Volcano Eruptions, More Dead Fish Wash Up In Gulf, Superbug "Pan-Drug" Resistance Appears, Lieberman Faces First Tests

Volcano Eruption -Piton de la Fournaise volcano, Reunion

A new eruption - the first in 2016 - started at the volcano this morning, around 08:05 local time when the volcano observatory registered a strong tremor signal, typical for the onset of Piton de la Fournaise's fissure eruptions.

All public access to the Enclos was closed after the Prefecture declared alert level 2 shortly after.
The new eruption seems to take place from a vent near Château Fort in the southeastern sector of the Enclos, but a team of volcanologist who went into the field could not make direct observations so far because of bad weather.

The eruption had been preceded by elevated seismic activity and beginning inflation of the volcanic edifice observed since 16 May.

A strong seismic swarm then began last night at 23:40 and was accompanied by strong ground deformation (as the magma was pushing its final way upwards).

Colombian volcano the Nevado del Ruiz which killed 30,000 in 1985 wakes up spewing ash 2,300 meters into the sky

Mount Sinabung Volcano North Sumatra Kills Three After It Blasted Ash 3 Kilometers Into The Sky Saturday

Costa Rica's Turrialba Volcano is the third Central American volcano to erupt this week

Guatemalan volcanoes Santiaguito and Fuego erupt sending ash plumes kilometres into the sky

Mount Etna Europe's largest and most active volcano erupts huge plumes of ash and smoke hundreds of metres into the sky

Costa Rican colossus Turrialba volcano spreads ash across capitol city San Jose after strong eruption

Mount St Helens is recharging 36 years after 'deadliest blast in US history’: Has scientists worried!

The Cleveland Volcano in the Aleutian Islands erupts steam and ash emissions

After 60 years of inactivity: The Bristol Island volcano, spews ash gas and steam into the South Georgia sky after heavy quake activity

Volcano Uptick: North Sulawesi's Mount Karangetang Indonesia and White Island volcano in Bay of Plenty New Zealand erupt on Wednesday

Volcano Eruption Uptick -San Cristobal volcano Nicaragua spews ash 2 km into the sky
Eurasia's largest volcano Klyuchevskaya Sopka, Russia, spews hot ash "miles" into the sky on Sunday

Authorities evacuate over 10,000 as Mount Kerinci volcano Indonesia shows increasingly intense eruptions over the last two weeks

Volcano Uptick...Santiaguito volcano Guatemala has a powerfull eruption only five day's after a major quake in the same area

Hundreds of dead fish washing up in Gulport Mississippi with "holes in them, leaking black stuff"

Hundreds of dead fish washing up in Gulport Mississippi with "holes in them leaking black stuff" just miles from where hundreds of thousands of dead fish washed up on the Grand Isle coast area Louisiana Monday, full story.

Department of Marine Resource officials are looking into what caused hundreds of fish to wash ashore in Gulfport Wednesday night.
The menhaden or pogie fish lined the beach just west of the Island View Casino.
Right now DMR is not describing this as a fish kill.

Fishery scientists will be on scene Thursday morning to look closer at the fish.
WLOX talked with a visitor from New Orleans who spotted the fish.

Dorian Cummings said he was planning to spend more time on the beach during his stay over the next few days leading up to the holiday, but is now having second thoughts.
"At first it was just a few of them and it wasn't too alarming or anything," said Cummings.
"As we started walking a little further down the beach they started getting more plentiful.
Then we actually started to look at the fish and that was the gross part.

They all had the same kind of features with holes and black stuff coming out of them."
D-M-R officials said they haven't received any other reports of fish washing up on the beach.

Mass die offs

Did 88,000 gallons of oil from a Shell pipeline off the coast of Louisiana cause hundreds of thousands of dead fish to wash up on Grand Isle coast Monday?
It's the worst fish kill in 20 years for West Palm Beach and scientists are worried this kill could just be the beginning of a disastrous season.

Hundreds of thousands of dead fish wash up Grand Isle coast area Louisiana days before Memorial Day weekend

Birds, crabs, prawns and seals now washing up dead where 50,000 tonnes of fish washed up in Chile last month

Expert claims he can't remember so many dead birds as major hailstorm kills nearly 10,000 Red-necked Phalaropes in Utah

Another 35 tonnes of dead fish: This time it's China!

Almost 50,000 tonnes of dead salmon and sardines along with millions of dead clams off the coast of Chile as a result of red tides caused by El Niño

Long-Dreaded Superbug Found in Human and Animal in U.S. – Phenomena: Germination

The antibiotic resistance factor MCR, which protects bacteria against the final remaining drugs of last resort, has been found in the United States for the first time—in a person, and separately, in a stored sample taken from a slaughtered pig.

Department of Defense researchers disclosed Thursday in a report placed onlineby the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy that a 49-year-old woman who sought medical care at a military-associated clinic in Pennsylvania last month, with what seemed to be a urinary tract infection, was carrying a strain of E. coli that possessed resistance to a wide range of drugs. That turned out to be because the organism carried 15 different genes conferring antibiotic resistance, clustered on two “mobile elements” that can move easily among bacteria. One element included the new, dreaded gene mcr-1.

