Also on today’s menu:
Bristol To Celebrate Old Home Day
The GOP Debate And The Trump Show
Prigozhin On Passenger List Of Crashed Airplane
Patriot Rail Company, LLC, based in Jacksonville, Florida, has purchased the Hobo Railroad in Lincoln and the Winnipesaukee Scenic Railroad in Meredith, which also operates Rail Bike Adventures out of the Laconia railroad station.
Patriot Rail, the nation’s third-largest short-line holding company, owns 32 railroads and related service companies in 23 states. Most are freight lines and Katie Roller, director of public affairs, said tourism trains represent a way to expand and diversify. Patriot does operate the Blue Ridge Scenic Railway in Georgia, which Roller said serves more than 130,000 patrons per year.
The Hobo and Winnipesaukee Scenic railroads were founded by the late Ed Clark of Lincoln in 1987, and have been operated by the Clark family since then. Brenda Clark, Ben Clark, and Jennifer Franz issued a statement, “It has been our passion to sustain the joy that Ed Clark first created in the late 1980s for the thousands of smiling faces who rode our historic trains and enjoyed the White Mountains and the beautiful Lakes Region. Now it is time to pass this extraordinary legacy on to Patriot Rail, which has the experience, commitment, and ability to take this wonderful tourist operation to even greater heights.”
Bristol To Celebrate Old Home Day
Bristol will hold its annual Old Home Day this Saturday, August 26, with an antique car show, musical entertainment, displays, demonstrations, and a craft fair.
It also is the date of the Tapply-Thompson Community Center’s lobster-chicken dinner, running from 5 to 6:30 p.m. in Kelley Park. (The meal will move inside the community center if there should be rain.) In addition to lobster and chicken, there will be a kids’ hot dog meal available.
“Solitary Man” Carroll Brown will provide musical entertainment.
Old Home Day is a tradition started by New Hampshire Governor Frank Rollins in 1899 with the hope of persuading people who had left for better soil, western adventures, or industrial jobs to return to their place of birth. He had written in New England Magazine in 1897, “I wish that in the ear of every son and daughter of New Hampshire, in the summer days, might be heard whispered the persuasive words: Come back, come back! Do you not hear the call? What has become of the old home where you were born? Do you not remember it — the old farm back among the hills, with its rambling buildings, its well-sweep casting its long shadows, the row of stiff poplar trees, the lilacs and the willows?”
Bristol is one of the towns that responded to call, and continues that tradition. For tickets to Saturday’s meal, go online to https://ttccrec.org or call 603-744-2713.
The GOP Debate And The Trump Show
Donald Trump skipped the Republican debate on August 23, appearing instead in a pre-recorded interview with Tucker Carlson on X. When asked during the debate whether the other candidates would support Trump even if he is convicted in any of the four criminal probes he faces, only two debaters, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, said no. Christie said Trump’s behavior could not be overlooked — a comment that led the crowd to engage in lengthy booing.
Former United Nations ambassador and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley said, “We have to face the fact that Trump is the most disliked politician in America. We can’t win a general election that way.”
Haley also took on Vivek Ramaswamy, who appeared to be the crowd favorite that evening, saying, “He wants to hand Ukraine to Russia; he wants to let China eat Taiwan; he wants to go and stop funding Israel.” Turning to him, she said, “You have no foreign policy experience, and it shows.”
Ramaswamy called Trump “the best president of the 21st century” and, when Christie said Ramaswamy sounded like the artificial-intelligence platform ChatGPT, the 38-year-old responded, “I am the only person on this stage who isn’t bought and paid for…. The real choice we face in this primary is this: Do you want a super PAC puppet, or do you want a patriot who speaks the truth? Do you want incremental reform, which is what you’re hearing about, or do you want revolution?” He added, “You hand it over to a new generation to actually fix the problem. That’s why I’m in this race, and we’re just getting warmed up.”
As for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who had been polling second-place behind (far behind) the former president, Trump adviser Jason Miller said audiences “saw the death of Ron DeSantis’ campaign tonight as Vivek Ramaswamy leapfrogged him into second place. DeSantis, it didn’t do good enough for him to tread water; he had to have a breakout moment, and Ramaswamy completely outshone him.”
Meanwhile, on Elon Musk’s platform, Trump repeated his lie about a stolen election in 2020, saying, “you have people that are very smart, but they’re fascists and they’re radical left lunatics” who will try again. He said he expects to make similar claims about mass voter fraud efforts next year.
When asked about the possibility of open conflict, Trump said, “There’s a level of passion that I’ve never seen. There’s a level of hatred that I’ve never seen, and that’s probably a bad combination.”
Prigozhin On Passenger List Of Crashed Airplane
Besides information on the debate, the biggest Google searches on August 23 involved Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the chief of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group which rebelled against the Kremlin earlier this year. Prigozhin was on the passenger list of an Embraer private jet that crashed Wednesday afternoon near Russia’s Tver region. It is not confirmed whether Prigozhin was actually on the plane.
Russia’s civil aviation agency reported that seven passengers and three crew members perished in the crash. The flight manifest included Prigozhin and two of his close associates, Dmitry Utkin, referred to as Prigozhin’s second-in-command, and Valeriy Chekalov. The aircraft was traveling from Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport to St. Petersburg. It crashed about a mile south of a Russian settlement called Kuzhenkino.
Prigozhin has not been seen publicly since surrendering to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Putin has been linked to the suspicious deaths of other Russians who have criticized his rule. When asked about the possibility of Kremlin involvement in the crash, President Joe Biden Jr. responded, “I don’t know for a fact what happened, but I’m not surprised. There’s not much that happens in Russia that Putin’s not behind.”
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Kiev was not involved in Prigozhin’s supposed death. “We had nothing to do with it. Everybody realizes who has something to do with it.”
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