Ebola Hits 10,000, The 25-Mile High Club
Saturday, October 25, 2014
Vol. 3, No. 298
Outbreak: The number of Ebola cases has passed 10,000, with 4,922 deaths, according to the World Health Organization. All but 10 of the deaths have occurred in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.
Here at home, Dallas nurse Nina Pham, the first person infected with Ebola in the US, got a big hug from President Obama in the Oval Office yesterday shortly after she was released from a Bethesda, Md. facility. She told reporters, “I feel fortunate and blessed to be standing here today.” Pham was expected to be re-united with her year-old King Charles spaniel, Bentley, which spent weeks in quarantine.
World: Citing a lack of evidence,a Pakistani anti-terrorism court has released one of the suspects in the 2005 beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. The suspect, Qari Hashim, was arrested in 2005. The leader of the plot, Omar Sheik, admitted his part in killing Pearl and was sentenced to death.
Jihad: At least 25 Egyptian soldiers were killed by a car bomb in the northern Sinai Peninsula yesterday. More soldiers were seriously wounded. The army has been fighting militants in the Sinai ever since the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarek.
Shooting Gallery: A high school student in Marysville, Wash. 35 miles north of Seattle killed one student yesterday and seriously wounded four others before taking his own life. The shooter was a freshman member of the football team and a homecoming prince. It’s the 11th mass school shooting since the Sandy Hook massacre in December 2012.
> A 34-year old gunman on a rampage in northern California killed two sheriff deputies, wounded a third and a civilian. The shooter was found and arrested after a huge manhunt.
The Series: The Kansas City Royals beat San Francisco 3-2 last night to take a 2-1 lead in the World Series. Game four is today in San Francisco.
Small Screen: TLC has cancelled the long-running reality show “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” because it got a little too real. Despite having shot an entire new season that’s ready for air, TLC canned the show after Honey Boo’s mother started dating a convicted sex offender. TLC said its only concern is for the child, Alana “Honey Boo Boo” Thompson, even though they’ve made her a national joke for three years.
The Obit Page: Joan Quigley, the astrologer who was the personal star-gazer to former first lady Nancy Reagan has died at age 87. The influence of Mrs. Reagan’s astrologer was revealed in the 1988 memoir by President Reagan’s former chief of staff Donald T. Regan, who wrote that Quigley searched the stars to set appropriate times for inaugurations, summit meetings, and even the president’s cancer surgery. Quigley was paid a $3,000 monthly retainer and spoke to Mrs. Reagan several times a day. Regan wrote, “Virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House chief of staff was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favorable alignment for the enterprise.”
Social Notes: Actress Gwyneth Paltrow, who announced her split with rocker-husband Chris Martin as a “conscious uncoupling”, is now “consciously coupled” with television producer Brad Falchuk of “Glee” and “American Horror Story.” Martin, who seems to collect Oscar winners, is dating Jennifer Lawrence.
Skyfall: A senior vice president of Google broke broke the world parachute altitude record yesterday, and the sound barrier, freefalling and parachuting from 25 miles up, right from the edge of the stratosphere. Alan Eustace, 57, ascended dangling from a balloon then cut loose and dropped at speeds up to 822 mph, taking 15 minutes to fall to earth wearing a specially designed space suit. Eustace said, “It was a wild, wild ride.” No kidding.
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