A bombing raid by a female air force pilot from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) made international headlines last month. But despite the headlines and internet memes, the UAE is not at the forefront of women's rights — not even compared to its Arab neighbors. 

The Emirati regime spends millions of dollars on its image in the United States. With the government keen to highlight its support for the US campaign against ISIS, it packaged the story about Major Mariam Al Mansouri story perfectly for American media. 

CNN was brought in to interview Al Mansouri on the ground, and the UAE's government media agency was there to take and distribute those iconic waving and thumbs-up photos to news outlets. But what you won't find mentioned in many of the gushing media stories is any reference to the true state of women's rights in the UAE.

While glamorized in American films and music videos, is a country where husbands are permitted to beat their wives. There is no legal recourse for marital rape, and the UAE has imprisoned victims who report rape to authorities — including Western tourists. 

Last year, Nicholas McGeehan, a Gulf researcher at Human Rights Watch, told The Daily Beast the UAE is “incredibly focused on maintaining a very progressive image despite the reality that it’s not.”

Horror stories from Western tourists have put a dent in that image. An Australian woman who reported a gang rape to police says she spent 8 months in prison, and British and Norwegian citizens have reportedly received similar treatment.

Prosecutors charge these women for engaging in extra-marital sex, claiming they have no proof the sexual violence they report was non-consensual. According to Human Rights Watch, even Western governments sometimes turn a blind eye to this.

“The UAE is very good at exerting its strategic and economic importance to ensure that its numerous allies in the West don’t raise objections, even when their citizens are mistreated," McGeehan said.

The country's treatment of migrant workers, particularly female domestic servants, has been compared to modern-day slavery. Many of these workers suffer physical violence, sexual abuse, passport confiscation, restrictions on mobility and communications, and even death while trying to escape, according to Human Rights Watch.

SEE ALSO: ISIS Has Female Battalions Too, And They’re Horrific

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While Iraq, the Kurds, Iran, and America's allies continue their military campaign against ISIS, Iraqi artists are attacking the group with a weapon of their own.

A few weeks ago Iraqi TV launched a new sitcom that uses humor, songs, and kitschy costumes to mock the Islamist group that has taken control of numerous towns in the country's north. The title of the show roughly translates to "Fairytale State," though some news outlets have translated it as "State of Superstition."

The sitcom's director, Ali al Qasem, told 7:30 Australia they were fighting against the group's use of fear and terror. "By tackling this issue with humor, you can reduce the fear of Islamic State among people, particularly children,"he said. 

The sitcom is set in a fictional Iraqi town that has been taken over by Islamic state. ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, who is seen hatching from an egg, takes control of the city with his high-strung dwarf sidekick.

At one point, the group is shown bickering over the logo for its flag.

"The Islamic State's appearance, the way they look, is terrifying. By presenting them in a comedic way, I think we can help people to overcome that fear," al Qasem said. 

Baghdadi's group goes on to create the "Blood Broadcasting Corporation"— The BBC — with a male anchor welcoming viewers while his female colleague struggles to cover herself with a sheet. 

“Hello and welcome ISIS and infidels," the anchor intones.

Future episodes appear to feature Islamic State holding the Olympics, shooting runners on the track to ensure their athlete wins.

“The whole world is talking about ISIS — America, France — but once you make fun of them, they’re finished. I think this is the response they deserve," al Qasem said.

In the final scene, Baghdadi conducts a chorus of ISIS militants and former Saddam Generals as they sing about their murderous exploits. Having killed everyone else, Baghdadi begins shooting his own people, and then blows himself up. 

According to Al Arabya, a clip of the show's theme song has gone viral. One clip has reached over 440,000 views on YouTube.

SEE ALSO: 10 Ways Muslims Are Using Sharia Law Against ISIS

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In August 1974, the United States undertook a top-secret mission that one CIA document disclosed in 2010 "ranks in the forefront of imaginative and bold operations undertaken in the long history of intelligence collection."

As the declassified article in the internal CIA journal Studies in Intelligence explains, Project AZORIAN was a collaboration among the CIA and private marine firms to recover a sunken Soviet submarine from the depths of the Pacific Ocean some 1,500 miles northwest of Hawaii. 

The Soviet G-II class ballistic missile submarine had sunk years before, killing all aboard in March 1968. It was diesel-powered, but US intelligence suspected the vessel was armed with nuclear weaponry.

If true, the US stood to learn much about its Cold War rival if it recovered the sub. It would give the US a look at Soviet weapons design, on top of other potential intelligence treasures. Fortunately for the Americans, Moscow was in the dark regarding its lost submarine's location.

Of course, the US first had to figure out how to even retrieve a 1,750-ton vessel that sat more than three miles below the ocean surface and under tremendous water pressure. The CIA's solution: a purpose-specific ship, the Hughes Glomar Explorer, which would lug the submarine upward with a giant eight-fingered claw in the style of a claw crane grabbing a plush toy.

