Quote:$250 Million Lawsuit Filed In The US Over The Beirut Blast (July 13, 2022)

Victims of the Beirut Port Explosion, along with Swiss foundation Accountability Now, filed a $250 million lawsuit in Texas on Monday against US-Norwegian geophysical company TGS.

According to a press release on Wednesday, Accountability Now explained that TGS owns Spectrum Geo, which had “chartered the derelict Moldavian flagged vessel Rhosus to come to Beirut while carrying 2750 tons of military-grade ammonium nitrate aboard.”

It is to note that, according to an investigative report, the ammonium nitrate was never officially seized by the Lebanese authorities.

Back in January 2021, Interpol issued Red Notices for 3 people in relation to the transportation of ammonium nitrate to Lebanon: the owner and the captain of the MV Rhosus ship that docked at the Port of Beirut, and the Portuguese ammonium nitrate trader who inspected the ammonium nitrate in the port’s Warehouse 12, several years ago.

It has been almost two years since the Blast occurred and citizens of Lebanon continue to await justice to be served.

No one has yet been held accountable for the explosion due to the country’s political unrest, corruption, and negligence of the government.
The Beirut Port Explosion occurred in August. 4, 2020, resulting in over 234 deaths, 7,000 injuries, and 300,000 people being displaced, in addition to massive destruction in the Lebanese capital.

The Blast has been described as the largest non-nuclear explosion in history.
This lawsuit is a step closer to bringing justice to the victims of the explosion.

Quote:In 1993 ICI demerged its bioscience business, splitting into two the publicly listed companies: ICI and Zeneca—Zeneca would later go onto merge with Astra AB, forming the current pharmaceutical company, AstraZeneca.

The company AkzoNobel is focused on paints and coatings. On October 9, 2018 Specialty Chemicals was re-branded as a new company, Nouryon, after acquisition by the Carlyle Group.

Due to high revenues from the sales of its pharmaceutical business, AkzoNobel was the world's most profitable company in 2008.

Quote:The British theory, advanced by journalist Walter De Bock in 1998, claims that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ordered Bull’s murder because he was taking lucrative Iraqi arms contracts away from British firms. (As support for his claim, De Bock noted that reporter Jonathan Moyle was murdered in Chile on March 31, 1990—eight days after Bull’s assassination—while investigating claims of secret British military trading with Iraq.) American involvement in the murder was suggested by Canadian journalist Dale Grant, reporting that Michael Bull “broached the idea that the CIA did it, because his father was applying for a U.S. pardon of his arms-smuggling conviction.” Two years later, former SRC employee Christopher Cowley told the House of Commons that he and Bull had briefed the CIA and Britain’s MI5 on the progress of Project Babylon as it proceeded. While convinced that Israel was responsible for killing Bull, Cowley “speculated that the CIA must have been tipped off by the Mossad [Israeli intelligence] and thus had acquiesced in the assassination.”

Project Babylon disintegrated after Bull’s death, which was doubtless the intention of his killer or killers. SRC immediately closed its doors and the employees scattered. Iraqi forces invaded neighboring Kuwait on August 2, 1990, and U.S.-led forces responded with aerial attacks in January 1991, climaxed by a swift land offensive the following month. Bull’s superguns were located and destroyed by United Nations weapons inspectors in the wake of the Gulf War. No suspects have yet been identified in Dr. Bull’s murder.

Quote:Project Babylon was a space gun project commissioned by then Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. It involved building a series of "superguns". The design was based on research from the 1960s Project HARP led by the Canadian artillery expert Gerald Bull. There were most likely four different devices in the program.

The events of Project Babylon are dramatized in the 1994 HBO movie Doomsday Gun starring Frank Langella as Bull, with Kevin Spacey, Alan Arkin, and Clive Owen in supporting roles, and in Frederick Forsyth's novel The Fist of God.

Quote:Vannevar Bush is a great name for playing six degrees of separation. Turn back the clock on any aspect of information technology - from the birth of Silicon Valley and the marriage of science and the military to the advent of the World Wide Web - and you find his footprints. As historian Michael Sherry says, "To understand the world of Bill Gates and Bill Clinton, start with understanding Vannevar Bush."


"As We May Think" describes a device - Bush called it a "memex" - that was meant to tame the then-novel problem of information overload by enhancing human memory (hence its name). Bush envisioned it as a universal library, relying on microfilm to store vast amounts of text, crammed onto a desktop.