In a scene straight out of “Les Miserables,” 5,000 angry demonstrators set fires and stormed barricades Saturday in Paris along the famed Champs-Elysees to protest president Emmanuel Macron and the rising gas taxes in France.

Police used water cannons and tear gas to try to contain the melee as demonstrators burned plywood, stomped on barriers and wielded signs reading “Death to Taxes.” They overturned one vehicle.

Smoke and flames mixed with holiday lights lining the boulevard to create a surreal scene, as one protester jumped on a pile of debris and waved a French flag, the Arc de Triomphe looming behind him.

Police said they arrested dozens, many for throwing objects during the demonstration. Officials said 19 people were hurt, including four police officers, and one victim who sustained serious injuries.

“It’s going to trigger a civil war and me, like most other citizens, we’re all ready,” said Benjamin Vrignaud, a 21-year-old protester from Chartres.

“They take everything from us. They steal everything from us,” said Laura Cordonnier, 21.

Saturday was the eighth day of protest across France, involving more than 81,000 demonstrators. Two people have been killed in the clashes.

Macron, whose popularity has dropped to a new low, is the focus of rage for the “yellow jacket” demonstrators. They accuse the pro-business president of elitism and indifference to the sufferings of ordinary citizens.

Anger is also welling over a hike in the diesel fuel tax, which is up roughly 30 U.S. cents per gallon. The gasoline tax is also set to rise. Gasoline in Paris now costs more than $7 a gallon, slightly more than diesel.

Macron maintains the taxes are needed to reduce dependence on fossil fuels and fund renewable energy systems.

But while Macron’s government noted that Saturday’s demonstrations were smaller than the roughly 244,000 people who marched against the gas tax last week, far left leader Jean-Luc Melenchon explained to local television that the issue plays a large roll in the French mindset: “When tax is no longer agreed to, it’s the start of revolutions in France.”

Post Wire Services

WAKEFIELD, Mass. – A historic Wakefield church went up in flames Tuesday night.

The First Baptist Church suffered an apparent lightning strike during the severe weather moving across Massachusetts.

MORE: Massive fire destroys historic Wakefield church

Crews began dismantling the remnants of the historic landmark in the rain Wednesday morning.

The 150-year-old building will now be torn down completely.

Just one painting hanging in the front entrance of the church was left behind, nearly untouched.

Please join the event, National Rosary to Support Justice Brett Kavanaugh, all prayers welcome!

The news that a group of feminist witches are planning to curse newly confirmed U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh are inspiring Catholics across the nation to spiritually support their fellow Catholic.

During the vicious confirmation process (trial?), I added Kavanaugh and his family to my daily prayers. Today I sent out a Hallmark card saying “Congratulations” to the justice, mailing it to his Supreme Court office.

Other Catholics are taking more spiritual measures to assist Kavanaugh.

A Catholic exorcist said he plans to hold a mass for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh next weekend after a group of witches announced their plans to gather in Brooklyn to publicly hex him.

“Conjuring up personified evil does not fall under free speech,” Father Gary Thomas, who serves as an exorcist for the Diocese of San Jose, Calif., told The National Catholic Register.

The San Jose exorcist asserts that those practicing such dark magic are evil.

Father Thomas said that those involved in the curse on Kavanaugh clearly believe in the power of personified evil. “They are going to direct the evil to have a permanently adverse effect on the Supreme Court justice,” he said.

“When curses are directed at people in a state of grace, they have little or no effect,” Father Thomas said. Otherwise, he has witnessed harm come upon people such as physical illness, psychosis, depression and having demons attach to them. Curses sometimes involve a blood sacrifice either through an animal or a human being, such as an aborted baby, according to him. However, there is no information about a blood sacrifice one way or the other for the Saturday event.

“The decision to do this against a Supreme Court justice is a heinous act and says a lot about the character of these people that should not be underestimated or dismissed,” he said. “These are real evil people.”

Father Thomas is perhaps the best known Exorcist today.

Thomas was ordained for the Diocese of San Jose in 1983 and his work as an Exorcist is so widely known that he was the subject of a 2011 film called The Rite. The film is loosely based on the Matt Baglio’s book The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist.

