All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
The Russian word pravda is often translated as “truth”, but it can also mean “justice”. The proto-Slavic prav had that latter meaning, pravo refers to a legal right, and the first law code in Kievan Rus’ was called the Russkaya Pravda. Over time the word has come to mean “truth”, but with strong connotations of “moral or spiritual truth”, or a just way
Scarcely had the last warmth drained from Charlie Kirk’s body than the theories began to take shape. It wasn’t a leftist killing, as common sense and all the recent evidence would tell us: it was something else entirely. In the 11 months since, an entire Charlie Kirk-truth industry has sprung up; a whole ecosystem of podcasters, armchair theorists, exaggerators, suspicious and conspiratorial fantasists, all trading in tendentious, half-baked, outlandish fairy tales about how and why the most important young conservative in America was murdered in cold blood. With freedom and the march of progress, anger and resentment don’t diminish.
If poor Jason Arday killed himself, it will be necessary to work out why. To do so, it will help to know why he resigned his professorship. It seems highly unlikely he resigned if Cambridge University did not want him to. It had defended him in public throughout, after all. Yet if he had been confident of Cambridge’s continuing support, why did he sacrifice the benefit of its protection? If Cambridge suggested to him that its protection would, for whatever reason, shortly cease, what caused its change of mind? What a terrible shock for him if the institution which had raised him so high was now ready to cast him out. Is the institutional attack on the press over this matter a deflection from the truth?
Something amazing happened as I was walking my 91-year-old mother through Ledbury: we saw a bobby on the beat. He was even in a helmet, not a baseball cap. “A real policeman!” squealed various people, reacting as they might to a steam train or an Austin-Healey, reminders of more distinctive days. The same surprise may soon be evident when we see dog collars. A new scheme, oversight ministry, adopted by some Church of England dioceses, is taking vicars off the streets. Instead of being front-line clergy they will become “oversight ministers” and “area deans,” managers of lay, unpaid “focal ministers.
Q. I have a good relationship with a neighbor. She has a labrador and I have a Jack Russell. If I cannot walk my dog she will do it and vice versa. Yesterday my daughter visited unexpectedly and was at the top of the house when she heard my neighbor open the front door and call my dog for his walk. Five minutes later she heard the dog being returned to the house. I don’t want to fall out with my neighbor but I would always walk her labrador for at least 45 minutes and my dog needs a proper walk every day. How should I proceed? N.B., Stockbridge A. Fitness trackers for dogs are all the rage – attached to the collar, they count steps and provide GPS tracking.
It has been a punishing summer in France. Heatwaves, drought and forest fires have driven away tourists and made life hell for firefighters. The nation’s winemakers have also had an anxious time of it, but there is now cautious optimism that the exceptional weather may work in their favor. Since late May, France has been swept by a succession of heatwaves as well as a series of destructive wildfires. The worst of these was in the Gironde, west of Bordeaux, which lost 42,000 hectares to flames. Swathes of Provence have also been ravaged by fires in recent weeks. As a result of the fires and the heat, France’s Ministry of Agriculture decided to postpone its annual grape harvest forecast from early August to early September. The announcement was welcomed by the industry.
“Well, we all have areas of ignorance,” said my husband with a little too much relish, I thought. He was responding to my admission that I had reached a ripe old age without realizing that the words yoga and yoke had the same origin. Yoke has been used in English for more than 1,000 years and yoga only since about 1785, but it had been in use in Sanskrit since the first millennium BC. The meaning of yoga was held to be either the yoking and reining in of the senses, or the yoking and joining oneself to the Prana (life force), the Om (absolute) and the Universe.
Three women in my Tuesday weights class are getting married. While we squat and thrust and fling our kettlebells around, there’s nonstop talk of veils, decorations, modes of transport to the venue and whether anyone eats wedding cake these days. Men are allowed in this weights class but, oddly, none ever shows up. The major update from one of the brides this week was that the local register office had given permission for her dog to attend the ceremony. She duly bought “a little tux” for Badger, so he could look the part. How do we feel about dogs at weddings?
If Tolstoy had written about British politics, he might have noted: “Happy parties are all alike; every unhappy party is unhappy in its own way.” Reform UK is beginning to resemble a laboratory test for the idea that every party run by Nigel Farage is unhappy in the same way. Just as in UKIP and the Brexit party, a highly dominant leader exists at the center of a court, with extreme tensions between loyalist long-marchers and arrivistes, between insurgency and respectability, between campaigning and preparing for government. A new round of bloodletting erupted on August 17, when the founder of ConservativeHome, Tim Montgomerie, who defected to Reform two years ago, was suspended following public criticism of Farage and the party’s home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf.
