BREAKING: Palm Springs explosion kills one at American Reproductive Services Building

An explosion at around 11 a.m. heavily damaged a fertility clinic in the upscale California city of Palm Springs. The event appears to have been intentional, local authorities said. One person was found dead, and the FBI said it was sending investigators, including bomb technicians, to the scene. The dead person is believed to be the perpetrator, but this is unclear.

Palm Springs Police Chief Andy Mills said in a statement Saturday that the blast “appears to be an intentional act of violence” and that several buildings were severely damaged.

The act was being investigated as a possible car explosion, said two law enforcement officials briefed on the matter who insisted on anonymity to discuss preliminary information from an ongoing investigation. Authorities have not disclosed a motive.

FBI Los Angeles said in a social media post on X that “assets being deployed include investigators, bomb technicians & an evidence response team.” Investigators from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were also assisting.

The city of Palm Springs said Saturday that the explosion happened at 11 a.m. local time and that residents were being asked to avoid the area around North Indian Canyon Drive near East Tachevah Drive.

Dr. Maher Abdallah, who runs the American Reproductive Centers fertility clinic, confirmed that his clinic was damaged. He told The Associated Press in a phone interview that all of his staff were safe and accounted for. The explosion damaged the practice’s office space, where it conducts consultations with patients, but left the IVF lab and all of the stored embryos there unharmed.

“I really have no clue what happened,” Abdallah said. “Thank God today happened to be a day that we have no patients.”

Aerial footage showed a burned-out car in a parking lot behind the building that housed the fertility clinic’s office space. The blast caved in the building’s roof and blew a wide debris field across a sidewalk and four lanes of the street on the other side of the structure.

Rhino Williams, 47, was chatting with customers at a restaurant he helps manage inside the Skylark Hotel just over a block away from the scene when he heard a huge boom. He saw a large dark gray plume of smoke and covered his nose with his shirt as he smelled burning plastic and rubber. He also said that he saw a building had “blown out” into the street, with bricks and debris scattered everywhere, and spotted a car’s front axle on fire in the building’s parking lot.

Nima Tabrizi, 37, of Santa Monica, said he was inside a cannabis dispensary nearby when he felt a massive explosion. 

“The building just shook, and we go outside and there’s massive cloud smoke,” Tabrizi said. “Crazy explosion. It felt like a bomb went off. ... We went up to the scene, and we saw human remains.”

Palm Springs is a community in the desert about a two-hour drive east of Los Angeles. Its known for upscale resorts and a history of celebrity residents.

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Chocolate factory explosion in Pennsylvania: 2 killed, many injured, 9 missing

Video by The Inside Paper seen on Twitter shows a huge explosion at a West Reading, PA factory on Friday night that left a number of casualties and two dead. [See below]

NEW – Massive explosion reported in a factory that produces chocolate in Reading, Pennsylvania pic.twitter.com/wqyr9Kzh9r

— Insider Paper (@TheInsiderPaper)

According to a  report by The New York Times, the explosion occurred at the R.M. Palmer Company in West Reading at around 5 p.m.

At least two employees were killed in the explosion and eight were transported to local hospitals with injuries. Worse, there are nine people missing, the report said.

The force was so massive that it shook houses several blocks away.

“I heard like a loud noise, like a roaring sound, then the house shake,” Liz Soto, who has a friend who works in the factory, told FOX 29. “She went to work, she’s confirmed to have gone to work, but we don’t know anything about her.”

Law enforcement said that the cause of the explosion is under investigation. 

“The explosion was so big that it moved that building four feet forward,” said Mayor Samantha Kaag. “Unfortunately, it wasn’t a great scene to come into. It was pretty scary.”

The 75-year-old company employs hundreds of people and is known for making seasonal chocolate candies.

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30 Taliban militants fail bomb-making class

"Hey, what does this do?" might have been the last words a Taliban bomb making student asked his instructor.

The blast that came next was so powerful the militants couldn't even be identified by their toenails as their remains were scattered hither and thither, all over the place.

At least 30 scumcrumpets were blown to smithereens in the Saturday blast, according to Khaama Press, the Afghan news agency.

The lesson learned: if you're going to learn how to make bombs and improvised explosive devices to kill innocent people, practice with duds. 

The fortuitous explosion happened in the village of Qultaq in Dowlatabad district of Balkh province in the northern region of Afghanistan. No innocent people were killed in the blast as 2,160 virgins prepared to go to get married.

The Afghan National Army said in a statement that six foreign nationals were included in the death toll, but the explosion was so huge that they could not be identified from the gory remains.

Khaama Press reported that, sadly, two children were killed by an IED planted by the Taliban in a village in Kunduz province by the crap weasels who died in class.

The Taliban signed a peace treaty with former President Donald Trump in February 2020, signaling the end of the longest war in U.S. history, the Afghanistan War. A month later, U.S. officials said that the Taliban did not intend to abide by the terms in the peace deal, surprising nobody but the naive

The Taliban has promised that the violence would continue in Afghanistan until the U.S. withdrew from the nation, but if you believe that, you might also believe that frogs hate water.

