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Tornado2

Best of the Web: Tornado hits Beirut Port, near explosion site

Sheeraz Raza
Insider Paper
Thu, 22 Oct 2020 12:06 UTC
waterspot
First rains of the season in Lebanon bring along frightening whirlwinds to the destroyed Beirut port area. Some viral videos are circulating on the web of the whirlwind/tornado at the site of the explosion at Beirut Port.

On 4 August 2020, a massive amount of ammonium nitrate stored at Beirut port city, the capital of Lebanon, exploded, causing at least 203 deaths, and around 6,500 injuries.

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People 2

Best of the Web: UK: Teaching white privilege as uncontested fact is illegal, minister says

Jessica Murray
The Guardian
Tue, 20 Oct 2020 23:23 UTC
Kemi Badenoch
© UK Parliament/Jessica Taylor/PAKemi Badenoch, the women and equalities minister, addressing the House of Commons in July.
Kemi Badenoch tells Commons debate on Black History Month that schools must offer opposing views.

Schools which teach pupils that "white privilege" is an uncontested fact are breaking the law, the women and equalities minister has said.

Addressing MPs during a Commons debate on Black History Month, Kemi Badenoch said the government does not want children being taught about "white privilege and their inherited racial guilt".

"Any school which teaches these elements of political race theory as fact, or which promotes partisan political views such as defunding the police without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law," she said.

Comment: Boom! Go Kemi go! It's nice that someone is telling it like it is and fighting against this dangerous ideology.

More background from the Independent:
While critical race theory exists as a broad school of thought that originated from left wing legal activism, central tenets of the philosophy include accepting the existence of systemic racism, as well as the prevalence of white supremacy and privilege over other racial groups.

It comes after the government was criticised for banning the use of teaching material that calls for the end of capitalism — describing it as an "extreme political stance".

In October, the Department for Education's guidance for PSHE programmes was updated to state that "schools should not use resources produced by organisations that take extreme political stances on matters. Examples of extreme political stances include ... a publicly stated desire to abolish or overthrow democracy, capitalism, opposition to the right or freedoms of speech ... or organisations that promote victim narratives that are harmful to British society".
See also:

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Bullseye

Best of the Web: UK Telegraph editor: "I'm almost starting to think this whole pandemic really is a conspiracy"

Annabel Fenwick Elliott
The Telegraph
Tue, 20 Oct 2020 16:38 UTC
covid suits
© GettyThe death toll is low, why are we marching into yet another ruinous lockdown?
I've been suspicious from the start. Back in March, when this novel virus first swept in from the East and countries across Europe started bolting their doors even before cases mounted, I remember saying to people, 'Blimey, what aren't they telling us yet?'

It was clearly killing people, but not in numbers that warranted the complete shutdown of society, I mused, as I cleared my desk and left the office for what would be - little did I know it then - seven months and counting.

We've had pandemics before during my lifetime. I cast my mind back to the 2009 swine flu outbreak. There was an initial flurry of panic; of media scaremongering, and yes, some deaths. But scientists quickly classified the foreign-imported pathogen as a new strain of flu and got to work making a vaccine. Life went on as normal.

Covid-19 was obviously proving to be a lot more virulent than swine flu, but even early on it was clear that the virus was sparing the vast majority of the population. Those I knew who caught it either suffered symptoms similar to a mild cold, or none at all. Bemused, as the Government set about building Nightingale hospitals that would hardly be used and Britain's vibrant cities turned into ghost towns, I kept thinking to myself, 'when are they going to tell us what's really going on?'
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Black Magic

Best of the Web: Young volunteer DIES during AstraZeneca's Covid-19 vaccine trial in Brazil. Pharma giant sez: 'No safety concerns'

Eduardo Simões
Reuters
Wed, 21 Oct 2020 07:24 UTC
AstraZeneca
© REUTERS/Amanda PerobelliFILE PHOTO: An employee is seen at the Reference Center for Special Immunobiologicals (CRIE) of the Federal University of Sao Paulo (Unifesp) where the trials of the Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine are conducted, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, June 24, 2020. Picture taken June 24, 2020.
Brazilian health authority Anvisa said on Wednesday that a volunteer in a clinical trial of the COVID-19 vaccine developed by AstraZeneca AZN.L and Oxford University had died but added that the trial would continue.

