Amid all the speculation about why Melania Trump made her extraordinary statement to the press on Thursday, one seems to have more substance than the rest, and that is that it was a preemptive attempt to get ahead of a damaging story that would come out soon. And now we have a plausible candidate for that theory. (Thanks to anat and jenorafeuer in the comments to yesterday’s post for sending me down this rabbit hole!)

It concerns a Brazilian model named Amanda Ungaro who had been friends with Melania for over two decades, and a man named Paolo Zampolli, a close friend of the Trumps who was appointed by him as an ambassador and who claims that he was the one who introduced the Trumps to each other,

Ungaro, meanwhile, told the Times that she was a 17-year-old model when she arrived in New York in 2002 after flying on Epstein’s plane from Paris with her French agent. She never saw Epstein again but met Zampolli later that year and began a two-decade romantic relationship with him beginning when she was 19, Zampolli told the Times.

In 2023, after Zampolli made headlines for explicit text messages he allegedly sent to a sex worker, Ungaro ended the relationship, moved to Florida and married a doctor from Brazil. The former couple then became mired in a custody battle for their 15-year-old son before Ungaro and her husband were arrested in June.

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It should be obvious to anyone by now that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a monster. His ongoing genocide in Gaza, his brutal suppression of Palestinians in the West Bank and condoning of settler violence, his attacks on Iranian civilians, and now his indiscriminate and widespread bombing of Lebanon that have killed a huge number of civilians and left many others homeless and otherwise destitute reveals a man who has absolutely no conscience.

Israel’s devastating bombardment of Lebanon in the hours after a US-Iranian ceasefire was announced has been widely condemned amid global efforts to salvage the truce.

More than 200 people were killed by Israeli bombing, including strikes with heavy munitions on densely populated areas, which drew outrage from the International Committee of the Red Cross and other international humanitarian organisations.

In Trump, he has finally found a US president who was willing to remove even the mildest restraints that former presidents placed on Israel and so his murderous impulses are now unchecked and revealed for all the world to see.

That he is a war criminal goes without saying. The amount of blood he has on his hands would give a normal person nightmares.
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And so Trump has backed off from his deranged genocidal threats against Iran that would and should surely constitute war crimes that alarmed even some of his supporters. He, as usual, claims success that he got a ceasefire but it is not at all clear what he got. Iran has issued a 10-point plan for a ceasefire not only contains many things that the US had rejected previously, but demands new ones.

Danny Citrinowicz, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council, has offered a sobering assessment of the outcome of America’s five week war, saying the conflict was launched with “sweeping promises: regime change in Iran, the dismantling of its missile and nuclear programs, and preventing it from threatening the Strait of Hormuz.”
“And where are we now?” he asks.
The regime is still firmly in power.
Its missile capabilities are damaged still intact
It still holds roughly 440 kg of uranium enriched to 60%.
And in return?
A ‘controlled’ reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, something that wasn’t even truly closed to begin with.
Let’s be honest: this is not a strategic victory.”

Observers are suggesting that Trump was desperate for an exit ramp after his blustering painted him into a corner and so seized on this as a way out, until the next time he feels like issuing an apocalyptic threat.

So how and why did Trump blunder into this war. The New York Times had a long article detailing how Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed Trump into attacking Iran during a meeting at the White House on February 11, assuring him that it would be easy to topple the Iranian leadership and replace it with one friendly to the US,
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Back in the days of the Vietnam war, there came to be something known as the Five O’Clock Follies, a term derisively used by reporters attending the daily briefings by the military where they would be told how wonderfully everything was going and how the enemy was bring crushed, when the reporters knew full well that the US was bogged down in a never-ending war that was causing many US casualties. That hiding of the truth recurred during the Iraq war as well and is surfacing now with Iran. It seems to be an inevitable consequence when wars drag on much longer than anticipated and casualties mount.

American presidents, especially in their second terms when things are not going well for therm, love to go to war. It his usually a sure-fire way of shoring up public support and wrapping themselves up with patriotic fervor. But that only works if the wars are short-lived or they do not have many casualties. People seem to be willing to accept massive death and destruction of ordinary people at the receiving end of US weaponry, however unjustified, but get upset when US troops start experiencing casualties. So nowadays presidents use aerial warfare with bombing campaigns and drone strikes, forfeiting the need to put in ground troops with all its risks.

In the current war against Iran, we mainly hear reports of what the US has done to Iran and very little about the retaliation. Given that we are now entering the sixth week and also given how much Trump lies about everything, it should be no surprise that The Intercept reports that the administration is hiding the true number of casualties.
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The Labour Party came into power in the UK in July 2024 in a landslide win that saw them win 411 seats out of 650, propelled by a public that was fed up with 14 years of Conservative rule. The problem was that Keir Starmer, now the prime minister of the UK, campaigned on bland statements instead of specifics and once in power, abandoned many of the issues that were sought by the party base, hewing to a more rightward direction instead. That, coupled with incompetence and poor choice of people appointed to key positions, resulted in his popularity quickly dissipating.

Just recently, he was in deeper trouble. The fiasco over his appointment of Jeffrey Epstein’s close buddy Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US and the forced resignation of his chief of staff had raised serious questions about his judgment. Then in late February, the party suffered a disastrous defeat at a by-election where the Green Party won a seat that had been comfortably Labour.

Hannah Spencer, a local plumber and Green party councillor, was elected as the party’s first MP in northern England after overturning Labour’s 13,000-vote majority.

Labour came third in the tightly contested race, 5,616 votes behind the Greens on 14,980 votes, while Reform UK finished second with 10,578 votes. The result represents a 25.4 percentage point drop in Labour’s share of the vote compared with 2024.

The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats lost their deposits as they won fewer than 5% of the votes, with both under 2%. The Greens’ victory in a Labour stronghold, its first ever in a Westminster byelection, establishes the party as a serious political force and a credible anti-Reform alternative.

It will deepen concerns among Labour MPs that Starmer’s party is haemorrhaging voters on the left in an effort to thwart the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform.

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Given her almost cartoonish expressions of support for Trump, why was Pam Bondi fired as attorney general? She had been aware that there were people who had Trump’s ear who had been pushing for her ouster but she thought that she could weather the storm or that at least he would give her a graceful way to exist, say over the next few months. But as is the case with Trump, loyalty for him is a one-way street, and he summarily fired her yesterday.

The New York Times reports that her main problem was that she had failed to secure convictions against people that Trump had wanted prosecuted, even though the cases against them were weak, so that even grand juries, usually so accommodating of prosector’s request to return indictments, refused to go along. But Trump doesn’t care if the people he appoints are given impossible tasks. For him, a failure is a failure, and even a sign of disloyalty to him.
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Even being an ultra-loyalist brown-noser wasn’t enough for attorney general Pam Bondi to keep her job as attorney general because Trump just fired her. She continued her sycophancy even after her ignominious ouster, saying that she will continue fighting for Trump in the private sector. This is understandable since she will be seeking a pardon for any and all transgressions committed by her.

So what caused her demise? After all, she threw a major tantrum at congressional hearings, insulted members of the oversight panel, rescinded prosecution of Trump allies, purged career attorneys who were deemed to be insufficiently cult-like, went after his foes, and praised Trump to the skies at every opportunity. All this would seem to be the kinds of things that would endear her to her narcissistic boss. Some of her appointees as US attorneys were thrown out by judges as being unqualified or not properly appointed but that kind of incompetence seems normal for this chaotic administration. Here is a timeline of her greatest hits during her time in office.
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