Tag: news

Sex trafficker to the stars Jeffrey Epstein is denied bail:

Multimillionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein was denied bail Thursday pending trial on child sex-trafficking charges.

“Starting with my conclusions, the government’s application for continued remand is hereby granted and the defense’s application for pretrial release is respectfully hereby denied,” Manhattan federal Judge Richard Berman said at the start of a hotly anticipated hearing.

“The government has established danger to others and to the community by clear and convincing evidence, and the government has established a risk of flight by a preponderance of evidence.”

It’s a sign that they might actually be serious. We won’t know, of course, until more arrests of the rich and famous start taking place. Which may be coming sooner than anyone thinks, if Vanity Fair has it right:

“There were other business associates of Mr. Epstein’s who engaged in improper sexual misconduct at one or more of his homes. We do know that,” said Brad Edwards, a lawyer for Courtney Wild, one of the Epstein accusers who gave emotional testimony at Epstein’s bail hearing. “In due time the names are going to start coming out.” (Attorneys for Epstein did not respond to a request for comment.)

Likely within days, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit will release almost 2,000 pages of documents that could reveal sexual abuse by “numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known prime minister, and other world leaders,” according to the three-judge panel’s ruling. The documents were filed during a civil defamation lawsuit brought by Epstein accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre, a former Mar-a-Lago locker-room attendant, against Epstein’s former girlfriend and alleged madam, Ghislaine Maxwell. “Nobody who was around Epstein a lot is going to have an easy time now. It’s all going to come out,” said Giuffre’s lawyer David Boies. Another person involved with litigation against Epstein told me: “It’s going to be staggering, the amount of names. It’s going to be contagion numbers.”

Shine the light on them. All of them.

Tommy Robinson is found guilty of contempt of court:

Tommy Robinson could be sent back to jail after he was again found in contempt of court today. Robinson was found to have broken the law by ‘aggressively confronting and filming’ defendants in a criminal trial and posting the footage on social media, in breach of a reporting ban, outside Leeds Crown Court in May 2018.

Following a long-running legal back-and-forth, the case was settled at the Old Bailey today, where a large crowd of Robinson’s fans turned nasty after the verdict.

As news of the judges’ ruling trickled through, a group of his supporters ran at barriers sectioning off police from the public, throwing missiles and chanting ‘shame on you’.

Robinson was previously jailed for the offence, but freed on appeal.

He’ll now have to wait to see whether he’ll be sent back to prison or be allowed to keep his freedom having already served two months of a 13-month sentence.

Today’s verdict means Robinson will return to prison if he is given a sentence of four months or more when he returns to court later this month. Anything less than that and he will have already served half the custodial period.

This strikes me as more gatekeeping kabuki than anything else. Tommy Robinson is clearly not a genuine nationalist or someone I would consider it meaningful to support. He’s very nearly as neoclownish as Jordan Peterson.

Two former state senators, both Republicans, were killed in recent days:

Lawmakers in Arkansas and Oklahoma are mourning the loss of two former state senators who were found dead in their homes within a span of two days.

In Arkansas, this week’s fatal shooting of former Republican state Sen. Linda Collins-Smith is being investigated as a homicide, authorities said.

In Oklahoma, former state Sen. Jonathan Nichols was found dead from a gunshot in his home in Norman, about 20 miles from Oklahoma City, according to police.

It could be a coincidence, of course. But it probably isn’t.

Amazing. Another bit of good news concerning Notre Dame: all three Rose Windows survived:

Haunting new photos of Notre Dame’s interior reveal how it survived the inferno after it was revealed three of its iconic Rose Windows escaped damage, as detectives probe the renovation work which may have led to the blaze.

The pictures revealed the golden crucifix and altar were preserved amongst the smouldering rubble after the roof was destroyed by Monday night’s fire.

Three ‘irreplaceable’ Rose Windows, which date to the 13th century and were last night feared to have melted or exploded, were intact.

