There are reports that a huge blast rocked Beirut today (Tues) with videos online showing a massive blast. It is reported that over 70 people have been killed with hundreds injured. Streets in surrounding areas have been destroyed and the blast was so powerful cars quite far back from the blast were flipped over.

The initial reports are suggesting the explosion occurred at a warehouse where dangerous chemicals and fireworks were stored but this could easily be a strategy to set the narrative. Given the scale of the blast one would have to wonder are fireworks really that popular and besides the main explosion indicates something far more massive.

In the last year Lebanon has undergone a huge financial crisis and the country has been plunged into poverty and the value of the currency has plumented with the result of a huge surge in unemployment and poverty. The country is completely broke. Thus the recent political development have to be therefore linked to today's explosion in some way.
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Student debt relief is now included in round the clock stimulus package negotiations on Capitol Hill. On Thursday, President Trump indicated that student debt relief measures passed in the Spring could be extended in the final Congressional package. read full story / add a comment

“We are slipping back from the age of reason into the mire of mystery, into a world of gods and devils, ghouls and angels. The difference this time is that we have chosen ignorance over knowledge, vapidity over insight, folly over realism. Consequently, we only have ourselves to blame when the rich and powerful take advantage of us.” – Andrew Davenport

Introduction

Why do we need to talk about Romanticism? What is Romanticism? And how does it affect us in the 21st century? The fact is that we are so immersed in Romanticism now that we cannot see the proverbial wood for the haunted-looking trees. Romanticism has so saturated our culture that we need to stand back and remind ourselves what it is, and examine how it has seeped into our thinking processes to the extent that we are not even aware of its presence anymore. Or why this is a problem. The Romanticist influence of intense emotion makes up a large part of modern culture, for example, in much pop music, cinema, TV and literature, e.g. genres such as Superheroes, Fantasy, Horror, Magical realism, Saga, Westerns. I will look at the origins of Romanticism, and its negative influence on culture and politics. I will show how Enlightenment ideas originally emerged in opposition to an absolute monarchy and the fixed dogmas of the Church and led to the formation of a working class ideology and culture of resistance. read full story / add a comment

UN Press Release, 27 JULY 2020 – An additional 6.7 million children under the age of five could suffer from wasting – and therefore become dangerously undernourished – in 2020 as a result of the socio-economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, UNICEF warned today.

According to an analysis published in The Lancet, 80 per cent of these children would be from sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Over half would be from South Asia alone.

“It’s been seven months since the first COVID-19 cases were reported and it is increasingly clear that the repercussions of the pandemic are causing more harm to children than the disease itself,” said UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore. “Household poverty and food insecurity rates have increased. Essential nutrition services and supply chains have been disrupted. Food prices have soared. As a result, the quality of children’s diets has gone down and malnutrition rates will go up.” read full story / add a comment

Religious leaders representing over 95% of Puerto Rico's population wrote Congress urging that the island be included in the next stimulus plan. Job creation, disaster relief and protections for the vulnerable were lifted in a letter signed by leaders of the Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran, Christian (Disciples) and Evangelical Churches. The Puerto Rico Council of Churches, Catholic Charities (Caritas) and the General Bible Society also added their names to the letter to Congress. read full story / add a comment

Ireland Has a New Coronavirus Fear: Americans Who Flout Quarantine read full story / add a comment

Alert to citizens, governors, mayors, presidents, prime ministers, and public health officials—

You want science. You always state that. Well, here is your very own science. In a paper titled: “Nonpharmaceutical Measures for Pandemic Influenza in Nonhealthcare Settings—Personal Protective and Environmental Measures.” Published in: “Emerging Infectious Diseases, Vol.26, No. 5, May 2020, it says:

Here, we review the evidence base on the effectiveness of nonpharmaceutical personal protective measures and environmental hygiene measures in non-healthcare settings and discuss their potential inclusion in pandemic plans. Although mechanistic studies [*] support the potential effect of hand hygiene or face masks, evidence from 14 randomized controlled trials of these measures did not support a substantial effect on transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza. We similarly found limited evidence on the effectiveness of improved hygiene and environmental cleaning.”
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Many people may already be aware of Jon Rappoport who writes at extensively at https://NoMoreFakeNews.com/ and who has from the very get go has asked fundamental questions about the Covid-19 crisis and provided very insightful analysis.

He has in conjunction with Catherine Austin Fitts of the Solari Report created a six part series of podcasts covering the how, why and objectives of the Covid-19 crisis. Catherine Austin Fitts is a leading financial expert and during the Bush Snr administration was She was Assistant Secretary of Housing — Federal Housing Commissioner at the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development

The second set of podcasts are interviews of various people, one an Prof of pathology of 20 years, Dr John Lee who talks alot of sense and calls out the British government on their approach to Covid. Then there is a really interesting interview of another doctor,

Dr James Todaro who explains what LancetGate is -the scandal around the Lancet Journal and the campaign to denigrate the drug Hydroxychloroquine read full story / add a comment

Testing on an experimental COVID vaccine began on 2000 “volunteers” in South Africa this week, and protesters gathered at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg to protest.

This is the Oxford University’s coronavirus vaccine trial from the UK, funded heavily by the World Health Organization and Bill Gates. read full story / add a comment

High Court calls Ireland and the Attorney General into challenge to Legal Aid Board’s refusal to consider aid for environmental charity.

