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Concern over Ebola has forced a Minnesota restaurant owner who serves African food to cover up part of her sign and reconsider her Liberian-themed menu. Kellita Whisnant has owned Mama Ti's African Kitchen in Brooklyn Park, Minn. for three years. Now that confirmed cases of Ebola have reached U.S. soil, she says business is down by about 50 percent. “This African name that brought people in before, is now hurting me," Whisnant told Minneapolis-St.Paul's KMSP Fox9 . "We get the jokes, the ridicule." Amid declining sales—and a customer flat out asking her if the restaurant had Ebola—Whisnant covered up the...

With the death of Michael Brown, the racial divide in this country has gotten worse. That is because of two diametrically opposed perspectives that permeate race relations. The first perspective is well-known and is reinforced repeatedly by the press and television media. Many Americans are angry and frustrated because of the belief the playing field for African-Americans is not level. White privilege keeps blacks down through job discrimination; blacks are profiled by law enforcement, resulting in much higher percentages of incarceration; the schools blacks have to attend are substandard and testing is biased. The first Ebola patient in Dallas was...

Millions take part in elections to new parliament even as cradle of Arab Spring remains divided over post-2011 path... Sunday’s general election is the first under the North African country's new constitution and the second since the 2011 uprising that overthrew the regime of Zine el Abidine Ben Ali. Turnout defied most opinion polls, which had projected a decline in popular participation in the election of a 217-member legislature with a five-year term... One of the places where turnout was perceptibly high in Oued Ellil, on the outskirts of the capital Tunis, where a siege and gun battle left five...

".. The orthodoxy's equivalent of the Nicene Creed has two scientific tenets. The first, promulgated by geneticist Richard Lewontin in "The Apportionment of Human Diversity" (1972), is that the races are so close to genetically identical that "racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance." The second, popularized by the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, is that human evolution in everything but cosmetic differences stopped before humans left Africa, meaning that "human equality is a contingent fact of history," as he put it in an essay of that title in 1984." "Since the sequencing...

Stephanie Nebehay October 25, 2014 The death toll from the Ebola epidemic rose to 4,922 out of 10,141 known cases in eight countries through Oct. 23, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Saturday. The virus, which reached Mali through a two-year-old girl who died on Friday, now threatens Ivory Coast, having infected people virtually all along its borders with Guinea and Liberia. Ivory Coast is the world's biggest cocoa producer. The Ebola outbreak has hurt the economic growth that has been raising living standards in the region. The three worst-hit countries of West Africa -- Guinea, Liberia and Sierra...

New York (CNN) -- One day after New York officials announced a Doctors Without Borders physician had tested positive for Ebola, another person who treated patients in West Africa developed a fever and was put in isolation at a northern New Jersey hospital. The second health care worker, a woman who hasn't been identified by name, did not have any Ebola symptoms upon arrival Friday at Newark Liberty International Airport, New Jersey health department spokesman Donna Leusner said. Yet things changed in the hours that followed. According to Leusner, "This evening, the health care worker developed a fever and is...

LONDON: One million doses of an Ebola vaccine will be produced by the end of 2015, the World Health Organization has announced. Vaccines, "several hundred thousand" of which will be produced in the first half of the year would be initially made available to front line health workers in West Africa as early as by December 2014. Dr Marie Paule Kieny, WHO assistant director-general, said: "While we hope that the massive response, which has been put in place will have an impact on the epidemic, it is still prudent to prepare to have as much vaccine available if they are...

Connecticut placed six West Africans who recently arrived in the United States under quarantine for possible Ebola exposure, a move that comes as the United States starts new restrictions on those coming from the countries hardest hit by the deadly virus. The family of six West Africans, who arrived Saturday and were planning to live in the United States, will be watched for 21 days, Connecticut state health authorities said Thursday. Officials have yet to say where the family came from. ... Ebola fears have also touched one of the world's most reclusive countries, North Korea, which will bar entry...

Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital has admitted that mistakes were made in the treatment of the first Ebola patient in the U.S., Thomas Duncan, and his family members have been very critical of the hospital since his death. Some family members and friends went to Presbyterian to stage a silent protest Thursday night. The silent protest boiled over into strong emotions, with some speaking out about their feelings.

