When was that picture taken.
If she's pregnant, who got the baby?
The Glue of the United Kingdom Is Slowly Dissolving
Six years ago Scotland voted by a 10-point margin to stay part of the U.K. Yet the last nine consecutive opinion polls show the backing for leave as high as 58 per cent, and averaging at 53 per cent. This sustained lead for independence spells trouble for Boris Johnson’s government, which fears demands for a second referendum will become overwhelming.
The Scottish National Party is expected to sweep to victory in local elections in May 2021, giving it an outright majority in the Edinburgh Assembly. The SNP has already been trying in the Scottish courts to circumvent a Johnson veto on another referendum. Whatever happens, the nationalists will ramp up their provocations.
Last week Bloomberg News revealed that Hanbury Strategy, a consultancy firm close to the Conservatives, had drawn up a detailed plan for ministers to defeat the nationalists. The main tidbit in the leaked memo was the advice that the government should “coopt the European Union” into arguing that an independent Scotland would struggle to rejoin the bloc. That would be an embarrassing last resort for an administration hellbent on Brexit, with or without a trade deal. The EU wouldn’t easily be coopted by Johnson.
The last independence referendum was meant to settle the issue of the Union for a generation. Yet now it’s in peril again. The threat has international ramifications.
The end of the United Kingdom would raise a question about Britain’s standing in the world, a deeper one than that posed by Brexit. If Northern Ireland were ever to vote to join the Irish republic, the damage could be limited: The status of the North has been unsettled since partition in 1921. But if Scotland were to secede that would be the end of the extraordinarily successful 307-year-old partnership that created the British Empire and fought two world wars.
Post-independence, London would lose its Scottish nuclear submarine bases and its permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council might be challenged. The rump U.K. would be diminished, in self-confidence and size.
Independence would impoverish the Scots, too. That argument clinched the vote last time and its force has redoubled since Covid-19. Sooner or later the Conservatives must make it again. But is Johnson the right man to do it?
more
https://www.yahoo.com/news/glue-united-kingdom-slowly-dissolving-060012635.html
Reminds me of the story Biden told about the granddaughter and the snake. (or whatever)
Here there be monsters: Diving into the legacy of the beasts of the Finger Lakes
There is something about the Finger Lakes that suggests the possibility of supernatural and mysterious things. Legends and stories abound of hauntings, spirit rapping, utopian communities, ancient ruins, inexplicable phenomena, extraterrestrial visits and the occasional glimpse of a sasquatch. Among the most intriguing stories are the numerous reported sightings in the deepest of the lakes of large aquatic creatures: lake monsters.
Each of the Finger Lakes has its own personality, of course, but the big lakes – Seneca and Cayuga – seem to fit within a different, more mysterious category. Their waters are colder, their moods are darker, their waves are bigger. You can travel on boats to and from the sea on these two lakes, and their sheer size seems to hint at the possibility of ancient aquatic megafauna. Native American Indians believed Seneca Lake to be a bottomless lake, with a monster that lived in its depths. Almost forty miles long each and one to three miles in width, the pitch-black depths of both of them, hundreds of feet deeper than sunlight can penetrate, descend to depths below sea level.
That reports of monsters in Cayuga Lake were numerous, perhaps even routine, in the 1800s can be inferred from a story in the January 5, 1897 edition of the Ithaca Journal. Incredibly, the piece reported that a recent sighting marked the 69th consecutive year in which there was a confirmed encounter with the monster nicknamed “Old Greeny.” The story went on to recount that members of the newspaper staff had been living in daily anticipation of Old Greeny’s appearance, and had refused reporting assignments that would have taken them near the lake because they were afraid of the monster.The 1897 incident was reported to have been by an Ithaca resident who was driving along the lake’s eastern shore and saw “what he knew must be the large, long sea serpent.” The story also quoted a ‘tramp’, however, who told a reporter that he believed it to be a muskrat.
More sporadic and isolated reports of the creature continued until 1929, when people began reporting not one, but two creatures seen together along the Lake's eastern shore. The creatures were described by witnesses as being approximately 12 to 15 feet in length. It was speculated that they might be: "…members of the Seneca Lake sea serpent family that found their way into the local waters through a subterranean channel which is believed to exist between the two lakes." Legends of tunnels connecting Cayuga and Seneca Lakes have long circulated, which anyone with a rudimentary grasp of the notion of water seeking its own level knows would be impossible.
Occasional other reports of Old Greeny have certainly been made since then, including a 1974 attack in which a teenage boy apparently had his arm broken by the bite of a large, eel-like creature, and the 1979 encounter by a local professional diver of a submerged animal 30 to 35 feet in length. Sill, all the reported sightings save one have been by one or two persons.
more
https://www.ithaca.com/news/here-there-be-monsters-diving-into-the-legacy-of-the-beasts-of-the-finger-lakes/article_6ea32908-90e7-11e8-879f-63ae3308b591.html
What is the date of that pic?