The cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris is home to scores of priceless artifacts, artwork and relics collected over the centuries, each with their own story.

As a devastating fire tore through the revered Gothic cathedral on Monday, toppling its spire, many feared these treasures might be lost forever.
A "forest" of wooden latticework fueled the blaze which consumed the building's roof, whose framework dates back to the 13th century, according to Msgr. Patrick Chauvet, the cathedral's rector.
The Paris Fire Brigade tweeted that the cathedral's stone construction has been "saved," as have the "main works of art." As more information emerges, what has been rescued from Notre Dame is becoming apparent.
Yet many details, such as possible water damage from the operation to save the building, are still unclear.

While French authorities investigate what caused the 15 April fire that ravaged the famous Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, one rabbi has speculated that this tragedy might’ve been the work of the divine, the Haaretz newspaper reports.

According to the newspaper, Shlomo Aviner, a rabbi of a West Bank settlement who was born in France, initially refrained from directly calling the blaze a punishment from god, but admitted that it might be possible after he was asked the following question: "So it can't be said that it was punishment?"
"It is possible, after all. The first big Talmud burning was in Paris, there in the plaza of the Notre Dame Cathedral", the rabbi said.

Local media has reported that former Peruvian President Alan García has died after undergoing emergency surgery at a hospital in Lima, following a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

He shot himself just as police raided his Lima home amid corruption allegations in Latin America’s largest graft probe.

According to the AP:

Health Minister Zulema Tomás said doctors provided cardiac resuscitation three times and were proceeding to operate on the 69-year-old former head of state at the José Casimiro Ulloa Hospital in Peru’s capital city of Lima.

The former president was among 230 people across Latin America facing investigation and prison time related to a mass kickback for construction contracts scheme centered on Brazilian conglomerate Odebrecht.

Despite earlier good news on the US-China trade deficit, U.S. soybean exports have plunged to their lowest levels since the early days of the U.S.-China trade war in what is an alarming sign for farmers pleading with the Trump administration to resolve all trade disputes.

Current data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) revealed that the total U.S. soybean exports reached 460,700 metric tons last week, down from 888,700 tons in the previous week and just above 446,500 tons in the same week a year ago. Of the soybean shipments last week, only 130,200 tons were loaded on vessels for China.

The Florida teen who flew to Colorado and bought a weapon and ammunition there just days before the 20th anniversary of the Columbine tragedy and soon became the subject of a massive manhunt is dead, officials said.

Sol Pais, 18, was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on Wednesday morning near the Echo Lake Lodge at the base of Mount Evans in Clear Creek County, according to authorities.

The discovery ended a nearly 24-hour manhunt for the high school student after she boarded a Denver-bound flight Monday then made threats, officials said.

“Because of her comments and her actions, because of her travel here to the state, because of her procurement of a weapon immediately upon arriving here, we considered her to be a credible threat — certainly to the community and potentially to schools,” Dean Phillips, FBI special agent in charge of the Denver field office, said at a press conference. “She has had an infatuation with Columbine and the perpetrators of Columbine.”

Following Monday's formal US listing of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, or FTO, Iran was quick to hit back as previously promised.

Iranian lawmakers voted Tuesday to in turn list US Central Command, or CENTCOM, as a terrorist organization, which means that any support given CENTCOM will be treated as an act of terrorism. It essentially means all American troops in the Middle East will be treated as terrorists, according to the newly passed law.

Will the Trump regime order military action against Venezuela on the phony pretexts of humanitarian intervention and responsibility to protect (R2P)?

Though highly unlikely, we’ve seen it many times before – “humanitarian” naked aggression, raping and destroying nations for their own good, “liberating” them from fundamental freedoms, looting their resources for “economic development” – the right thing to do?

One nation attacking another threatening no one is the highest of high crimes – a fundamental Nuremberg Tribunal principle affirmed by Chief Justice Robert Jackson, a US Supreme Court Justice.

Calling Nazi war crimes “the supreme international crime against peace,” he stressed the following in his opening remarks, saying:

“The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”

Recent US sanctions have been directed at the heart of Venezuela’s economy: the oil industry, an industry that has also been crippled by the continued sabotages on the electric power grid of the country.

But when you think that enough suffering has been imposed on the people of Venezuela with all sorts of warfare actions taken out from the toolbox of a full scale Hybrid War, the US government strikes again with another hit. This time by preventing the sale of Venezuelan oil to Cuba, which amounts to killing the two proverbial birds with one stone.

