When the annual Conservative Political Action Conference kicks off Thursday night, a highlight of the Republican Party’s calendar, some regular faces won’t be in attendance as former President Donald Trump cements his grip on the party.
Instead, the conference will welcome Trump for a keynote speech and the lineup is packed with loyalists and former administration officials. Dissent is not allowed this year.
Here’s a look at some who are not attending, either by CPAC’s choice or their own:
PHILADELPHIA — A Philadelphia rape suspect armed with cooking skewers stood in a Macy’s bathroom for 20 minutes before his victim walked in, police say.
District Attorney Larry Krasner on Wednesday announced rape and related charges following the arrest of Jaleel Uqdah, 22, for the February 21st assault in the Macy’s department store in Center City.
Uqdah is alleged to have assaulted the woman inside of a stall in a woman’s restroom located on the third floor of the department store last Sunday. The District Attorney’s Office today charged Uqdah with: Rape, Involuntary Deviate Sexual Intercourse, Aggravated Assault, Robbery, Sexual Assault , Unlawful Restraint, Possession of an Instrument of Crime, False Imprisonment, and related offenses.
The fact that President Biden was willing to nominate Xavier Becerra — someone with zero experience in anything related to health care — to the Department of Health and Human Services during this pandemic, illustrates Biden prioritizes partisan politics above all else. pic.twitter.com/e5yAYL3vxw
Hold that Tot – your main spud, MR. POTATO HEAD isn’t going anywhere! While it was announced today that the POTATO HEAD brand name & logo are dropping the ‘MR.’ I yam proud to confirm that MR. & MRS. POTATO HEAD aren’t going anywhere and will remain MR. & MRS. POTATO HEAD pic.twitter.com/6I84KrxOLQ
A pair of new studies show that an ominous new variant of COVID-19 is spreading rapidly in New York City, showing up in 1 out of 8 infections tracked in a scientific database.
The results are preliminary — neither study has been peer-reviewed, and one has not been made public — but scientists say that vaccines could be less effective against the mutation, and that it is spreading fast.
According to The New York Times, “The new variant, called B.1.526, first appeared in samples collected in the city in November. By the middle of this month, it accounted for about one in four viral sequences appearing in a database shared by scientists.”
That figure includes the South African variant as well, but both studies showed significant spread of the NYC variant:
President Biden is getting ready to sign an executive order, one that will review the United States’ ability to get hold of certain things that it’s currently having trouble getting hold of. On the list are semiconductors, one of the main reasons behind the current PS5 (and graphics card) shortages.
As CNBC reported earlier this month, a shortage of the chips—caused by pandemic interruptions to global supply chains—is wreaking havoc across the world, from car manufacturers to hardware companies like AMD and Qualcomm, and that’s trickling on down to places like Sony and Nvidia, because you can’t build PlayStations and GeForce cards without semiconductors.
Tax records that former President Donald Trump tried to keep secret for years are now in the hands of the New York district attorney.
Prosecutors obtained the records on Monday, just hours after the US Supreme Court denied Trump’s last-ditch effort to keep the records private, a spokesperson for the district attorney said.
The millions of pages of documents, sources say, contain Trump’s tax returns spanning from January 2011 to August 2019, as well as financial statements, engagement agreements, documents relating to the preparation and review of tax returns, and work papers and communications related to the tax returns.
Disney Plus has added a content warning to the beginning of 18 episodes of The Muppet Show, which started streaming on the platform on Friday.
“This programme includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures,” it reads.
“These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now.”
The disclaimer has been added to each of the episodes for different reasons, including one where Johnny Cash sings in front of the Confederate flag.
The Confederacy was the group of southern states that fought to keep slavery during the US Civil War and the flag is seen as a symbol of racism by many.
Disney’s disclaimer added: “Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together.”
Dr. Rachel Levine evaded questions from Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) on Thursday regarding Levine’s support for giving children puberty blockers and sex-change surgeries.
Levine, who is President Joe Biden’s nominee for assistant Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary, fielded questions from various lawmakers during a confirmation hearing, but Paul asked especially blunt, pointed, and graphic questions.
“Genital mutilation has been nearly universally condemned,” Paul began, citing the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Children’s Fund, the United Nations Population Fund. “According to the WHO, genital mutilation is recognized internationally as a violation of human rights. Genital mutilation is considered particularly egregious because, as the WHO notes, it is nearly always carried out on minors and is a violation of the rights of children.”