Global Marine and other companies agreed to conceal the ship's true function behind a cover story: The Hughes Glomar Explorer was an experimental deep-sea mining vessel, and its inauguration came complete with a champagne christening ceremony and speeches from the enterprising seafarers.   

The story of the US's partial success in this long endeavor — which spanned the tenure of two presidents and three Directors of Central Intelligence — is not newly surfaced. LA Times columnist Jack Anderson broke the news as early as February 1975, and the public radio program Radiolab dedicated a half-hour program to this curious Cold War footnote (In the episode, Julia Barton reported that one of the legacies of project AZORIAN was the birth of the now-typical "neither confirm nor deny" response by government officials faced with inquiring reporters).  

But what the CIA's latest disclosure does offer is several stranger-than-fiction anecdotes on the many times the Hughes Glomar Explorer's mission could have gone awry.

Faith in the technical viability of the project was shaky to begin with. In 1972, Admiral Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote a memo that recommended dropping the mission "because of decreased intelligence value of the target with the passage of time" and mounting costs. Deputy Secretary of Defense Kenneth Rush only estimated the project's chance of success at 20 to 30 percent.

But Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms, the paper discloses, was worried about the long-term consequences of backing out, feeling that "a termination now would appear capricious to contractors and jeopardize future cooperative efforts."

President Nixon finally gave the project a green-light after a "long series of high-level program reviews." 

After jumping these bureaucratic hurdles, the mission also had a close encounter with a major political flare-up. Too broad for the Panama Canal, the Glomar had to sail around the southern tip of South America to get the Pacific Ocean. The crew then docked in the port city of Valparaiso, Chile, only to find themselves in the midst of August Pinochet's violent coup on September 11th, 1973.

Seven technicians had traveled to Chile to join the mission. "After checking in to their hotel, early on 11 September, the Global Marine personnel were awakened by the sounds of the revolution in the streets." The Americans were under virtual house-arrest for a few days before eventually leaving safely — though not without stoking suspicions that the United States had a hand in socialist president Salvador Allende's ouster.

SEE ALSO: A declassified CIA paper shows how the US helped stop an Iranian sneak attack on Saudi oil platforms in 1987

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US-led economic sanctions against technology exports to Russia might have the unintended consequence of pushing Russian and Chinese technological industries into close cooperation, Russia-based security expert Vasily Kashin writes for The Moscow Times. 

Kashin, an analyst at the Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies in Moscow, notes that any partnership between China and Russia would be mutually beneficial for both countries given long-standing US limits on arms sales to China, and more recent American measures stemming trade with Russia.

Per The Moscow Times: 

China's production of military technology very favorably complements Russia's. While Russia exports upward of $2 billion in military equipment to China annually, Beijing is strong in a number of specific areas where Moscow is particularly weak. For example, despite making some progress, Russia has yet to achieve serial production of its own strike drones and remains heavily reliant on European and Israeli partners for that equipment.

Kashin notes that China has developed full-scale mass production of two reconnaissance drones — which means China is starting to master defense technologies that are a relative Russian weakness. China has military and technical cooperation experience with other geopolitically difficult countries as well: In the past, China has developed military relationships with Pakistan and Iran. 

Kashin writes that China and Russia are already in the early stages of developing civilian industrial cooperation with a clear potential defense aspect to it. The countries are close to reaching a deal on the procurement of electronic components of satellites, he notes.

According to Missile Threat, a website operated by the George C. Marshall and Claremont Institutes, it would make sense for Russia to reach out to China for help with an early warning missile system. China has the technological capability to build a satellite system necessary for Russia's early-warning systems, while Russia could provide China with the technology necessary to protect itself against medium-range ballistic missiles. 

Since the start of the Ukraine crisis, Russia and China have also moved closer together in the energy sector. In May, the two countries signed a gas pipeline megadeal that would provide China with natural gas for 30 years. 

This string of successes for Chinese foreign policy with Russia underscores how Russia has shifted eastwards after confrontation with the West over Ukraine.

Ultimately, the crisis in Ukraine might benefit China more than any other country.

"[China is] the big winner from the Ukraine crisis — everybody wants to work with them," Eurasia Group president Ian Bremmer told Business Insider in an email. "I’d say not only are they ignoring U./EU sanctions, they’re actually taking advantage of them."

However, the ongoing crisis in Syria is leading to a thawing of relations between Russia and the US.

A recent meeting between Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart has led to speculation that Russia and the US may be nearing yet another "reset" of relations. This could hypothetically lead to a reduction in sanctions and a return of Russia doing business with Europe instead of China.

But if Russia and the US attempt to mend their relationship, China and Russia will likely remain close as the two countries continue see their interests converge. 

