Former President Trump made a surprise visit with New York City police and firefighters Saturday to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks.
In remarks to assembled guests, the former president sharply rebuked President Biden and the US pullout from Afghanistan.
“It was gross incompetence and I hate to talk about it on this day,” Trump said.
Trump praised New York’s Finest, telling the crowd, “if they let you do your job you wouldn’t have crime in New York!”
As some in the crowd nodded their heads, The Donald jokingly warned them to “just stand and just be perfect.”
Critics have bashed the Biden administration for its latest mistake as White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki announced several Afghan evacuees tested positive for a deadly disease inside the U.S. On Friday, Psaki confirmed an outbreak of measles cases among Afghan escapees has temporarily halted new flights from bringing more people into the U.S.
Critics have continued to slam the Biden administration for seemingly failing at every point in their botched Afghanistan withdrawal. Despite a measles vaccine being required for entry, Psaki said the cases still happened.
“Let me give you the information we have at this point, or I have I should say. Operation ‘Allies Welcome’ flights into the United States have been temporarily paused,” she announced. “…These individuals are being quarantined in accordance with public health guidelines and the CDC has begun full contact tracing. All arriving Afghans are currently required to be vaccinated for measles as a condition of entry into the United States.”
Meanwhile, Americans were still reportedly stranded in Afghanistan as the Biden administration called the Taliban “business-like and professional.”
Return to the Magic and Mystique of the Renaissance!
The Festival is back and better than ever! The celebration begins on Saturday, September 4, and runs six consecutive weekends, and Labor day, ending on Sunday, October 10. The Festival is celebrating its return to the past with new entertainment, beautiful new displays from local artisans, as well as some classic shows and craftspeople that bring thousands of guests joy year after year.
The Pittsburgh Renaissance Festival is an entire day of immersive experiences for people of all ages. Guests can enjoy three armored Jousts a day, Knighting ceremonies, and nine stages of non-stop entertainment including music, dancing, comedy, sword fighting, and more! With so much unique entertainment, guests can revel in a different experience with every visit.
Returning Favorites like the CRAIC show and The Washing Well Wenches are back along with a variety of new performances.
The 2021 Pittsburgh Renaissance Festival is open Saturdays and Sundays only, September 4 through October 10, 10:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. The Festival is open rain or shine in the Gateway to the Laurel Highlands, just thirty miles southeast of Pittsburgh.
Admission for the 2021 season is $24 for adults and $12 for children ages 5-12. Children aged four and under are always free. Tickets can be purchased on their website at a discounted rate, or through the on-site box office on festival days.
Coupons can be found at Wendy’s and Eat N’ Park and must be redeemed at the Box Office.
For more information please visit the Festival website at www.pittsburghrenfest.com, or on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Decades after the popular president was gunned down in broad daylight, many people are still asking ‘who really killed Kennedy’ — and, why won’t the government release all the assassination records?
Many unanswered questions remain about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22nd, 1963. In the decades since, conspiracy theories and speculation of all kinds have surfaced, adding to the swell of allure surrounding the single event that changed – and continues to mystify – the country.
Now, nearly 60 years later, Fox Nation is revisiting that tragic day in Dallas, as calls grow for the government to release all of their secret files.
Fox News legal analyst and host of ‘JFK: The Conspiracy Continues’ Gregg Jarrett joined ‘Fox & Friends’ Monday, telling co-host Will Cain that the government is to blame for the skepticism — asserting that most Americans don’t believe the beloved 35th U.S. president was shot and killed by a lone gunman.
“The government, to this day, continues to hide thousands of assassination records,” said Jarrett, who noted that, by law, President Biden has until October 26th of this year to release those documents.
Cain asked the legal analyst why the FBI and the CIA have been actively working to keep these files secret, to which Jarrett replied by taking jabs at both organizations:
“The fact that they have worked sedulously and secretly behind the scenes to stop these documents from being released to the American public invites the question, what are they hiding?”
“Americans are entitled to the truth of this,” asserted Jarrett.
The truth, though, has perplexed Americans from the very beginning.
At least a dozen times this year, medical rescue workers in the county responded to four or more deadly overdoses in a single day, the vast majority involving fentanyl.
In the small working-class city of Clairton, at least six people have died this year in overdoses involving the drug — two on the same street, records show.
