Early on the morning of Saturday, August 10th, 2019, billionaire investor Jeffrey Epstein was found unresponsive in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, New York, in an apparent suicide attempt. Paramedics were called and lifesaving measures were begun, but Epstein was pronounced dead about an hour later at a local hospital.
On the night of August 8-9, 1969, four members of the notorious Manson Family invaded a rented home in Los Angeles and brutally murdered five people. Not much by today’s standards, is it? But at the time, the crime created a sensation.
Part of the impact was generated by the celebrity of one of the victims, actress Sharon Tate, who had rented the home with her husband, director Roman Polanski, out of the country on a movie shoot at the time. Tate was eight and a half months pregnant with their child, who also lost its life. Cult leader Charles Manson had earlier instructed Tex Watson to go to the house and “totally destroy everyone in [it], as gruesome as you can”.
On Wednesday, July 24, 2019 former Special Counsel Robert Mueller testified before the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees regarding his 448 page Report on investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, Trump campaign officials collusion with Russia, and President Trump’s subsequent attempts to obstruct justice by curtailing or stopping the investigation. Mueller has been a frequent guest on Capitol Hill, testifying there many dozens of times in his thirty-plus year career.
At 12:05 PM BST on July 23rd, 2019, in London, England, it was announced that former UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson had been elected Leader of the Conservative Party, currently in power in Britain. Although the formality of outgoing PM Theresa May’s resignation to the Queen, and Her Majesty’s formal invitation to Johnson to form a government, will not occur until the following day, the vote effectively makes Boris Johnson the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
A former journalist, Member of Parliament, Mayor of London and Foreign Secretary, the blonde, mop-headed Johnson has often been compared to Donald Trump, predominantly for their trademark bluster and the incendiary nature of their statements, as well as a similarly anti-immigrant, isolationist, transactional political opportunist bent. A leader in the pro-Brexit movement, Johnson has vowed to fully sever ties with the European Union by the current October 31st deadline, come what may.
What may have been the most important moment in human history occurred 20 July 1969, when Man first set foot upon the moon. NASA’s Apollo space program, designed to accomplish this astounding feat of ingenuity, technology, mathematics and physics, was conceived during the Eisenhower administration, but not constituted until President John F. Kennedy’s stirring address to Congress in 1961, where he proposed a national goal, “before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”
In mid-July of 1969, as all eyes were riveted skyward on the Apollo 11 mission to land a man on the moon, a rather more tawdry drama was playing out here on planet Earth. Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, brother of slain American president John F. Kennedy and slain presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, became embroiled in a personal tragedy that would ultimately set the seal on the demise of his family’s aspirations to become a political dynasty.
On the night of July 18-19, 1969, under circumstances still not fully understood to this day, Kennedy was involved in a fatal crash of his car off the Dike Bridge on Chappaquiddick Island in Martha’s Vineyard, which took the life of 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne.