SEE ALSO: Putin's next move could make Eastern Europe explode

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Yesterday, Reza Aslan, a creative writing professor at the University of California at Riverside and widely respected public commentator on religious affairs, tweeted that "Iran currently has the highest number of US college alums serving in any foreign government cabinet in the world," and included a helpful pictorial guide. It was retweeted several hundred times.

Iran currently has the highest number of US college alums serving in any foreign government cabinet in the world pic.twitter.com/WjQecvZOTk

— Reza Aslan (@rezaaslan) October 14, 2014

Aslan's recent statements on US relations with Iran give needed context for his intended meaning. After the singing of the Joint Plan of Action between Iran and the so-called P5+1 in Geneva in late 2013, Aslan went on the Daily Show to offer his interpretation of the interim nuclear agreement's impact.

"It's created a reconciliation camp and an isolationist camp and right now the reconciliation camp has all the momentum," he said. "Where here in the US nobody talks about this deal as possibly laying the groundwork for true normalization that's all they talk about in Iran."

In Aslan's mind, this bumper crop of "reconciliationist" and often American-education Iranian leaders proves that the country is shifting towards an accommodation with the US. It shows that Iran has left behind its decades of bellicose anti-American rhetoric and policy and has re-oriented itself towards new realities in the Middle East and the broader world — if only the hawks in Washington could realize the unprecedented opportunity.

"Everybody in the US asks, can we trust Iran to hold up its end of the bargain," Aslan said on the Daily Show. "That's not the problem. The problem is us."

But Aslan's tweet actually doesn't prove what it implies. 

A distressingly vast range of despotic and otherwise anti-Western figures were educated in the United States or Europe. Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual father of modern Islamism, studied at the Colorado College of Education in the late 1940s. The exposure to American values did anything but endear him to them. In an essay entitled "The America I Have Seen," Qubt condemned the US for its sexual permissiveness, and concluded that "when the book time will have closed, America will have added nothing ... to the account of morals that distinguishes man from object, and, indeed, mankind from animals."

Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical cleric who became a top propagandist for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and was killed in a US drone strike in September of 2011, was educated at Colorado State and George Washington University.

Aafia Siddiqui, perhaps the highest-ranking female Al Qaeda operative in history, earned a PhD at Brandeis. Mohammad Atta, the lead hijacker for the 9/11 attacks, held a master's degree in urban planning from the Hamburg University of Technology in Germany.

Looking beyond violent Islamism, Pol Pot studied at the Sorbonne in Paris before he led a campaign of political violence in his native Cambodia that killed between 1 and 3 million people — as did the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha, who built perhaps the most oppressive of all of eastern Europe's post-war socialist regimes. Mengistu Haile-Mariam was sent to the United States for military training in the last 1960s, only to later spearhead a communist regime in Ethiopia that became one of the most brutal governments in modern African history. 

Exposure to the democratic world is no guarantee that an individual will develop any kind of sensitivity towards its values or outlook. It can have the exact opposite effect — creating the contrast needed to sharpen an individual's conservatism, as in the case of Qutb or Atta, or fueling visions of a violent revolutionary alternative, as in the case of Mengistu, Pol Pot, or Hoxha.

This is a troubling reality for believers in the idea that the arc of history bends inexorably towards a Western-democratic notion of justice and freedom. Some very smart people have been exposed to the realities of that system up close and have not only found it inadequate but violently rejected it, using their personal experience as the basis for a powerful and often highly resonant critique of western and American values. They serve as evidence that backlash may be more probable than universal democratic triumph, and that that backlash can originate from the heart of democracy itself.

Aslan didn't intend his tweet illustrate this reality. But it does.

Javad Zarif, Iran's California State University-educated Foreign Minister, lived in the US longer than just about any other high-ranking Iranian regime official. As Ali Alfoneh and Reuel Marc Gerecht recalled in an essay in The New Republic, Zarif wrote in a recent Persian-language memoir that he cut himself off from American life as much as possible when he was living in the country:

Apart from a single visit to a professor’s home, where, out of fear of religious dietary restrictions, he did not touch anything but the salad, Zarif recalls that he never set foot in a residence of a non-Muslim American family in the course of more than twenty-four years in the United States. The couple seem to have shared a total disinterest in American society. Zarif admits that they “never learned the name of spices in English” since they did not, either then or later, 
socialize with Americans.

Elsewhere in the book, Zarif expounds upon his view of the Islamic Republic's revolutionary mission, one that involves an explicit rejection of the American and western norms that Zarif had once lived within:

"We have a fundamental problem with the West and especially with America,” Zarif declares. “This is because we are claimants of a mission, which has a global dimension. It has nothing to do with the level of our strength, and is related to the source of our raison d’être." ... While Zarif considers national welfare one of the goals of the Islamic Republic, he stresses that “we have also defined a global vocation, both in the Constitution and in the ultimate objectives of the Islamic revolution.” He adds: “I believe that we do not exist without 
our revolutionary goals.”

