Father’s Day offer
With Father’s Day coming up next weekend, we thought we’d do something special.
So for this week only, if you take out a gift subscription – 50% off, so £40 for the year – we’ll send you one of three excellent, highly dad-friendly books from the wonderful All You Need To Know… series, written by experts and published and edited by our founder, Jon Connell. One’s on Churchill, the second is on Napoleon, and the third covers “the great explorers”.
This offer is available to our UK readers only, and it closes on Father’s Day itself (21 June), though we’ll need the book orders by Tuesday 16th to guarantee delivery to the old man in time.
Comment
Police and protesters on the streets of Belfast this week. Charles McQuillan/Getty
Is Britain’s asylum system really broken?
When unionist MP Jim Allister suggested that the “bloodletting maniac” arrested in Belfast on Monday was from an “alien culture”, says Brendan O’Neill in The Spectator, the usual suspects were up in arms. So let me explain what he means. The attacker was from Sudan. For 30 years, up to the Sudanese Revolution of 2019, the country was governed by a system of “Islamist savagery”: religious diktat was ruthlessly enforced, women were treated like cattle, homosexuals like “godless filth”. Apostasy was considered such an abominable sin that even heavily pregnant women could be sentenced to death for supposedly committing it. Is it really so absurd to describe that culture as “alien” – and inferior – to ours?
There are, of course, problems with the asylum system, says Robert Shrimsley in the FT, and it’s impossible not to be outraged and alarmed by that savage attack in Belfast. But “there is the reality and then there is the grift”. Right-wing commentators seize on incidents that fit the “white victimhood” agenda, while ignoring those that don’t. Where, for example, was the “some cultures are better than others” brigade when a white man was jailed in April for beating and raping a Sikh woman in her home in Walsall? Each immigrant crime is a chance to attract more subscribers or to promote books with titles like Suicide of a Nation and The Silent Jihad. The politicians are at it too, of course, most notably Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe with their “disingenuous warnings of civil unrest”. The danger of all this is not just that voters fall for these dishonest narratives. It’s that their legitimate concerns won’t be addressed because of elite contempt for the grifters and opportunists taking advantage of them.
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Property
THE ISLAND HOUSE This four-bedroom home, made from timber and patinated aluminium, overlooks Loch Pooltiel on the Isle of Skye, says The Guardian. On the ground floor is an open-plan kitchen-diner-living room, along with a bedroom, a family bathroom and a laundry, with floor-to-ceiling windows offering expansive views over the water. Upstairs are three further bedrooms and a second bathroom. A garden of nearly three acres surrounds the house and there’s a decked terrace off the dining area. Skye’s main town, Portree, is an hour’s drive. £570,000. Click on the image to see the listing.
Heroes and villains
Wynn-Williams testifying in Washington last year. Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg/Getty
Heroes
Meta, whose efforts to silence a whistleblower are doing wonders for her book sales. The tech firm secured a court order banning former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams from promoting her tell-all memoir, Careless People, so when she appeared at a Hay festival event last week she sat on stage but said nothing. The ensuing publicity boosted week-on-week sales by 304.5%, pushing the title to the top of the paperback nonfiction charts. (To order a copy, click here.)
Hero
The author of a note in a time capsule that was unearthed in Crystal Palace, south London last week, for providing a racing tip that came up trumps. Buried in 1964 alongside four coins, the letter said the money was from a winning wager on a horse named Santa Claus in the Epsom Derby, and urged the finder to bet on a horse with a name that could be “associated with Santa Claus”. The story went viral and several locals put money on Christmas Day, a 7-1 runner at the Epsom Derby on Saturday – which promptly romped to victory.
Villain
An Air Canada pilot who has been accused of captaining more than 900 commercial flights over 17 years despite not having the proper licence. Authorities say Geoff Wall, 59, who retired last year before the investigation began, held some valid credentials but wasn’t certified to sit in the captain’s seat. The airline said all pilots undergo flight training every six months, and that Wall demonstrated “a high level of competency to safely operate large aircraft”.
Villains
Kingston council in southwest London, for saying that e-bikes could increase women’s access to cycling because it helps them meet their “traditional domestic responsibilities” and “stay looking nice”. Officials apologised for the comment, which was made in an equality impact assessment, saying it “does not align with the council’s commitments to fairness, inclusivity and protecting the rights of all women and girls”.
Life
Hockney in 1963. Tony Evans/Getty
Until his death this week, aged 88, says The Telegraph, David Hockney was widely regarded as the greatest living artist. But he never lost his dry, Yorkshire sense of humour. The lifelong smoker kept a sign in his studio that read: “Death awaits you, even if you do not smoke.” He told critics that he only dyed his hair because he saw an advert in 1960s America that claimed “Blondes have more fun”. Invited to paint the Queen, he declined, explaining he was too busy “painting England”. Late in life he took to wearing a badge that read “end bossiness soon” (end bossiness now, he explained, would have been too bossy). And when nosy biographers asked about his modest childhood in Bradford, he refused to be pigeonholed: “We didn’t think we were working class,” he said, “we thought we were first class.” He wasn’t wrong.
The Knowledge Crossword
Global update
Kim Jong-un and Xi Jinping in Pyongyang on Tuesday. Yan Yan/Xinhu
North Korea’s extraordinary recovery
Just five years after Covid left North Korea on the ropes, say Dasl Yoon and Timothy Martin in The Wall Street Journal, it has become “the world’s most unlikely growth story”. In Pyongyang, you can hail an Uber-like ride and eat at restaurants serving brick-oven pizza and chicken wings. Chinese electric vehicles whizz through the streets. Car dealerships sell BMWs. Smartphones are now so widespread that there are more than 50 different brands to choose from. This isn’t just propaganda. Satellite imagery shows surging vessel activity at North Korea’s oil-storage facilities and the country shining roughly three times as brightly at night as it did five years ago. The regime built 10,000 new homes in the capital last year, more than were built in either Los Angeles or Chicago. Its economy grew an estimated 3.7% in 2024, the fastest rate in eight years.
The catalyst for all this is the war in Ukraine. Arms sales and troop deployments to Russia have netted Pyongyang more than $10bn, a huge sum for an economy with an estimated GDP of $27bn. Another big revenue stream for leader Kim Jong-un is his army of cyber thieves, whose raids on crypto exchanges have added billions of dollars to government coffers. Kim, who hosted Xi Jinping this week for the first time since 2019, has been expanding his network of geopolitical friends: he attended a Chinese military parade for the first time last autumn and signed a friendship treaty with Belarus in March. North Korea remains extremely poor, with nearly half of its 26 million residents thought to be malnourished. Even so, says University of California academic Stephan Haggard, who has studied the country’s economy for decades, its recovery is an “incredible accomplishment”.
🇰🇵🚦 It’s a far cry from the country I visited in 2007, says Peter Hitchens in the Daily Mail. Electricity was in such short supply that my supposedly luxury hotel was plunged into darkness each morning. My escorts refused to tell me the price of a cheese sandwich at a stall by the Metro, and I never laid eyes on actual North Korean money. And there were hardly any cars on the streets – though they did have beautiful girls in militaristic uniforms directing the non-existent traffic from podiums.
Weather
Quoted
“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”
Confucius
That’s it. You’re done.
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