difference between you and the Talib. You must not treat others with cruelty and that much harshly, you must fight others but through peace and through dialogue and through education.’ Then I said I will tell him how important education is and that ‘I even want education for your children as well.’ And I will tell him, ‘That’s what I want to tell you, now do what you want.’

Dirty Disney: The subliminal messages hidden in kids’ films

Did you spot all the rude little moments hidden in Disney films when you were a kid? Source: Supplied

YESTERDAY we uncovered the truth behind the mysterious code that appears in countless Pixar and Disney films, ‘A113’.

There’s a perfectly innocent explanation for the code — but some viewers allege Disney used to have a much less innocent habit of sticking subliminal messages into their films.
If you’re a child of the ‘90s, you might have heard the playground whispers that your favourite Disney flicks harboured blink-and-you-miss-em moments that weren’t exactly G-rated. Here are five Disney flicks that seemed to slip rude little surprises past the censors:
Aladdin
There’s a scene in this 1992 children’s classic in which Aladdin tries to woo Princess Jasmine on her balcony, only to be confronted by her tiger. As the shot cuts away, we can still hear Aladdin stammering to the angry tiger in the background — including what sounds suspiciously like the line, ‘Good teenagers, take off your clothes’.
Disney claimed that the actual line was ‘Good kitty, take off and go,’ - but did replace it with the phrase ‘Down, kitty’ for the DVD release of the film.

The Lion King
Yes, animals can be dirty too. This moment in the 1994 hit was paused on many a kid’s VHS copy. As Lion King Simba slumps on the ground, he sends a cloud of dust swirling up into the night sky. For a moment, the dust seems to form into the letters: S-E-X. Scandal!
An animator on the film has confirmed that yes, there was indeed a word intentionally spelled out in the dust — but it’s not what you think, filthy viewers. Animator Tom Sito insists that the letters actually spell ‘SFX’, an in-jokey ‘hello’ from the film’s art and special effects (or ‘SFX’) department.

The Little Mermaid
Nobody loves weddings more than this priest, it would seem. At the end of this 1989 flick, a disguised Ursula walks up the aisle to marry Prince Eric. The short, stumpy Bishop marrying the pair has an unsightly bulge in his trousers that suggests he’s REALLY happy to be there.
Those with purer minds than us insisted that the fulsome trouser-mountain was actually the priest’s knobbly knee — but, as with Aladdin, Disney thought it best to quash all rumours by digitally removing the offending pants-tent from the DVD release of the film.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Sure, she was a cartoon, but a lot of people still had the hots for Jessica Rabbit, star of the 1988 live action/animated hybrid Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Seems Disney were happy to play up to her sex appeal: in this scene from the film, Jessica and her human co-star Bob Hoskins are ejected from a car following a cartoony crash. Pausing the film frame by frame, as the YouTube user below felt it necessary to do, one can see that Jessica flashes rather more skin during the crash than is appropriate for a kid’s film.
Even today, Jessica Rabbit fans online still debate whether or not Jessica Rabbit is wearing underpants in this scene. Our suggestion: get off the computer, fellas, and go take a walk outside. You might even meet a human female.

The Rescuers
Yes, Disney’s habit of filth-ifying their films stretches all the way back to the 70s, with this 1977 family favourite. This is perhaps the most subliminal of all Disney’s adult moments, but it’s also the one that’s hardest for them to explain away.
During the scene in which Miss Bianca and Bernard are flying on Orville’s back through New York City, two images of a topless woman are present in the background. The two images, one per frame, could not be seen in ordinary viewing because the film runs too fast — at 30 frames per second on video.
Nevertheless, the discovery of the topless frames led to the recall of around 3.4 million videotapes when the film was released on VHS in 1999 — and an apology from Disney.

Texas Health Worker Tests Positive For Ebola

DALLAS, Texas, Oct 12 (Reuters) - A Texas health worker has contracted Ebola after treating a Liberian who died of the disease at a Dallas hospital last week, raising concern about how U.S. medical guidelines aimed at stopping the spread of the disease were breached.
The infected worker, identified as a woman but not named by authorities as they announced the case on Sunday, is believed to be the first person to contract the disease in the United States.
Health officials said the worker at the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital had been wearing protective gear during treatment of Thomas Eric Duncan. Duncan was a Liberian who died on Wednesday after being exposed to Ebola in his home country and developing the disease while visiting the United States.