Zarif's foreign ministry has apparently taken a hard line on nuclear negotiations, and has refused to back down on uranium enrichment and other fundamental issues. In 2006, a Columbia University undergraduate asked Zarif on camera if he believed that 6 million Jews had died in the Holocaust. Zarif wouldn't say.

What about the others Aslan cites? Mahmoud Vaezi, head of Iran's Ministry for Communications and Information Technology, received a PhD at Lousiana State University after receiving an undergraduate degree at California State University at Sacramento and San Jose. His ministry is responsible for overseeing Iran's National Information Network, the country's compartmentalized and heavily-censored "national internet." It's responsible for all sorts of other censorship as well, and in an interview with Iran's Shargh Daily (Persian original here), Vaezi made it clear that the regime has no immediate plans to lift its web filters.

In 2014, Reporters Without Borders named Iran one of its "enemies of the Internet."

Mohammadreza Nematzadeh, currently Iran's Minister of Industries, was a part of Iran's revolutionary vanguard in the last 1970s, and had a minister-level position in the Islamic Republic's first government. He also held a high position within the Labor and Social Affairs ministry at a time just after the revolution when the Ministry was purging itself of Ba'hai employees. He's an Islamic Republic lifer, although he does hold a degree from Berkley.

Then there's Ali Akbar Salehi, foreign minister during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and currently the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran. His PhD from MIT hasn't prevented his agency from continuing to build and research additional uranium centrifuges even with an interim nuclear deal in place. As foreign minister he implemented policies that maintained Iran's relationship with Bashar al-Assad's regime in the opening years of Syria's civil war. Salehi's educational background did little good for the millions of Syrians that the Assad victimized with Iranian diplomatic and military cover.

Aslan has pointed to a factoid — a piece of information, and nothing more. The educational history of Iran's leadership does nothing to suggest that Iran will be more accommodating towards the United States, or more moderate in its internal or international policies.

SEE ALSO: How the Shah of Iran's illness may have changed the course of Middle Eastern history

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A competition between the U.S. Marine Band out of Okinawa, Japan and the Republic of Korea Army Band was luckily captured on video.

Filmed in the parking lot at the 2014 Gyeryong Military Culture Festival, the two bands faced-off against each other with some pretty awesome drum battles as a crowd looked on. It's obviously a friendly match — South Korea and the US are allies — but the video certainly shows where music can break through a language barrier.

The Marines are based in Okinawa, Japan with III Marine Expeditionary Force. You can decide for yourself who wins this one, but the Marine band leader graciously called it a tie.

It's pretty cool to watch. Check it out:

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Good morning. Here's what you need to know for Thursday. 

1. Hong Kong's pro-democracy protests have been reignited by video footage that appears to show officers beating an unarmed demonstrator, while photos of the victim apparently show severe bruising from the alleged attack. 

2. A second Texas nurse infected with Ebola after treating Liberian patient Thomas Eric Duncan reported having a slight fever before she flew to Dallas from Ohio the day prior to receiving a diagnosis.

3. The plunge in oil prices has placed increasing financial pressure on countries that export it, including Russia, Iran, and Venezuela. In the short term, "the big producers will probably face budget problems in varying degrees of severity, with an array of economic, strategic and political ramifications," The New York Times writes. 

4. Gen. John Allen, a former four-star general, warned on Wednesday that Islamic State militants were making significant gains in Iraq and Syria despite US-led airstrikes against the terrorist group, the Financial Times reports. 

5. Two new polls on Wednesday suggested that Brazil's Oct. 26 presidential election between leftist incumbent Dilma Rousseff and pro-business candidate Aecio Neves would be extremely close. 

6. Hurricane Gonzalo is now churning through the Atlantic and is expected to hit Bermuda on Friday. According to CNN, this is one of the strongest Atlantic storms in recent years.

7. The Chinese drugmaker Sihuan Pharmaceutical Holdings Group Ltd. has sent an experimental Ebola drug to Africa, where the company is planning clinical trials, Reuters reports.  

8. Avalanches and blizzards in Nepal's mountain region have killed at least 20 people, while five climbers are still missing, the Associated Press reports. 

9. BBC's website has been blocked across China after a video that appears to show police officers beating a pro-democracy protester began circulating online. BBC Global News director Peter Horrocks said the move appeared to be "deliberate censorship."

10. Apple is expected to unveil a bunch of new details about the iPad at its second major product launch of the season on Thursday. 

And finally ...

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk thinks that self-driving cars will become a real thing in five to six years. 

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Hong Kong (China) (AFP) - Hong Kong's embattled leader reopened his offer of talks with student leaders Thursday a week after the government abruptly pulled out of discussions aimed at ending weeks of mass democracy rallies.

