On Tuesday, 17 April 2018, former First Lady Barbara Bush passed away peacefully at home at the age of 92, with her husband of 73 years at her side. A few days previously, Mrs. Bush, whose heart had been failing for years, refused further medical treatment and opted for comfort care.
On 11 April 2018, Paul Ryan, 54th Speaker of the US House of Representatives, announced that he would not run for reelection in November. Ryan is not resigning, and will serve out his full term, but his political power and especially his fundraising ability, will be substantially eroded. Ryan stated as his predominant motive for the move that he wanted to spend more time with his family, particularly his three teen-aged children.
Early on Monday, April 9th, the FBI raided the Manhattan office and hotel room of Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and confidante, Michael Cohen, known as Trump’s “fixer.” For a decade Cohen has acted as Trump’s consigliere, smoothing rough patches and paying out hush money to who knows how many of his sexual partners (Steve Bannon once characterized this as “hundreds”). Cohen, in short, knows where all the bodies are buried.
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has come under heavy fire recently for alleged abuses of taxpayer money in his extravagant, sometimes paranoid, expenditures. Pruitt maintains a vast security detail of more than 20, operating on an expanded 24-hour schedule, and overtime pay for several agents has already reached the yearly cap, just four months into 2018.
On Sunday evening, 25 March 2018, TV’s premiere news magazine, “60 Minutes”, aired an interview with Stephanie Clifford, AKA Stormy Daniels, the adult film star who alleges a 2006 affair with Donald Trump, and who was paid $130,000 by his lawyer, scant weeks before the 2016 election, to keep quiet about it.
The White House announced Thursday evening, March 8th that President Donald Trump had agreed to meet face to face for talks with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, tentatively in May 2018. The decision, apparently made on the spur of the moment without resort to advisors or experts, will, if adhered to, lead to the first personal meeting of an American President and a North Korean leader, since that state’s establishment in 1948.
