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Gathering the mushrooms 🍄 #folk show on @harrogateradio tonight at 8pm. Everything from #Bellowhead to #BellaHardy. Give it a listen, you might find your new favourite....
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Hello folky folk. Not sure if it's of interest but I host a weekly folk music show on internet radio. Wednesdays, 7pm (UK) and available to listen again. It's called Gathering the Mushrooms,and it features everything from #acidfolkadelia, #darkfolk #tradfolk #nu folk.
www.harrogatecommunityradio.onlineI'm always looking for musical inspiration. 🍄🌛 But due to technical issues, I'm kind of stuck with Spotify.
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@meer_salt did you read the book? #TheWonder? Very good, but I enjoyed the film very much.
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Why, yes, Mrs. Castorini, I would love some oatmeal.
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Lazy Caturday Reads: Scandals Galore!
Good Afternoon!!
By Mary Cassatt, 1883-84
The negotiations about the proposed cease fire in the Iran war are expected to begin soon, but meanwhile the news in the U.S. is suddenly filled with scandalous stories.
Yesterday, Dakinikat wrote about Melania Trump’s mysterious announcement to the White House press; I have a bit more context to add to that. Then last night the news about serious accusations of sexual misconduct by Eric Swalwell broke. There’s also news about Kristy Noem’s husband and his identity crisis.
I’ll get to those items, but I want to begin with a feel-good story for once.
Marcia Dunn at AP: Artemis II’s record-breaking journey around the moon ends with dramatic splashdown.
HOUSTON (AP) — Artemis II’s astronauts closed out humanity’s first lunar voyage in more than half a century with a Pacific splashdown on Friday, blazing new records near the moon with grace and joy.
It was a dramatic grand finale to a mission that revealed not only swaths of the lunar far side never seen before by human eyes, but a total solar eclipse and a parade of planets, most notably our own shimmering Earth against the endless black void of space.
With their flight now complete, the four astronauts have set NASA up for a moon landing by another crew in just two years and a full-blown moon base within the decade.
The triumphant moon-farers — commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canada’s Jeremy Hansen — emerged from their bobbing capsule into the sunlight off the coast of San Diego.
In a scene reminiscent of NASA’s Apollo moonshots of yesteryear, military helicopters hoisted the astronauts one by one from an inflatable raft docked to the capsule, hauling them aboard for the short trip to the Navy’s awaiting recovery ship, the USS John P. Murtha.
“These were the ambassadors from humanity to the stars that we sent out there right now, and I can’t imagine a better crew,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said from the recovery ship.
NASA’s Mission Control erupted in celebration, with hundreds pouring in from the back support rooms. “We did it,” NASA’s Lori Glaze rejoiced at a news conference. “Welcome to our moonshot.”
Read more at the AP link.
Now for the feel-disgusted news about Eric Swalwell. Based on what I’ve read, it’s surprising that this didn’t come out sooner. Apparently, he’s been DM young women, sending dick picks, and sexually assaulting women for years.
A former staffer of Rep. Eric Swalwell, a leading Democratic candidate for California governor, says that the congressman raped her when she was heavily intoxicated and left her bruised and bleeding, an allegation Swalwell strongly denies.
“I was pushing him off of me, saying no,” the woman told CNN of the incident, which she said happened in 2024 after she had stopped working in Swalwell’s office. “He didn’t stop.”
By Francesca Strino
She said it was the second time Swalwell had nonconsensual sexual contact with her while she was drunk. In 2019, when she was still working for him, she said she woke up naked with him in a hotel room after a night of heavy drinking. She said she had no memory of what happened but could feel physically that they’d had sexual contact.
Three other women who spoke with CNN also alleged various kinds of sexual misconduct by the Democratic congressman – including Swalwell sending them unsolicited explicit messages or nude photos.
One woman who connected online with Swalwell over her interest in Democratic politics says she ended up extremely drunk inside his hotel room after a night out with the congressman, with little memory of what occurred. Earlier in the night at a bar, he kissed her and touched her leg without her consent, she said.
Another woman, who described receiving unsolicited nude messages from Swalwell, was social media creator Ally Sammarco. She said she initially reached out to the congressman on Twitter to discuss politics. “I truly never thought he would respond – I had like 1,000 followers at the time,” she said. “And he actually responded.”
Swalwell denied the women’s allegations.
“These allegations are false and come on the eve of an election against the front-runner for governor,” Swalwell said in a statement to CNN. “For nearly 20 years, I have served the public – as a prosecutor and a congressman and have always protected women. I will defend myself with the facts and where necessary bring legal action. My focus in the coming days is to be with my wife and children and defend our decades of service against these lies.”
I don’t think that’s going to work. These are not subtle accusations, and the women told others about their experiences at the time. Sammarco saved the messages she got from Swallwell. A bit more from CNN:
One member of Swalwell’s staff said they quit immediately after receiving CNN’s detailed list of questions about the allegations.
CNN found corroboration for key elements of each of the women’s claims, including the former staffer who said she was sexually assaulted. Two family members and a friend said in interviews with CNN that she told them about the alleged 2024 assault in the following days, and CNN also reviewed text messages she sent two friends describing her allegations at the same time. “I was sexually assaulted on Thursday,” she wrote to one of her friends, adding: “By Eric.”
The woman also shared medical records related to her receiving STD and pregnancy testing after the alleged assault.
For the woman who connected online with Swalwell over Democratic politics, a family member and two friends confirmed she told them last year about the incident where she ended up intoxicated in his hotel room. CNN also reviewed messages between her and Swalwell, including a photo he sent her that matches footage of him during a CNN interview in her city on the night they met in person.
There’s still more at the link.
Politico: Jeffries, Pelosi and other Democrats call on Eric Swalwell to end governor campaign.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi headlined a growing list of Democratic lawmakers called on Rep. Eric Swalwell Friday to withdraw his campaign for California governor amid allegations of sexual misconduct.
Lily Walton with Raminou, 1922, by Suzanne Valadon
“This extremely sensitive matter must be appropriately investigated with full transparency and accountability,” Pelosi said in a statement. “As I discussed with Congressman Swalwell, it is clear that is best done outside of a gubernatorial campaign.”
In a joint statement with other elected House Democratic leaders, Jeffries called for a “swift investigation” as well as the end of his pending campaign.
“This is unacceptable of anyone — certainly not an elected official — and must be taken seriously,” the leaders said.The San Francisco Chronicle reported Friday that a former congressional aide accused the congressman of two sexual encounters without her consent, beginning in 2019. CNN later reported that four women allege that Swalwell has committed sexual misconduct, including one former staffer who accuses Swalwell of rape….
Key backers of Swalwell’s governor bid swiftly revoked their support after the Chronicle’s story was published, including Reps. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.) and Adam Gray (D-Calif.), who served as campaign co-chairs.
“Today’s reports about Eric Swalwell’s conduct while in office are deeply disturbing,” Gray said in a statement. “Harassment, abuse, and violence of any sort are unacceptable. Given these serious allegations, I am withdrawing my support and Eric Swalwell should end his campaign immediately.”
But nothing underscored the peril for Swalwell’s nearly two-decade political career as vividly as Pelosi’s statement. The former speaker included Swalwell in her inner circle of favored Democratic members for years, tapping him for junior leadership roles and to serve as a manager in Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial in 2021.
Read the rest at the link.
The Melania Trump story might have stayed on social media if she hadn’t decided to make a public statement at the lectern that is supposed to be reserved for the POTUS. But it’s out there now, and she will have to deal with it.
It began with a disturbing story in The New York Times on March 20: Trump Friend Asked ICE to Detain the Mother of His Child.
Last June, the man credited with introducing President Trump to his wife asked the administration for a favor.
Paolo Zampolli, a former modeling agent turned presidential special envoy, had learned that his Brazilian ex-girlfriend was in a Miami jail, arrested on charges of fraud at her workplace. They had been in a custody battle over their teenage son. Now he saw an opportunity.
Eduard Manet, Woman with a Cat, 1880
He reached out to a top official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, explaining that his ex was in the country illegally, according to records obtained by The New York Times and a person familiar with the communications. Could she be put in ICE detention? That could help him get his son back.
The official, David Venturella, promptly called the agency’s Miami office to ensure that ICE agents would pick up the woman from the jail before she was released on bail, according to the records and a person with knowledge of the conversation who requested anonymity to discuss it. During the call, Mr. Venturella noted that the case was important to someone close to the White House.
The woman, Amanda Ungaro, was placed in ICE custody and ultimately deported, an outcome that may well have happened regardless of Mr. Zampolli’s meddling. But the ICE official’s willingness to spring into action for a Trump ally — even one in a low-level, largely ceremonial role — reflects a recurring theme of the second Trump administration: The levers of the federal government can be pulled to settle a personal score.
I read this story when it was published, but I didn’t make the connections I should have.
Amanda Ungaro is on X AKA Twitter, and she is fighting back. If you have access, you can read the many tweets she has been sending to Melania.
Melania is apparently sensitive about how she came to the U.S. In fact Zampolli is the one who brought her here and got her an H1-B visa. When she first arrived, she moved into a building occupied by other models who worked for Zampolli’s agency. It looks like Melania has really stepped in it. The Epstein files are back in the news.
From Julie K. Brown, the journalist who originally wrote about Epstein in The Miami Herald, at her Substack The Epstein Files: Could a former Brazilian model be the whistleblower Melania Trump is afraid of?
The First Lady’s unprecedented public statement about Jeffrey Epstein yesterday raised a lot of questions about what, if anything, is about to be revealed about Donald and Melania Trump’s relationship with the late sex trafficker.
The Epstein case had quieted down in the wake of Trump’s decision to attack Iran — some critics allege that was one of Trump’s goals in launching a war in the first place — to cool the MAGA furor over DOJ’s inept release of the Epstein files.
Now it seems that plan, if true, has led to a Jack-In-The-Beanstalk effect — as in trading a cow for beans and climbing into danger without really thinking it through.
Because there is another story that I admit I missed when it ran in the New York Times a few weeks ago.
It appears that the Trump administration may have targeted Zampolli’s ex-girlfriend, a former Brazilian model named Amanda Ungaro, deporting her back to Brazil amid her custody battle with Zampolli over their teenage son.
As the NYT’s story notes: “The levers of the federal government can be pulled to settle a personal score.”
Self-Portrait with a Cat, created by Frida Konstantin
In this case, the score involved Paolo Zampolli, a former modeling agent who was appointed last year by Trump as special envoy for “global partnerships,” which allows him to travel the world to advance trade and other partnerships with the U.S.
Just days ago, he was in Hungary with Vice President Vance, supporting the re-election of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, an effort to publicly back the right-wing leader in the days running up to the election.
Zampolli, 56, was in Epstein’s orbit around the time that Trump met Melania in 1998. He was also friends with Epstein, as the two entertained a business deal over buying a modeling agency.
And Zampolli’s name is in the Epstein Files, with Epstein noting in one email that he was “trouble.”
Still all the drama surrounding Zampolli’s custody battle with his estranged girlfriend didn’t connect any dots, at least not for me, until the First Lady’s speech yesterday.
Read the rest at the link.
The New York Times has another piece about Melania’s statement today: Trump Says First Lady ‘Had a Right’ to Talk About Epstein.
President Trump said Friday that he had known his wife wanted to speak about Jeffrey Epstein at some point, and that he “thought she had a right to talk about it,” even if he had not known what exactly she planned to say.
“It doesn’t bother me,” Mr. Trump said in a brief telephone interview, referring to the remarks Melania Trump made from the entrance hall of the White House a day earlier.
“I didn’t know what the statement was,” he said, “but I knew she was going to make a statement.”
The first lady’s comments certainly came as a surprise to many other people who work in the White House, according to two officials familiar with the situation who asked for anonymity to discuss the matter. It was not clear why she had chosen that moment to talk about Mr. Epstein. Absent any explanation, questions and feverish conspiracy theories swirled.
The president said his wife had been agonizing for a long time over her press coverage and rumors connecting her to Mr. Epstein. What was particularly upsetting to her, Mr. Trump explained, was one theory positing that it was Mr. Epstein who introduced her to her future husband. In her remarks on Thursday, Mrs. Trump recounted the story of meeting Mr. Trump “by chance at a New York City party in 1998.” She said she did not encounter Mr. Epstein for the first time until two years after that.
“She finds it very insulting,” Mr. Trump said of the rumors. “And I said, ‘If you want to do that, you can do that.’ I said if she wants to do it — I didn’t recommend it, but I said, I let it be her, I said, if you want to do it. …”
He added, “She didn’t meet me through Jeffrey Epstein. And I could understand her feelings. But I said, ‘If you want to do it, do it.’”