The outbreak in West Africa, the worst outbreak on record of Ebola, has killed more than 4,000 people, mostly in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
The new case in Texas indicated a professional lapse that may have caused other health workers at the hospital to also be infected, said the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
"We don't know what occurred in the care of the index patient, the original patient, in Dallas, but at some point there was a breach in protocol, and that breach in protocol resulted in this infection," CDC director Dr. Thomas Frieden told a news conference.
"We are evaluating other potential healthcare worker exposures because if this individual was exposed, which they were, it is possible that other individuals were exposed," he said.
The worker was in close contact with Duncan and initial testing shows that the level of virus in her system is low. The CDC will conduct a secondary test to confirm the results from a lab in Austin that showed Ebola infection, he said.
"Unfortunately it is possible in the coming days that we will see additional cases of Ebola," he said.
Frieden said there was one person who may have had contact with the infected health worker when she could possible transmit the disease and that person is being monitored.
Frieden said the intubation of Duncan and use of a dialysis machine - measures taken while trying to save his life - posed high risk for transmission of the virus.
Duncan died in an isolation ward on Oct. 8, 11 days after being admitted. More than 50 people attended to his care. The hospital said it was decontaminating its isolation unit while health officials said Duncan's body had been cremated.
'FULL CDC PRECAUTIONS'
Dan Varga, the hospital's chief clinical officer told a news conference that the infected worker "was following full CDC precautions ... so gown, glove, mask and shield."
The hospital has already faced criticism for at first turning away Duncan when he first showed up there on Sept. 25, saying he had been in Liberia and had a fever. About two days after he was discharged, he grew much sicker and was taken back by ambulance and put in an isolation unit.
None of the 10 people who had close contact with him or 38 people who had contact with that group have shown any symptoms, state health officials said.
Texas officials did not identify the health worker or give any details about the person, but CNN said it was a woman nurse.
The Texas case is not the first outside badly hit West Africa in which a health care worker contracted the disease after contact with a patient.
In Spain, a nurse who contracted Ebola after caring for two infected priests repatriated to Spain remained seriously ill but is showing signs of improvement. Teresa Romero, 44, is so far the only person who has tested positive for Ebola through a transmission in the country.
Fifteen people were being monitored in a Madrid hospital for signs of Ebola on Sunday, as the Spanish government tries to contain recriminations over how it has handled the case. None have so far shown any symptoms.
EBOLA PAMPHLETS
In Dallas, there was a yellow hazardous material drum on the lawn of the brick apartment where the Texas health worker lived and information pamphlets about the Ebola virus were stuffed in the doors in the surrounding blocks of the apartment.
Neighbor Cliff Lawson, 57, said he was woken at 6:00 a.m. by two Dallas police officers who told him "don't panic."
"I went back to bed after that. There's nothing you can do about it. You can't wrap your house in bubble wrap," Lawson said.
A team is decontaminating the patient's apartment and car, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings said.
The hospital said in a statement that the new patient, who had not been working for two days, had been taking her own temperature twice a day. The worker informed the hospital of a fever and was isolated immediately upon arrival there.
A union for registered nurses said the Ebola case in Dallas shows that not enough is being done to educate health workers on how to manage patients who show signs of infection.
"Handing out a piece of paper with a link to the Centers for Disease Control, or telling nurses just to look at the CDC website - as we have heard some hospitals are doing - is not preparedness," said Bonnie Castillo, a registered nurse and senior official with National Nurses United.
SCREENING AT JFK AIRPORT
News of the second patient in Dallas came as U.S. authorities step up efforts to stop the spread of the virus. New York's John F. Kennedy Airport on Saturday began the screening of travelers from the three hardest hit West African countries.
Liberia is the country worst affected by the virus with 2,316 victims, followed by 930 in Sierra Leone, 778 in Guinea, eight in Nigeria and one in the United States, the World Health Organization said on Friday. Some 4,033 people are known to have died in seven countries from the outbreak, it said.
Ebola is spread through contact with bodily fluids of an affected person or contamination from objects such as needles. People are not contagious before symptoms such as fever develop.
The United Nations said on Friday that its appeal for $1 billion to respond to the West Africa outbreak was only 25 percent funded. (Reporting by Jim Forsyth in San Antonio, Frank McGurty in New York, David Bailey in Minneapolis, David Morgan in Washington and Sarah White in Spain; Writing by Jon Herskovitz, Jason Neely and Brendan O'Brien; Editing by Anna Willard, Stephen Powell and Frances Kerry)

What is Ebola? Ebola, a virus which is rabid in Liberia. It is believed that fruit bats of the Pteropodidae family are natural Ebola virus hosts. Ebola is introduced into the human population through close contact with the blood, secretions, organs or other bodily fluids of infected animals such as chimpanzees, gorillas, fruit bats, monkeys, forest antelope and porcupines found ill or dead or in the rainforest.

Ebola then spreads through human-to-human transmission via direct contact (through broken skin or mucous membranes) with the blood, secretions, organs or other bodily fluids of infected people, and with surfaces and materials (e.g. bedding, clothing) contaminated with these fluids during the last stages.

The Ebola virus causes an acute, serious illness which is often fatal if untreated. Ebola virus disease (EVD) first appeared in 1976 in 2 simultaneous outbreaks, one in Nzara, Sudan, and the other in Yambuku, Democratic Republic of Congo. The latter occurred in a village near the Ebola River, from which the disease takes its name.


 Over in Liberia this is a common death sentence in urban areas as of late summer and early fall of 2014.  Ebola, has come to the United States. One person has died, a man named Thomas Eric Duncan. He helped take a woman whose family was his neighbors, The hospital turned the woman away because there was no room in the Ebola ward and she was in the final stages of Ebola. As her body was shaking in a seizure like state with convulsions, incontinent of bodily fluids, and through the broken skin Thomas risked his life to try to give her at least a chance at life by going to the hospital.

