HUNTER PLEADS: President Biden’s troubled son Hunter has agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor federal charge of late filing of taxes while being excused from a charge of lying about his drug use when he bought a handgun.

  This comes as the result of a five-year investigation under the presidential administrations of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The younger Biden will plead guilty to misdemeanor counts of failing to pay his 2017 and 2018 taxes on time and agree to be placed on probation.

  Right wingers were immediately complaining that Biden is not being charged with anything having to do with business information found on the laptop computer he left in a repair shop, including deals involving China and Ukraine.

  Former President Trump immediately complained that, “They gave him a traffic ticket and cleared everything up.” Trump went on, “It is a disgrace to the system, it is a disgrace to America, it is a very unfair situation, it is prosecutorial misconduct, and it is election interference — all wrapped up into one.” 

  Trump himself is under a 37-count federal indictment on far more serious charges.

  While the Biden family’s detractors claim this is a sweetheart deal, it seems to fall in a typical range. Millions of people are late filing taxes every year without being prosecuted, and neither are the roughly 25 million people a year who lie on the form when they buy a gun.

20,000 LEAGUES: A Canadian military search plane reports having detected “banging sounds” at 30-minute intervals as an international team searches a patch of the Atlantic for the deep-sea submersible and its five passengers that went missing on a plunge to view the wreck of the Titanic. The US Coast Guard had no immediate interpretation for what the noises might be. 

  The craft, if it’s still intact, has about a day’s worth of oxygen left for its five occupants.

  Other people in the submersible craft industry have previously warned OceanGate Enterprises, the operators of the submarine Titan, that their 20-foot sub’s design could lead to “catastrophic” problems and that the company had not followed standard certification procedures. Two former employees have said they thought the hull was not thick enough to withstand the pressures it would encounter.

   OceanGate said in a 2019 blog post that “bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation.”

  Ominously, the Titan is reported to be equipped with gear that is supposed to bring it to the surface in an emergency, and it has not surfaced.

THE TRUMP DOCKET: The federal judge presiding over  Donald Trump’s classified documents case has set a trial date for as soon as August 14^th, although that is likely to be delayed by pre-trial motions and maneuvering. The NY Times notes that rookie judge Aileen Cannon started out with a speedy trial schedule in the only four cases she has presided over so far, then pushed back the dates. 

THE NEW STALIN: Russian dissident Alexei Navalny is on trial again for charges that could end with a sentence of another 30 years in prison, ensuring that he never gets out while the Stalinist President Vladimir Putin is still in power. Acquittals in Russia are rare and Navalny is already serving a nine-year sentence. 

IT’S POLITICAL: Republican political leaders are out of synch with the majority of Americans on abortion rights, according to the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.

  A majority of 57% oppose the court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the 50-year-old decision that guaranteed the right to an abortion in this country. Of course, opinions were sharply divided along political lines with three-quarters of Democrats and almost 6-in-10 independents against the decision that overturned Roe. Two-thirds of Republicans support overturning Roe.

CHINA SYNDROME: Only a day after Secretary of state Antony Blinken visited China’s Xi Jinping to smooth relations, President Biden stirred up the dust again by calling Xi a “dictator.”

  Speaking of the Chinese spy balloon that floated across the US in February,

Biden said, “The reason why Xi Jinping got very upset in terms of when I shot that balloon down with two boxcars full of spy equipment in it is he didn’t know it was there.” And then he said, “That’s what’s a great embarrassment for dictators, when they didn’t know what happened.” 

  China called Biden’s statement “extremely absurd and irresponsible,” which is what you say when your country is run by a dictator. 

THE SPIN RACK: A federal judge in Arkansas has struck down the state’s new law forbidding medical treatments for children and teenagers seeking gender transition care. It’s a blow to conservatives trying to ban such medical care. Judge James Moody wrote in his decision that, “the evidence showed that the prohibited medical care improves the mental health and well-being of patients and that by prohibiting it, the state undermined the interests it claims to be advancing.”  — Romanian prosecutors have filed charges ranging from violence and rape to running a human-trafficking and organized crime ring against social media celebrity Andrew Tate and his brother, Tristan. Tate is accused of luring seven women to his properties in Romania and trapping them in a sex operation. — Republican presidential candidates are on track to spend a record combined $1 billion running for their party’s nomination, according to Open Secrets, which tracks campaign-finance spending. 

BELOW THE FOLD: Larry Myers Jr., the man known as “Mr. Buttermilk Biscuits” on TLC’s reality show “My 600-lb Life” has died at age 49. He weighed 940 pounds when he was on the show.

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