^{^} ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

Friday 11th September		-		The Roman Empire suffered its greatest defeat at the Battle of the Teutoborg Forest, 9. Actress Vincenza Armani died, 1569. Explorer Mungo Park born, 1771. The Hope Diamond was stolen, along with other crown jewels of France, 1792. Soprano Catherine Bott born, 1952. Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov died four days after being poisoned with a ricin-filled pellet fired from an umbrella, 1978. Various September 11 attacks-related observances in the US.
Saturday 12th September		-		The Athenians and Plateans defeated the first Persian invasion of Greece at the Battle of Marathon, 490 BCE [accepted date]. Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino, born, 1492. Poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning eloped, 1846. Physicist and astronomer Sarah Francis Whiting died, 1927. Singer-songwriter Jennifer Nettles born, 1974. Actor Jeremy Brett died, 1995. Programmers' Day.
Sunday 13th September		-		Roman emperor Titus died, 81. Michelangelo began work on his statue of David, 1501. Physician Walter Reed born, 1851. IBM introduced the 305 RAMAC, the first commercial computer to use disk storage, 1956. Fashion designer Stella McCartney born, 1971. Nurse and author Betty Jeffrey died, 2000. Roald Dahl Day in the UK, Africa and Latin America.
Monday 14th September		-		Cartographer Claudius Clavus born, 1388. The Flight of the Earls from Lough Swilly, Ireland, 1607. Nurse and activist Margaret Sanger born, 1879. Actress and Princess of Monaco Grace Kelly died, 1982. Microsoft released Windows Me, considered one of the worst operating systems in history, 2000. Chef and broadcaster Keith Floyd died, 2009.
Tuesday 15th September		-		Serial killer Gilles de Rais was taken into custody, 1440. Titus Oates, fabricator of the Popish Plot against King Charles II of England, Scotland and Ireland, born, 1649. Gardener André Le Nôtre died, 1700. Napoleon's Grande Armée reached the Kremlin in Moscow, 1812. Writer Agatha Christie born, 1890. Actress and author June Salter died, 2001. World Lymphoma Awareness Day
Wednesday 16th September		-		Julia Drusilla, daughter of Germanicus, born, 16. Owain Glyndŵr was declared Prince of Wales, 1400. King James II of England and Ireland (James VII of Scotland) died in exile, 1701. Actor Peter Falk born, 1927. Eight people escaped East Germany in a homemade hot air balloon, 1979. Dancer and choreographer Patsy Swayze died, 2013. International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer (United Nations).
Thursday 17th September		-		Humanist and astronomer Celio Calcagnini born, 1479. The city of Boston, Massachusetts, was founded, 1630. Writer and poet Tobias Smollett died, 1771. Chemist Vera Yevstafievna Popova born, 1867. Frida Kahlo suffered near-fatal injuries in a bus accident, leading to her taking up art instead of continuing her studies, 1925. Fashion designer Laura Ashley died, 1985.

^{^} THE WISDOM OF...

This week, Frida Kahlo:

I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy as long as I can paint.

^{^} FILM QUIZ

A selection of quotations from films by the same director. Answers next issue or from the regular address.

• I'm not wearing any pants. Film at eleven.
• He was wearing my Harvard tie. Can you believe it? My Harvard tie. Like oh, sure he went to Harvard.
• Is this the way it happened? Was Jack the Ripper in fact a sixty-foot sea serpent from Scotland? Did I take this job to make a quick buck? We may never know the answers to these questions.
• Dad! Mom, Dad, this is Larry Kroger. The boy who molested me last month. We have to get married.
• - David, you are hurting my feelings!
  - Hurting your feelings? Has it occurred to you that it might be unsettling to see you arise from the grave to visit me?

Last issue's quotations were from films directed by Clint Eastwood:

• You know, it's been a while since New York had news this good. Especially with an airplane in it.
      -- Sully: Miracle on the Hudson [2016]
• - I sure do miss my bed.
  - You said that last night.
  - No, last night I said I missed my wife, tonight I just miss my dadgum bed.
      -- Unforgiven [1992]
• My only hope is that whatever doesn't burn up lands on Gerson's house.
      -- Space Cowboys [2000]
• He looks like he could change a nine-dollar bill in threes.
      -- The Eiger Sanction [1975]
• Inspector, your methods are unconventional to say the least. Oh, you get results. But often your successes are more costly to this department in terms of expenses and physical destruction than most other men's failures.
      -- Sudden Impact [1983]

^{^} WEIRD WORLD NEWS

Strange stories from around the world, some of which might be true...

