At least eight are reported injured after a blast ripped through a street in Lyon, France Friday afternoon. French President Emmanuel Macron has called the incident an “attack”.
The suspected parcel bomb detonated on Victor-Hugo Road in Lyon, south-east France around 1730 eastern Europe time (1130 ET) and is reported to have been a package stuffed with “nails, screws, bolts”. The eight injured, which includes an eight-year-old girl, are reported to have sustained light injuries.
If Nevada’s Democratic governor signs a bill passed by the state senate Tuesday into law, his state will have moved the National Popular Vote movement six votes closer to effectively nullifying the Electoral College as established in the U.S. Constitution.
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec’s written account of her Oct. 11, 2016, meeting with FBI informant Christopher Steele shows the Hillary Clinton campaign-funded British intelligence operative admitted that his research was political and facing an Election Day deadline.
Moscow’s development of nuclear-powered drones has been closely watched in recent years, amid concern that Russia could be adding a “doomsday” weapon capable of unleashing tidal waves to its arsenal.
The Poseidon can target coastal areas with a heavy nuclear weapon, causing a devastating tsunami wave. Putin has said its tests have been successful.
He first mentioned the nuclear-powered drone among an array of other new weapons in a state-of-the-nation address last year, saying they would render U.S. missile defense systems useless.
RAND Senior Defense Analyst David Ochmanek discussed the simulations at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) in Washington D.C. last week. “In our games, where we fight China or Russia … blue gets its a** handed to it, not to put too fine a point on it,” he said, during a panel discussion. Blue denotes U.S. forces in the simulations.
Russia and China have amassed large inventories of precision-guided cruise missiles and ballistic missiles that can reach hundreds of miles and strike military targets, the researcher said. Set against this backdrop, U.S. military outposts and aircraft carriers in the contested regions could face a potential devastating barrage of missiles.
The Supreme Court will decide its first set of LGBT rights cases following Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement. Kennedy was the architect of the high court’s gay rights jurisprudence.
The justices announced Monday that they will hear three cases asking whether a federal anti-bias law covers gay, lesbian, and transgender workers.
All three disputes involve gay or transgender employees who say they were terminated due to unlawful sex-stereotyping.
The Court’s decision to hear the Title VII disputes marks the first time in the modern period that the justices will hear a LGBT rights case without retired Justice Anthony Kennedy, who shaped the nation’s gay rights jurisprudence. Beginning in 1996, Kennedy wrote decisions striking down state laws barring local governments from recognizing gays as a protected class, state bans on sodomy, and the federal Defense of Marriage Act.
Kennedy’s work reached its apex in 2015 when he wrote the majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, establishing same-sex marriage across the country.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act bans employment discrimination based on sex. Between 1979 and 2018 eight federal appeals courts have rejected arguments that Title VII’s ban on sex discrimination reaches gays, lesbians, or trans people.
The New York dispute involved a gay skydiving instructor called Donald Zarda who was terminated from Altitude Express Inc. after disclosing his sexual orientation to a client. The client claims that Zarda inappropriately touched her, and that Zarda promptly shared his orientation to assuage her concerns. In turn, Zarda sued the company, arguing his dismissal was motivated by animus in violation of Title VII.
Though a federal trial court dismissed Zarda’s claim, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in his favor. Zarda has since died in a BASE jumping incident.
The Michigan dispute involves a Christian funeral home director called Thomas Rost who fired a transgender employee, Aimee Stephens. Rost dismissed Stephens for failing to abide by the company dress code, which requires male employees to wear suits. Stephens identifies as a woman.
We all grew up being told in school how California is along a major fault line, and that to expect to see a major earthquake there sometime, anytime, soon. Well, scientists are being left baffled by why they have not seen any major ground-rupturing quakes in the region in 100-years.
The computer models they have run for the fault lines in the region say there is only a 0.3% chance of this happening. As a result geophysicists are wondering if something else is causing the “earthquake pause”.
Read More: Live Science
What was that expression Jackie Gleason used to say? oh oh “How sweet it is”.
How is Al Sharpton — the Jussie Smollett of civil rights — still a kingmaker?
This week, nearly every single Democratic candidate for president — save the otherwise-distracted Joe Biden — has or will appear at Sharpton’s annual convention for his National Action Network, which he calls a charity.
A more rational observer might call it a personal piggybank funded by shakedowns.
This is a man who, as The Post exclusively reportedin December, sold the rights to his life story to his own “nonprofit,” paying himself $531,000 — on top of his $244,661 salary to run NAN in 2017.
When asked by The Post when he would see that half-million, Sharpton — who was covering the 100th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s birth in South Africa for MSNBC, itself a sacrilege — took offense.
“What does that have to do with anything?” he asked.
Such is Al Sharpton’s M.O., one that’s kept him in public life for over 30 years: dodge, deflect, deny, distract — and then cry racism. Sound extreme? It’s a practice that has kept major American corporations donating to NAN rather than deal with Sharpton’s poisonous accusations. McDonald’s, Pfizer, Verizon, AT&T, General Motors, American Honda, Chrysler, Macy’s, Anheuser-Busch and Colgate-Palmolive have all paid to keep Sharpton quiet.
Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg reportedly donated $110,000 throughout his term in office, and Sharpton, who historically loved nothing more than to point his megaphone at City Hall and inflame racial tensions, finally shut up.
“Once Sharpton’s on board, he plays the race card all the way through,” a source told The Post in 2015. “He just keeps asking for more and more money.”
One of the great mysteries of modern American history is how Sharpton ever survived Tawana Brawley. For those too young to remember, in 1987, Brawley, then 15, was discovered wrapped in a garbage bag, smeared with human waste and racist epithets written in charcoal. She claimed that she had been gang raped in the woods in upstate New York by six white men, including then-Dutchess County prosecutor Steven Pagones.
Sharpton was Brawley’s greatest supporter, even as it was revealed she made the whole thing up, even as she and he were ordered to pay restitution to Pagones, whose life and reputation were ruined.
It was an order both, of course, tried to shirk. (Sharpton’s fee was eventually paid by supporters.)
In ‘80s and ‘90s New York, when race relations were dismal at best, dangerous at worst, Al Sharpton sought to instigate and agitate rather than calm. Even as he later became a buffoon, one of those only-in-New York characters with his bouffant and his medallion, wearing athletic suits even as he was morbidly obese, “Al Charlatan” to Ed Koch, he indefatigably reinvented himself. He dropped the weight, bought a briefcase.
He wrote a book, ran for president, aligned himself with the Dalai Lama.
We knew, as he surely did, that it was still all a big con, an entertaining sideshow. And really, it still is. Who in today’s America finds Al Sharpton politically and racially relevant? Who can recall the last thing Al Sharpton did for someone not named Al Sharpton?
On Friday, every candidate from Kamala Harris to Elizabeth Warren to Bernie Sanders will nonetheless kiss the ring, as Beto O’Rourke did on Wednesday afternoon. Beto pulled a cynical 180-degree turn on his former opposition to reparations. In other words, he was against it just last month before he was “absolutely” for it today — perfect funhouse logic for the political theater of Reverend Al.
House Democrats introduced the Equality Act last week, a measure that would ensure gender ideology — i.e., transgender bathrooms, forced preferred pronoun use, and biological men playing women’s sports, etc. — is cemented into federal law.
H.R. 5, which was introduced with 239 co-sponsors, states its purpose is to “prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation, and for other purposes.”
…In fact, the measure would likely force American women throughout the country to relinquish their rights to privacy, safety, and the ability to compete in sports “equally.”
…“it actually would promote inequality by elevating the ideologies of special-interest groups to the level of protected groups in civil rights law.”
…“if the Equality Act passes, gender identity ideology will be taught via the law, and its punitive power will ensure your compliance”:
The Equality Act has the support of at least 161 major corporations, all of which are listed on the website of Hands Across the Aisle.
Apple CEO Tim Cook tweeted his support for the Equality Act:
Hands Across the Aisle responded the Equality Act is a “direct attack on women and girls”:
In the era of #MeToo, it’s hard to understand why these companies are willing to endanger women and girls by acting so deliberately to undermine the nation’s indecent exposure and voyeurism restrictions, in what are supposed to be single-sex accommodations. Is it any wonder that many of them have recently faced significant sexual harassment allegations, or had large bias or sexual harassment claims brought against them?
…a forced gender ideology at the federal level would be a nightmare for American women, many who, at this point in time, now take for granted the equal educational opportunities they regularly enjoy.
“If gender-identity ideology becomes the law of the land, women in all walks of life will suffer the consequences of the blatantly sexist notion that a man who adopts stereotypical feminine roles, behaviors or clothing must be treated in all respects as a woman,” Waggoner warned in an op-ed at the Hill. “Contrary to the gender identity advocates who are pushing the act, being female is not about wearing dresses, adopting other feminine stereotypes, or ‘feeling female.’”
Many targets by the movement in Paris and other cities included known landmarks and stores or places seen as elitist, such as the Parisian restaurant Le Fouquet’s on the Champs Elysées.
Now, they will be dedicated to ensuring security at the next round of Yellow Vest demonstrations, which have been held every Saturday for the past 18 weeks.
But last week’s demonstrations, which some Yellow Vest leaders had suggested may be their last, turned into some of the most violent to date.
After the weekend, the French government sacked the top police official in Paris, 66-year-old Michel Delpuech, for failure to keep the protests in the capital from spiralling out of control.
Damage done
In addition to the landmark restaurant in Paris, more than 100 other businesses were damaged along the Champs-Elysées.
Major cities dealing from the movement include Lyon, Bordeaux, Strasbourg, Nantes and Nice, to name a few.
On Sunday, China’s President Xi Jinping will start his visit to France with a stop in Côte d’Azur beginning with Nice and Monaco.
For the upcoming protest this week, which will mark the 19th week, calls on social media have singled out Nice, Toulouse and Montpellier.