Month: July 2014

By Carolyn Cohn and Chris Vellacott LONDON (Reuters) – The Ebola outbreak has not hurt foreign investment in Sierra Leone but will inevitably require more spending to fight it, the country’s foreign minister said on Monday. Sierra Leone is among a group of West African countries suffering the worst-ever outbreak of Ebola, accounting for close to a third of the more than 600 deaths across the region since February, according to World Health Organisation figures. “It has not taken investors off-track,” Samura Kamara told Reuters in an interview in London.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama's choice to lead the beleaguered Veterans Affairs Department is going before the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee for a confirmation hearing as Congress considers a bill to help the next VA leader do his job.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists have linked more than 100 spots in our DNA to the risk of developing schizophrenia, casting light on the mystery of what makes the disease tick.

Researchers in Saudi Arabia said Tuesday they have found genetic traces of the dangerous Middle East respiratory virus, MERS-CoV, in the air of a barn that housed a sick camel. The study in mBio, the journal of the American Society for Microbiology, calls for further research to determine if the potentially fatal virus can be transmitted through the air. MERS emerged in 2012 and has already killed 209 of the 699 people infected, according to the World Health Organization latest update on June 11. For this study led by Esam Azhar, associate professor of medical virology at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, researchers sampled the air inside a camel barn owned by a man who died of MERS.

Last year, 13 women in Turkey were murdered by their partners whilst nominally under state protection, according to official figures. Turkey, which aspires to join the European Union, has drafted new legislation to try to bring women's rights in line with European standards. Officials say the number of shelters has doubled in the past three years and victim support centers have been set up, allowing women like Hayat to receive protection and remain with their children. Turkey ranked 120th of 136 nations in the World Economic Forum's 2013 Gender Gap Index, down 15 places since 2006, while a 2011 U.N. report indicated domestic violence rates were almost twice those in the United States, and ten times higher than in some European countries.     "There is a real concrete, open threat to our rights.