Mercyvill

Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton participates in ''A Conversation with Hillary Rodham Clinton'' at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Manhattan, New York June 12, 2014. German security agents recorded a conversation involving Hillary Clinton while she was U.S. Secretary of State, media reported on Friday, a potential embarrassment for Berlin which has lambasted Washington for its widespread surveillance. Clinton's words were intercepted while she was on a U.S. government plane, Germany's Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper and German regional public broadcasters NDR and WDR said, without giving details of where she was or when the recording was made. The respected broadsheet quoted German government sources saying the conversation had been picked up "by accident...

1 of 11. A masked man carries items out of a liquor store that had been broken into during on-going demonstrations to protest against the shooting of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, August 16, 2014. Racially charged protests flared overnight in Ferguson, Missouri, in an eruption of fresh anger over the fatal Aug. 9 shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a police officer. Tensions had temporarily cooled on Thursday night but by Friday evening, protesters were again swarming through a residential and retail district in the small town outside St. Louis that has become the site of repeated clashes betwee...

The Catholic diocese of Makurdi, Benue,Nigeria, has barred the faithful from taking corpses of late relations to churches for funeral Mass as a measure to check the spread of Ebola virus. The diocese directed that corpses of deceased members should be given immediate burial. It, however, said that it would allow corpses to be brought to the churches in the area only when death certificates issued by relevant medical authorities were produced. This is contained in a statement by the Director of Communications in the diocese, Rev. Fr. Moses Iorapuu, in Makurdi on Saturday. The statement, which was issued on behalf of Bishop of the diocese, Very Rev. Athanissius Usu, also announced changes in two aspects of activities during mass, including the mode of administering the Holy Communion. According to the statement, parishioners will henceforth be served the eucharistic feast on their hands as against the practice of putting it on their tongue by the priest. Also, it s...

ON ISRAEL ... The lines of communication between us and Hamas were never severed, Hezbollah leader tells Lebanese paper; Nasrallah played down the success of the Iron Dome defense system.He said Israel seeks short wars that lead to “a quick, decisive and clear victory.” ON ISIS .... Nasrallah says his organization is ready to fight threat that also faces Gulf states, Jordan. Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah. Photo: REUTERS BEIRUT- The Hezbollah leader described the radical Islamist movement that has seized large areas of Iraq and Syria as a growing "monster" that could threaten Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Gulf states, according to an interview printed on Friday. In a separate speech, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said Islamic State also posed an existential threat to his own nation, Lebanon, the target of an incursion by...

Islamic State insurgents "massacred" some 80 members of Iraq's Yazidi minority in a village in the country's north, a Yazidi lawmaker and two Kurdish officials said on Friday. "They arrived in vehicles and they started their killing this afternoon," senior Kurdish official Hoshiyar Zebari told Reuters. "We believe it's because of their creed: convert or be killed." A Yazidi lawmaker and another senior Kurdish official also said the killings had taken place and that the women of the village were kidnapped. A push by Islamic State militants through northern Iraq to the border with the Kurdish region has alarmed the Baghdad government, drawn the first U.S. air strikes since the end of American occupation in 2001 and sent tens of thousands of Yazidis and Christians fleeing for their lives. Yazidi parliamentarian Mahama Khalil said he had spoken to villagers who had survived the attack. They said the killings took place d...

(Science Photo Library) More than a century after their discovery, we still don’t know what blood groups like O, A and B are for. Do they really matter? Carl Zimmer investigates. Are you A, B, O or AB? It is a widespread belief in Japan that character is linked to blood type. What's behind this conventional wisdom? When my parents informed me that my blood type was A+, I felt a strange sense of pride. If A+ was the top grade in school, then surely A+ was also the most excellent of blood types – a biological mark of distinction. It didn’t take long for me to recognise just how silly that feeling was and tamp it down. But I didn’t learn much more about what it really meant to have type A+ blood. By the time I was an adult, all I really knew was that if I should end up in a hospital in need of blood, the doctors there would need to make sure they transfused me with a suitable type. And yet there remained some nagging questions. Why do 40% of Ca...

Cairo official says cease-fire calls Israeli recognition of Palestinian unity gov't; Labor chief accuses Netanyahu of destroying Israel-U.S. ties; thousands in Tel Aviv called on government to restoring quiet near Gaza border. ...

This colorized transmission electron micrograph (TEM) obtained March 24, 2014 from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, reveals some of the ultrastructural morphology displayed by an Ebola virus virion. PHOTO: AFP. There is a suspected case of Ebola at the Rahima Moosa Hospital, west of Johannesburg, DA Gauteng health spokesperson Jack Bloom claimed on Thursday. ...

Center for Disease Control | Getty Images. In this handout from the Center for Disease Control, a colorized transmission electron micrograph (TEM) of a Ebola virus virion is seen. Reports of Singapore's first case of Ebola, the deadly viral outbreak that has killed more than 1,000 people in West Africa, have been confirmed as false, the Straits Times reported on Thursday. A Nigerian woman in her 50s was identified as a possible Ebola case by doctors at Gleneagles hospital on Thursday. She was immediately isolated and transferred by ambulance to the Communicable Diseases Centre at Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH), but the hospital has since confirmed that the woman does not have the disease. Professor Philip Ch...