Read it.

Almost ten years ago, a Catholic priest was set upon by Islamists who had sworn an oath of allegiance to the Islamic State group. Now, as part of a relatively rapid administrative process, Fr. Jacques Hamel looks set to be beatified by the Church he served for many years.

Hamel was murdered on July 26th, 2016, in the Church of Saint-Étienne in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, near Rouen. His two young killers entered the church during Mass and pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, before killing Hamel at the altar. (Another churchgoer was seriously injured.)

In the years since, this still notorious case has prompted pilgrimage to the crime scene, where a once blood-soaked wooden altar, still showing knife-marks, stands beside a desecrated cross.

Whereas there is a standard waiting period for a beatification process, normally at least five years, the Pope has waived this. Instead, the Diocese of Rouen was allowed to commence work on Jacques Hamel’s case significantly earlier, completing this phase in 2019 with an 11,000-page dossier, now under review in Rome.

Vatican News describes the document as comprising more than 100 kilograms of paper, around 10,000 hours of work, 600 transcribed sermons, and interviews with 60 witnesses. Officially already a martyr, this process puts Hamel on the path to beatification.

Read it.

Unbelievable.

asylum seeker accused of causing the death of a 14-year-old girl in a fatal traffic collision before leaving the scene without offering help.

The tragic incident took place six years ago near the village of Marken in the western Netherlands.

The defendant, Jamal T., who lives in Germany but was born in Iraq, was allegedly distracted while looking for directions on one of his co-passengers’ mobile phone.

The prosecutor’s office is seeking two weeks’ imprisonment for careless driving, arguing that the defendant was not paying sufficient attention to the road and could have avoided the collision, and is requesting a further six weeks in prison for failing to stop and provide assistance after the impact.

Read it.

And rightly so.

Two police officers are facing gross misconduct investigations following the death of 18-year-old Henry Nowak, who was handcuffed and arrested while suffering a fatal stab wound, according to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC).

The IOPC said evidence suggests the officers who first arrived at the scene may have failed to recognise that Nowak required urgent medical assistance. Therefore the investigation will examine the decision to arrest and handcuff him rather than provide immediate first aid, as well as the actions of control room staff handling emergency calls.

The watchdog also said one officer may have breached professional standards relating to authority, respect, and courtesy after allegedly dismissing Nowak’s claim that he had been stabbed. This is a euphemistic way of describing what happened: the officer in question when told by Nowak he had been stabbed replied “I don’t think you have, mate.”

The investigation follows formal complaints from Nowak’s family, who questioned differences between how Henry was treated by officers and how Digwa was treated after his arrest.

Read it.

An African migrant was arrested on suspicion of stabbing and killing a 19-year-old man in the French city of Fréjus during the weekend of June 27–28th.

The suspect, from Guinea in West Africa, was scheduled to face a deportation ruling on the day of his alleged offence, in which a young man was killed with a knife blow to the neck. Rescue workers struggled in vain to help the deceased.

Three other young men were hospitalized during the knife attack, which occurred shortly after the Guinean alleged perpetrator filed an appeal against his French deportation order (or OQTF), which the local administrative court was scheduled to examine.

Not for the first time, a violent crime was committed—allegedly—by someone already subject to a French deportation order. Indeed, France appears to struggle with deporting migrants who have been ordered to leave the country.

Read it.

Dutch farmers’ organisations have warned of a summer of protests if the government presses ahead with proposed nitrogen restrictions that they say could put many farms out of business.

The warning came as parliament debated Agriculture Minister Jaimi Van Essen’s plans on Wednesday. Farmer representatives met for crisis talks in Nijkerk while farmers gathered outside with tractors to protest the proposals.

The organisations—including Agractie, the Dutch Dairy Farmers Union (NMV), the Dutch Poultry Farmers Union (NVP), Farmers Defence Force (FDF), and LTO Nederland—oppose plans to introduce wider buffer zones around Natura 2000 protected areas and tougher livestock emissions limits, arguing they would make farming in some regions virtually impossible.

Read it.

Good luck with that.