You can blame the Obamas for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex's ill-fated adventures in America. There they were, Barack and Michelle, with eight-figure book deals and a lucrative spin on the global keynote circuit after Donald Trump's triumph in 2016. Barely two years later, Mrs. Obama was filling major arenas on a rockstar-styled promo tour for her White House-memoir Becoming. I remember sitting up high at the Barclays Center in New York in 2018, when Sarah Jessica Parker interviewed Mrs. Obama with awkward sycophancy, clearly dazzled by the former First Lady’s sheer presence. Obama’s candor and intellect, no matter how commodified to maximize book sales, stood as a sharp contrast to the icy aloofness of her replacement, Melania Trump.
Freddy is joined by Andrew Cockburn, Washington editor of Harper's magazine, to discuss the state of the US Navy as the USS George Washington arrives in the Arabian Sea to replace the USS Abraham Lincoln, whose crew have sent home photographs of blocked lavatories, rotting rations and sailors who have lost a stone or more. Freddy and Andrew examine why the Iranian strike on the Navy's supply base in Bahrain has left the fleet resupplying from Diego Garcia, why Trump has ordered $50 billion of new launch systems ripped out and steam catapults put back, and whether Trump is now trapped in a war he can never admit he has not won. Learn how to earn yield on gold, paid in gold, at Monetary-Metals.com/Americano Produced by Henry Lloyd. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Are Donald Trump and his wife secretly estranged – or is Melania just a bit strange? That somewhat grubby question cuts to the heart of one of the more mysterious subplots of the Great Trump Saga, the longest-running American tabloid show. One Trumpworld source told me that "Melania spends too much time online" Yesterday, the First Lady magically reappeared for a public event at the White House. "I heard you missed me," she began, before giving a speech about some goodly fostering initiative. "Here I am." It was a joke her husband might have composed. Melania hadn’t been spotted in public since the World Cup final a month ago, and the "Where’s Melania?
It is ironic that the “be kind” brigade beating their breasts and wailing about the "lynching" and "assassination" of Jason Arday think the appropriate response is to whip up hatred against Nathan Cofnas, the scholar who exposed Arday's academic misconduct. At the vigil for Arday at Trafalgar Square in London, several speakers singled out Cofnas for blame, including Diane Abbott MP, who described him as a “racist.” Nathan contacted me shortly afterwards worried that he risked being murdered if he set foot in London.
If you control the world’s largest economy, as the US does, and if your enemy depends on exports to the West, as Iran does, it should hardly be a surprise when the big economy decides to use its commercial and financial leverage. That is exactly what the US is doing – and this week it announced it would ratchet up the pressure substantially. Some sanctions were already in place, most notably restrictions on Iran’s oil exports, enforced by the US Navy. What’s new is that those sanctions will be supplemented by a full range of additional sanctions on commercial and bank transactions routed through third countries.
The prospect of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle leaving the United States has been dangled by reports in the British media. Many of us Americans are buoyant. The Daily Telegraph and the Sun reported that their children will begin British schooling in September. The family will occupy a private house outside London, keep their California and Portuguese homes and remain non-working royals. The King learned of the plan only on Sunday. He welcomes private time with his grandchildren, yet the late Queen’s boundary still stands: no half-in, half-out arrangement. How things have changed in the six years since the Sussexes left Britain. Harry’s arrival in America in 2020 was met with considerable curiosity and some excitement, which he has since squandered.
I don’t know how familiar readers are with the term “accelerationism.” It is generally used to describe a tendency on the left, though is increasingly heard on the right too. The basic idea of accelerationism is that there are certain flaws in the societal structure which if pushed could bring things to their inevitable conclusion more quickly. It is why there are so many people on the left of politics who say that sustainable government spending should be discouraged. It is not just because they are economically illiterate. What they really hope is that a speeded-up financial disaster will expose the “underlying contradictions of capitalism,” and we’ll all realize that Karl Marx was right and promptly vote for Zack Polanski or similar at the next election.
In 2023, Lindsay Clancy, a former labor-and-delivery nurse from Duxbury, Massachusetts, strangled her three children to death with exercise resistance bands in the basement of the family home. She then cut her wrists and neck and jumped from a second-story window, an act that left her paralyzed from the waist down. Her murder trial opened in Plymouth Superior Court in July and is expected to run for six to eight weeks. Both sides agree Clancy killed five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson and eight-month-old Callan. What is contested is whether she should be held responsible.
A shade over three decades ago, Gary Barlow and Take That sang “Whatever I said, I didn’t mean it, I want you back for good.” “Back for Good” has traditionally been taken to be a song about someone wanting their loved one back after a breakup. However, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex clearly listened to it on whatever easy listening channel they tune into in Montecito and decided that this is not simply Gary Barlow’s lovelorn lament but the earnest desire of the British people to have them return to us. Therefore, Meghan and Harry have announced that they will be returning to Britain. Not for a visit of a few days, as has happened in recent weeks, or even for a more protracted period.