The book chronicled Thomas’ training in the rite of exorcism, as well as, other accounts of exorcists at work. In the novel, the author also recounted Thomas’ own experience confronting the Devil and the history of exorcism in the Catholic Church.

Catholics are also responding to the witches’ Facebook events page to indicate their support of Kavanaugh.

https://www.facebook.com/events/179836286297165/permalink/192005118413615/

https://www.facebook.com/events/179836286297165/permalink/191990385081755/

https://www.facebook.com/events/179836286297165/permalink/191865501760910/

Back when I was a Tea Party organizer, I read Saul Alinsky’s Rule for Radicals. I am going to apply RULE 6: “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.”

I have created my own Facebook event, National Rosary to Support Justice Brett Kavanaugh. If you are Catholic, please pray the Rosary, and say the Prayer to St. Michael, with me between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. this Saturday. I will enjoy saying these prayers very much, knowing that I am countering the work of bitter feminists while supporting a fellow Catholic.

If you are not a Catholic, please add your prayers, thoughts, and vibes during these hours! I suspect that Justice Kavanaugh will have a lot of spiritual warriors on his side tomorrow.

An ex-boyfriend of Christine Blasey Ford reportedly wrote a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee contradicting her testimony last Thursday on polygraphs — prompting Sen. Chuck Grassley to raise doubts about her truthfulness.

The man, who says he dated Ford from 1992 to 1998, wrote in the letter — obtained by Fox News — that he once saw Ford help ease the nerves of a friend preparing to take a polygraph by ­“explaining in detail what to ­expect” and how they work.

During last Thursday’s hearing, Arizona sex crimes prosecutor Rachel Mitchell asked Ford if she had ever talked with anyone other than her lawyers about “how to take a polygraph.” Ford said, “Never.”

The man, whose name was not released, also said that during his relationship with Ford, she never mentioned Brett Kavanaugh or her

In a letter late Tuesday, Grassley (R-Iowa) asked Ford’s lawyers for the polygraph results, saying the ex’s claim “raises specific concerns about the reliability of [Ford’s] polygraph-examination results.”

A pair of kidnappers who abducted a delivery driver at gunpoint and demanded money from his boss were arrested after a police chase that ended on an Upper West Side fire escape, authorities said.
The 32-year-old driver was making a delivery in Brooklyn around noon on Monday when he accidentally hit a parked car, Captain Timothy Malin, the commanding officer of the 20th Precinct on the Upper West Side, said at a news conference Tuesday.
After he hit the car, two men approached him and demanded cash, but the delivery driver told them he’d have to call his boss, Malin said.
When the driver’s boss told him they’d go through the insurance company, however, the two men pulled out a gun, forced the driver into a white BMW sedan and got on the phone with the boss.
Top Tri-State News PhotosTop Tri-State News Photos
“If you want your van back, and if you want your delivery driver back, you’re going to have to pay us,” they told the boss, according to Malin.
The boss, however, “very smartly” told the men to meet him at West 73rd Street and Broadway in Manhattan, Malin said.
After the call, the driver’s boss called 911 and met up with officers from the 20th Precinct, who devised a plan to trap the kidnappers.
STORM TEAM 4Severe Storms Bring Hail, Tornado Threat to Tri-State
When the kidnappers showed up at the intersection with the delivery driver around 3 p.m., the officers tried to stop them. The kidnappers tried to get away, but ended up crashing the car on the sidewalk, Malin said.
Officers were able to catch one of the kidnappers, but the other ran down the block and through a school in an attempt to flee.
He eventually ran up eight stories on a fire escape on West 72nd Street, where he was arrested, according to Malin.
Clothed Body With Chains Around Legs Found in NYC Harbor
After officers got a warrant to search the kidnappers’ car, they found a handgun, a small amount of heroin and a small amount of cocaine inside, according to Malin.
“[This was] one of the strangest cases that I’ve been a part of in the 18 and a half years I’ve been with the New York City Police Department,” Malin said.
The delivery driver was “shaken up, but completely unhurt,” the commanding officer noted.

Ten years ago, it was too-easy credit that brought financial markets to their knees. Today, it could be a global debt of $247 trillion that causes the next crash.

