This essay is written from the point of view of a physician, medical educator, and bioethicist who sees the deplorable fact of physician involvement in the Shoah as an opportunity to highlight enduring moral lessons for the medical professions. Medicine and law are intimately connected to one another, and, since the professionalization of medicine in the United States and Europe in the latter half of the 19th century, even more so. One discipline that connects both is moral philosophy; for b oth law and medicine involve reason and the will, directed toward the good of the person. Thus, the story of the Holocaust is a tragedy that unfolded because of the corruption of moral philosophy first, and medicine and law second.

Why is this important? The reason is that there are those who argue against the contemporary application of lessons learned from the horrors of Nazi medicine. Some say that "Nazi medicine" was not real medicine or science: We cannot even call what the Nazis did "medicine," since medicine contains within it an assumption of rigor and beneficence. This is an objection I hear from medical scientists, who point to safeguards such as the Nuremberg Code (1947), the Declaration of Helsinki (1964), and the Belmont Report (1978) as proof of the radically different nature of science today. But this argument is circular. It defines science as "good science," (relegating anything unethical to "bad science" or "pseudoscience") when in fact these very safeguards were born out of abuses from what was then the most scientifically advanced country in the world. Medicine then, as now, is not somehow immune from this abuse, as the horrific postwar abuses at Tuskegee and elsewhere make clear.

Other scholars have suggested that the real cause of the Holocaust was an economic, political, or racial one — not a moral one — and that, since the United States has a radically different political, economic, and cultural system, the use of the "Nazi analogy" should be restricted. Medical abuses today are somehow less likely because economic, political, and cultural considerations are highly specific. One prominent bioethicist, for example, noted:

A key component of Nazi thought was to rid Germany ... of those deemed economic drains on the state ... a fear rooted in the bitter economic experience after the First World War. ... [These themes] have little to do with contemporary debates about science, medicine, or technology.

New evidence has emerged of gross violations during the UK investigation into the alleged poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury on 4^th March 2018. The new revelations put into question the main evidence that the Skripals were poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok.

The blood samples taken from the Skripals could have been tampered with so that they test positive for Novichok, newly disclosed information obtained from the UK Ministry of Defense reveals. Furthermore, documents show that Russia was not the only country in the world that could be linked to the nerve agent Novichok.

The US had covered up its own Novichok program masked as research on fourth generation nerve agents (FGAs) and muzzled the Organisation for the prohibition of chemical weapons (OPCW) a decade before the Skripals attack.

Beijing's flood season ended on Aug. 31, with the highest average precipitation in recent 20 years, said the municipal meteorological bureau.

During the flood season, lasting from June 1 to Aug. 31, the average precipitation of China's capital reached 627.4 mm, approximately 70 percent more than that of the same period in ordinary years.

In 2021, Beijing has also experienced the rainiest July since 1951, as measured by average precipitation of 400.4 mm.

From June 1 to Aug. 31, the city reported 62 instances of precipitation, an increase of 30 percent from the same period last year, said the bureau.

Source: Xinhua

We received 379 reports about a fireball seen over Île-de-France, Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, Bretagne, Brittany, Centre-Val de Loire, Cymru, England, Hauts-de-France, Normandie, Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Occitanie, Pays de la Loire, St Helier, St Martin, Vale and Wales on Sunday, September 5th 2021 around 21:47 UT.

For this event, we received 5 videos and one photo.

People from across the political spectrum packed onto the streets of Amsterdam to protest the Dutch government's proposed vaccine passes. The demonstration blocked roads in the city centre for miles.

Crowds of protesters gathered in Amsterdam's Dam Square on Sunday for a 7km (4 mile) march through the city's canal-lined streets and back to the square, all in protest of the center-right government's coronavirus policies.

Video footage showed a seemingly endless column of protesters marching along the route, with some observers claiming that the actual group of demonstrators was up to 3km (1.8 miles) long.

French riot police officers have been scolded for brutally arresting two women, after backing away when confronted by a big group of protesters against the so-called coronavirus health passes, who stormed a mall in central Paris.