• Police in Heidelberg, Germany, are stumped after someone left a styrofoam box containing three vials of liquid on a local train last Friday, at first prompting the bomb squad to be called out. The liquid was later found to contain hamster DNA, but despite widespread appeals the owner of the box has yet to come forward; the contents of the vials have been disposed of as their cold storage had been broken to identify them. ● A deputy in Douglas County, Georgia, who went to a house to serve papers leaving her squad car door open (in case she had to make a quick escape from vicious dogs) returned to find the car had been occupied - by a goat. It took some coaxing and two dogs to persuade it to get out of the car - knocking the deputy over in the process without causing injury - and she discovered that while in the car it had chewed through some of her paperwork. ● A hunter in Oregon who shot an elk non-fatally with a bow and arrow returned the next day to try kill it off and was instead gored to death by the very same elk. ● Scientists have finally worked out how to identify frog species from their tadpoles, as part of a scheme to conserve Asian horned frogs in their native Vietnam. ● A container of the Deinococcus radiodurans bacteria, commonly nicknamed Conan the Bacterium for its hardiness, attached to the outside of the International Space Station three years ago has been found to have survived. ● An endangered Northern Rockhopper penguin that was washed up on a on a southwest Australian beach and is being cared for at Perth Zoo is being given special care to keep him from getting lonesome - he is the only one of his species of penguin in care anywhere in Australasia. Keepers, worried that he would not be able to socialise when he returned to the wild, have been showing him livestream video of rockhoppers at other zoos around the world, and episodes of Pingu, the children's animated series about a penguin. According to zoo spokeswoman Danielle Henry "He's absolutely loved it [Pingu]."


• An attempt to smuggle eight gold bars from Manchester to Dubai has been thwarted after they were found hidden in an aircraft passenger's lunchbox during a routine luggage search. The bars, weighing about 35lbs (16kg), were estimated to be worth £750,000 ($978,400), and were seized under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002. They will be auctioned by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) in their first use of the Criminal Finance Act 2017, which allows precious metals to be forfeited in the same way as stolen cash. HMRC assistant director Gill Hilton said that money raised from the auction "will go straight back into the public purse" for essential health and education services.


• Pregnancy tests have been in the news this week, with the revelation that an expensive electronic tester was little more than a traditional paper testing strip with an electronic circuit to detect which result had been shown on the strip and flash it up on a display. Meanwhile a hacker (in the traditional, non-criminal sense of the word) going by the Twitter ID of foone has apparently managed to run the iconic 1993 first person shooter game Doom on an electric pregnancy tester, although he admitted that he had to replace both the CPU and LCD display. Still pretty fragtastic though...


• Jessica A. Krug, for years a lecturer in history at George Washington University specialising in African American history, imperialism and colonialism, and a Black rights activist has self-published an essay in which she admits to not actually being Black, but white and Jewish. She writes of having falsely claimed North African Blackness, US Blackness then Caribbean Bronx Blackness for "the better part of my adult life" concluding "I am not a culture vulture. I am a culture leech." George Washington University confirmed being aware of the letter but declined to comment, other than to say that Klug would not be teaching there this semester.


• Fans of slow travel, or those wishing to relive the 1960s "Hippie trail", can now book a seat on the longest operational bus route in the world, running between London, England, and Delhi, India, a 12,427 mile (20,000km) route passing through 18 countries, including France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Russia, China, Myanmar, Nepal and Bhutan over 70 days. The service smashes the current record for the longest bus route which is a mere 3,853 miles (6,200km) across South America between Lima, Peru, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.


• Police in Millersburg, Kentucky, pulled over a driver after noticing that the license plate on his car did not look right. They discovered that it was paper with a Kentucky horse design, license plate style-lettering and other features including a sketch of the state all drawn with permanent marker pens. They also found that the state license sticker was missing and that the driver had a suspended license and was driving without insurance.