The rise in deaths has prompted public officials to call for efforts from law enforcement and other government agencies to battle the crisis, including the legalization in Pennsylvania of the distribution of fentanyl strips — a tool that can alert people to the presence of the drug.
ROME (AP) — Pope Francis cracked down Friday on the spread of the old Latin Mass, reversing one of Pope Benedict XVI’s signature decisions in a major challenge to traditionalist Catholics who immediately decried it as an attack on them and the ancient liturgy.
Francis reimposed restrictions on celebrating the Latin Mass that Benedict relaxed in 2007, and went further to limit its use. The pontiff said he was taking action because Benedict’s reform had become a source of division in the church and been exploited by Catholics opposed to the Second Vatican Council, the 1960s meetings that modernized the church and its liturgy.
Critics said they had never before witnessed a pope so thoroughly reversing his predecessor. That the reversal concerned something so fundamental as the liturgy, while Benedict is still alive and living in the Vatican as a retired pope, only amplified the extraordinary nature of Francis’ move, which will surely result in more right-wing hostility directed at him.
Francis, 84, issued a new law requiring individual bishops to approve celebrations of the old Mass, also called the Tridentine Mass, and requiring newly ordained priests to receive explicit permission to celebrate it from their bishops, in consultation with the Vatican.
Under the new law, bishops must also determine if the current groups of faithful attached to the old Mass accept Vatican II, which allowed for Mass to be celebrated in the vernacular rather than Latin. These groups cannot use regular churches; instead, bishops must find alternate locations for them without creating new parishes.
In addition, Francis said bishops are no longer allowed to authorize the formation of any new pro-Latin Mass groups in their dioceses.
Francis said he was taking action to promote unity and heal divisions within the church that had grown since Benedict’s 2007 document, Summorum Pontificum. He said he based his decision on a 2020 Vatican survey of all the world’s bishops, whose “responses reveal a situation that preoccupies and saddens me, and persuades me of the need to intervene.”
The pope’s rollback immediately created an uproar among traditionalists already opposed to Francis’ more progressive bent and nostalgic for Benedict’s doctrinaire papacy.
“This is an extremely disappointing document which entirely undoes the legal provisions,” of Benedict’s 2007 document, said Joseph Shaw, chairman of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales.
Originally built to speed up calculations, a machine-learning system is now making shocking progress at the frontiers of experimental quantum physics
Quantum physicist Mario Krenn remembers sitting in a café in Vienna in early 2016, poring over computer printouts, trying to make sense of what MELVIN had found. MELVIN was a machine-learning algorithm Krenn had built, a kind of artificial intelligence. Its job was to mix and match the building blocks of standard quantum experiments and find solutions to new problems. And it did find many interesting ones. But there was one that made no sense.
“The first thing I thought was, ‘My program has a bug, because the solution cannot exist,’” Krenn says. MELVIN had seemingly solved the problem of creating highly complex entangled states involving multiple photons (entangled states being those that once made Albert Einstein invoke the specter of “spooky action at a distance”). Krenn, Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna and their colleagues had not explicitly provided MELVIN the rules needed to generate such complex states, yet it had found a way. Eventually, he realized that the algorithm had rediscovered a type of experimental arrangement that had been devised in the early 1990s. But those experiments had been much simpler. MELVIN had cracked a far more complex puzzle.
“When we understood what was going on, we were immediately able to generalize [the solution],” says Krenn, who is now at the University of Toronto. Since then, other teams have started performing the experiments identified by MELVIN, allowing them to test the conceptual underpinnings of quantum mechanics in new ways. Meanwhile Krenn, working with colleagues in Toronto, has refined their machine-learning algorithms. Their latest effort, an AI called THESEUS, has upped the ante: it is orders of magnitude faster than MELVIN, and humans can readily parse its output. While it would take Krenn and his colleagues days or even weeks to understand MELVIN’s meanderings, they can almost immediately figure out what THESEUS is saying.“It is amazing work,” says theoretical quantum physicist Renato Renner of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, who reviewed a 2020 study about THESEUS but was not directly involved in these efforts.
Krenn stumbled on this entire research program somewhat by accident when he and his colleagues were trying to figure out how to experimentally create quantum states of photons entangled in a very particular manner: When two photons interact, they become entangled, and both can only be mathematically described using a single shared quantum state. If you measure the state of one photon, the measurement instantly fixes the state of the other even if the two are kilometers apart (hence Einstein’s derisive comments on entanglement being “spooky”).