It is usually taken as a given, for better or worse, that the Grand Old Men of English letters tend to move, if not necessarily to the right, to an accommodation with conservatism and the status quo as they grow older. It is, after all, harder to rail against the establishment when you have been weighed down with CBEs, honorary doctorates and the adulation that comes from being a much-loved writer. However, nobody seems to have told this to the novelist, polemicist and one-time enfant terrible Will Self, and the results have been, depending on your perspective, either disappointing or bleakly amusing. Self has published an extraordinary 7,000-odd word open letter to Andy Burnham on his X account, as part of what he calls his “Sitreps.
When Senator Lindsey Graham died suddenly last month from a heart condition, official Washington paused its partisan spitting contests to honor a Master of the Beltway. Not since John McCain’s funeral in 2018 had there been such a high display of institutional respect for a senator – complete with eulogies in the Capitol Rotunda and an invitation-only funeral at the National Cathedral attended by foreign leaders. But now South Carolina has to decide who replaces the Great Man. We are used to a political climate dominated by candidates who embrace egotistical posturing and exaggerate their qualifications. So on one level it was refreshing to see the South Carolina debate last night.
Will Trump and Kim Jong-un meet again? This is the million-dollar question after President Trump lauded his “very good relationship” with Kim and ordered a scaling back of US-South Korean military exercises earlier this week. Hours later, Trump elusively mentioned that the North Korean despot had responded “positively” to his overtures. Another rendezvous between the two leaders cannot be dismissed, especially with Kim Jong-un in a stronger position now than during the first Trump administration. But unlike during the Trump 1.0 years, which saw three meetings between Kim and the President, things are different now. Back then, neither leader had met the other before; kindling a bromance was a novelty. Now, however, it will be a case of déjà vu.
A beautiful and superfluous woman is the mark of a king. Why, then, did the Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff want the American people googling Natalie Harp? Did he think that the American people would suddenly turn on Donald Trump over suspicions as to his marital fidelity? Trump doesn’t trust men and enjoys the platonic company of women Last month, as is now well known, Trump was smuggled from Air Force One in a catering trolley in order to confound a possible Iranian assassination plot. Other White House staff, including Marco Rubio, remained on the official jet. But Harp, reportedly after some internal dramas, traveled with the President on a second plane. This is useful information for Democrats looking, as ever, to do down the President.
Arizona families won big this week. The teachers union and Save Our Schools fell short (again) in their latest attempt to roll back the universal Empowerment Scholarship Account program that helps more than 100,000 students there. The groups needed 255,949 valid signatures to place their Protect Education Act on the November ballot. They submitted 421,451, but after legal challenges and county reviews, so many proved invalid that the initiative appears to have fallen well short of the minimum number. School-choice opponents will continue to organize and spend Nearly 70,000 signatures were disqualified. The Arizona Free Enterprise Club noted that the initiative is projected to be more than 10,000 signatures short.
The BBC’s coverage of the Jason Arday scandal is something of a scandal itself. The corporation spent years uncritically promoting the myth of Arday. Prior to July 2026, the broadcaster produced at least 11 radio programs (totaling nearly six hours of Arday content), four news articles and two TV interviews championing the academic and repeating his false claims. When the initial story broke about his plagiarism and lies, the BBC doubled down on its defense of the academic. The first article which I would say features real criticism of the former professor was published on August 6, a day after he resigned, more than two weeks after the original Arday exposé was published on Substack and six years after the BBC’s first hagiographic piece about the late academic.
In a sign of the unease about Vladimir Putin’s ongoing war in Ukraine that exists behind closed doors in Moscow, one of Russia’s most senior bankers was fired yesterday after a series of critical comments he made earlier in the year about the fragility of Russia’s economy. Warning that Russia was “falling behind” globally both technologically and economically, Andrey Klepach stated the country would fail to win the economic “war of attrition” against Ukraine. “The Ukrainian economy, despite everything, is surviving,” he said. Klepach, chief economist at Russia’s second-largest, state-owned bank VEB, gave a speech in May, during which he linked the pressure on the country’s economy with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
What sounds more like a mob to you? Reporters asking questions about a professor’s résumé and backstory? Or swarms of the perpetually offended damning those reporters as racists, fascists, scum, even murderers? It’s the latter, isn’t it? This is the bleak irony of the Jason Arday tragedy: his self-styled defenders decry the media mob while forging their own frothing mob. They accuse journalists of destroying a man’s life even as they hound those journalists, and libel them as “lynchers,” and demand that they face the kangaroo justice of a public shaming. Arday’s death was a 'modern-day lynching,’ say self-styled anti-racists The people with blood in their nostrils are not the newspapermen who only did their jobs and asked probing questions about a public figure.