He would not say when exactly he had this discussion with the first lady, but said that “it wasn’t a big discussion. I’d say it lasted for about two minutes. I had no problem. I thought she actually did a good job.”
He’s lying, obviously. I doubt if she told him. Now she has revived interest in the Epstein files and Trump can’t be happy about that.
The Black Cat, by Carl Wilhelm Wilhelmson , 1922, Swedish, 1866-1928
The last scandal for today–the Kristi Noem story. The story was originally in the Daily Mail, but it’s behind a paywall.
The Independent: Kristi Noem’s husband offers cryptic three-word answer to report that he talked about leaving wife and becoming a woman.
Kristi Noem’s husband, Bryon Noem, has pushed back on a report that he insulted his wife in phone calls and online messages with a dominatrix and expressed a desire to become a woman.
Bryon Noem told The Independent the claims in the report were “not all true.” He did not elaborate when asked for more information.
The 56-year-old was reported to have been in an on-off relationship online with Shy Sotomayor, a 30-year-old sex worker known as Raelynn Riley, since 2016, she claimed in an interview with the Daily Mail, published Friday.
It is the latest in a series of exposés on the husband of the recently ousted Homeland Security Secretary, who has been keeping a low profile since the story broke last week.
Sotomayor shared recordings of phone calls and screenshots of messages she said she exchanged with Bryon Noem, where he said she was “so much better” than his wife. He also expressed wanting to transition to become a woman, the messages showed.
In one recent message, the South Dakota insurance boss said he wanted to change his name to Crystal “so bad,” and that he wanted plastic surgery. “I want to be your trans bimbo b****,” the messages showed.
The outlet linked Bryon Noem’s telephone number to the messages with Sotomayor, and it also corresponded to an email address under the pseudonym “Chrystalballz666.”
The messages reportedly from Bryon Noem appear in stark contrast to Kristi Noem’s opposition to transgender rights. As South Dakota governor, she signed an exclusionary bill to ban surgical and non-surgical gender-affirming treatments for children in the state, and barred transgender girls and women from playing on women’s sports teams.
Read the rest at The Independent.
There’s no news on the Iran talks yet, so I’ll end this with two disturbing Iran stories:
The New York Times: Iran Unable to Find Mines It Planted in Strait of Hormuz, U.S. Says.
Iran has been unable to open the Strait of Hormuz to more shipping traffic because it cannot locate all of the mines it laid in the waterway and lacks the capability to remove them, according to U.S. officials.
The development is one reason Iran has not been able to quickly comply with the Trump administration’s admonitions to let more traffic pass through the strait. It is also potentially a complicating factor as Iranian negotiators and a U.S. delegation led by Vice President JD Vance meet in Pakistan this weekend for peace talks.
Woman with a cat, Pierre Bonnard
Iran used small boats to mine the strait last month, soon after the United States and Israel began their war against the country. The mines, plus the threat of Iranian drone and missile attacks, slowed the number of oil tankers and other vessels passing through the strait to a trickle, driving up energy prices and providing Iran with its best leverage in the war.
Iran left a path through the strait open, allowing ships that pay a toll to pass through.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has issued warnings that ships could collide with sea mines, and semiofficial news organizations have published charts showing safe routes.
Those routes are limited in large part because Iran mined the strait haphazardly, U.S. officials said. It is not clear that Iran recorded where it put every mine. And even when the location was recorded, some mines were placed in a way that allowed them to drift or move, according to the officials.
As with land mines, removing nautical mines is far more difficult than placing them. The U.S. military lacks robust mine removal capabilities, relying on littoral combat ships equipped with mine sweeping capabilities. Iran also does not have the capability of quickly removing mines, even the ones it planted.
Raw Story: Hegseth’s key Iran claim collapses as US intel finds Iran has thousands of missiles.
One of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s main defenses of the U.S. decision to negotiate a controversial ceasefire with Iran is that its ballistic missile program has been “functionally destroyed.”
But that claim has now been shot down by U.S. intelligence assessments, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
“Iran still has thousands of ballistic missiles in its arsenal that it could use by retrieving launchers from underground storage areas, according to American officials familiar with U.S. intelligence assessments,” said the report. “The assessments come as the U.S. is working to cement a cease-fire that would fully open the Strait of Hormuz and also insulate Iran, American troops and states in the region from further attacks. Some American officials said they are concerned that Iran will use the break in fighting to reconstitute some of its missile arsenal.”
The conflict has taken a toll on Iran, with around half of its missile stockpile lost, the assessment found — but “it retains thousands of medium- and short-range ballistic missiles that could be pulled out of hiding or retrieved from underground sites, said U.S. and Israeli officials.”
This comes as even a number of Republican and conservative analysts are crying foul about the terms of the ceasefire, which appear one-sidedly in favor of Iran.
That’s it for me today. I guess it’s okay to focus on salacious stuff on the weekend. Happy Caturday!
#AmandaUngaro #ArtemisII #BryonNoem #catArt #caturday #DonaldTrump #EpsteinFiles #EricSwalwell #IranWar #IranSBallisticMissles #JeffreyEpstein #KristiNoem #MelaniaTrump #mines #NASA #PaoloZampolli #politicalScandals #rape #sexualAssault #StraitOfHormuz -
Lazy Caturday Reads: Scandals Galore!
Good Afternoon!!
By Mary Cassatt, 1883-84
The negotiations about the proposed cease fire in the Iran war are expected to begin soon, but meanwhile the news in the U.S. is suddenly filled with scandalous stories.
Yesterday, Dakinikat wrote about Melania Trump’s mysterious announcement to the White House press; I have a bit more context to add to that. Then last night the news about serious accusations of sexual misconduct by Eric Swalwell broke. There’s also news about Kristy Noem’s husband and his identity crisis.
I’ll get to those items, but I want to begin with a feel-good story for once.
Marcia Dunn at AP: Artemis II’s record-breaking journey around the moon ends with dramatic splashdown.
HOUSTON (AP) — Artemis II’s astronauts closed out humanity’s first lunar voyage in more than half a century with a Pacific splashdown on Friday, blazing new records near the moon with grace and joy.
It was a dramatic grand finale to a mission that revealed not only swaths of the lunar far side never seen before by human eyes, but a total solar eclipse and a parade of planets, most notably our own shimmering Earth against the endless black void of space.
With their flight now complete, the four astronauts have set NASA up for a moon landing by another crew in just two years and a full-blown moon base within the decade.
The triumphant moon-farers — commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canada’s Jeremy Hansen — emerged from their bobbing capsule into the sunlight off the coast of San Diego.
In a scene reminiscent of NASA’s Apollo moonshots of yesteryear, military helicopters hoisted the astronauts one by one from an inflatable raft docked to the capsule, hauling them aboard for the short trip to the Navy’s awaiting recovery ship, the USS John P. Murtha.
“These were the ambassadors from humanity to the stars that we sent out there right now, and I can’t imagine a better crew,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said from the recovery ship.
NASA’s Mission Control erupted in celebration, with hundreds pouring in from the back support rooms. “We did it,” NASA’s Lori Glaze rejoiced at a news conference. “Welcome to our moonshot.”
Read more at the AP link.
Now for the feel-disgusted news about Eric Swalwell. Based on what I’ve read, it’s surprising that this didn’t come out sooner. Apparently, he’s been DM young women, sending dick picks, and sexually assaulting women for years.
A former staffer of Rep. Eric Swalwell, a leading Democratic candidate for California governor, says that the congressman raped her when she was heavily intoxicated and left her bruised and bleeding, an allegation Swalwell strongly denies.
“I was pushing him off of me, saying no,” the woman told CNN of the incident, which she said happened in 2024 after she had stopped working in Swalwell’s office. “He didn’t stop.”
By Francesca Strino
She said it was the second time Swalwell had nonconsensual sexual contact with her while she was drunk. In 2019, when she was still working for him, she said she woke up naked with him in a hotel room after a night of heavy drinking. She said she had no memory of what happened but could feel physically that they’d had sexual contact.
Three other women who spoke with CNN also alleged various kinds of sexual misconduct by the Democratic congressman – including Swalwell sending them unsolicited explicit messages or nude photos.
One woman who connected online with Swalwell over her interest in Democratic politics says she ended up extremely drunk inside his hotel room after a night out with the congressman, with little memory of what occurred. Earlier in the night at a bar, he kissed her and touched her leg without her consent, she said.
Another woman, who described receiving unsolicited nude messages from Swalwell, was social media creator Ally Sammarco. She said she initially reached out to the congressman on Twitter to discuss politics. “I truly never thought he would respond – I had like 1,000 followers at the time,” she said. “And he actually responded.”
Swalwell denied the women’s allegations.
“These allegations are false and come on the eve of an election against the front-runner for governor,” Swalwell said in a statement to CNN. “For nearly 20 years, I have served the public – as a prosecutor and a congressman and have always protected women. I will defend myself with the facts and where necessary bring legal action. My focus in the coming days is to be with my wife and children and defend our decades of service against these lies.”
I don’t think that’s going to work. These are not subtle accusations, and the women told others about their experiences at the time. Sammarco saved the messages she got from Swallwell. A bit more from CNN:
One member of Swalwell’s staff said they quit immediately after receiving CNN’s detailed list of questions about the allegations.
CNN found corroboration for key elements of each of the women’s claims, including the former staffer who said she was sexually assaulted. Two family members and a friend said in interviews with CNN that she told them about the alleged 2024 assault in the following days, and CNN also reviewed text messages she sent two friends describing her allegations at the same time. “I was sexually assaulted on Thursday,” she wrote to one of her friends, adding: “By Eric.”
The woman also shared medical records related to her receiving STD and pregnancy testing after the alleged assault.
For the woman who connected online with Swalwell over Democratic politics, a family member and two friends confirmed she told them last year about the incident where she ended up intoxicated in his hotel room. CNN also reviewed messages between her and Swalwell, including a photo he sent her that matches footage of him during a CNN interview in her city on the night they met in person.
There’s still more at the link.
Politico: Jeffries, Pelosi and other Democrats call on Eric Swalwell to end governor campaign.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi headlined a growing list of Democratic lawmakers called on Rep. Eric Swalwell Friday to withdraw his campaign for California governor amid allegations of sexual misconduct.
Lily Walton with Raminou, 1922, by Suzanne Valadon
“This extremely sensitive matter must be appropriately investigated with full transparency and accountability,” Pelosi said in a statement. “As I discussed with Congressman Swalwell, it is clear that is best done outside of a gubernatorial campaign.”
In a joint statement with other elected House Democratic leaders, Jeffries called for a “swift investigation” as well as the end of his pending campaign.
“This is unacceptable of anyone — certainly not an elected official — and must be taken seriously,” the leaders said.The San Francisco Chronicle reported Friday that a former congressional aide accused the congressman of two sexual encounters without her consent, beginning in 2019. CNN later reported that four women allege that Swalwell has committed sexual misconduct, including one former staffer who accuses Swalwell of rape….
Key backers of Swalwell’s governor bid swiftly revoked their support after the Chronicle’s story was published, including Reps. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.) and Adam Gray (D-Calif.), who served as campaign co-chairs.
“Today’s reports about Eric Swalwell’s conduct while in office are deeply disturbing,” Gray said in a statement. “Harassment, abuse, and violence of any sort are unacceptable. Given these serious allegations, I am withdrawing my support and Eric Swalwell should end his campaign immediately.”
But nothing underscored the peril for Swalwell’s nearly two-decade political career as vividly as Pelosi’s statement. The former speaker included Swalwell in her inner circle of favored Democratic members for years, tapping him for junior leadership roles and to serve as a manager in Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial in 2021.
Read the rest at the link.
The Melania Trump story might have stayed on social media if she hadn’t decided to make a public statement at the lectern that is supposed to be reserved for the POTUS. But it’s out there now, and she will have to deal with it.
It began with a disturbing story in The New York Times on March 20: Trump Friend Asked ICE to Detain the Mother of His Child.
Last June, the man credited with introducing President Trump to his wife asked the administration for a favor.
Paolo Zampolli, a former modeling agent turned presidential special envoy, had learned that his Brazilian ex-girlfriend was in a Miami jail, arrested on charges of fraud at her workplace. They had been in a custody battle over their teenage son. Now he saw an opportunity.
Eduard Manet, Woman with a Cat, 1880
He reached out to a top official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, explaining that his ex was in the country illegally, according to records obtained by The New York Times and a person familiar with the communications. Could she be put in ICE detention? That could help him get his son back.
The official, David Venturella, promptly called the agency’s Miami office to ensure that ICE agents would pick up the woman from the jail before she was released on bail, according to the records and a person with knowledge of the conversation who requested anonymity to discuss it. During the call, Mr. Venturella noted that the case was important to someone close to the White House.
