Josh Jackman
Pink NewsMon, 28 Jan 2019 15:03 UTC
© Destination Eurovision/youtube
Bilal Hassani has won the right to represent France at the Eurovision Song Contest
Gay singer Bilal Hassani has won the right to represent France in the Eurovision Song Contest.
The 19-year-old singer,
who has faced a wave of homophobic hatred online in recent weeks, lost the judges' vote during Saturday's (January 26) French selection show
Destination Eurovision, but won the public vote by a huge margin.
This was enough to catapult the singer from fifth place to first in the standings, going from 44 points behind one of his seven competitors, Seemone, to 44 points ahead of her, according to the Eurovision
site.
Comment: Free. The perfect individual. Liberated from all 'oppressive bonds of society' - including biological ones.
'King' is a good name for his (er, her? xer?) song actually. The logical terminus of the Enlightenment is the worship of self as king, polar opposite to the pre-Enlightenment norm of recognizing a higher power outside of the self, then symbolized by the monarchy.
© AP Photo / El Nuevo Dia,Omar Perez
An explosion has occurred at Venezuela's port of La Guaira on Sunday, local media reported citing users of social media.
The Nacional media outlet reported that
fire brigades had arrived on the scene without revealing additional details or the cause of the explosion.
La Guaira, the capital city of Venezuela's northern Vargas state and the nation's primary port, was founded in 1577 and has been the scene of several key naval battles during the late-20th-century forming of the oil-rich South American country.
Last year, a powerful explosion at an LPG dispensing station belonging to the Venezuelan state-owned PDVSA energy company and located in the state of Miranda in the north of the country saw two killed and six others injured.
Comment: It's notable that Venezuela is in the middle of some of its most important
military drills for decades following years of US meddling and more recent direct attempts to facilitate the overthrow of democratically elected leader Maduro.
Joe Roberts
MetroMon, 28 Jan 2019 10:33 UTC
© Lincolnshire Live / BPM Media
Harry Miller said police wanted to know his ‘thinking’ for liking the limerick on Twitter
Harry Miller, who believes 'trans women are not women', says the formal probe by Humberside Police was into his 'thinking' and his reasons for liking the limerick on Twitter. The limerick referred to trans women as 'stupid' and made comments about vaginas and 'synthetic' hormones.
Mr Miller, who used to be a policeman, says an officer told him he was investigating reports of a hate crime.
'Cop said he was in possession of 30 tweets by me,' he recalled on Twitter. 'I asked if any contained criminal material. He said "No." 'I asked if any came close to being criminal and he read me a limerick. Honestly. A limerick. A cop read me a limerick over the phone.' After telling the PC he did not write the limerick, he reportedly said: 'Ah. But you liked it and promoted it.'
© Wiltshire Police
Stephanie Colasanti
Stephanie Colasanti, 31, was convicted on two counts of fraud after spending £175,000 ($227,000) of Glenda Bennett's inheritance on vacations, shopping sprees, a car and funding her drug use.
In sentencing the former bank worker, a judge told Colasanti she used the 84-year-old's bank account "as your own piggy bank" after her relative had inherited almost $650,000.
RTMon, 28 Jan 2019 10:32 UTC
© Reuters / Ronen Zvulun
. Historian and 'Nazi hunter' Efraim Zuroff told RT that the results show a combination of "anti-Semitism and abysmal ignorance."
Sunday is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK, marking 74 years to the day since the Soviet Red Army liberated the Auschwitz extermination camp. Despite extensive documentary evidence, and testimony from survivors and perpetrators, Holocaust denial is on the rise in Britain.
One in 20 Britons believe the Holocaust never happened, according to a
poll published on Sunday. Eight percent believe that the official death count of six million is exaggerated and one in five believe less than two million Jews were murdered. 45 percent simply don't know how many died.
RTMon, 28 Jan 2019 08:57 UTC
Spot the EU flag. Is this simply about protesting against violence, or is there an ideological cause behind it?
Anger over violence and vandalism resulting from the weekly Yellow Vest demonstrations has spurred the creation of a new protest movement - the Red Scarves - revealing new divisions within French society.
Shouting
"We, too, are the people!" around 10,000 activists marched through the street of Paris calling on the authorities to restore public order. While some in the crowd said they initially supported the Yellow Vests' agenda and demands, many reconsidered their views in light of the tactics used by more extreme elements of the grassroots movement.
Over 2,000 people have been injured in clashes with police since the Yellow Vest protests began on November 17. Ten people have died as a result of the protests - among them bystanders who were caught between police and protesters. An 80-year-old woman died in December after a gas canister used by police to disperse demonstrators went through her apartment window.
While the Yellow Vests accuse the government of using excessive force against them,
those representing the Red Scarves believe that the authorities have the right to intervene to restore order.
"Long live our policemen! Long live our gendarmes!" they shouted on Sunday.