Last month, two State Department officials were set to make what they called a routine visit to Brazil, ahead of October’s presidential election. Their stated objective was an assessment of election integrity, religious freedom and freedom of expression in Latin America’s largest democracy. Brazil was not convinced. It slammed the door in their faces and denied their visas. Washington insists its diplomats were simply sent to ask questions. Brasília cries foreign interference from a nation that has a history of meddling in Latin American politics. Tensions between the two largest democracies in the Americas have not run this high in decades.
Donald Trump has instructed his Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to “substantially reduce” joint military exercises between the United States and South Korea. The two countries have had a bilateral defense agreement since 1953, and it was in defense of the government in Seoul that 36,500 American service personnel gave their lives during the Korean War. (It is worth noting that, despite the signing of an armistice at Panmunjom in July 1953, the conflict is technically ongoing.) Trump’s hazardous decision to downgrade military cooperation with and support for South Korea has come as a surprise.
France’s under-15s can carry on using social media after a parliamentary ban was struck down by the Republic’s constitutional council on Friday. The ruling is a humiliating blow for Emmanuel Macron, who had championed the legislation from the beginning. It had won the backing of both parliament and the Senate last month but the Council had other ideas. In rejecting the Bill, France’s highest constitutional authority judged that it “places a disproportionate restriction on freedom of expression and communication.” Macron heard the news as he enjoyed the surf at his seaside retreat on the Riveria, a break that has already provoked the ire of many. Should the President be gallivanting on a jet-ski when so much of the country is ravaged by destructive wildfires?
On July 30 and 31 around 80,000 migrants entered Ceuta from Morocco, according to the Spanish government’s latest estimate. Roughly 90 percent have since gone back. But, according to the government’s estimate, somewhere between 7,000 and 9,000 remain in the Spanish city whose normal population is 83,000. Ceuta’s authorities believe the figure may be as high as 11,000. At least 83 bodies connected with the crossing have been recovered on the Spanish side of the border. Morocco officially acknowledges another 14 deaths but humanitarian organizations have estimated that in total more than 140 people have died since the border was breached.
During her abortive run for governor of South Carolina, Nancy Mace’s signature policy was to remove a tax on boat loan interest – appropriate enough for someone who always seemed to be trimming her sails to catch the wind. After January 6 the newly minted Congresswoman declared that Donald Trump had no future in the GOP. But after his fortunes revived, she refashioned herself as a Trump loyalist and was a key figure in the effort to oust the then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. A rather monomaniacal focus on transgenders in women’s bathrooms and women’s sports followed, coinciding with the peak of public interest in that issue from 2021-23.
For decades, voices on the liberal and progressive left have invariably rolled out the terror-inducing accusation of “racism” in order to get their way and silence opponents. It’s thus unsurprising to see, in the wake of British academic Jason Arday’s death, that they're still resorting to this cynical tactic, and in this case, to absolve themselves of responsibility for having exploited this vulnerable man in the first place. To call it a ‘witch hunt’ is predictable and unfounded hyperbole In response to Arday’s death, Jo Grady, general secretary of Britain’s University and College Union, said the “level of harassment he suffered and the racism he was subjected to has been sickening.
Americans love their killers. Still, Luigi Mangione, who shot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson dead in December 2024, may be the most beloved of them all. It took a special sort of fetishist to see something in maniacs like Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed for no reason other than their sadistic compulsions. Mangione, though? Nearly every American has been ground down by our country’s healthcare system. Mangione’s defenders rarely dispute that he gunned down Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare Police had prepared for a mob last Friday, as Mangione appeared in a Manhattan courthouse to plead guilty to federal stalking charges. But by midmorning, the officers outnumbered everyone they’d been sent to contain. The cult of Luigi had not come.
If you were Kim Jong-un, you’d be pretty happy right now. North Korea’s third supreme leader is not only the hermit kingdom’s most successful leader – he is also the richest. With the sanctions-stricken country having amassed over $20 billion in foreign currency earnings as of last year, Kim is at his most emboldened since he took power in December 2011. As more North Korean artillery, missiles, and manpower head in Moscow’s direction to aid its war against Ukraine, Kim knows that for now, North Korea can count on its Cold War patrons of Russia and China for brotherly support. Pyongyang’s neighbors offer a crucial helpline in circumventing international sanctions and ensuring the Kim regime continues to reap rewards. North Korea is no stranger to evading sanctions.