In the headlines

Police have arrested a man on suspicion of attempted murder after an apparent attempted beheading on a street in Belfast. Footage of the attack last night appears to show the suspect, who is believed to be Somali, pinning the victim down and repeatedly stabbing him in the head. Keir Starmer has described the incident as “sickening”. Terrorists, hostile states and gangsters were given more than £28bn of taxpayers’ money between 2015 and 2021, says The Telegraph. A Cabinet Office report buried by the previous government shows that foreign aid and Covid relief loans were misappropriated on a vast scale, with millions going to Russia and Islamic State and billions to organised crime. AstraZeneca’s first weight-loss pill has been shown to help people lose up to 10% of their body weight in just six months during trials. Elecoglipron targets the same GLP-1 gut receptors as weight-loss injections such as Wegovy and Mounjaro, and because the pills will be cheaper and more convenient than jabs, pharmacies expect millions of UK patients to switch.

Comment

Dugin: “Putin’s brain”. Getty

Even Putin’s cheerleaders are souring on the war

No Russian thinker has worked harder than Aleksandr Dugin to “rationalise the invasion of Ukraine”, says Simon Shuster in The Atlantic. Long before it began, Dugin cooked up a whole philosophical system, “neo-Eurasianism”, to explain why Russia, the biggest country in the world, needed to steal even more land from its neighbours, killing thousands in the process. His work on the subject was so influential in the Kremlin it earned him the nickname “Putin’s brain”. But today, even Dugin seems to be having second thoughts. Interviewed on Russian TV last week by a propagandist widely rumoured to be Putin’s goddaughter, he was so unable to answer the basic softball question “what is worth fighting for?” that even his interviewer couldn’t keep a straight face. And at the end of last month, he posted that Russia’s chances “not only of achieving victory but simply holding the country together” were “critically low”.

In recent months, says Andrei Zakharov in The New York Times, criticism of the war, and of Putin, has reached corners of Russian society that never previously raised a murmur of dissent. Authorities have been blocking popular messaging apps and pushing users on to Max, a state-backed alternative. Messages are so widely understood to be visible to the FSB that a comedy show on Russia’s biggest TV channel did a joke in which a private message on the app began: “Hi everyone!” On previously pro-war Telegram chats the Russian president is now habitually referred to as “grandpa”, a derogatory term long used by his harshest critics. For years now, Russia’s social contract has been: stay out of politics, and the state will stay out of your lives. The Kremlin’s grandpas fail to see that cutting internet access breaks that contract, and “rage is boiling over”.

Art

Instagram/@Fullgrownfutureuk

Gavin and Alice Munro have spent the past 20 years trying to “grow trees into chairs”, says Sydney Page in The Washington Post. The process, which takes up to 12 years, involves planting oak, willow, beech and so on at their “Chair Orchard” in Derbyshire, then using specialised ancient techniques – coppicing, grafting, pleaching, espalier – to coax them into the correct shape. They then dry the trees indoors for a year and sand them down into their final form. Some of the chairs are usable as furniture but most are sold as works of art, fetching upwards of £65,000. Click on the image to order yours.

The right enemies

Apic/Getty

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