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After back-to-back potentially serious laboratory accidents, federal health officials announced on Friday that they had closed the flu and anthrax laboratories of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and have halted shipments of all infectious agents from the agency’s highest-security labs. The accidents, and the C.D.C.'s emphatic response to them, could have important implications for other laboratories around the world engaged in research into dangerous viruses and bacteria. If the C.D.C — which the agency’s director, Dr. Thomas Frieden, called “the reference laboratory to the world” — had multiple accidents that could have, in theory, killed not just laboratory...

Deceitful. That is the best way to describe a Los Angeles Times report about five protesters arrested yesterday in Murrieta, CA. Nowhere in the story are the identities of the protestors indicated; whether they are pro-amnesty or against the dumping of the illegals in a federal facility in their city. Although the truth is very carefully avoided in the Los Angeles Times, you can find it right way in the headline at the Gateway Pundit: "FIVE COUNTER-PROTESTERS ARRESTED During Tense Standoff at Murrieta Illegal Immigrant Rally." The co-conspirators in the Los Angeles Times attempt to keep its readers from learning...

China designated a clearing bank in Seoul for yuan transactions in South Korea on Friday, coinciding with a visit by President Xi Jinping, as Beijing promotes greater use of its currency overseas, AFP reports. Read more: http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_07_04/Beijing-Seoul-agree-to-direct-trade-in-national-currencies-4477/ China's central bank has authorised the Bank of Communications, the country's fifth largest lender, to undertake yuan clearing business in the South Korean capital, the People's Bank of China (PBoC) said in a statement. The announcement came as Chinese President Xi Jinping wrapped up a state visit to South Korea on Friday. China is seeking to make the yuan - also known...

Opposition and criticism are building against Dallas County Commissioner Clay Jenkins’ plan to bring to Dallas 2,000 unaccompanied minors from Central America who crossed the Texas border. On Thursday, Judge Jenkins announced three proposed sites to house the youngsters. Those places include Hulcy Middle School in Dallas’ Red Bird area, the Lamar School in Grand Prairie, and a building at the Parkland Hospital complex in Dallas. full title: Criticism Building Against Plan For Unaccompanied Minors

Radioactive material stolen in Mexico: officials Mexico City (AFP) - The Mexican government warned Friday that a vehicle containing radioactive material has been stolen, and issued a dire warning to the thieves against taking the potentially deadly material from its protective container. Federal civil defense officials said the vehicle had been transporting deadly iridium-192, a radioactive substance used in making some industrial products. The substance "can be dangerous for human health if removed from its container," the officials said in a statement, adding that the material can be lethal even if handled for only a brief time. The theft in...

**SNIP** Drug-resistant tuberculosis also appears to have spread, with several counties in southern Texas reporting twice the usual average number of cases. TB is a disease that needs to be carefully monitored and screened for, a prospect that is not possible under the current circumstances. Dengue fever, a potentially deadly mosquito-borne disease that causes fatigue, pain in the bones and muscles, and fever, and infects close to 100 million people worldwide every year, has been detected this year in southern Texas for the first time since 2005. Illegal immigrants, possibly from Mexico, are a likely source. If infected mosquitoes begin...

An employee of Germany's intelligence agency has been arrested on suspicion of spying for the US, reports say. The man is said to have been trying to gather details about a German parliamentary committee that is investigating claims of US espionage. German media say the man arrested this week is a 31-year-old employee of the federal intelligence agency, known as the BND. The German federal prosecutor's office confirmed the man's arrest, but gave no other details. A spokesman for Ms Merkel said she had been informed of the arrest, as had the members of the nine-strong parliamentary committee investigating the...

Obama gave this bloodthirsty Libyan jihad murderer the full protection of a US citizen. Ahmed Abu Khatallah was mirandized and has since clamped down and shut up, which was Obama’s objective all along. In the continuing cover-up of the Benghazi jihad murderers and Obama’s feckless and reckless abandonment of our people, Obama’s main objective is to cover up what really happened that night on his watch. This Libyan devout jihadi was read his Miranda rights — which give him the right to remain silent to avoid self-incrimination, a U.S. official told CNN. “I have serious concerns that conducting a rushed...

The other shoe just dropped when it comes to how the federal government illegally spies on Americans. Last summer, the details of the NSA's "backdoor searches" were revealed. This involved big collections of content and metadata (so, no, not "just metadata" as meaningless as that phrase is) that were collected under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA). This is part of the program that the infamous PRISM effort operates under, and which allows the NSA to collect all sorts of content, including communications to, from or about a "target" -- where a "target" can be incredibly loosely defined...