"Over the last few days, including this morning through third parties, we expressed a wish to the students that we would like to start a dialogue to discuss universal suffrage as soon as we can and hopefully within the following week," Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying told reporters.

The offer comes after a two day spike in violence between police and protesters in which video footage emerged of plainclothes officers beating a handcuffed demonstrator as he lay on the ground in a public park in the early hours of Wednesday morning. 

The video caused widespread outrage among demonstrators who have previously accused police of using excessive violence and failing to protect their ranks from repeated assaults by government loyalists.

Leung refused to be drawn on the video saying: "We should not politicize this incident."

Protesters are calling for Leung to step down and for Beijing to rescind a decision made in August that his successor in 2017 must be vetted by a loyalist committee before standing for election -- something demonstrators have called "fake democracy".

But it remains to be seen what headway could be made in talks between the government and protesters as Leung reiterated that Beijing will not row back on its August decision.

"Politics is the art of the possible and we have to draw a line between possibilities and impossibilities," he said.

SEE ALSO: Meet 15 Protesters Who Are Fighting For Democracy In Hong Kong

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This story was updated at 9:10 ET.

A key American official has confirmed that the US is ditching the nationalist rebels fighting the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad and building a new ground force to focus on fighting the Islamic State, Hannah Allam of McClatchy reports.

“At this point, there is not formal coordination” with the Free Syrian Army, John Allen, the retired Marine general in charge of coordinating the US-led campaign against the Islamic State (aka ISIS or ISIL), told reporters at the State Department. 

General Allen's office tells Business Insider that Allam's report is inaccurate and that the U.S. is still working with parts of the FSA.

"General Allen met with a number of representatives from across the spectrum of the Syrian opposition including key military figures," The statement said. "In all the meetings, General Allen was clear that the US was committed to building upon the existing military capacity of the vetted elements of the Free Syrian Army. He was also clear about the need for the political elements of the moderate Syrian opposition to become as coherent as possible as they will be essential to the long term political outcomes in Syria."

On the other hand, FSA rebels were not invited to a recent meeting regarding the coalition against ISIS and the U.S. has backed off its demands that Assad must go.

“They are basically telling the FSA that they are not part of their plans and they are going to start from scratch,” Andrew Tabler, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told The Daily Beast.

President Barack Obama has repeatedly swept aside the FSA as "essentially an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists, and so forth" while the CIA gave the group just enough training and arms to survive.

SEE ALSO: 2 Big Weaknesses In Obama's ISIS Plan Are Being Fully Exposed

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The world's most expensive piece of military equipment, Lockheed Martin's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jet, is edging towards operability after two decades of research and design. In 2006, the first F-35 rolled out of a high-security plant in Fort Worth, Texas, although the plane is still far from battle-ready.

"Spitfire II,""Black Mamba," and "Cyclone" were just a few of the rumored names for the trillion-dollar plane. 

In July of 2006, Lockheed, alongside the US Air Force, announced the new F-35 jets would be named "Lightning II" in homage to the aerial combat legacy of two former fighter jets.

"This aircraft represents the fruits of lessons learned over a hundred years of flight and aerial combat. We’re excited about bringing it into our inventory, and warfighters around the globe are excited about flying it in defense of freedom," then-US Air Force Chief of Staff General Michael Moseley said at the naming ceremony.

The World War II-era Lockheed P-38 Lightning and the UK's Electric Lightning are the two specific systems credited for the name. 

According to Lockheed the P-38 "shot down more Japanese aircraft than any other fighter and, as a reconnaissance aircraft, obtained 90 percent of the aerial film captured over Europe."

Approximately 10,000 were built during World War II, flying more than 130,000 missions around the globe.

The UK's English Electric, a company now called BAE Systems, developed "The Lightning" in the mid-1950s. It was the world's first aircraft to "supercruise," or break the sound barrier without employing its afterburners. The jet's top-speed was estimated at 1,500 miles per hour.

Currently, there are three variants of the F-35 fighter jet. The first version of the aircraft is expected to be combat-ready by mid-2015, Reuters reports. But the program has been beset with delays and cost overruns, and the plane's debut has been pushed back several times before.

SEE ALSO: This map shows why the F-35 turned into a trillion-dollar disaster

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Amid rising conflicts engulfing the Middle East, most of the 44 nations surveyed in a new Pew Research Center study listed the top threat in the world as "religious and ethnic hatred."

Nations were given the option of selecting between five dangers: nuclear weapons, pollution, AIDS and other diseases, inequality, and religious and ethnic hatred.

At 58%, Lebanon had the highest level of concern of any country and identified religious and ethnic hatred as the single greatest danger to the world, correlating to its diverse religious makeup of Shia Muslims, Sunni Muslims, Lebanese Christians, Greek Orthodox, and Jews. Meanwhile, severe battles between Hezbollah and Jabhat al-Nusra have brought war to Lebanon. Egypt, Israel, Palestine, and Tunisia also shared Lebanon's concern. 

