“1st Ebola diagnosis in the United States: Is there reason to worry?”

For the first time, a patient in an American hospital has been diagnosed with Ebola. The unidentified man, who is being treated at a Dallas hospital, didn't show symptoms until after four or five days of arriving in the United States from Liberia. Citing privacy concerns, official are being tight-lipped about how he contracted the virus or how he's being treated. Shortly after the news broke Tuesday evening, more than 50,000 tweets about Ebola flew through Twitter in a one-hour period, many of them panicked responses. Should we be concerned? The short answer: no. Now let's get to the long answer. Could the patient's fellow passengers be infected? Fellow passengers aren't thought to be at risk because you can only contract Ebola through direct contact of someone who's actively sick with it. The CDC has issued warnings to avoid nonessential travel to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, the countries grappling most with the outbreak. And it's also working with airport officials in those nations, so every person getting on a plane is screened for fever.

In Other News Testimony given by the director of the embattled U.S. Secret Service on Tuesday appears to conflict with the news that broke hours after Julia Pierson's testimony -- that a private security contractor with a gun shared an elevator with President Obama, in violation of protocol, during his trip to Atlanta two weeks ago. Pierson is responsible for briefing the President whenever there is a serious breach of his or his family's security. Late Thursday morning, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi told a group of reporters in New York that his country had uncovered a plot by ISIS sympathizers to attack subway systems in Paris and New York. Al-Abadi said the information had come from his country's intelligence service. The federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies quickly cautioned that they could not confirm the Iraqi report. None the less the story was featured on the evening news broadcasts on NBC and CBS. New York officials, prompted by the report, deployed SWAT teams and K-9 units to the city's subway stations, sent uniformed patrol personnel to check on all 450 stations in the subway system, randomly inspected handbags and luggage and kept officers on duty after their shifts ended. By the next day, heavily armed officers were patrolling subway systems in cities across the country. All because of a report that had been debunked early on.