CONAKRY (Reuters) – The number of suspected Ebola patients in Guinea has more than doubled from last month, the health ministry said on Thursday, highlighting a “fourth phase” of the epidemic after a dip in cases in early 2015.

The worst outbreak in history, which has killed more than 10,000 people in West Africa, appears to be on the wane, especially in Liberia where there are no current cases.

But there is still resistance to the anti-Ebola effort in Guinea, which is struggling to control the outbreak and has overtaken Sierra Leone as the main hub for transmission.

Dr Rafiou Diallo, a spokesman for Guinea’s health ministry, said there were 91 suspected and confirmed Ebola patients in treatment centers compared with just 39 in February.

“There is without doubt a spike in the number of cases, especially in Forecariah and Coyah (western Guinea). The explanation is there is still resistance that has not been overcome,” he said.

The number of Ebola cases in Guinea peaked in late December when there were nearly double current number of patients at 171, according to the World Health Organisation.

The current Ebola outbreak was first confirmed in Guinea’s remote southeastern forest region last March.

From there, it spread across the country and into neighboring states. Liberia and Sierra Leone were worst hit but Mali and Senegal also recorded cases.

Guinea’s President Alpha Conde has set mid-April as the target for completely ending the epidemic. Officials in Guinea have previously said Ebola was under control, only to see the virus later spread further.

“Officials are calling this the fourth phase of the epidemic characterized by an increase in cases following the dip in January,” Dr. Jean-Pierre Lamarque, regional health adviser for the French foreign ministry, said by telephone from Guinea.

Read the rest @ http://news.yahoo.com/guinea-says-number-ebola-patients-more-doubles-since-153922232.html

For the past two years, a company called Carbon3D has been secretly developing a new type of 3D printing—one that would be far faster than polyjet, stereolithography and selective laser sintering. This week they pulled the sheets off, and it looks pretty nuts.

Called CLIP, for Continuous Liquid Interface Production, the technology combines elements of SLA with a photochemical process, and the result is that parts are not so much printed—that is, they’re not laid down/cured/sintered one layer at a time—so much as they are grown, out of what seems an impossibly shallow dish of liquid

Read the rest @ http://www.core77.com/posts/32917/Company-Unveils-Radical-Layerless-3D-Printing-Technology-25-to-100-TimesFaster-Than-Standard-3D-Printing

By Phillip Morris, The Plain Dealer

Eric Holder’s damn punks: Phillip Morris

By Phillip Morris, The Plain Dealer

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder on the shooting of two Ferguson, Missouri police officers: “This was not someone trying to bring healing to Ferguson,” he said. “This was a damn punk who was trying to sow discord in an area that’s trying to get its act together.”Carolyn Kaster, Associated Press

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Damn punk!

That’s a good start. Perhaps we’re getting somewhere. Precise language matters when cultural norms are explored or uncomfortable conversations broached. Perhaps we can build something useful from U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s widely noted Ferguson invective.

Holder was in the ballpark when he used the description “damn punk” to describe the person who shot and wounded two police officers in Ferguson, Missouri early Thursday morning as a protest ended.

Holder didn’t know the identity, race or sex of the shooter when he issued his angry insult. But he knew enough to make a calculated judgment. He knew that the would-be killer needed to be called out and labeled in a way that few leading black officials have been willing to use in branding the lethal parasites who routinely terrorize and destabilize urban communities.

It’s about time.

“This was not someone trying to bring healing to Ferguson. This was a damn punk who was trying to sow discord in an area that’s trying to get its act together and trying to bring together a community that has been fractured for too long,” he said.

That’s one useful way of looking at the attack. But it may not have been as Machiavellian or orchestrated as Holder deduced. Eric Frein, for instance, the survivalist accused of killing one Pennsylvania state trooper and severely wounding another last fall, more neatly fits the description of a sociopath, a damn punk with intent to kill cops and destabilize communities.

Frein reportedly confessed to authorities that he killed the troopers in an attempt to “wake up people” and to force change in government. The Ferguson shooter appears to be a different kind of damn punk, but potentially just as lethal.

This was a damn punk who was trying to sow discord in an area that’s trying to get its act together.

St. Louis County law enforcement officials say that Jeffrey Williams, 20, the man arrested in connection with the officers’ shootings, told them he was actually aiming at someone who had robbed him earlier. The Ferguson cops just happened to get in the way of the bullets.

Skeptical investigators, much like Holder, still believe that the attack was an ambush aimed at law enforcement — even though Williams was not recognized by the organized protesters as one of their own. Who knows?

What is important here, however, is to cultivate a greater focus on the damn punks who terrorize American streets. While it is currently en vogue to demonize police, America’s inner cities teem with ruthless young men who routinely kill and maim with a shocking disregard for life — not because of twisted political motives.

And that is why the passion contained in Holder’s anger must be amplified. The damn punk — or punks — of whom Holder spoke represent a far greater threat to urban America than the police departments now under community fire and U.S. Department of Justice scrutiny.