Meanwhile in the West, "the gap between the rich and the poor is increasingly considered the world’s top problem by people living in advanced economies,"the Pew Research Center says. Americans, and generally most European nations listed "inequality" as the world's greatest danger. Spain cited this concern at a rate of 54%, the highest level of concern in this category. 

Ukraine and Russia both named "nuclear weapons" as their highest threat, along with Japan, Pakistan, and Turkey. It is estimated that Russia — which leads the world in number of nuclear weapons — along with the US, UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea, possess approximately 17,000 nuclear weapons altogether.

Most African countries claimed "AIDS and other infectious diseases" as their most pressing issue in the world today.

 Here is the full list of all 44 surveyed countries:

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama authorized the use of American military reservists on Thursday to support humanitarian aid efforts against the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

In a letter to leaders of the US Congress, Obama said an unspecified number of reservists will be used to help activate duty personnel in support of the Ebola mission in West Africa.

It could include personnel like engineers, logistics staff, and communications specialists. No individuals or units has been identified yet for the call-up.

Earlier on Thursday, sources told NBC News that "eight engineers and logistical specialists from the Guard, both active-duty and reservists, would probably be included in the first deployment." They would be assisting in the construction of 17 Ebola treatment centers in Liberia.

"The president has laid out very clearly what the mission is. The Department of Defense has told the president that it will require about 4,000 Department of Defense personnel to execute the mission the president has directed them to execute," White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Thursday, according to USA Today. "What I don't know is the composition of that force."

Here's the full executive order, via Buzzfeed News.

(Reuters reporting By Steve Holland, Jeff Mason and David Alexandria; Editing by Sandra Maler)

SEE ALSO: Our Ongoing Ebola Coverage

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It's not exactly a golden age for Turkish foreign policy. 

ISIS is on Turkey's southern border. Ankara's having trouble handling its always fractious relationship with the Kurds. President Reccip Tayyip Erdogan can't seem to go a week without lashing out at his ostensible allies.

And today, Turkey failed in its bid for a two-year term on the UN Security Council, losing out to Spain and New Zealand in a vote before the UN General Assembly over two open seats.

The result comes as a surprise, since Spain is one of Europe's perennial economic trouble spots, and New Zealand is a geographically isolated island nation of 4.5 million people.

Turkey, on the other hand, fancies itself a rising superpower, a NATO member boasting the world's 17th-largest economy along with a sizable and advanced military. Its leaders have even tried to take a leading role in reforming the Security Council in a way that would reflect the ascendancy of emerging powers like Turkey.

Newsweek's Benny Avni was correct in calling today's vote "a tremendous upset." Avni noted that Turkey's foreign minister had hosted a party for diplomats at Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria the night before the vote, "where many of the guests predicted an easy victory for Turkey."

But Turkey was apparently complacent and didn't realize how dead set its two biggest rivals in the Middle East were against letting Ankara hold one of 15 UNSC votes. Per Avni, the two countries most suspicious of the Muslim Brotherhood wanted Erdogan to pay a tangible diplomatic cost for his support for the group:

In the past few days, according to several diplomatic sources, there was an intense campaign, led by Egypt and Saudi Arabia, against Turkey’s membership in the council. The two countries are angered by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood, which both are fighting at home.

Another possible explanation is Turkey's disastrously muddled handling of its border with Syria. Turkey has lined tanks along the border near the besieged city of Kobane, but steadfastly declined to come to the city's aid as ISIS closed in — at the same time its officials were slamming the allied bombing missions against Islamic State fighters as a "PR campaign."

Turkey has taken a harder line against Syrian President Bashar Assad than just about any other NATO country, something that's led to the government turning a systemic blind eye toward jihadist recruiting within its own borders.

The vote not only denies Turkey one of the most prestigious and powerful positions in the entire international system — it's also a sign of how frustrated much of the world is with Ankara's trajectory, and how ineffective Iraq and Syria's northern neighbor now is at stating its case.

SEE ALSO: Travel back to 1950s Iraq

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Kevlar helmets really do work.

Case in point comes from a Marine's helmet-mounted camera while on patrol in southern Afghanistan. The recently uploaded video shows a very close call after a sniper zeroed in on a group about to exit a doorway.

As three Marines peer out the door, they ask if there is cover outside and then out of nowhere, a single gunshot is heard. The video shows the head of the Marine in the middle snap back, and all three immediately realize what happened and run in the opposite direction.

"Oh sh--!" one of them says right after. Dan Lamothe at The Washington Post's Checkpoint blog reports the incident occurred last year in the Now Zad district in Helmand Province.

"Dude you just got shot," the Marine filming says. "Yeah I did get shot," he responds, rather nonchalantly. 

