Jeffrey Epstein a Suicide:Jeffrey Epstein, the financier accused of  sex trafficking and having sex with underage girls, hanged himself in his Manhattan jail cell, officials said this morning.Epstein’s body was found at about 7:30  in the Metropolitan Correctional Center. 

  Epstein made a previous attempt, having been found unconscious with marks on his neck. Authorities have not said whether they took extra precautions since that incident. 

  The 66-year-old Epstein had been charged with sex trafficking of girls as young as 14. A man reputed to be a billionaire who had several opulent homes, a private jet, and travelled with the rich and elite, had a long-standing reputation for paying young girls for sex. 

  Epstein’s suicide came only hours after a federal appeals court released a damning set of documents revealing Epstein’s prolific sexual activityand how his associates recruited young women and girls, including from a Florida high school.  The documents include depositions, police reports, photographs, receipts, and flight logs as well as a memoir written by a woman who says she was the victim of sex-trafficking by Epstein and his associates.

  Epstein’s death does not end the affair. The documents released yesterday were filed in a defamation lawsuit that a woman named Virginia Giuffre brought in 2015 against Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime companion and aide who has been accused of helping him procure young women.

 Giuffre, who was recruited as a masseuse, said in a deposition that her job was to sexually please Epstein and his friends. She said the word “massage” became code for “sex.” She said, “My whole life revolved around just pleasing these men and keeping Ghislaine and Jeffrey happy.” She said, “Their whole entire lives revolved around sex.”

On Background:After the mass shootings in Dayton and El Paso, President Trump has performed a double-triple reverse, now saying that he is open to red-flag laws and background checks for gun buyers.

 “Frankly, we need intelligent background checks,” Trump told reporters yesterday. He added, “On background checks, we have tremendous support for really common-sense, sensible, important background checks.”

 Polling shows that most Americans believe that gun violence is a problem, and they want more restrictions on guns. Perhaps most important is that Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell has refused to call the Senate back from summer vacation to vote on a gun bill.

Love Letters:Hours after President Trump said he received a “very beautiful letter” from North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, the North fired two missiles nearly 250 miles into the Sea of Japan, the South’s military said. 

  Trump had been mooning over the letter he got from Kim. “It was a very positive letter,” he told reporters at the White House. “I think we’ll have another meeting. He really wrote a beautiful, three-page — I mean, right from top to bottom — a really beautiful letter.”

  Trump wrote on twitter that Kim said “very nicely, that he would like to meet and start negotiations as soon as the joint U.S./South Korea joint exercise are over.”

  The missiles were a not-so-nice way of saying the same thing.

The News Roundup:The San Francisco school board announced that it is reconsidering its decision to destroy a series of depression-era murals depicting slaves and a dead American Indian following widespread complaints that the move amounted to censorship. The board is instead considering just covering the murals, which is also censorship. — The Russian military admits that an explosion at a nuclear testing facility Thursday did involve nuclear materials and that five civilian employees died in addition to the two military personnel previously confirmed dead. 

 Fifty years After: Musician Carlos Santana admits that he was tripping while performing some of the best music of his life at the 1969 Woodstock Music festival. Santana thought his band wasn’t going on until 2 am so he took some mescaline given to him by The Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia.

  Then they were put on stage in the afternoon. Santana told The NY Times, “I know people say, ‘Santana took too much acid.’ Well maybe you haven’t taken none at all! You see what it is. I see what it can be and should be, which is how it felt when the Berlin Wall came down, or Mandela was freed. That’s what Woodstock was about: a collective consciousness, commonality, unity, harmony, celebrating.”

  The man was clearly on acid.

Promises, Promises:Healthcare for all, free college. Getting rid of Donald Trump. Democratic candidates for president are making all kids of promises to get elected. 

  Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders may have made the promise that will surely get him elected. He said during an interview that if he’s elected President he will let the world know whether there really are space aliens. He said, “My wife would demand that I let you know.”

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