• Music lovers gathered in the Saint Burchardi Church in Halberstadt, Germany, earlier this week to hear a chord change. Nothing unusual in that, chord changes are common in music, but for this particular piece it was the first in seven years. Avant-garde composer John Cage's As Slow As Possible is being played automatically on a specially-built organ in the church. The performance started in 2001, with a nearly-18-month pause, and, if it manages to reach its conclusion without stopping, will conclude in 2640. The next chord change is due on 5^th February 2022. Cage is probably best known for 4'33", in which the performers sit still and unplaying for the titular time, the 'music' being the background sounds of the venue.


• Taunton resident Matthew Robson, 28, is raising money to buy his first home by selling his collection of whisky. For every birthday, his father has given him an 18-year-old bottle of Macallan single malt with strict instructions not to open them. His father bought the first bottle, a 1974, to "wet the baby's head" and "thought it would be interesting if I bought one every year and he'd end up with 18 bottles of 18-year-old whisky for his 18^th birthday." The collection cost his father about £5,000 ($6,523), but according to whisky broker Mark Littler "the value of Macallan has risen massively over the last five to ten years" and with buyers showing interest as far afield as New York and Asia it should make more than £40,000 ($52,181) at auction, enough for a decent deposit on a house.


• The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) instructed 54-year-old Alison Birch, owner of AJ's hair salon in Gloucestershire to reword a recruitment advert she posted on the JobCentre Plus website because she "put a discriminatory word in it". The advert said that AJ's was "a happy salon looking for happy people" and a government official took exception to the request for "happy people" as discriminating against people who are not happy. Birch complained, arguing that "surely by asking for happy applicants I won't make unhappy people even more unhappy by not offering them a job" and the DWP later issued an apology and offered to repost the original ad.


• Artist, musician and TV presenter Neil Buchanan has had to officially deny being Banksy, the mysterious street artist whose identity has remained a mystery for years, after a rumour began circulating online linking the locations of Banksy's artworks with places Buchanan's former band Marseille had played gigs. Buchanan presented the children's show Art Attack on ITV for 17 years from 1990 and created large-scale artworks using different materials, including sacks of vegetables and a lawnmower. A statement on his website read that it had been inundated with enquiries but "we can confirm that there is no truth in the rumour whatsoever."

IN BRIEF: Austrian Josef Koebert broke his own record by standing in a box full of ice for over 270 minutes. ● The Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine has reprinted cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed to mark the end of the trial of terrorists who carried out a gun attack on their offices after they first republished them (the cartoons originated in a Danish magazine). ● A magnitude 3.3 earthquake has struck the area around Leighton Buzzard in Buckinghamshire; no reports of injuries. ● The Moon's poles are covered with a fine layer of rust, despite there being no free oxygen; it is thought to be hematite created by iron reacting with oxygen carried from the Earth by plasma from the planet's magnetic tail. ● A burial casket reported floating in a Maryland river turned out to be a concrete slab that had been part of a floating dock. ● A new survey of the world's deepest freshwater cave, the Hranice Abyss in the Czech Republic, has found it to be more than twice as deep as previously thought, at around 3,280' (1km). ● Engineers have adapted a classic Game Boy 8-bit handheld console to be powered by solar panels and electromagnetic coils activated by button presses. ● Artist Caroline Barnes has been recreating famous paintings in toast and toppings. ● Mountain runner Donnie Campbell has broken the record for the fastest solo round of Scotland's 282 highest mountains, known as the Munros, by more than a week, running up each mountain then running, cycling, walking or kayaking to the next; he completed the round in 31 days and 23 hours. ● With more than 2 million acres of California burned by wildfires so far this year, Cal Fire has revealed that one of the blazes, dubbed the El Dorado, was started by a pyrotechnic device used as part of a baby's gender reveal party.

CORONAVIRUS ROUND-UP: India has overtaken Brazil to become the country with the second-largest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, with 4,204,613 at the time of reporting; only the United States has more, with over 6 million. ● American business executive Herman Cain died of COVID-19 on July 30, but recently tweeted to attack Joe Biden and support Donald Trump, the man who, albeit indirectly, was responsible for his death. [We suspect it was someone who knew his Twitter password rather than the spirit of Cain himself... -Ed.] ● The Pope has declared that gossiping in Catholic Church communities is a "plague worse than COVID".

