• Listen to this segment with Arun Gupta

Uprising’s guest expert Arun Gupta, a Journalist and regular contributor to the Guardian, In These Times, The Progressive, and Truthout, and co-founder of the Occupied Wall Street Journal and the Indypendent, analyzes today’s news headlines:

US war planes hit various parts of Syria near the Turkish border yesterday as well as parts of Iraq, in the latest chapter of the campaign against the Islamic State rebel group. Fierce battles on the ground between Kurdish forces and ISIS fighters over the border town of Kobani continued as the Turkish government remained on the sidelines, refusing to step in. Clashes between pro-Kurdish activists and Turkish police in the cities of Istanbul and Ankara resulted in nearly 2 dozen deaths. Click here for an Al Jazeera article, and here for a Washington Post article about the story.

The US has just seen its first fatality from Ebola with the death yesterday of the Liberian man Thomas Eric Duncan. Duncan’s story is a tragic one. He came to the US after many years, wishing to reunite with his son who lives here, only to be diagnosed with Ebola and die before meeting his son. He was not administered donated blood of Ebola survivors as other patients have. Authorities, who have the entire family under quarantine, had even raised the specter of prosecuting Duncan had he lived. Duncan had shown no symptoms such as fever when he entered the US. Despite this, several airports around the country have announced a policy of checking the temperatures of all passengers arriving in the US from West African nations where the Ebola virus has hit hardest. Click here for a Guardian newspaper article, and here for a New York Times article about the story.

And finally, St. Louis has witnessed the killing of yet another African American teen at the hands of a white police officer. The office in question was off-duty and working for a private security company when he encountered three black teenagers in a suburb called Shaw. He claims that the teen he killed was armed and fired three shots at him before he returned fire 17 times killing the boy. The young man, named Vonderrit Myers Jr., was unarmed according to his relatives, who are drawing comparisons with Michael Brown. There were protests in response to Myers’ killing last night. The police officer in question remains unnamed. Meanwhile, in New England, a study released yesterday shows that Boston police disproportionately stop and search African Americans during the course of their work. Click here for a USA Today article, and here for a New York Times article about the story.