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Great Barrier Reef has record levels of coral, says survey

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Almost 3,000 speeding drivers caught during bank holiday operation
All: BreakingNews.ie (RSS)

A senior officer said the gardaí operation had saved lives.

Moscow, Kyiv exchange accusations after Ukrainian nuclear plant shelled
All: BreakingNews.ie (RSS)

Moscow, Kyiv exchange accusations after Ukrainian nuclear plant shelled

Victim dies six weeks after shooting outside Dublin hotel
All: BreakingNews.ie (RSS)

Gardaí have appealed for information and launched a murder inquiry.

Girl (4) dies following incident at Sligo caravan park
All: BreakingNews.ie (RSS)

A four-year-old girl has died after being struck by a vehicle at a caravan park in Enniscrone, Co Sligo, this afternoon.

RT News (Telegram)

Meta Quietly Cuts Misinformation Safeguards Ahead of Midterms

Misinformation safeguards are quietly being dropped allowing fake news and sock puppet accounts to swamp Facebook before the US midterm elections, despite Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s promises to clean up the platform.

The company squashed an investigation into false political advertising by banning researchers from the site and the CrowdTangle tool used to identify fake news only works temporarily.

“They’re not talking about it,” former Facebook Policy Director Katie Harbath stated. “We don’t know how that’s going to manifest itself for the midterms on the platforms”.

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Hasty “Swastika” T-shirt Apology From US School

Hanover County Superintendent Dr Michael Gill tried to explain the apparent swastika-esque t-shirt design one of his teachers created as being intended to represent “four hands and arms grasping together”, but ended up backtracking fast after obvious undertones were picked up.

“We are deeply sorry for the emotions that the logo has evoked and by extension, to the atrocities that were committed under its banner”, he continued.

The Jewish Community Federation of Richmond praised the “swift” removal of the offending items.

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“Unaccountable” NGO Pushes Wokeness Onto British Universities – report

The “unaccountable” charity Advance HE aims at influencing policies, processes and actions in UK universities, running several campaigns promoting “diversity and inclusion,” the Telegraph has revealed.

According to the outlet, the group is actually affecting academic freedoms, curriculums and admissions around the country.

“Like universities, we share a long-standing commitment to promoting and protecting freedom of speech and academic freedom. Our charters complement freedom of speech, as they enhance the voice and input of a more diverse range of staff and students,” Advance HE’s spokesperson said.

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Library in US Defunded after Refusing to Censor LGBT Books

A library in Jamestown, Michigan, was voted to be defunded after a furious backlash erupted about a memoir by a nonbinary writer describing their coming out story with a degree of intimate detail.

The 62% to 37% decision against raising property taxes to keep funding the Patmos Library leaves the institution able to remain open only through the first quarter of next year.

“I’m not quite sure what instigated the culture wars that we’re seeing, but libraries are certainly at the front end,” said Michigan Library Association director Deborah Mikula.

Gender Queer: A Memoir was the most challenged book in the entire country last year due to its graphic content and complaints that it “promoted LGBTQ ideology”.

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Palestinian militants say 100 rockets launched at Israel (VIDEOS)
RT World News (RSS)

Israel’s Iron Dome intercepted many, as IDF jets pounded Gaza

The Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) said on Friday that it had launched more than 100 rockets at Israel, warning that a wider offensive would follow. The assault was launched in response to an Israeli military operation that killed one of the PIJ’s most senior commanders and continued to rock Gaza overnight.

Israeli jets struck an apartment building in Gaza earlier on Friday, eliminating PIJ commander Taysir al-Jabari. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) also targeted an additional 10-20 PIJ operatives with missiles and artillery, in a dramatic offensive it named ‘Op...

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UN ‘incentivizes terrorists’ – Israeli ambassador
RT World News (RSS)

With Israel’s missiles hammering Gaza, the country’s ambassador has accused the UN of being soft on terror

Israeli ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan accused the organization of “making false immoral comparisons” between Israel’s military and Palestinian “terrorists,” after it expressed “deep concern” over Israel’s assault on Gaza. While the Israeli offensive took out senior terrorists, Palestinian officials say dozens of civilians were killed or injured.

UN Middle East envoy Tor Wennesland issued a statement on Friday saying he was...

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News | Today's latest from Al Jazeera (RSS)

Musk coun­ter­suit ac­cus­es Twit­ter of fraud
Musk claims that the num­ber of users ad­ver­tis­ing on the site is about 65 mil­lion not the firm’s 238 mil­lion fig­ure.
Published On 5 Aug 2022

Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant: Ukraine, Russia trade blame for deadly attack
WION - world News Releases (RSS)

Both Ukraine and Russia traded blame for the deadly attack on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant on Friday.

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Canada announces ban on import of handguns until passage of gun control law
WION - world News Releases (RSS)

In a move designed to indirectly achieve the goals of a gun control legislation proposed in May, Canada announced Friday it will ban the import of

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 How a Missile in Kabul Connects to a Speaker in Taipei
Strategic Culture Foundation (RSS)

Washington’s hard power display of taking out Al-Qaeda’s Al-Zawahiri will not be reciprocated by Beijing over Pelosi’s provocative visit to Taiwan. It does however, definitively bury the decades-long era of cooperative US-Chinese relations.

By Pepe ESCOBAR

This is the way the “Global War on Terror” (GWOT) ends, over and over again: not with a bang, but a whimper.