The woman, Amanda Ungaro, was placed in ICE custody and ultimately deported, an outcome that may well have happened regardless of Mr. Zampolli’s meddling. But the ICE official’s willingness to spring into action for a Trump ally — even one in a low-level, largely ceremonial role — reflects a recurring theme of the second Trump administration: The levers of the federal government can be pulled to settle a personal score.
I read this story when it was published, but I didn’t make the connections I should have.
Amanda Ungaro is on X AKA Twitter, and she is fighting back. If you have access, you can read the many tweets she has been sending to Melania.
Melania is apparently sensitive about how she came to the U.S. In fact Zampolli is the one who brought her here and got her an H1-B visa. When she first arrived, she moved into a building occupied by other models who worked for Zampolli’s agency. It looks like Melania has really stepped in it. The Epstein files are back in the news.
From Julie K. Brown, the journalist who originally wrote about Epstein in The Miami Herald, at her Substack The Epstein Files: Could a former Brazilian model be the whistleblower Melania Trump is afraid of?
The First Lady’s unprecedented public statement about Jeffrey Epstein yesterday raised a lot of questions about what, if anything, is about to be revealed about Donald and Melania Trump’s relationship with the late sex trafficker.
The Epstein case had quieted down in the wake of Trump’s decision to attack Iran — some critics allege that was one of Trump’s goals in launching a war in the first place — to cool the MAGA furor over DOJ’s inept release of the Epstein files.
Now it seems that plan, if true, has led to a Jack-In-The-Beanstalk effect — as in trading a cow for beans and climbing into danger without really thinking it through.
Because there is another story that I admit I missed when it ran in the New York Times a few weeks ago.
It appears that the Trump administration may have targeted Zampolli’s ex-girlfriend, a former Brazilian model named Amanda Ungaro, deporting her back to Brazil amid her custody battle with Zampolli over their teenage son.
As the NYT’s story notes: “The levers of the federal government can be pulled to settle a personal score.”
Self-Portrait with a Cat, created by Frida Konstantin
In this case, the score involved Paolo Zampolli, a former modeling agent who was appointed last year by Trump as special envoy for “global partnerships,” which allows him to travel the world to advance trade and other partnerships with the U.S.
Just days ago, he was in Hungary with Vice President Vance, supporting the re-election of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, an effort to publicly back the right-wing leader in the days running up to the election.
Zampolli, 56, was in Epstein’s orbit around the time that Trump met Melania in 1998. He was also friends with Epstein, as the two entertained a business deal over buying a modeling agency.
And Zampolli’s name is in the Epstein Files, with Epstein noting in one email that he was “trouble.”
Still all the drama surrounding Zampolli’s custody battle with his estranged girlfriend didn’t connect any dots, at least not for me, until the First Lady’s speech yesterday.
Read the rest at the link.
The New York Times has another piece about Melania’s statement today: Trump Says First Lady ‘Had a Right’ to Talk About Epstein.
President Trump said Friday that he had known his wife wanted to speak about Jeffrey Epstein at some point, and that he “thought she had a right to talk about it,” even if he had not known what exactly she planned to say.
“It doesn’t bother me,” Mr. Trump said in a brief telephone interview, referring to the remarks Melania Trump made from the entrance hall of the White House a day earlier.
“I didn’t know what the statement was,” he said, “but I knew she was going to make a statement.”
The first lady’s comments certainly came as a surprise to many other people who work in the White House, according to two officials familiar with the situation who asked for anonymity to discuss the matter. It was not clear why she had chosen that moment to talk about Mr. Epstein. Absent any explanation, questions and feverish conspiracy theories swirled.
The president said his wife had been agonizing for a long time over her press coverage and rumors connecting her to Mr. Epstein. What was particularly upsetting to her, Mr. Trump explained, was one theory positing that it was Mr. Epstein who introduced her to her future husband. In her remarks on Thursday, Mrs. Trump recounted the story of meeting Mr. Trump “by chance at a New York City party in 1998.” She said she did not encounter Mr. Epstein for the first time until two years after that.
“She finds it very insulting,” Mr. Trump said of the rumors. “And I said, ‘If you want to do that, you can do that.’ I said if she wants to do it — I didn’t recommend it, but I said, I let it be her, I said, if you want to do it. …”
He added, “She didn’t meet me through Jeffrey Epstein. And I could understand her feelings. But I said, ‘If you want to do it, do it.’”
He would not say when exactly he had this discussion with the first lady, but said that “it wasn’t a big discussion. I’d say it lasted for about two minutes. I had no problem. I thought she actually did a good job.”
He’s lying, obviously. I doubt if she told him. Now she has revived interest in the Epstein files and Trump can’t be happy about that.
The Black Cat, by Carl Wilhelm Wilhelmson , 1922, Swedish, 1866-1928
The last scandal for today–the Kristi Noem story. The story was originally in the Daily Mail, but it’s behind a paywall.
The Independent: Kristi Noem’s husband offers cryptic three-word answer to report that he talked about leaving wife and becoming a woman.
Kristi Noem’s husband, Bryon Noem, has pushed back on a report that he insulted his wife in phone calls and online messages with a dominatrix and expressed a desire to become a woman.
Bryon Noem told The Independent the claims in the report were “not all true.” He did not elaborate when asked for more information.
The 56-year-old was reported to have been in an on-off relationship online with Shy Sotomayor, a 30-year-old sex worker known as Raelynn Riley, since 2016, she claimed in an interview with the Daily Mail, published Friday.
It is the latest in a series of exposés on the husband of the recently ousted Homeland Security Secretary, who has been keeping a low profile since the story broke last week.
Sotomayor shared recordings of phone calls and screenshots of messages she said she exchanged with Bryon Noem, where he said she was “so much better” than his wife. He also expressed wanting to transition to become a woman, the messages showed.
In one recent message, the South Dakota insurance boss said he wanted to change his name to Crystal “so bad,” and that he wanted plastic surgery. “I want to be your trans bimbo b****,” the messages showed.
The outlet linked Bryon Noem’s telephone number to the messages with Sotomayor, and it also corresponded to an email address under the pseudonym “Chrystalballz666.”
The messages reportedly from Bryon Noem appear in stark contrast to Kristi Noem’s opposition to transgender rights. As South Dakota governor, she signed an exclusionary bill to ban surgical and non-surgical gender-affirming treatments for children in the state, and barred transgender girls and women from playing on women’s sports teams.
Read the rest at The Independent.
There’s no news on the Iran talks yet, so I’ll end this with two disturbing Iran stories:
The New York Times: Iran Unable to Find Mines It Planted in Strait of Hormuz, U.S. Says.
Iran has been unable to open the Strait of Hormuz to more shipping traffic because it cannot locate all of the mines it laid in the waterway and lacks the capability to remove them, according to U.S. officials.
The development is one reason Iran has not been able to quickly comply with the Trump administration’s admonitions to let more traffic pass through the strait. It is also potentially a complicating factor as Iranian negotiators and a U.S. delegation led by Vice President JD Vance meet in Pakistan this weekend for peace talks.
Woman with a cat, Pierre Bonnard
Iran used small boats to mine the strait last month, soon after the United States and Israel began their war against the country. The mines, plus the threat of Iranian drone and missile attacks, slowed the number of oil tankers and other vessels passing through the strait to a trickle, driving up energy prices and providing Iran with its best leverage in the war.
Iran left a path through the strait open, allowing ships that pay a toll to pass through.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has issued warnings that ships could collide with sea mines, and semiofficial news organizations have published charts showing safe routes.
Those routes are limited in large part because Iran mined the strait haphazardly, U.S. officials said. It is not clear that Iran recorded where it put every mine. And even when the location was recorded, some mines were placed in a way that allowed them to drift or move, according to the officials.
As with land mines, removing nautical mines is far more difficult than placing them. The U.S. military lacks robust mine removal capabilities, relying on littoral combat ships equipped with mine sweeping capabilities. Iran also does not have the capability of quickly removing mines, even the ones it planted.
Raw Story: Hegseth’s key Iran claim collapses as US intel finds Iran has thousands of missiles.
One of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s main defenses of the U.S. decision to negotiate a controversial ceasefire with Iran is that its ballistic missile program has been “functionally destroyed.”
But that claim has now been shot down by U.S. intelligence assessments, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
“Iran still has thousands of ballistic missiles in its arsenal that it could use by retrieving launchers from underground storage areas, according to American officials familiar with U.S. intelligence assessments,” said the report. “The assessments come as the U.S. is working to cement a cease-fire that would fully open the Strait of Hormuz and also insulate Iran, American troops and states in the region from further attacks. Some American officials said they are concerned that Iran will use the break in fighting to reconstitute some of its missile arsenal.”
The conflict has taken a toll on Iran, with around half of its missile stockpile lost, the assessment found — but “it retains thousands of medium- and short-range ballistic missiles that could be pulled out of hiding or retrieved from underground sites, said U.S. and Israeli officials.”
This comes as even a number of Republican and conservative analysts are crying foul about the terms of the ceasefire, which appear one-sidedly in favor of Iran.
That’s it for me today. I guess it’s okay to focus on salacious stuff on the weekend. Happy Caturday!
#AmandaUngaro #ArtemisII #BryonNoem #catArt #caturday #DonaldTrump #EpsteinFiles #EricSwalwell #IranWar #IranSBallisticMissles #JeffreyEpstein #KristiNoem #MelaniaTrump #mines #NASA #PaoloZampolli #politicalScandals #rape #sexualAssault #StraitOfHormuz -
Lazy Caturday Reads: Scandals Galore!
Good Afternoon!!
By Mary Cassatt, 1883-84
The negotiations about the proposed cease fire in the Iran war are expected to begin soon, but meanwhile the news in the U.S. is suddenly filled with scandalous stories.
Yesterday, Dakinikat wrote about Melania Trump’s mysterious announcement to the White House press; I have a bit more context to add to that. Then last night the news about serious accusations of sexual misconduct by Eric Swalwell broke. There’s also news about Kristy Noem’s husband and his identity crisis.
I’ll get to those items, but I want to begin with a feel-good story for once.
Marcia Dunn at AP: Artemis II’s record-breaking journey around the moon ends with dramatic splashdown.
HOUSTON (AP) — Artemis II’s astronauts closed out humanity’s first lunar voyage in more than half a century with a Pacific splashdown on Friday, blazing new records near the moon with grace and joy.
It was a dramatic grand finale to a mission that revealed not only swaths of the lunar far side never seen before by human eyes, but a total solar eclipse and a parade of planets, most notably our own shimmering Earth against the endless black void of space.
With their flight now complete, the four astronauts have set NASA up for a moon landing by another crew in just two years and a full-blown moon base within the decade.
The triumphant moon-farers — commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canada’s Jeremy Hansen — emerged from their bobbing capsule into the sunlight off the coast of San Diego.
In a scene reminiscent of NASA’s Apollo moonshots of yesteryear, military helicopters hoisted the astronauts one by one from an inflatable raft docked to the capsule, hauling them aboard for the short trip to the Navy’s awaiting recovery ship, the USS John P. Murtha.
“These were the ambassadors from humanity to the stars that we sent out there right now, and I can’t imagine a better crew,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said from the recovery ship.
NASA’s Mission Control erupted in celebration, with hundreds pouring in from the back support rooms. “We did it,” NASA’s Lori Glaze rejoiced at a news conference. “Welcome to our moonshot.”
Read more at the AP link.
Now for the feel-disgusted news about Eric Swalwell. Based on what I’ve read, it’s surprising that this didn’t come out sooner. Apparently, he’s been DM young women, sending dick picks, and sexually assaulting women for years.
A former staffer of Rep. Eric Swalwell, a leading Democratic candidate for California governor, says that the congressman raped her when she was heavily intoxicated and left her bruised and bleeding, an allegation Swalwell strongly denies.
“I was pushing him off of me, saying no,” the woman told CNN of the incident, which she said happened in 2024 after she had stopped working in Swalwell’s office. “He didn’t stop.”
By Francesca Strino
She said it was the second time Swalwell had nonconsensual sexual contact with her while she was drunk. In 2019, when she was still working for him, she said she woke up naked with him in a hotel room after a night of heavy drinking. She said she had no memory of what happened but could feel physically that they’d had sexual contact.
Three other women who spoke with CNN also alleged various kinds of sexual misconduct by the Democratic congressman – including Swalwell sending them unsolicited explicit messages or nude photos.
One woman who connected online with Swalwell over her interest in Democratic politics says she ended up extremely drunk inside his hotel room after a night out with the congressman, with little memory of what occurred. Earlier in the night at a bar, he kissed her and touched her leg without her consent, she said.
