The cause of Thursday's massive fire at the port of Beirut — a month after blasts there killed 190, injured over 6,000, and destroyed much of the city's eastern coastal area — is still unknown. But the fire has re-traumatized Lebanese and again thrown the city into panic.

While Lebanon continues to disintegrate politically, it may well be sheer folly to expect peace or stability to erupt any time soon in this volatile, strategic region.

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As Alexei Navalny lies in a medically induced coma in a Berlin hospital, battling for his life, the United States, Germany, and its other allies are debating how to respond to Russia's latest outrage – an attack on the country's leading dissident with a banned nerve agent.

This week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that tests at a military laboratory had "identified unequivocally" that the 44-year-old Navalny had been poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent Novichok and demanded that Russia account for what she called his "attempted murder."

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The national conventions finished amidst historic domestic unrest, while Donald Trump and Joe Biden presented their starkly contrasted plans to address the crises facing the United States. However, the differences on race relations and the protests are not the only differences between the candidates. Their foreign policy views could not be more dissimilar.

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"Be afraid, be very afraid." As a political independent who closely followed both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, I felt that fear was the underlying theme of both. While there were moments of eloquence and inspirational joy at each gathering, the number of upbeat messages paled in comparison to the harsh attacks and negative warnings issued by both sides.

Although the Democrats praised America's potential, its exceptional character and the need for unity and opportunity for all, the dominant subtheme was President Trump's mishandling of the deadly coronavirus pandemic.

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America has awakened. Or gone woke. So has American journalism, or much of it. Only two decades ago, boycotts of unpopular ideas and the people who held them were confined to extreme newsletters, obscure journals and college campuses, where students have long taken pride in shutting down provocative speakers.

But the decline of "legacy" newspapers and the growing concentration of power and influence in the hands of Big Tech - primarily Google, Facebook, Apple and Twitter - have enabled those behind these causes to exert far greater influence.

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