Hundreds of people forced their way into the Forum des Halles shopping center on Saturday, amid a nationwide string of demonstrations against the Covid-19 restrictions and mandates. The group was seen chanting 'Freedom!' inside the mall, which is partially underground and connected to the metro transit hub of Chatelet-Les Halles.


To restore public order, authorities deployed a riot police unit, BRAV-M, a French acronym for the Motorized Brigades for the Repression of Violent Actions - even though the crowd was not even technically defying the ban on entering shopping centers without a health certificate, since Forum des Halles is one of a handful of Paris venues exempt from the coronavirus pass mandate.

Work is now underway on building a "sanitary shield" around Russia, held together by a chain of high-tech biological research facilities designed to handle deadly pathogens and develop vaccines against them, Moscow has announced.

Speaking at the New Knowledge conference in the Russian capital on Friday, Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova praised the project as vital for the country to deliver. The order to establish it came from President Vladimir Putin himself, and officials are now "actively working" on plans for it, she said.

"Today we believe that this project is one of the most important, because this won't be the only pandemic that we will have to face in our lives," Golikova added. The first 15 "high security" laboratories will be up and running by 2024 and will deal with viruses that are "very, very contagious, and lead to fatal diseases," she said. At present, the country only has three such labs, but there are hopes to lift this number to 36 by 2030.

Being White House press secretary is hard. Particularly hard when your boss seemingly can't remember what he said last week. Even harder when he's caught trying to push a false narrative onto another world leader.

It must have something to do with all those TV lights, the undivided attention of the audience and the sheer power of being the intermediary between the President of the United States and the world's press that turns perfectly ordinary people into power-crazed monsters prepared to say or do anything to keep mud from sticking to their employer.

In The Covidian Cult (Part I) and (Part II), I characterized the so-called "New Normal" as a "global totalitarian ideological movement."

Since I published those essays, more and more people have come to see it for what it is, not "insanity" or "an overreaction," but, in fact, a new form of totalitarianism, a globalized, pathologized, depoliticized form, which is being systematically implemented under the guise of "protecting the public health."

In order to oppose this new form of totalitarianism, we need to understand how it both resembles and differs from earlier totalitarian systems. The similarities are fairly obvious — the suspension of constitutional rights, governments ruling by decree, official propaganda, public loyalty rituals, the outlawing of political opposition, censorship, social segregation, goon squads terrorizing the public, and so on — but the differences are not obvious.

Whereas 20th-Century totalitarianism (i.e., the form most people are generally familiar with) was more or less national and overtly political, New Normal totalitarianism is supranational, and its ideology is much more subtle. The New Normal is not Nazism or Stalinism. It is global-capitalist totalitarianism, and global capitalism doesn't have an ideology, technically, or, rather, its ideology is "reality."

A stunned U.S. East Coast faced a rising death toll, surging rivers and tornado damage Thursday after the remnants of Hurricane Ida walloped the region with record-breaking rain, drowning more than 40 people in their homes and cars.

In a region that had been warned about potentially deadly flash flooding but hadn't braced for such a blow from the no-longer-hurricane, the storm killed at least 46 people from Maryland to Connecticut on Wednesday night and Thursday morning.

At least 23 people died in New Jersey, Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy said. At least 13 people were killed in New York City, police said, 11 of them in flooded basement apartments, which often serve as relatively affordable homes in one of the nation's most expensive housing markets. Suburban Westchester County reported three deaths.

Officials said at least five people died in Pennsylvania, including one killed by a falling tree and another who drowned in his car after helping his wife to escape. A Connecticut state police sergeant, Brian Mohl, perished after his cruiser was swept away. Another death was reported in Maryland.

Sophy Liu said she tried using towels and garbage bags to stop the water coming into her first-floor New York City apartment, but the flood rose to her chest in just a half hour. She roused her son from bed, put him in a life jacket and inflatable swimming ring and tried to flee, but the door stuck. She called two friends who helped her jar it loose.