Another woman, who described receiving unsolicited nude messages from Swalwell, was social media creator Ally Sammarco. She said she initially reached out to the congressman on Twitter to discuss politics. “I truly never thought he would respond – I had like 1,000 followers at the time,” she said. “And he actually responded.”
Swalwell denied the women’s allegations.
“These allegations are false and come on the eve of an election against the front-runner for governor,” Swalwell said in a statement to CNN. “For nearly 20 years, I have served the public – as a prosecutor and a congressman and have always protected women. I will defend myself with the facts and where necessary bring legal action. My focus in the coming days is to be with my wife and children and defend our decades of service against these lies.”
I don’t think that’s going to work. These are not subtle accusations, and the women told others about their experiences at the time. Sammarco saved the messages she got from Swallwell. A bit more from CNN:
One member of Swalwell’s staff said they quit immediately after receiving CNN’s detailed list of questions about the allegations.
CNN found corroboration for key elements of each of the women’s claims, including the former staffer who said she was sexually assaulted. Two family members and a friend said in interviews with CNN that she told them about the alleged 2024 assault in the following days, and CNN also reviewed text messages she sent two friends describing her allegations at the same time. “I was sexually assaulted on Thursday,” she wrote to one of her friends, adding: “By Eric.”
The woman also shared medical records related to her receiving STD and pregnancy testing after the alleged assault.
For the woman who connected online with Swalwell over Democratic politics, a family member and two friends confirmed she told them last year about the incident where she ended up intoxicated in his hotel room. CNN also reviewed messages between her and Swalwell, including a photo he sent her that matches footage of him during a CNN interview in her city on the night they met in person.
There’s still more at the link.
Politico: Jeffries, Pelosi and other Democrats call on Eric Swalwell to end governor campaign.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi headlined a growing list of Democratic lawmakers called on Rep. Eric Swalwell Friday to withdraw his campaign for California governor amid allegations of sexual misconduct.
Lily Walton with Raminou, 1922, by Suzanne Valadon
“This extremely sensitive matter must be appropriately investigated with full transparency and accountability,” Pelosi said in a statement. “As I discussed with Congressman Swalwell, it is clear that is best done outside of a gubernatorial campaign.”
In a joint statement with other elected House Democratic leaders, Jeffries called for a “swift investigation” as well as the end of his pending campaign.
“This is unacceptable of anyone — certainly not an elected official — and must be taken seriously,” the leaders said.The San Francisco Chronicle reported Friday that a former congressional aide accused the congressman of two sexual encounters without her consent, beginning in 2019. CNN later reported that four women allege that Swalwell has committed sexual misconduct, including one former staffer who accuses Swalwell of rape….
Key backers of Swalwell’s governor bid swiftly revoked their support after the Chronicle’s story was published, including Reps. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.) and Adam Gray (D-Calif.), who served as campaign co-chairs.
“Today’s reports about Eric Swalwell’s conduct while in office are deeply disturbing,” Gray said in a statement. “Harassment, abuse, and violence of any sort are unacceptable. Given these serious allegations, I am withdrawing my support and Eric Swalwell should end his campaign immediately.”
But nothing underscored the peril for Swalwell’s nearly two-decade political career as vividly as Pelosi’s statement. The former speaker included Swalwell in her inner circle of favored Democratic members for years, tapping him for junior leadership roles and to serve as a manager in Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial in 2021.
Read the rest at the link.
The Melania Trump story might have stayed on social media if she hadn’t decided to make a public statement at the lectern that is supposed to be reserved for the POTUS. But it’s out there now, and she will have to deal with it.
It began with a disturbing story in The New York Times on March 20: Trump Friend Asked ICE to Detain the Mother of His Child.
Last June, the man credited with introducing President Trump to his wife asked the administration for a favor.
Paolo Zampolli, a former modeling agent turned presidential special envoy, had learned that his Brazilian ex-girlfriend was in a Miami jail, arrested on charges of fraud at her workplace. They had been in a custody battle over their teenage son. Now he saw an opportunity.
Eduard Manet, Woman with a Cat, 1880
He reached out to a top official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, explaining that his ex was in the country illegally, according to records obtained by The New York Times and a person familiar with the communications. Could she be put in ICE detention? That could help him get his son back.
The official, David Venturella, promptly called the agency’s Miami office to ensure that ICE agents would pick up the woman from the jail before she was released on bail, according to the records and a person with knowledge of the conversation who requested anonymity to discuss it. During the call, Mr. Venturella noted that the case was important to someone close to the White House.
The woman, Amanda Ungaro, was placed in ICE custody and ultimately deported, an outcome that may well have happened regardless of Mr. Zampolli’s meddling. But the ICE official’s willingness to spring into action for a Trump ally — even one in a low-level, largely ceremonial role — reflects a recurring theme of the second Trump administration: The levers of the federal government can be pulled to settle a personal score.
I read this story when it was published, but I didn’t make the connections I should have.
Amanda Ungaro is on X AKA Twitter, and she is fighting back. If you have access, you can read the many tweets she has been sending to Melania.
Melania is apparently sensitive about how she came to the U.S. In fact Zampolli is the one who brought her here and got her an H1-B visa. When she first arrived, she moved into a building occupied by other models who worked for Zampolli’s agency. It looks like Melania has really stepped in it. The Epstein files are back in the news.
From Julie K. Brown, the journalist who originally wrote about Epstein in The Miami Herald, at her Substack The Epstein Files: Could a former Brazilian model be the whistleblower Melania Trump is afraid of?
The First Lady’s unprecedented public statement about Jeffrey Epstein yesterday raised a lot of questions about what, if anything, is about to be revealed about Donald and Melania Trump’s relationship with the late sex trafficker.
The Epstein case had quieted down in the wake of Trump’s decision to attack Iran — some critics allege that was one of Trump’s goals in launching a war in the first place — to cool the MAGA furor over DOJ’s inept release of the Epstein files.
Now it seems that plan, if true, has led to a Jack-In-The-Beanstalk effect — as in trading a cow for beans and climbing into danger without really thinking it through.
Because there is another story that I admit I missed when it ran in the New York Times a few weeks ago.
It appears that the Trump administration may have targeted Zampolli’s ex-girlfriend, a former Brazilian model named Amanda Ungaro, deporting her back to Brazil amid her custody battle with Zampolli over their teenage son.
As the NYT’s story notes: “The levers of the federal government can be pulled to settle a personal score.”
Self-Portrait with a Cat, created by Frida Konstantin
In this case, the score involved Paolo Zampolli, a former modeling agent who was appointed last year by Trump as special envoy for “global partnerships,” which allows him to travel the world to advance trade and other partnerships with the U.S.
Just days ago, he was in Hungary with Vice President Vance, supporting the re-election of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, an effort to publicly back the right-wing leader in the days running up to the election.
Zampolli, 56, was in Epstein’s orbit around the time that Trump met Melania in 1998. He was also friends with Epstein, as the two entertained a business deal over buying a modeling agency.
And Zampolli’s name is in the Epstein Files, with Epstein noting in one email that he was “trouble.”
Still all the drama surrounding Zampolli’s custody battle with his estranged girlfriend didn’t connect any dots, at least not for me, until the First Lady’s speech yesterday.
Read the rest at the link.
The New York Times has another piece about Melania’s statement today: Trump Says First Lady ‘Had a Right’ to Talk About Epstein.
President Trump said Friday that he had known his wife wanted to speak about Jeffrey Epstein at some point, and that he “thought she had a right to talk about it,” even if he had not known what exactly she planned to say.
“It doesn’t bother me,” Mr. Trump said in a brief telephone interview, referring to the remarks Melania Trump made from the entrance hall of the White House a day earlier.
“I didn’t know what the statement was,” he said, “but I knew she was going to make a statement.”
The first lady’s comments certainly came as a surprise to many other people who work in the White House, according to two officials familiar with the situation who asked for anonymity to discuss the matter. It was not clear why she had chosen that moment to talk about Mr. Epstein. Absent any explanation, questions and feverish conspiracy theories swirled.
The president said his wife had been agonizing for a long time over her press coverage and rumors connecting her to Mr. Epstein. What was particularly upsetting to her, Mr. Trump explained, was one theory positing that it was Mr. Epstein who introduced her to her future husband. In her remarks on Thursday, Mrs. Trump recounted the story of meeting Mr. Trump “by chance at a New York City party in 1998.” She said she did not encounter Mr. Epstein for the first time until two years after that.
“She finds it very insulting,” Mr. Trump said of the rumors. “And I said, ‘If you want to do that, you can do that.’ I said if she wants to do it — I didn’t recommend it, but I said, I let it be her, I said, if you want to do it. …”
He added, “She didn’t meet me through Jeffrey Epstein. And I could understand her feelings. But I said, ‘If you want to do it, do it.’”
He would not say when exactly he had this discussion with the first lady, but said that “it wasn’t a big discussion. I’d say it lasted for about two minutes. I had no problem. I thought she actually did a good job.”
He’s lying, obviously. I doubt if she told him. Now she has revived interest in the Epstein files and Trump can’t be happy about that.
The Black Cat, by Carl Wilhelm Wilhelmson , 1922, Swedish, 1866-1928
The last scandal for today–the Kristi Noem story. The story was originally in the Daily Mail, but it’s behind a paywall.
The Independent: Kristi Noem’s husband offers cryptic three-word answer to report that he talked about leaving wife and becoming a woman.
Kristi Noem’s husband, Bryon Noem, has pushed back on a report that he insulted his wife in phone calls and online messages with a dominatrix and expressed a desire to become a woman.
Bryon Noem told The Independent the claims in the report were “not all true.” He did not elaborate when asked for more information.
The 56-year-old was reported to have been in an on-off relationship online with Shy Sotomayor, a 30-year-old sex worker known as Raelynn Riley, since 2016, she claimed in an interview with the Daily Mail, published Friday.
It is the latest in a series of exposés on the husband of the recently ousted Homeland Security Secretary, who has been keeping a low profile since the story broke last week.
Sotomayor shared recordings of phone calls and screenshots of messages she said she exchanged with Bryon Noem, where he said she was “so much better” than his wife. He also expressed wanting to transition to become a woman, the messages showed.
In one recent message, the South Dakota insurance boss said he wanted to change his name to Crystal “so bad,” and that he wanted plastic surgery. “I want to be your trans bimbo b****,” the messages showed.
The outlet linked Bryon Noem’s telephone number to the messages with Sotomayor, and it also corresponded to an email address under the pseudonym “Chrystalballz666.”
The messages reportedly from Bryon Noem appear in stark contrast to Kristi Noem’s opposition to transgender rights. As South Dakota governor, she signed an exclusionary bill to ban surgical and non-surgical gender-affirming treatments for children in the state, and barred transgender girls and women from playing on women’s sports teams.
Read the rest at The Independent.
There’s no news on the Iran talks yet, so I’ll end this with two disturbing Iran stories:
The New York Times: Iran Unable to Find Mines It Planted in Strait of Hormuz, U.S. Says.
Iran has been unable to open the Strait of Hormuz to more shipping traffic because it cannot locate all of the mines it laid in the waterway and lacks the capability to remove them, according to U.S. officials.
The development is one reason Iran has not been able to quickly comply with the Trump administration’s admonitions to let more traffic pass through the strait. It is also potentially a complicating factor as Iranian negotiators and a U.S. delegation led by Vice President JD Vance meet in Pakistan this weekend for peace talks.
Woman with a cat, Pierre Bonnard
Iran used small boats to mine the strait last month, soon after the United States and Israel began their war against the country. The mines, plus the threat of Iranian drone and missile attacks, slowed the number of oil tankers and other vessels passing through the strait to a trickle, driving up energy prices and providing Iran with its best leverage in the war.
Iran left a path through the strait open, allowing ships that pay a toll to pass through.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has issued warnings that ships could collide with sea mines, and semiofficial news organizations have published charts showing safe routes.
Those routes are limited in large part because Iran mined the strait haphazardly, U.S. officials said. It is not clear that Iran recorded where it put every mine. And even when the location was recorded, some mines were placed in a way that allowed them to drift or move, according to the officials.
As with land mines, removing nautical mines is far more difficult than placing them. The U.S. military lacks robust mine removal capabilities, relying on littoral combat ships equipped with mine sweeping capabilities. Iran also does not have the capability of quickly removing mines, even the ones it planted.
Raw Story: Hegseth’s key Iran claim collapses as US intel finds Iran has thousands of missiles.
One of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s main defenses of the U.S. decision to negotiate a controversial ceasefire with Iran is that its ballistic missile program has been “functionally destroyed.”
