The Centers for Disease Control has officially declared a flu epidemic.
The number of states reporting high levels of flu jumped from 13 to 22 last week and the CDC says there are now flu outbreaks in every region of the country.
The CDC also said that 15 children have died as a result of this year’s flu outbreak, 6 of them in Tennessee alone. East Tennessee Children’s Hospital has reported 442 children with flu already this year.
ABC Chief Medical Editor Dr. Richard Besser said on Good Morning America that about a hundred children a year die from the flu. He said that children, the elderly and anyone with a compromised immune system are at highest danger for death.
The CDC says the H3N2 subtype is the strain in 90 percent of confirmed flu cases.
Dr. Besser said that the flu season has been striking earlier during the last few years and he called it a “worrying trend.”
He advised anyone in a high risk category to get a flu shot.
The Pakistan government has announced plans to execute 500 convicted terrorists in response to the Taliban’s killing of 133 children and 15 teachers at an Army Public School in Peshawar.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had announced last week the government was lifting a moratorium on the death penalty in terrorism related cases. Reports say that at least six terrorists have already been hung.
“Interior ministry has finalized the cases of 500 convicts who have exhausted all the appeals, their mercy petitions have been turned down by the president and their executions will take place in coming weeks,” an unnamed source told AFP news agency.
Pakistan officials said the attack on the school was their own country’s 9/11.
The United Nations has spoken out against Pakistan ending the moratorium on the death penalty for convicted terrorists.
The terrorists were unrepentant, releasing a video saying they will continue to kill children if any of the terrorists children are killed by military action against them.
ISIS is now the world’s biggest user of children as forces for their terrorist army.
ISIS calls the children forced into fighting “cubs of the Islamic State” and see them as key to taking over the Middle East. They believe that using social media to promote the use of child fighters is a way to gain more young teens into the extremist groups.
ISIS is taking the children to special “indoctrination camps” where they are forced to convert to Islam, learn the details of the ISIS brand of Islam and then be trained on weapons and war tactics.
The children are also forced to attend executions and torture of people who violate ISIS version of Sharia Law.
ISIS recently sent on social media pictures of two children they described as “martyrs” for the cause after they were killed in U.S. airstrikes on ISIS bases. One of the children, identified as Abu Ubaida, was described as the “youngest fighter in Islamic State.”
They also shared videos of children re-enacting the beheading of American journalist James Foley and changing “Allahu Akbar” while carrying about the “head” of their fake Foley.
Former football star Tim Tebow, roundly attacked by anti-Christianists for the open displays of his faith in his life, has announced that a children’s hospital is opening in the Philippines.
The Tim Tebow Foundation said that the former quarterback has been working since 2011 to build and obtain the operating license from the Philippine Health Department. The hospital is already working to help impoverished children but will officially have a “grand opening” in spring 2015.
The five-story hospital was built in conjunction with CURE International, a non-profit that works to provide medical care for impoverished children. The hospital will have 30 beds, three operating rooms and a staff of over 50.
“I have always had a great love and passion for the Filipino people,” Tebow, the founder of the foundation, said in a statement. “It is so exciting to be able to provide healing and care for these incredibly deserving children halfway around the world.”
With the opening of the Tebow CARE Hospital, the group will now have 12 hospitals around the world to help children in need.
In a rare break among Islamic terrorist groups and countries that support them, the Pakistani Taliban has been roundly denounced for their attack on a school that left 132 children dead.
The Pakistani Taliban has been attempting to justify their attack by saying that the assault was revenge against the army for an offensive against the terrorist organization. The terrorists said their families had suffered losses, so it was right to kill the children of army members.
The spokesman for the Afghanistan branch of the Taliban condemned the attack as being against the basics of Islam.
“The intentional killing of innocent people, children and women is against the basics of Islam and this criteria has to be considered by every Islamic party and government,” Zabihullah Mujahid said in a statement, according to Reuters.
The Iranian government also released a statement strongly condemning the terrorist action.
“This is a totally un-Islamic and inhumane act. Terrorism, extremism and endangering the lives of innocent people, in any form and with any objective, is condemned,” Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham told reporters.
Pakistan’s prime minister Nawaz Sharif says the government had tried to negotiate with the terror group but the talks broke down, leading to a military offensive against the group.
