Model and actress Laetitia Casta is the latest French celebrity to join the backlash against the #MeToo movement. She claims it turns women into victims and says she wants nothing to do with it.

"I am not a feminist but a woman," Casta, 39, told Corsican news outlet Corse-Matin during an interview ahead of a local premiere on the Mediterranean island. "Women need not be afraid ... How can we give so much power to others? We are big enough to say what we want! We are responsible for ourselves."

A new report on one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history reveals that police allowed civilians to enter the crime scene, step on bullet casings and compromise the integrity of evidence before it was processed.

The Connecticut State Police (CSP) released an After Action Report on Friday, detailing the agency's response to the 2012 Sandy Hook mass shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, which claimed the lives of 20 children and six staff members.

On December 14, 2012, gunman Adam Lanza shot his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School and opened fire on two classrooms before killing himself. Investigators never discovered a motive, but said Lanza was obsessed with Norwegian gunman Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in 2011.

Haiti is a disaster zone. It's the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, and the epitome of a 'failed state'. It's a country founded upon the wholesale slaughter of 3,000-5,000 mostly innocent white French men, women and children following an 1804 massacre, and there is almost nothing attached to its name that could be considered an accomplishment other than being the 'world's first black Republic'.

In any case, Haiti has made it big in the news recently, due to President Trump deriding it and other African nations as "shithole countries". He especially considers them poor sources of new immigrants to the United States, and that the country should be more open to countries like Norway, a nation which once sent 1/3rd of its population to the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

This article will present five reasons why President Trump is not racist in regards to his opinion on Haiti being a shithole country (facts are racist!), and will end with a strong argument that countries like Norway would indeed be far more preferencial sources of immigration to ensure U.S. prosperity. That is of course, if they even bothered to come. Norway by many measures is considered to be the most prosperous country in the world.

Article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which was ratified by the United Nations General Assembly in 1966, obliges states to impose certain restrictions on freedom of speech. The article was the product of a long debate among UN members. Countries from the Soviet bloc and many non-aligned nations, notably Brazil, were keen to include a prohibition on propaganda for war, and also to make it as broadly defined as possible - that is to say to ban not just incitement of war, but propaganda on behalf of war more generally. Western states, by contrast, were rather more reluctant to include the provision, and in so far as they were willing to accept it, wanted to limit it just to incitement. In the end, the West lost the debate. The final wording of Article 20 states clearly: "Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law."

The Washington Post bureau chief in Beirut commended the courage of a battlefield reporter in Syria, despite being informed the man is in fact a radical Islamist. She has refused to take back her words.

On January 11, Liz Sly retweeted a video featuring a man with a microphone cowering in front a camera in the middle of an airstrike, purportedly shot near the northern Syrian city of Idlib, a current focal point of fighting between the opposition and government forces.

"This Syrian journalist, standing in an open field while bombs explode all around him, is very lucky to be alive. No flak jacket or helmet. You can barely hear him above the explosions. He and his colleagues are very brave," wrote Sly, who is responsible for the newspaper's Syria and Iraq coverage.

"This Syrian journalist's name is Tahir al-Umar and he is with Free Syrian TV," she added in a later post.

To cap off a long, strange day, my husband and I took the kids out last night to see Pitch Perfect 3. The first Pitch Perfect is a firm favorite in our household, the kind of movie we end up watching when we can't agree on what to watch. We'd been waiting til we all had a night to see the latest one together, so we made a night of it and went out for some dinner, too. I even had a Coke. The sugary kind. This was a big night, people! So we were all in high spirits and I entered the theater excited to see some good music and have a good time.

I wasn't expecting a masterpiece, but I also wasn't expecting to be blasted in the face with ninety minutes of blatant war propaganda from the United States Department of Defense.

Before I go on I should mention that a group called Insurge Intelligence published a report a few months back on thousands of military and intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act which showed unbelievably extensive involvement of US defense and intelligence agencies in the production of popular Hollywood movies and TV shows. Just from the information this group was able to gain access to, the scripts and development of over 800 films and 1,000 television titles were found to have been influenced by the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA to advance the interests of the US war machine. We're talking about big, high profile titles you've definitely heard of, from Transformers to Meet the Parents.