But that claim has now been shot down by U.S. intelligence assessments, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
“Iran still has thousands of ballistic missiles in its arsenal that it could use by retrieving launchers from underground storage areas, according to American officials familiar with U.S. intelligence assessments,” said the report. “The assessments come as the U.S. is working to cement a cease-fire that would fully open the Strait of Hormuz and also insulate Iran, American troops and states in the region from further attacks. Some American officials said they are concerned that Iran will use the break in fighting to reconstitute some of its missile arsenal.”
The conflict has taken a toll on Iran, with around half of its missile stockpile lost, the assessment found — but “it retains thousands of medium- and short-range ballistic missiles that could be pulled out of hiding or retrieved from underground sites, said U.S. and Israeli officials.”
This comes as even a number of Republican and conservative analysts are crying foul about the terms of the ceasefire, which appear one-sidedly in favor of Iran.
That’s it for me today. I guess it’s okay to focus on salacious stuff on the weekend. Happy Caturday!
#AmandaUngaro #ArtemisII #BryonNoem #catArt #caturday #DonaldTrump #EpsteinFiles #EricSwalwell #IranWar #IranSBallisticMissles #JeffreyEpstein #KristiNoem #MelaniaTrump #mines #NASA #PaoloZampolli #politicalScandals #rape #sexualAssault #StraitOfHormuz -
Lazy Caturday Reads: Scandals Galore!
Good Afternoon!!
By Mary Cassatt, 1883-84
The negotiations about the proposed cease fire in the Iran war are expected to begin soon, but meanwhile the news in the U.S. is suddenly filled with scandalous stories.
Yesterday, Dakinikat wrote about Melania Trump’s mysterious announcement to the White House press; I have a bit more context to add to that. Then last night the news about serious accusations of sexual misconduct by Eric Swalwell broke. There’s also news about Kristy Noem’s husband and his identity crisis.
I’ll get to those items, but I want to begin with a feel-good story for once.
Marcia Dunn at AP: Artemis II’s record-breaking journey around the moon ends with dramatic splashdown.
HOUSTON (AP) — Artemis II’s astronauts closed out humanity’s first lunar voyage in more than half a century with a Pacific splashdown on Friday, blazing new records near the moon with grace and joy.
It was a dramatic grand finale to a mission that revealed not only swaths of the lunar far side never seen before by human eyes, but a total solar eclipse and a parade of planets, most notably our own shimmering Earth against the endless black void of space.
With their flight now complete, the four astronauts have set NASA up for a moon landing by another crew in just two years and a full-blown moon base within the decade.
The triumphant moon-farers — commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canada’s Jeremy Hansen — emerged from their bobbing capsule into the sunlight off the coast of San Diego.
In a scene reminiscent of NASA’s Apollo moonshots of yesteryear, military helicopters hoisted the astronauts one by one from an inflatable raft docked to the capsule, hauling them aboard for the short trip to the Navy’s awaiting recovery ship, the USS John P. Murtha.
“These were the ambassadors from humanity to the stars that we sent out there right now, and I can’t imagine a better crew,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said from the recovery ship.
NASA’s Mission Control erupted in celebration, with hundreds pouring in from the back support rooms. “We did it,” NASA’s Lori Glaze rejoiced at a news conference. “Welcome to our moonshot.”
Read more at the AP link.
Now for the feel-disgusted news about Eric Swalwell. Based on what I’ve read, it’s surprising that this didn’t come out sooner. Apparently, he’s been DM young women, sending dick picks, and sexually assaulting women for years.
A former staffer of Rep. Eric Swalwell, a leading Democratic candidate for California governor, says that the congressman raped her when she was heavily intoxicated and left her bruised and bleeding, an allegation Swalwell strongly denies.
“I was pushing him off of me, saying no,” the woman told CNN of the incident, which she said happened in 2024 after she had stopped working in Swalwell’s office. “He didn’t stop.”
By Francesca Strino
She said it was the second time Swalwell had nonconsensual sexual contact with her while she was drunk. In 2019, when she was still working for him, she said she woke up naked with him in a hotel room after a night of heavy drinking. She said she had no memory of what happened but could feel physically that they’d had sexual contact.
Three other women who spoke with CNN also alleged various kinds of sexual misconduct by the Democratic congressman – including Swalwell sending them unsolicited explicit messages or nude photos.
One woman who connected online with Swalwell over her interest in Democratic politics says she ended up extremely drunk inside his hotel room after a night out with the congressman, with little memory of what occurred. Earlier in the night at a bar, he kissed her and touched her leg without her consent, she said.
Another woman, who described receiving unsolicited nude messages from Swalwell, was social media creator Ally Sammarco. She said she initially reached out to the congressman on Twitter to discuss politics. “I truly never thought he would respond – I had like 1,000 followers at the time,” she said. “And he actually responded.”
Swalwell denied the women’s allegations.
“These allegations are false and come on the eve of an election against the front-runner for governor,” Swalwell said in a statement to CNN. “For nearly 20 years, I have served the public – as a prosecutor and a congressman and have always protected women. I will defend myself with the facts and where necessary bring legal action. My focus in the coming days is to be with my wife and children and defend our decades of service against these lies.”
I don’t think that’s going to work. These are not subtle accusations, and the women told others about their experiences at the time. Sammarco saved the messages she got from Swallwell. A bit more from CNN:
One member of Swalwell’s staff said they quit immediately after receiving CNN’s detailed list of questions about the allegations.
CNN found corroboration for key elements of each of the women’s claims, including the former staffer who said she was sexually assaulted. Two family members and a friend said in interviews with CNN that she told them about the alleged 2024 assault in the following days, and CNN also reviewed text messages she sent two friends describing her allegations at the same time. “I was sexually assaulted on Thursday,” she wrote to one of her friends, adding: “By Eric.”
The woman also shared medical records related to her receiving STD and pregnancy testing after the alleged assault.
For the woman who connected online with Swalwell over Democratic politics, a family member and two friends confirmed she told them last year about the incident where she ended up intoxicated in his hotel room. CNN also reviewed messages between her and Swalwell, including a photo he sent her that matches footage of him during a CNN interview in her city on the night they met in person.
There’s still more at the link.
Politico: Jeffries, Pelosi and other Democrats call on Eric Swalwell to end governor campaign.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi headlined a growing list of Democratic lawmakers called on Rep. Eric Swalwell Friday to withdraw his campaign for California governor amid allegations of sexual misconduct.
Lily Walton with Raminou, 1922, by Suzanne Valadon
“This extremely sensitive matter must be appropriately investigated with full transparency and accountability,” Pelosi said in a statement. “As I discussed with Congressman Swalwell, it is clear that is best done outside of a gubernatorial campaign.”
In a joint statement with other elected House Democratic leaders, Jeffries called for a “swift investigation” as well as the end of his pending campaign.
“This is unacceptable of anyone — certainly not an elected official — and must be taken seriously,” the leaders said.The San Francisco Chronicle reported Friday that a former congressional aide accused the congressman of two sexual encounters without her consent, beginning in 2019. CNN later reported that four women allege that Swalwell has committed sexual misconduct, including one former staffer who accuses Swalwell of rape….
Key backers of Swalwell’s governor bid swiftly revoked their support after the Chronicle’s story was published, including Reps. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.) and Adam Gray (D-Calif.), who served as campaign co-chairs.
“Today’s reports about Eric Swalwell’s conduct while in office are deeply disturbing,” Gray said in a statement. “Harassment, abuse, and violence of any sort are unacceptable. Given these serious allegations, I am withdrawing my support and Eric Swalwell should end his campaign immediately.”
But nothing underscored the peril for Swalwell’s nearly two-decade political career as vividly as Pelosi’s statement. The former speaker included Swalwell in her inner circle of favored Democratic members for years, tapping him for junior leadership roles and to serve as a manager in Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial in 2021.
Read the rest at the link.
The Melania Trump story might have stayed on social media if she hadn’t decided to make a public statement at the lectern that is supposed to be reserved for the POTUS. But it’s out there now, and she will have to deal with it.
It began with a disturbing story in The New York Times on March 20: Trump Friend Asked ICE to Detain the Mother of His Child.
Last June, the man credited with introducing President Trump to his wife asked the administration for a favor.
Paolo Zampolli, a former modeling agent turned presidential special envoy, had learned that his Brazilian ex-girlfriend was in a Miami jail, arrested on charges of fraud at her workplace. They had been in a custody battle over their teenage son. Now he saw an opportunity.
Eduard Manet, Woman with a Cat, 1880
He reached out to a top official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, explaining that his ex was in the country illegally, according to records obtained by The New York Times and a person familiar with the communications. Could she be put in ICE detention? That could help him get his son back.
The official, David Venturella, promptly called the agency’s Miami office to ensure that ICE agents would pick up the woman from the jail before she was released on bail, according to the records and a person with knowledge of the conversation who requested anonymity to discuss it. During the call, Mr. Venturella noted that the case was important to someone close to the White House.
The woman, Amanda Ungaro, was placed in ICE custody and ultimately deported, an outcome that may well have happened regardless of Mr. Zampolli’s meddling. But the ICE official’s willingness to spring into action for a Trump ally — even one in a low-level, largely ceremonial role — reflects a recurring theme of the second Trump administration: The levers of the federal government can be pulled to settle a personal score.
I read this story when it was published, but I didn’t make the connections I should have.
Amanda Ungaro is on X AKA Twitter, and she is fighting back. If you have access, you can read the many tweets she has been sending to Melania.
Melania is apparently sensitive about how she came to the U.S. In fact Zampolli is the one who brought her here and got her an H1-B visa. When she first arrived, she moved into a building occupied by other models who worked for Zampolli’s agency. It looks like Melania has really stepped in it. The Epstein files are back in the news.
From Julie K. Brown, the journalist who originally wrote about Epstein in The Miami Herald, at her Substack The Epstein Files: Could a former Brazilian model be the whistleblower Melania Trump is afraid of?
The First Lady’s unprecedented public statement about Jeffrey Epstein yesterday raised a lot of questions about what, if anything, is about to be revealed about Donald and Melania Trump’s relationship with the late sex trafficker.
The Epstein case had quieted down in the wake of Trump’s decision to attack Iran — some critics allege that was one of Trump’s goals in launching a war in the first place — to cool the MAGA furor over DOJ’s inept release of the Epstein files.
Now it seems that plan, if true, has led to a Jack-In-The-Beanstalk effect — as in trading a cow for beans and climbing into danger without really thinking it through.
Because there is another story that I admit I missed when it ran in the New York Times a few weeks ago.
It appears that the Trump administration may have targeted Zampolli’s ex-girlfriend, a former Brazilian model named Amanda Ungaro, deporting her back to Brazil amid her custody battle with Zampolli over their teenage son.
As the NYT’s story notes: “The levers of the federal government can be pulled to settle a personal score.”
Self-Portrait with a Cat, created by Frida Konstantin
In this case, the score involved Paolo Zampolli, a former modeling agent who was appointed last year by Trump as special envoy for “global partnerships,” which allows him to travel the world to advance trade and other partnerships with the U.S.
Just days ago, he was in Hungary with Vice President Vance, supporting the re-election of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, an effort to publicly back the right-wing leader in the days running up to the election.
Zampolli, 56, was in Epstein’s orbit around the time that Trump met Melania in 1998. He was also friends with Epstein, as the two entertained a business deal over buying a modeling agency.
And Zampolli’s name is in the Epstein Files, with Epstein noting in one email that he was “trouble.”
Still all the drama surrounding Zampolli’s custody battle with his estranged girlfriend didn’t connect any dots, at least not for me, until the First Lady’s speech yesterday.
Read the rest at the link.
The New York Times has another piece about Melania’s statement today: Trump Says First Lady ‘Had a Right’ to Talk About Epstein.
President Trump said Friday that he had known his wife wanted to speak about Jeffrey Epstein at some point, and that he “thought she had a right to talk about it,” even if he had not known what exactly she planned to say.
“It doesn’t bother me,” Mr. Trump said in a brief telephone interview, referring to the remarks Melania Trump made from the entrance hall of the White House a day earlier.
“I didn’t know what the statement was,” he said, “but I knew she was going to make a statement.”
The first lady’s comments certainly came as a surprise to many other people who work in the White House, according to two officials familiar with the situation who asked for anonymity to discuss the matter. It was not clear why she had chosen that moment to talk about Mr. Epstein. Absent any explanation, questions and feverish conspiracy theories swirled.
