Dear Reader, | I do hope you are continuing to enjoy The Knowledge. | We've found the best way to grow has been through word of mouth, and I'm enormously grateful to everyone who has taken the time to refer a friend to us. As a thank you, we are giving away 10 John Lewis vouchers worth £100 each. To be in with a chance of winning, all you have to do is get one person to sign up to The Knowledge over the next seven days. The more referrals you make, of course, the better your chances of winning. | Simply click below to share by WhatsApp or email, or copy and paste your unique URL: https://www.theknowledge.com/subscribe?ref=qFAau3IJDx | | | All good wishes, Jon Connell | | | Donald Trump has blasted his hush-money trial as a "disgrace" after being found guilty on all 34 counts. The unanimous jury decision – over whether he falsified business records to hide payments to porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election – makes Trump the first former US president to be convicted of a crime. Sentencing is on 11 July; his lawyers say they'll appeal. Joe Biden has given Kyiv permission to use American weapons on targets in Russian territory for the first time. The major policy shift allows US missiles to be fired at military assets involved in the offensive in Kharkiv, where Russian forces have made significant gains in recent weeks. The NHS has begun giving cancer patients personalised vaccines to treat the disease. Thousands will be given access to the pioneering new treatment, which primes the immune system to destroy any remaining cancer cells after surgery. | | | | Trump leaving court in Manhattan yesterday. Steven Hirsch/Getty |
| Trump's right – this case should never have been heard | The guilty verdict in Donald Trump's trial should both "shock the nation" and reassure it of its ability to achieve justice, says The Economist. In reality, it will "probably accomplish neither". Yes, a jury of his peers weighed the evidence and unanimously convicted him of breaking election laws by covering up hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. But tempting as it is to see this as proof that "no citizen is beyond the reach of justice", the reality is that in the long run, this will likely do more to harm the rule of law than to affirm it. | Given how vague and shaky the case is, Trump has numerous credible avenues for appeal, which will last until long after the November election. Ongoing legal wrangling will make it far easier for his supporters to argue that he is the victim of a political stitch-up and a biased judge and jury. And whatever his opponents say, that accusation is not without merit. Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, who brought the charges, is a Democrat who was elected to his post after "boasting that he was most qualified to prosecute Mr Trump". Yet he was under no obligation to do so – prosecutors have wide discretion, for good reason. Bragg's predecessor as well as Joe Biden's Justice Department considered bringing versions of these charges but elected not to. History may prove them right. | 🤬 🙄 Whatever you think of the result, says Renato Mariotti in The New York Times, it "didn't have to end this way". Trump's legal team lost a winnable case by adopting an "ill-advised strategy that was right out of Mr Trump's playbook". Instead of sticking to a simple story – that the defendant was too busy being president to have any direct knowledge of dodgy dealings – they denied everything and attacked everybody who dared to take him on. This strategy has served Trump well in business and in politics. In a Manhattan courtroom, it finally backfired. | | | | Bao Li back home in China. Roshan Patel/National Zoo |
| Washington DC is braced for "pandamonium", says Axios, following the news that two giant pandas are being sent to the city's National Zoo. The massive mammals have been a symbol of US-China diplomacy since 1972, when Beijing loaned two of them to the city as a gesture of goodwill. But these loan deals have dried up in recent years amid rising tensions between Washington and Beijing, and DC's last three giant pandas were returned in November. The new arrivals – two-year-olds Bao Li and Qing Bao – will be flown over on a specially kitted out jumbo jet: the "FedEx Panda Express". |