Today the city council of New Orleans unanimously passed a resolution which calls on the city to review and divest from companies that perpetrate human rights violations anywhere in the world. Proposed by local Palestine solidarity activists who support the Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment (BDS) movement for Palestinian human rights, the resolution is not on its face an endorsement of the official BDS campaign, but activists are celebrating a move that opens up that possibility.

"Even though [the resolution] is a significantly watered down version," Tabitha Mustafa, co-writer of the first draft, told Mondoweiss, "we see it as a first step in a process that will potentially include other resolutions and culminate in a far-reaching ordinance."

The symbolic victory for Palestinians and Palestine solidarity activists comes amidst a political climate in which anti-BDS measures written by Israel lobby groups inundate state legislatures across the country, and governors from New York to Maryland and dozens of other states have outlawed doing business with those supporting BDS, echoing Israel's talking points while doing so. Similar bills wait in Congress, inertia building along with Israel's international isolation.

Who could hate the Dreamers? With a name like that, you have to root for them. Therein lies the power of the left, freezing something and labeling it. Making it unassailable by semantic fiat. Like pro-choice, or income inequality, the name itself gives the veneer of moral force.

The White House recently released a statement from the Trump Administration:

President Donald J. Trump is grateful to Chairman [Bob] Goodlatte, Chairman [Mike] McCaul, Congressman [Raul] Labrador, and Congresswoman [Martha] McSally for introducing immigration legislation that would accomplish the President's core priorities for the American people. The President looks forward to advancing legislation that secures the border, ends chain migration, cancels the visa lottery, and addresses the status of the DACA population in a responsible fashion.

How very obscure. Because Trump campaigned, at least implicitly, on the promise of ejecting all illegal immigrants and other undesirables from American society.

A few who live amid the usually serene beauty and year-round warmth of Santa Barbara County say nature's recent onslaughts of wildfires and mudslides have dampened their California dreams.

For Hannah Troy, the twin blows of the Thomas Fire, which scorched parts of Santa Barbara last month in the biggest wildfire in the state's history, and this week's deadly mudslides only deepened her unease about the landscapes around her.

"California to me feels like it's just becoming a flourishing tinderbox," Troy said at a Red Cross shelter at a college in Santa Barbara, a wealthy city a couple hour's drive up the Pacific coast from Los Angeles.

Troy, a legal worker in her 50s, was born in New York's Long Island but moved as a child with her parents to Los Angeles. In 2006, she moved to the Montecito area to live with her sister and brother-in-law on a half-acre property, which survived this week with only some uprooted fences.

Last year, scores of protesters descended into Washington D.C. to protest the inauguration of Donald Trump. Dubbed the Women's March, these passionate and unabashed left wing protesters donned pink hats, cutely named p***y hats - a reference to the Access Hollywood tape, where the president is heard joking with former Today show host Billy Bush, making lewd remarks about women. The hot mic moment occurred in 2005. The tape was leaked in October of 2016 and had no discernable impact on the race. Trump still won. This year, however, could spell the end of the pink p***y hats because they're problematic. According to the social justice warriors of America, it excludes transgender and non-binary persons (whatever the hell the latter means), and women of color, whose genitals might not be pink. I'm not joking (via Washington Free Beacon):

...the Detroit Free Press reports that women activists in Michigan and elsewhere are making a conscious effort to move away from the hat out of fear that it "excludes and is offensive to transgender women and gender nonbinary people who don't have typical female genitalia and to women of color because their genitals are more likely to be brown than pink."

"I personally won't wear one because if it hurts even a few people's feelings, then I don't feel like it's unifying," said Phoebe Hopps, the founder of Women's March Michigan. "I care more about mobilizing people to the polls than wearing one hat one day of the year."

Hopps said it is not just her, and that national Women's March organizers "are not making it the cornerstone of our messaging because ... there's a few things wrong with the message."

The Facebook page for the Women's March in Pensacola agreed, lecturing followers that "The Pink P*ssy Hat reinforces the notion that woman = vagina and vagina = woman, and both of these are incorrect."

LaShawn Ebly, co-chair of Black Lives Matter-Lansing, told the Free Press that she intends to make the hats the cornerstone of her speech at an upcoming rally. "I will say this one thing: It is a problem," she said by way of a preview.

Yeah, there's something wrong, but I don't think it has to do with the hats. At the same time, there is nothing as entertaining as left wingers eating each other.