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I care."Let me tell you something, I've worked with Prince Andrew, I've seen the good he has been able to do for UK business overseas.”Boris Johnson, UK prime minister, August 2019Based on the allegations, Boris Johnson again appears to be using public office for personal gain. Recall how his government spent £100 million of hard working taxpayers money promoting Brexit slogans which match the Conservative party’s election campaign.It appears that Mr Johnson and Jennifer Arcuri had a four year relationship. At this time, as Mayor of London, he allegedly gave £126,000 of taxpayers money to Ms Arcuri’s new business adventures. Whatever voters may think, there may now be a case for Mr Johnson to be charged with the offence of public misconduct in office.This will add to Mr Johnson’s growing list of unlawful activities.In September 2019, Mr Johnson’s gave unlawful advice to the Queen.Mr Johnson and his ministers are now the subject of infringement proceedings by the the European Commission because of the UK government failure to follow the law on Commissioner appointments.Mr Johnson could find himself at the centre of a new legal row involving taxpayers money and his relationship with Ms Arcuri.Mr Johnson is currently the prime minister of the United Kingdom.

Hello, Mr. Jeff Avery. I see that you have asked a couple of questions about Canada, so please let me explain my country’s status in a little detail.First, is it a part of either the UK or of France. Well, not according to the Central Intelligence Agency which describes it this way: “Canada became a self-governing dominion in 1867, while retaining ties to the British crown. Canada repatriated its constitution from the UK in 1982, severing a final colonial tie.” That’s fair enough, although de facto, the Statute of Westminster made Canada’s independence (already substantial) complete back in 1931.Now, one of the ways of verifying if a country is actually a country is to see if it has embassies abroad. After all, I would be greatly surprised to see a Californian or Texan embassy in Washington, D.C.Here is the Embassy of Canada, Paris.And here is Canada House, in a very desirable and expensive location in London, right on Trafalgar Square.For historical reasons, the Canadian Ambassador to the UK, like its ambassadors to its sibling Commonwealth countries like Australia and New Zealand, is not called an ambassador but a High commissioner. The rank of a High Commissioner is equal to that of an ambassador.France lost any claim to Canada in 1763 when it signed the Treaty of Paris. This treaty ended the Seven Years’ War, which you probably know as the French and Indian War. What was called Canada at the time, and is now Quebec, was ceded by the French to the British.The British colonies in North America, including Quebec, agitated over time for responsible government and, in the mid-19th century, were granted it. An effort to combine English and French speaking Canada into one political unit failed to work well, so Canadians requested a federal system be set up, which it was in 1867. This was the beginning of Canada, as we know it. It was a political structure called a “self-governing dominion,” meaning that it had a government generally similar to Britain’s, but made its own laws in every respect except two: foreign policy and defence. The reasoning was that, if Britain was paying for defence (which it was), it had to set the foreign policy, too. If you’re interested about how and why Britain gave up control of those, too, then you may want to do a little reading about how and why Canada signed the Treaty of Versailles in its own name, how the Alaska Boundary Dispute convinced many Canadians that Britain’s interests were not always the same as Canadian ones, and what the Treaty of Westminster meant for the self-governing dominions.Canada’s written constitution, equivalent to the American constitution, was originally a British Act of Parliament. It brought Canada into existence, specified its form of government, and listed federal and provincial powers. At no point did it have a way for Canadians to change it, though, because Canada couldn’t agree on a way to change it. That omission was fixed in 1982. At the same time, Canada received a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, equivalent to (but arguably more modern and usable than) the American Bill of Rights.Now, as an American, you may be confused about Canada’s status because it is a constitutional monarchy, not a republic, and because the Queen of Canada is the same physical person as the Queen of the United Kingdom. That is understandable. However, the Queen has visited the United States before as the head of state of the U.K., and she has also, on two other occasions, visited the United States as the head of state of Canada. She can’t do both at the same time because they are different titles, different jobs. The U.K. Prime Minister cannot tell her to do something that affects Canada; that’s her Canadian Prime Minister’s job.Let me give you an analogy: the ancient country of Andorra is one of the last remnants, if not the last, of Charlemagne’s empire. It has two heads of state, who share the responsibilities of the office. One of them is a Spanish bishop and the other one is the President of France. When the President of France is doing his President of France work, he’s not functioning as the Andorran co-Prince, and when he’s working for Andorra, he’s not functioning as the President of France.Or if that’s still too strange, think of Elon Musk, who is in charge of both SpaceX and Tesla Motors, but those two companies remain separate and distinct.I hope this helps. And, to summarize, Canada is not part of either the U.K. or France.

