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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” — George Orwell

When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals.

In the current governmental climate, where laws that run counter to the dictates of the Constitution are made in secret, passed without debate, and upheld by secret courts that operate behind closed doors, obeying one’s conscience and speaking truth to the power of the police state can render you an “enemy of the state.”

That list of so-called “enemies of the state” is growing.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is merely the latest victim of the police state’s assault on dissidents and whistleblowers.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio suddenly doesn’t appreciate the idea of criminal illegal aliens coming to his city, vowing to take the President to court if he acts on a plan to ship them there.

Last week, President Trump set the political world on fire after confirming reports that White House officials threatened to release illegal immigrants into sanctuary cities, then insisting he’s still considering doing so.

“Due to the fact that Democrats are unwilling to change our very dangerous immigration laws, we are indeed, as reported, giving strong considerations to placing Illegal Immigrants in Sanctuary Cities only,” Trump announced, adding this should make the “radical left … very happy.”

New York City’s most recognized communist, however, was shockingly displeased.

“It’s illegal. It is just plain illegal,” de Blasio seethed. “We will meet him in court. We will beat him in court.”

The office of First Lady Melania Trump responded on Friday after Anna Wintour implied during an interview that the current first lady will not appear on the cover of Vogue despite featuring past first ladies.

“To be on the cover of Vogue doesn’t define Mrs. Trump, she’s been there, done that long before she was first lady,” Stephanie Grisham, spokeswoman for Trump, said in a statement first obtained by Fox News.

“We always had a tradition at Vogue to photograph the first ladies when they first came in to office — some extraordinary, wonderful women, and it was an honor to photograph them,” Wintour said during an interview CNN before praising former First Lady Michelle Obama for “inspiring so many women” and doing “wonders for fashion.” Vogue featured Obama three separate times when she served as first lady.

Following a massive bust of the notorious Sinaloa Cartel in Ohio, state legislators are utilizing many of Judicial Watch’s arguments to get the federal government to designate Mexican drug cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO).

In a resolution introduced this month, lawmakers in the Buckeye State “respectfully urge the federal government to designate the drug cartels operating from Mexico as foreign terrorist organizations, so that the government may use appropriate means to mitigate and eventually eliminate the operations of the cartels.”

The resolution states that Transitional Criminal Organizations (TCO) based in Mexico (drug cartels) are responsible for the flow of opioids across the border into the United States and Ohio and that they are also responsible for the proliferation of human trafficking in the United States, particularly Ohio, as part and parcel of their drug trafficking operations.

Tulsi Gabbard, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, has called President Donald Trump’s decision to veto a bill seeking to end US support for the Yemen war nothing less than proof he serves Saudi Arabia.
By vetoing the bill dubbed the War Powers Act, Trump again “proves he’s the servant of Saudi Arabia – the theocratic dictatorship spending billions spreading the most extreme and intolerant form of Islam around the world, supporting al-Qaeda & other jihadists, and waging genocidal war in Yemen with US help,” Gabbard said in an emotional tweet.