Elizabeth II: Britain is in mourning after the death yesterday of  Queen Elizabeth II, who died at her Balmoral estate in Scotland  at age 96 after 70 years on the throne and only three days after greeting her 15^th Prime Minister.

  Her son immediately ascended to the throne as Charles III at age 73. He is expected to return to London today to address the nation. The new king’s wife Camilla, his former mistress, now becomes “Queen Consort,” which still sounds similar to mistress.

  Elizabeth was crowned on June 3, 1953, when Winston Churchill, the great leader during World War II, was still prime Minister.  She reigned during a time when the British empire retracted from world dominance and her family entered the modern age for better and worse. Three of her four children have divorced, something unheard of among royalty when Elizabeth was young. 

   Following the death of her father, George VI, Elizabeth, became the sixth woman to ascend to the British throne and held it 70 years on the job, the longest-reigning monarch in British history. 

  With Charles taking the throne, his oldest son, Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge, is next in line followed by his own son, George, born in 2013.

  Elizabeth’s coronation was the first to be broadcast live on television, the first of many concessions she had to make as society changed and her country’s loyalty to the royal family weakened. Many Brits questioned the need for keeping the institution that no longer had any real political power. The Queen was a figurehead and a tourist attraction. 

  The stability of the royal family and succession was also challenged by the marital lives of her children. In 1992, Charles and his wife, Diana, far more popular around the world than her husband, decided to separate. Charles’s brother  Prince Andrew and his wife, Sarah Ferguson broke up, and their older sister, Princess Anne, divorced her husband, Mark Phillips. The queen subsequently labeled 1992 her “annus horribilis.”

  One of the biggest challenges to her grip on the throne, as well as the public’s affection, came in 1997 with the death of Diana. For days Elizabeth ignored the public outpouring of grief, treating Diana’s death as a private matter for someone who was no longer a royal, appearing both estranged and emotionally remote from the British people.  

  In later years she was forced to strip her wayward son Andrew of his royal duties after he was exposed as a participant in the Jeffrey Epstein sex ring, and was confronted by her grandson Harry marrying the actress Meghan Markle and pulling back from royal duties to move to California.

  But through all her days, Elizabeth was a figure of strength and constancy for Britain.

Trump World: Donald Trump’s former attorney general Bill Barr says he thinks the Justice Department is close to having the evidence to indict Donald Trump for hoarding secret documents in his Mar-a-Lago estate, but hopes they don’t do it. “Do you indict a former president?” Barr asked. “What will that do to the country, what kind of precedent will that set, will the people really understand that this is not, you know, failing to return a library book, that this was serious.” 

  Meanwhile, the Justice Department has asked the federal judge who granted Trump’s request for a special master to screen the documents taken from Trump’s home to reconsider her opinion. Justice lawyers said they will appeal Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision to a higher court if she does not relent on her decision to bar the DOJ from using the documents in its investigation of Trump while the special master reviews them.

Indicted: Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon surrendered yesterday to the Manhattan district attorney’s to face charges of defrauding donors who thought they were giving money to help build a wall on the US-Mexico border. Bannon has been indicted on two felony counts of money laundering, two felony counts of conspiracy, and one felony count of scheming to defraud.

  “Stephen Bannon acted as the architect of a multimillion dollar scheme to defraud thousands of donors across the country — including hundreds of Manhattan residents,” District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, said in a statement. If convicted, Bannon faces up 15 years in prison.

The Obit Page: Bernard Shaw, the stalwart anchorman who led CNN’s coverage from Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989 during the Chinese government’s crackdown on protesters, and from Baghdad at the start of the Persian Gulf War, has died at age 82.

  Shaw was the primary face and voice of CNN for 20 years.

  A former correspondent for both CBS and ABC News, Shaw took the risk in 1980 of joining the new cable operation at CNN. He was one of the first Black anchors of a network evening news program, following Max Robinson, who became a co-anchor of ABC News’s “World News Tonight” in 1978.

— Anne Garrels, a correspondent for NPR who was also present in Baghdad for the American “shock and awe” bombing campaign in 2003, died this week in Norfolk, Conn. She was 71.

  Garrels had worked at ABC News but left for NPR. As NPR’s international reporter, she accidentally became a war correspondent. She was one of 16 reporters who stayed in Baghdad at the opening of the war. Garrels later told interviewer Terry Gross that she subsisted for days on Kit Kat chocolate bars and Marlboro Lights. 

The Spin Rack: Oberlin College in Ohio has agreed to pay $36.59 million to the  local family-owned Gibson’s bakery that said it was defamed and falsely accused of racism after a worker caught a Black student shoplifting bottles of wine. The college had supported students who accused the bakery of racial profiling — Researchers at the nonprofit Climate Central project say that with global warming and rising sea levels, roughly 650,000 individual, privately owned parcels of land, about 4.4 million acres, are projected to fall below changing tidal boundaries by 2050.

-30-