Brigitte Macron has brought forward her libel trial against Natacha Rey, who made bizarre claims that the French First lady was born a man.

The hearing has been moved from March 2025 to June 19, 2024, at the request of Macron's lawyer following Rey's claims that she was born under the name Jean-Michel Trogneux.

Since the interview with Rey, 48, on a YouTube channel at the end of 2021, lawyer Jean Ennochi said the rumours surrounding French President Emmanuel Macron's 70-year-old wife had continued to be fuelled.

Ennochi therefore requested the hearing to be sped up, as concerns around how the rumours have spread beyond France and into the United States have arisen.

He also said: 'In recent weeks, particularly internationally, via the Trumpist influencer Candace Owens, who relayed, I felt that the harm to my clients was increasing day by day'.

Researchers around the world are growing more uneasy with the spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N1) in US dairy cows as the virus continues to make its way into new herds and states. Several experts say the US is not sharing enough information from the federal investigation into the unexpected and growing outbreak, including genetic information from isolated viruses.

To date, the US Department of Agriculture has tallied 32 affected herds in eight states: Idaho, Kansas, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, South Dakota, and Texas. In some cases, the movement of cattle between herds can explain the spread of the virus. But the USDA has not publicly clarified if all the herds are linked in a single outbreak chain or if there is evidence that the virus has spilled over to cows multiple times. Early infections in Texas were linked to dead wild birds (pigeons, blackbirds, and grackles) found on dairy farms. But the USDA reportedly indicated to Stat News that the infections do not appear to be all linked to the Texas cases.

Given the fact that Candace Owens has received much outrage at her suggestion (and lost her job over the kerfuffle that followed) that Brigitte Macron, the wife of President Emanuel Macron, is in fact a man who transitioned into a "woman," it might serve our readers to understand the data behind Ms. Owens' assertion. The facts of this case are rather startling, to say the least. The video Ms. Owens linked has also long been scrubbed. Why, if it is all fake news?

So, here is a primer of the main arguments.

The questioning of Brigitte Macron's real sex began back in 2021, when the journal, Faits & Documents, published by Xavier Poussard, began a five-part series, entitled, "Le Mystère Brigitte Macron" ["The Mystery of Brigitte Macron"]. The investigation, which had taken three years, was done by Natacha Rey and then furthered by Mr. Poussard. By the end of 2021, there was a great buzz about all this in France.

The main arguments presented in the journal, with much documentary proof, may be summarized as follows:

1. Brigitte Macron was born a man and transitioned into a woman. There is a mysterious video from 1977, which shows a man shadowed out, calling himself "Veronique," who had begun to live as a woman. Documented analysis shows that Veronique's voice is remarkably like that of Mrs. Emmanuel Macron (to avoid confusion hereon in, we shall only use this designation).

2. This initial hint led to a fuller investigation into the background of Mrs. Macron, whose given name is "Brigitte," and whose family name is Trogneux; the family hails from the city of Amiens. What investigators found next was rather unexpected. There were two Trogneux children, a brother named Jean-Michel (born in 1945) and a sister named Brigitte (born in 1953). But this sister (Brigitte) supposedly died in 1961. And the photos of the sister, the late Brigitte, look nothing like the present Mrs. Macron who actually is a dead-ringer for the brother, Jean-Michel. So, what exactly is going on here? A dead Brigitte, and a Mrs. Macron who looks like the brother?

Brigitte Macron, the First Lady of France, filed a complaint last year against two women who uploaded a YouTube video titled "Brigitte Macron is a man." The video alleged that Brigitte had a gender reassignment at 18.

On Wednesday, the French newspaper Le Point reported that Brigitte's complaint against the two women was "voided" by a Paris Judge.

In its decision, consulted by AFP, the court declared void the summons issued by Brigitte Macron for invasion of privacy and image rights, considering that the facts she denounced should have been qualified of public defamation.

Brigitte Macron, her brother, and the three children of the First Lady had assigned two women on February 15, 2022, one presenting herself as a "medium," the other as an "independent journalist."

They asked the court to condemn these two women to pay them damages for having broadcast on the YouTube channel of the "medium", on December 10, 2021, "a perfectly eccentric thesis" according to which Brigitte Macron, born Trogneux, does not would never have existed, but that his brother would have taken on this identity after changing sex.

Residents in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong are on high alert for flooding, with authorities forecasting water flows in a major river to hit "once-in-100-year" levels on Monday morning.

The provincial flood and disaster prevention department said on Sunday afternoon that floodwaters in the Bei River, a southern tributary of the Pearl River, were expected to peak at 37.3 metres (122 feet) by 1am, or about 5.8 metres above the warning line.

Warning levels had already been exceeded at 20 monitoring stations along the waterway by Saturday evening.

