Category: Knowledge

Example of one I didn’t know:

Australia and Canada did not become fully independent until the 1980s.

“The British courts still heard final appeals from the courts of the dominions. In 1982 for Canada, and 1986 for Australia, Britain finally renounced its control.”

“There are some extremely remarkable and mysterious landscapes on Earth that can leave their visitors absolutely awestruck. Here is a collection of 20.”

In the most commonly used representation of the world, the Mercator Projection, Greenland and Africa are about the same size. In reality, Africa is more than 14 times larger!

This story is really getting complicated. These are the same two guys we read about Monday when they refused to testify or be deposed in the impeachment investigation. Shortly thereafter, they were fleeing the country.

Allegedly, these are two unrelated cases. Congress wanted them to testify about the Ukrainian Bidengate scandal, while the feds arrested them for laundering money to make illegal campaign contributions. (Illegal because they were channeling money from foreign donors into American elections to support Trump and others.) I have a feeling things may tie together when all the curtains are pulled back. At the moment it is not clear whether they were fleeing the country to avoid the expected Congressional subpoenas, or because they knew the feds were closing in on the criminal charges.

But here’s a kicker. Get this. The two had one-way tickets to Vienna. Rudy Giuliani was also scheduled to travel to Vienna the following day. Rudy claims those two trips were unrelated, that he was going to Vienna for a completely different reason, and that he was not scheduled to meet with them until they returned to Washington – a pretty difficult trick considering they had one-way tickets!

I wonder if Rudy will still go ahead with his Vienna trip, just to pretend that he was telling the truth about that completely different reason. Probably not. One thing about Rudy – he doesn’t spend a lot of time trying to construct plausible lies. He just wings it.

Much like his main client.

Here’s another kicker, hot off the presses: Giuliani was not only using these two guys in his crusade to dig up dirt in Ukraine, but he also accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from them for consulting and legal services!

These guys are tight!

It’s filled with shocking details that I had not been aware of. Epstein is the serial abuser of underage girls who used to hang with everybody who was anybody, including Donald Trump and Bill Clinton. His lawyers included Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz. (Here is Epstein’s Wikipedia page.)

Many believe his connections got him a sweetheart deal for crimes that should have left him in prison for life. The Herald said it found about 80 women Epstein allegedly molested or sexually abused over a five-year period, and the report charged that even Epstein’s brief state prison time was lax, being housed in a private wing at the Palm Beach County jail and allowed outrageous work release privileges (12 hours per day, 6 days per week) and a private security detail.

Here are some of the juicier quotes:

In the affidavit, Roberts claimed that Epstein and Maxwell directed her to have sex with (Prince) Andrew and (Alan) Dershowitz and others. She had sex with Andrew three times, she alleged — once in London, when she was 17, again in New York, when she was 17, and a third time, as part of an orgy on Epstein’s island, when she was 18. By law, at 17, she would have been above the age of consent in New York and England, but not in Florida, where the age of consent is 18. As part of the affidavit, Roberts furnished a photograph of her with the prince and Maxwell, which she said was taken in London.

Of Dershowitz, who was part of Epstein’s criminal defense team, was often a guest at Epstein’s homes, she said. “I had sexual intercourse with Dershowitz at least six times,’’ Roberts wrote in the 2015 court affidavit. “The first time was when I was about 16, early on in my servitude to Epstein and it continued until I was 19.’’ She detailed some of those trysts, which she said happened at Epstein’s homes in Palm Beach, New Mexico and on Epstein’s island. One of Epstein’s housemen, Juan Alessi, testified in a 2009 sworn deposition that Dershowitz visited Epstein’s Palm Beach home four or five times a year.

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Perhaps most outrageous of all: The prosecutor who gave Epstein his outrageously lenient sentence is now Trump’s Secretary of Labor. Some of the current lawsuits involving the case are against Secretary Acosta. The women argue Acosta and other federal prosecutors broke the law in their handling of the case.