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Update on Beirut blast

What we know to date about the Beirut explosion on August 4th is that it has thus far killed 137 and has injured about 5,000 more. We also know that Hezbollah stockpiled 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate [or 5,500.000 pounds] in London and Germany which was eventually discovered and removed to a warehouse near the Beirut seaport. The explosive material was originally slated to be used against Israel.

Hezbollah kept three metric tons of ammonium nitrate, the explosive thought to be behind the mega blast in a storehouse in London, until MI5 [the UK's equivalent to our FBI] and the London Metropolitan Police found it in 2015.

The Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists kept the explosive in thousands of ice packs in four properties in northwest London, according to a report in The Telegraph last year. The ice pack deception tactic was used in Germany, as well. 

Soldiers guard American University

It was Israel's Mossad [our equivalent is the CIA] that tipped off MI5 about the stockpile of explosives. Mossad also helped the Germans locate the stockpile in their country in which there was a raid on a mosque and residents tied to the terrorist group throughout Germany.

MI5 arrested a man in his 40s for allegedly planning terrorist attacks, but did not find evidence that the terrorists were planning an attack in the UK.

In 2019, the UK banned Hezbollah, making it a criminal offense to support or be a member of the group, carrying a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.

Last week, a cross-party group of UK parliamentarians expressed concern that the UK was not effectively enforcing the ban on Hezbollah. In fact, the ban on terrorism in the UK was about as effective as the ban on rioting in the US.

At this time, rescue workers in Lebanon are digging through the rubble looking for survivors from Tuesday's explosion.

What we know now is that the explosion was preceded by a huge fire at the Port of Beirut, on the northern Mediterranean coast of Lebanon's capital.

 In this video posted on social media white smoke could be seen billowing from Warehouse 12, next to the port's huge grain silos and then comes the enormous explosion.

Shortly after the roof of the warehouse burns and there is a large initial explosion, followed by a series of smaller blasts that some witnesses said sounded like fireworks going off.

Then, about 30 seconds later, there was a colossal explosion that sent a mushroom cloud into the air and a super-sonic blast wave radiating through the city. Reports say the blast could be heard as far as 125 miles from ground zero.

That blast wave leveled buildings near the port and caused extensive damage over much of the rest of the capital, displacing about 300,000 residents and collective losses that may reach $10-15bn, said Beirut Gov. Marwan Abboud.

The blast destroyed the immediate dockside area, creating a crater approximately 460 feet wide [about 1 1/2 football fields wide], which flooded with seawater.

The warehouse where the initial fire and explosions were observed was completely obliterated and an adjacent grain silo was heavily damaged.

"What we are witnessing is a huge catastrophe," said the head of the Lebanese Red Cross, George Kettani. "There are victims and casualties everywhere."

Satellite images highlight complete devastation in the port area, with one ship apparently blown out of the water and onto the dockside.

The explosion's shockwave blew out windows at Beirut International Airport's passenger terminal, about 5 miles away from the port.

Lebanon's President, Michel Aoun, blamed the detonation on 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate that he said had been stored unsafely at a warehouse in the port.

Ammonium nitrate is a crystal-like white solid commonly used as a source of nitrogen for agricultural fertilizer. But it can also be combined with fuel oils to create an explosive used in the mining and construction industries. Militants have made bombs with it in the past as in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 that killed 168 people, including children in a daycare, and injuring about 800 others.

Experts agree that ammonium nitrate, if stored properly, is relatively safe if not left for long periods of time as it will decay and absorb moisture, making it more dangerous if fire reaches it.

Before [top] After [bottom]

A fire appears to have triggered the explosion of the ammonium nitrate in Beirut.

Lebanese broadcaster LBCI and Reuters news agency cited sources as saying the fire was started by welding work being carried out on a hole in Warehouse 12.

The port's general manager, Hassan Koraytem, confirmed that maintenance was conducted on the door of the warehouse before the explosion.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said a female diplomat from the German embassy had died in her apartment from the blast.

The Lebanon-based cruise ship agency Abou Merhi said two people died and seven were injured when its Orient Queen ship was severely damaged by the blast.

There are also reports of one American, one Australian and two Egyptians killed in the blast along with residents in the surrounding vicinity.

Prime Minister Hassan Diab described the circumstances that led to the explosion as "unacceptable," and the director of Lebanese Customs, Badri Daher, told the press that his and Mr. Koraytem's warnings about the danger the material posted and calling for its removal were ignored.

Documents circulated online appeared to show that customs officials sent letters to the judiciary seeking guidance at least six times from 2014 to 2017.

The government has ordered officials at the port who oversaw the storage of the ammonium nitrate to be put under house arrest pending the completion of the investigation.

Many Lebanese citizens are unimpressed by the government's promises of transparency and accountability. They believe the investigation is an attempt by a political elite accused of corruption, neglect and mismanagement to dodge blame for the disaster and point fingers elsewhere.

Heads may roll . . . possibly literally.

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