A few days later he came into the United States, he was tested before he left Liberia and was completely healthy. Days after he came here he fell ill. He went to the hospital where he was discharged. He came back 4 days later and was admitted on September 29, 2014. He died on October 3, 2014. Now a nurse that cared for him is infected. We shall see how far this Ebola infection will go within the United States...

References are from CNN and The World Health Organization

Young People Are Uneducated And Shouldn’t Vote, Says Fox News

 Should young people vote?

Top 10 Reasons to Register and Vote 10.  It's your money. The county commissioners, governor, state officials, legislators, president and members of Congress you vote for will decide how much of our wealth to invest in public services and how to fairly share the tax burden.   9.  It's your children's education. You elect local and state school board members who set public education policy and budgets that will affect how well prepared your children and grandchildren will be for the future. Decisions by our legislators, governor, members of Congress and president also affect the public schools-- and the quality and cost of higher education as well. 8.  It's your job. Congress, the president, the governor and your legislators influence what job training is available, minimum wage, pay equity, fairness in hiring, health insurance through your employer, job and pension security, and workplace safety. 7.  It's your health care. Actions by the governor, legislature and Congress as well as their decisions on Medicaid, Medicare and private insurance laws determine your access to health care. 6.  They're your highways. Nevada’s population and traffic are growing rapidly. Your county commissioners, legislators, governor and members of Congress decide what highways are needed, what alternatives to highways such as public transit to support, and how to pay the bill. 5.  It's your Social Security. The president and your members of Congress decide how much payroll tax you pay, cost of living increases and benefit schedules for your Social Security pension, and what Medicare services you receive and share payment for. 4.  You live in Nevada. Your county, state and national elected officials set standards, enforcement strategies and budgets. They plan and zone where roads and industries will be built and how public lands will be used --decisions that can determine how and where you live and work. 3.  It's your neighborhood. The elected officials and judges you vote to retain make daily decisions about crime prevention, laws and law enforcement, safe and affordable homes, traffic patterns, where to put schools, parks and recreation. 2.  They're our children. We do our best to keep them healthy, fed, safe, educated and cared for. The officials you elect set policies that affect all Nevada families in pursuing their goals and dreams. 1.  It's your Constitutional Republic. Make it work. Register and Vote. Top 10 Reasons Why Young People Should Vote  10. Local elections like school board and city council races really do have an impact on your daily life.   9. If you don't vote, you're not allowed to celebrate the Fourth of July. Honest.   8. Young people have the most to gain and lose in any election because they have to live with the consequences longer than anyone else.   7. If you vote and an adult you know doesn't, you can tease them about it forever.   6. With the Internet, it takes about a minute to get all the registration and voter information for your state and county.   5. At the polling location, you might get to finally meet that cute guy or girl you always see in your neighborhood. Plus, they'll be instantly impressed by your devotion to civic duty.   4. Every political issue and policy affects you whether you know it or not.   3. The feeling of power you get after voting is a great rush.   2.      Election Day is the one day each year when everyone in the U.S. is EQUAL. Your vote counts just as much as anyone else's.      1.  If you don't vote, you're putting control of your world into the hands of someone else…and you have no idea where those hands have been.

Top 10 Lame Excuses Not To Vote 10. My dog ate my registration card. 9. Reruns of the Simpsons are on TV. 8. Martin Sheen of "West Wing" is not running. (Well, maybe that should be a good reason...) 7. I forgot to register to vote. 6. You went the last time and there was no free food. 5. I don't know who is running. 4. I don't have a ride. 3. I am too busy. 2. You feel guilty when the person you voted against loses. 1. My vote won't make a difference.

10 Ways to Cast Your Vote if You're Under 18 If you're old enough to vote, by all means, vote! If you're not, here's a list of other things you can do to get involved in a campaign. 10. Listen to a candidate speak. They might end up representing you, so check them out. 9. Ask questions. If you want information from a candidate, ask for it. Contact their official campaign headquarters. Most have websites with contact information. 8.  Surf the Web. Go to the internet and surf.  Almost every candidate has a statement on the issues of their campaign. 7.  Volunteer at your local polling center. On the day of elections volunteers are needed to help people at the voting booths. Why not step in to lend a hand? 6.  Write a letter to the editor. Voice your concerns about an issue or sing the praises of your favorite candidate to your school or local newspaper. 5.  Go behind the curtain. If you're old enough, vote -- if not, go with your parents or a friend or teacher, just to see how it's done and take some of the mystery out of the process. 4.  Run for office. We don't necessarily mean running for an actual government position, but you could try class president, art club secretary or school board student representative -- the more you learn about elections, the better prepared you will be to vote. 3.  E-vote. Groups like KidsVotingUSA have set up mock elections, so that even if you aren't old enough to actually vote, you can participate and follow the races. Go to: www.kidsvotingusa.org. 2.  Register other folks. Even if you're not old enough to register to vote, you can still work in your high school or community to help others who are not yet registered. 1.  Become one with a leaflet. By that we mean you can volunteer with a campaign. If you really like what a candidate stands for, offer to help him or her out. They may need help passing out leaflets or answering phones at their campaign headquarters.