The family of Louis, the 17-year-old boy beaten to death at a construction site in Narbonne, France, have spoken publicly about the impact of the attack, with his aunt describing the footage of the incident as “unspeakable.”

Marie-Julie Marteau, Louis’ aunt, told BFMTV on Monday, June 29, that she had watched videos of the assault and said the family had been left deeply traumatized. She said Louis’ mother had been “in a state of total shock” since the teenager’s death.

Marteau described the video as extremely distressing and said the family struggled to understand the level of violence shown in the footage.

She added that those responsible appeared to show no remorse during the assault. “They are laughing, they beat him, they leave him no way out,” she said, describing the footage as showing the attack being recorded alongside “snickering and selfies.”

Read it.

White working-class students are effectively locked out of almost every race-based diversity scholarship at Oxford and Cambridge despite being among the most educationally disadvantaged groups in England, according to a new analysis.

The investigation, published in Britain’s Daily Telegraph, found that more than a dozen scholarships, bursaries and outreach schemes at the two elite universities prioritise applicants from black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds, while offering little or no equivalent support to poor white British students. The findings have reignited criticism that Britain’s diversity agenda rewards race over genuine disadvantage.

According to the analysis, Oxford and Cambridge together offer at least 15 scholarships or financial aid schemes aimed specifically at BAME students, alongside at least 15 outreach programmes including residential visits, taster days, and webinars. White working-class men appear eligible for just one of those diversity schemes, while white working-class women qualify for only two.

Quillette.

For neo-decolonial activists, Western civilisation reflects all of the things they regard as oppression: capitalism, Zionism, borders, prisons, police, property, universities, legal systems, national sovereignty, and the ordinary habits of middle class life.

To call for our civilisation’s “total eradication” is to demand a revolutionary unmaking of the world that Western people inhabit. It is a politics of purification. It’s hard to view this as anything other than naked destructivism. They are talking about dismantling our whole society.

Western civilisation is a lot of things beyond simplistic labels like “capitalist”. Western civilisation is the assumption that government is limited by law; that a person can speak, worship, publish, own property, marry, dissent, sue, vote, and be judged as an individual. Western civilisation means the various habits of argument, self-criticism, contracts, due process, scientific inquiry, and voluntary association that make modern life possible. It is the system that has lifted billions of people out of poverty worldwide.

During the George Floyd protests, when another user asked whether there was a better slogan than “defund the police,” Chevalier reportedly replied: “Fuck you. We’re gonna defund and abolish. You don’t get to water down our movements.” When someone suggested that abolition meant ending policing “as we know it,” she corrected them: “No. It means ending policing full stop. Period. No more police at all ever.”

Freeberg nails it.

The straight white male privilege is: If people want to play this tribe game, your tribe is the first one they’re going to excoriate. It’s pretty consistent. So it’s not at all hard to pick out these people. They hate you already.

Winnowing down this friends list is as easy as falling off a log, for us straight white males. We just say “You don’t want to have anything to do with me? Fine. Your terms are acceptable.” And that’s it. No muss no fuss.

Gays…transgenders…blacks…”native Americans” and women…who have figured out the above three truisms and are struggling to get them implemented in their own lives…I dunno. I dunno how they even get started on it. It must be awful. A bunch of damn fair-weather friends and you have to figure out which ones are lying. Who’s only pretending to be your friend, so they can be someone else’s.

It would drive me bonkers. In a heartbeat.

Glad I’m a straight white male. A loathed, native-born, third-generation, Scandihoovian, meat eating carbon spewing always-wrong SWM.

Read it.

Mice get all the good stuff.

Not the Bee.

The Left tells us that if we just submit to government medicine and allowed the entire medical industry to become socialist, everything will be okay.

Meanwhile, as The Guardian reports, the reality is somewhat different.

It’s absolutely horrible.

Read it.

Reckless driving and aggressive driving can describe similar behavior, but they are not the same legal idea. Reckless driving is usually the more serious label because it turns on willful or wanton disregard for safety. Aggressive driving usually describes a pattern of hostile or impatient traffic behavior, and some states do not use that label as a separate charge.