The president said his wife had been agonizing for a long time over her press coverage and rumors connecting her to Mr. Epstein. What was particularly upsetting to her, Mr. Trump explained, was one theory positing that it was Mr. Epstein who introduced her to her future husband. In her remarks on Thursday, Mrs. Trump recounted the story of meeting Mr. Trump “by chance at a New York City party in 1998.” She said she did not encounter Mr. Epstein for the first time until two years after that.
“She finds it very insulting,” Mr. Trump said of the rumors. “And I said, ‘If you want to do that, you can do that.’ I said if she wants to do it — I didn’t recommend it, but I said, I let it be her, I said, if you want to do it. …”
He added, “She didn’t meet me through Jeffrey Epstein. And I could understand her feelings. But I said, ‘If you want to do it, do it.’”
He would not say when exactly he had this discussion with the first lady, but said that “it wasn’t a big discussion. I’d say it lasted for about two minutes. I had no problem. I thought she actually did a good job.”
He’s lying, obviously. I doubt if she told him. Now she has revived interest in the Epstein files and Trump can’t be happy about that.
The Black Cat, by Carl Wilhelm Wilhelmson , 1922, Swedish, 1866-1928
The last scandal for today–the Kristi Noem story. The story was originally in the Daily Mail, but it’s behind a paywall.
The Independent: Kristi Noem’s husband offers cryptic three-word answer to report that he talked about leaving wife and becoming a woman.
Kristi Noem’s husband, Bryon Noem, has pushed back on a report that he insulted his wife in phone calls and online messages with a dominatrix and expressed a desire to become a woman.
Bryon Noem told The Independent the claims in the report were “not all true.” He did not elaborate when asked for more information.
The 56-year-old was reported to have been in an on-off relationship online with Shy Sotomayor, a 30-year-old sex worker known as Raelynn Riley, since 2016, she claimed in an interview with the Daily Mail, published Friday.
It is the latest in a series of exposés on the husband of the recently ousted Homeland Security Secretary, who has been keeping a low profile since the story broke last week.
Sotomayor shared recordings of phone calls and screenshots of messages she said she exchanged with Bryon Noem, where he said she was “so much better” than his wife. He also expressed wanting to transition to become a woman, the messages showed.
In one recent message, the South Dakota insurance boss said he wanted to change his name to Crystal “so bad,” and that he wanted plastic surgery. “I want to be your trans bimbo b****,” the messages showed.
The outlet linked Bryon Noem’s telephone number to the messages with Sotomayor, and it also corresponded to an email address under the pseudonym “Chrystalballz666.”
The messages reportedly from Bryon Noem appear in stark contrast to Kristi Noem’s opposition to transgender rights. As South Dakota governor, she signed an exclusionary bill to ban surgical and non-surgical gender-affirming treatments for children in the state, and barred transgender girls and women from playing on women’s sports teams.
Read the rest at The Independent.
There’s no news on the Iran talks yet, so I’ll end this with two disturbing Iran stories:
The New York Times: Iran Unable to Find Mines It Planted in Strait of Hormuz, U.S. Says.
Iran has been unable to open the Strait of Hormuz to more shipping traffic because it cannot locate all of the mines it laid in the waterway and lacks the capability to remove them, according to U.S. officials.
The development is one reason Iran has not been able to quickly comply with the Trump administration’s admonitions to let more traffic pass through the strait. It is also potentially a complicating factor as Iranian negotiators and a U.S. delegation led by Vice President JD Vance meet in Pakistan this weekend for peace talks.
Woman with a cat, Pierre Bonnard
Iran used small boats to mine the strait last month, soon after the United States and Israel began their war against the country. The mines, plus the threat of Iranian drone and missile attacks, slowed the number of oil tankers and other vessels passing through the strait to a trickle, driving up energy prices and providing Iran with its best leverage in the war.
Iran left a path through the strait open, allowing ships that pay a toll to pass through.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has issued warnings that ships could collide with sea mines, and semiofficial news organizations have published charts showing safe routes.
Those routes are limited in large part because Iran mined the strait haphazardly, U.S. officials said. It is not clear that Iran recorded where it put every mine. And even when the location was recorded, some mines were placed in a way that allowed them to drift or move, according to the officials.
As with land mines, removing nautical mines is far more difficult than placing them. The U.S. military lacks robust mine removal capabilities, relying on littoral combat ships equipped with mine sweeping capabilities. Iran also does not have the capability of quickly removing mines, even the ones it planted.
Raw Story: Hegseth’s key Iran claim collapses as US intel finds Iran has thousands of missiles.
One of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s main defenses of the U.S. decision to negotiate a controversial ceasefire with Iran is that its ballistic missile program has been “functionally destroyed.”
But that claim has now been shot down by U.S. intelligence assessments, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
“Iran still has thousands of ballistic missiles in its arsenal that it could use by retrieving launchers from underground storage areas, according to American officials familiar with U.S. intelligence assessments,” said the report. “The assessments come as the U.S. is working to cement a cease-fire that would fully open the Strait of Hormuz and also insulate Iran, American troops and states in the region from further attacks. Some American officials said they are concerned that Iran will use the break in fighting to reconstitute some of its missile arsenal.”
The conflict has taken a toll on Iran, with around half of its missile stockpile lost, the assessment found — but “it retains thousands of medium- and short-range ballistic missiles that could be pulled out of hiding or retrieved from underground sites, said U.S. and Israeli officials.”
This comes as even a number of Republican and conservative analysts are crying foul about the terms of the ceasefire, which appear one-sidedly in favor of Iran.
That’s it for me today. I guess it’s okay to focus on salacious stuff on the weekend. Happy Caturday!
#AmandaUngaro #ArtemisII #BryonNoem #catArt #caturday #DonaldTrump #EpsteinFiles #EricSwalwell #IranWar #IranSBallisticMissles #JeffreyEpstein #KristiNoem #MelaniaTrump #mines #NASA #PaoloZampolli #politicalScandals #rape #sexualAssault #StraitOfHormuz -
Lazy Caturday Reads: Scandals Galore!
Good Afternoon!!
By Mary Cassatt, 1883-84
The negotiations about the proposed cease fire in the Iran war are expected to begin soon, but meanwhile the news in the U.S. is suddenly filled with scandalous stories.
Yesterday, Dakinikat wrote about Melania Trump’s mysterious announcement to the White House press; I have a bit more context to add to that. Then last night the news about serious accusations of sexual misconduct by Eric Swalwell broke. There’s also news about Kristy Noem’s husband and his identity crisis.
I’ll get to those items, but I want to begin with a feel-good story for once.
Marcia Dunn at AP: Artemis II’s record-breaking journey around the moon ends with dramatic splashdown.
HOUSTON (AP) — Artemis II’s astronauts closed out humanity’s first lunar voyage in more than half a century with a Pacific splashdown on Friday, blazing new records near the moon with grace and joy.
It was a dramatic grand finale to a mission that revealed not only swaths of the lunar far side never seen before by human eyes, but a total solar eclipse and a parade of planets, most notably our own shimmering Earth against the endless black void of space.
With their flight now complete, the four astronauts have set NASA up for a moon landing by another crew in just two years and a full-blown moon base within the decade.
The triumphant moon-farers — commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canada’s Jeremy Hansen — emerged from their bobbing capsule into the sunlight off the coast of San Diego.
In a scene reminiscent of NASA’s Apollo moonshots of yesteryear, military helicopters hoisted the astronauts one by one from an inflatable raft docked to the capsule, hauling them aboard for the short trip to the Navy’s awaiting recovery ship, the USS John P. Murtha.
“These were the ambassadors from humanity to the stars that we sent out there right now, and I can’t imagine a better crew,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said from the recovery ship.
NASA’s Mission Control erupted in celebration, with hundreds pouring in from the back support rooms. “We did it,” NASA’s Lori Glaze rejoiced at a news conference. “Welcome to our moonshot.”
Read more at the AP link.
Now for the feel-disgusted news about Eric Swalwell. Based on what I’ve read, it’s surprising that this didn’t come out sooner. Apparently, he’s been DM young women, sending dick picks, and sexually assaulting women for years.
A former staffer of Rep. Eric Swalwell, a leading Democratic candidate for California governor, says that the congressman raped her when she was heavily intoxicated and left her bruised and bleeding, an allegation Swalwell strongly denies.
“I was pushing him off of me, saying no,” the woman told CNN of the incident, which she said happened in 2024 after she had stopped working in Swalwell’s office. “He didn’t stop.”
By Francesca Strino
She said it was the second time Swalwell had nonconsensual sexual contact with her while she was drunk. In 2019, when she was still working for him, she said she woke up naked with him in a hotel room after a night of heavy drinking. She said she had no memory of what happened but could feel physically that they’d had sexual contact.
Three other women who spoke with CNN also alleged various kinds of sexual misconduct by the Democratic congressman – including Swalwell sending them unsolicited explicit messages or nude photos.
One woman who connected online with Swalwell over her interest in Democratic politics says she ended up extremely drunk inside his hotel room after a night out with the congressman, with little memory of what occurred. Earlier in the night at a bar, he kissed her and touched her leg without her consent, she said.
Another woman, who described receiving unsolicited nude messages from Swalwell, was social media creator Ally Sammarco. She said she initially reached out to the congressman on Twitter to discuss politics. “I truly never thought he would respond – I had like 1,000 followers at the time,” she said. “And he actually responded.”
Swalwell denied the women’s allegations.
“These allegations are false and come on the eve of an election against the front-runner for governor,” Swalwell said in a statement to CNN. “For nearly 20 years, I have served the public – as a prosecutor and a congressman and have always protected women. I will defend myself with the facts and where necessary bring legal action. My focus in the coming days is to be with my wife and children and defend our decades of service against these lies.”
I don’t think that’s going to work. These are not subtle accusations, and the women told others about their experiences at the time. Sammarco saved the messages she got from Swallwell. A bit more from CNN:
One member of Swalwell’s staff said they quit immediately after receiving CNN’s detailed list of questions about the allegations.
CNN found corroboration for key elements of each of the women’s claims, including the former staffer who said she was sexually assaulted. Two family members and a friend said in interviews with CNN that she told them about the alleged 2024 assault in the following days, and CNN also reviewed text messages she sent two friends describing her allegations at the same time. “I was sexually assaulted on Thursday,” she wrote to one of her friends, adding: “By Eric.”
The woman also shared medical records related to her receiving STD and pregnancy testing after the alleged assault.
For the woman who connected online with Swalwell over Democratic politics, a family member and two friends confirmed she told them last year about the incident where she ended up intoxicated in his hotel room. CNN also reviewed messages between her and Swalwell, including a photo he sent her that matches footage of him during a CNN interview in her city on the night they met in person.
There’s still more at the link.
Politico: Jeffries, Pelosi and other Democrats call on Eric Swalwell to end governor campaign.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi headlined a growing list of Democratic lawmakers called on Rep. Eric Swalwell Friday to withdraw his campaign for California governor amid allegations of sexual misconduct.
Lily Walton with Raminou, 1922, by Suzanne Valadon
“This extremely sensitive matter must be appropriately investigated with full transparency and accountability,” Pelosi said in a statement. “As I discussed with Congressman Swalwell, it is clear that is best done outside of a gubernatorial campaign.”
In a joint statement with other elected House Democratic leaders, Jeffries called for a “swift investigation” as well as the end of his pending campaign.
“This is unacceptable of anyone — certainly not an elected official — and must be taken seriously,” the leaders said.The San Francisco Chronicle reported Friday that a former congressional aide accused the congressman of two sexual encounters without her consent, beginning in 2019. CNN later reported that four women allege that Swalwell has committed sexual misconduct, including one former staffer who accuses Swalwell of rape….
Key backers of Swalwell’s governor bid swiftly revoked their support after the Chronicle’s story was published, including Reps. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.) and Adam Gray (D-Calif.), who served as campaign co-chairs.
“Today’s reports about Eric Swalwell’s conduct while in office are deeply disturbing,” Gray said in a statement. “Harassment, abuse, and violence of any sort are unacceptable. Given these serious allegations, I am withdrawing my support and Eric Swalwell should end his campaign immediately.”
But nothing underscored the peril for Swalwell’s nearly two-decade political career as vividly as Pelosi’s statement. The former speaker included Swalwell in her inner circle of favored Democratic members for years, tapping him for junior leadership roles and to serve as a manager in Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial in 2021.
Read the rest at the link.
The Melania Trump story might have stayed on social media if she hadn’t decided to make a public statement at the lectern that is supposed to be reserved for the POTUS. But it’s out there now, and she will have to deal with it.
It began with a disturbing story in The New York Times on March 20: Trump Friend Asked ICE to Detain the Mother of His Child.
Last June, the man credited with introducing President Trump to his wife asked the administration for a favor.