Northern and western Guangdong have been battered by intense rainstorms since Friday, breaking rainfall records for April in many places.

The cities of Qingyuan, Shaoguan, Huizhou and capital Guangzhou have been particularly hard hit, prompting flood alerts and rainstorm warnings for three days in a row.

Some definitions:

• An "account holder" is you, your IRA, your pension plan, your stock and bond investments held at an "account provider" or "intermediary" or "depository institution" such as Merrill Lynch, Schwab, Wells Fargo.
• An "entitlement holder" is the definition of you whose ownership claim to your financial assets has been subordinated to the claims of "secured creditors" of the institution where you have your accounts.

Please do understand that the dispossession of which I write is your dispossession.

Klaus Schwab tells us that in the Great Reset that the World Economic Forum is preparing for us "you will own nothing and you will be happy." Well, we already own nothing. Our bank deposits and stocks and bonds, in the event the depository institution gets into trouble, belong to the depository institution's creditors, not to us. All assets are pooled and serve as collateral whether or not labeled "segregated."

You might remember that during the last financial crisis we were told that there would be no more bail-outs, that in the future there would be bail-ins. A bail-out is when central bank money creation rescues the favored troubled financial institutions. A bail-in is when the depositors' assets are used for the rescues.

Was Tehran's 'symbolic' attack on the Jewish state a victory or a defeat for the future?

The night of April 13-14 was another round of 'shock therapy' for the world as Iran launched a direct attack on Israeli territory. This followed an unjustified strike by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, which resulted in the deaths of 11 diplomats and two high-ranking generals of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Initially, Israel denied responsibility, but later indirectly admitted to targeting the building under the belief that it served as a military base coordinating Hamas operations. This act clearly violated the Vienna Conventions of 1961 and 1963, which protect diplomatic missions. Typically, such an infringement would lead to the severance of diplomatic ties, but since Iran and Israel have had no such relations and have been on the brink of conflict for decades, Israel's abrupt move can be interpreted as a declaration of war. Faced with this provocation, Iran was put in a very tight spot and felt compelled to act.

Almost two weeks of suspense followed as the world waited for Iran's response, which seemed logically inevitable. Pundits and analysts mostly considered two obvious options that Iran could use: either give a mirror response and hit Israeli territory or one of its diplomatic offices in the region, or use its proxy forces, which are as much of a problem for Israel as Iran itself. But Tehran decided to take a third course, both launching a direct attack and using its allies in the region. This attack made history as it was Iran's first direct assault on Israel. Among other things, it was the most massive drone attack on record, estimated to have involved more than 200 UAVs, as well as 150 cruise missiles, 110 Shahab-3, Sajil-2 and Kheibar surface-to-surface ballistic missiles, and seven Fattah-2 hypersonic cruise missiles. The strikes were launched from multiple locations including Iran, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and the part of Yemen controlled by the Ansar Allah Houthi group.

It was a little past midnight on Friday, and Israel's Supreme Command Post was racing to complete as many strikes as possible in the final hours before a cease-fire with the Palestinian militant group Hamas was to take effect at 2 a.m.

On a wall covered with huge screens, a three-dimensional diagram of a high-rise building with one of its apartments marked in red popped up. On another screen, a live video from the air circled above a building in Gaza that looked a lot like the one in the diagram.

This room is the nerve center of a bunker dubbed the "Fortress of Zion," a new Israeli Army command post deep underground beneath its headquarters in the heart of Tel Aviv. It is designed to command the kind of high-tech air wars that have supplanted ground invasions fought by tanks and infantry battalions.

Heavy thunderstorms have lashed the United Arab Emirates (UAE), dumping more than a year and a half's rain on the desert city-state of Dubai in just a few hours and flooding major highways and its international airport.

The rains began late on Monday, soaking the sands and roads of Dubai with some 20mm (0.79 inches) of rain, according to meteorological data collected at Dubai International Airport. The storms intensified at about 9am (05:00 GMT) on Tuesday and continued throughout the day, dumping more rain and hail onto the overwhelmed city.

By the end of Tuesday, more than 142mm (5.59 inches) had soaked Dubai. An average year sees 94.7mm (3.73 inches) of rain at Dubai International Airport, the world's busiest for international travel and a hub for the long-haul carrier Emirates.

Denmark's historic old stock exchange building in the centre of Copenhagen has been engulfed by fire.

The 17th Century Børsen is one of the city's oldest buildings and onlookers gasped as its iconic spire collapsed in the flames.

Everyone inside the building was able to leave and people rushed to rescue some of its historic paintings.

Culture minister Jakob Engel-Schmidt said 400 years of Danish cultural heritage had gone up in flames.

The building, dating back to 1625, is a stone's throw from Denmark's parliament, the Folketing, housed in the old royal palace of Christiansborg castle. Danish media said the nearby square was being evacuated.