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PINELLAS COUNTY, Fla. (WFLA) — A Clearwater man was charged with two felonies for throwing pizza at a person 65 years or older during an argument Sunday afternoon. According to the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, Kyle Barthelmes, 44, of Clearwater, got into a verbal argument with a woman after she told him to lower his voice because he had been drinking and taking Xanax. When the argument escalated, a third person intervened, separating Barthelmes and the woman. Barthelmes continued to argue before he threw several items from the freezer. Deputies said he also grabbed a piece of pizza and threw...

CNN anchor Don Lemon said Wednesday night on his show “Don Lemon Tonight” that Republicans are hypocritical to criticize President Joe Biden for calling Republicans “semi-fascist” when former President Donald Trump “talked shit about everybody.” CNN conservative commentator Scott Jennings said, “He ran his campaign on, ‘I’m going to unify the country.’ His message to the nation was we are all in this together. I’m going to unify the country. And now, he’s out saying two things. One, lots of y’all are fascists, and by the way, if you vote Republican, there’s a decent chance our democracy will no longer...

Mask Up, Berkeley StudentsI was trying to avoid writing more stuff on masks, but this is unbelievable. UC Berkeley, that bastion of California higher education, is now requiring masks -both indoors and outdoors, if one is not vaccinated against… influenza! And, as a virologist and vaccinologist, the use of the slang “flu” makes me cringe. There are no “flu” vaccines. There are a variety of vaccines for reducing Influenza A and Influenza B virus infection and disease. None of them work particularly well. And just as with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the vast majority of deaths from Influenza A and B...

“The relationship between Norway and Israel,” wrote Trond Ellingsen the other day at Document, Norway’s leading alternative news website, “is now at a historically low level.” We’ll get around to the reason in a minute, but first let’s just note that that’s saying a lot, given that antisemitism on a very profound level goes back a long way in the exquisite land of the fjords. The Norwegian Constitution, drafted in 1814, originally contained this sentence: “Jews are still excluded from admission to the kingdom.” Knut Hamsun, probably Norway’s most illustrious novelist, was a Nazi. During World War II, it...

WASHINGTON — The White House on Thursday rejected criticism from Republicans that President Joe Biden is dividing Americans by attacking ardent followers of former President Donald Trump, saying the party’s far-right wing is trying to dodge accountability. At her daily briefing, Jean-Pierre referred to “ultra MAGA Republicans,” those who support Trump, whose signature slogan was Make America Great Again. “We understand that we hit a nerve, we get that. We understand that they’re trying to hide. And we understand that ultra MAGA office holders want to play games here and dodge accountability,” she said. She said these Republicans are pushing...

He wrote a book describing a Russian military so ill-prepared when it invaded Ukraine that he didn’t know his unit had entered the country until he awoke to the sound of artillery fire. Pavel Filatiev, a former Russian soldier, arrived in France on Sunday, after writing a tell-all book detailing his time in Ukraine as a paratrooper in the Russian army. Now 34-year-old Pavel Filatiev, who says he was a paratrooper in Russia’s military, is seeking political asylum in France after arriving there last weekend. He has been greeted as a hero by some in the West, his book embraced...

Alice Speri is a far-left journalist whose work appears in even farther-left Internet site, The Intercept. She recently wrote a piece, which also appeared in the French newspaper Le Monde, on innocent Americans “killed by Israel.” A report on her indictment is here: “Anti-Israel journalists cover up the Palestinians’ murder of numerous Americans,” by David J. Michaels, JNS, August 24, 2022:Alice Speri (Photo: Francesco Ascanio Pepe) …Who are the primary victims of the bloodlust supposedly uncovered by The Intercept and Le Monde?One is Rachel Corrie, a young woman originally from Olympia, Washington who died in 2003.The other is Shireen...

Jeremy Grantham is among Wall Street’s most respected investors. The cofounder of Boston asset manager GMO is well known for having predicted Japan’s asset price bubble in the 1980s, the dot-com bubble of the late ’90s, and even the U.S. housing blowup that came before the 2008 financial crisis. Now the 83-year-old Wall Street veteran is arguing that despite the stock market’s struggles this year, the economy’s real downturn has yet to come. Grantham has been warning of a brewing “superbubble,” and he says it’s yet to pop. In a Wednesday research note, the investor noted that stocks remain “very...

