Anglican and Roman Catholic bishops in Ireland have joined Pope Francis in offering prayers for those killed in an explosion in Creeslough, County Donegal, on Friday.

On Sunday, Irish police released the names of the ten people who were killed in the explosion. The victims included three children, among them Shauna Flanagan Garwe, who was five years old.

The blast destroyed a petrol station and a shop, and damaged surrounding buildings, in the village, which is in the north-western part of the Republic of Ireland.

On Saturday, the Archbishop of Armagh, the Most Revd John McDowell, and the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Michael Jackson, released a statement with the bishop of Derry & Raphoe, in whose Church of Ireland diocese Creeslough is situated.

“On behalf of Church of Ireland people across this island, we wish to express our sympathy to all who have been bereaved,” the statement read. It continued: “Our hearts also go out to those who have been injured and to their families, along with the assurance of our prayers in the weeks to come.

Read it all.

It was a breakthrough discovery: a protein that cuts DNA at precise points, leaving overhanging sticky ends ready to glom onto a matching partner. Using the protein, researchers could cut and paste genetic sequences from one species into another as easily as a word processing program can rejigger a sentence.

These genetic gymnastics, first reported in 1972 by researchers at Stanford Medicine and UC San Francisco, launched a field known as recombinant DNA technology. But within months of the discovery, the research was halted — at the researchers’ request.

The technology, scientists feared, could lead to “Frankencells” that are antibiotic resistant or toxic or that incite cancer-causing proteins when the hybrid molecules were introduced into living cells. The scientists called a partial moratorium on this promising field of study — the first time researchers had voluntarily done such a thing.

“[This is] the first time that I know of that anyone has had to stop and think about an experiment in terms of its social impact and potential hazard,” said Paul Berg, PhD, the Robert W. and Vivian K. Cahill Professor of Cancer Research, Emeritus, then chair of biochemistry at Stanford Medicine. Berg, who was a leading figure in the nascent field, went on to share the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1980 for his work with recombinant DNA.

Read it all.

“Our job as bioethicists is to encourage scientists to be self-aware and to initiate conversations about important topics.” – Hank Greely, JD, director of Stanford University’s Center for Law and the Biosciences #Technology #Researchhttps://t.co/AWpGnE0oeQ

— Stanford Medicine (@StanfordMed) October 10, 2022

[Josep] Borrell, speaking at an annual conference of EU ambassadors, admitted that Brussels was “quite reluctant” to believe US warnings that Russia was going to invade Ukraine in February and had failed to analyse Russian president Vladimir Putin’s actions.

“We didn’t believe it will happen . . . And we haven’t foreseen neither the capacity of Putin to escalate,” he said.

Borrell added Brussels failed to understand what other countries wanted, and instead pushed its own ideas on them.

“We think that we know better what is in other people’s interests,” he said. “We have to listen more . . . to the rest of the world. We need to have more empathy.

“We try to export our model, but we don’t think how others will perceive this,” he added.

Read it all.

The Federal Reserve is risking a ‘world recession’ by forcing the world into a dash to raise rates, warns EU’s top diplomat in unguarded critique of US monetary policy https://t.co/jXmo4V4L2F @FinancialTimes w @Sam1Fleming @colbyLsmith

— Henry Foy (@HenryJFoy) October 10, 2022

Happy Thanksgiving to all those in Canada celebrating today 🦃 📸 pic.twitter.com/32gTrRILD7

— Luke Van Rompaey (@lukevanrompaey) October 10, 2022

So who does control the new American system? The answer isn’t broke woke-ists. It’s the monopolists who own the platforms where the woke-ists live. Elon Musk and Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett and Sergei Brin and Larry Page and Lorraine Jobs don’t care about mean tweets. They care about the hundreds of billions of dollars in their bank accounts, their lavish mansions and private jets, and pursuing rich person hobbies like colonising Mars. Their primary political goal, as a class, is to prevent the state from ever getting strong enough to tax their fortunes, break up their monopolies, or interfere with the supplies of cheap immigrant and offshore labour from which they profit. The more fractured, dejected, and heavily surveilled the America public is, the less likely a strong state is to emerge.

In the contest between the oligarchs and the fading Rooseveltian state, the woke is a useful tool— not an independent power. Its members are the foot soldiers of the Democratic Party, whose job it is to organise the dispossessed into groups that are narrow, factional, and divided enough that they can’t come together into a force that threatens oligarchical control. Its discontent with the Turbo-Capitalist order can be usefully turned against anyone who refuses to follow the ever-changing party line — beginning with the “deplorables” who are now regularly portrayed as murderous, undemocratic racists and fascists, and extending to JK Rowling and Margaret Atwood. The result is a closed circuit in which Turbo-Capitalist oligarchs and Woke activists make common cause against formerly independent institutions like universities, professional associations, and the press. All of these institutions rely on guarantees of individual and collective rights by the state, which the Turbo-Capitalists and the Woke seek to capture and use as an instrument to enforce their own privatised social bargain: everything within the Party, nothing outside the Party, nothing against the Party.

The unprecedented reach of the technologies that the new oligarchy commands has already destroyed the press and replaced it with a government-corporate censorship regime that has no parallel in peacetime America. Combined with what appears to be a healthy appetite for humiliating others, this power does not bode well for the future of social peace in America, or for the health of the next American Republic.

Read it all.

America has turned from a land of opportunity into a bi-coastal oligarchy | David Samuels https://t.co/1UCMMGKm2A

— UnHerd (@unherd) October 8, 2022

May the grace of the Lord Jesus sanctify us and keep us from all evil; may He drive far from us all hurtful things, and purify both our souls and bodies; may He bind us to Himself by the bond of love, and may His peace abound in our hearts.

Woe is me! For I have become
as when the summer fruit has been gathered,
as when the vintage has been gleaned:
there is no cluster to eat,
no first-ripe fig which my soul desires.
The godly man has perished from the earth,
and there is none upright among men;
they all lie in wait for blood,
and each hunts his brother with a net.
Their hands are upon what is evil, to do it diligently;
the prince and the judge ask for a bribe,
and the great man utters the evil desire of his soul;
thus they weave it together.
The best of them is like a brier,
the most upright of them a thorn hedge.
The day of their watchmen, of their punishment, has come;
now their confusion is at hand.
Put no trust in a neighbor,
have no confidence in a friend;
guard the doors of your mouth
from her who lies in your bosom;
for the son treats the father with contempt,
the daughter rises up against her mother,
the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
a man’s enemies are the men of his own house.
But as for me, I will look to the Lord,
I will wait for the God of my salvation;
my God will hear me.

–Micah 7:1-7