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"Systemic failures" in Uvalde shooting went far beyond local police, Texas House report details

Zach Despart
Texas Tribune
Sun, 17 Jul 2022 12:00 UTC
uvalade
© Evan L'Roy/The Texas TribuneFamily members and friends participate in a march in Uvalde on July 10, 2022, in support of those killed and injured in the school shooting at Robb Elementary.
The 18-year-old who massacred 19 students and two teachers in Uvalde on May 24 had no experience with firearms before his rampage began. He targeted an elementary school with an active shooter policy that had been deemed adequate but also had a long history of doors propped open.

No one was able to stop the gunman from carrying out the deadliest school shooting in Texas history, in part because of "systemic failures and egregious poor decision making" by nearly everyone involved who was in a position of power, a new investigation into the shooting has found.

On Sunday, a Texas House committee released the most exhaustive account yet of the shooter, his planning, his attack and the fumbling response he provoked.

Comment: See also: And:



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Fire

Police say wildfires that tore through UK on hottest day ever may have been arson

Charlotte McLaughlin
Daily Mail
Tue, 19 Jul 2022 15:00 UTC
wennington fires uk
© Peter Macdiarmid/LNPThis pictures show how the dramatic fire in the village of Wennington engulfed a row of homes as the blaze spread from the grass
Wildfires broke out across the UK as families fled for their lives as their homes which they tried to save with buckets of water were engulfed amid blazes across the country in record 40.3C heat - and police are now probing whether some were caused intentionally.

Firefighters have described blazes tearing through homes and buildings in London as 'absolute hell' - with residents evacuated after homes were destroyed, two people taken to hospital for smoke inhalation, and 1,600 calls for assistance.

Elsewhere in the country hundreds of fire crews are out battling raging infernos in Wales, Scotland and the rest of England as 'tinderbox' dry conditions in the UK caused wildfires to threaten homes, animals and people and a children's nursery was destroyed along with most of a street in Yorkshire amid police fears some of the fires could have been deliberate.
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Beaker

Legendary biologist endorses lab leak theory

Noah Carl
The Daily Sceptic
Wed, 20 Jul 2022 14:53 UTC
wuhan lab virus leak covid
A US government report last week concluded that the origin of COVID can most likely be traced to an accidental leak from a Chinese laboratory.
Not many experts have openly endorsed the lab leak theory of Covid origins.

There are the 'internet sleuths' who make up DRASTIC (several of whom remain anonymous). There's the science writer Nicholas Wade. And there's Matt Ridley and Alina Chan - co-authors of Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19. (In a recent interview, Ridley told me that both he and Chan now think a lab leak is "more likely".)

Few others have been willing to come out and say that, yes, the balance of evidence favours a lab leak. This may be because they're genuinely undecided, or because they hold the opposite view (that the evidence favours a natural spillover).

Comment: They always miss the Fort Detrick connection.

See also:

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Propaganda

Russia: Wikipedia designated as lawbreaker


RT
Wed, 20 Jul 2022 13:19 UTC
wikipedia header
© Altan Gocher / DeFodi Images via Getty Images
Russia wants its search engines to inform users that the platform promotes false information about the Ukraine conflict.

Russia's state media regulator, Roskomnadzor, has obliged search engines to label Wikipedia as being in violation of the law, saying that the online encyclopedia promotes misleading information about the conflict in Ukraine.

The watchdog said on Wednesday that it would take steps to punish Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., which hosts Wikipedia, due to its failure to delete content deemed in violation of Russian law. With this in mind, the regulator "has decided to apply a coercive measure which would see search engines inform internet users about a violation of Russian legislation by a foreign entity."

