Prince claims thrown out
Allegations that a 17-year-old girl was forced to have sexual relations with Prince Andrew have been thrown out by a Florida judge. Virginia Roberts, now 31, had claimed she was made to have sex with Prince Andrew in 2001 by his former friend Jeffrey Epstein. Roberts was trying to join a lawsuit against Epstein. Promising to return America “to the principles of liberty and limited government”, Kentucky senator Rand Paul yesterday launched his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, hoping to turn his trademark libertarianism into a cause uniting conservatives across the party.
The 52-year-old Paul, an ophthalmologist by training, is only the second contender, after Ted Cruz, to declare formally. But he seems to have been running for ever.
He was a podium fixture and backstage adviser during his father Ron Paul’s two quixotic White House runs in 2008 and 2012, and managed his winning 1996 congressional campaign in Texas.
Once he was elected to the Senate in 2010, it was taken for granted that Rand would soon launch a bid of his own, using and expanding his father’s potent grassroots organisation. But Paul now faces a dilemma: how does he retain the enthusiasm of his father’s supporters, while differentiating himself enough to attract other conservatives who regarded the elder Paul as a quirky eccentric?
The dilemma was evident in the very choreography of Rand Paul’s formal announcement, in front of a boisterous crowd in a hotel ballroom in Louisville, Kentucky. His father, 79, was on stage but did not speak.
Nonetheless, his shadow looms over the son’s nascent campaign. An unabashed libertarian, a virtual isolationist who wanted the government out of public and personal matters alike, Ron Paul attracted a fanatical following of believers.
But despite some near misses, he never won a primary and was never a serious factor in the Republican race. No one knows that better than Rand Paul.
At this early stage in perhaps the most unpredictable Republican nominating contest in decades, polls put Paul in a tightly packed second tier of declared or potential candidates, behind Jeb Bush and Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker.