STOP PRESS
The UK Appeals court has rejected nurse Lucy Letby’s application to appeal her convictions for the murders of 7 neonatal babies and the harming of 6 others. The appeal was lodged, not on the question of doubt about the verdicts, but on some technical points regarding judge Goss’s conduct of the trial. And that’s all the appeal judges are allowed to tell us! The code of Omerta even applies to them while there is yet one more, minor case pending against her.
It’s a very strange country, I know. Owing to a shortage of criminal barristers and courts, the total number of cases awaiting trial has now topped 78 thousand; almost equivalent to the entire prison population.
Further down the rabbit hole
What’s the craziest thing Trump could invent, concerning the Biden administration? Well, nobody knows. But in the history of Trump’s paranoid ravings, the accusation being parroted by his greedy, idiot bumsuckers on Fox News, rejuvenated after last year’s minor setback of a near billion-dollar settlement for serially libelling the Dominion voting machine company, must qualify for a place at the Mad Hatter’s tea party.
You recall, after his defeat at the polls, in 2021 the Archives people at the White House politely asked Trump to return a whole bunch of classified documents he’d spirited away to Mar a Lago? And that when he refused, they got a search warrant and sent FBI agents in to recover the secrets, some of which were so secret that the former child-president was using them to impress his friends among the club membership, millionaire hangers-on with no security clearances whatever?
Well, according to his Fox buddy, rack-rent landlord Sean Hannity, those G-Men weren’t just there to protect national security. They’d been ordered by Attorney-General Merrick Garland, a Biden stooge, to burst in and assassinate Trump. Who wasn’t even there at the time. For look, the proof lies in the warrant itself, authorising the use of lethal force!
Now, this shattering revelation came out on the same day that video was released fom court filings, internal security footage showing a Mar a Lago employee hiding boxes of material the FBI didn’t find on their first visit. That’s because they didn’t search Trump’s bedroom, where a dozen or so boxes, we now learn, had been squirreled away. (I think we already knew about the boxes in the bathroom?)
Thanks to judge Aileen Cannon, one of his own, most unqualified judicial appointments-for-life, who has somehow gotten charge of the case, he’s being very slowly and reluctantly prosecuted by Special Counsel, Jack Smith for the offence, which would have had any ordinary citizen serving life behind bars within days of being arrested. His bizarre behaviour over clinging on to the classified material at any cost remains unexplained. In some ways, it’s toddler-like. His Big Defence is, ‘I was the President, so they’re my bits of paper! Everything belongs to me!’ But legally, they don’t, they belong to the State. It depends on what type of documents they are. Postcards and press cuttings, we can ignore. Nuclear secrets, details of CIA networks and Iran policy positionals, perhaps not.
Judge Cannon has made the most of the defence notion, issuing an order referring the question of whether or not these are private presidential records or public state records for the decision of a potential jury far down the line. Legal experts say it should be her decision to take now, it’s not rocket science; but they caveat that the law would then allow her to overrule whatever the jury decides and so force an acquittal the justice department couldn’t appeal against. Maybe she’s not so callow after all.
All FBI warrants apparently contain some sort of arse-covering clause allowing agents to use lethal force where necessary. As the manager of a terrible country house hotel, my licence permitted me to have pole dancing in the bar, not that I had any intention of doing so. It was there just in case, along with a list of other unlikely permissions. In the case of the Mar a Lago searches, however, which at the time were described as being almost too polite and deferential, the first agents missed a lot by not being more assertive, the standard getout clause has taken on a more sinister significance.
The fact that Biden did not, as Trump claims, personally order the searches has become completely irrelevant in the telling: it was a hit, from which the enormous orange liar only narrowly escaped with his life. So, please send money… Proof, if proof were needed in Trump’s bizarre, reversed-out universe of Truth Social, that Biden is the one who is ‘MENTALLY UNFIT’ (his caps) to hold the highest office.
(Story: – “utterly bonkers” – MSNBC)
Postscriptum
During the trial, it was remarked that a number of people in the public seating areas were dressed like Trump, in blue suits and with absurdly long, red ties. Associates or former employees of Trump’s, they had apparently been asked by the defendant to attend as ‘supporters’ – in other words, they were there to intimidate the jurors. Not for nothing was Trump mentored by the notorious Mafia lawyer, Roy Cohn.
MSNBC reports, USA Today has an article, pointing out how many of Trump’s gaggle of supporters attending his ‘Stormy Daniels’ trial in Manhattan have criminal records.* Most have either served time, are awaiting transfer to jail pending further rulings, or have already been pardoned. Apparently the numbers have swelled since five years ago, when the Washington Post described Trumpland as ‘a remarkable universe of criminality’.
Personally, I suspect it’s less to do with Trump liking to have people around who remind him daily that his whole shitty life he’s got away Scot-free with endless dishonesty, and more to do with his Jesus complex.
Post postscriptum, 30 May: the Manhattan jury has brought in 34 unanimous Guilty verdicts on all charges. Sentencing has been postponed to 11 July.
