Is Prince Charles daft?

I was surprised to read that Prince Charles had accepted large amounts of cash from a billionaire Qatari, apparently to go towards his charity.

Claims in the Sunday Times that Charles accepted three donations between 2011 and 2015 from former Qatari prime minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani – known as “HBJ” – were described as “shocking” by critics. One donation, totalling €1m, was reportedly handed over in a small suitcase and another was stuffed in a carrier bag from upmarket department store Fortnum & Mason.

The cash, allegedly then counted by Charles’s aides and subsequently collected by Coutts bank, was paid to the Prince of Wales’s charitable fund which aims to “transform lives and build sustainable communities” through awarding grants.

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Next January 6th hearings suddenly scheduled for tomorrow

The committee probing the events made the surprising announcement that there would be another hearing on Tuesday, June 28th at 10:00 am ET to present new evidence. Since they had previously said that there would be no more hearings until July, this took observers by surprise. Despite questions as to the reasons for the change, none were given, increasing the suspense.

You can see the hearings on many news sources with C-Span being my preferred source for video and NPR for audio.

‘Country Queers’: On being LGBTQ+ in rural America

The radio program On The Media talked to Rae Garringer, the creator of the oral history project Country Queers that seeks to challenge the stereotype that the LGBTQ+ community can only find acceptance in urban areas and face unrelenting hostility is rural ones.

All across the country this month, people are celebrating queer and trans pride with parades, cookouts, dances, and family gatherings. And yet the future of the community feels darker than it has in a long time. Threats from Proud Boys and elected officials seem to reinforce the idea that LGBT people cannot survive or thrive in places outside a few coastal cities. But a study from the Movement Advancement Project in 2019 revealed that at least 3 million queer people live in rural America. And many have no interest in fleeing to big cities for protection. This week, Annalee Newitz sits in for Brooke, and talks to Rae Garringer about their oral history project, Country Queers. When Garringer was attending college in the early 2000s, the only queer rural representation they saw was in crime stories. Country Queers features LGBT people who are living in rural parts of the United States, in small towns and remote farms, and they’re often taking great joy in it.

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Trump’s anger shows that the January 6th hearings are hurting him

Congressional hearings are generally a confused mess, especially when they deal with issues on which there are strong partisan feelings. This is because there are a large number of people on the panel and, being politicians, they tend to make speeches to impress their base back home rather than ask questions that might elicit information or clarify issues. Furthermore, those who want to confuse the matter can introduce red herrings, filibuster, engage in endless repetition, raise points of order that are not points of order, and in so many ways sow confusion.

The current hearings into the events of January 6th are remarkably different. They have put out a clear timeline of events, interweaving live testimony with pre-recorded ones and supplementing those with documents and other forms of evidence. This is because each day’s questioning is largely led by a single designated person and they clearly had carefully planned goals in mind for each session. The hearings are playing out like a TV mini-series, including cliff-hangers for the episodes to come.
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First Pride Parade in Sri Lanka

When it comes to LGBTQ+ issues, Sri Lanka was very much in the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ era. We all knew gay people and they were usually welcome in families and institutions and did not suffer any major overt discrimination, as far as I was aware. It was well known that many prominent politicians were gay without it being a factor in their public life.

But there were few people who were out. That seems to have changed recently. As is often the case, in times of instability and chaos, old taboos start to crumble and this week saw the first Pride Parade in Colombo that was organized (I think) by the people involved in the mass demonstrations against the government.

Cricket success boosts Sri Lankan morale

The economic crisis in Sri Lanka shows no sigs of ending soon. That is not surprising since the immediate cause of the current crisis is the severe lack of foreign exchange reserves to import even the most basic goods such as fuel, medicines, and food, and only other nations and foreign agencies can ameliorate the situation by giving loans and grants but that takes time to negotiate and then implement.