Scud is a series of tactical ballistic missiles developed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The name Scud has been widely used to refer to these missiles and the wide variety of modern variants.

Border Patrol agents in Arizona were reportedly fired upon by a Mexican military helicopter that traveled across the border. KVOA-TV reports that Mexican authorities were conducting a drug interdiction operation when the incident happened early Thursday morning on the Tohono O’odham Indian Nation. The Mexican chopper fired at the agents and then flew back into Mexico.

The U.S. economy contracted at a much steeper pace than previously estimated in the first quarter, but there are indications that growth has since rebounded strongly. The Commerce Department said on Wednesday gross domestic product fell at a 2.9 percent annual rate, the economy's worst performance in five years, instead of the 1.0 percent pace it had reported last month. While the economy's woes have been largely blamed on an unusually cold winter, the magnitude of the revisions suggest other factors at play beyond the weather. Growth has now been revised down by a total of 3.0 percentage points since...

SEATTLE (AP) — Seattle Police are investigating a report of a drone peeping into a woman’s apartment window. Police were called to the downtown Seattle apartment complex on Sunday morning after she spied an unmanned aerial vehicle hovering outside the building. The woman said she was concerned the drone was looking into her apartment. After calling police, an employee of her apartment building says he went outside and saw two men piloting the drone. They packed up their gear, which included a video camera, and drove off before police arrived. Authorities say they are checking for surveillance video that may...

Your eyes do not deceive you. They’re real and they’re, well, uh. Hide your eyes.

“They were returning to the victim’s house from White Castle,” said Ferndale Police Sgt. Patrick Jones. “Two black males ran up to them and one of them punched the victim on the left side of his face.” Police say the victim fell to the ground and struck his head on the roadway. Neither of the two men involved in the attack said a word to the Ferndale victim. Ewing gave an interview to WXYZ-TV news in which he said he suffered a concussion, a broken jaw, chipped teeth, cuts and bruises. The man who was with the victim told police...

Homicide detectives were investigating Sunday the death of a 65-year-old man who was beaten by two unidentified women at a Willowbrook Metro train station. L.A. resident John Whitmore was waiting for a train at the Metro-Blue Line near Imperial Highway and South Wilmington Avenue (map) on Friday, June 13 when two black women kicked Whitmore and hit him with their hands until he collapsed, according to a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department news release.

Sunni militants have reportedly captured two more key border crossings, to Jordan and Syria, in western Iraq. The rebels, who include Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isis) fighters, now control three border crossings in Anbar province, Iraq's largest. Meanwhile, in the north, reports say the airport in the town of Tal Afar has also fallen to the rebels. The militants' gains in large parts of western and northern Iraq have alarmed the international community. They have taken four strategically important towns in the predominantly Sunni Anbar province - Qaim, on the Syrian border, and Rutba, Rawa and Anah...

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) cancelled its longtime relationship with an email-storage contractor just weeks after ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s computer crashed and shortly before other IRS officials’ computers allegedly crashed. The IRS signed a contract with Sonasoft, an email-archiving company based in San Jose, California, each year from 2005 to 2010. The company, which partners with Microsoft and counts The New York Times among its clients, claims in its company slogans that it provides “Email Archiving Done Right” and “Point-Click Recovery.” Sonasoft in 2009 tweeted, “If the IRS uses Sonasoft products to backup their servers why wouldn’t you choose...

Russia is somewhat obsessed with Jen Psaki. The State Department spokeswoman has turned into Russia’s favorite punching bag as relations with the United States have deteriorated over the crisis in Ukraine. She is demonized on television. Her gaffes are celebrated widely as internet memes on Russian social media. A popular radio morning show even mocked her in a song set to a popular children’s tune. “There is nobody more competent than Psaki, nobody more pretty, or smarter,” sang the chorus, sarcastically. The song accused her of peddling “nonsense” to journalists and urged her to “keep it up, we want to...

<p>The American Embassy in Baghdad plans to evacuate a substantial number of its personnel this week in the face of a militant advance that rapidly swept from the north toward the capital, the State Department announced on Sunday.</p> <p>The embassy, a beige fortress on the banks of the Tigris River within the heavily-secured Green Zone, where Iraqi government buildings are also located, has the largest staff of any United States Embassy.</p>