*For a more complete list of Trump’s known criminal ‘associates’, go to http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trumps-team-felons-adds-important-member. (31 May)
GW
Papua New Guinea: More than 100 people are feared to have been killed in a 3 a.m. landslide that has wiped out an entire village after heavy rain. (Various)
Mexico: “Powerful winds brought down a stage at a presidential election campaign rally in northwestern Mexico killing nine people, including a child ….At least 50 people were hurt and emergency workers were still on the scene in the Monterrey suburb of San Pedro Garza Garcia … early Thursday.” (AccuWeather)
USA: “Disruptive and dangerous thunderstorms will erupt and advance from the central United States to the East Coast during the Memorial Day weekend.” AccuWeather is predicting hurricane force winds, tornados, big hail and lightning strikes will ruin many outdoor events.
Pakistan: “… is in the midst of an intense heatwave, with hundreds of heatstroke victims being treated in hospitals. Temperatures soared to 49C (120F) on Wednesday … in the southern Sindh province … more than 8C above May’s average daytime temperature. … These anomalously high … temperatures have followed the country’s wettest April since 1961, with more than double the usual monthly rainfall.” (Guardian)
Australia: (report dated 15 May) “Since the start of May, Sydney and other parts of the New South Wales coast have been hit with uninterrupted rain … current forecasts indicate it’s far from over, with the potential for Sydney’s main weather station to break the record number of days of rain in a row by the time the event ends, according to the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM)” (ABC News).
Tailpipe
Do you take ice with that?
A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences contains alarming news about our old friend, the Thwaites Glacier, in West Antarctica – also known as the Doomsday glacier because of its size – it’s as big as Florida – and its possible addition to sea level rise of about three meters should it and the ice behind it all melt out.
It’s all melting out.
A new micro-submarine survey has shown that as the tide comes in and goes out, warm salt water is undercutting the ice sheet by several miles at a time. If only the part that’s overhanging the sea goes, it’ll add about half a meter to global sea level. That’d be Miami, central London and most of Bangladesh gone, not to mention whatever so much fresh water would do to the ocean currents, that could change weather patterns all over the globe. But that floating part is holding back a land glacier five times the size, that would be free to slide into the sea.
It’s all going a lot faster than they thought, although it’ll still be the next century before the worst effects are felt. I’m not sure I’ve got that long, but good luck to my three-year-old grandson Sam. Teach him to swim.
And speaking of which, has the Gulf Stream already gone? This bath of warm north Atlantic water, also known as the AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) has maintained the British Isles in a more or less steady Goldilocks climate – not too hot, not too cold – for millennia. Scientists have been worried for some time that the melting Greenland ice cap is weakening the current to the point of failure. Meteorological summer is only a week away, but after the wettest eight months in our weather history it’s another dank, drizzly, windy day with flood warnings, and barely 11 degrees C outside.
Getting the wind up
By contrast, the entire length of the mid-Atlantic arc from the West Africa coast across the Azores and the Leeward Islands into the Gulf of Mexico is showing an incredible temperature anomaly of up to +4.5 degrees F, foreshadowing a wild hurricane season starting 1 June, according to the AcccuWeather specialists. The warmer the water, the faster the intensification of the low pressure systems that follow this well-beaten track into the Caribbean.
The price of survival
In October, 2022, I received a bill for the previous month’s dual-fuel energy use of just £40. Mine is a tiny house, 62 sq m, reasonably well insulated, where I live alone by the light of a single LED lamp and the flickering computer screen. Last month, April 2024, the bill for March was £390.
Okay, it’s been cold and damp and mouldy all winter and, surviving on a diet of anticoagulants, I’ve needed more warmth than most. Ofgem has just lowered the cap on energy prices from July, which might help (until it goes up again in September). But I’ll join the Chancellor in rejoicing that inflation is down to only 2.3 per cent this month when it’s stayed that low or lower for maybe another year or two. I want my money back!
Death metal
Among the reasons I’ve explored for the horrid neurological condition Hunzi, my poor lovely Border Collie developed, that meant we had to put him to sleep last Easter, heavy metal poisoning was high on the list.
Imagine my surprise when, just as I had started looking up questions like ‘could toxic metals have poisoned my dog?’ I spotted in the convenience store that our local rag, the Cambrian News had only the previous week published a two-page article on the apparently insuperable problem of toxic metals persistently leaching from C19th mine tailings upstream into the water courses of this part of mid-Wales.
Reader, I bought a copy. (I almost never do, I worked there as a miserably underpaid subeditor back in 2004 and the bastards fired me for reporting them to the NUJ.)
Now I feel guilty that I used to encourage Hunzi to dive into the local river on our walks, where over a period of 12 years on warm days he would happily slurp gallons of lead, zinc, cadmium, mercury and god-knows what else, until he could no longer co-ordinate his leg movements and terrifyingly lost his balance and all sense of spatial awareness. Local scientists reckon it’s another major privatised water board scandal to go with the problem of sewage discharges.
I just know it as a black-and-white hole in my life.
Election Special
It’s a pity Labour’s Rachel Reeves, shadow Chancellor, has decided they cannot afford to pursue their promise to invest £28 billion in clean, green industrial projects over five years. It would be worth it. Goldman Sachs estimates that the £372 billion of government investment hypothecated in Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, together with tax breaks, has been worth around 1.2 trillion dollars to the US economy:
- “… (private) investments in clean energy and transportation accounted for a whopping 44 percent of all investment growth in fixed assets like plants, property and equipment in the entire U.S. economy last year”. (DeSmog, quoting Clean Investment Monitor)
Odd that a former Director of Public Prosecutions doesn’t have the courage of his convictions (joke! Ed.) Green up, Starmer.
The Boglington Post (Incorporating The Pumpkin) 