The discovery “heralds the emergence of truly pan-drug resistant bacteria,” the DOD personnel, Patrick McGann, PhD of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and Kurt Schaecher, PhD of the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, along with eight colleagues, write in the journal report.

Dr. Beth Bell, director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the CDC has begun working with the researchers and the Pennsylvania Department of Health to understand how the woman came to be carrying the highly resistant  bacterium. (Later Thursday, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf confirmed the case, and the CDC joint investigation, in a statement.) The DOD researchers who described her case, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, provided no other information on her case, except to say that she had not traveled in the previous five months, suggesting she did not pick up the bacterium outside the U.S.

"It is extremely concerning; this is potentially a sentinel event,” Bell said in a phone interview. “There is a lot that needs to be done in terms of contact tracing and field investigation, to have a sense of who else might have been exposed or might be carrying this resistant bacterium.”

MCR is so troubling because it confers protection against colistin, the last remaining antibiotic that works against a broad family of bacteria that have already acquired resistance to all the other antibiotics used against them. 

“This shows that we are right on the verge of getting into the territory of routine bacterial infections being untreatable,” Steven Roach, the food safety program director at the Food Animal Concerns Trust, said by phone. “It underscores the failure of both the federal government and Congress, and the industry, to get a grasp of the problem. We can’t continue to drag our feet on taking needed action.”

Germ Resistant To Antibiotic Of Last Resort Appears In U.S.

A germ that can't be treated with an antibiotic that is often used as the last resort has shown up for the first time in the United States.

Government scientists say the case is cause for serious concern but doesn't pose any immediate public health threat.

The germ was discovered in a 49-year-old woman in Pennsylvania with a urinary tract infection. The infection was caused by E. coli bacteria that had a gene that made them resistant to an antibiotic known as colistin.

The findings were published online Thursday in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.

Colistin, a medicine that dates to the 1950s, is now used on infections that have become resistant to every other antibiotic. In this case, the woman's infection could still be treated with another antibiotic. She recovered.

But the case is still causing concern among public health officials. Now that this resistance gene has shown up in the U.S., it could spread to other germs, creating infections that doctors will have no way to treat.

That's already happened in other parts of the world, including China.

First test for Lieberman from Iran and Hizballah

The Middle East is full of surprises, but they are rarely disconnected from events. This applies to the speech made by Hizballah secretary Hassan Nasrallah on Wednesday May 25 which dredged up the past from 1992 in an allegation that the IDF while in Beirut, kidnapped four Iranian diplomats and is secretly holding them alive till this day in a jail in Israel.

He was not the first to resuscitate this old story. Monday May 23 the Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan brought it up, suddenly and surprisingly, in a special interview he gave to the Iranian news site Defa Press News.

General Dehqan said, “We claim on the basis of proofs that they are alive and in captivity by the Zionist regime.” He went on to say that, “the Israelis are responsible for the health of the Iranian diplomats.” He was referring to: charge d'affaires of the Iranian Embassy in Beirut Seyed Mohsen Mousavi, military attaché Ahmad Motevaselian, embassy technician Taghi Rastegar Moghadam, Islamic republic news agency Kazzem Akhavan.

Two days later, on Wednesday, while saying that ‘the resistance axis’ – meaning Iran-Syria-Hizballah – has not forgotten the Palestinian problem, Nasrallah said: “We have more land under Israeli occupation.” 

Nasrallah had a long orderly list of ‘occupied places’: Shaaba Farms, The Kfar Shouba Hills, meaning Har Dov, and Ghajar village. “We also have”, Nasrallah continued, “captives and missing people whose families still wait for their return.”  And, “On the legal and ethical level, there is a Lebanese responsibility towards the four Iranian diplomats who were handed over to Israel.”

According to Nasrallah, just as the occupied lands must be returned, so must the Iranian diplomats be returned, first of all to Lebanon.

Nasrallah next turned to speak about the new Israeli Defense Minister calling him “crazy”.
Seven years ago, in 2009, German mediators were invited to broker a prisoner swap between Israel and Hizballah. They arranged for the bodies of the IDF soldiers: Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, whom Hizballah abducted and murdered in 2006, to be returned. The Germans established that the four Iranian diplomats had never been by held by Israel but were captured by Christian Phalangists and were apparently executed by them.

This finding was never accepted by the Iranian Foreign Ministry who insisted that their four diplomats were still in Israeli captivity.  

The Iranian Defense Minister and the Hizballah leader have obviously coordinated the resuscitation of the diplomats’ fate and intended to use it as a tool to justify military or terrorist action against Israel.  

DEBKAfile’s military and intelligence sources point to two reasons for the Iranian-Hizballah move:

1. A first test for the new Israeli defense minister Avigdor Lieberman. They want to determine his responses to aggression and establish the measure of his control of Israeli military deployments on the Syrian and Lebanese borders. His predecessor, Moshe Yaalon, was conversant with every detail of those deployments.

1. Tehran and Hizballah, have publically admitted that Israel had no hand in the assassination of the Hizballah military leader in Syria, Mustafa Badr Al Din, near Damascus on May 13. But as a morale booster for Shiite forces in Syria they may resort to a strike against Israel, Saudi Arabia or Jordan, whom they believe complicit in the killing.