That is precisely the intention of the latest US sanctions against Venezuela targeting 34 oil tankers dedicated to transporting crude from Venezuela to Cuba. The measures against the Venezuelan cargo vessels owned by state-run oil company PDVSA are doubly illegal since they are also extraterritorial affecting two other firms: the Liberia-based Ballito Shipping Incorporated and the Greece-based ProPer In Management Incorporated.

US President Donald Trump has vetoed a congressional resolution that sought to end US involvement in the Saudi-led war in Yemen, the White House has said.

“This resolution is an unnecessary, dangerous attempt to weaken my constitutional authorities, endangering the lives of American citizens and brave service members, both today and in the future,” Trump said in the veto message.

The resolution, which had passed the House of Representatives and Senate, sought to end US military involvement in the war in Yemen that had not received prior authorisation from Congress.

Julian Assange has been awarded the 2019 European United Left-Nordic Green Left Award for Journalists, Whistleblowers and Defenders of the Right to Information, WikiLeaks informed Tuesday.

The award is given to individuals “uncovering the truth and exposing it to the public” and to honor “individuals or groups who have been intimidated and/or persecuted” for such actions. Thus recognizing Assange’s work through WikiLeaks.

The prize is sponsored by European left-wing parliamentarians, who devised it in 2018 in honor of assassinated Maltese journalist Daphne Galizia. Nobel Peace prize winner (1976), Mairead Maguire, received it on Assange’s behalf at an event in the European Parliament in France.

Ottawa imposed sanctions on 43 Venezuelan officials Wednesday, according to a statement by Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland.

While the statement did not specify the names of those targeted, Freeland indicated that they were “high-ranking officials” or “governors.”

“Canada is committed to supporting the peaceful restoration of constitutional democracy in Venezuela,” she added.

Previous Canadian sanctions had targeted a total of 70 Venezuelan officials.

The measures by the Trudeau government come on the heels of successive rounds of sanctions imposed against Caracas by the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). After sanctioning Venezuela’s oil, mining and banking sectors, Washington has recently gone after vessels and cargo companies involved in Venezuelan oil shipments. The latest round targeted four shipping companies and nine vessels on Friday.

For almost a decade Washington has sought to silence, jail and eliminate the world’s most prominent investigative journalist, Julian Assange (JA) and his team of co-workers at WikiLeaks (WL).

Never has the mass media been so thoroughly discredited by official documents which directly contradict the official propaganda, mouthed by political leaders and parroted by ‘leading’ journalists.

Washington is particularly intent on capturing JA because his revelations have had a particularly powerful impact on the US public, political critics, the alternative media and human rights groups in turning them against US wars in the Middle East, South Asia, Africa and Latin America.

We will proceed by discussing what JAand WLaccomplished and why the particular ‘cutting edge’ of their reportage disturbed the government.

Venezuela under Chavez and Maduro is in the forefront of combatting illicit drugs. More on this below.

The US is the world’s leading facilitator of the illicit trade – working with drug cartels, notably through the CIA. Major US banks profit hugely from laundering dirty money.

In his book titled “The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade,” Alfred McCoy documented CIA and US government complicity in drugs trafficking at the highest official levels.

It continues today in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, South and Central America, facilitating the global supply of illicit drugs.

A girls’ school was destroyed in an attack by unknown armed men in Farah province in the west of Afghanistan on Monday night, local officials confirmed.

Another school in the province was destroyed on Sunday night.

The schools were destroyed by use of explosives, the head of Education Department Mohammad Azimi said.

This comes after another girl’s school named Benafsha Girls High School was burned down by unknown armed men on Sunday night in Tosak village on the outskirt of the city.

Farah education department head Mohammad Azimi said the unknown armed men entered Nawdeh Girl’s High School on Monday night and replaced explosives devices inside the building and then exploded the devices.

According to Azimi, the school building completely has been destroyed and all the facilities and books have been burned.

At least 2,000 girls were enrolled in the two schools, Azimi said.

The Veterans Affairs Department’s watchdog is investigating a new office created by President Trump early in his administration that was designed to protect whistleblowers from reprisal but is now facing allegations of aiding retaliation against them.

VA’s Office of Inspector General is leading the investigation from its new Office of Special Reviews, which the IG created to conduct “prompt reviews of significant events” and examine allegations of senior VA employee misconduct, an IG spokesman said. The new IG office is looking into activities at the Office of Accountability and Whistleblower Protection as part of an ongoing review of the implementation of the 2017 law that created OAWP.