Jeffrey Williams may be innocent of the felony assault charges he faces in Ferguson. Time will tell. He may indeed be the non-productive, harmless man his family described for The New York Times — an unemployed male who lives with his pregnant girlfriend and spends his time playing and betting on video basketball games.

Or, he may be a young man who would fire recklessly into a crowd to avenge himself.

Or, he may be a would-be cop killer.

Regardless, America loses on all counts.

That’s why Holder’s contempt for damn punks must become a more pronounced sentiment for fed-up communities with long histories of ignoring or tolerating serious internal threats. Each successive generation of young punks makes it more difficult to break concentric circles of dysfunction, hopelessness, despair and violence.

It’s time those communities, under siege by these punks, started publicly identifying and rejecting those whose sole purpose is to kill, steal, leach and destroy. Damn punks are the core of the problem — not blue uniforms.

Thank you, Mr. Holder.

WASHINGTON (AP) — For the second consecutive year, the Obama administration more often than ever censored government files or outright denied access to them under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, according to a new analysis of federal data by The Associated Press.

The government took longer to turn over files when it provided any, said more regularly that it couldn’t find documents, and refused a record number of times to turn over files quickly that might be especially newsworthy.

It also acknowledged in nearly 1 in 3 cases that its initial decisions to withhold or censor records were improper under the law — but only when it was challenged.

Its backlog of unanswered requests at year’s end grew remarkably by 55 percent to more than 200,000.

The government’s new figures, published Tuesday, covered all requests to 100 federal agencies during fiscal 2014 under the Freedom of Information law, which is heralded globally as a model for transparent government. They showed that despite disappointments and failed promises by the White House to make meaningful improvements in the way it releases records, the law was more popular than ever. Citizens, journalists, businesses and others made a record 714,231 requests for information. The U.S. spent a record $434 million trying to keep up.

The government responded to 647,142 requests, a 4 percent decrease over the previous year. The government more than ever censored materials it turned over or fully denied access to them, in 250,581 cases or 39 percent of all requests. Sometimes, the government censored only a few words or an employee’s phone number, but other times it completely marked out nearly every paragraph on pages.

On 215,584 other occasions, the government said it couldn’t find records, a person refused to pay for copies or the government determined the request to be unreasonable or improper.

The White House touted its success under its own analysis. It routinely excludes from its assessment instances when it couldn’t find records, a person refused to pay for copies or the request was determined to be improper under the law, and said under this calculation it released all or parts of records in 91 percent of requests — still a record low since President Barack Obama took office using the White House’s own math.

“We actually do have a lot to brag about,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.

The government’s responsiveness under the open records law is an important measure of its transparency. Under the law, citizens and foreigners can compel the government to turn over copies of federal records for zero or little cost. Anyone who seeks information through the law is generally supposed to get it unless disclosure would hurt national security, violate personal privacy or expose business secrets or confidential decision-making in certain areas. It cited such exceptions a record 554,969 times last year.

Under the president’s instructions, the U.S. should not withhold or censor government files merely because they might be embarrassing, but federal employees last year regularly misapplied the law. In emails that AP obtained from the National Archives and Records Administration about who pays for Michelle Obama’s expensive dresses, the agency blacked-out a sentence under part of the law intended to shield personal, private information, such as Social Security numbers, phone numbers or home addresses. But it failed to censor the same passage on a subsequent page.

The sentence: “We live in constant fear of upsetting the WH (White House).”

In nearly 1 in 3 cases, when someone challenged under appeal the administration’s initial decision to censor or withhold files, the government reconsidered and acknowledged it was at least partly wrong. That was the highest reversal rate in at least five years.

The AP’s chief executive, Gary Pruitt, said the news organization filed hundreds of requests for government files. Records the AP obtained revealed police efforts to restrict airspace to keep away news helicopters during violent street protests in Ferguson, Missouri. In another case, the records showed Veterans Affairs doctors concluding that a gunman who later killed 12 people had no mental health issues despite serious problems and encounters with police during the same period. They also showed the FBI pressuring local police agencies to keep details secret about a telephone surveillance device called Stingray.

“What we discovered reaffirmed what we have seen all too frequently in recent years,” Pruitt wrote in a column published this week. “The systems created to give citizens information about their government are badly broken and getting worse all the time.”

The U.S. released its new figures during Sunshine Week, when news organizations promote open government and freedom of information.

The AP earlier this month sued the State Department under the law to force the release of email correspondence and government documents from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. The government had failed to turn over the files under repeated requests, including one made five years ago and others pending since the summer of 2013.

The government said the average time it took to answer each records request ranged from one day to more than 2.5 years. More than half of federal agencies took longer to answer requests last year than the previous year.

Journalists and others who need information quickly to report breaking news fared worse than ever.

Under the law, the U.S. is required to move urgent requests from journalists to the front of the line for a speedy answer if records will inform the public concerning an actual or alleged government activity. But the government now routinely denies such requests: Over six years, the number of requests granted speedy processing status fell from nearly half to fewer than 1 in 8.

The CIA, at the center of so many headlines, has denied every such request the last two years.

___

Online:

U.S. data: http://www.foia.gov/data.html