Comment: See also:

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Attention

If the Dutch farmers' protest was happening in Canada, it would be an 'insurrection'

Rex Murphy
National Post
Tue, 19 Jul 2022 07:50 UTC
Dutch farmer protest
© KEES VAN DE VEEN / ANP / AFP via Getty ImagesFarmers block the arrival and departure halls at Groningen Airport Eelde in Eelde, the Netherlands, to protest the Dutch government's far-reaching plans to cut nitrogen and ammonia emissions, on July 6, 2022.
There is something happening in the Netherlands that has been happening for weeks, which if anything even closely resembling it were happening in Canada, especially in Ottawa, it would surely be called an "insurrection." It might even have cabinet ministers and the prime minister calling those participating an intolerable "fringe minority." Come to think of it, it would probably have driven the government to invoke the civil-rights-denying Emergencies Act, and arrest any of its leaders, especially any of those from the rebellion hot spot of darkest and most menacing Medicine Hat.


Comment: Ottawa Freedom Convoy tears down illusion of democracy in North America


I am referring to the huge and continuous protest against the Dutch government. For some weeks now upwards of 40,000 farmers have been on their tractors and in their trucks crowding highways and snarling traffic in a mass protest against a green edict that would force them to halve emissions of nitrogen oxide and ammonia by 2030. Among the minor (sarcasm here) consequences of this wand-wave from on high is that the Dutch would lose about 30 per cent of their livestock numbers. Only 30 per cent — a mere rounding error. Who needs livestock? Food suppliers?

It's quite an amazing story for a couple of reasons, not least of which is the extremely limited, diluted coverage it is receiving worldwide. From our perspective, amazing, too, in that some of the protesters have noted the truckers protest here in Canada as something of their inspiration. So where are the nightly reports, breathless with the "Canadian connection" of a major ongoing European protest?
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Eye 1

Let the people pay: How EU leaders make their citizens suffer the fallout from their failed Russia policy

Rachel Marsden
RT
Wed, 20 Jul 2022 11:33 UTC
president macron
© Chesnot / Getty Images
In a Bastille Day interview, French President Emmanuel Macron told citizens to "prepare ourselves for a scenario where we have to do without Russian gas entirely." At the same time, Macron accused Moscow of using the fuel as a "weapon of war," echoing the spin emanating from a European Union leadership that obscures the real reason the bloc is facing an energy shortage that's driving up the cost of living.

This crisis is entirely self-inflicted.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen accused Russia of energy "blackmail" at the end of April, citing the state-owned Gazprom's announcement of a halt in gas deliveries to Poland and Bulgaria for failing to pay for in rubles. What von der Leyen - and now Macron - conveniently omitted was that it was the EU's own anti-Russian sanctions, adopted in a knee-jerk and ideologically-driven fashion at the outset of the Ukraine conflict, that represent the root cause of these disruptions.

The West quickly adopted a strategy of targeting and sanctioning various aspects of the Russian financial system, including banks and foreign reserves, cutting it off from the SWIFT global transaction system - and then had the gall to complain that Moscow was asking for payment for its gas exports in its own currency to mitigate the hassle of navigating a system from which it was effectively blocked. "Export your gas but good luck trying to get paid," is hardly a reasonable expectation.

Comment: See also:

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Light Saber

Historic decision against mandatory vaccination by Italian court + covid vaccine risk to human genome now legally established


Children's Health Defense
Mon, 18 Jul 2022 06:58 UTC
justice
On July 6th, 2022, the court of Florence has approved a sentence annulling the measure taken by the Order of Psychologists of Tuscany against one of its members, the reason being: 'the suspension of the exercise of the profession risks compromising primary individual rights such as the right to a livelihood and the right to work'.

The judge ruled that the psychologist doesn't need to be vaccinated in order to do his job by establishing that:
  • these substances don't prevent infection and transmission. Therefore, in front of the Italian law, there can not be an obligation.
  • She also recognises that these substances provokes severe adverse events.Therefore, it even less legitimate to force anybody to be injected.
  • The judge put the dignity of the human being at the centre and referred twice to the period of Nazism and Fascism. Mandatory vaccination is possible if there is informed consent. For Covid injections, she explained that an informed consent is not possible as we don't know the ingredients and the mechanisms of these substances because of industrial and alleged military secret.
This interim decision is grounded in serious conclusion: there is no right to suspend a citizen from the right to work based of this illegal request of vaccination with these experimental substances.