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| | | 🗳️ 34 days to go... The way Keir Starmer has purged leftwingers like Diane Abbott is very much in character, says Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph. Having risen to the top of Britain's "legal bureaucracy", the Labour leader is a master in exerting power by "thwarting his". His preferred candidates, dubbed "Starmtroopers", are "solid types unlikely to rebel over anything". That should make his life in No 10 easier. But it's worth remembering that some of the "former Trots" Tony Blair tolerated – the likes of John Reid and Alan Milburn – "went on to be his most trusted, reform-minded lieutenants". All prime ministers need "characters and thinkers" in their ranks. Starmer's Labour risks being "a very dull party indeed". | | | | Advertisement | | Sarah Raven is an online luxury gardening company providing everything you need for a beautiful garden and a stylish home. Discover must-have plants and seeds to create your own home-grown harvest, exclusive bulb collections curated by Sarah Raven herself, plus essential gardening kit and stylish homeware. All our plants have gone through a tough selection process – they're trialled and tested at Sarah's home, Perch Hill Farm in East Sussex – so you know you'll only ever get the best quality for your kitchen and garden. Click here to discover more. |
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| | Nice work if you can get it | | I heard that Lenny Kravitz used to be such a heavy weed smoker that he hired somebody to roll his spliffs, says Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian. So I asked him about it. "Erm, yes," he told me. "A junior high school friend. He had other jobs, too, but one of them was to roll joints." What other jobs? "Just assisting me. I wanted my buddy with me." Were you rubbish at rolling or too busy? "No, I was actually very good at it. But if I'm in the studio, playing all the instruments, running around…" Fair dinkum. | | | | Enjoying The Knowledge? Click below to share | | |
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| | | | Blair on the campaign trail in 1997. Tom Stoddart Archive/Getty |
| We are still suffering from Blair's constitutional "revolution" | Ever since the end of New Labour, Britain has been "in a state of permanent constitutional crisis", says David Starkey on David Starkey Talks. Why has the Conservative government of the past 14 years been so disastrous? Why are we about to vote in a Labour government that nobody wants "with a vast majority"? It's because of a constitutional "revolution" carried out by Tony Blair – a revolution "exactly equivalent in scale" to Clement Attlee's post-war Labour government. Right back to the Magna Carta in the 12th century, the "central principle" of the English (then British) constitution has been the sovereignty of Parliament: "you are bound by law because you've participated in making it". | This principle carried us peacefully through the Industrial Revolution, through Empire and through "gigantic social transformations". In contrast to the revolutionaries in Europe, suffragettes and the working class didn't want "to tear Parliament down", but to sit in it. Then, under New Labour, Parliament's authority was eroded "with astonishing speed". The Bank of England was made independent, and thus unaccountable to elected politicians. Scottish devolution created a "grotesque parody of a government in Edinburgh". Issues like climate policy were farmed out to endless "quangos"; the 1998 Human Rights Act outsourced justice from popular consent to the European Court of Human Rights. Without reversing all of this, and giving control back to parliament, then all other talk of reform is pointless. | | | | Venice's Ponte delle Tette |
| Breasts pop up on our streets more than you might think, says The Economist. In France, you'll find roads called Rue des Poupardières (Street of the Breastfeeders, or Street of the Nurseries), which hark back to the Renaissance-era practice of rich women sending their babies off to be breastfed by poor rural women. And in Venice, there's a bridge named after the prostitutes who "advertised their assets" there in the 16th century. It's called Ponte delle Tette, or Bridge of the Tits. |
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| | | During the 1979 election, says Patrick Kidd in The Times, the pioneering journalist Ann Leslie asked if the Tory campaign bus could make more frequent lavatory stops as her bladder had been weakened by giving birth. Margaret Thatcher gave a withering look. "No one needs to go more than twice a day," she said. "I go first thing in the morning and then at night and it's quite enough." | | | | | | | | It's Laurent Schwarz, a two-and-a-half-year-old from Bavaria who's been dubbed a "pint-sized Picasso" thanks to his colourful abstract paintings, says The Independent. The wunderkind's works have gained him more than 30,000 followers on Instagram, and a fierce bidding war has erupted over his first acrylic on canvas, The Fingers, with one US buyer offering $138,000. Some of his creations were showcased at Munich's biggest art fair, while a gallery in New York has approached the family for a potential exhibition. Schwarz's favourite subjects are elephants, horses and dinosaurs, and he typically ends up "covered in just as much paint as the canvas". See more of his oeuvre here. | | | | "Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets." Napoleon |
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