My mother had a part-time job as a church secretary during the late 60s and early 70s, and was tasked with creating the weekly programs handed out at the services on Sundays. The bulletins were printed on 8.5x11 paper that was ordered from religious supply companies, and had a nice 5 x 8 color image printed on one side so that when they were folded in half the program would have an attractive cover image. To populate the inside of the program Mom would type a mimeograph stencil, which looked like this (only shorter, for letter sized pages)....and then she would run the program paper through the mimeograph machine, which looked like this:She would have to type it in a landscape orientation, of course, so that the text inside the folded program would be readable, so she had a typewriter with an extra wide carriage. Mimeograph stencils were just that, stencils, a translucent waxy top page over an opaque backing that provided stability for typing or freehand drawing with a stylus. The typewriter key or stylus onto the stencil would carve away enough of the waxy coating that ink could penetrate those areas when the stencil was stretched over the drum of the mimeograph machine. When you made a mistake typing on a stencil, you painted over the error with a clear liquid that filled in the gaps of the waxy coating, and after it dried you could make your correction. Mimeographs typically printed with black ink and should not be confused with ditto machines, which printed in purple. Ditto machines, which looked like this...were a little simpler and cheaper to operate, and were used by teachers to create classroom materials all through my public school education, from 1962-1973. Ditto masters were thick white glossy top sheets attached to thick purple backing sheets. When you wrote or typed on a ditto master the purple ink on the inside of the backing sheet would adhere to the back of the white top sheet. If you made a mistake you could use thin paper tape to cover it on the back of the white top sheet and type or write over it again, or you could use a single edge razor blade to shave the mistake off the back of the white top sheet, then type or write over it.I myself got my first full-time corporate office job about ten years later, in 1979, at Major League Baseball, and worked there for ten years, during which time I used a lot of other technology that is now mostly unheard of.I remember using the fax precursor that was called a Qwip machine.There was an 11" long rotating drum that opened up slightly so a standard US sheet of 8.5" x 11" paper could be clamped into it lengthwise. It was attached to an acoustic coupler designed to hold an old Western Electric style telephone handset, which was also attached to the device.If you wanted to send a facsimile copy of a document to someone else you would pick up the handset attached to your Qwip machine and call the phone number associated with the Qwip handset on the other end. If they didn't answer, you were out of luck. If they did answer you would tell them you had a document to send and how many pages it was. You would ask them if they preferred six minutes per page (standard resolution, which was still pretty grainy) or three minutes per page (grainier yet). You would then clamp your original onto the drum of your unit while on the other end the recipient would clamp into his or her drum a sheet of special thick glossy thermal paper. Once the papers were clamped in you would confirm by voice that the other side was ready and then each of you would put your handsets into the acoustic couplers. The sender's machine would begin to whine, the recipient's would whine in return (like the old dialup modem handshakes), and the transmission would begin. On the sender's end a stylus/needle would scan the original document from top to bottom as it rotated on the drum, looking for text or other dark pixels to transmit. On the recipient's end the stylus/needle would literally burn the image received into the thermal paper, which would emit a distinctive odor.After the page finished both humans would pick up their handsets out of their acoustic couplers and discuss the quality of the transmission. "Did it come through OK?" If not, they might re-send it. If it did, then they would repeat the process for Page 2, if there was a Page 2. And Page 3, and onward, always doing the voice check between pages.When Federal Express first started up, in addition to their air courier services, they had a near-monopoly on the first generation of plain paper fax machines. It was possible to take a thick document to a Federal Express office and have it transmitted within minutes to another Federal Express office hundreds or thousands of miles away, where the intended recipient could come and pick it up (or have Federal Express deliver it to them). As the prices of plain paper fax machines came down and more offices had them, this part of Federal Express' business evaporated, and today very few people remember it. (I remember sending at least one document this way.)When I went to work for the American League in 1980 I was given an office that included a Western Union TWX machine (close cousin of the better known Telex machines).You could dial up another TWX machine directly or you could use a paper tape with one or more stored addresses on it to contact other TWX users (in my case, the other MLB offices and clubs). You could type your message live or record your message on paper tape (which was quicker and allowed correction of errors). I learned to cut and read paper tapes. I could look at a paper tape and tell you if it was an address tape or a message tape, and if it was an American League address tape or an all-clubs message tape (this was more trivial than it sounds: not only was the all-clubs tape twice as long, it began with ATL BRAVES instead of ORIOLES BAL and so just by looking at a few lines of the tape I could easily tell the difference).The one in my office had a clear plastic foam-dampened hood over it, similar to the one in this image, which was intended to reduce the noisiness when the device was operating.It was basically useless and I always referred to it as the "Cone of Silence" for that reason.My job with the American League included daily waiver transactions and publication of a daily bulletin. During spring training I used the TWX machine (because the clubs carried their TWX machines with them to Florida and Arizona), but during the rest of the year I did this using an IBM Mag Card 1 terminal, basically a hopped-up Selectric, and pre-stored my content on reusable 50-line magnetic cards that fed into a reader attached to the typewriter.By 1986 when I was out of law school and working in the MLB Commissioner's Office, we had a sponsorship deal with IBM and there was some kind of mainframe in an air-conditioned room. The secretaries all had terminals on their desks, where they used word processing software to prepare our correspondence, contracts, etc. I startled my secretary Eileen by asking her to teach me how to do basic word processing / editing tasks on her terminal, but I found it very useful. She left at 5:30 and I was routinely there for at least another hour or two (and the Federal Express office a block away was open till 8). I could often get documents done, printed, and out the door instead of waiting for her to come in and follow my handwritten edits in the morning.I did use a Dictaphone during this period of my life, mostly for correspondence and to go through a to-do list of things I wanted Eileen to help me accomplish the next day. She came in at 8:30 and I came in at 9:30, so she could get a good head start on me this way. Usually I would do this in the evenings. I would speak into a little handheld unit that contained a microcassette, and leave the cassette in my outbox. Eileen would then play it back on a unit that looked like this (note the foot pedal, so Eileen could play/pause with her foot, keeping both hands on the keyboard typing):In 1989 I went to work for an agency called ProServ that represented athletes. At ProServ I had access to a Dictaphone but again found that the professional staff had no access to computers or other technology. The secretaries and assistants did have terminals where they did word processing and had a primitive form of email or IM that communicated only among terminal owners. I found this out because several of them got in trouble for sending some very mocking messages about the corporate leadership, not knowing that anyone else could see them.Within a year or three I had a Macintosh at home and began agitating at the office for a computer that would allow me to do more work hands-on, editing my own documents instead of marking them up with ink and waiting for an assistant to do it. No lawyer or professional at ProServ had ever had a computer on his or her desk, but after a little while they relented, and my modern era of office work began.