Sunday, October 5, 2014

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Greta Van Susteren Scolds Obama for ‘ Childish ’ Snipe at Fox News - " Act Presidential "

Biden apologizes to Turkish President Erdogan for saying Turkey allowed foreign fighters into Syria


Good Old Democrat.

Vice President Biden on Saturday apologized to Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for saying the Turkish leader admitted his country made mistakes by allowing foreign fighters to cross into Syria.
Biden spoke directly to Erdogan to “clarify” comments made on Thursday at Harvard University and apologized for “any implication" that Turkey or other allies had intentionally supplied or helped in the growth of the Islamic State or other extremists groups in Syria, the White House said.
Erdogan denied making such remarks and said Biden would become "history to me" over the comments at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, in Cambridge, Mass., unless he fixed the situation.
The speech was an especially bad event for the vice president who has a history of gaffes and unscripted, problem-causing remarks.
Biden also took a question from a student who identified himself as being the vice president of the student body by jokingly saying first: Ain't that a b-tch? … I mean ... excuse me, the vice president thing?”
In 2010, after President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law on national TV, Biden was caught on a live microphone saying to the president this is "a big f---ing deal."
Biden on Thursday also described Erdogan as "an old friend" but suggested he said privately: “You were right. We let too many people through.”
Turkey is now trying to seal its border.
Erdogan also said: "I have never said to (Biden) that we had made a mistake, never. If he did say this…, then he has to apologize to us.
"Foreign fighters have never entered Syria from our country. They may come to our country as tourists and cross into Syria, but no one can say that they cross in with their arms."
He said Turkey had prevented 6,000 suspected jihadis from entering the country and deported another 1,000.
The spat comes as Turkey, a NATO ally, is expected to define the role it will play in the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State militants who have captured a swath of Iraq and Syria, in some cases right up to the Turkish border.
This week Turkey's parliament approved a motion giving the government powers for military operations across the border in Syria and Iraq and for foreign troops to use Turkey's territory.
A day earlier, Biden and Erdogan held a telephone discussion on ways their countries can work together to degrade and destroy Islamic State and restore security and stability to the region, according to the White House.
At Harvard, Biden said that "our biggest problem is our allies" in responding to the civil war in Syria.
"The Turks … the Saudis, the Emiratis, etc. What were they doing? They were so determined to take down (Syrian President Bashar) Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war," Biden said.
"What did they do?” he continued. “They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad -- except that the people who were being supplied were al Nusra and al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world."
The White House also said in readout of the Biden-Erdogan conversation Saturday: "The two leaders reaffirmed the importance of Turkey and the United States working closely together to confront ISIL," as Islamic State is also known.

CDC chief warns travel ban could make Ebola crisis worse


The head of the CDC said Saturday that imposing a travel ban between the U.S. and West African countries dealing with the Ebola virus could worsen the outbreak that has killed over 3,000 people in five countries. 
"Though we might wish we can seal ourselves off from the world, there are Americans who have the right of return and many other people that have the right to enter this country," Dr. Thomas Frieden told a press conference. "We're not going to be able to get to zero risk no matter what we do unless we control the outbreak in West Africa."
Frieden added that a travel ban could make it difficult to get medical supplies and aid workers to the affected regions in West Africa. 
"We really need to be clear that we don't inadvertently increase the risk to people in this country by making it harder for us to respond to the needs in those countries," he said, "by making it harder to get assistance in and therefore those outbreaks would become worse, go on longer, and paradoxically, something that we did to try and protect ourselves might actually increase our risk."
Health officials have ruled out two potential Ebola cases in the Washington D.C. area, with Howard University Hospital in the District and Shady Grove Adventist Hospital in suburban Maryland confirming that patients who had been kept in isolation did not have the virus. A similar scare in New Jersey, when a passenger on a United Airlines flight from Brussels fell ill, also turned out not to be the virus. 
Frieden said Saturday that officials are “beginning to see some progress” toward controlling the outbreak, “but it's going to be a long hard road.”
Frieden said that they've already gotten "well over" 100 inquiries on suspicious cases in recent months, with an uptick coming after the Dallas patient was diagnosed. Federal officials have said tests have been done on about 15 and all but one -- Duncan -- were false alarms.
Most of the cases don't involve travel to West Africa, "but we'd rather have a wider net cast," said Frieden. That way "we're more likely to find someone promptly if they did actually have exposure and they do actually have symptoms," he said.
The virus that causes Ebola is not airborne and can only be spread through direct contact with the bodily fluids -- blood, sweat, vomit, feces, urine, saliva or semen -- of an infected person who is showing symptoms.
The first person diagnosed with Ebola in the United Sates went to a Dallas hospital last week but was mistakenly sent home, despite revealing he was visiting from Liberia, before returning by ambulance days later.
"There were things that did not go the way they should have in Dallas," Dr. Anthony Fauci, infectious diseases chief at the National Institutes of Health, said Friday. "But there were a lot of things that went right and are going right."
Texas officials now are monitoring 50 people, 10 of whom they consider at high risk, who came into contact with the man, identified as Thomas Eric Duncan. They've had to quarantine four of them, and even had problems getting rid of the infectious waste left in the apartment where the patient stayed.
Texas health officials say Duncan is now in critical condition.
Dallas County Judge Clay Lewis Jenkins said during the Saturday press conference that he took the four to a new home where they will be quarantined for 21 days.
Jenkins, the county top elected official, urged Americans to show compassion for them, saying they are deeply concerned about the public’s health and are people “just like in your family.”

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