Oxford confirmed the plan to keep testing, saying in a statement that after careful assessment "there have been no concerns about safety of the clinical trial."


Comment: Actually, vaccine trials in the US were suspended due to concerns about side effects, however trials were, for some unspecified reason, allowed to continue in South Africa... So far 8,000 of the planned 10,000 volunteers in the trial have been recruited and given the first dose in six cities in Brazil, and many have already received the second shot, he said.


A source familiar with the matter told Reuters that the trial would have been suspended if the volunteer who died had received the COVID-19 vaccine, suggesting the person was part of the control group that was given a meningitis vaccine.


Comment: This is an unproven claim.


CNN Brasil reported that the volunteer was a 28-year-old man who lived in Rio de Janeiro and died from COVID-19 complications.

Comment: China has successfully passed multiple trials of their coronavirus vaccine and Russia has officially launched theirs: Also check out SOTT radio's:

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Binoculars

Best of the Web: Macron addresses killing of 'beheaded' French teacher, an 'Islamist terrorist attack' - UPDATES

Emma Beswick
euronews
Sat, 17 Oct 2020 18:24 UTC
Macron
© AFPPresident Emmanuel Macron called the attack an "assassination"
A teacher beheaded on a street near Paris on Friday afternoon has been named as Samuel Paty by French Education MinisterJean-Michel Blanquer.

The suspected killer, who was armed with a knife and a plastic pellet gun, was later shot dead by officers in a nearby town, police said.

French authorities have launched an anti-terror investigation.

President Emmanuel Macron called it an "assassination" and an "Islamist terrorist attack".

Here's what we know about the attack so far:

Who was the victim?

Paty, a 47-year-old history and geography teacher, was decapitated near the school in the commune of Conflans Saint-Honorine, northwest of the French capital, at around 5 pm local time.

Police told the AFP news agency that he had hosted a class discussion with secondary school students about cartoons of Islam's Prophet Muhammad.

Comment: Police also apprehended those believed to be connected to the killer:
French police have detained four people, including a minor, in connection with the brutal slaying of a schoolteacher in Conflans-Saint-Honorine near Paris, which was described by President Emmanuel Macron as Islamist terrorism.

Five more people were taken into custody after the raid, according to unconfirmed French media reports. Among them is the suspect's father and several people who were involved in a row with the victim, a school teacher, which allegedly triggered the crime.
Charlie Hebdo magazine is organizing a rally in response to the gruesome murder:
The French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which was targeted by Islamists for publishing cartoons of Islam's Prophet Mohammed, has called for a public rally in the wake of what is seen as a copycat killing of a schoolteacher.

The publication, known for its no-holds-barred approach to satirical cartoons, has called on the French people to show up on Sunday in the iconic Paris Place de la Republique square. The protest is being organized in league with the French teachers' union and freedom groups, Charlie Hebdo said.
UPDATE (10/19): Abdoulakh Anzorov reportedly tweeted an image of Mr. Paty's head after the murder. Some of Paty's students may have seen the image, which included this message: "From Abdullah, the servant of Allah, to Macron, the leader of the infidels, I executed one of your hell dogs who dared to belittle Muhammad." Paty had been doxxed online after he showed the image of a naked Mohammed cartoon. Any angry father whose daughter was in the class called on Muslims to take action against the teacher. After that, Paty's personal information showed up online.

Russian authorities say they have no powers to open up their own investigation into Anzorov, but will keep in touch with French officials. They added that he had been radicalized in France (he lived there since he was six), so there's not much they can do.

Meanwhile France intends to strengthen their control over Islamist group funding. And French police have made a number of arrests in operations against Islamist radicals:
The authorities have launched more than 80 probes into the spread of hate online, [the interior minister] said.
Never has the government mobilized so many resources to fight Islamism on social media.
Darmanin said that around 50 Muslim groups will be inspected by the authorities this week. "Several of them, as per my proposal according to the president's request, will be dissolved by the Council of Ministers."

One of the groups in the crosshairs is the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF), a human rights NGO chronicling attacks on Muslims, according to its website. Darmanin linked the group to the parent who had "launched a 'fatwa' against the teacher."
A certain number of elements allow us to believe that [this group] is an enemy of the Republic.
The minister said he will also ask for another Muslim NGO, BarakaCity, to be dissolved. Its founder, Idriss Sihamedi, was detained last week following an online harassment complaint by a media columnist.
...
Journalist Zineb El Rhazoui accused the CCIF of participating in a "harassment campaign" against the slain teacher, and similar allegations were made by lawmaker Aurore Berge. The CCIF rejected these allegations as "false," denying any ties to the case.

