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.

This is how sports fans should behave

I wrote yesterday about my astonishment at the huge crowds that were attending the cricket matches between Australia and Sri Lanka despite the devastating economic crisis in Sri Lanka that has resulted in a chaotic and tragic situation with massive shortages that has brought the country to a halt.

After the final game of the five one-day matches, the local crowd gave the visiting Australian team rousing expressions of gratitude for coming despite the problems . Many wore yellow shirts, the color of the Australian team, carried banners saying “Thank you Australia”, and chanted “Australia! Australia!” as the visitors took a lap of honor around the stadium.

I have rarely seen such a display of affection for a visiting team by home team fans. One that comes to mind is back in 1961 when half a million people turned out in Melbourne to give Frank Worrell’s visiting West Indian team a ticker tape parade. I hope there is more of this.

Australian player Glenn Maxwell expressed his surprise and appreciation.

News you can’t use?

Becoming old is no picnic but it does provide one advantage, at least as far as I am concerned. I do not worry much anymore about taking major efforts to prolong life, since any precautionary steps I take are likely to have only a small effect. It is not that I now live recklessly. It is just that I can be more relaxed about what is worth doing and what is not. One liberating area is food. What I care most about now when it comes to food is that as long as I eat a balanced diet and not too much junk, what matters is whether it is tasty and enjoyable, and I pay little attention to factors like its cholesterol or fat or sugar content. I figure that whatever damage I have done to my body because of past consumption of those items is too late to rectify. The one thing I do do is take daily walks because it is enjoyable to get out and about and meet and chat with my neighbors. The reputed health benefits are a bonus.

But I do read the occasional article about health tips and found the results of this study to be intriguing because even if the results are replicated and robust, it does not seem actionable.
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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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