With this historic court decision, "the Risk to human genome is now legally established" Renate Holzeisen, Italian attorney engaged in the defense of the Human Rights, said in an interview for an Italian radio.
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Light Sabers

A view from Donbass: Ukraine has treated the people of this region as sub-humans, this made peace impossible

Vladislav Ugolny,
RT
Sun, 17 Jul 2022 14:38 UTC
home in donbass
© AFP / ANATOLII STEPANOV
The military conflict in Ukraine, which began on February 24, was preceded by a long war in Donbass. Over the course of eight years, it claimed the lives of at least 14,200 people (according to the OHCHR), over 37,000 were wounded, hundreds of thousands became refugees or had their homes destroyed. A de-escalation was achieved in February 2015, as both sides realized that a bad peace was better than a good war, and attempted to find a political resolution on the basis of the Minsk agreements. That, however, failed to bring peace to Donbass, which instead faced eight long years of economic and legal blockade, compounded by chaotic shelling of areas near the frontlines.

They were eight hard years, which involved rebuilding bombed schools, hospitals, and houses, a rather humiliating dependence of formerly well-to-do people on humanitarian aid, an economic slump due to the economic blockade imposed by the Ukrainian government, restricted access to pensions, and the risk of being wounded or killed for those who lived in urbanized frontline areas. People who voted for the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics in the referendum in May 2014 could never have imagined living in this endless terror.

They were forced to wait for that terror to stop until February 2022, when Russia recognized the independence of Donbass and then deployed its military to, among other things, protect it and liberate territory occupied by Ukrainian forces since 2014. It hasn't exactly been a walk in the park, but the people of Donbass now know that war will soon be over for them. The people's militias of both republics are doing everything in their power to achieve victory as soon as possible.
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Stock Down

BlackRock lost record breaking $1.7 trillion of clients money in six months

Marc Rubinstein
Bloomberg
Wed, 20 Jul 2022 23:51 UTC
economy crash
BlackRock Inc. is used to breaking records. The world's largest asset manager was the first company to exceed $10 trillion of assets under management. But the bigger they are, the harder they fall. And this year BlackRock achieved another record: the most money lost by a single company in a six-month period. In the first half of this year, it lost $1.7 billion of customer money.

BlackRock management was quick to invoke the market carnage of the first half when it revealed the return on investment last week. "2022 ranks as the worst start in 50 years for both stocks and bonds," Chairman and CEO Larry Finck he said on his earnings call.

While few companies can avoid what the market throws at them, some are at least trying to outdo it. BlackRock is giving up more and more: at the end of June, only about a quarter of its assets were actively managed to beat a benchmark, instead of tracking it smoothly as passive strategies are designed to do. That's less than a third when BlackRock acquired Barclays Global Investors in 2009 to become the leading exchange-traded fund player.
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Attention

Russian-controlled nuclear power plant attacked by Ukraine, 2nd attack this month on Europe's largest plant


RT
Wed, 20 Jul 2022 13:31 UTC
Zaporozhye
© Sputnik / Konstantin MihalchevskiyThis aerial view shows the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant located in the steppe zone on the shore of the Kakhovsky reservoir in the city of Energodar, Zaporozhye region, Ukraine.
Europe's biggest nuclear power plant has been attacked by three 'kamikadze drones' belonging to the Ukrainian armed forces, Russian media has reported, citing local officials.

According to statements, Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, located in southeastern Ukraine but under the control of Moscow's forces, has not been damaged and its reactor was not impacted by the attack.

The radiation background is normal and it is constantly being monitored, Vladimir Rogov, a member of the Zaporozhye Region military-civil administration, told Tass news agency.

Comment: Footage following the attack:



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