BarakaCity head Sihamedi, meanwhile, said that the dissolution of the group cannot happen "in the snap of a finger," and would be "illegal," because Darmanin is "not a king in an absolute monarchy."
UPDATE (10/20): The French mosque responsible for sharing a video online thought to have provoked the murder (though it didn't include Paty's name or any calls for violence) expressed regret for doing so. But the French interior ministry has now demanded the mosque be closed down for six months.

The father who initially called for action to be taken against the teacher online allegedly issued a fatwa against the teacher, according to Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin. Before the murder, he was in contact with Anzorov, the young Chechen who ended up beheading Paty:
The news contradicted earlier reports claiming the killer had no contact with, or knowledge of, Paty or the school where he taught - despite allegedly having asked specifically for the 47-year-old history and geography teacher's whereabouts upon arriving at the school on Friday. ...

The father and several of his relatives have since been arrested in a crackdown on "Islamic terrorism" following Paty's killing, as the French government acknowledged it had not done enough to police extremist organizations. Five students have also reportedly been arrested for allegedly helping Anzorov identify Paty in exchange for money.
France's L'Express magazine reprinted Mohammed cartoons, some of which were reportedly those shown by Paty in class.

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Russian Flag

Best of the Web: Navalny loses the plot, changes story once again, campaigns for Biden against Trump

John Helmer
johnhelmer.net
Sun, 18 Oct 2020 17:10 UTC
navalny
Alexei Navalny has opened his US media campaign on Sunday with interviews on CBS Television and the New Yorker magazine. Wearing a new white shirt, he has also opened a new version of the attempted assassination.

In Navalny's fresh plot, he now says he was poisoned when he was putting on clothes in his hotel room in Tomsk, and then touched a water bottle. "We know that I was poisoned in the hotel because I — well, again, it's just a pure speculation because no one knows what happened exactly — but I think that when I was, er, maybe put some clothes with this poison on me, I touched it with the hand [left hand], and then I sipped from the bottle [right hand]. So this nerve agent was not inside of the bottle but on the bottle."

The evidence for the poisoning, Navalny insisted to CBS, can be found in the reports of the French and Swedish military laboratories. According to a partial release of the official report by the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI), "two blood samples were collected from the patient [Navalny] on the 5th of September 2020".

Litigation in a Stockholm court by Mats Nilsson is under way to compel publication of the full FOI report. The laboratory confirms it did not test Navalny's urine, skin samples, clothing, or the water bottle.

Navalny now claims to the New Yorker that the evidence of his poisoning can be found in the classified report of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), although it too has announced that it did not test the water bottle and did not identify Novichok. "I was poisoned with a different kind of Novichok. Even the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons classifies its reports, because no one wants to publish the formula."
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Gold Seal

Best of the Web: Lionel Shriver: Covid has killed off our civil liberties

Lionel Shriver
The Spectator
Sat, 17 Oct 2020 00:08 UTC
face cop
© Getty Images
It started with smoking. The 1960s and 1970s saw little popular objection to legislation restricting advertisements by private companies purveying a legal product. Little objection was raised thereafter when these same companies were banned from promoting their wares at all. Broadly shamed, even smokers have mutely accepted confiscatory taxes on cigarettes. As laws to protect the public from passive smoking have extended parts of the US to beaches, parks and even one's own apartment balcony — locations where the danger to others is virtually nonexistent — few have cried overreach. It's a truism: tobacco companies are evil (and so are smokers). The suppression of smoking is widely regarded as a public health triumph.

Thus few of us ever paused to examine the assumption behind anti-smoking laws: that the people are not to be trusted to make their own decisions regarding their health. The idiots have to be controlled.

For the curtailment of civil liberties, public health policy, graciously instituted for our own good, has been the thin end of the wedge for decades. Over time, that wedge has been getting fatter.