The video brings to mind a similar incident that happened last year, once again involving a Marine. After he was also shot in the helmet, Marine Cpl. Ian Gorman filled out a damaged gear statement which ended up going viral among Marine leadership in which he wrote, "I was shot in the helmet by enemy. I need a new one. I do not desire to reimburse the government."

Watch (profanity warning):

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Vice President Joe Biden's son Hunter was kicked out of the Navy Reserve this year after he tested positive for cocaine, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

A Yale-educated lawyer, the 44-year-old Hunter Biden was commissioned as a Navy ensign May 7, 2013 and assigned as a public affairs officer at a reserve unit in Norfolk, Va., the Journal reported. But just a month later when he checked into his new unit and was given a drug test, he popped for cocaine.

He was discharged in February of this year.

In a statement, Biden said it was "the honor of my life to serve in the U.S. Navy, and I deeply regret and am embarrassed that my actions led to my administrative discharge. I respect the Navy’s decision. With the love and support of my family, I’m moving forward.”

It was not clear what type of discharge he received. Military personnel discharged for drug usage usually do not receive honorable discharges, although Biden's statement says he received an "administrative discharge."

The Navy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

CNN has more:

The U.S. official said the Navy never had contact with the vice president's office over the issue, and that standard procedure for failed drug tests is administrative discharge. The vice president's office didn't comment on the report.

In a speech given at the commissioning of the USS Delaware in 2012, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus noted that Hunter would be joining the service. His brother Beau also served in the military, as an attorney in the Army with a deployment to Iraq.

Biden's job in the Navy Reserve was only a part-time commitment. He has kept busy as head of the legal unit for Ukraine's largest private gas firm, according to The Washington Post. He also serves as managing partner at Rosemont Seneca Partners and is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University.

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Good morning. Here's what you need to know for Friday. 

1. A wave of deteriorating economic data in Europe has stoked fears of another financial meltdown.

2. The second Dallas nurse infected with Ebola is being transferred to a unit at the National Institutes Of Health in Maryland. 

3. Meanwhile, US lawmakers sharply criticized the response of federal health officials to Ebola in a congressional hearing on Thursday. 

4. Europe also said Thursday that it would step up efforts to contain the spread of Ebola and help the worst-hit countries in West Africa. 

5. Police cleared a main protest site in Hong Kong early Friday, although pro-democracy activists and officials remain in a standoff after three weeks of demonstrations. 

6. Kurdish fighters claim to have pushed back Islamic State militants in the Syrian town of Kobani but have asked a US-led coalition for more airstrikes and weapons. 

7. Hurricane Gonzalo is barreling toward Bermuda as a powerful Category 4 storm. 

8. A $54 billion so-called "tax inversion" deal under which Chicago-based AbbVie would buy the Irish drug company Shire is likely to collapse. 

9. The iPhone 6 is finally available in China.  

10. Apple unveiled its newest iPads — the iPad Air 2 and the iPad Mini 3 — in an event on Thursday. The iPad Air 2 will start at $499, and the iPad Mini 3 will start at $399.

And finally ...

The San Francisco Giants are heading to the World Series. 

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In April, the 20th-century film house British Pathé digitized more than 80,000 of its films and put them on YouTube.

"Ageless Iraq" is one of them, shot in the 1950s to introduce "a new country" to the world, "one that hasn't forgotten the glories of its history."

Since this movie was made, Iraq has been the site of repeated conflict and atrocities — chemical warfare, sectarian violence, a US-led invasion, and now ISIS' blitz across the country. Many observers wonder whether Iraq will even be able to survive as a single, coherent political unit.

The movie is a jarring reminder that nothing in history is inevitable and that there was a time when even one of the world's most problematic countries seemed like it was on a promising trajectory. 

You can watch the entire film here and here.

"Ageless Iraq is no longer a remote, isolated country," the narrator says. "Today she is a main junction linking the east and west"— as these European tourists are meant to prove.

"Ageless Iraq" emphasizes the country's budding modernity, which is presented as a straightforward boon imported from a more advanced western world.

A disciplined police force is credited with keeping Baghdad running safely ...

The US military is trying to reduce its size and spending as it winds down its mission in Afghanistan and attempts to pivot away from the Middle East. But there's one multi-billion dollar factor standing in the way, for one branch of the military at least: the troubled F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

From 2012 to 2013, the only American military branch not to see a 20 percent fall in contract spending obligations, which constitute about half of the total defense budget, was the Navy. Its $94 billion in obligations for the most recent fiscal year represents a dip of only 2 percent, compared to a 22% decline for the Army and a 21% drop for the Air Force.

The F-35, the often-delayed and astronomically expensive fifth-generation fighter jet, is a huge part of the reason why.

As a report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies explains, the Navy's "[shift] toward buying more products, principally the [F-35] Joint Strike Fighter."

