Six In The Morning

Health teams face real-life horror in Ebola battle

　

By Kari Huus, NBC News
When officials in Uganda verified an outbreak of the Ebola virus on Saturday, it set international health workers in motion. The hemorrhagic virus is the stuff of real-life horror — spreading through contact with infected individuals, their bodily fluids and even clothing they have worn. In many cases Ebola leads to a rapid decline marked by fever, diarrhea, vomiting and internal and external bleeding. In the few days since it was reported, medical teams from in and outside Uganda have descended on the source of the outbreak in western Uganda, Kibaale district, where so far, there have been 38 confirmed cases of Ebola (formally Ebola hemorrhagic fever) and 16 deaths, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

CIA drone strikes violate Pakistan's sovereignty, says senior diplomat
Islamabad's high commissioner believes the US should hand over control of the attacks to his government

Chris Woods The Guardian, Friday 3 August 2012
One of Islamabad's most senior diplomats is warning that CIA drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas are weakening democracy and risk pushing people towards extremist groups. Wajid Shamsul Hasan, the high commissioner to London and one of Pakistan's top ambassadors, also accuses the US of "talking in miles" when it comes to democracy but "moving in inches". In an interview with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Hasan, four years into his second stint in the post, argues that US drone strikes risk significantly weakening Pakistan's democratic institutions.

Share prices crash as Draghi's 'big bazooka' falls flat
Italy and Spain take a fresh hammering after European Central Bank fails to promise action

RUSSELL LYNCH FRIDAY 03 AUGUST 2012
Troubled Spain and Italy took a fresh hammering and shares plunged across the world yesterday as the European Central Bank dashed hopes of a "big bazooka" to tackle the region's debt woes. With the eyes of the world's financial markets fixed on Frankfurt, the ECB president, Mario Draghi – who promised boldly last week to do "whatever it takes" to preserve the euro – failed to offer up any new measures or "shock and awe" tactics to address the single currency bloc's lingering crisis.

Sudan woman shackled with baby, faces death by stoning-activists
A Sudanese woman accused of adultery has been sentenced to death by stoning and is being held shackled with her six-month-old baby in jail, activists said on Wednesday, in the second such sentence in the past few months in the country.

Ulf Laessing, Reuters | 01 August, 2012 19:26
President Omar Hassan al-Bashir said last month that Sudan would adopt a "100 percent" Islamic constitution, prompting concerns the country would apply Islamic law more strictly after the secession of mostly non-Muslim South Sudan a year ago. A court in the capital Khartoum sentenced 23-year-old Laila Ibrahim Issa Jamool on July 10 to death by stoning for adultery, said Sudanese human rights activist Fahima Hashim who has been following her and other such cases.

An accident or a plot? Deaths of Cuban dissidents raises questions.
Despite Cuban government reports and public comments from the two survivors of the crash saying it was an accident, a dissident’s family believes someone ran the car off the road.

By Anya Landau French
More than a week after a traffic accident in which Cuban dissidents Oswaldo Paya and fellow Cuban dissident Harold Cepero lost their lives, there’s controversy about what exactly caused the accident. Despite Cuban government reports, and now publicly available comments from the two survivors of the crash that it was nothing more than an accident, Mr. Paya’s family believes someone ran the car off the road. The family has reported that contacts abroad told them that the two Europeans in the car that day, Aron Modig of Sweden and Angel Carromero of Spain, sent text messages indicating they believed they were being followed (and even that one or both texted that a car had run them off the road).

Vertigo is named 'greatest film of all time'
Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo has replaced Orson Welles's Citizen Kane at the top of a poll that sets out to name one film "the greatest of all time".

The BBC
The British Film Institute's Sight and Sound magazine polls a selected panel once a decade and Citizen Kane has been its top pick for the last 50 years. This time 846 distributors, critics and academics championed Vertigo, about a retired cop with a fear of heights. Starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, Vertigo beat Citizen Kane by 34 votes. In the last poll held 10 years ago, Hitchcock's 1958 thriller came five votes behind Welles's 1941 classic. Its triumph coincides with the launch of the BFI's Genius of Hitchcock season, a major retrospective celebrating the acclaimed "master of suspense".