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Henry Nowak was 18, and at the end of his first term at Southampton University in England when he was murdered. Around 11:30 p.m. on December 3 last year, Henry was walking back from a night out with his college football team. He hadn’t drunk heavily – during the trial we heard that he was below the drink driving limit. On the way home Henry encountered Vickrum Digwa, the 23-year-old Sikh man who would murder him. Given the seriousness with which our police take racism, of course their response to this was to handcuff Henry Digwa was carrying two blades, an eight-inch "shastar" openly displayed, and a smaller "kirpan" around his neck and under clothing.

The New York Knicks clinched an NBA championship spot Monday – and President Trump shared his excitement over his home team’s progress and his hopes to attend an NBA Finals game during today's cabinet meeting “Boy, what a team. They win all their games," Trump said. "They really, they have some great players. I think I will be going to one of their games.” He also congratulated Knicks owner Jim Dolan, who he counts as a longtime friend. https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/2059684404973236616 Trump has been a Knicks fan for years, with recently surfaced photos showing him sitting courtside back in 1991. If his plans work out, he will be the first sitting US president to attend an NBA Finals game.

For the Pentagon, Nigeria is firmly on the list of countries where terror has run amok. In 2025 and again in January and May this year, the US Air Force bombed rebel camps in the north in an effort to halt a spree of murders and abductions that has left thousands dead or missing. US bombings earlier this week killed Islamic State’s second in command, Abu Bakr al-Mainuki, but the insurgency shows no sign of slowing; 17 trainees died recently in an attack on the army’s special forces academy and the conflict has spread to nearby Mali. In Nigeria, keeping the peace is a challenge. Since independence from Britain in 1960, there have been six coups and a civil war.

The long war in Ukraine has morphed into a new and decisive phase, one that could lead to Ukraine’s upset victory over its much larger, more aggressive neighbor. The global consequences of Russia’s loss – and Vladimir Putin’s humiliation – would be enormous. What is this new phase? Is there really evidence the tide has turned in Ukraine’s favor? To sort out the answers and understand what’s new about the war’s current phase, we need to do a brief tour of the three phases that preceded it. The first phase began well over a decade ago, in February 2014, when Barack Obama was president. Ukraine fatefully signaled it wanted much stronger ties with Europe and the United States, not Russia, at the very moment US deterrence was weak.