Jason Arday has resigned as a Cambridge professor after the university launched an investigation into his academic conduct, saying he no longer wished to be “under a constant spotlight”. Arday has been accused of plagiarising his PhD thesis, as well as making seemingly false claims about his athletic feats and fundraising efforts. Iran says it is in the “final stages” of agreeing a deal with Oman on a new shipping route through the Strait of Hormuz. A senior Iranian official told Reuters the agreement would hand Tehran control over traffic entering the strait, a development US officials have repeatedly said they will never accept. Vaccines that don’t need to be refrigerated have been successfully trialled on patients for the first time, after British boffins created a dry powder version of the tetanus-diphtheria jab. It’s hoped that “fridge-free” vaccines could help reduce wastage – around half are currently discarded each year due to temperature issues – and be rolled out in war zones and other areas where fridges are scarce.

When Jason Arday became the youngest ever black professor at Cambridge in 2023, says Lara Brown in The Spectator, the 37-year-old’s appointment was greeted with considerable fanfare. “We are so lucky to have you,” the head of the education faculty gushed. “You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.” But it seems he’s also a world-class fabulist. After allegations emerged that Arday plagiarised his thesis, journalists have discovered and debunked a raft of outlandish claims: that he raised £5m for charity; ran an almost superhuman 30 marathons in 35 days; starred in a TV show that began 20 years before he was born. When The Guardian told him they’d found no evidence for his assertions that he’d been threatened by knife-wielding lunatics and been sent a severed pig’s head, his response was telling: “I thought you’d just believe me.”

Arday, who resigned yesterday, is the perfect avatar for two of the right’s biggest bugbears, says Jason Okundaye in The Guardian: that academic standards have been supplanted by “woke orthodoxy” and that minorities are unfairly advanced in the name of DEI. The natural instinct of progressives has been to defend him, but they’d be better off looking at how his appointment was handled. There is, clearly, a need for more diversity at Cambridge: when I matriculated in 2015, there were only 15 black males among our cohort of 3,449 students, and “single-figure” black academics. But by trumpeting Arday’s history-making appointment and tales of hardship – he purportedly couldn’t speak until he was 11 and couldn’t read until he was 18 – Cambridge treated him not as a scholar but as a “mascot”, a vehicle to signal their diversity bona fides. Progressives should be pushing for “diversity without tokenism”, not defending an institution that “reduced equality to a mere PR exercise”.

Swimmers at Highgate Pond in north London report seeing “all sorts of species from the Labour Party menagerie”, says Jack Blackburn in The Times. There have been sightings of the lesser spotted Peter Mandelson (Princeps Tenebrarum), who swims like an eel – “a creature that is slippery, elusive and prone to biting when provoked”. Then there is Minister Furiosus, otherwise known as Ed Miliband, whose style is a “bizarre cross between breaststroke and doggy paddle”. The spectacle is apparently “enough to make onlookers choke on their bacon sandwiches”.

Star Wars is finally being dubbed into Welsh, says Steven Morris in The Guardian. The Cymraeg version of the 1977 sci-fi classic has an all-star cast including Emmy winner Matthew Rhys as Han Solo, Slow Horses star Aimee-Ffion Edwards as Princess Leia and Notting Hill’s Rhys Ifans as Obi-Wan Kenobi. It will air on the Welsh channel S4C on Christmas Day, with iconic phrases such as Amser maith yn ôl, mewn galaeth bell bell i ffwrdd… (“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”) and A boed i’r Grym fod gyda chi (“May the force be with you”).

Osama bin Laden was always clear about the goal of al-Qaeda, says Graeme Wood in The Atlantic: “kill Americans” and “bleed” the US to bankruptcy. The terror group can certainly claim some success. The 9/11 attacks killed 2,977 people, and the estimated cost of America’s subsequent “War on Terror” has reached more than $8trn. But since the horrors of that sunny September morning almost 25 years ago, the group has pulled off only one further fatal attack on American soil, killing three US sailors at a naval base in 2019. The most ferocious blow al‑Qaeda could manage after 9/11 was not much worse than the kind of “mundane workplace violence” that Americans regularly inflict on themselves.

Where the group has succeeded is in building up its affiliated franchises across the globe, from Yemen to the Sahel to the Horn of Africa. These groups are not just ruthless but “flush with men and materiel”. The East African branch fields a force of around 10,000 men and pulls in roughly $100m in annual revenue through taxation, smuggling and “outright theft”. The Yemeni outfit leads operations against the West and has developed drone programmes. In the Sahel, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), sent trucks “bristling with weapons” into Mali this year and nearly toppled the country’s government. Even a weaker affiliate on the Indian subcontinent is now in an “enviable position”, with the back-in-power Taliban allowing its followers to congregate and train in Afghanistan. These groups have at times misfired, but mostly they seem to have “learned from the mistakes of al-Qaeda core”. Neither the US nor any other country has managed to destroy them.

Andy Burnham’s wife, Marie-France van Heel, was aghast when he told her he wanted to run for the Labour leadership again after defeats in 2010 and 2015, the PM tells Elizabeth Day on the How to Fail podcast. “She was like: ‘Not again; they’ve told you twice they don’t want you.’” Van Heel, a marketing executive, has never been afraid to criticise her husband. When Burnham was an MP in his early 30s, he thought he’d come across well in some TV interviews he’d done, only to receive a text from his wife reading: “ANSWER THE F***ING QUESTION.”

To The Knowledge:

In a recent issue of Radio Times, a gentleman comments on a comedy programme and starts his letter: “I haven’t laughed this much since my wife died.” I am sure he didn’t mean it that way.

Richard Allen
Coventry

It’s Jemima Lines, says Grace Wheeler on BBC Sport, who has become the first British woman to be selected for an America’s Cup team in 90 years. The 29-year-old will be part of the GB1 team in next year’s sailing event, which now requires at least one woman in each five-person crew. A former competitive kitefoiler, Lines brings both experience and a sense of adventure to the squad, having previously worked as a guide at Everest Base Camp, climbed several Alaskan peaks, trekked across Mongolian mountain ranges and cycled solo around Iceland.