Paolo Zampolli, a former modeling agent turned presidential special envoy, had learned that his Brazilian ex-girlfriend was in a Miami jail, arrested on charges of fraud at her workplace. They had been in a custody battle over their teenage son. Now he saw an opportunity.
Eduard Manet, Woman with a Cat, 1880
He reached out to a top official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, explaining that his ex was in the country illegally, according to records obtained by The New York Times and a person familiar with the communications. Could she be put in ICE detention? That could help him get his son back.
The official, David Venturella, promptly called the agency’s Miami office to ensure that ICE agents would pick up the woman from the jail before she was released on bail, according to the records and a person with knowledge of the conversation who requested anonymity to discuss it. During the call, Mr. Venturella noted that the case was important to someone close to the White House.
The woman, Amanda Ungaro, was placed in ICE custody and ultimately deported, an outcome that may well have happened regardless of Mr. Zampolli’s meddling. But the ICE official’s willingness to spring into action for a Trump ally — even one in a low-level, largely ceremonial role — reflects a recurring theme of the second Trump administration: The levers of the federal government can be pulled to settle a personal score.
I read this story when it was published, but I didn’t make the connections I should have.
Amanda Ungaro is on X AKA Twitter, and she is fighting back. If you have access, you can read the many tweets she has been sending to Melania.
Melania is apparently sensitive about how she came to the U.S. In fact Zampolli is the one who brought her here and got her an H1-B visa. When she first arrived, she moved into a building occupied by other models who worked for Zampolli’s agency. It looks like Melania has really stepped in it. The Epstein files are back in the news.
From Julie K. Brown, the journalist who originally wrote about Epstein in The Miami Herald, at her Substack The Epstein Files: Could a former Brazilian model be the whistleblower Melania Trump is afraid of?
The First Lady’s unprecedented public statement about Jeffrey Epstein yesterday raised a lot of questions about what, if anything, is about to be revealed about Donald and Melania Trump’s relationship with the late sex trafficker.
The Epstein case had quieted down in the wake of Trump’s decision to attack Iran — some critics allege that was one of Trump’s goals in launching a war in the first place — to cool the MAGA furor over DOJ’s inept release of the Epstein files.
Now it seems that plan, if true, has led to a Jack-In-The-Beanstalk effect — as in trading a cow for beans and climbing into danger without really thinking it through.
Because there is another story that I admit I missed when it ran in the New York Times a few weeks ago.
It appears that the Trump administration may have targeted Zampolli’s ex-girlfriend, a former Brazilian model named Amanda Ungaro, deporting her back to Brazil amid her custody battle with Zampolli over their teenage son.
As the NYT’s story notes: “The levers of the federal government can be pulled to settle a personal score.”
Self-Portrait with a Cat, created by Frida Konstantin
In this case, the score involved Paolo Zampolli, a former modeling agent who was appointed last year by Trump as special envoy for “global partnerships,” which allows him to travel the world to advance trade and other partnerships with the U.S.
Just days ago, he was in Hungary with Vice President Vance, supporting the re-election of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, an effort to publicly back the right-wing leader in the days running up to the election.
Zampolli, 56, was in Epstein’s orbit around the time that Trump met Melania in 1998. He was also friends with Epstein, as the two entertained a business deal over buying a modeling agency.
And Zampolli’s name is in the Epstein Files, with Epstein noting in one email that he was “trouble.”
Still all the drama surrounding Zampolli’s custody battle with his estranged girlfriend didn’t connect any dots, at least not for me, until the First Lady’s speech yesterday.
Read the rest at the link.
The New York Times has another piece about Melania’s statement today: Trump Says First Lady ‘Had a Right’ to Talk About Epstein.
President Trump said Friday that he had known his wife wanted to speak about Jeffrey Epstein at some point, and that he “thought she had a right to talk about it,” even if he had not known what exactly she planned to say.
“It doesn’t bother me,” Mr. Trump said in a brief telephone interview, referring to the remarks Melania Trump made from the entrance hall of the White House a day earlier.
“I didn’t know what the statement was,” he said, “but I knew she was going to make a statement.”
The first lady’s comments certainly came as a surprise to many other people who work in the White House, according to two officials familiar with the situation who asked for anonymity to discuss the matter. It was not clear why she had chosen that moment to talk about Mr. Epstein. Absent any explanation, questions and feverish conspiracy theories swirled.
The president said his wife had been agonizing for a long time over her press coverage and rumors connecting her to Mr. Epstein. What was particularly upsetting to her, Mr. Trump explained, was one theory positing that it was Mr. Epstein who introduced her to her future husband. In her remarks on Thursday, Mrs. Trump recounted the story of meeting Mr. Trump “by chance at a New York City party in 1998.” She said she did not encounter Mr. Epstein for the first time until two years after that.
“She finds it very insulting,” Mr. Trump said of the rumors. “And I said, ‘If you want to do that, you can do that.’ I said if she wants to do it — I didn’t recommend it, but I said, I let it be her, I said, if you want to do it. …”
He added, “She didn’t meet me through Jeffrey Epstein. And I could understand her feelings. But I said, ‘If you want to do it, do it.’”
He would not say when exactly he had this discussion with the first lady, but said that “it wasn’t a big discussion. I’d say it lasted for about two minutes. I had no problem. I thought she actually did a good job.”
He’s lying, obviously. I doubt if she told him. Now she has revived interest in the Epstein files and Trump can’t be happy about that.
The Black Cat, by Carl Wilhelm Wilhelmson , 1922, Swedish, 1866-1928
The last scandal for today–the Kristi Noem story. The story was originally in the Daily Mail, but it’s behind a paywall.
The Independent: Kristi Noem’s husband offers cryptic three-word answer to report that he talked about leaving wife and becoming a woman.
Kristi Noem’s husband, Bryon Noem, has pushed back on a report that he insulted his wife in phone calls and online messages with a dominatrix and expressed a desire to become a woman.
Bryon Noem told The Independent the claims in the report were “not all true.” He did not elaborate when asked for more information.
The 56-year-old was reported to have been in an on-off relationship online with Shy Sotomayor, a 30-year-old sex worker known as Raelynn Riley, since 2016, she claimed in an interview with the Daily Mail, published Friday.
It is the latest in a series of exposés on the husband of the recently ousted Homeland Security Secretary, who has been keeping a low profile since the story broke last week.
Sotomayor shared recordings of phone calls and screenshots of messages she said she exchanged with Bryon Noem, where he said she was “so much better” than his wife. He also expressed wanting to transition to become a woman, the messages showed.
In one recent message, the South Dakota insurance boss said he wanted to change his name to Crystal “so bad,” and that he wanted plastic surgery. “I want to be your trans bimbo b****,” the messages showed.
The outlet linked Bryon Noem’s telephone number to the messages with Sotomayor, and it also corresponded to an email address under the pseudonym “Chrystalballz666.”
The messages reportedly from Bryon Noem appear in stark contrast to Kristi Noem’s opposition to transgender rights. As South Dakota governor, she signed an exclusionary bill to ban surgical and non-surgical gender-affirming treatments for children in the state, and barred transgender girls and women from playing on women’s sports teams.
Read the rest at The Independent.
There’s no news on the Iran talks yet, so I’ll end this with two disturbing Iran stories:
The New York Times: Iran Unable to Find Mines It Planted in Strait of Hormuz, U.S. Says.
Iran has been unable to open the Strait of Hormuz to more shipping traffic because it cannot locate all of the mines it laid in the waterway and lacks the capability to remove them, according to U.S. officials.
The development is one reason Iran has not been able to quickly comply with the Trump administration’s admonitions to let more traffic pass through the strait. It is also potentially a complicating factor as Iranian negotiators and a U.S. delegation led by Vice President JD Vance meet in Pakistan this weekend for peace talks.
Woman with a cat, Pierre Bonnard
Iran used small boats to mine the strait last month, soon after the United States and Israel began their war against the country. The mines, plus the threat of Iranian drone and missile attacks, slowed the number of oil tankers and other vessels passing through the strait to a trickle, driving up energy prices and providing Iran with its best leverage in the war.
Iran left a path through the strait open, allowing ships that pay a toll to pass through.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has issued warnings that ships could collide with sea mines, and semiofficial news organizations have published charts showing safe routes.
Those routes are limited in large part because Iran mined the strait haphazardly, U.S. officials said. It is not clear that Iran recorded where it put every mine. And even when the location was recorded, some mines were placed in a way that allowed them to drift or move, according to the officials.
As with land mines, removing nautical mines is far more difficult than placing them. The U.S. military lacks robust mine removal capabilities, relying on littoral combat ships equipped with mine sweeping capabilities. Iran also does not have the capability of quickly removing mines, even the ones it planted.
Raw Story: Hegseth’s key Iran claim collapses as US intel finds Iran has thousands of missiles.
One of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s main defenses of the U.S. decision to negotiate a controversial ceasefire with Iran is that its ballistic missile program has been “functionally destroyed.”
But that claim has now been shot down by U.S. intelligence assessments, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
“Iran still has thousands of ballistic missiles in its arsenal that it could use by retrieving launchers from underground storage areas, according to American officials familiar with U.S. intelligence assessments,” said the report. “The assessments come as the U.S. is working to cement a cease-fire that would fully open the Strait of Hormuz and also insulate Iran, American troops and states in the region from further attacks. Some American officials said they are concerned that Iran will use the break in fighting to reconstitute some of its missile arsenal.”
The conflict has taken a toll on Iran, with around half of its missile stockpile lost, the assessment found — but “it retains thousands of medium- and short-range ballistic missiles that could be pulled out of hiding or retrieved from underground sites, said U.S. and Israeli officials.”
This comes as even a number of Republican and conservative analysts are crying foul about the terms of the ceasefire, which appear one-sidedly in favor of Iran.
That’s it for me today. I guess it’s okay to focus on salacious stuff on the weekend. Happy Caturday!
#AmandaUngaro #ArtemisII #BryonNoem #catArt #caturday #DonaldTrump #EpsteinFiles #EricSwalwell #IranWar #IranSBallisticMissles #JeffreyEpstein #KristiNoem #MelaniaTrump #mines #NASA #PaoloZampolli #politicalScandals #rape #sexualAssault #StraitOfHormuz -
Sounds dirty, doesn’t it, getting your palimpsest on? In fact, it’s the broadest sort of euphemism for swearing. It’s not total absence of profanity from a text or conversation. Profanity is there, legible in occasional traces despite the better-behaved language that effaces it. When your grandmother says she never swears, I call bullshit. When authors avoid profanity but acknowledge that their characters (including a narrator) swear just beyond our hearing, I call bullshit, too. What motivates this caution but politeness that simultaneously evades and acknowledges the way we speak now? Great literature eschews bad language — so goes the conventional wisdom — but the swearing is there anyway, because the literature is written and read by polite people who swear. Palimpsestual profanity shapes attitudes towards proper speech, that is, speech that’s proper in a fictional setting.
You can see how palimpsestual profanity works in the following remark by the Honourable Bertram Wilberforce Wooster about confronting Thomas, an ill-mannered child, in P. G. Wodehouse’s Very Good, Jeeves! (1930):
“Well young Thos,” I said. “So there you are. You’re getting as fat as a pig.” It seemed as good an opening as any other. Experience had taught me that if there was a subject on which he was unlikely to accept persiflage in a spirit of amused geniality it was this matter of his bulging tum. On the last occasion when I made a remark of this nature, he had replied to me, child though he was, in terms which I would have been proud to have had in my own vocabulary.
Bertie doesn’t employ profanity himself, nor does he report Thomas’ profanity; instead, he reports that there was admirable profanity involved, profanity Bertie should learn and use, just not in P. G. Wodehouse’s fiction. So, don’t tell me that the Hons of mid-twentieth-century England didn’t swear, nor that the warm, stimulating bee-hum of a walk through the gardens of a stately house might not be punctuated with profanities. You won’t read it, but you are invited to imagine the place of profanity in manorial life.
Boys learn bad language at school, of course, so we can count on them to try it out on their relatives, friends, and guests. But contrary to our stereotypes of era and class, well-bred women swear, too. Rosie Little, wife of Bertie’s more or less lifelong more or less friend, Bingo Little, is a case in point: “A few years previously,” Bertie tells us, “when my Aunt Dahlia had stolen [Rosie’s] French cook, Anatole, she had called Aunt Dahlia some names in my presence which had impressed me profoundly.” Rosie is a novelist, and we know how much writers like to use all the words they know, except that, ironically, Wodehouse and Bertie both know bad words but won’t use them, preferring to imply their use by others, that is, justifying the phenomenon of swearing without actually doing swearing.