^ TRUMPWATCH

Trump faced widespread condemnation after The Atlantic published an article citing four sources with additional verification of some elements from the Associated Press and Fox News reporting that his refusal to visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetary near Paris while in France for events to mark the centenary of the end of World War I in 2018 was not, as claimed at the time by some people close to him, that it was raining and he did not want his hair dishevelled. Instead, according to The Atlantic's sources, he told senior staff members that morning "Why should I go to that cemetary? It's filled with losers." In another conversation while in France it is reported that he referred to the 1,800 US marines killed at Belleau Wood as "suckers" and questioned why the US intervened to help the Allies, asking "Who were the good guys in this war?" The battle at Belleau Wood is significant in Marine Corps history; two divisions of American troops including a brigade of Marines, plus elements of the British and French armies halted the German advance on Paris there in early 1918. General Pershing, commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, gave the now-famous quotation that "the deadliest weapon in the world is a United States Marine and his rifle" in reference to the battle. Condemnation of Trump came from across the political spectrum but was best summed up by Democrat Senator Tammy Duckworth, a veteran who lost both legs when her helicopter was shot down during the Iraq War - "He doesn't understand people's bravery and courage because he's never had any of his own."
    Trump has form on disrepecting military heroes. He is on record disparaging US soldiers in the Vietnam War for fighting "when there was no money it it for them" (Trump avoided the draft on educational grounds and because of the infamous "bone spurs" on his feet), questioning why flags should be lowered to half mast out of respect for the late Senator John McCain after his death, and denied having called McCain a "loser" for having been captured; there was video evidence of him doing just that, as there is of him disparaging gold star families (those who have lost a family member in military service) many of which joined the condemnation after The Atlantic article was publshed. Retired general Paul Eaton, who commanded US troops in Iraq and whose father was shot down in the Vietnam War, commented "I'm going to keep this short for your famous short attention span. You have shown disrespect to the military on countless occasions. I am stunned that anybody in the United States military would consider you anything but a loser or a sucker. You're no patriot." A Lincoln Project campaign ad called Trump "simply un-American". Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger III, the military veteran and civilian pilot who landed US Airways flight 1459 on New York's Hudson River in 2009, saving the lives of all aboard following bird strikes shortly after take-off tweeted that "I am a veteran. I volunteered for military service during wartime. So did my father. His generation saved us from fascism. [..] for the first time in American history a president has repeatedly shown utter and vulgar contempt and disrespect for those who have served and died serving our country. [..] We owe it not only to those who have served and sacrificed for our nation, but to ourselves and to succeeding generations to vote him out." A number of veterans' groups also spoke out against Trump in light of the article.
    Trump, of course, denied the report, falling back on the tired "fake news" argument, and telling the press that his way of dealing with vets is "much more successful" than John McCain's, "with Choice and Accountability and all the things I've got." The Veterans' Access to Care Through Choice, Accountability, and Transparancy Act of 2014 was negotiated primarily by John McCain and Bernie Sanders. Trump signed a bill extending it in 2017, but has repeatedly claimed that his administration was the first to pass it. Fox News reacted to The Atlantic's article by attacking it, then confirming it, then attacking it again before finally confirming it for the second time. After national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin confirmed key points of the article and added that she had been told Trump had once said it was "not a good look" to include wounded veterans in a proposed Fourth of July military parade as "Americans don't like that", the Whiner-in-Chief promptly gave a sensible, reasoned response called her a "slimeball" and demanded that Fox News fire her, to which she responded, when interviewed on Fox News "I can tell you that my sources are unimpeachable". Unlike Trump...
    So, what was Trump doing while he was supposed to be paying respects to the war dead at Aisne-Marne? For once, not golfing. He was, it has been reported, choosing works of art in the US ambassador's Paris mansion to take back to America to display in the White House, selecting a portrait and bust of Benjamin Franklin and figurines of Greek gods, valued in total at $750,000 (£580,000). The figurines are now sitting on the Oval Office mantelpiece while the Franklin portrait and bust were later identified as copies of the originals and presumably shipped back. Ambassador Jamie McCourt was said to have been "startled" at Trump's behaviour, while Trump dismissed his concerns, saying that the mansion would get them back in six years.

