Strange Situation At NSA

Officers opened fire after two men allegedly dressed as women refused to stop a stolen vehicle Monday at the National Security Agency gate at Fort Meade in Maryland. The stolen vehicle smashed into a police vehicle blocking the road, officials said.

One of the men died, and the other man and an officer were hurt.

Officials claimed that there were plenty of chances for the incident to end nonviolently.

The NSA released a statement Monday afternoon saying the driver of the sport utility vehicle disobeyed instructions from an NSA police officer and failed to stop shortly before 9 a.m.

Investigators are looking into whether the men were under the influence of drugs following a night of partying, a federal law enforcement official said.

A man reported his car stolen from a hotel not far away from NSA Headquarters and said he had been with two men who had taken his car. Cocaine was found in the vehicle. The Howard County Police Department confirms that a Ford Escape reported stolen in Howard County, Maryland, is the vehicle involved in the incident.

The FBI said they did not think terrorism was related to the incident.

MSNBC

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Md. Lawmakers Call For Crude Oil Train Shipment Risk Assessment, More Railroad Transparency

Maryland lawmakers concerned about increasingly common rail shipments of crude oil through Maryland are calling for the state to conduct a full assessment of the risks and for railroads to be more transparent about their operations, according to The Baltimore Sun.

CSX Transportation and Norfolk Southern bring train shipments of crude oil into Maryland, including to a barge terminal in South Baltimore’s Fairfield area and through Cecil County on the way to refineries in Delaware.

Legislation filed last week in Annapolis, Md. would require the state’s health and environment departments to establish statewide accident prevention, emergency response and contingency plans in the case of a major railroad disaster involving crude oil. It also would require both railroads to disclose more information about their crude shipments to the public.

Recently, a recent derailment of a CSX crude oil train during a snowstorm in West Virginia burned one home to the ground, forced hundreds of others to be evacuated, shuttered water treatment plants and sparked concern about pollution to the nearby Kanawha River, according to The Baltimore Sun.

Under a federal law that took effect in May, railroads are required to disclose to local jurisdictions the volumes, routes and frequency of all Bakken crude-oil shipments that are more than 1 million gallons.  However, in the past, much of that information has been unavailable to the public in Maryland.

Nurse’s Discharge Leaves Just One Ebola Case In U.S.

A nurse’s release Tuesday from an Atlanta hospital leaves a single person in the United States now battling Ebola, though she and others — including President Barack Obama — stressed the fight against the deadly virus isn’t over.

“While this is a day for celebration and gratitude, I ask that we not lose focus on the thousands of families who continue to labor under the burden of this disease in West Africa,” said 29-year-old Amber Vinson.

Smiling broadly and occasionally brushing aside tears, Vinson was surrounded by relatives as well as Emory doctors and nurses.

Nurse Nina Pham from Dallas, who also had Ebola, was released Oct. 24 from a National Institutes of Health hospital in Bethesda, Md.

Meanwhile, on Monday, Kaci Hickox traveled from New Jersey to Maine, where her boyfriend is a senior nursing student at the University of Maine at Fort Kent.  Hickox, who spent the weekend in a quarantine tent in New Jersey, said she never had Ebola symptoms and tested negative in a preliminary evaluation. She also sharply criticized New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo for ordering mandatory quarantines.

Hickox, told CNN that her “basic human rights have been violated,” and was released Monday, two days after testing negative for Ebola.  She was seemingly powerless to challenge her banishment to a quarantine tent in Newark.

The nurse’s treatment, as well as the quarantine policies of New York and New Jersey, have been criticized as heavy-handed.

Former Ebola patient Rick Sacra, a doctor infected in Liberia, likened the mandatory quarantine for returning health-care workers in New York and New Jersey to a “police state approach.”