The worst Ebola outbreak in recorded history has now infected 10,000 people, killing nearly 50 percent of them, the World Health Organization revealed on Saturday.

The number of “confirmed, probable and suspected cases” has reached 10,141, with 4,922 reported deaths, stated the W.H.O., which is tasked by the United Nations with directing the international responses to epidemics. Approximately 200 new cases are noted by the organization since its last report four days ago.

The west African countries of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone are by far hardest hit, accounting for all but 10 deaths and 27 infections. In addition to these nations, Mali, Spain, and the United States are listed as “affected countries,” while Nigeria and Senegal are described as “previously affected countries.”

More than a dozen clinics that provide abortions in the state of Texas should be able to reopen their doors on Wednesday, following an unsigned order by the U.S. Supreme Court late Tuesday that puts on hold a lower court ruling that shuttered them.

The order from the high court, approved by a 6-3 margin, comes as a reprieve to women and reproductive rights advocates in the state who have been fighting to nullify a law passed by the legislature last year which has led to the closure of all but eight abortion clinics in the nation’s second most populous state.

Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which has been fighting the law said the order was most welcome but that the overall fight for women’s freedoms in Texas was far from over.

“The U.S. Supreme Court gave Texas women a tremendous victory today,” said Northrup in a statement following the court’s decision. “[On Wednesday], thirteen clinics across the state will be allowed to reopen and provide women with safe and legal abortion care in their own communities.”

However, she continued, “This fight against Texas’ sham abortion law is not over. HB2 was designed to gut the constitutional protections of Roe v. Wade and half of the state’s clinics remain closed. We will continue this legal battle until the rights of Texas women are restored.”

According to the Washington Post:

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The Food and Drug Administration is carrying out little testing for pesticide residues on fruit and vegetables, a new report by a federal watchdog reveals.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) report (pdf) found that in 2012, the FDA tested less than one-tenth of 1 percent of imported shipments.

FDA does not test for some commonly used pesticides—like glyphosate—for which the EPA has established tolerance levels, nor does FDA disclose in its annual reports that it doesn’t do this testing, the GAO analysis states.

In addition, GAO charges, “FDA does not use statistically valid methods consistent with Office of Management and Budget standards to collect national information on the incidence and level of pesticide residues.”

The Pentagon has failed to adequately treat—or even track—over 600 U.S. service members who report that they were exposed to degraded chemical weapons agents while they were deployed to Iraq after the 2003 invasion, the New York Times revealed Friday.

The report—which references long-documented chemical arms stockpiles developed by Saddam Hussein’s government during the 1980s in collaboration with the United States and other western states—reveals that, in addition to Iraqi and Iranian civilians, U.S. service members have likely been placed in harm’s way with little recourse.

The chemical weapons stockpiles referenced in the article are not the same as the non-existent “weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)” former President George W. Bush used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, of which Bush and top aides told nearly one-thousand documented lies.

The Times article is a follow-up to a previous investigation, published in October, which disclosed 17 cases of service members’ injuries due to contact with sarin or a sulfur mustard agent and revealed that the U.S. military had suppressed information about the exposure. Since the October investigation, hundreds of service members have reported to the military that they believe they were exposed, according to a review of Pentagon data ordered by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, the Times reported Friday.

In an age of expanding national security powers, increasing surveillance state, and rolled-back civil liberties protections, Americans’ perception of their own personal freedoms is plummeting, according to the annual ranking by the Legatum Institute in London.

In Washington D.C. this week to promote their findings, researchers with the Legatum Institute measure a nation’s prosperity on a number of factors including health, safety, education, economy, opportunity, social capital, governance and personal freedoms.

According to the 2014 Index (pdf) released earlier this month, in the measure of personal freedom, the United States has fallen from 9th place in 2010 to 21st worldwide—behind such countries as Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Uruguay and Costa Rica.

The rate of melting ice in Antarctica’s vulnerable Amundsen Sea region has tripled in the past decade, a new report published in Geophysical Research Letters on Wednesday has found.

Analyzing 21 years of data from four separate observation techniques, scientists from NASA and UC Irvine (UCI) discovered that glaciers in the region are shedding more ice mass than any other part of Antarctica and are the biggest contributors to rising sea levels in the region.

“The mass loss of these glaciers is increasing at an amazing rate,” said Isabella Velicogna of UCI and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who co-authored the report. She added that the changes “are proceeding very fast.”

