“This bell has a lot of symbolism in it and it’s a very special project for us,” the owner of the bell foundry, Joost Eijsbouts, told the Czech public radio. “To use material designed for violence and turn it into something peaceful is a good idea.”
Resellers have become problematic and many Labubu fans are still willing to pay exorbitant price markups.Kena Flynn was at The Grove shopping center in Los Angeles recently when she stumbled upon some Labubus being sold at a kiosk. Flynn said in a TikTok on Sunday that the prices were “really bad,” but her boyfriend bought two anyway.
“At a certain point, you can’t buy them,” Flynn said in her video. “I just want a Labubu and I cannot buy one from Pop Mart, so here we are.”Looking to keep up with the overwhelming demand, Pop Mart says it’s on track for 50 more retail locations in the U.S. by the end of the year. That’ll give shoppers more chances to hunt for Labubus, as Pop Mart says it’s planning multiple new Labubu releases tied to seasonal moments and holidays throughout the rest of the year.COLOGNE, Germany (AP) — More than 20,000 residents were being evacuated from part of Cologne’s city center on Wednesday as specialists prepared to defuse three unexploded U.S. bombs from World War II that were unearthed earlier this week.
Even 80 years after the end of the war, unexploded bombs dropped during wartime air raids are frequently found in Germany.Disposing of them sometimes entails large-scale precautionary evacuations such as the one on Wednesday, though the location this time was unusually prominent and this is Cologne’s biggest evacuation since 1945. There have been bigger evacuations in other cities.
Authorities on Wednesday morning started evacuating about 20,500 residents from an area within a 1,000-meter (3,280-foot) radius of the bombs, which were discovered on Monday during preparatory work for road construction. They were found in the Deutz district, just across the Rhine River from Cologne’s historic center.
As well as homes, the area includes 58 hotels, nine schools, several museums and office buildings and the Messe/Deutz train station. It also includes three bridges across the Rhine — among them the heavily used Hohenzollern railway bridge, which leads into Cologne’s central station and is being shut during the defusal work itself. Shipping on the Rhine will also be suspended.But government attorneys told the judge that the Trump administration has no plans to apply the executive order to the FEC.
The judge said he can’t conclude from the text of the executive order alone that Trump orare on the verge of taking such an “extraordinary step.” The order doesn’t single out the FEC and applies broadly to all executive branch employees, the judge concluded.
“The Court does not doubt that the committees would have cause for profound concern were the FEC’s independence to be compromised,” he wrote. “Given the FEC’s central role in overseeing parties and campaigns, a compromise of its independence would pose an immense threat to our democratic elections, for all the reasons Congress established the FEC’s independence in the first place.”The portion of the executive order challenged by the lawsuit has raised particular concern among campaign finance watchdogs, who call it a conflict of interest. Congress created the FEC in 1974 after