In 1989 three physicists—Daniel Greenberger, the late Michael Horne and Zeilinger—described an entangled state that came to be known as “GHZ” (after their initials). It involved four photons,each of which could be in a quantum superposition of, say, two states, 0 and 1 (a quantum state called a qubit). In their paper, the GHZ state involved entangling four qubits such that the entire system was in a two-dimensional quantum superposition of states 0000 and 1111. If you measured one of the photons and found it in state 0, the superposition would collapse, and the other photons would also be in state 0.The same went for state 1. In the late 1990s Zeilinger and his colleagues experimentally observed GHZ states using three qubits for the first time.
The Biden administration on Wednesday ordered a ban on U.S. imports of a key solar panel material from Chinese-based Hoshine Silicon Industry over forced labor allegations, two sources briefed on the matter said.
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WASHINGTON — A federal judge in Florida halted the Biden administration’s new debt-relief program for minority farmers on Wednesday.
Judge Marcia Morales Howard, an appointee of President George W. Bush, temporarily blocked the Agriculture Department from implementing a $4 billion program aimed at helping distressed minority farmers on the basis that it likely violates white farmers’ rights to equal protection under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. That argument was backed by several former aides in the Trump White House.
Howard ordered the Agriculture Department not to issue payments under the program for “socially disadvantaged” farmers until she can rule on the merits of the case. She wrote that the program, which is embedded in President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan law, is “significantly likely” to violate the constitutional rights of the plaintiff, a white farmer named Scott Wynn.
Her order creates a nationwide injunction against the debt-relief program.
Earlier this month, in a similar case, a Wisconsin judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking implementation of the program, which covers up to 120 percent of the debts of farmers who are members of groups that have historically been discriminated against based on their race or ethnicity. Across the country, several white farmers have filed lawsuits, at least one of which is backed by America First Legal, a group founded by former Trump White House aides.
“The government must not be allowed to use its awesome authorities to punish, harm, exclude, prefer, reward or damage its citizens based upon their race or ethnicity,” Stephen Miller, a former White House aide and the head of America First Legal, said in a statement in conjunction with one of the other cases.
Civil rights advocates have expressed concern that other Agriculture Department programs aimed at redressing past discrimination — as well as federal programs outside the scope of farming — could be at risk if federal courts find that the American Rescue Plan’s program for socially disadvantaged farmers is unconstitutional.
‘There’s very little in terms of extreme weather that has changed over the last many decades,’ a former Obama administration official said.
Democrats and their media lapdogs are rabidly hyping the bogus narrative that climate change is an imminent “existential threat” to mankind as part of a cynical move to promote left-wing agendas.
That’s the takeaway from a Fox News interview with physicist Steven Koonin, who offered scientific support to those who believe grifting climate alarmists are flippantly weaponizing this sham talking point to enrich and empower themselves.
“It’s a fiction of the media and the politicians who like to promote that notion,” Koonin said on Fox Nation’s “Tucker Carlson Today.”
More than 460 companies are observing Juneteenth at this point, with many offering a paid day off or holiday pay. Here are some companies continuing PTO this year.
Amid the wave of discussions about racial injustice that began to gain momentum last summer, companies such as Allstate, Google and Nike have announced over the past year that they will recognize Juneteenth as a paid holiday for their employees.
The day celebrates the delayed news that President Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, freeing “all persons held as slaves” in the United States. However, it wasn’t until June 19, 1865 – referred to more informally as Juneteenth – that enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned of their freedom when Union soldiers arrived.
The legislation has gained momentum since the massive Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd last year and the Democrats’ takeover of the White House and Congress.
But Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson blocked the bill in 2020, saying that the day off for federal employees would cost US taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. Johnson dropped his objection this week despite his concerns, paving the way for the bill’s passage in the Senate.
“Although I strongly support celebrating Emancipation, I objected to the cost and lack of debate,” said Johnson in a statement. “While it still seems strange that having taxpayers provide federal employees paid time off is now required to celebrate the end of slavery, it is clear that there is no appetite in Congress to further discuss the matter.”
The measure needs to pass the House and be signed by President Joe Biden to become law.
On June 19, 1865, Major General Gordon Granger announced in Galveston, Texas, the end of slavery in accordance with President Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.
