| Keir Starmer has rejected Diane Abbott's claim that she has been banned from standing for Labour at the general election. The veteran MP was readmitted to the party yesterday, a year after she was suspended for questioning the amount of racism faced by Jews, Irish people and Travellers. Giving smooth peanut butter to babies could stop them developing a peanut allergy. Researchers at King's College London found that teenagers who regularly ate the spread before they were five were 71% less likely to have the condition than those who didn't, as early life is critical for the development of the immune system. North Korea has dropped at least 260 balloons carrying rubbish and excrement on South Korea. The smelly stratagem is a response to South Korean activists using balloons to send propaganda leaflets to the north. | | |  | Nikki Haley: reversing course. Joe Raedle/Getty |
| Now even "birdbrain" is giving Trump a free pass | There is literally nothing Donald Trump can say that will stop Republicans voting for him, says Susan Glasser in The New Yorker. Over the past few weeks, the presidential hopeful has floated the idea of remaining in office for a third term, and repeatedly promoted a false conspiracy theory that FBI agents were authorised to shoot him during their raid on Mar-a-Lago in 2022. Yet Republicans simply "cringe and change the subject". The party's hope is that everyone except Trump superfans will tune out or ignore the mad musings of their candidate – and that's exactly what's happening. "Little that he has said or done seems to have made any appreciable impact on an increasingly amnesiac electorate." | That Republicans have "made their peace" with Trump is both old news and perhaps the most important story of the 2024 election. Case in point is his former GOP primary rival Nikki Haley. During her campaign, she labelled him "diminished", "unstable" and "unhinged", and complained about fellow politicians who "know what a disaster he's been and will continue to be" but were too afraid to say so publicly. Yet last week, Haley endorsed Trump. Rather than making the case for why he should be president, she reverted to "what has become the Republican template for such flip-flops": ignore Trump entirely, and claim that Joe Biden's administration has been such a disaster that it justifies voting for "a man who nicknamed her birdbrain". | | | | Students from London Metropolitan University worked with the furniture maker Benchmark to create a range of furnishings using wood offcuts and "objects gathered from the streets of London", says Dezeen. Their kooky creations include a pair of walnut wood sliders, made with tennis balls found in a local park and old gym towels for straps; a frying pan buffed up and hung as a mirror; a broken clamp repurposed as a bookend; a dumbbell made with bicycle handlebars and sycamore wood; and a desk lamp made using an old carbon fibre bicycle fork. See more here. |
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| | | Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, has been heavily criticised for seeking arrest warrants against the leaders of both Israel and Hamas. But the British-born barrister insists he had no choice. "In Latin America, Africa and Asia they are seeing this as a crystallising point," he tells The Sunday Times's Christina Lamb. "Are powerful states sincere when they say there's a body of law or is this rules-based system all a nonsense?" Regarding the case against Israel, he cites the Troubles. "The British didn't decide to say, 'Well, on the Falls Road [the heart of Catholic Belfast] there undoubtedly may be some IRA members and Republican sympathisers, so therefore let's drop a 2,000lb bomb on the Falls Road.' You can't do that." | | | | | | Advertisement | | We've been helping our clients for generations – so that their wealth can last across future generations. Our expert wealth and investment managers specialise in investing on your behalf, leaving you free to focus on what really matters in life. | Wherever you are in your investing journey, you'll receive the same high level of personal service. We think our clients say it best: 3 in 5 of our clients have personally recommended us to their friends and family. Click here to find out more. | Capital at risk. |
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| | | | Rishi Sunak's election campaign started badly when he asked a group in Wales – whose team didn't qualify for this summer's Euros – if they were looking forward to "all the football". He's not the first PM to get in a pickle over the beautiful game, says Zoe Williams in The Guardian. Perhaps the most memorable was David Cameron, who in 2015 appeared to mix up Aston Villa, the team he claimed to support, with West Ham, who play in the same colours. It's excruciating: "You can see cortisol coursing through his body as he realises his mistake." Watch – and listen to his unforgettably awkward laugh – here. | | | | | | Enjoying The Knowledge? Click below to share | | |
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| | |  | Adil Rashid (centre) with the T20 World Cup in 2022. Quinn Rooney/Getty |
| What Farage gets wrong about British Muslims | Once again, says Rakib Ehsan in The Spectator, Nigel Farage – "arguably the most influential politician in recent British political history" – has sparked a furious debate. Interviewed on Sky News over the weekend, he said the UK was home to a growing number of Muslims who refuse to subscribe to "British values". By way of comparison, Farage praised the contribution of West Indian soldiers in the world wars, and their "cultural love" of cricket. Someone should tell him about Khudadad Khan, the Pakistani-born machine-gunner who won the Victoria Cross in 1914 as the only survivor of a bloodbath in Belgium. Or indeed the leg-spinner Adil Rashid, who has attained "legendary status in white-ball cricket for England". | As co-author of a recent report on British Muslims, I'm no stranger to "problematic behaviours and attitudes" within the community, particularly the "more segregated elements" in northern England. Levels of anti-Semitism are "relatively high", and the "principal terror threat faced by modern Britain comes in the form of Islamist extremism". But sweeping generalisations about British Muslims miss the good in many of these "patriotic, community-spirited and family-oriented communities". For example, 86% of Muslim survey respondents said they thought Britain was "a good place to live", while only 3% said it was "bad". In the wider population just 70% thought good and 12% bad. Nearly 70% of Muslim respondents said getting married and raising children to be good citizens was a duty; in the general population it was a measly 43%. Modern Britain is a complicated place. Influential politicians "tarring entire groups with the same brush" helps no one. | | | | This video of a Japanese carpenter making a model of the Colosseum out of chocolate – even using melted chocolate as cement – has racked up more than four million likes on Instagram. It's the "Choclosseum", says one user. Another adds: "I got diabetes watching this." See the full video here. |
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| | | 🗳️ 36 days to go…
"Labour's best-kept secret is the extent to which it would forge a closer relationship with the EU," says Andrew Grice in The Independent. Keir Starmer won't bring it up for fear of spooking Leave voters. But after talking to shadow ministers, I'm certain the party's voter-friendly line on the matter – "no return to the single market, customs union or free movement of people" – is a smokescreen. Their plan is to extend a proposed EU-UK security pact beyond defence, policing and justice to include "economic security", allowing them to break down trade barriers. In an "ideal world for Labour", this would also involve Starmer "landing the prize of a deal to return migrants to the EU". | | | | | | | | It's Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, an album of which there's only one copy in existence. The rare record was made between 2007 and 2013 by the hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan – with a couple of guest appearances from Cher – and burned on to two CDs before the master recordings were deleted. Having passed through the hands of the disgraced pharmaceutical entrepreneur Martin Shkreli, and then the US Department of Justice, it was bought by the digital art collective Pleasr for $4m. It has now been loaned to The Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania, which will play 30-minute excerpts as part of a forthcoming exhibition. | | | | | "A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested."
Tom Wolfe |
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