An elderly and reluctant Frenchman was ejected from a French Air Force fighter during a retirement day jolly - and narrowly missed taking the pilot with him, an investigation report littered with unintentional howlers has revealed....
Things got worse when the pilot took off from northeastern France's Saint-Dizier Robinson airbase. Rather than the gentle ascent at 10-15 that airline passengers experience, the Frenchman at the Rafale's controls carried out a typical fighter jet departure and "climbed at 47, generating a load factor of around +4G. Then, as he levelled off, he subjected his passenger to a negative load factor of about -0.6G".
Our pensioner, loose in his straps, not really wanting to be there and totally unused to being flung around like a rag doll, reached out to grab something and hang on for dear life. He picked the worst possible handhold: the trigger handle for the ejection seat.
The Adminstrations daily briefings have become less about defeating the virus and more about the many feuds of Donald J. Trump. Sometime in the last three weeks Mr. Trump seems to have concluded that the briefings could be a showcase for him in lieu of his campaign rallies. Mr. Trump opens each briefing by running through a blizzard of facts and numbers he opens the door for questions, and the session deteriorates into a dispiriting brawl between the President and his antagonists in the White House press corps.
If Mr. Trump thinks these daily sessions will help him defeat Joe Biden, he's wrong. This election is now about one issue: how well the public thinks the President has done in defeating the virus and restarting the economy. If Americans conclude he succeeded in a crisis, they will forgive him for reacting more slowly than he and many others might have in January. They will judge Mr. Trump by the results, not by how well he says he did.
Were the supplies distributed fairly? You decide.
Ian Morrison turned 46 on March 13 and celebrated his birthday in quarantine with a case of COVID-19. Morrison is well-known in the Philadelphia LGBTQ community for his drag performances as Miss Brittany Lynn and his performances at Drag Bingo, Drag Queen Story Time and other venues. Morrison talked at length about his harrowing experience with the coronavirus in a socially distanced interview with PGN.
just a short visual that compares the US to other countries.
Lock Q 2 6 K L M But what does it mean? Read more
he newspaper Eesti Ekspress reports that the Estonian Security Police has detained the founder and head of the international neo-Nazi group Feuerkrieg Division, but officers cannot arrest him because he is a 13 year old school student. Read more
Chinese doctors who have for months treated patients on the front lines of China's fight against the new coronavirus offered a sobering assessment of the potential treatments, saying they hadn't seen clear evidence that drugs such as chloroquine were effective.
I've seen a few Pubs here say that they would vote for Joe over Trump if he got the nod. I want to see a roll call of those who are ready to switch.
As the number of people dying in New York each day reaches grim levels, city officials have hired contract workers to bury the dead on Hart Island, a longtime burial ground for the city's indigent residents. The island, a one-mile strip off the Bronx accessible only by boat, serves as the final resting place for more than a million former New Yorkers " those who died without known next of kin or whose families could not afford a funeral. Read more
The latest scorcher of an attack ad by the Republican Lincoln Project concedes Donald Trump had other priorities before launching his lackluster battle against COVID-19. But he wasn't distracted by impeachment, as he claims. Instead, he was too busy golfing and packing people into campaign rallies, according to the message released Thursday by the conservative group. "Coronavirus has now killed three times more Americans than 9/11," the ad notes somberly at the start. "So what's Donald Trump been up to? Blaming the impeachment hearings for distracting him from preparing for the pandemic." Despite warnings about the urgency of the virus from both his trade adviser Peter Navarro and the World Health Organization in January " and the subsequent shutdown of Italy " Trump "had plenty to do, like campaign rallies and golfing," notes the ad, titled "Distracted."
As the coronavirus lockdown began, the first impulse was to search for historical analogies"1914, 1929, 1941? As the weeks have ground on, what has come ever more to the fore is the historical novelty of the shock that we are living through. As a result of the coronavirus pandemic, America's economy is now widely expected to shrink by a quarter. That is as much as during the Great Depression. But whereas the contraction after 1929 stretched over a four-year period, the coronavirus implosion will happen over the next three months. As recently as five weeks ago, at the beginning of March, U.S. unemployment was at record lows. By the end of March, it had surged to somewhere around 13 percent. That is the highest number recorded since World War II. We don't know the precise figure because our system of unemployment registration was not built to track an increase at this speed.
The coronavirus pandemic is raging across the world, but in America, New York City is being hit particularly hard. The city reported 824 deaths from Covid-19 infection within 24 hours on Thursday, the deadliest day of the pandemic in the city so far, and deaths in the state have topped 7,000. Reuters reported on Thursday, New York City has hired contractors to dig trenches on Hart Island to bury the dead (this work is normally done by incarcerated people). Normally, two dozen bodies a week are buried at the site, which is intended for people with no next of kin or whose families are unable to arrange a funeral. According to Reuters, which published drone footage of the site, the bodies have started coming in at a rate of two dozen a day, five days a week. According to satellite images provided to Motherboard by geospatial data company Maxar Technologies in Colorado, the burial trenches in New York City were already visible from space three days ago, on April 6.
White House allies and Republican lawmakers increasingly believe the briefings are hurting the president more than helping him. Many view the sessions as a kind of original sin from which all of his missteps flow, once he gets through his prepared script and turns to his preferred style of extemporaneous bluster and invective. Read more
President Trump on Thursday said mass testing for the coronavirus is not necessary for the United States to get back to normal, contradicting experts who say widespread testing will be key to successfully easing out of social distancing. Read more
Hungary's far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orban gained sweeping powers last week when the country's parliament passed emergency coronavirus measures that allow him to effectively rule by decree, suspend by-elections and grant authorities the ability to jail people for spreading disinformation. There is no time limit on when these new powers end.
Just a week later, rights groups say Orban has already begun using these new powers to assert control. As countries implement extraordinary measures to stem the spread of coronavirus, Hungary and other governments have used the moment to their political advantage - bringing concern over how the rule of law can survive a pandemic.
"Viktor Orban has completed his project of killing democracy and the rule of law in Hungary," said Sophie In't Veld, a Dutch liberal member of European Parliament involved in monitoring rule of law.