Meanwhile the government has issued desperate appeals to the population and ordered government employees to work just four days a week and to use the fifth day to grow food in their backyards in order to help with the food crisis. They have asked all workers to work from home as much as possible so as to reduce the need for transportation. But that has not been enough to stop protestors from marching to demand that the president and prime minister resign immediately.
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Trump’s attempts to subvert the justice department exposed

The January 6th hearings yesterday focused on the attempts by Trump and his minions to use the Department of Justice to advance his lies that the election was fraudulent. In yet another gripping day of testimony, three of the most senior justice department officials during the last days of his presidency (acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, acting deputy assistant general Richard Donoghue, and Steven Engel, assistant attorney general for the office of legal counsel) describe how Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and others enlisted the assistant attorney general for civil affairs Jeffrey Clark to try and get the justice department to send a letter drafted by Clark, to Georgia elections officials saying that the election in that state was invalid. Clark would meet with Trump, defying rules that prevented justice department officials from meeting with White House officials without approval of the attorney general, a policy designed to prevent undue political pressure.

The committee’s top Republican Liz Cheney is offering more details about the actions of justice department official Jeffrey Clark, who had his house raided today by federal investigators.

According to Cheney, Clark and another justice department lawyer drafted a letter addressed to the Georgia state legislature, which would have said the department had “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple states, including the state of Georgia”, and that the legislature should convene and consider approving a new slate of electors.

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Texas is an example of how low Republicans have sunk

An example of the depths to which the Republican party has sunk can be seen in Chris Cillizza’s description about what went down at the convention of the Republican party in Texas last weekend.

* They approved a measure that stated that President Joe Biden “was not legitimately elected.”

* They rebuked the 10 Senate Republicans involved in the bipartisan talks on gun legislation — including Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who was booed during his speech Friday at the convention.

* They voted to advance language in the party platform that describes homosexuality as “an abnormal lifestyle choice” and calls on students “to learn about the humanity of the preborn child.”

* They harassed Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw, calling him “eye patch McCain.” (Crenshaw lost an eye during military service in Afghanistan.)

Taken together, the message was simple: This is Donald Trump’s party. Period. End of sentence.

“Donald Trump radicalized the party and accelerated the demands from the base,” University of Houston political scientist Brandon Rottinghaus told the Texas Tribune. “There simply aren’t limits now on what the base might ask for.”

So what was Crenshaw’s sin that so offended his Republican colleagues? It was that at an event late last year in Texas, Crenshaw said this:

“There’s two types of members of Congress: There’s performance artists and legislators. The performance artists are the ones that get all the attention, the ones you think are more conservative because they know how to say slogans real well, they know how to recite the lines that they know our voters want to hear.”

Later, he added this: “We have grifters in our midst … in the conservative movement. Lie after lie after lie.”

So his sin was telling it like it is. If you do not buy completely into the fantasy world created by Trump, you have gone over to the enemy and must be destroyed.

Cornyn and Crenshaw are as right-wing as they come but that is not enough these days. The Republican party is beginning to eat its own.

The scandalously slow police reaction to the Uvalde shooting

Immediate post-tragedy statements by the local police chief said that the long delay in responding to the Uvalde school shooter was because they were waiting for protective gear and firepower and a key to open the door to the school. All those turn out to be false, as Trevor Noah discusses. There were many police equipped with weapons and equipment just standing nearby and the door was unlocked.

Once again, ‘the good guy with the gun’ (in fact many of them heavily armed and supposedly highly trained) did not solve the problem of dealing with a single, heavily armed person with murderous intent.

Trump’s potentially criminal behavior becomes ever more apparent

The revelations of Trump’s utter contempt for democracy because of his attempts to overturn the election results get worse with each day of public congressional hearings, if you can believe it. The fourth day of congressional hearings yesterday saw a stream of solidly Republican state election officials in Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, all of whom voted for Trump, describe the awful abuse and harassment they experienced when they refused to go along with the Trump gang’s demands that they reject the results of the elections in their state and substitute alternate delegates, and the blatant lies that they were told as to the supposed evidence that existed of mass fraud. It should be emphasized that Trump was not simply uttering falsehoods about fraud. He consistently displayed a blatant disregard for truth, repeatedly telling lies that he had been told were lies even by his own administration officials.

The evidence is mounting that the events of January 6th, 2021 were not isolated but the culmination of a concerted effort by Trump and his cronies to overturn the election, and that they were willing to go to almost any lengths to do so. After listening to these hearings, what surprises me is that he did not order the military to act to keep him in power, so determined was he to stay in power.
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