At least 4,877 people have died in the world's worst recorded outbreak of Ebola, and at least 9,936 cases of the disease had been recorded as of Oct. 19, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday, but the true toll may be three times as much. The WHO has said real numbers of cases are believed to be much higher than reported: by a factor of 1.5 in Guinea, 2 in Sierra Leone and 2.5 in Liberia, while the death rate is thought to be about 70 percent of all cases. That would suggest a toll of almost 15,000.

I have spent a little time compiling links to threads about the Ebola outbreak in the interest of having all the links in one thread for future reference. Please add links to new threads and articles of interest as the situation develops. Thank You all for you participation.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen said Thursday he would raise his Ebola-fighting investments to $100 million, with programs to train doctors in Massachusetts and to build special containment units to evacuate any who get infected. Allen, the shyer sidekick of billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, wants to use the cash both to strategically help the fight against Ebola and to attract even more money. “The Ebola virus is unlike any health crisis we have ever experienced and needs a response unlike anything we have ever seen,” Allen said in a statement. “To effectively contain this outbreak and prevent it from becoming a...

The Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Health Commission has criticised the Government’s planned nation-wide Tetanus vaccination campaign. The statement has expressed deep concern regarding the vaccinations. It says that the campaign leaves many questions unanswered hence the alarm. This is contained in a media statement released by the Catholic Health Commission of Kenya currently meeting at St Patrick’s Pastoral Centre, Kabula in Bungoma. The statement is co-signed by Bishop Paul Kariuki Njiru of Embu Diocese with his counterpart, Bishop Joseph Mbatia of Nyahururu on behalf of the Commisssion of the Bishops' Conference. The Commission includes 24 health facility managers drawn...

It appears that the one of the CDC's Ebola patient planes will soon be on the move again, heading to Africa. This is from the flight-following website FlightAware. 23-Oct-2014 GLF3 Bermuda Int'l (TXKF / BDA) Dakar (GOOY / DKR) 06:25AM ADT 03:33PM GMT Scheduled 23-Oct-2014 GLF3 Cartersville (KVPC) Bermuda Int'l (TXKF / BDA) 02:10AM EDT 05:27AM ADT Scheduled http://flightaware.com/live/flight/N163PA

Ali Mazrui, a Kenyan-born political scientist who was one of Africa’s leading public intellectuals and whose nine-part 1986 television documentary, “The Africans,” was praised in some corners but criticized in the United States as a diatribe against the West, died Oct. 12 at his home in Vestal, New York. He was 81. His death was announced by Binghamton University, the State University of New York, where Mazrui was a faculty member. The cause was not disclosed. Mazrui, the scion of a prominent Islamic family in Kenya, had been one of the foremost scholars of African politics and society since the...

LONDON (AP) — A new study underscores the potential danger of airplane passengers infected with Ebola leaving West Africa: If there were no exit screening in place, researchers estimate that three people with the disease might fly out of the region each month. The hardest-hit West African nations have been checking passengers since summer, but the new work is a reminder of how much easier it could be for the virus to travel outside the outbreak region if those measures weren't in place — and that screening can't catch every case. Since the Ebola outbreak was first identified in March,...

Ebola lockdown: British plan to send 3,000 UK troops into Sierra Leone to set up military blockades to restrict movement in attempt to stop the virus spreading Chief of the General Staff General Sir Nick Carter heads review of UK response to disease One suggestion is to use Royal Navy ships to patrol its coastal waters Oxfam said lack of Western military personnel in West Africa puts lives at risk Charity wants troops to deliver vital supplies and build treatment centres Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2798713/3-000-uk-troops-germ-warfare-style-ebola-blockade-plan-sierra-leone.html#ixzz3GpOlWDAk Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

Bloomberg - link and title only.

<p>Muslim burial practices are being blamed for the spread of Ebola.</p> <p>Remains of Secretary General of The Nigeria Supreme General for Islamic Affairs and Seriki of Egbaland, Alhaji Lateeef Adegbite at his burial in 2012.</p> <p>Islam requires family members to personally wash the corpses of loved ones from head to toe. This practise is putting more Africans at risk to catch the disease that is spread by body fluids.</p>

The examples of Ebola hysteria in the US are starting to get too numerous to count. Two students from Rwanda, 2,600 miles away from West Africa, are sent home from a New Jersey elementary school for 21 days. A Maine high school teacher is given three weeks off because she attended a convention in Dallas, Texas. A Texas college sends out letters to prospective students from disease-free Nigeria that informing them that they are no longer accepting applications from countries with "confirmed Ebola cases". A Pennsylvania high-school football player is met by chants of "Ebola" from the opposing team. A...