Swearing isn’t reserved for schoolboy potty-mouths or modern romance novelists, as Bertie acknowledges in Right Ho, Jeeves! (1934):
I suppose it was that word “upset” that touched Aunt Dahlia off. Experience had taught her what happened when Anatole [yes, the very same cuisinartist] got upset. I had always known her as a woman who was quite active on her pins, but I had never suspected her of being capable of the magnificent burst of speed which she now showed. Pausing merely to get a rich hunting-field expletive off her chest, she was out of the room and making for the stairs before I could swallow a sliver of — I think — banana.
Okay, maybe your grandmother the dowager doesn’t swear, but your aunt does, and the profanity never specified is drenched with the mud and sweat and class and privilege of the hunt, so is nothing that Bertie hasn’t heard before, exhilarating though it is to hear it forcefully expelled from Aunt Dahlia’s diaphragm.
Of course, Wodehouse couldn’t have sold copies of a sweary Wooster and Jeeves book, anyway, because profanity was considered obscenity in the early and mid-twentieth century, and shipping profanity in the form of books or anything else violated laws, in the United States, the Comstock Act. Right Ho, Jeeves! was published in the same year as Allen Walker Read’s article titled “An Obscenity Symbol” (in the journal American Speech), in which the symbol in question, the very word fuck, never appears in print. Indeed, the article is one big euphemism, an example of palimpsestual scholarship. But even had he been allowed to publish profanity, Wodehouse would have passed the opportunity by, because Bertie Wooster, by his own admission, is not an especially sweary guy. We couldn’t bear Bertie rushing into a room saying, “What the fuck?” rather than his characteristic “What, what what?” There’s profanity in the air in the Wooster world, urban and rural, but filtered by Bertie’s non-sweary perspective, it’s both there and not there.
Others who hide profanity underneath the surface of their stories have less excuse, and this opens up the question of motive: why hide what is everywhere around us? Last summer I sprained my ankle badly and relocated to the first floor of our house, shifting between work at the dining room table and resting my ankle while sitting in my comfortable chair in the front room. Weeks off one’s pins provides an opportunity to read a long work for which one usually hasn’t time, so I piled the twelve volumes of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time next to the chair and read them through, all 2,998 pages in my four-volume University of Chicago Press omnibus edition. It’s written in a style that resists profanity, but I’m someone always on the lookout for it, so I couldn’t help but notice, and not for the first time, how infrequently (and unrealistically) one encounters profanity in those pages.
A bit of profanity surfaces in The Valley of Bones (1964). It’s inevitable there — as a war novel, it wouldn’t be credible without some acknowledgment of strong language. Thus, Dicky Umfraville, ne’er do well, says of Commander Buster Foxe, the “polo-playing sailor”: “‘Buster’s a contemporary of mine […] a son-of-a-bitch in the top class. I’ve never told you my life story, have I?’” After six volumes of polite society, it’s refreshing to hear someone say what he really thinks, and readers may well hope to hear more of Dicky’s salty life story, but the gravity of the rest of the writing pulls us back into the chaste main narrative.
The Valley of Bones also includes a dirty story, a Powellian rarity. Welsh soldiers jokingly discuss their war experience:
When the balloon was in the sky, the air began to leak something terrible out of it, it did, and Dai was frightened, so frightened Dai was, and Dai said to Shoni, Look you, Shoni, this balloon is not safe at all, and the air is leaking out of it terrible, we shall have to jump for it, and Shoni said to Dai, But, Dai, what about the women, and Dai said, oh, fook the women, and Shoni said, But have we time?
The fuck here might draw even more attention were it not presented as a dialectal euphemism, much like Irish feck and similarly coy, not in the soldiers’ speech, but in Powell’s less vernacular narrative style. Having decided to present his Welshmen as naturally sweary, but unwilling to pile profanity on profanity, Powell manages to suggest two uses of fuck simultaneously in the punchline. Of course, the profanity is indirect, not in the narrative voice, but supposedly observed by the narrator.
In Powell’s fictional world, women swear as much as soldiers. In the final volume of the series, Hearing Secret Harmonies (1975), the wife of a corporate director comments on her recent reading: “I believe I’ve read something by Ada Leintwardine — The Bitch — The Bitches — something like that. I know bitches came into the title.” Partly, we can attribute this freedom with profanity to the difference between books written and read in 1964 and 1975, respectively. Partly, too, we might see this as women’s profanity about or even against women, which is probably more acceptable than men disparaging women with a word like bitch, or even Dicky Umfraville’s deploying it against another man.
Once or twice in Powell’s novels, women’s profanity is flamboyant, yet deflected by narrative details. In A Buyer’s Market (1952), we’re introduced to Milly Andriadis, a late-night hostess. “Mrs. Andriadis let go my arm, and ran swiftly towards the door, which she wrenched open violently, just in time to see a taxi drive away from the front of the house. She made use of an expletive that I had never before — in those distant days — heard a woman employ. The phrase left no doubt in the mind that she was extremely provoked.” Class is an issue of course, but the Honorables, once you get to know them, seem likely swearers, too. Note that, when it comes to representing class in the books, the only hard swears belong to the lower social strata — soldiers and hostesses — and the upper classes aren’t exposed for the swearers they really are.
Powell, though palimpsestual, was no prude. Still, his public profanity was usually indirect. In his memoirs, To Keep the Ball Rolling (I own the abridged edition of 1983), he delights in telling sweary stories about Maurice Bowra, long Warden of Wadham College and finally Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford. “The Bowra world was one in which there must be no uncertainty. A clearcut decision had to be made about everything and everybody — good, bad — desirable, undesirable — nice man, shit of hell,” the shit Powell’s own yet “really” Bowra’s. Thus, “Bowra always refer[ed] to Kolkhorst as ‘Kunthorse.’” Why is it that so many powerful people have to degrade others with bad language? It’s all part of describing the crusty behavior of the upper crust.
Powell approaches profanity with restraint — he’s not for all swearing all the time — but he can’t resist telling on Bowra, who apparently swore unreservedly, when he and the Powells met “on one of these Hellenic Cruises”:
Four letter words have been rather overdone of late years, but, when the ex-Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, president of the British Academy, holder of innumerable honorific degrees and international laurels, expressed his feelings (and the feelings of all of us), it was intensely funny. “Fuck!” The monosyllable must have carried to the African Coast.
A great moment in swearing, indeed, as regards Bowra but also in the narrative maneuver that justifies printing the word without it sticking to the author. No life or narrative without swearing, but, simultaneously, no narratological responsibility taken for the swearing.
In this attitude and maneuver, Powell was in step with other English writers of his time. Late in To Keep the Ball Rolling, Powell introduces his friendship with Kingsley Amis, the novelist, poet, critic, and curmudgeon. Amis had plenty of advice for writers, some of which he wrote into his posthumously published The King’s English: A Guide to Modern Usage (1997). He devoted three pages to “four-letter words” and advised “Use them sparingly […] for special effect only.” He thought “They may be used in dialogue,” and “An attempt at humour will often justify their appearance. The power of making one male character say to another, ‘She’s a fucky nuck case’ is not one to be lightly surrendered.” In Stanley and the Women (1984), Amis did not surrender it.
Amis, then, would support Powell’s account of the Welsh soldiers’ dirty dialogue, but even like minds disagree on the degree of palimpsest required in good style. Amis insisted that “Even in low farce, never use any [four-letter word] in its original or basic meaning unless perhaps to indicate that a character is some kind of pompous buffoon or other undesirable. Even straightforward excretory ones are tricky.” But Powell’s anecdote of the Welsh fookers is not farcical but affectionate. Does the punning in that passage sufficiently cover fook’s basic meaning? I venture not — rather, it calls attention to basic fooking while hiding beneath the pun. Mid-twentieth century English novelists found many ways to write over profanity with gentility, but, if only palimpsestually, the profanity is there for our reading pleasure.
https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2024/02/11/palimpsestual-profanity/
#ADanceToTheMusicOfTime #AnthonyPowell #BertieWooster #books #humor #jeeves #KinglseyAmis #MauriceBowra #PGWodehouse #ToKeepTheBallRolling
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CW: Food advice
Mrs Bread has decided she wants tempeh to be part of our lives. So she's been talking about it for months and has bought some which I apparently need to cook today. I've tried tempeh twice and didn't like it at all. I thought it would work like tofu but doesn't seem to. I wondered if anyone had any experience with tempeh and might be able to give some pointers? THANK YOU YOU RUDDY LEGENDS. 🌱
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Mrs. Endicott's Splendid Adventure: A Novel "Maybe we all build up walls around us as a defense, so we can’t be hurt" Sale: $5.99 to $2.99 by Rhys Bowen Rating: 4.6/5 (30,659 Reviews) #historical #novel #wwii #friendship #romance #booksky #books #travel #women #resilience
Mrs. Endicott's Splendid Adven... -
Mrs. Endicott's Splendid Adventure: A Novel "Maybe we all build up walls around us as a defense, so we can’t be hurt" Sale: $5.99 to $2.99 by Rhys Bowen Rating: 4.6/5 (30,659 Reviews) #historical #novel #wwii #friendship #romance #booksky #books #travel #women #resilience
Mrs. Endicott's Splendid Adven... -
Mrs. Endicott's Splendid Adventure: A Novel "Maybe we all build up walls around us as a defense, so we can’t be hurt" Sale: $5.99 to $2.99 by Rhys Bowen Rating: 4.6/5 (30,659 Reviews) #historical #novel #wwii #friendship #romance #booksky #books #travel #women #resilience
Mrs. Endicott's Splendid Adven... -
Mrs. Endicott's Splendid Adventure: A Novel "Maybe we all build up walls around us as a defense, so we can’t be hurt" Sale: $5.99 to $2.99 by Rhys Bowen Rating: 4.6/5 (30,659 Reviews) #historical #novel #wwii #friendship #romance #booksky #books #travel #women #resilience
Mrs. Endicott's Splendid Adven... -
“Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence.”
#OnThisDay, 14 May 1925, Virginia Woolf publishes Mrs Dalloway.
#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #LiteraryWomen #Histodons(Affiliate link: https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15351/9781784870867)
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“Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence.”
#OnThisDay, 14 May 1925, Virginia Woolf publishes Mrs Dalloway.
#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #LiteraryWomen #Histodons(Affiliate link: https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15351/9781784870867)
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“Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence.”
#OnThisDay, 14 May 1925, Virginia Woolf publishes Mrs Dalloway.
#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #LiteraryWomen #Histodons(Affiliate link: https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15351/9781784870867)
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“Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence.”
#OnThisDay, 14 May 1925, Virginia Woolf publishes Mrs Dalloway.
#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #LiteraryWomen #Histodons(Affiliate link: https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15351/9781784870867)
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Mrs. Nugent was the Johnson's next door neighbour, and known to be unreasonable on subjects like Madonna played at full volume at 3 a.m.
Terry Pratchett, Johnny and the Dead
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Mrs. Nugent was the Johnson's next door neighbour, and known to be unreasonable on subjects like Madonna played at full volume at 3 a.m.
Terry Pratchett, Johnny and the Dead
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Mrs. Nugent was the Johnson's next door neighbour, and known to be unreasonable on subjects like Madonna played at full volume at 3 a.m.
Terry Pratchett, Johnny and the Dead
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Mrs. Nugent was the Johnson's next door neighbour, and known to be unreasonable on subjects like Madonna played at full volume at 3 a.m.
Terry Pratchett, Johnny and the Dead
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Mrs. Nugent was the Johnson's next door neighbour, and known to be unreasonable on subjects like Madonna played at full volume at 3 a.m.
Terry Pratchett, Johnny and the Dead
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Mrs. H needs some snacks for her class! Help her out if you can, and remember sharing is caring! 🥰🥰 #SheShed
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:7rztsjyksn3xdjjr6ygsqldr/post/3mlql3huumk2p -
Mrs Peachment is vile. #TVMysteries 💀 #GeorgeGently
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Mrs Doubtfire
Watched tonight because my daughter had never seen it. This movie hasn’t aged very well, but it is good for a few laugh out loud moments. 3½ stars out of 5
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creates semantic nodes and clusters #MRS #DOUBTFIRE advanced-search.aepiot.ro/advanced-sea... #TOMM #MOORE advanced-search.allgraph.ro/advanced-sea... Do you like aéPiot semantics? Donate to the aéPiot semantic platform: www.paypal.com/donate?busin...
MultiSearch Tag Explorer -
creates semantic nodes and clusters #MRS #DOUBTFIRE advanced-search.aepiot.ro/advanced-sea... #TOMM #MOORE advanced-search.allgraph.ro/advanced-sea... Do you like aéPiot semantics? Donate to the aéPiot semantic platform: www.paypal.com/donate?busin...
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