Nicola Sturgeon and her husband Peter Murrell were at one time Scotland’s premier power couple. Sturgeon became the leader of the Scottish National Party and the First Minister in 2014. Peter Murrell served as the chief executive officer of the SNP from 2001 until 2023. But all that came crumbling down. She surprisingly resigned in 2023, claiming ‘occupational burnout’, while he also resigned his position after being criticized for misleading the party.

But things got worse. Murrell was charged with embezzlement in 2024 for using SNP money to purchase various luxury items and last week admitted to stealing over £400,000 from party over a 12-year period and now faces a lengthy prison sentence.

[T]he lengthy indictment, which included a 119-page list of all the items he bought using the SNP’s money, disclosed that for much of that time he was pilfering the SNP’s accounts to acquire a remarkable series of luxury goods, while earning £107,000 as party chief executive.

The indictment noted that in addition to the £124,000 motorhome, which he left parked in his mother’s driveway in Fife, and the Jaguar I-Pace, he bought gardening equipment for the home he shared with Sturgeon, a £1,300 Miele coffee machine for their home, a telescope, a Sony PlayStation, Fortnum & Mason hampers and several Montblanc fountain pens.

The charge said he submitted false invoices, used the party’s credit cards, falsified the party’s accounts and in some cases claimed they were legitimate expenses to cover up his embezzlement. Several times he used credit cards taken out in the names of SNP staff who worked for him.
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Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker interviewed Danny Citrinowicz, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council and an expert on the Middle East, for his assessment of the current wars in the Middle East. Citrinowicz was brutal. He says that there is no way for Trump to avoid humiliating failure over the Iran war, that Benjamin Netanyahu is also in a bind, and that it is the Iranians, especially the hardliners, who are emerging from this war stronger than before, despite all the damage from the bombing.

We have to remember what happened on February 28th—that Israel and the United States launched this campaign to topple the regime. In fact, they ended up strengthening it. Opening the strait is not an achievement, since its closing was a by-product of the war itself. The Iranians are going to get some money, and sanctions relief may come after the deal is signed, too. If they don’t get money from this, they won’t do it. So, in that regard, what we’re facing right now is a war that may have been a tactical success for the U.S., but is a strategic failure.

But I think Trump is fed up with the current situation, and I think that he’s also afraid of escalation. He could escalate tomorrow, but I think he’s afraid of having boots on the ground. And I think he might be starting to understand that even escalation won’t change the strategic situation, because the Iranians are not going to capitulate. A blockade won’t do it; hitting energy facilities won’t do it; nothing will. And they’re ready to retaliate. So Trump didn’t have any other options besides this deal.
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July 4th of this year marks the 250th anniversary of the declaration of independence and I am bracing myself for an overwhelming effusion of patriotic fervor. Given that Trump loves to wrap himself up in the flag (all while he and his family and cronies are looting the country), we can be sure that event will be even more disgustingly over the top than if someone sane was president.

As an immigrant to the US, I was struck by how so many Americans talk about patriotism and view it as an unalloyed good. Some immigrants become hyper-patriotic, perhaps to show that they really do belong here.

It is not that the concept of patriotismwas foreign to us in Sri Lanka. But it was not as pervasive. I recall that at a time of economic hardship, people were urged in the name of patriotism to grow more food and learn to live with less. As part of this movement to create patriotic feelings, movie theaters started playing the national anthem at the start. I remember feeling the pressure to stand up for it even though such gestures seemed merely performative. I now regret having done so.

I later abandoned the idea of patriotism altogether when I saw how the government used it to promote agendas that served its own interests and not those of the people at large. I now despise the entire concept of patriotism (and have written so many times in the past). I totally agree with Leo Tolstoy who wrote the following:
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Tulsi Gabbard is the director of national intelligence, tasked with overseeing the many intelligence agencies in the US. Although she tried desperately to suck up to Trump when it became clear that he was not happy with her for some reason, it was not enough for her to keep her job and today Trump fired her. You can read the twists and turns of her weird political journey here, where, like so many others, she sacrificed what she said were her strong principles in order to kowtow to Trump.

As usual, this kind of news is released on a Friday evening in the hope that most people will not be paying attention.

The White House forced Gabbard to resign, the Reuters news agency reported, citing a source familiar with the issue. Fox News was first to report Gabbard’s exit, citing her husband’s cancer diagnosis.

Trump was asking cabinet members last month whether he should replace Gabbard, according to two people briefed on the discussions.
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Gabbard already seemed marginalized last June, when Trump endorsed Israel’s decision to attack Iran before the US joined the war by ordering the bombing of the Islamic regime’s nuclear facilities.

The decision was a public repudiation of Gabbard’s earlier testimony on Capitol Hill that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. Trump seemed to add insult to injury by declaring he did not care what she said, and dismissing her assessment as “wrong”.

Within weeks, Gabbard made a public effort to get back into the president’s good graces by calling for Barack Obama and several top national security officials in his administration to be prosecuted, alleging that they had conducted a “treasonous conspiracy” to falsely depict Russia as interfering in the 2016 election on Trump’s side.

She is the fourth woman that Trump has fired, following Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, and Lori Chavez-DeRemer.

The big mystery is how FBI director Kash Patel still has a job. Patel is an incompetent grifter and clown. He should thank his lucky stars that he is male, since Trump seems to give men more leeway.