Comment: The size of the Yellow Vest rallies has perhaps 'shrunk' since 'Acte III' on December 1st, but numbers have since gone way up again. Yellow Vest protests with an equivalent number as the above single counter-protest in Paris were held in multiple towns and small cities across France on Saturday.
These 'red scarves' are also chanting simple things like 'democracy', and a number of them of waving EU flags. So they may say they're sympathetic with the Yellow Vests and simply want violence to end, but it's likely that pro-status quo feelings motivate many or most of them.
They are, to use the French word, the
bourgeoisie, middle class Parisians who do quite well from globalization, thank you very much, and for whom Macron is their worthy president. If they were
genuinely concerned with the violence, they would have figured out by now, like most, that the media is lying about its primary cause: police-instigated violence against initially-peaceful Yellow Vests.
UPDATE 16:00 CET
One of the protest signs reads 'Finance is my friend', an apparent indication of their support for the banks:
In this on-the-scene video report, an RT France reporter puts the crowd size at about 1,500, about one seventh of the French media's figure. While interviewing a 'foulard rouge' wearing an EU flag, he is accosted by another man telling him he is a 'collaborator of Putin'...
© Getty Images
‘Technology is the puppet, but surveillance capitalism is the puppet master.’
Hindsight is the only exact science in this business, and in that long run we're all dead. Printing shaped and transformed societies over the next four centuries, but nobody in Mainz (Gutenberg's home town) in, say, 1495 could have known that his technology would (among other things): fuel the Reformation and
undermine the authority of the mighty Catholic church; enable the rise of what we now recognise as modern science; create unheard-of professions and industries; change the shape of
our brains; and even
recalibrate our conceptions of childhood. And yet printing did all this and more.
Why choose 1495? Because we're about the same distance into our revolution, the one kicked off by digital technology and networking. And although it's now gradually dawning on us that this really is a big deal and that epochal social and economic changes are under way, we're as clueless about where it's heading and what's driving it as the citizens of Mainz were in 1495.
Comment: More information on the EU's GDPR rules. Ms. Zuboff may feel it's a good start, but like all moves into uncharted territory, it is having some issues.
RTSat, 26 Jan 2019 14:19 UTC
© Reuters/Umit Bektas
A mob of angry civilians has attacked a Turkish military camp near the Iraqi city of Dohuk, burning equipment and vehicles. The incident comes in response to the deaths of civilians during Turkish airstrikes, local media reports.
The incident occurred in northern Iraq on Saturday, when a large mob of civilians attacked a Turkish military encampment located in the predominantly-Kurdish region of Dohuk.
Footage from the scene which surfaced online shows civilians at the military encampment with Turkish military vehicles and tents burning in the background.
At least one person died and 10 were reportedly wounded during the incident. It remains unclear if the Turkish Army sustained any casualties -
servicemen are nowhere to be seen in the footage.
© Twitter/https://twitter.com/RakeshPoeran
Nine people were inured after an explosion in The Hague caused the front of a building to collapse, the Dutch city's fire department has said.
Emergency workers rescued two injured people from a collapsed three-story home in the city in the Netherlands and are
looking for anyone else who might have been killed or injured.
At least seven people have been taken to nearby hospitals, The Hague fire department said.
RTL News said
a blast of unknown origin had caused three houses to collapse. It said nearby residents had been evacuated as a precaution.
A story and photograph published by local news service Omroep West said a single building had collapsed after a blast and emergency services were at the scene.
Comment: From Russia to the US, industrial, commercial and residential gas related explosions have happened all over the place this month. Below is a selection of some of the most recent:
Because this did not happen in Russia, you won't hear commentary in the media to the effect that weak Dutch infrastructure caused it.
© Jacques Demarthon · AFP · Getty
She's probably part-time, and doesn't want to be.
Britain just notched up yet another record-breaking low for unemployment, according to the government. Unemployment stayed at just 4%, while the number of people with jobs rose to 32.54 million, or 75.8%,
"the highest since comparable estimates began in 1971," according to the UK's Office for National Statistics.
But once again, the monthly jobs tally eclipsed how that miracle was achieved. "Headline" unemployment is only at a record low because of a 42% increase in the number of people who are in "involuntary" part-time work.
"Involuntary" means
they're only working part-time because they cannot get a full-time job.
Comment: Governments can fiddle the numbers all they like but they can only fool people for so long until before there will be a backlash, as we're seeing with movements like the
Yellow Vests in France:
For more, check out SOTT radio's:
Comment: Free. The perfect individual. Liberated from all 'oppressive bonds of society' - including biological ones.
'King' is a good name for his (er, her? xer?) song actually. The logical terminus of the Enlightenment is the worship of self as king, polar opposite to the pre-Enlightenment norm of recognizing a higher power outside of the self, then symbolized by the monarchy.