Churches in Montreal are becoming concerned about hosting community groups after being hit with bills for municipal taxes.

Joel Coppetiers, the Minister at the Cote des Neiges Presbyterian church, was shocked when his institution first received a municipal tax bill in early 2015.

It was "the first indication that something had changed," said Coppetiers.

Provincial law exempts churches and manses from paying municipal taxes but Coppetiers was told that if a manse is vacant for several months between ministers, it's taxable.

http://montreal.ctvnews.ca/no-more-religious-exemptions-montreal-is-taxing-churches-1.3415164#_gus&_gucid=&_gup=twitter&_gsc=ufCD1mJ

Michael Moore is not through with President Donald Trump just yet.

After making the documentary "Michael Moore in TrumpLand" before the 2016 presidential election, the Oscar-winning filmmaker is working on a new project focused on Trump. Moore, who predicted more months before the election last year that Trump would win it (and accurately predicted the states that would give him the victory), has been secretly working on a new documentary.

Titled "Fahrenheit 11/9," referring to when Trump was declared president (in the early hours the day after the election), the movie will be released by The Weinstein Company, which also put out Moore's Oscar-nominated 2004 documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11."

According to a release sent out by the Weinsteins, Moore has been working without any fanfare in the last few months on it, and the film is "expected to be key in dissolving Trump's 'teflon' shield and, in turn, his presidency."

http://newscdn.newsrep.net/h5/nrshare.html?r=3&lan=en_US&pid=24&id=mice5a59dGl_us&app_lan=&mcc=311&declared_lan=en_US&pubaccount=ocms_0&referrer=200620&showall=1&mcc=311

Three Men and a Man Baby

https://twitter.com/Breznican/status/864688337973420033

is coming to St. Pete for a fundraiser but won't do town halls. So we made this billboard. @IndivisibleTeam @maddow @TB_Times

https://twitter.com/IndivisibleFL13/status/864190203187146752

The “Alien” movies suggest that making space exploration into a private, profit-seeking venture won’t end well

Director Ridley Scott’s “Alien” science fiction horror film franchise continues with its sixth installment that debuts in U.S. theaters this week. “Alien: Covenant,” the second prequel in the series, picks up years after the events depicted in the 2012 film “Prometheus,” in which a small group of explorers from Earth is sabotaged by a relative of the intelligent, acid-bleeding space monsters first introduced in the 1979 original.

Along with Parkour-adept parasitic extraterrestrials, a common thread runs through Scott’s “Alien” films: In his universe, space activity is a private, commercial enterprise. The first film takes place on the Nostromo, a commercial cargo transporter named after a 1904 Joseph Conrad novel centered on a fictional South American private silver-mining concession. In the subsequent films we learn the back story that Nostromo was owned and operated by the fictional Weyland Corporation, an intergalactic mining company focused on terraforming planets for profit that wants to capture, study and weaponize the aliens.

Unlike Scott’s 2015 feel-good space film “The Martian,” which is focused on scientific research and intergovernmental cooperation for the advancement of science, the “Alien” films depict a grimmer, for-profit take on space exploration. Even without the monsters, outer space from this perspective is a dark and cruel place, characterized by blue-collar workers toiling in the outer reaches of the void on behalf of a giant soulless corporation back home on Earth.

http://www.salon.com/2017/05/15/libertarians-in-space-is-alien-covenant-a-parable-about-the-privatization-of-space/

If Donald Trump disclosed highly classified state secrets to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister, he may be vulnerable to impeachment — not because he broke the law, which evidently he did not, but because he committed an act that would be considered criminal and perhaps treasonous if perpetrated willfully by any other government official.

Trump is exempt from the criminal statutes governing disclosure of classified information because he can legally declassify anything at will. But whimsical and boastful misuse of that authority, in the presence of an adversary power, is an extremely serious offense that requires immediate Congressional investigation.

The president has put the nation at risk, not for the first time, and his apparent disdain for normal security and intelligence protocols represents an ongoing national emergency. It is an emergency that began within weeks of his inauguration, when he and his staff formulated their response to a February 12 North Korean missile test as diners at his Mar-a-Lago club watched agog from surrounding tables.

In the hours after the Washington Post revealed this latest breach — which involved information about a terrorist plot by the Islamic State — Trump’s national security adviser H.R. McMaster publicly declared that “the story, as reported is false.” McMaster went on to deny specifically that the president had discussed “intelligence sources or methods” or “any military operations that were not already publicly known.”

http://www.nationalmemo.com/impeach-trump-transcript-president-blabbed-secrets-russians/

before the election that Trump is one of the most dangerous candidates ever

https://twitter.com/riotwomennn/status/864463661519302657

Curtis Ellis, a Trump adviser who accused Democrats of plotting the “liquidation of white, blue-collar working families,” is a finalist to become the Labor Department’s top diplomat, sources briefed on the matter tell Bloomberg BNA.

Ellis—who has written for controversial conservative publications and is aligned with White House adviser Steve Bannon—has emerged as one of two contenders to run the DOL’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB), said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The little-known deputy undersecretary position at ILAB is considered an essential piece of the White House push to restore U.S. manufacturing jobs by cracking down on labor abuses overseas.

Ellis is currently part of the Labor Department’s beachhead team and is overseeing the department’s trade policy. He has already been attending ILAB meetings and representing the bureau to foreign governments as a temporary political appointee.

https://www.bna.com/trump-ally-ellis-n73014450933/

SB 1018 would effectively lower state standards in order to license the facilities. The legislation was written by a for-profit private prison corporation.

The Texas Senate passed a bill Tuesday that would license immigrant family detention centers, which critics call “baby jails,” as child care facilities. Democrats railed against Senate Bill 1018, which would allow prison firms to skip all the burdensome regulations that other child care facilities must follow.

The bill was written by GEO Group, Inc., the nation’s second-largest for-profit prison corporation. It advanced on a 20-11 party-line vote, with all Senate Republicans in favor.

“The very idea of holding children in a baby jail is unconscionable in my book. … They’re not leaving their country to come here for fun,” said Senator Sylvia Garcia, D-Houston. “This is a vendor bill if I’ve ever seen one.”

https://www.texasobserver.org/texas-senate-votes-license-baby-jails-child-care-facilities/

It didn’t take long for the American Civil Liberties Union to respond to President Donald Trump’s executive order on Thursday setting up a commission to investigate voter fraud and vulnerabilities in election systems.

The ACLU has filed a freedom of information request for information that the Trump administration is using as the basis for its claims of voter fraud.

The chair of Trump’s new Presidential Commission on Election Integrity will be Vice President Mike Pence, report Reuters, the Washington Post and Politico. The vice chair will be Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who has backed tough voter ID laws and taken a tough stance on immigration, according to Politico.

Trump has previously claimed that between 3 million and 5 million people voted illegally in the November election. Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said in a press release that Trump’s voter fraud claims have been “widely debunked.”

http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/aclu_files_information_request_after_trump_signs_executive_order_for_electi