Usually summer is slow in terms of news. This year? Insanity. Today the Greek Prime Minister resigned and called a snap election for September 20. It seems he wants to strengthen his hold on power after only seven months in office during which time he fought Greece’s creditors for a better bailout deal but had to cave in. Seriously. Who would want to be the prime minister of Greece? It has to be a thankless job and with all sides unhappy.
The Duffy trial in Ottawa is a serious bore, with minute, mind-numbing details. Given that, it is definitely hampering Harper’s campaign. It’s pretty obvious that people close to the PM lied through their teeth and lawyers are doing serious contortions to try to prove this. One wonders why Harper called the election when he knew very well that this trial would fall out during his tours of Canadian cities. We are guessing that he’s hoping it will blow over in a couple of weeks and the whole thing will be just a bad dream.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign continues to be dogged by that nasty email server business. Now she claims that in fact, emails on the private server she used when she was secretary of state contained material were classified – with a but. She said that the material had been retroactively classified out of an abundance of caution by U.S. intelligence agencies. Now that’s special.
Today, a federal judge has added fresh fuel to the controversy asserting during a hearing Thursday that she violated government policy by storing official messages on a private server when she worked as secretary of state. It will be very interesting to see if the Clintons can get themselves out of this fiasco.
Has anyone seen a picture of Donald Trump’s third wife Melania? The answer is not yet but when they do – vavavavoom. She’s 45 years old and an ex model, 12 years older than his daughter Ivanka. She was born in Slovenia and became a US citizen in 2006. It’s pretty obvious he’s holding her in abeyance until just the right time for her to pop out of a cake singing happy birthday Mr. President, or something like that. Badabing badaboom.
We really don’t like writing anything about Jenner as we don’t like giving him/her any publicity. However when we read that he/she may be up for manslaughter charges due to a car accident last January, before the dresses, high heels and reality show, well, it’s not exactly promoting him/her. Someone died in that accident and it seems it was caused by Jenner going at an unsafe speed for the prevailing conditions. Of course the question is if convicted where do they send him/her? To a male or female prison? Let’s bet they drop the charges so no one has to deal with this issue.
A second, even bigger, ‘cheat sheet’ exposing the users of the website Ashley Madison has been released. Hacking group ‘the Impact team’ at lunchtime on Thursday released another mine of documents and confidential information to back up their first huge leak.
This whole business is getting much more interesting as the names are being released. They included at least two assistant U.S. attorneys; an information technology administrator in the Executive Office of the President; a division chief, an investigator and a trial attorney in the Justice Department; a government hacker at the Homeland Security Department and another DHS employee who indicated he worked on a counter-terrorism response team.
US Defense Secretary Ash Carter confirmed the Pentagon was looking into the list of people who used military email addresses as adultery can be a criminal offense under the Code of Military Justice. Now we ask you, how stupid can people be? Would someone really use a military address and think it was secure? We hope not because it is those people who are seemingly protecting the United States.
Good Shabbos, We’ll talk…
PS… A shout-out to Rabbi David Eliezrie who took Blanche on a ‘nature walk’ last Shabbos while we were in Washington. The nature part of the walk was about 5 minutes through some kind of over-grown vegetation. We climbed over fallen trees and had to balance on a path so as not to fall into what looked like a polluted stream. All of this on a steamy, humid hot day in the nations capital. Let’s just say we’d rather do a mall-walk in an air-conditioned building. We’ll leave ‘nature’ to tree-huggers.
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