On Trump's visit to Kenosha, Wisconsin, last week he posed for a photo-op designed to boost support for his paramilitary-style crackdowns on mostly-peaceful protesters, posing in front of a burned-out camera shop with its owner, John Rode III. It has since emerged that Rode is not the current owner, but the previous one. Current owners Tom Gram and Paul Willette later told local press that they had refused to participate in what they perceived as being a political stunt. Gram commented "I think everything he does turns into a circus and I just didn't want to be involved in it." ● At the much-publiced roundtable discussion with local officials in Kenosha Trump suggested that participants take off the their facemasks, and repeatedly interrupted Black participants when reporters asked them questions. ● FlunkyAttorney General William Barr has told CNN that police repeatedly treating Black people differently from white people is not necessarily systemic racism, despite being the very definition of systemic racism. ● Trump has called federally-funded training of federal staff to identify white privelege and critical race theory "un-American propaganda". ● Trump has also threatened to pull funding from schools that incorporate the New York Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project into their curricula. The project reframes American history to include the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans. ● The Really American PAC has aired an ad identifying Trump as the "stoker in chief" of racist violence across America. ● For all his attempts to appear strong and the law and order candidate in the election a Harvard CAPS-Harris poll has found Joe Biden beating Trump on race, policing and law and order. ● More than 175 law enforcement officials including politicians, sheriffs and police officers have officially endorsed Joe Biden as having a better law and order policy. ● Trump's attempts to appear strong on law and order are no doubt a result of his inability to fight an election campaign on the economy. When he came to office he said "You will see a drop [in the trade defecit] like you've never seen before." With the economy tanking as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and his trade wars the trade defecit surged to $63.6bn (£49.18bn) in July, the highest it has been in 12 years, and 18.9% higher than in June.

Trump mocked Joe Biden for not socially distancing by shaking hands with someone (both were masked), before Trump gave a campaign speech in a partially open aircraft hanger to a mostly-unmasked crowd. George Washington University professor of medicine and surgery Jonathan Reiner commented that Trump cares more about his personal image than the health of others - "He didn't like the way he looked [in a mask] and thought it made him look weak. This is what happens when the president's narcissism collided with the needs of the country. Narcissism won." ● After the Democrats attacked Trump for his imaginary timeline of having a COVID-19 vaccine deployable two days before the election (even to the point of having the Department of Health order states to be prepared to "implement large-scale distribution of COVID-19 vaccines in the fall of 2020") Trump accused Joe Biden and Kamala Harris of being unscientific. As has been shown many times over the last few years, Trump projects his own flaws onto his opponents. It was his abject failure to listen to scientists that led to America suffering an otherwise largely avoidable crisis as a result of COVID-19.

After a federal appeals court ruled that Trump would not have to hand over his tax records to Manhattan prosecutors while an appeal against the earlier ruling that he should was ongoing, Joe Biden tweeted "I've released 21 years of my tax returns. What are you hiding, @RealDonaldTrump?" ● The US Department of Justice is seeking to take over the defence for Trump in a defamation case brought by a woman who accuses him of sexually assaulting her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. They claim that they have the legal right to take over the defence and elevate the case from a state to a federal court because Trump was President when he denied the allegations. Moving to a federal court will effectively kill the case because the government cannot be sued for defamation.