In 1980, Juneteenth became a Texas state holiday. In the decades since, every state but South Dakota came to officially commemorate Juneteenth, but only a handful of states observe it as a paid holiday.
Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ed Markey, Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn and Texas Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee are among the members of Congress who led the effort to to make Juneteenth the 12th federal holiday.
On this day in 1963, Soviet cosmonaut Valentina V. Tereshkova became the first woman to travel in space, having been launched into orbit aboard the spacecraft Vostok 6, which completed 48 orbits in 71 hours.
The National Geographic Society marked World Oceans Day on Tuesday by declaring that the waters around Antarctica will now be known as the Southern Ocean — the planet’s fifth ocean.
The National Geographic Society is changing the world map.
The 130-year-old exploration and education non-profit marked World Oceans Day on Tuesday by declaring that the waters around Antarctica will now be known as the Southern Ocean — the planet’s fifth ocean.
“The Southern Ocean has long been recognized by scientists, but because there was never agreement internationally, we never officially recognized it,” National Geographic Society Geographer Alex Tait said.
“It’s sort of geographic nerdiness in some ways,” Tait said. “We’ve always labeled it, but we labeled it slightly differently (than other oceans). This change was taking the last step and saying we want to recognize it because of its ecological separation.”
“Under no level of heightened scrutiny can the law survive,” U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez said before issuing a permanent injunction that takes effect in 30 days. Benitez argued the state’s definition of illegal military-style rifles bans firearms allowed in other states, depriving California gun owners of their rights. He compared the AR-15 rifle to a Swiss Army knife, saying it’s “a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment. Good for both home and battle.”
Jill Biden has become the first sitting first lady in modern US history to reach her 70th birthday.
The Bidens celebrated the event on Thursday by going to their beach house in Rehoboth, Delaware, which they bought in 2017. It’s their first visit to the house since Joe Biden became president.
The first lady was born on 3 June 1951, around eight and a half years after Joe Biden, 78, was born on 20 November 1942. They married in 1977.
How old were other first ladies?
Jill Biden was the oldest first lady to enter the office in January at 69 years old. Bess Truman, Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush were all 67 as their husbands left the office. Anna Harrison, wife of William Henry Harrison, was the second oldest first lady to enter the office at 65, only lasting a month between March and April 1841 before her husband passed away. Mr Harrison became the first president to die in office and remains the most short-lived president, dying on the 32nd day of his tenure.
Today is Friday, June 4, the 155th day of 2021. There are 210 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On June 4, 1919, Congress approved the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which said that the right to vote could not be denied or abridged based on gender. The amendment was sent to the states for ratification.
On this date:
In 1812, the Louisiana Territory was renamed the Missouri Territory, to avoid confusion with the recently admitted state of Louisiana. The U.S. House of Representatives approved, 79-49, a declaration of war against Britain.
In 1912, Massachusetts became the first state to adopt a minimum wage law.
In 1939, the German ocean liner MS St. Louis, carrying more than 900 Jewish refugees from Germany, was turned away from the Florida coast by U.S. officials.
The inevitable has occurred. A piece of space debris too small to be tracked has hit and damaged part of the International Space Station – namely, the Canadarm2 robotic arm.
The instrument is still operational, but the object punctured the thermal blanket and damaged the boom beneath. It’s a sobering reminder that the low-Earth orbit’s space junk problem is a ticking time bomb.
Earth’s tectonic plates have moved continuously since they emerged a whopping 3.6 billion years ago, according to a new study on some of the world’s oldest crystals. Previously, researchers thought that these plates formed anywhere from 3.5 billion to 3 billion years ago, and yet-to-be published research even estimated that the plates are 3.7 billion years old.
The scientists on the new study discovered the onset date of plate tectonics by analyzing ancient zircon crystals from the Jack Hills in Western Australia. Some of the zircons date to 4.3 billion years ago, meaning they existed when Earth was a mere 200 million years old — a baby, geologically speaking. Researchers used these zircons, as well as younger ones dating to 3 billion years ago, to decipher the planet’s ongoing chemical record.
“We are reconstructing how the Earth changed from a molten ball of rock and metal to what we have today,” study lead researcher Michael Ackerson, a research geologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., said in a statement.
Fidel Castro had reached power slightly more than two years before, on 1 January 1959, when his forces brought down the government of Fulgencio Batista, whom they accused of being authoritarian and corrupt.
