Beirut Blast Tore Up Thousands of Homes

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The gigantic explosion in Beirut on Tuesday tore through homes, blowing off doors and windows, toppling cupboards, and sent flying books, shelves, lamps and everything else.

Dozens were trapped under the wreckage and those who survived still cannot believe that they did.

The Names & Faces of The Victims of The Beirut Explosion — A Separate State of Mind | A Blog by Elie Fares

Look at their faces. Say their names. Think of their grieving mothers and fathers, their fatherless or motherless sons and daughters, their partner-less wives and husbands. And be angry. These are victims. These are people whose only fault was to be in a country whose criminals are in charge, whose politicians are so evil they […]

The Names & Faces of The Victims of The Beirut Explosion — A Separate State of Mind | A Blog by Elie Fares

New Test Paradigm Needed for SARS-CoV-2 | Harvard Magazine – (If anyone is listening anymore… a rapid sensitive enough at-home test exists)

The current cheap testing regimens were developed by just a handful of researchers, he says. “Imagine if the federal government just took over…to create an all-star team of diagnosticians centered around one of these technologies,” or even charged them with creating something brand new. “And then said, ‘We’re going to put billions of dollars into this, and it will allow us to stop the raging outbreaks that are burning in half the country right now. And we’ll do it in the next three weeks.’ That, to me, seems like a no-brainer: it takes the pressure off of needing a vaccine; it stops people from dying; it stops the virus from getting into schools and nursing homes—the moment population prevalence has been brought under control.”

Source: New Test Paradigm Needed for SARS-CoV-2 | Harvard Magazine

H&M Group Apologizes Again For Racial Insensitivity

The H&M Group is now apologizing to its employees and the public for a photo it recently discovered in the internal systems of one of its clothing companies, & Other Stories, which reportedly labeled one of its hats as “Nxxxx Lab Beanie.”

“We are deeply sorry about the word connected to an image of a product that was sent out to our stores during July,” Managing Director Karolina Gutke wrote in a memo to & Other Stories’ employees recently, reports CNN. “This is completely unacceptable and there is no excuse [as] to why this happened.”

From CNN:

H&M Group confirmed the slur appeared on a list in July of all the clothing items and accessories to be sold for the upcoming Fall/Winter season. The list was uploaded to an internal system and under each product was the internal name of the item — a kind of codename used only by the company. The captions are created and uploaded by design and buying teams — and have to be approved by multiple people before they hit the server, the employees said.

Source: H&M Group Apologizes Again For Racial Insensitivity

Black Teacher in Mississippi Dies of COVID-19 As Schools Reopen

Mississippi Today reports that 42-year-old Nacoma James, a Black man, died on Thursday while self-quarantining after displaying symptoms of COVID-19. James was a teacher at Lafayette Middle School and an assistant high school football coach. While students and teachers returned to the school earlier this week, James remained at home. “No one has told me officially that he had COVID, but I do know he was self-quarantining this week,” Adam Pugh, the district’s Superintendent, told Mississippi Today.

Source: Black Teacher in Mississippi Dies of COVID-19 As Schools Reopen

U.S. Intelligence: GOP Is Accepting Russian Help for Trump

Giuliani told the Washington Post earlier this summer that Derkach “doesn’t seem pro-Russian to me.” In case that ruse was fooling anybody, U.S. intelligence has now officially described Derkach as an organ of Russian political interference.

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans on the Homeland Security Committee are holding hearings in an attempt to substantiate this charge — or, more realistically, to insinuate it. They have produced no evidence to advance their charge. The Russians have given Republicans stolen tapes of secret conversations Biden held with Ukrainians during his tenure as vice-president, and pro-Trump media outlets have hyped up the material, but nothing they have is inconsistent with the narrative that mainstream news organizations found. Biden was working to clean up Ukraine.

Senate Republicans tried to be cagey about their activities. After pro-Russian Ukrainians said they’d passed materials on to Republican officials, a Johnson staffer told NBC News in July that it was “‘false’ the committee has received any ‘oppo,’ or opposition research, without responding directly to whether that covers any materials from foreign sources.”

Source: U.S. Intelligence: GOP Is Accepting Russian Help for Trump