The Trump campaign is running print ads with a picture of Joe Biden photoshopped to make him look older, while Trump has repeatedly, and deliberately, mispronounced Kamala Harris' name and said that it "would be an insult to our country" for her to one day be the first woman president, reinforcing his image as a mysogenist racist. ● Possibly the best (imagined) headline of Trump's presidency came after supporters in Texas attempted to stage a flotilla parade of support with hundreds of small boats on Lake Travis. The resulting water turbulence was more than the boats could handle resulting in 15 distress calls being received by the Sheriff's office, five boats sinking completely, three towed to safety while partly submerged and at least one man rescued hanging on to a dinghy. As George Takei put it, "Trump Supporters Forced to Abandon Sinking Ships".
    Trump has repeated his suggestion that Americans should vote by mail then (illegally) again in person, this time in Pennsylvania. Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania's attorney general promptly tweeted that "Our election laws are clear: One person, one vote." US FlunkyAttorney General William Barr, interviewed on CNN, repeatedly dodged the question of whether voting twice was legal before feigning ignorance of basic voting law. In response, Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) mailed Barr a single-page letter reading "Federal law prohibits voting twice in the same election. 52 USC § 10307". An old video interview of Trump has resurfaced, as they seem to do, from back in May, where he said "The level of dishonesty with Democrat voting is unbelievable. If you told a Republican to vote twice, they'd get sick at even the thought of it"... ● After Postmaster General Louis DeJoy backed down on changes to the postal service that would have detrimentally affected postal voting Trump showed his true colours regarding staff who he sees as failing him. Asked by a reporter if he would support an investigation into potential campaign finance law violations by DeJoy while CEO of a logistics company in North Carolina (allegedly pressing employees to donate to the Republican Party then reimbursing them through bonuses to their wages), Trump shrugged "Sure".

At the end of August Ivanka Trump tweeted a video of her husband and [unqualified] Trump adviser Jared Kushner "on the 1st commercial flight ever between Israel and the United Arab Emirates!" As most of the replies pointed out, neither Kushner nor anybody else shown in the video was wearing a facemask, which is a requirement on most airlines. ● Eric Trump's status as dumbest spawn of Trump seems to be unchallenged; he again confused the stock market with the economy and after image searching for the word 'mob' on Google returned pictures of a character called Mob from the Japanese anime Mob Psycho 100 he accused Google of running a conspiracy to manipulate Americans because other search engines did not. [Search engines run their own algorithms; Google's accounts for 'freshness' - it's probable that as the most-used search engine it has had a lot of searches for Mob Psycho 10 from anime fans.] As @eugenege mused in reply, "To be honest, Google may be manipulating search results because it is indeed weird that Mob Psycho 100 shows up in Google Images rather than the Trump crime family." Eric also took aim at Joe Biden, for tweeting a picture of himself meeting labour leaders on Labor Day, all wearing masks and seated outside socially distanced as "Everything this guy does is dumb energy and ridiculous." The Twitterati quickly pointed out that Biden was "a real leader talking to real Americans about real problems workers face" (@rtmuss) and that "following science may be boring but he hasn't killed 190,000 Americans and counting..." (@TimFaulkner81).

Asked by an ABC affiliate station how he responded to the Trump campaign's suggestion that he had lost a step Joe Biden turned it into a comparison between how he and Trump manage walking down gently-inclined ramps - "Look at how [Trump] steps and look at how I step. Watch how I run up ramps and how he stumbles down ramps, okay?" ● Francis Brennan, director of strategic response for Trump's election campaign tweeted a video of reporters calling for Biden to talk to them after leaving church with the comment "REPORTER: Mr Vice President come talk to us. Joe Biden just keeps meandering along." Biden had stepped out of St Joseph on the Brandywine church in Wilmington, Delaware, waved at reporters and walked through the cemetary to pay his respects at the graves of his first wife and his daughter who both died in a car crash in 1972 and of his son Beau, a veteran of the Iraq War who died of cancer in 2015. The Twitterati were, quite rightly, outraged, but no apology was forthcoming, nor was the original tweet deleted. Where was Trump while Biden was in church and visiting the graves of family members? Was he in church himself, perhaps with some of the evangelicals who continue to support him despite his behaviour? No. Trump was on a golf course...

The announcement by NATO and Germany that there is "proof beyond doubt" that Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny, currently in a German hospital after being airlifted from Siberia, was poisoned with a Novichock nerve agent, the same as was used in a poisoning attack on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England, (both survived but a local woman who came into contact with the perfume bottle used to spray it onto the Skripal's door handle died), condemnation came from around the world, except for two notable exceptions: Russia, which said that if such a nerve agent had been used it did not necessarily originate in Russia, and that Germany should disclose all the evidence, and America, where Trump parroted the Kremlin line and said that Beijing was a bigger threat to the world.