The secretary of the Army said today that the service could not rule out future cuts to the service's new Joint Light Tactical Vehicle program -- a vehicle that he said was essentially designed for the last war, not the next.

In March, the Army announced it would cut funding in the proposed fiscal 2020 budget for its new, high-performance JLTV to free up money for future modernization projects. The Army plans to buy only 2,530 JLTVs in the fiscal 2020 budget request, compared to last year's purchase of 3,393.

"We will have a mixed fleet of Humvees and JLTVs; we know that, and we will buy a lot of JLTVs, we know that too. But I can't tell you today whether the cut we made in this budget is the last or not," Army Secretary Mark Esper told a group of reporters today at the Pentagon.

The JLTV and the CH-47 Chinook Block II were among 93 programs Army senior leaders selected for cuts over the next five years to help free up billions of dollars for its bold modernization strategy.

President Donald Trump ordered thousands of additional American troops to the southwest border over the next two months, according to a document drafted last week by Defense Department officials and obtained by Newsweek.

Officials in U.S. Army North, the unit overseeing the border mission, drafted the deployment orders in anticipation of a new request from Homeland Security to aid U.S. Customs and Border Protection in the ongoing joint agency border mission.

The document further demonstrated President Trump’s increasing urgency to address a crisis at the southern border, with the orders being drafted days after Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen resigned on April 7.

The song has ended but the melody lingers on. The expected release Thursday of the redacted text of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s “Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election” will nudge the American people a tad closer to the truth on so-called “Russiagate.”

But judging by Attorney General William Barr’s 4-page summary, the Mueller report will leave unscathed the central-but-unproven allegation that the Russian government hacked into the DNC and Podesta emails, gave them to WikiLeaks to publish, and helped you win the election. The thrust will be the same; namely, even if there is a lack of evidence that you colluded with Russian President Vladimir Putin, you have him to thank for becoming president. And that melody will linger on for the rest of your presidency, unless you seize the moment.

The Mauna Loa volcano is picking up the pace when it comes to volcanic activity. Scientists have begun monitoring the Big Island volcano, just in case, it could erupt violently.

Mauna Loa is impressively close to Kilauea, the volcano which erupted for weeks last May. An eruption last year by Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano destroyed more than 700 homes from May through August. Kilauea’s current alert status is “Normal,” but the landscape around the volcano has been permanently altered, creating 250 acres of new land.

The Hawaii Volcano Observatory is closely monitoring Mauna Loa because conditions have risen to levels comparable to a more active period between 2014 and 2017, The Hawaii Tribune-Herald reported Sunday.

It should come as no surprise that socialists are hypocrites and Senator Bernie Sanders is no different. He likes to spend his time blaming capitalism and free markets for the 1% when he himself is a true 1%er.

Sanders has never actually created much of anything over the course of his life, other than the hot air he expels as he looks down on those who actually produce wealth in a country with a very limited (if any) free market left. He may have written some books in which he bemoans the system that has allowed him to get rich, but Sanders is wealthy not just from his books, but off the backs of the taxpayers. Don’t let him fool you – he became a millionaire in 2016. He was rich because the government steals money from producers and gives it to him and other criminal hypocrites as a salary for being an authoritarian politician. And this was going on long before he wrote a book.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is expected to visit Moscow in the coming months with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

WHILE JULIAN ASSANGE languishes in south London’s maximum-security Belmarsh Prison, a British court is weighing his fate. The 48-year-old Australian founder of WikiLeaks is serving time for the minor crime of jumping bail by taking asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden. His fear at the time was that the Swedes, with a track record of assisting rendition of suspects sought by the U.S., would send him straight across the Atlantic. Now that he has lost his diplomatic refuge, 70 British members of Parliament have petitioned to dispatch Assange to Sweden if prosecutors there reopen the case they closed in 2017. The greater threat to his liberty is the U.S. Department of Justice’s extradition demand for him to stand trial in the U.S. for conspiring with Chelsea Manning to hack a government computer.

After winning the Israeli election with a slim majority, in a campaign that grew more sordid and vilifying by the day, Benjamin Netanyahu is poised to begin his fifth term as Israeli prime minister.

The culmination of his dirty tricks campaign was an election-day stunt in which his Likud party broke regulations – and possibly the law – by arming 1,200 activists with hidden cameras, to film polling stations in communities belonging to Israel’s large Palestinian minority.