After a decade of escalating US household debt brought on by low wages and the national debt more than doubling over the same time frame, to $21 trillion, debt could soon put the brakes on this economic recovery, analysts warn.

“We think the major economies are on the cusp of this turning into the worst recession we have seen in 10 years,” said Murray Gunn, head of global research at Elliott Wave International.

And in a note, he added: “Should the [US] economy start to shrink, and our analysis suggests that it will, the high nominal levels of debt will instantly become a very big issue.”

The economic stats:

US household debt of $13.3 trillion now exceeds the 2008 peak. That’s due in part to mortgage lending, which is hovering near its decade-ago level of $9 trillion-plus.
Student loans outstanding have skyrocketed from $611 billion in 2008 to around $1.5 trillion today.
Auto loans, at nearly $1.25 trillion, have exceeded the 2008 total, while credit card balances are just as high now as before the Great Recession.
Meanwhile, global debt — a result of central bankers flooding economies with cheap money to lift them out of an funk — is now $247 trillion, up from $177 trillion in 2008. That is close to 2 ¹/₂ times the size of the global economy.
“We won’t be able to call it a recession, it’s going to be worse than the Great Depression,” said economic commentator Peter Schiff, forecasting a major economic downturn as early as the tail end of the Trump presidency’s first term. “The US economy is in so much worse shape than it was a decade ago.”

Economic theorists say insurmountable debt is the big kahuna. The huge sums today certainly fed the boom times. But since it must eventually be repaid, the tipping point will come when a wave of defaults by overwhelmed borrowers — potentially squeezed by rising interest rates — leads to a widespread reduction in spending and incomes, economists explain.

Although Schiff has gotten some calls wrong in the past — he incorrectly predicted the US Federal Reserve would fail in its roundabout quantitative easing campaign to “reflate” housing and stocks in the wake of the financial crisis — he is convinced he is right on the money this time.

“I think we are going to have a dollar crisis — you think the Turkish lira looks bad now, wait till you see when the dollar is imploding and we have a sovereign debt crisis in the US,” he told The Post. “The US government is going to be given a choice between defaulting on the debt, or else massive runaway inflation.”

Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs said the fiscal outlook for the US was “not good,” and could threaten the nation’s economic security during the next recession.

Schiff dismisses the latest batch of positive indicators, including the lowest unemployment rate in a generation, soaring business confidence spurred by President Trump’s tax cuts and the Dow hitting record highs. “Obviously, there is a whole lot of optimism — but there is a very good chance the US economy is in recession within the next two years. This is already the second-longest economic expansion in history,” Schiff said, adding that recent dips in new housing starts and auto sales may be red flags.

Gunn sees a brutal deflationary spiral ahead in the next downturn.

“People will look to central banks to help them out, but the authorities will be found wanting,” Gunn warned.

“Our prediction is that central banks will go from being feted for ‘saving the world’ in 2008 to being vilified for being impotent in the coming deflationary crash.

Source: Next crash will be ‘worse than the Great Depression’: experts

In the wake of #MeToo, more than 1,000 people have downloaded an app aimed at rooting out repeat sex offenders by allowing victims and witnesses to report the crimes anonymously and join forces against the sickos.

Called JDoe, the free app launched on the Apple and Android app store in April. It works by prompting users to report when and where an incident took place, along with the name of the perpetrator and any details of the crime.

The information is then stored in an encrypted database. Users cannot see the names of other victims or of perpetrators, but the app’s algorithm scans for patterns. If a repeat offender turns up, accusers receive separate notifications along with information on pursuing joint legal action through JDoe’s network of attorneys, if they desire.

There’s no need to wait for other victims to surface, however. JDoe also provides a way for users to anonymously report individual incidents to police or legal services providers.

In either scenario, the accused are not notified through the app that they have been reported.

A page on the JDoe app shown on an iPhone where you can fill out a report on a sexual offender, as well as details on the incident
JDoe
Company founder and CEO Ryan Soscia, 24, says he began developing JDoe in 2015, shortly after learning that a group of teammates and friends had been assaulted by the same trainer.