Sixty years after the Bay of Pigs invasion – the failed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba – the island continues to celebrate its victory while the invaders who survived live on in the US with the satisfaction of having done their duty.
Despite substantial popular support for Castro, many Cubans did not agree with his revolution and left for exile.
The Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 was doomed to fail even before the first shot was fired. The Brigade still blames Washington.
From the White House, US President John F Kennedy cancelled at the last minute the US air strikes that would have neutralised Castro’s aviation.
He did so because he felt the United States could not appear to be behind the invasion. Being seen as such would not only damage its international reputation, but would also give an excuse to the Soviet Union, which at that time was consolidating its position as a key ally of Castro, to respond and provoke an unprecedented nuclear conflict.
Under these circumstances, the attack by the determined but inexperienced youths who dreamed of “liberating Cuba from Castro” lasted less than 72 hours.
The Duke of Edinburgh’s life was filled with contradictions but will be remembered most for his unstinting support of the Queen.
His mother and father met at the funeral of Queen Victoria in 1901. At a time when all but four of Europe’s nations were monarchies, his relatives were scattered through European royalty. Some royal houses were swept away by World War One; but the world into which Philip was born was still one where monarchies were the norm. His grandfather was the King of Greece; his great-aunt Ella was murdered along with the Russian tsar, by the Bolsheviks, at Ekaterinberg; his mother was a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria.
A homeowner contacted officials after being given what seemed to be an unexploded cannonball that a family member found near the Monocacy Battlefield.
Bomb technicians moved the cannonball to Beaver Creek Quarry in Hagerstown, where they conducted “an emergency disposal,” according to the Maryland State Fire Marshal.
We’ve now endured a year of life-disrupting measures due to the coronavirus pandemic, which the country — and world — has adapted to. Sadly, it appears as though our own social lockdown measures created needless death and despair.
The cure was worse than the problem.
If you ask one Bloomberg columnist, who formerly worked as a columnist for The Economist, the nightmare will never end– and why should it? Everything is bad and sad and most definitely hopeless, despite the fact that states across the country are rolling back restrictions with great success.
Andreas Kluth, who writes opinions for the left-wing publication, argued Wednesday, “We must start planning for a permanent pandemic,” and he cited the emergence of these supposedly deadly new viral “variants” we keep hearing so much about.
“For the past year, an assumption — sometimes explicit, often tacit — has informed almost all our thinking about the pandemic: At some point, it will be over, and then we’ll go ‘back to normal,’” Kluth wrote. “This premise is almost certainly wrong.”
German researchers have uncovered marine life along the Antarctic seafloor for the first time in decades after a massive iceberg calved from the Antarctic Ice Sheet last month.
Israeli archaeologists have unearthed two dozen Dead Sea scroll fragments from a remote cave in the Judean Desert, the first discovery of such Jewish religious texts in more than half a century.
“For the first time in approximately 60 years, archaeological excavations have uncovered fragments of a biblical scroll,” the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) said in a statement.
More than 20 bits of parchment were found after teams rappelled down an 80-metre cliff and scoured the Cave of Horror, so called due to its precarious position and because 40 skeletons of women, men and children were found there during excavations in the 1960s.
Jewish rebels are believed to have hidden in the canyon south of Jerusalem two millennia ago to escape a Roman advance. The fragments from the Hebrew Bible may have been stashed in the cave during the Bar Kochba Revolt, a Jewish uprising against Roman Emperor Hadrian, between AD132 and AD136.
Officials are keen to show off newly discovered artifacts as they try to revive visitor numbers after the tourism industry received a painful blow during the coronavirus pandemic.
The funerary temple of Queen Neit was also discovered near the pyramid of her husband, King Teti of Egypt’s 6th dynasty which dates back 4200 years, said famed archaeologist Zahi Hawass, who headed the archaeological mission.
The coffins include the first dating back to the New Kingdom to be found at Saqqara, a UNESCO world heritage site that is home to the Step Pyramid, the tourism and antiquities ministry said in a statement. Carved in human form and painted in bright colors, many of them are still intact.
Ancient games, statues, and masks were also found.
“All these discoveries will rewrite the history of Saqqara and the New Kingdom,” said Hawass.
On Jan. 4, 1988, Sophie Masloff became the first woman to serve as president of Pittsburgh’s city council. Masloff would go on to become one of the most well-liked mayors in the city’s history.