Trump is attempting to green-wash his reputation, telling a rally in Florida "Who would have thought, Trump is the great environmentalist? I am, I am. I believe strongly in it." Since taking office he has pulled America out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, cut regulations protecting 60% of America's waterways from industrial pollution and toxins, cut air pollution regulations, approved a pesticide proven to cause brain damage in children, cut Obama-era fuel efficiency standards, replaced Obama's Clean Power Plan with a set of regulations that will drastically increase carbon emissions, encouraged an increase in coal mining, dismissed wind power and claimed that bans on plastic drinking straws were impractical because a paper straw "disintegrates as you drink" dribbling liquid onto your tie.

One of the more sadly amusing revelations from former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen's book is that Trump hired an Obama look-a-like to appear in a video where Trump was interviewing him The Apprentice-style and "ritualistically belittled the first Black president and then fired him." While the White House naturally denied the claim and denounced Cohen, the book does contain a still from the video. ● After Mary Trump wrote that her uncle had paid someone to sit his SAT exams to get into the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), and released a recording of Trump's sister, retired federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry, confirming the story and saying she knew the name of the person, UPenn Professor Eric Orts is relaunching calls originally made, along with six other professors, in June that an official enquiry should be opened into Trump's allegedly fraudulent admission to the school.

After Trump threatened to defund New York City because of "lawless" protests governor Andrew Cuomo fired back "Forget bodyguards, [Trump] better have an army if he thinks he's gonna walk down the street in New York." New York gives the federal government more money than it receives back. ● John Bolton has claimed that after British diplomatic cables in which Ambassador Kim Darroch criticised Trump as incompetent, inept and radiating insecurity leaked last year a furious Trump told Bolton to "get him out of here". Bolton told Mark Sedwill, then head of the British civil service, that "thing are going to get worse unless you can figure out how to get him out." Three days later Darroch resigned, returned to Britain and was elevated to the House of Lords. ● The Trump administration has imposed sanctions on senior officials in the International Criminal Court (ICC) because of "illegitimate attempts to subject Americans to its jurisdiction" according to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The ICC, created by a 2002 UN treaty which 123 countries - but not the US, China, India or Russia - have ratified is investigating alleged war crimes committed by American forces in Afghanistan. ● Trump has admitted that Mexico has not paid as much as a single peso towards his vanity border wall, but claimed that he could recoup the cost with toll booths. ● Trump has finally discovered emojis; the Twitterati are freaked out, especially at the thought that he might discover the eggplant [aubergine, for Brits] emoji...

^{^} OBITUARIES

Singer Bruce Williamson (The Temptations, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, 49), anthropologist and author David Graeber (Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Occupy Wall Street, 59), bassist Ian Mitchell (The Bay City Rollers, Rosetta Stone, 62), actor Rodney Litchfield (Coronation Street, Early Doors, Shameless, 81), film director Jiří Menzel (Closely Watched Trains, Larks on a String, The Interpreter, 82), screenwriter and playwright Sir Ronald Harwood (The Pianist, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, The Dresser, 85), composer William Pursell ("Our Winter Love", 94).

^{^} DUMBLEDORE BEAR'S LOTTERY PREDICTOR!

Dumbledore Bear, our in-house psychic predicts that the following numbers will be lucky:

4, 10, 20, 38, 41, 47

[UK National Lottery, number range 1-59]
You can get your very own prediction at http://www.simonlamont.co.uk/tfir/dumbledore.htm.

^{^} AND FINALLY...

    Little Jennifer's class were having a lesson about food. "Alright, class, can you tell me five things that contain eggs?"
    Little Simon put his hand up. "Quiche, Miss! I watched my Mum make one last week."
    "Very good, Little Simon. Now, what else?"
    Little Mary put her hand up. "Omelette, Miss! We had omelettes last night!"
    "Very good, Little Mary. Anybody else?"
    Little Emily put her hand up. "Cake, Miss! I helped Mummy make a birthday cake for Daddy!"
    "Quite right, Little Emily. OK, that leaves two to go."
    Little Jennifer put her hand up. "My Granny's chickens, Miss! She's got two!"

---

^{^} ...end of line