President Donald Trump’s administration is “evaluating” the future of the White House Council on Women and Girls and considering whether to keep or eliminate the council, according to several reports.

Politico on Friday reported that the council has gone dark while the White House decides its future, according to three unnamed senior White House officials.

ABC News reported on Friday, citing an unnamed senior White House official, that Trump’s administration is debating the future of the council created by former President Barack Obama.

“The White House is evaluating the best positioning of this office going forward,” White House spokeswoman Hope Hicks told ABC News in a statement. “We want the input of the various agencies to understand the assets they have so that we make this office additive, not redundant.”


http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/white-house-obama-council-women-girls

A report on Alex Jones’ InfoWars claiming child sex slaves have been kidnapped and shipped to Mars is untrue, NASA told The Daily Beast on Thursday.

“There are no humans on Mars. There are active rovers on Mars. There was a rumor going around last week that there weren’t. There are,” Guy Webster, a spokesperson for Mars exploration at NASA, told The Daily Beast. “But there are no humans.”

On Thursday’s program, the InfoWars host welcomed guest Robert David Steele onto The Alex Jones Show, which airs on 118 radio stations nationwide, to talk about kidnapped children he said have been sent on a two-decade mission to space.

“We actually believe that there is a colony on Mars that is populated by children who were kidnapped and sent into space on a 20-year ride,” said Steele. “So that once they get to Mars they have no alternative but to be slaves on the Mars colony.”

Jones echoed Steele, saying “clearly they don’t want us looking into what is happening” because “every time probes go over they turn them off.”

“Look, I know that 90 percent of the NASA missions are secret and I’ve been told by high level NASA engineers that you have no idea. There is so much stuff going on,” Jones said.


http://www.thedailybeast.com/nasa-denies-that-its-running-a-child-slave-colony-on-mars

In 1962, Centralia was a bustling coal town boasting more than 1,000 residents. In 2017, only ten people remained.

The exodus began after a massive coal fire started underground. Multiple attempts to put it out all fell through and the fire still burns today.

The state government stepped in to relocate residents, issuing eminent domain to force them out in 1992. A few resisted, eventually winning a court case which allowed them to remain in the near-ghost town.

Now, Centralia, its legacy and its residents are the subject of a new documentary: "Centralia: Pennsylvania's Lost Town" which is opening in select theaters starting on May 6. You can watch a trailer for the film at the top of this article.




http://www.pennlive.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2017/05/centralia_burning_for_decades.html

But more often, the film is a riot, a nerdy celebration of the hero fantasy, through the eyes of a hero who hasn’t gotten jaded, grim, and angry yet. Too many American heroes are growling, gravelly, and grim, dealing with gigantic moral crises and planet-shattering threats, and giving up any ability to enjoy the novelty of discovery, or the sheer giddiness of power. The MCU movies have been the decade’s strongest counterbalance against the unrelenting grittiness of superheroes, and Spider-Man is the peak of heroic fantasy fun. He isn’t just a hometown hero New Yorker, actively in love with his city and the people in it. He isn’t just the kid who gets called up to run with the big dogs, or the moral leader who understands the balance of power and responsibility. He’s the avatar for everyone who’s ever daydreamed about not just being tougher than the threats in their life, but also faster, more flexible, and funnier. Spider-Man: Homecoming brings the character back to his basics. In the process, it shows why he’s always been such a popular draw, and it makes a strong argument for a branch of the MCU / Sony heroverse that operates on a smaller scale than the rest of the world. Here, the small size isn’t just a story necessity, or a franchise strategy. It’s the heart of the story, and an argument for smaller hero stories in general.


https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/29/15892494/spider-man-homecoming-review-tom-holland-michael-keaton-robert-downey-jr

State officials from Virginia, California and Kentucky said Thursday that they will refuse a request for voter roll data from President Trump's commission on election integrity.

Earlier Thursday, it was reported that the commission sent letters to all 50 states asking for voters' names, birthdays, the last four digits of their Social Security numbers and their voting history dating back to 2006.

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) said in a statement that he has “no intention” of fulfilling the request, defending the fairness of his state's elections. He also blasted the commission in his statement, saying it was based on the "false notion" of widespread voter fraud in the November presidential election.

“At best this commission was set up as a pretext to validate Donald Trump’s alternative election facts, and at worst is a tool to commit large-scale voter suppression,” McAuliffe stated.

California Secretary of State Alex Padilla (D) also responded to the request, saying “I will not provide sensitive voter information to a commission that has already inaccurately passed judgment that millions of Californians voted illegally” in the last election.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/340192-state-officials-refuse-to-turn-over-voter-roll-data-to-trump

The health care bill being debated in the Senate could have a devastating effect on millions of Americans, not least of all the country’s legal sex workers.

A few of them have refused to take that lying down ― politically speaking that is.

Instead, they’ve formed a group called Hookers for Healthcare to raise awareness about how the proposed American Health Care Act could harm their lives and careers.

Alice Little, who works at the Sagebrush Ranch brothel near Carson City, Nevada, wrote a blog post on BunnyRanch.com. In it, the 25-year-old explains how reducing access to Medicaid can make it that much harder for women like herself to become financially independent.

“A young woman entering our business who in some cases may also be a single mother with limited financial means will also need time to build her customer base,” Little wrote. “Expanded access to Medicaid for her or her child may be the only way that she is able to know that they will be covered for health care until she can increase her income.”

Sex workers aren’t the only brothel employees who could be hurt by Trumpcare. Little said that cashiers, bartenders, housekeepers and drivers could also lose access to health care if the law no longer required many employers to provide insurance.

“If Obamacare were repealed, that mandate would be lifted, and these hard working parents and grandparents would lose access to coverage for themselves and their families,” she said.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hookers-for-healthcare-trumpcare_us_59557122e4b0da2c732240ea?ncid=tweetlnkushpmg00000025§ion=weird-news

Say a charity group helps you recover from polio. Decades later, representatives from that same organization ask to have a word about your bill being drafted in secret that would reportedly gut healthcare for millions, including people with disabilities, while giving massive tax cuts to the wealthy. You might at least hear them out. Some people might even say that you owe them one.

Southern gentleman and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, though, apparently disagrees. As Death and Taxes recently pointed out, McConnell contracted polio as a two-year-old. As he described years later, on the 50th anniversary of the polio vaccine being introduced, polio is a virus that comes on like the flu, but can paralyze people for life. In McConnell's case, after he'd gotten over the initial illness, he had residual effects in his left quadriceps muscle.

McConnell was lucky enough that his family lived within driving distance of Warm Springs, Georgia, home to the first (and for many years, the only) hospital devoted solely to treating people with polio. In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had himself been paralyzed by polio, created a charity called the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP) to support the hospital and aid polio patients around the country. Comedian and radio personality Eddie Cantor called for Americans to send their spare change to President Roosevelt, in "a march of dimes to reach all the way to the White House."


https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/a3zbmz/mitch-mcconnell-polio-refused-march-of-dimes-meeting-over-senate-health-bill