The most popular name for baby boys in the UK is Muhammad, according to a new chart for 2014 compiled by BabyCentre. The name, also spelled as Mohammed and often given after the Muslim prophet, has seen an enormous gain in popularity, jumping 27 ranks. “Traditionally Mohammed is often given to the first-born boy in Muslim families,” managing editor at parenting website BabyCentre, Sarah Redshaw,... 

A car moved by the La Berre river after the city of Portel-des-Corbieres, southern France, was flooded following heavy rains on November 30, 2014. In southern France, more than 1,500 people have been forced to evacuate their homes amid the country’s worst flooding in over a decade. According to French officials, between “800 and 1,000 people” were evacuating their homes along the Agly river in... 

Palestinians carry their belongings as they leave their flooded houses during heavy rain in Gaza City on November 27, 2014. Thousands of Palestinians have been evacuated from their homes and moved to safer places in the Gaza Strip after heavy flooding struck the besieged coastal sliver earlier this week. Among those affected on Saturday were families who had lost their homes during Israel’s 50-day... 

The Anosibe slum area is seen in the Malagasy capital Antananarivo. Malagasy officials have raised the death toll from a recent bubonic plague outbreak to 47 as the bacterial disease spreads through the country. Madagascar’s Health Ministry made the announcement on Monday, and warned that the toll would probably rise over the coming months as it spreads towards the capital Antananarivo. They added... 

A car is carried away by flood waters in the southern region of Ouarzazate in Morocco, November 22, 2014. At least 35 people have been killed in a flooding in Morocco while 214 others have been rescued, the country’s Interior Ministry says. The southern province of Guelmim which was worst affected by the floods, accounted for 24 of the fatalities, the Interior Ministry said in a statement. The... 

A worker in a bio-hazard suit waits to disinfect a truck which is loaded with ducks culled for bird flu infection, at the exit of a poultry farm in southern Germany. A new case of the H5N8 strain of bird flu, which is highly contagious among birds but has never been detected in humans, has been found in a wild goose in northern Germany. “The H5N8 virus has been confirmed in a wild bird in [Germany’s... 

FDNY activated the Special Operations and Hazmat units after the woman, who had recently traveled from Guinea, dropped dead in Brooklyn on Tuesday, raising the alert of a suspected new Ebola case. A woman who returned from Guinea 18 days ago and was on an Ebola monitoring list dropped dead in a Brooklyn hair salon yesterday after eyewitnesses said she began bleeding from the mouth and nose, but authorities... 

About half of the US had snow on the ground Tuesday, with temperatures falling to freezing in all 50 states. A massive snowstorm has wreaked havoc in much of the United States, bringing record low temperatures and leaving at least seven people dead. About half of the country had snow on the ground Tuesday, with temperatures falling to freezing in all 50 states, including Hawaii, according to the National... 

Storms, heavy rain and flooding have battered an already water-logged north-central Italy, shutting down costal roads and rail links. The heavy rain triggered flash floods, causing rivers to burst their banks, forcing limited evacuations and closing road and bridges on Saturday. Italy’s civil protection agency issued flood alerts for a large region of the country, from the port city of Genoa on... 

Marcel-Lehel Lazar, the Romanian top hacker known as Guccifer who accessed private email accounts of numerous top government & military officials as well as the Bush & Rockefeller family, is quoted in the New York Times as predicting a nuclear attack on Chicago sometime in 2015. A potpourri of conspiracy theories about the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the 1997 death of Princess Diana... 

Pentagon’s main innovation unit is looking for promising ideas that would help thwart infectious disease outbreaks, including Ebola epidemic that already claimed almost 5,000 lives out of 13,241 officially confirmed cases worldwide. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Pentagon’s research organization tasked with developing advanced military technology has announced a tender... 

The United Nations’s Ebola chief has expressed hope that the deadly outbreak, which is wreaking havoc on West African countries, could be contained by 2015. UN System Coordinator for Ebola Virus Disease David Nabarro made the remarks in an interview with The Associated Press on Thursday. Nabarro voiced optimism that “in the coming months we could certainly see a diminution, and hopefully in the... 

This trio of images obtained October 6, 2014 from NASA/JPL-Caltech depicts satellite observations of NASA/JPL-Caltechdeclining water storage in California as seen by NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment(GRACE) satellites in June 2002 (L), June 2008 (C) and June 2014. Water in the world’s largest aquifers is being pumped out at greater rates than can be replenished naturally. NASA... 

At least a dozen people have been killed and hundreds of others remain missing following heavy rains that caused a massive landslide in central Sri Lanka. Rescue workers have begun their search for more than 300 people who are either missing or unaccounted for after the huge landslide hit the village of Koslanda Wednesday morning. Koslanda is located some 200 kilometers east of the capital, Colombo. “The... 

A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds that almost three quarters of Americans want to see government enforced mandatory quarantines for health workers returning from West Africa. A whopping 71% of respondents said they felt health workers who have treated Ebola sufferers abroad should be subject to a 21-day isolation, even if they show no symptoms of the virus themselves. Just 24 percent disagree...