Islamist group the Taliban has killed over 100 children in an attack on a Pakstiani school in an attack that took hours. The assault was a revenge attack for the Nobel Peace Prize being given to Malala Yousafzai for her standing up to the Islamists.
The attack lasted over eight hours before Pakistani military was able to eliminate the last of the terrorists in Army Public School in Peshawar.
“The gunmen entered class by class and shot some kids one by one,” a student told local media.
The terrorists attacked around 11 a.m. local time when 500 students between grades one through ten were in the building.
“We were standing outside the school and firing suddenly started and there was chaos everywhere and the screams of children and teachers,” Jamshed Khan, a school bus driver, told NBC News.
Sources say that the terrorists killed one teacher by dousing them with gasoline and burning them alive while they forced the students to watch.
“Our suicide bombers have entered the school, they have instructions not to harm the children, but to target the army personnel,” Taliban spokesman Muhammad Umar Khorasani told Reuters.
Islamic terrorists have killed a pastor from South Africa who felt a passion to help the Afghani people after the United States removed the Taliban.
Three terrorists with explosives on their chest stormed into the compound where Pastor Werner Geoenewald and his family have been living. The explosion killed Werner and his two children Jean-Pierre and Rode. The fire also destroyed all the family’s belongings leaving the mother Hannelie alone.
The children were 17 and 15. Hannelie survived because she had been working a nearby clinic at the time of the attack.
“Their house was burned down,” Hannelie’s sister Riana Du Plessis said on Sunday from South Africa. “Hannelie went back there this morning to try to recover some of their goods, but there was nothing to recover. She lost everything – her children, her husband, her cats, her dogs.”
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the murders saying they were out to kill Christians.
Islamic terrorist group ISIS beheaded four Iraqi children who would not deny the name of Jesus.
Rev. Canon Andrew White, the “Vicar of Baghdad”, told the story of the four children during an interview for the Orthodox Christian Network. He said that the story is just one of the many examples of the Islamic group’s brutality.
“ISIS turned up and they said to the children, ‘you say the words that you will follow Muhammad.’ The Children, all under 15, four of them, they said, ‘no, we love Yasua [Jesus]. We have always loved Yasua. We have always followed Yasua. Yasua has always been with us.'” White said. “[The Militants] said, ‘say the words!’ [The Children] said, ‘no, we can’t do that.’ They chopped all their heads off.”
White said that many parents are being forced to say they’re converting to Islam to protect the lives of their children. ISIS routinely makes children kneel before their parents with weapons to their heads saying they will murder the children if the adults don’t convert to Islam.
White finally had to leave Iraq because of death threats from ISIS.
“They have threatened to kill me. They are after me. They wanted that Abuna [Father] from England,” White said. “So the Archbishop of Canterbury said ‘you’ve got to leave now.'”
A new United Nations report is outlining the ways ISIS has been brutalizing children.
The UN International Children’s Fund says that over 5 million children have had their lives directly impacted by ISIS actions. Thousands of children have been used both as human shields by the terrorists or have been strapped to tables and had their blood drawn for terrorists wounded in attacks.
The report outlines specific instances where the terrorists were using children to create propaganda devices. In one case, the terrorists went to a hospital and pulled two cancer stricken children out of bed to pose in a picture holding an ISIS flag with fighters.
The report outlines statements from former teenage fighters that say ISIS is forcing children to take drugs so they will carry out any order including suicide terror attacks.
In addition to the front line uses, the terrorists are also forcing children to be domestic servants, cooking, cleaning and bringing water to the wounded in makeshift hospitals.
A provocative new study shows that teenagers living in East Baltimore face many of the same living conditions as children living in third world countries.
The “WAVE” study, a global research project examining the well-being of children between 15 and 19-years-old, focuses on what is considered “vulnerable” environments around the world. The study looked at Ibadan, Nigeria; Johannesburg, South Africa; New Delhi, India; Shanghai, China and Baltimore Maryland.
Factors studied included physical environment, social cohesion and how often they are exposed to violence in their community.
The study showed that in all five cities the teens were exposed to unsanitary conditions such as trash piled in the street, abandoned buildings infested with rats and used drug paraphernalia in fields and yards.
However, teens in Baltimore and Johannesburg, which are considered “wealthy” cities, consider their living conditions to be negative and had worse outcomes when it came to health issues.
Baltimore was worst in the list of cities when it came to social cohesion and was not best rated in any category.