Last week my better half and I, Tess, went to a Southern California thrift store to hunt for treasures that others had all but trashed. Tess found a couple of delicate plates that a young clerk was about to wrap with an old yellowed-out newspaper that she had just torn at the fold. “Wait a sec,” I said before the nonchalant clerk took another rip. “That’s a pretty old newspaper. Mind if I take it off your hands?” “Sure,” she shrugged, quickly handing it to me then reaching for more paper to wrap the plates. The dingy, old broadsheet turned...

Editor’s Note: This post highlights images from Webb science in progress, which has not yet been through the peer-review process. For the first time, astronomers have used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to take a direct image of a planet outside our solar system. The exoplanet is a gas giant, meaning it has no rocky surface and could not be habitable. The image, as seen through four different light filters, shows how Webb’s powerful infrared gaze can easily capture worlds beyond our solar system, pointing the way to future observations that will reveal more information than ever before about exoplanets....

The Ship of Fools allegory first appears in Plato’s Republic, where Plato uses it to show how a weak and badly trained captain creates chaos among the crew, who bicker over which of them should steer the ship, even though they have little of the knowledge and skills necessary for doing so. They end up mutinying against the captain and spending their time plundering the ship’s stores and eating and drinking, even as they sail towards disaster. Plato, of course, was targeting the Athenian democracy, and its presumption that ordinary citizens have the capacity to govern, even though they...

TWENTY-SECOND WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME LUKE 5:1–11 Friends, today’s Gospel gives us the story of the miraculous draught of fishes. In many ways, the whole of the spiritual life can be read off of this piece. Without being invited, Jesus simply gets into the fisherman’s boat. This is to insinuate himself in the most direct way into Simon’s life. And without further ado, he begins to give orders, first asking Simon to put out from the shore and then to go out into the deep. This represents the invasion of grace. The single most important decision that you will ever...

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump · 1h

COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness for all age groups has been much worse against the Omicron virus variants than earlier strains, particularly the currently dominant subvariants, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data presented on Sept. 1. The data, much of which has never been published before, shows that the protection against both symptomatic infection and severe disease is not as strong against the Omicron, which emerged in December 2021, and its subvariants. Data from the CDC’s Increasing Community Access to Testing, a no-cost testing program, showed that vaccine effectiveness for a booster compared to a primary series...

Cardinal Muller to the Pope: 'Cardinal Zen will be tried by China, the Vatican should not sacrifice him to reasons of state' On the just-concluded Consistory with almost all the world's cardinals - an event that has not happened since 2014 - the Vatican's silence on the fate of Hong Kong's Cardinal Emeritus Joseph Zen ze-Kiun from China, who is absent from Rome because he is under house arrest for raising his voice against Beijing by defending human rights both in Hong Kong and in China, weighed like a boulder. "Next month there will be an unfair trial. No one...

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — A federal judge on Thursday declined to issue an immediate ruling on former President Donald Trump’s request to appoint a special master to review the trove of documents seized in the Mar-a-Lago raid last month. Instead, US District Judge Aileen Cannon said she would release a written statement in “due course.”

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — A federal judge on Thursday declined to issue an immediate ruling on former President Donald Trump’s request to appoint a special master to review the trove of documents seized in the Mar-a-Lago raid last month. Instead, US District Judge Aileen Cannon said she would release a written statement in “due course.”

A man whose testimony helped send former police officer Derek Chauvin to prison for 22 years in the 2020 death of George Floyd allegedly threatened to kill police officers and come after their families while being arrested for domestic assault on Saturday. Donald Wynne Williams, 34, a mixed martial arts fighter and self-proclaimed expert on chokeholds, has been charged in Ramsey County with felony domestic assault by strangulation. Charges say Williams got into an argument with his ex-girlfriend over ice on Saturday while the two were setting up with their three children near the State Fairgrounds in St. Paul to...

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday implored an audience at the Venice Film Festival to resist indifference to his country’s conflict with Russia as the months-long war rages on. Appearing on the festival’s Sala Grande screen, Zelensky told the global film industry audience that Russia is staging “a primitive plot in three acts for the world to make three dramatic mistakes. To get used to the war. To put up with the war. To forget about the war.” More than half a year since Russia first invaded, the war in Ukraine is “a drama based on real-life events” that is...

Professor Damien Ernst of the University of Liege in Belgium is making startling predictions about the economic future of Europe, if something is not done to lower energy prices. In an interview with French news site Atlantico on Monday, Ernst predicted that if energy prices are not contained, Europe is going to see mass impoverishment, and he noted there is no indication the energy situation is going to improve anytime soon. In the interview he predicted that, “the perfect storm” that has formed in energy markets will have a massive impact on household and businesses, and that as time goes...