“What we [at JDoe] really try to focus on is enabling people to pursue justice together,” Soscia tells The Post. “We’re trying to democratize legal services.”

He describes the app’s identity encryption as something “Edward Snowden would approve of.”

As the app’s user base grows, Soscia plans to develop a map feature that visually displays incident reports. His team is also working on a feature that will alert users if they enter an area with multiple incident reports.

In addition, Soscia plans to grow the app’s survivor-support services such as referrals for mental health care providers. “We’re looking to provide almost a Yelp-like service,” he says.

“There’s power in realizing you’re not alone,” he says. “And that could be powerful throughput for the justice system.”

Source: People are using a new app to report sex assault anonymously

Coca-Cola is in talks with cannabis producer Aurora Cannabis to make marijuana-infused beverages, Bloomberg reported on Monday.

The companies would likely develop health-focused beverages that will ease inflammation, pain and cramping, the report said, citing sources familiar with the matter.

“Along with many others in the beverage industry, we are closely watching the growth of non-psychoactive CBD as an ingredient in functional wellness beverages around the world,” Coca-Cola said in a statement, referring to cannabidiol, a constituent of cannabis.

“No decisions have been made at this time,” the beverage group said, adding that it would not comment on further speculation.

Aurora, in a separate statement, said it would not discuss business development initiatives until they are finalized, but added: “Aurora has expressed specific interest in the infused beverage space, and we intend to enter that market.”

A partnership between Coke and Aurora would mark the first entry of a major manufacturer of non-alcoholic beverages into the market for cannabis-related products.

The news comes as more US states move to legalize marijuana for recreational use and as Canada, where Aurora is based, prepares to fully legalize the recreational use of cannabis next month.

There is no guarantee that talks between the companies will be successful or that a commercial agreement would be made public, BNN Bloomberg reported.

Earlier this year, alcohol producer Molson Coors said it will make cannabis-infused drinks with Hydropothecary Corp, while Corona beer maker Constellation Brands invested $4 billion more into marijuana producer Canopy Growth.

Coca-Cola’s shares rose marginally in premarket trade on Monday.

Source: Coca-Cola is in talks to make marijuana-infused drinks

Richard Gere and wife Alejandra Silva are readying for diaper duty.

On Sunday, Silva, 35, confirmed she and Gere, 69, are expecting their first child together, sharing a snap of the Dalai Lama putting his hand on her growing baby bump.

“Just a few moments ago… Getting blessings for our precious to come..” she posted on Instagram. “We couldn’t announce it before telling HH Dalai Lama☺️.”

Gere, a practicing Buddhist, secretly wed Silva in a civil ceremony in April.

Rumblings of a potential pregnancy first emerged in August, though both Gere and Silva have children from previous relationships. The “Pretty Woman” actor and second wife Carey Lowell are parents to 18-year-old son Homer, while Silva and ex-husband Govind Friedland welcomed son Albert in December 2012.

Prior to Silva, Gere was married to Cindy Crawford from 1991 to 1995. He wed Lowell in 2002, before separating in 2013. Their divorce was finalized in 2016.

Source: Richard Gere’s wife confirms pregnancy as blessed by Dalai Lama

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – JPMorgan Chase & Co Chief Executive Jamie Dimon on Sunday said he regretted comments that he was “smarter” than U.S. President Donald Trump and could beat him in an election.

“I shouldn’t have said it. It also proves I would not be a good politician,” Dimon said in an interview on ABC’s “This Week.”

On Wednesday, Dimon quickly backtracked after saying he could beat Trump in a campaign but not liberal Democrats.

Trump had a sharp rejoinder for Dimon on Thursday, saying the JPMorgan chief executive lacked the “smarts” to be president but was otherwise wonderful.

Dimon said he was speaking “more out of frustration and my own machismo,” and had no plans to run for president.

“I never say never to anything, but no,” Dimon said when asked if he would run for president.

The bank executive said he felt Trump’s policies were helping the economy.

“He should take some credit,” Dimon said, for regulatory and tax changes. “That has helped the economy. It is impossible to tease out how much.”

Source: JP Morgan chief Dimon says shouldn’t have made remarks about Trump