🔓 Today's Must-Reads - 31 July 2024

Exposing the narrative with the latest news, studies, reports and articles!

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• School can't be sued after child received COVID vax against parents' wishes, court rules. The Vermont Supreme Court ruled Friday a family cannot sue their child's school district after the then-6-year-old was given a COVID-19 vaccine without their consent. The child, labeled L.P. in the original complaint, was vaccinated at a November 2021 clinic hosted by the Windham Southeast School District. L.P.'s father told a school official days prior to the clinic the child was not to be vaccinated, court documents say. The school official acknowledged the father's directive, according to Friday's ruling.

• Acting Secret Service Chief Played Key Role in Limiting Resources for Trump. Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe was directly involved in denying additional security resources and personnel, including counter snipers, to former President Trump’s rallies and events – despite repeated requests by the agents assigned to Trump’s detail in the two years leading up to his July 13 attempted assassination, according to several sources familiar with the decision-making. Rowe succeeded former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, who resigned last week after bipartisan calls following her widely panned testimony before the House Oversight Committee. It was Rowe’s decision alone to deny counter sniper teams to any Trump event outside of driving distance from D.C.

• Would the U.S. Consider Assassinating Putin? What would be gained by killing Putin? If the bar was juxtaposing the status quo with the consequences of Putin’s violent removal, would Russia’s threat to the United States and its allies be degraded? Would Russian troops withdraw from Ukraine and cease posing a threat to NATO allies in the Baltics and Eastern Europe? Or might Russian intentions become even more hostile and less predictable? Would the United States do it? The record shows that the U.S. sanctioned violence in sponsoring the overthrow of democratically elected antagonist regimes in Iran in 1953 and Chile in 1973, while the Church committee investigations documented multiple CIA attempts to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

• The Grayzone caused ‘biggest PR fiasco in history’ for US govt regime change arm, leaked emails reveal. The Grayzone’s publication of an embarrassing phone call with a National Endowment for Democracy VP triggered an institution-wide meltdown at the US government’s regime change laboratory. Following the call, the group’s founding president privately admitted the “fiasco” exposed major “problems beneath the polished surface.” Now, leaked emails obtained by The Grayzone reveal the organization has since descended into chaos, with two senior officials fired due to the fiasco, and remaining staff engaged in civil war between the neocon old guard and the “woke” new generation hired to replace them.

• Cautious consumers drive second quarterly sales fall at Starbucks. Starbucks has suffered a second straight quarterly drop in sales, underlining the pressures on a leadership team already contending with an activist shareholder and scrutiny from its charismatic former boss. The world’s largest coffee chain cited a “cautious consumer environment” as it reported a 3 per cent fall in its global comparable sales for the three months to June, following a 4 per cent decline in its previous quarter.

• McDonald's sales fall worldwide for first time in four years. The fast food giant said same-store sales decreased by 1% in the second quarter of the year - its first drop since the COVID pandemic forced thousands of branches to close in early 2020. Total revenue for the period was flat at $6.5bn, while net income fell by 12% to $2bn, the results also revealed. McDonald's blamed the figures on a fall in the number of its customers in the US, which was partly offset by price rises, along with the "continued impact of the war in the Middle East" and weaker demand in China.

• The UN’s Green Agenda Will Spark Famine. This is the second part in a series looking at the plans of the United Nations (UN) and its agencies designing and implementing the agenda of the Summit of the Future in New York on 22-23 September 2024, and its implications for global health, economic development, and human rights. The right to food once drove UN policy towards reducing hunger with a clear focus on low- and middle-income countries. Like the right to health, food has increasingly become a tool of cultural colonialism – the imposition of a narrow ideology of a certain Western mindset over the customs and rights of the ‘peoples’ that the UN represents. This article discusses how it happened and the dogmas on which it relies.

• Dr Anthony Fauci is caught in new email storm linked to controversial beagle experiments as he is accused of lying to congress. Fauci is being accused of lying to Congress when he said he never used private email to conduct official business. Fauci, 83, told a journalist in 2021 that he would reach out to them through his private email as he faced backlash over research being done on beagle puppies by his National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID). The project saw innocent hound dogs tormented and killed in a lab in Tunisia to learn more about a parasitic disease, something the NIAID initially denied funding before Fauci confirmed this year that was a fib.

• Manufactured Uncertainty. For those who have been following this line of thinking, the basic premise is that the governments of the world, often acting in concert with the major banks and industries, have sought to expand their wealth and power in such a way that, at some point, socio-economic collapse would inevitably occur. And they’ve succeeded marvellously. For decades, they’ve dramatically increased their positions but have reached the point at which the bill for the big party must be paid, and they have no intention of paying it. It will be passed to the hoi polloi, who will soon realise that it will break many of them. And they’ll be hopping mad. So, how should this moment be handled?

• ‘White Dudes for Harris’? Kamala is the queen of cringe - The Democratic elites cannot help but racialise everything. ‘Man buns of the world, unite!’ That’s the call that seems to have gone out across blue America in the past few days, as fear-addled liberals have coalesced behind a woman who, up until five minutes ago, was a national joke. I have to hand it to Queen Bee Kamala Harris and her team. They have leveraged white guilt very effectively, summoning thousands of white-saviour worker bees from their hives. When it became clear that Harris had clinched the Democratic nomination, they descended upon social media in droves to profess their allegiance to her.

• Earlier Forecast Of “A Summer From Hell” in Germany Just Isn’t Materializing. July Comes In Near Normal! After a preliminary tabulation of data collected from its approx. 2000 stations across the country, the results of Germany’s, DWD national weather service in Offenbach show that earlier dramatic predictions of a “hellish summer” have yet to come true.

• Putin calls for “full-scale implementation” of digital ruble. Praising the “efficiency and functionality” of the Bank of Russia’s CBDC, Russian President Vladimir Putin instructed his government on Wednesday to prepare for the widespread introduction of the digital ruble. Since August 2023, the Bank of Russia has been conducting a pilot program for the digital ruble involving 12 banks, 600 individuals and 22 trade service enterprises. The program will be expanded in September to include an additional 20 credit institutions. Participants will be able to make payments via QR code during the second phase of testing.

• The predictive power of dreams - We need all the guidance we can get. Until the late 19th century dreams were understood as omens, predictions, and warnings. Whilst most cultures acknowledged that dreams sometimes gave false predictions (in Homer’s Iliad, Zeus deliberately sent the Greek king Agamemnon a “lying dream” to help the Trojans), oneiromancy, or divination through dreams, was shared by nearly all the world’s cultures, from Mesopotamia to mediaeval Japan. When the Egyptian pharaoh had a dream about seven plump and seven scrawny cows, Joseph didn’t interpret it psychologically as a reflection of the pharaoh’s relationship with his mother, or an effusion from the collective unconscious. He read it as a prediction — and, at least according to Genesis, he was right. Yet in late 19th-century Europe, among the educated classes, opinion on dream interpretation started swinging away from those familiar positions and towards new theories of the unconscious.