1. ISIS IRAQ SYRIA
U.S. assistance: President Barack Obama is considering airstrikes and humanitarian airdrops to help save thousands of Iraq’s Shiite Turkmen, who officials say are facing a potential slaughter at the hands of ISIS. The Islamist fighters have besieged the town of Amerli, 70 miles north of Baquba, since the Sunni extremists swept into Iraq from Syria since mid-June. The town’s fewer than 20,000 residents are without power. Their situation echoes the ordeal of Iraq’s ethnic Yazidis, whose plight after they were forced to flee into the mountains to escape ISIS militants triggered U.S. aid drops and the first U.S. airstrikes against ISIS.
2. UKRAINE
Over the border: Separatist forces in eastern Ukraine, backed by Russian tanks and armored personnel carriers, battled government forces on two fronts, a Ukrainian military official said today. The fighting was taking place southeast of Donetsk, and along the nation’s southern coast in the town of Novoazovsk, just 12 miles from the Russian border, according to Mykhailo Lysenko, the deputy commander of the Ukrainian Donbas battalion. Lysenko called the fighting in the south “a full-scale invasion.
3. EBOLA
This is never good to hear: “It’s even worse than I’d feared,” Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said this week about the Ebola outbreak rampaging through West Africa. “Every day this outbreak goes on, it increases the risk for another export to another country. The sooner the world comes together to help Liberia and West Africans, the safer we will all be.” More than 2,600 people have been infected by Ebola in Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Nigeria since the outbreak began in December, according to the World Health Organization. Nearly 1,500 have died.
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source: CNN.com