The study examined more than two decades’ worth of data on “mass balance” of glaciers in the Amundsen Sea Embayment—including “how much ice the glaciers gain and lose over time from accumulating or melting snow, discharges of ice as icebergs, and other causes”—between 1992 and 2013.

The glaciers in the region lost mass throughout that entire period, at an ever-increasing speed. In fact, they are shedding roughly 91.5 billion tons of ice every year at a rate which grew by an average of 6.7 billion tons annually since 1992.

That rate is “almost three times the rate of increase for the full 21-year period,” the authors wrote. “By comparison, Mt. Everest weighs about 161 gigatons (177 billion U.S. tons), meaning the Antarctic glaciers lost an amount of water weight equivalent to Mt. Everest every two years over the last 21 years.”

Palestinian officials have said they will push the United Nations Security Council to vote on a resolution on Wednesday to end the Israeli occupation by 2016.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made his opposition to the move clear.

During talks in Rome on Monday, Netanyahu said he would reject any attempt to set a deadline for the establishment of Palestinian statehood, calling on Secretary of State John Kerry to use U.S. veto power to prevent the resolution from passing.

“Our expectation is that the United States will stand by its position for the past 47 years that a solution to the conflict will be achieved through negotiations, and I do not see a reason for this policy to change,” he told reporters following a meeting with Kerry.

The U.S. has exercised that power in the past to block resolutions it sees as anti-Israel. But officials said Kerry was seeking to learn more about the Palestinian bid for statehood, in part because of increased support for the measure from allies like Jordan. Several European nations have added their support, with Sweden officially recognizing Palestinian statehood this year, and a series of symbolic votes in France, the UK, Spain and Ireland.

The Guardian writes:

Reuters also reports:

France will also introduce a rival proposal, which would set a two-year deadline for peace talks between Israel and Palestine.

By caving to industry pressures, environmental regulatory agencies are failing to uphold their obligation to future generations, declared Mary Christina Wood, the author pushing a new legal framework to fight global warming, on the final episode of Moyers & Company.

Wood, a University of Oregon law professor who wrote Nature’s Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age (2013; Cambridge University Press), advocates an idea called “atmospheric trust litigation,” which takes the fate of the Earth into the courts, arguing that the planet’s atmosphere—its air, water, land, plants, and animals—are the responsibility of government, held in its trust to insure the survival of all generations to come.

“If this nation relies on a stable climate system, and the very habitability of this nation and all of the liberties of young people and their survival interests are at stake the courts need to force the agencies and the legislatures to simply do their job.”
—Mary Christina Wood, University of Oregon Law School

“The heart of the approach is the public trust doctrine,” she told her host, longtime journalist and political commentator Bill Moyers. “And it says that government is a trustee of the resources that support our public welfare and survival. And so a trust means that one entity or person manages a certain wealth, an endowment, so to speak, for the benefit of others. And in the case of the public trust, the beneficiaries are the present and future generations of citizens.”

The theory underpins lawsuits filed by Our Children’s Trust, which ask for the courts to order state and local governments and agencies to act more aggressively to bring down carbon emissions.

“[I]f this nation relies on a stable climate system, and the very habitability of this nation and all of the liberties of young people and their survival interests are at stake the courts need to force the agencies and the legislatures to simply do their job,” Wood explained.

Environmental laws passed in the 1970s “held a lot of promise” decades ago, she said but they’ve lost what little power they once possessed. Wood continued:

And Wood disagreed with those who argue that climate change is a political issue to be dealt with outside the courts.

“Climate is not just an environmental issue,” she said. “This is a civilizational issue. This is the biggest case that courts will get in terms of the potential harm in front of them, the population affected by that harm, and in terms of the urgency. Climate is mind-blowing. It can’t be categorized any longer as an environmental issue.”

In a related feature earlier this year, Moyers spoke to a member of the next generation who is a co-plaintiff in one of the atmosphere trust litigation lawsuits being spearheaded by Our Children’s Trust.

“Public trust states that the government is a trustee to protect these natural resources that every living species, including humans, rely upon for our survival, for our well-being,” 18-year-old Kelsey Juliana told Moyers at the time. “And so the public trust says, government, we hold you, we trust you to put these resources, air, water, land, you know, to protect them for this generation and for many generations down the line.”

Watch the full segment with Wood below:

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