Why, speaking of fat: the latest matter that the state regards as its business is what we eat and how much. In the interests of curbing obesity, British soft drinks now incur a tax when exceeding a set level of sugar. Regulatory pressure to reduce fat, salt and sugar content is resulting in smaller serving sizes, so that shoppers pay the same price for less food. NHS GPs are encouraged to 'prescribe' bicycles. Teachers primly remove chocolate bars from children's lunch boxes. Denmark's groundbreaking 2011 'fat tax' on products containing more than 2.3 per cent saturated fat (butter, meat, non-skimmed milk, cheese, pizza and much processed food) may have lasted less than a year, but could credibly be revived any time at a supermarket near you. Although overeaters and smokers pay the same taxes to support the NHS as everyone else, the service has seriously entertained denying such sinners access to certain kinds of care. What the hell — in 2020 they've at least gone egalitarian, denying everybody care.
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Eye 1

Best of the Web: Google & Oracle to monitor Americans who get Warp Speed's Covid-19 vaccine for up to TWO years

Whitney Webb
The Last American Vagabond
Thu, 15 Oct 2020 00:00 UTC
Google & Oracle to Monitor Americans
Moncef Slaoui, the official head of Operation Warp Speed, told the Wall Street Journal last week that all Warp Speed vaccine recipients in the US will be monitored by "incredibly precise . . . tracking systems" for up to two years and that tech giants Google and Oracle would be involved.

Last week, a rare media interview given by the Trump administration's "Vaccine Czar" offered a brief glimpse into the inner workings of the extremely secretive Operation Warp Speed (OWS), the Trump administration's "public-private partnership" for delivering a Covid-19 vaccine to 300 million Americans by next January. What was revealed should deeply unsettle all Americans.

During an interview with the Wall Street Journal published last Friday, the "captain" of Operation Warp Speed, career Big Pharma executive Moncef Slaoui, confirmed that the millions of Americans who are set to receive the project's Covid-19 vaccine will be monitored via "incredibly precise . . . tracking systems" that will "ensure that patients each get two doses of the same vaccine and to monitor them for adverse health effects." Slaoui also noted that tech giants Google and Oracle have been contracted as part of this "tracking system" but did not specify their exact roles beyond helping to "collect and track vaccine data."

Comment: See also:

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Black Cat

Best of the Web: New York Jewish leaders say they were 'stabbed in the back' by Gov. Cuomo

Reuvain Borchardt
Hamodia
Mon, 12 Oct 2020 15:43 UTC
New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo
© Mike Groll/Office of Gov. CuomoNew York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo at a press conference at the State Capitol on Tuesday, announcing the shutdown of houses of worship in COVID-19 hotspots.
Hamodia has exclusively obtained a full recording of a conference call New York Gov. Andrew Cumo had with Jewish leaders last Tuesday, in which he said he would limit houses of worship to 50% occupancy in areas seeing a COVID-19 uptick, just hours before a public press conference in which he limited it to 10 attendees.

"The current rule ... in any indoor gathering ... it's 50% of capacity," the governor said. "That's the current law. We have to follow that law. If we don't follow that law then the infection rate gets worse. Then we're gonna have to go back to close down. And nobody wants to do that. But I need your help in getting the rate down, and the rate will come down, if we follow the rules on the mask and the social distancing and the 50%."

But just a few hours later, Cuomo announced restrictions on houses of worship to as few as 10 people. Jewish leaders said they felt "stabbed in the back" by what they deemed Cuomo's duplicity.

Hamodia has exclusively obtained a recording of the full call here.
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Syringe

Best of the Web: A Sars-Cov2 vaccine - don't hold your breath

Dr. Malcolm Kendrick
drmalcolmkendrick.org
Sat, 10 Oct 2020 18:55 UTC
COVID-19 vaccine
[But concern may be in order]

I suppose most people believe the trials on vaccines for COVID19 will be looking to demonstrate that they reduce the risk of infection, death, or serious illness - or suchlike.

Also, you may have heard that several vaccines could be ready for use early next year 2021. Maybe even later this year.

As Dilbert may retort: Hahahahahahahahahahahaha! Oh, let me pause and wipe away my tears of mirth.

Really. Think about it. Then think a bit more...

AstraZeneca (AZ) is thought to be leading the pack with their vaccine AZD1222. Their major clinical trial will recruit 30,000 participants - which is good. You can find the trial description on Clinicaltrials.gov. It goes by the snappy title 'Phase III Double-blind, Placebo-controlled Study of AZD1222 for the Prevention of COVID-19 in Adults.' 1
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