Austin Iovanna

Day A, Block 2
12 March, 2015
The Week
A Looming offense in Iraq
-U.S. preparing Iraqi forces to fight against jihadist group, starting
around May
-Training around 25,000 Iraqi & Kurdish soldiers to take down the
2000 ISIS members in Iraqs 2nd largest city, Mosul
-They will have to fight house to house & the bloodshed will be
intense
-ISIS no longer seems invinciblegives hope for success
The guru of gold diggers
-Larisa Renar (psychologist) runs Private Life Academygives
women tools they need to secure a wealthy husband
-Courses include lessons in overcoming awkwardness, having an
appealing phone voice, improving love making, etc.
-She encourages the women to open themselves up to luxury and
men will soon come
-Russian desire for safety, driving force for many women in this
program
Bryants lonely soul
-Kobe Bryant always rude, ball hog, distant and critical
-Admits hes been a loner since age 6moving to Italy and never
being able to secure friends or comfort in the foreignness of his
surroundings
-Very work-oriented, no time for simply hanging out aimlessly
Yemens descent into chaos
-Yemen is the poorest Arab country & has never been truly stable
(oil in south, politics in north, causing controversy)
-Lawlessness & poverty make Yemen an easy territory for extremist
recruiting
-2009, they created al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula
-Countless U.S. attacks (including USS Cole bombing, Boston
bombing, etc.)
-Houthis, ran by al-Houthi family, now leads the Shiite Zaydi sect
(minority group in mainly Sunni country) They hate the U.S. and the
Sunnis in al Qaida

-They probably cannot stabilize Yemen

-All of this chaos is leading to more and more extremism, with ISIS
recruiting from Yemeni towns (and some al Qaida members
switching to ISIS)
-Yemen doesnt have a functioning govt but they still have
independent forces

A climate skeptics secret payoff

-Wei-Hock Soon, physicist at Harvard Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics, made career in asserting that global warming isnt
man-caused but instead because of sun related idea
-Documents received through Freedom of Information Act showed
that Soon was funded $1.2 million by Exxon Mobil and other
companies who have strong efforts to deny global warming
Just like the divorce debate
-Irish population worried about Gay marriage affecting straight
marriage
-Catholic bishops saying it will undermine marriage as a building
block of society
-1995; about to legalize divorce
-Citizens worried about division of land, women being abandoned
-Like gay marriage being legal, just because something becomes
legal doesnt mean that everyone is going to go out and do it
-Ireland still has the lowest divorce rate in all of Europe, proving this
idea
-Just giving small gay Irish population right to exercise a civil right
ISIS lures British girls to the cause
-Three teens (15 and 16) boarded a flight to Turkey and crossed into
Syria in hopes of becoming brides of men in ISIS
-Straight-A students with no evidence of being radicalized
-Online media marketing Syria like Disney World, becoming a
princess, etc.
-Women who have done are running these online efforts, trying to
recruit other women to do the same thing they have done
Promising HIV vaccine
-Ongoing 3-decade struggle to find effective anti-HIV vaccine
-Method resembling gene therapy that can possibly prevent new
infections and treating those already infected
-Trains immune system to produce antibodies that fight infection,
modifying DNA targeted by HIV virus

-Tested on monkeys, protecting them for a full year

-Human trials expected to start within a year
Megadrought may grip the Southwest
-Southwest & central Great Plains supposed to receive worst
drought in over 1000 years
-Long-term climate prediction by NASA, Cornell and Columbia
predicts it will last about a decade
-Not just lack of rain, but drying out of soil, which will be devastating
to water supplies and crop harvesting, etc.