Today, the British go to the polls. Despite some hopeful signs for Labour early on, the latest poll commissioned by The Independent newspaper predicts a landslide win for Theresa May and the Conservatives, winning possibly 362 seats, well above the 326 she needs for a majority, and 31 more that the party currently has. Other polls too predict a Conservative win.
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That the Trumps are shameless and greedy is already well-established. Now comes yet another expose of their sleaziness, this time using big-name charities for personal gain. Forbes magazine has an articleabout how the Trumps used their own so-called charitable foundations and so-called charitable fund raisers to siphon money to Donald Trump’s business enterprises.
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When we hear of the country Nicaragua, many of us will associate it with the vicious war that Ronald Reagan waged against that country, using the CIA-supported Contra mercenaries an terrorist proxies to destabilize that country by killing people and inflicting damage on schools and hospitals and other soft targets, simply because the Reagan administration did not approve of the Sandinista government led by Daniel Ortega.
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Brent Larkin used to be the director of the editorial page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer before he retired and now has a weekly column that appears on Sundays. He is someone whom I consider to be a conservative and during his tenure the editorials tended to favor conservative causes and endorse conservative candidates. In last Sunday’s column, he reflected on what he had learned on a recent overseas trip about how other countries view the US and Donald Trump, and that they, unlike his supporters in the US, see him as the “mean, small man he really is”.
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The war in Afghanistan is a tragic version of the film Groundhog Day, where the same cycle of events gets played out over and over again with no discernible progress. We now have president Trump faced with the prospect of deciding whether to send in more troops and a new commander to break the stalemate, which is the same situation president Barack Obama faced in 2009 when he was newly elected.
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James Bond he is not.
Leo Varadkar has been elected leader of the Fine Gael party in the Republic of Ireland which means that he will become the country’s next taoiseach, the equivalent of prime minister. On the positive side is the fact that the 38-year old Varadkar is the son of an Indian immigrant father and Irish mother. He is also gay. Neither of these is insignificant given the overwhelming Roman Catholic culture of the country and the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment that saw the passage in 2004 of legislation that removed citizenship rights from the Irish-born children of non-national parents.
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In the US, any terror attack sends the media into a frenzy of fear mongering and as a result people here tend to be in a state of permanent fear. But as I have said many times before, Americans don’t seem to realize that people in other countries seem to be made of sterner stuff than those who live in the ‘home of the brave’ and take these awful acts in stride. It is not that they minimize the tragedies but that they don’t let themselves be paralyzed by them.
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London suffers yet another terrorist attack with seven dead so far and dozens more injured, many critically, in two separate but connected events. We are told that three assailants were shot dead by police. Although no group has yet claimed responsibility for the attacks, given that this occurred less than a week before British elections on June 8 and that there was a similar attack in Manchester last week Paris a few days before the French presidential election, one has to ask if there is a deliberate pattern to launch such attacks just before elections.
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A reporting team from The Guardian has been on the road with Jeremy Corbyn and provides an inside look at him when he is not in the public eye. One gets the impression of a man who is comfortable in his own skin and knows who he is and what he wants, who becomes uncomfortable only when he feels pressured to answer hypothetical questions for which there really are no good answers. Meanwhile Conservative leader Teresa May has come across as phony and somewhat bumbling.
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