NATO allies to unite against ISIS
NATO allies to unite against ISIS
NEWPORT, Wales (AP) — The U.S. and key allies agreed Friday that the Islamic State group is a significant threat to NATO countries and that they will take on the militants by squeezing their financial resources and going after them with military might.
With the Islamic State militants spreading across eastern Syria and northern and western Iraq, President Barack Obama noted that the moderate Syrian rebels fighting both the group and the government of Bashar Assad are “outgunned and outmanned.” In addition to the action pledged by fellow NATO leaders, he pressed Arab allies to reject the “nihilism” projected by the group..
The new NATO coalition will be able to mount a sustained effort to push back the militants, Obama said. The U.S. secretaries of State and Defense, meeting with their counterparts at the international gathering, insisted the Western nations build a plan by the time the U.N. General Assembly meets this month.
“I did not get any resistance or pushback to the basic notion that we have a critical role to play in rolling back this savage organization that is causing so much chaos in the region and is harming so many people and poses a long-term threat to the safety and security of NATO members,” Obama said at the summit conclusion. “So there’s great conviction that we have to act, as part of the international community, to degrade and ultimately destroy ISIS, and that was extremely encouraging.”
Laying out a strategy for Iraq, Obama hinted at a broader military campaign, likening it to the way U.S. forces pushed back al-Qaida along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, taking out the group’s leadership, shrinking its territory and pounding at its militant followers. To do that, the U.S. used persistent airstrikes, usually by CIA drones.
US doctor with Ebola is stable
OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — A doctor who became infected with Ebola while working in Liberia is sick but in stable condition and communicating with his caregivers at the Nebraska Medical Center, officials said Friday.
Dr. Rick Sacra, 51, is being treated at a 10-bed special isolation unit, the largest of the United States’ four. It was built to handle patients with highly infectious and deadly diseases, according to Dr. Mark Rupp, chief of the infectious diseases division at the center.
Sacra — the third American aid worker sickened with the virus — arrived at 6:38 a.m. Friday at the Omaha hospital. Sacra was wheeled on a gurney off the plane at Offutt Air Force Base, transferred to an ambulance and then wheeled into the hospital, said Rosanna Morris, chief nursing officer for the medical center.
Sacra was conscious Friday and was able to communicate with medical staff, Morris said.
The first two American aid workers infected by Ebola — Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol — have recovered since being flown to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta for treatment. Sacra came to Omaha instead of Atlanta because federal officials asked the medical center to treat him in order to prepare other isolation units to take more Ebola patients if needed.
Plane crashes as pilot unresponsive
KINGSTON, Jamaica (AP) — Shadowed by two U.S. fighter jets, a small plane with its windows frosted and its pilot slumped over flew a ghostly 1,700-mile journey down the Atlantic Coast and beyond Friday before finally crashing in the waters off Jamaica. The fate of the two or more people aboard was not immediately known.
The plane carrying a prominent real estate developer from Rochester, New York and his wife went down about 14 miles northeast of the coastal town of Port Antonio and Jamaica’s military dispatched two aircraft and a dive team, said Maj. Basil Jarrett of the Jamaican Defense Force.
“An oil slick indicating where the aircraft may have gone down has been spotted in the area where we suspect the crash took place,” Jarrett said at an early evening news conference in the capital of Kingston.
No wreckage has been located, but Jarrett said search-and-rescue teams were scouring the waters for any survivors. As dark fell, Jamaica suspended the search until first light today.