Well, it was not a good day for Trump, with guilty charges and pleas from two of his former associates for illegal dealings and fraud. It must have been bad as the President didn't tweet on the issue for 12h. The issues might seem convoluted to an outsider - and possibly the President himself. I've tried to get them clear in my head below.
Paul Manafort, the presidents former campaign manager, was declared guilty on 8 of the 18 counts put against him. He was found to have submitted false foreign income declarations during the period where he acted as a consultant for the then pro Russian Ukrainian president and was paid tens of millions of dollars. Then, when the Ukraine money ran out, he used false declarations to achieve loans in millions of dollars from banks. His sentence could be for up to 60 years, according to US media, but was more likely to be between 8 to 10 years.
All these activities pre-date his involvement with the Trump campaign and the president praised Manafort on Twitter today after a long silence, for his refusal to 'break' under intense pressure and 'invent' stories about Trump.
President Trumps former longstanding lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty on charges of violating campaign finance laws, the latter done at the direction of "the candidate", for the "principal purpose of influencing [the] election". The payments were hush money paid to two women with whom Trump allegedly had affairs. Cohen also pleaded guilty to million dollar amounts of tax evasion. With his plea bargain, Cohen could see his sentence from reduced from 65 years to five years and three months, according to the BBC.
President Trump does not like Michael Cohen anymore but also thinks that the campaign payment violations were not a crime, as others like Obama had made them too in the past. Almost a reasonable argument until you find out that the Obama violation was due to delays of declaring donations made by others to the campaign within a required 48h period. The actions were not deliberately hidden and the donations were declared, so this was a civil offence. Cohen, on the other hand, deliberately chose to make payments (whether alone or under instruction) and keep them secret, making this a criminal offence.
But will the mud stick on the irascible Teflon President? Not yet. Perhaps at some point in the future, all the accumulated inconsistencies and dealings will slowly add up even for his core electoral base - until a small final addition causes a tipping point and a rapid fall from grace.
In-between work and other distractions, I finally managed to edit the image of a Peacock butterfly fore-wing. Over 3000 photographs taken, to create 103 focus stacks, which were then joined into one panorama. The final panorama had one small gap near the front edge of the wing in a dark area, after the poor Hugin panorama software had tried to assemble the full wing over the best part of a day. Today, I manually fitted in the missing piece. Ironically, I had to down-sample the image so that you can see it above. The level of detail is reflected in a small section of the image shown below. See if you can work out where it should fit.
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