An apt metaphor for the current state of the West: Notre Dame is on fire.

Gene Wolfe, author of more than 30 books including classics like The Book of The New Sun, has died at the age of 87.

I spoke with him once. He was friendly, polite, and vastly amused by the idea that we were publishing a book of literary analysis of everything he ever wrote. He asked who the author was, and when I told him, he said, “But I know him! He never struck me as a madman!”

Requiescat in pace.

The rumors last week were correct. Julian Assange has been expelled from the Ecuadorian embassy and arrested by the UK police:

Julian Assange has been arrested by British police today after Ecuador withdrew his political asylum seven years after he was given refuge by the country. The Wikileaks founder was dragged out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in handcuffs by a large group of seven Metropolitan Police officers as stunned supporters and protesters watched on in central London.

He is currently in police custody and is set to appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court ‘as soon as possible’.

Ecuador’s president Lenin Moreno said the decision to withdraw Assange’s asylum status came after the ‘repeated violations to international conventions and daily-life protocols’ and his ‘discourteous and aggressive behaviour’. Moreno added that he had asked Britain to guarantee that Assange would not be extradited to a country where he could face torture or the death penalty.

Moments after the arrest, during which Assange held on to a Gore Vidal book on the history of the national security state, WikiLeaks said Ecuador had acted illegally and ‘in violation of international law’. Assange, 47, has not left Ecuador’s diplomatic soil for seven years amid fears he would be arrested and extradited for publishing thousands of classified military and diplomatic cables.

Obviously Ecuador has the right to expel anyone it wants from its embassy. But why now? And what UK law has Assange violated to justify his arrest?

It appears those dreaded white supremacist eco-fascists have struck again, this time in Utrecht, Holland:

A gunman has opened fire inside a tram and at several other locations in the Dutch city of Utrecht, authorities say.

Several people have been injured and one is feared to have died, media reports say.

Police say the gunman is still at large. Trains and trams have stopped running and schools have been asked to keep their doors closed.

Counter-terror police reportedly say the shooting “appears to be a terrorist attack”.

In response, the Netherland Antilles have announced new gun control legislation….

UPDATE: Dutch police are reporting that the white supremacist eco-fascist responsible for the shootings is a Turk.

When reality interferes with the narrative, it’s reality that must make way:

A Democrat with a racist past? That fact might be too far from the mainstream line for CNN, so they labeled Virginia Governor Ralph Northam a ‘Republican’ when reporting on his apology for a past racist photo.

Northam is under pressure from both Democrats and Republicans to resign after admitting that he is one of two men that appeared in an old photograph, one in blackface and the other dressed in a KKK robe. He apologized for the photo, unearthed from a 1984 school yearbook this week, saying that it did not reflect the person he is today, and promised to work to regain the public’s trust, but did not indicate any intention to leave office.

When the story was covered on Anderson Cooper’s show on CNN Friday night, the governor’s name was labeled with the letter ‘R’ – which stands for ‘Republican’.

This sort of thing is why I don’t ever watch ABCNNBCBS Fake News. If they’re misrepresenting the most easily verified facts, what else are they lying about?

The God-Emperor has spoken:

President Trump has canceled the White House holiday party for the media, making the decades-old tradition a victim of his increasingly contentious relationship with major news organizations. The annual Christmas-season gathering was a significant perk for those covering the White House, as well as other Washington reporters, anchors and commentators, and New York media executives would regularly fly in for the occasion. At its peak, the invitation-only soirees grew so large that there were two back-to-back events, one for broadcast outlets and one for print organizations.

Bravo. Despite the various disappointments to date, Donald Trump still easily the best President since Calvin Coolidge. Let them celebrate whatever fake holidays it is they pretend to celebrate on their own.

I don’t do “holiday” parties myself. We celebrate Christmas.

Stan Lee (1922-2018)

We’re told an ambulance rushed to Lee’s Hollywood Hills home early Monday morning and he was rushed to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. We’re told that’s where he died.