Judge highlight Aarhus Convention’s requirements for access to justice

High Court Justice Niamh Hyland has directed that Ireland and the Attorney General be joined in the proceedings brought by an environmental charity against the Legal Aid Board for its refusal to consider an application for legal aid because the charity was a company and not an individual. read full story / add a comment

Michael Moore's important new film 'Planet of Humans' has given shape to suspicions that I and many others have had about the burgeoning green movement and what is driving it's sudden popularity across the spectrum, despite all the years "in the wilderness" when old school green activists were pariahs.
Of course It's the usual reason as we suspected: i.e. corporate PROFIT!
WATCH THIS MOVIE!! read full story / add a comment

The Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) has released a press release today where they did their own analysis of the excess deaths in Ireland since early March and the figure they come to is between 1,100 and 1,200 which is substantially lower than the "official" Covid death toll of 1700+.

This means that as was suspected the official number was way too liberal with categorizing deaths as due to Covid. This new figure is closer to a regular year of flu in terms of number of deaths and conclusively proves that Covid is barely any more dangerous than flu in terms of threat. What we see here is a slow back track and while the emphasis is still on social distancing, this is merely to give cover to the fact that at a minimum this has been one big mistake and a massive over-reaction but is true of many other countries but not all. It could be viewed as how badly group think has taken over our society because there were moments in the last few months where one dare not challenge the official figures for fear of social ostracizing
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IRELAND'S UN SECURITY COUNCIL SEAT

LETTER SENT TO IRISH BROADSHEET NEWSPAPERS

Sir,

Ireland’s previous stint on the UN Security Council in 2001 is nothing to be proud of in terms of promoting world peace.

In 2001, under the then Fianna Fail Government with Brian Cowan as Foreign Minister, Ireland voted for several resolutions that ultimately approved the US led invasion of Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world, in what then Labour TD Michael D. Higgins termed “an illegal war”. Nineteen years later with no end in sight America’s longest war has caused the deaths and injuries of tens of thousands, many of them women and children, and has created deep bitterness, division and sectarianism. read full story / add a comment

Comparing similarities of the Political Governance in Ireland to that of China.
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Shannon LNG faces further challenge in High Court
Judicial Review of listing as ‘Project of Common Interest’

The controversial Shannon LNG terminal proposed for the Shannon Estuary faces its second challenge in the High Court from the environmental charity, Friends of the Irish Environment today. The environmental organisation is asking the Irish Court to seek a ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union on whether the inclusion of the project on a list of priority European Energy infrastructure was lawful. read full story / add a comment

Legal Aid Board refusal to fund environmental NGO faces High Court challenge
Irish legal costs ‘prohibitively expensive’

The High Court will tomorrow [June 30] hear a two-day challenge to the Legal Aid Board’s refusal to provide legal aid to the environmental charity Friends of the Irish Environment [FIE].

The NGO sought the funding in April of 2018 to support its Judicial Review of the National Development Plan and the National Planning Framework. This case alleges that the Government of Ireland erred in law in failing to adequately fulfil its obligations under the Strategic Environmental Assessment and the Habitats Directive when approving the plans. read full story / add a comment

Finally there is someone out there and certainly not from the mainstream media who is calling bullshit on the whole Covid nonsense. In this opinion piece by John Church from the hectordrummond blog, many will nod their head in agreement. He really cuts through the crap.

I have had enough. After nearly 3 months of this, I am going to call it for what it is: TOTAL AND UTTER NONSENSE. I cannot watch any news programme anymore, given the 24/7 monochromal pseudo-emotion that is all we ever see. read full story / add a comment

PLANNING BOARD QUESTIONS DURSEY ISLAND MASS TOURISM PROJECT
Not Satisfied Over Bird Protection on Remote Island

An Bord Pleanála has sought further information on the application by Cork County Council in partnership with Fáilte Ireland for a €10 million development on Dursey Island off the west Cork coast.

The 6.5 km long uninhabited island, currently accessed by a cable car with a capacity of 6 and return journey time of 20 minutes, is to be replaced by a state-of-the-art two-way cable car system capable of carrying up to 300 people each way every hour. The project includes an extensive Visitor Centre with restaurant, gift shop and glazed elevator on the mainland. read full story / add a comment

The murder of Floyd is not a once-off incident. Last year 1,099 people were killed by the US police, of which a sizeable proportion are black. 99% of these murders remain in absolute impunity –an alarming impunity rate only rivalled by the likes of Colombia in the continent, which goes to demonstrate how police violence, far from an anomaly, is condoned by the US establishment. By all of it, whether Republican or Democrat. read full story / add a comment

This report is from AntiWar.com

In April, an exclusive report published on Mintpress News laid bare an "unholy alliance" between al-Qaeda and the displaced government of Abdurabbuh Mansur Hadi that a coalition led by Sunni Gulf monarchies has been unsuccessfully seeking to reinstall with the help of the West since 2015. These revelations come on top of previous investigations that have further exposed how the relentless Western-backed war in Yemen has emboldened al-Qaeda militants responsible for multiple terrorist attacks on Western targets in the last two decades. Even if the war is drawing to a close, a strengthened al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) will be the result. read full story / add a comment