I have been traveling a lot since Wednesday and so have not been blogging and only occasionally catching up with news. This sporadic blogging will continue until I return home.

When I found time to catch up recent events, the big news politically was of course Ted Cruz’s extraordinary speech at the Republican National Convention where he not only refrained from endorsing Donald Trump, he went so far as to urge people to ‘vote their conscience’. By itself, voting one’s conscience is what anyone should do in any election so it should not be controversial. But in this context, it was clearly meant to suggest that people not vote for Trump, a curious call at an event that was meant to be a springboard to propel the party candidate towards the general election.
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We have entered day two of the Republican convention and so far things have been peaceful, at least outside the convention hall. Inside the basic message of the first day in the speeches was that we are all going to die horrible deaths unless Donald Trump is elected president, and that Hillary Clinton should be in jail because she is directly responsible for the deaths in Benghazi.
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The attempted coup in Turkey has failed and the government there has blamed the uprising on a cleric who lives in a rural retreat in Pennsylvania. They have demanded that the US hand the cleric over to them.
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Tony Schwartz was the ghostwriter for Donald Trump’s 1987 book The Art of the Deal that Trump touts as evidence of his ability to make deals that he thinks is the key to why he would make a great president. That process threw Schwartz into close and extended contact with Trump. He has viewed with alarm in the past year Trump’s rise in politics and has felt guilty for his own role in painting him in a better light than he deserved and now has decided to describe the person he really saw.
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Time magazine reports in great detail on all the last-minute maneuvering that went on before the Twitter announcement by Donald Trump of his selection of Mike Pence and the latter’s Tweet of acceptance, and the process was even more chaotic than previously suggested.
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As the Republican convention gets underway tomorrow in Cleveland and the Democrats the following week in Philadelphia, expect to see a lot of images of elephants and donkeys during the two events. In Sri Lankan politics, all political parties have an associated symbol that they choose for themselves. The symbols can be animals or inanimate items like a chair. These are prominently displayed at all party functions and are even present on ballot papers next to the party candidate’s name. This serves a practical purpose for voters who might be illiterate because they can identify whom to vote for by the symbol alone.
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It now turns out that the initial speculation that Donald Trump’s botched announcement of Indiana governor Mike Pence as his running was due to him not being sure he wanted him seems to be correct. Usually, such an announcement is made with great fanfare in the hope of gaining positive coverage for the ticket. But yesterday Trump made the choice on Twitter and Pence accepted the same way, a low-budget affair if there ever was one, just the kind of thing Trump hates.
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