Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. has in progress a massive criminal investigation into the financial misdealings of Donald Trump. Part of his investigation includes hush money payments, made by Trump’s then fixer, Michael Cohen, in 2016 to buy silence from porn star Stormy Daniels, who says she had a sexual liaison with Trump.

DA Vance is pursuing his investigation through a grand jury.

So we asked our Chief Investigative Reporter, associate solitary reporter Susanna Sherman, to observe, most secretly, a scenario where Trump and Daniels appear together before the grand jury.

Under a total news blackout, Daniels described to the grand jurors every salacious detail about her sexual encounter with Trump. No detail escaped her attention, as the prosecutors made extensive notes in preparation for their own tell-all books.

Trump sat through Daniels’ testimony with an unrelentingly stone cold expression, but when Daniels offered him the opportunity to meet privately in her hotel room, he readily accepted. Daniels smirked at Melania as she and Trump entered the hotel.

Climate change has come to Turkey in a big way: deadly mucilage, very ugly, has killed coral reefs and fish in the strategically important Dardanelles Strait, which separates European Turkey and Asian Turkey: https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2021/06/04/turkey-canakkale-underwater-marine-mucilage-damon-pkg-intl-hnk-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/around-the-world/.

So we asked our Chief International Correspondent, associate solitary reporter Larry Theis, who is fluent in Turkish (among many other languages) to confront Turkey’s autocratic president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in Ankara.

“Sir,” Theis began, “I sense that there is a very close connection between your conspicuously authoritarian style of governing, and all this crap that is seriously polluting the waters in your country.”

“Larry, you’re a damn nuisance. I am a very strong leader because my people are wholly dependent on me, they barely know how to read. It is for their own good that I have polluted the waters of the Dardanelles with that awful mucilage, which is so destructive.”

“In my own genius, I will figure out how to solve the problem, technologically, and then my very subservient people will adore me even more.”

Today in Greenville, North Carolina, Donald Trump got on a stage and continued to do what he’s been doing ever since June 2015, when he rode down his gold-plated escalator at his Manhattan Tower with trophy wife number three.

Greenville is the County Seat of Pitt County, in the Tarheel State. What a fitting name for a county seat where Trump threw red meat to his deplorables, because there are sincere voters who would have liked to have seen Trump at the bottom of a pit during the election last year.

Cuttting to the chase, in Greenville today, he lied (he’s really good at that) to his Tarheel State audience, and, most likely, to plenty of Trumpites who came from other states, ‘cause that’s their idea of entertainment.

He said the election was stolen from him.

He said votes by dead people were counted.

He trashed Native Americans for exercising their right to vote.

He mocked Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom Democrats had thought about running for President, only Joe Biden got there first (see also https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/04/fauci-attacks-personal-conspiratorial-491896). 

Not only that, he demanded that China pay reparations for causing Covid-19 (https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/05/trump-north-carolina-speech-gop-492000).

Reparations really should be paid to the descendants of Africans who arrived on our shores in chains. But of course Trump’s base won’t hear of that.

As associate solitary reporter Johanna Jones (who lives, most unhappily, we have to acknowledge, in a tent on the grounds of Mar-a-Lago) watched at today’s rally, Trump celebrated the ruling by a federal judge in Southern California which declared unconstitutional California’s more than thirty-year ban on assault weapons. You can read all about that activist judge’s ruling in today’s Times, article by Mike Ives: “Federal Judge Overturns California’s 32-Year Assault Weapons Ban: The judge said the ban was a ‘failed experiment.’”

Colorado’s leading gun control advocate, associate solitary reporter Ellen McConaughey, said at a protest this afternoon on the west steps of the Colorado State Capitol, “That judge has no idea what he’s done. He probably should be impeached.”

On this day in 1989, China greeted pro-democracy protesters in Beijing with tanks and gunfire. No one really knows how many innocent Chinese were killed, probably above 300.

That incident has been erased from Xi Jinping’s history books. No protests of any kind in Tien An Men Square today.

In the summer of 1988 your solitary reporter was a tourist and saw that gigantic public area in its glory. Deng Xiaoping was leading China then.

Things have changed since then.

Things have also changed in Hong Kong, where Chinese authorities had previously promised autonomy.

In Hong Kong today, thousands of protesters turned out to remember the disgrace of the Tien An Men Square Massacre, but were strenly warned by Chinese authorities, sometimes even in English, and at least ten leaders of the protests were arrested.

While nobody in Xi’s entourage noticed, our Seoul-based associate solitary reporter, Ko Il-sun, slipped in and confronted China’s Dictator for LIfe, Xi Jinping, who summarily dispatched Ko with only a few concise words.

“Mr. Ko, you fail to realize that I am the reincarnation of the Chinese Emperors. Except for the last gasps of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, they had even more power then, than I do now.”

“Now go back to Seoul and keep your mouth shut. If you don’t I’ll throw you in with the Uyghurs so you can be re-educated."