Netanyahu justified the move by saying it would ensure the election was “kosher”. Yet again, Israel’s prime minister made it clear that the country’s 1.7 million Palestinian citizens were unwelcome interlopers in what he regards as an exclusively Jewish political process.

President Trump makes plenty of hostile moves toward Russia of his own accord. This is compounded, however, when members of his cabinet, like CIA Director Gina Haspel start conniving to mislead Trump into taking even more hostile moves.

When the alleged Novichok poisoning happened in Salisbury in March of 2018, President Trump was not inclined to go along with recommendations within his cabinet to take a “strong option” to move against Russia.

Haspel was somehow “tasked” with convincing Trump to accept this move, and in doing so she showed Trump fake photographs of dead ducks, claiming that the ducks were poisoned in the “sloppy” Russian action.

Deterrence was the watchword among U.S. Air Force leadership during last week’s Space Symposium, and officials stated in strong terms that the United States is prepared to enact a show of force to prove its ability to respond to threats in space.

“There may come a point where we demonstrate some capabilities so that our adversaries understand that they will not be able to deny us the use of space without consequences,” Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson told reporters during a Wednesday roundtable.

With Syria’s major northern city of Aleppo already facing rocket fire from al-Qaeda forces in Idlib, the pro-government forces within the city itself are now causing trouble, with at least 11 reported killed in fighting between the Russian military and Shi’ite militias.

Details are still emerging, but the fighting seems to have taken place near a vegetable market, and several civilians are among the slain, and there are conflicting ideas of what caused the fighting in the first place.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights suggested that control over checkpoints was a big priority, with both sides charging people to cross the checkpoints, and considering it a substantial money-maker.

Americans are increasingly living in fear of the opposing political party. While the elites laugh and continue to enslave the populace even further because of this fear, Americans increasingly embrace their chains while asking them to be shortened, and all while dehumanizing those on a different plantation.

The fact is, none of us are free. We are all slaves to the same master – the political elites. The only way to be free is to accept it and attempt to free others in the process. So far, the government has not had to put literal chains on anyone because most Americans are mental slaves. If you own the mind, you won’t need to enslave the body. This is causing problems in problems in our society, however, as many fear those who think differently than they do while giving a pass to the ones actually at fault for their dissatisfaction.

he got banned for the “two face democrats” cartoon from this past week.

The recent collapse in world trade volume is the worst since the financial crisis and as dangerous as during the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s, according to The Telegraph.

Data from the CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis revealed that world trade volume dropped 1.8% in the three months to January compared to the preceding three months as a synchronized global downturn gained momentum.

The Bamiyan Buddhas were destroyed by an intolerant sect pretending to follow Islam. Buddhism all across Asia grieved. The West hardly paid attention.

The remaining ruins of Babylon, and the attached museum, were occupied, plundered and vandalized by a US Marine base during Shock and Awe in 2003. The West paid no attention.

Vast tracts of Palmyra – a legendary Silk Road oasis – were destroyed by another intolerant sect pretending to follow Islam with their backs covered by layers of Western “intelligence”. The West paid no attention.

Scores of Catholic and Orthodox churches in Syria were burnt to the ground by the same intolerant sect pretending to follow Islam with their backs sponsored and weaponized, among others, by the US, Britain and France. The West paid no attention whatsoever.

Notre-Dame, which in many ways can be construed as the Matrix of the West, is partially consumed by a theoretically blind fire.

Those who still had doubts, should finally be better informed. “Jewish state”, Zionism and democracy are mutually exclusive. When the beginning of the Passover feast with the first Seder begins this Friday night, it would be time to liberate the country not from bread crumbs but from far-right political politicians who want nothing more than religious Zionism as the weapon of the eternal Judaization. This affects not only the oppressed and occupied Palestinians deprived of their liberty, but also the secular Jewish citizens of Israel.

Michelle Obama was on an dinner cruise along the Seine River in Paris when the Notre Dame Cathedral caught fire on Monday night

Mrs Obama was pictured smiling and sipping wine as she mingled with guests on the roof of the luxury boat

Their mood changed considerably soon after when news filtered through that the nearby 800-year-old cathedral was on fire

At one point, Obama was pictured staring at a fellow passenger's phone with a concerned look on her face

The captain of the boat opted to tweak the route of the cruise and the dinner went ahead as planned

The fire broke out at about 6.30pm and plumes of smoke quickly billowed from the cathedral and could be seen across much of Paris

Mrs Obama shared a touching tribute in the aftermath, saying her 'heart aches with the people of France'