Syria has stationed missile batteries aimed at Israel in the aftermath of alleged Israeli air strikes in the country, the website of Lebanon’s Al Mayadeen TV, considered close to the regime of President Bashar Assad, quoted a top Syrian official as saying on Sunday.
The report came as Syrian Information Minister Omran Zoabi said on Sunday that alleged Israeli air strikes against three targets on the outskirts of Damascus “open the door to all possibilities.”
Source: The Jerusalem Post – Report: Syria stations missile batteries aimed at Israel
A series of massive explosions illuminated the dark sky over Damascus early Sunday, igniting renewed claims that Israel has launched attacks into the war-torn country. Continue reading →
Syria responded angrily to the overnight air strikes on military targets that it accused Israel of carrying out, warning that the attack “opens the door to all possibilities.” Continue reading →
Two Iron Dome batteries were deployed in Safed and Haifa, as a result of tensions in the north.
Following an IDF evaluation of developments in the region, culminating in Israeli strikes on Syria – as confirmed by officials – Israel is bolstering protective measures in preparation for possible retaliatory rocket fire. Continue reading →
Israeli jets devastated Syrian targets near Damascus on Sunday in a heavy overnight air raid that Western and Israeli officials called a new strike on Iranian missiles bound for Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
As Syria’s two-year-old civil war veered into the potentially atomic arena of Iran’s confrontation with Israel and the West over its nuclear program, people were woken in the Syrian capital by explosions that shook the ground like an earthquake and sent pillars of flame high into the night sky.
“Night turned into day,” one man told Reuters from his home at Hameh, near one of the targets, the Jamraya military base.
Source: Reuters – Israel strikes Syria, says targeting Hezbollah arms
Two Iranian men have been found guilty of plotting terrorist attacks against Western government facilities in Kenya.
Ahmed Mohammed and Sayed Mansour were arrested in Nairobi, Kenya last June with 33 pounds of explosives. The men were found to have connections to an Islamic terror group that planned to blow up British, U.S. and Israeli targets.
Both men deny the charges but a judge said they have been “proven guilty beyond all reasonable doubt of all terror-related charges.” Prosecutors said the men had the explosives “in circumstances that indicated they were armed with the intent to commit a felony, namely, acts intended to cause grievous harm.”
The men arrived in Kenya on June 12, 2012 and traveled to the port city of Mombasa to obtain RDX, a powerful explosive significantly stronger than TNT and considered one of the most powerful explosives in the United States’ military arsenal. After their arrest a week later in the capital of Nairobi, their explosives were found hidden at a golf course outside of Mombasa.
Police say the men have an accomplice that has not yet been apprehended by authorities and could be trying to arrange for alternate attacks. The terror group is suspected of bringing more than 190 pounds of RDX into the country for terrorist bombing attacks.
Both Mohammed and Mansour face up to 15 years in prison.
A report in the journal Science is exposing a research group in China that is creating hybrid super-viruses that could cause a mass pandemic should they be released into the world.
Professor Hualan Chen, director of China’s National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory at Harbin Veterinary Research Institute, lead the team that mixed highly lethal strains of flu with others that are more readily spread between humans.
For example, the scientists combined the highly lethal H5N1 bird flu, which does not transmit easily between humans, with the H1N1 virus which is highly contagious among humans. Of the 127 different strains of the hybrid created in the lab, five of them were confirmed to be transferred through the air between guinea pigs.
“Nobody can extrapolate to humans except to conclude that the five viruses would probably transmit reasonable well between humans,” Professor Simon Wain-Hobson, virologist with the Pasteur Institute in Paris said. “We don’t know the pathogenicity [lethality] in man and hopefully we will never know. But if the case fatality rate was between 0.1 and 20 per cent, and a pandemic affected 500 million people, you could estimate anything between 500,000 and 100 million deaths,” he said.
Despite the claims of the Chinese team that the research was done to create new vaccines should the virus ever organically mutate in nature, worldwide scientists said that the possibility was so remote that it was irresponsible of the Chinese to undertake the research.
ional Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory at Harbin Veterinary Research Institute.
In light of reports that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons on civilians and that military troops are carrying out summary executions of suspected rebels without trial, the U.S. is considering supplying arms to the Syrian rebels.
U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told reporters that for the first time the U.S. is no longer ruling out the possibility of arming the rebels. Last year, President Obama had rejected a similar proposal from then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“Arming the rebels, that’s an option,” Hagel said during a press conference. “You look at and rethink all options. It doesn’t mean you do or you will. These are options that must be considered with the international community.”
A European Union ban on arming the rebels expires in a few weeks and Hagel’s British counterpart, Philip Hammond, said Britain would be looking at their options after the ban’s expiration.
Sources within the defense department told a BBC reporter that because the U.S. does not want to directly get involved militarily in Syria, arming the rebels is now considered the “least worst option.”
Both Hagel and Hammond stated that despite multiple reports and photographic proof of the Syrian government using chemical weapons, there is still not enough hard evidence to act. Hammond said that because much of the public clearly remembers the weapons of mass destruction claims in 2003 which led to the Iraq invasion, any evidence of chemical weapons would have to come from “very clear, very high quality evidence.”
More than 70,000 have died in the Syrian civil war.
While much of the world is focused on the H7N9 bird flu outbreak in China, Saudi Arabia has quietly announced that five people have died from the novel coronavirus (NCoV). The virus has killed 11 of the 17 people it has infected for a mortality rate of 65%.
The virus is in the same family as the SARS virus that emerged in Asia in 2003 and caused hundreds of deaths worldwide. While NCoV is still in the early stages and thus could have a lower overall mortality rate, by comparison the mortality rate for SARS during the 2003 outbreak was 9.6%.
Confirmed cases of NCoV have been found in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Germany and the U.K. The European victims of the virus either traveled to the middle east or were in close contact to a victim who had traveled to that region. Unlike the H7N9 virus outbreak, the NCoV virus has been conclusively proven to travel human-t0-human.
The World Health Organization said the latest cases were not within the same family and that none of the victims showed recent travel or contact with animals. (Scientists have been investigating the possibility the virus originated in animals.) The Saudi Health Ministry said they have taken samples from anyone connected to the fatalities to see if they might be infected with NCoV.
The WHO says despite the evidence of human-to-human transmission, the threat to the general population is small.
The latest video from a pro-life undercover investigation of abortion clinics in the U.S. has an Arizona clinic admitting they kill babies.
The doctor with Family Planning Medical Associates Group in Phoenix told a 24-week pregnant woman that they “induce a demise – an intrauterine demise – um, death” in a video released by Live Action. The video is the third in a series of six undercover investigations. The previous two videos, one in New York and one in Washington, D.C., included a woman that said they would place a baby inside a jar of toxic substances to make sure it died.
In the Arizona video, the doctor warns the investigator not to visit an emergency room if there is a problem.
“No, call us first,” the doctor said. “If you showed up in an average emergency room with an emergency room physicians who’s not a gynecologist, probably has never seen or done a termination, they will treat you as though you are somebody with a desire pregnancy.”
That means the emergency room staff would try to save the baby’s life.
Live Action is releasing the videos to show that the murders at the West Philadelphia clinic described in the trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell are not exceptions to the rule as claimed by pro-abortion groups like Planned Parenthood.