AL-QAEDA are set to become as dangerous as they were during the 9/11 attacks twenty years ago, an expert has claimed.
The terror cult has gained a ruthless new leader dubbed “the Sword of Revenge” – sparking fears of fresh attacks in the West.
Saif al-Adel, from Egypt, is thought to be the new chief of the terror group, and has set about recruiting hordes of ISIS fighters.
The ex-military general has been called a “brilliant and ruthless” strategist, and is expected to take over from Ayman Zawahari.
A senior British terrorism expert told the Daily Mirror: “Compared to Zawahiri he is likely to be a much more effective leader, at least so or more so even than bin Laden.”
It comes following rumours that Zawahari has died, prompting intelligence agencies to ready themselves for an “al-Qaeda rebrand”.
Zawahari took the reins from Osama bin Laden following his death in 2011, but has not been seen for years.
The Capitol Police is keeping its security posture high in response to intelligence that indicates some extremists who joined the Jan. 6 insurrection have discussed plans to attack the building during the State of the Union, Acting Capitol Police Chief Yogananda Pittman revealed Thursday.
The chatter among extremists about trying to blow up the Capitol during the still-unscheduled presidential address, Pittman said, has prompted the Capitol Police to maintain the elevated presence it has kept since last month’s riot. Any decrease in the police’s posture, she said, would come after the threat passes and other gaps identified in the aftermath of the Capitol siege are resolved.
The iconic Mr. Potato Head toy from Hasbro is dropping the “Mr.” from its name and rebranding as simply, Potato Head.
“Culture has evolved,” Hasbro Senior Vice President and General Manager Kimberly Boyd said. “Kids want to be able to represent their own experiences. The way the brand currently exists—with the ‘Mr.’ and ‘Mrs.’—is limiting when it comes to both gender identity and family structure.”
A teacher’s aide in Maryland masturbated during a Zoom call with eighth-graders — but insists he thought the online lesson had ended.
Marc Schack, an assistant for special education students at Shady Grove Middle School in Gaithersburg, told the Bethesda Magazine Wednesday he was unaware his self-love session had been captured on the virtual call until being interviewed.
“I thought I was logged out when class was over,” Schack told the bimonthly mag. “I had no clue that Zoom was still on. Why would I do that? That’s my job. I had no clue that Zoom was on. I mean, that’s just crazy behavior.”
WITHIN HOURS OF the storming of the Capitol on January 6, the FBI began securing thousands of phone and electronic records connected to people at the scene of the rioting — including some related to members of Congress, raising potentially thorny legal questions.
Using special emergency powers and other measures, the FBI has collected reams of private cellphone data and communications that go beyond the videos that rioters shared widely on social media, according to two sources with knowledge of the collection effort.
In the hours and days after the Capitol riot, the FBI relied in some cases on emergency orders that do not require court authorization in order to quickly secure actual communications from people who were identified at the crime scene. Investigators have also relied on data “dumps” from cellphone towers in the area to provide a map of who was there, allowing them to trace call records — but not content — from the phones.
THE US Navy has fired a pizza box sized satellite into orbit that generated enough electricity to power an iPad.
The Photovoltaic Radiofrequency Antenna Module (PRAM) was launched in May 2020 and harnesses light from the sun that it converts into electricity.
According to CNN, the experimental tech is attached to a drone that orbits the Earth every 90 minutes.
It’s designed as a prototype for a future system to send electricity from space back to any point on Earth.
“To our knowledge, this experiment is the first test in orbit of hardware designed specifically for solar power satellites, which could play a revolutionary role in our energy future,” said Paul Jaffe, PRAM principal investigator and co-developer of the project.
“Some visions have space solar matching or exceeding the largest power plants today – multiple gigawatts – so enough for a city,” he told CNN.
Unless you’re the world’s richest person, you shouldn’t be buying bitcoin. That’s the message from Bill Gates – the third richest.
With a rally of more than 400% over the past year, bitcoin has become increasingly mainstream, and everybody including prominent investors and policy makers have been talking about it. Elon Musk’s Tesla recently invested US$1.5-billion in the cryptocurrency and said it would accept it for payments.
For Gates, it’s not something Main Street should buy into — plus it’s bad for the environment as mining the coins requires a lot of energy.
