Our Chief International  Correspondent, associate solitary reporter Larry Theis, has visited every major industrial nation except France, which means that he has spent several vacations in South Africa, Elon Musk’s country of origin.

Theis is way too busy to have learned if Musk learned Afrikaans as a boy, so we’ll cut to the chase.

The only way House Speaker Kevin McCarthy could grab the Speaker’s gavel was to promise Lauren Boebert, a superTrumpie who represents most of western Colorado, that she could all by herself demand from the floor of the Peoples’ House that McCarthy quit so that Congressman Chip Roy (R-Texas) could become Speaker.

Musk bought Twitter so he could have more influence over peoples’ lives than he would have if his only businesses were SpaceX and Tesla. 

Musk is no dummy, which is why, according to our Chief Congressional Correspondent, associate solitary reporter Melissa Smith, Musk arranged to silence Boebert by telling his new Twitter CEO, Linda Yaccarino (who is fluent in Italian) to hire Boebert as her Chief Deputy.

“I’ve always loved birds,” Boebert told Smith, “and that’s why, when I owned Shooters Grill, I always shot every single eagle that landed on the roof there.”

”You know, my idol, Sarah Palin, proved herself as a man’s woman by killing at least a dozen caribou a day.”

As result of Boebert’s resignation, a vacancy committee of the Colorado Republican Party will convene tomorrow to begin vetting Boebert’s replacement.

Boebert’s husband, Jayson, is a consultant for Terra Energy, a large producer of natural gas in Colorado. Jayson told Smith that now that his wife will be Yaccarino’s number two, he has no desire to dissolve his consultancy company, from which he received a mere $478,000 in 2020.

Finally, CNN’s CEO, Chris Licht, promised one of his top stars, Kaitlan Collins, that he will never ever ask her to go to Goffstown, New Hampshire and interview Donald Trump, especially with a hostile, snickering audience at St. Anselm College. 

Our Chief New Hampshire correspondent, Dan McGuiness, attended the CNN Town Hall in Goffstown. He was the only reporter in the audience who distinctly heard Trump tell Collins, “You’re a nasty person and you are not at all my type.”

Republican lawmakers in Tennessee have been in the news recently, after they expelled two young Democrats from the legislature (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/07/us/tennessee-house-democrats-jones-pearson.html.

The ostensible reason for the expulsions was that Representatives Justin Jones and Justin Pearson staged a protest demanding that the legislature pass effective gun control legislation after yet another gun massacre, this time in a private school where three students and three teachers were killed.

Jones and Pearson are both Black. A  third legislator who joined them, Rep. Gloria Johnson, a Democrat representing Knoxville, was not expelled. Johnson is White, and this further increased racial tensions.

All this was closely observed by associate solitary reporter Mike McGuiness, who is based in Nashville, Tennessee’s capital.

“They got what they deserved,” said House Speaker Cameron Sexton, a Republican, who praised the expulsions, and told McGuiness that Jones and Pearson should have their citizenship revoked and that the duo should be put on a slow freighter headed to Ghana, to the place from which thousands of Africans were impolitely put on slave ships headed for America.

“We’re the Volunteer State,” Sexton said, “and I am proud to have volunteered them to be sent back to Africa, where they belong.”

Orthodox churches tend to favor the nations where their churches are located — the ecclesiastical term is autocephalic — and so Metropolitan Pavlo, the leader of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church who directs the Kyiv-Pechersk monastery, follows his Russian counterpart, Ст҃ѣ́йшїй патрїа́рхъ кѷрі́ллъ (Patriarch Kirill, Church Slavonic). 

When Kirill loudly proclaimed his support for Putin’s war, his counterpart in Istanbul was highly critical, saying that it is a sad day for the Orthodox Church (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriarch_Kirill_of_Moscow).

Pavlo is being actively investigated by the Ukrainian Security Service (https://www.cnn.com/europe/live-news/russia-ukraine-war-news-04-02-23/h_32b56dc29ff3ae944faed9648ff00846). Kirill is a close ally of Russia’s Thug-in-Chief, Vladimir Putin. 

So we dispatched associate solitary reporter Foma Kheroshonsky, who is based in Moscow, to confer with Pavlo and Kirill. Kheroshonsky, who pretends to be fluent in Russian, is a graduate of the Iliff School of Theology in Denver.

After an extended theological conversation, during which Russian vodka was not served, Kheroshonsky, Pavlo, and Kirill emerged and spoke to a packed press conference.

“I have now seen the light,” Pavlo began. “Mr. Putin and his friend Patriarch Kirill have agreed to focus their efforts on reforming Putin’s autocratic ways and stay away from Mother Ukraine.”

Kirill went straight to Putin and told him what’s what. Putin reluctantly acceded and announced that he will withdraw all his troops and firepower from Ukraine, especially the embattled eastern part of the country.