Two Hellfire R9-X missiles launched from a MQ9 Reaper drone on the balcony of a house in Kabul. The target was Ayman Al-Zawahiri with a $25 million bounty on his head. The once invisible leader of ‘historic’ Al-Qaeda since 2011, is finally terminated.

All of us who spent years of our lives, especially throughout the 2000s, writing about and tracking Al-Zawahiri know how US ‘intel’ played every trick in the book – and outside the book – to find him. Well, he never exposed himself on the balcony of a house, much less in Kabul.

Another disposable asset

Why now? Simple. Not useful anymore – and way past his expiration date. His fate was sealed as a tawdry foreign policy ‘victory’ – the remixed Obama ‘Osama bin Laden moment’ that won’t even register across most of the Global South. After all, a perception reigns that George W. Bush’s GWOT has long metastasized into the “rules-based,” actually “economic sanctions-based” international order.

Cue to 48 hours later, when hundreds of thousands across the west were glued to the screen of flighradar24.com (until the website was hacked), tracking “SPAR19” – the US Air Force jet carrying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – as it slowly crossed Kalimantan from east to west, the Celebes Sea, went northward parallel to the eastern Philippines, and then made a sharp swing westwards towards Taiwan, in a spectacular waste of jet fuel to evade the South China Sea.

No “Pearl Harbor moment”

Now compare it with hundreds of millions of Chinese who are not on Twitter but on Weibo, and a leadership in Beijing that is impervious to western-manufactured pre-war, post-modern hysteria.

Anyone who understands Chinese culture knew there would never be a “missile on a Kabul balcony” moment over Taiwanese airspace. There would never be a replay of the perennial neocon wet dream: a “Pearl Harbor moment.” That’s simply not the Chinese way.

The day after, as the narcissist Speaker, so proud of accomplishing her stunt, was awarded the Order of Auspicious Clouds for her promotion of bilateral US-Taiwan relations, the Chinese Foreign Minister issued a sobering comment: the reunification of Taiwan with the mainland is a historical inevitability.

That’s how you focus, strategically, in the long game.

What happens next had already been telegraphed, somewhat hidden in a Global Times report. Here are the two key points:

Point 1: “China will see it as a provocative action permitted by the Biden administration rather than a personal decision made by Pelosi.”

That’s exactly what President Xi Jinping had personally told the teleprompt-reading White House tenant during a tense phone call last week. And that concerns the ultimate red line.

Xi is now reaching the exact same conclusion reached by Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this year: the United States is “non-agreement capable,” and there’s no point in expecting it to respect diplomacy and/or rule of law in international relations.

Point 2 concerns the consequences, reflecting a consensus among top Chinese analysts that mirrors the consensus at the Politburo: “The Russia-Ukraine crisis has just let the world see the consequence...

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 Sunak’s Plan to Criminalise ‘Hating Britain’ Is a Throwback to Empire
Strategic Culture Foundation (RSS)

The former chancellor wants to refer Britain’s critics to Prevent. He’s obviously terrified of the truth

By Sita BALANI

In Rishi Sunak’s latest attempt to revive his floundering leadership bid, he has announced that he would widen the definition of extremism to include those with an “extreme hatred of Britain”.

Anyone expressing anti-nationalist views could be referred to Prevent, the government’s anti-radicalisation scheme. Though the government claims participation in the ‘deradicalisation’ programme is voluntary, when referrals lead to the police banging on your door at dawn or pulling your child out of maths to interrogate them, the government’s definition of ‘voluntary’ starts to seem as vague and inconsistent as its definition of ‘extremism’.

There’s a long history of British governments criminalising dissent. Sedition laws were a cornerstone of the counterinsurgency strategy that Britain used to quell anticolonial rebellions. The Indian Penal Code, drafted by Thomas Macauley, makes displaying ‘disaffection’ towards the government a criminal offence. India, like many other postcolonial nations, kept this repressive law on the books. The Modi government has used it to cement its shift towards a virulent, authoritarian nationalism. Now the postcolonial boomerang is rebounding once again on British shores.

Even an analysis such as this one – which draws attention to Britain’s colonial legacy, the violent impact of its laws, its resemblance to fascist regimes elsewhere – could be viewed as ‘anti-British’. Given that anyone who wants to understand the modern world would need to engage with the history of empire, the making of nation-states, and the political function of racism, it’s difficult to see how any serious intellectual work is possible under these conditions.

When Prevent became statutory in 2015 with the Counter Terrorism and Security Act, it was clear that this marked a serious escalation in criminalisation. Prevent targeted Muslims specifically, but it did so through a profound transformation of the terms of ordinary civic life. Teachers, doctors, social workers, and nurses were expected to monitor their students, patients and clients for signs of ‘radicalisation’. In the process, they were conscripted into the state’s surveillance machinery.

Prevent trainings were rolled out across the crumbling remains of state services, embedded into safeguarding structures to make it harder to boycott or disrupt the programme. As a result, Prevent is now firmly lodged in our institutions. Even if the legislation were repealed (and there appears little chance of that in the near future), a wider transformation would be needed to prise systems of surveillance and punishment out of schools, healthcare, and social work.

Prevent does not work on the basis of intervening in genuine threats – it relies on prejudice, paranoia, and rumour

Now Sunak wants to extend the reach of Prevent even further. Of course, subjecting everyone who speaks ill of Britain to a ‘deradicalisation’ programme is entirely unworkable. Social media is awash with people expressing their rage at ‘rainy fascist island’. As Andrew Neil’s recent diatribe in the Daily Mail points out,...

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