"Navy products contract obligations increased by 8 percent, several times the rate of growth from 2009–2012," the report states. "Notable sources of growth included the Joint Strike Fighter program ($7.4 billion), nuclear reactors ($1.1 billion), the H-1 Upgrade program ($800 million), CVN-68 ($800 million), DDG-51 ($750 million), 6 and the E-2C Advanced Hawkeye ($500 million)." 

So the F-35 represents a majority of the Navy's major new product obligations. It's a big reason that spending in this area is still going up, while contract spending is falling across the rest of the military.

Lockheed Martin is the top recipient of Department of Defense contracting for fiscal year 2014 as well, and its F-35 is the single most expensive project in military history.

A slew of problems and delays make the plane a potential liability for many of the US allies contributing to its design and manufacture.

In contrast, the Army has seen huge cuts in its contract obligations, which at $87 billion are smaller than the Navy's for the first time in over ten years. In contrast, the Army's contract spending in 2008 is nearly double what it is today, perhaps a result of the surge that sent around 30,000 additional US troops to Iraq. 

Despite the overall decline in this form of spending, the US military's contract obligations in 2013 were still over $100 billion greater than in 2000 or 2001. The bump in contract spending that followed the post-9/11 "war on terror" appears to be a permanent shift even if it's declined more recently.

Contractors cover a broad category of responsibilities ranging from research and development to hardware procurement and private security work.

Contract obligations represent roughly half of "total gross defense outlays," according to the CSIS report. The share fell to 49 percent in 2013, the lowest total in the post-9/11 era. 

SEE ALSO: This map explains why the F-35 has turned into a trillion-dollar fiasco

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ISIS is laying siege to Iraq's third-largest military installation, where Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) warn that they are ravaged psychologically and on the brink of being overrun, Susannah George reports for McClatchy DC. 

The Ain Asad Air Base, located within Iraq's western Anbar Province, is under attack from ISIS and will likely fall if the ISF forces defending it outside don't receive some kind of outside help.

Soldiers report that they are running low on supplies and that morale has collapsed as the US and coalition troops are providing essentially no support to the installation. 

"It’s not possible to get in any supplies by land," an unidentified ISF soldier told McClatchy. “Forces in the base are almost collapsed psychologically and scared. I cannot say for how long we can hold the base.”

The soldier said that if coalition airstrikes were undertaken in the area, the soldiers besieged in the base could respond to ISIS advances and retake the surrounding villages. But without the airstrikes, the ISF remained pinned-down and surrounded.

ISIS is currently enjoying a surge of strategic momentum in Anbar province, and Iraqi forces are struggling to respond. Earlier this month, ISIS took control of the strategic city of Hit, along with its military base.

Although the ISF said it conducted an orderly retreat from the base and destroyed supplies so that ISIS could not take advantage of them, the jihadists appear to have seized heavy artillery from Hit. This weaponry is now being used to further the jihadists' ambitions throughout the province. ISIS is using the artillery for assaults against the provincial capital Ramadi, as well as in the battle for Ain Asad.

ISIS is continuing to advance across Anbar partly because of the US-led coalition's strategic choices.

Over the past week, the US has been focused on conducting airstrikes against ISIS in Kobane, Syria, while paying minimal attention to ISIS activities in western Iraq.

“The core problem is that the US does not have the strategic initiative," Christopher Harmer, a senior naval analyst at the Institute for the Study of War told McClatchy. "We are reacting to where ISIS is advancing, rather than proactively implementing a strategy to defeat them.”

Should ISIS manage to take the Ain Asad Air base, the group would likely seize a trove of weaponry and munitions. In August, ISIS took control of Syria's Taqba Air Base, and looted SA-16 man-portable air defense systems, Sidewinder missiles, and even MiG-21B fighter jets, which former Iraqi pilots are now reportedly training the jihadists to fly.

SEE ALSO: ISIS keeps defeating the Iraqi army in a 'critical' province next to Baghdad

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Ebola fears have now reached all the way to the front door of the Pentagon.

At 9 AM this morning, according to Washington's WJLA news, police found a woman vomiting in one of the parking lots at the Defense Department's Arlington, VA headquarters. She said she had recently traveled in West Africa, triggering a now-familiar series of responses, including the isolation of the general area and the deployment of a hazardous materials team: 

#Hazmat team at #Pentagon for woman recently arrived from Africa vomiting on tour bus #Ebolahttp://t.co/eXNMAKCn3upic.twitter.com/X2SQ3iG7aX

— Jeffrey Guterman PhD (@JeffreyGuterman) October 17, 2014

The Washington Post notes that these measures were taken "out of an abundance of caution." Even so, just the possibility of Ebola has managed to shut down some of the area around the headquarters of the US military.

The patient was reportedly taken to a hospital in nearby Fairfax, VA.

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