There is no single national rule. A speed, lane change, or tailgating incident can be treated differently depending on the state, the road conditions, the risk created, and whether the driver threatened or endangered someone else.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Not the Bee.

It’s Somali Independence Day in Little Mogadishu, and this Minnesota man got stuck in the crowd.

Memo to self: Avoid Minnesota.

Not the Bee.

Arab Muslim migrant Loay Alnaji, a former community college professor, walked up to 69-year-old Paul Kessler at a protest in Thousand Oaks, California, two months after the horrific October 7th terror attack carried out by Hamas jihadis.

Alnaji, a jihad-lover, was angry that Kessler was counter-protesting the mostly peaceful pro-jihad rally. The two traded verbal spars, then witnesses say Alnaji walked over to Kessler and smacked him on the head with his megaphone.

Kessler fell backward on the concrete, busted his head open, and died due to the resulting brain bleed.

Judge Derek Malan offered Alnaji a sweetheart deal after he pled guilty in May to felony involuntary manslaughter and felony battery causing serious bodily injury. On Tuesday, he was sentenced to one year in county jail and two years of probation.

Memo to self: Avoid California.

Not the Bee.

This is your average pro-LGBT Democrat right here. Nothing going on upstairs. Just repeat the line.

Read it.

According to the UN Environment Programme, the world can expect to generate 408 million tons of waste by 2040. If nations around the world successfully adapted their systems, including getting better at reusing plastics and improving their processes for sorting recycling, then this total could be brought down to 216 million tons.

While multiple surveys show that there is overwhelming global support for a ban of some single-use plastics and consumers have also repeatedly claimed that the topic is important to them, Statista data shows that this is not necessarily trickling down all the way into shopping behaviors. According to a survey carried out by Statista Consumer Insights between April 2025 and March 2026, only between a third and a tenth of shoppers in most surveyed countries say that they avoid plastic packaging when buying food. This rate was especially low in Japan, known for its high use of single-use food packaging, at 7 percent. It stood at just 17 percent in the United States. India was one of the outliers of the survey. There, almost half of urban respondents said they had an eye on the matter. A comparably high level of respondents said the same in Vietnam, potentially showing that in countries where supermarkets still play a smaller role in daily shopping, plastic waste can be considered more by consumers.

The survey also reveals something about the nature in which respondents answer questionnaires. When asked if they actively try to reduce harmful packaging, many people tend to respond that they do. This is called social desirability bias, meaning that respondents might exaggerate their positive deeds in order to feel better about themselves. The answers displayed in the chart are from a multi-pick question in which respondents could pick all options that apply to them from a list of food consumption statements. Despite being free to check all boxes, many respondents focused on a few central statements, disregarding some of the desirable, but potentially less true behaviors.

They’re asking the wrong questions. Most shoppers don’t get to choose the packaging in which their products come. If they did, they might choose something other than plastic. But they want the product, and, however much they might prefer that it not come in plastic, they don’t get to chose—they have to take what the maker of the product offers. Nobody is going to choose one product over another merely based on the packaging unless it’s a total commodity, and even then price is far more dispositive.

Navy Matters.

More and more, the Western naval ship acquisition world is reverting to ‘existing designs with only minor modifications’ instead of new ship designs. This is due to fear rather than combat requirements: fear of runaway costs, fear of schedule delays, fear of bad publicity and criticism, fear of innovation, etc. Fear. The Western naval world is acquiring ships as a reaction to fear of their own ineptitude

Instead of honestly and objectively assessing the reasons for acquisition failures and fixing the problems, Western navies have opted for the perceived path of safety over that of combat effectiveness.

That’s an Aggie for you.

The Telegraph (UK).

The Treasury has removed a numeracy test from its graduate scheme to boost diversity.

What kind of ‘graduates’ find numeracy a barrier?

The government department quietly scrapped the numerical reasoning test from its application process in 2020 owing “to evidence of the test having an adverse impact on candidate diversity”.

I guess diversity is more desired than, say, core competency.

The measure, uncovered by the Spectator magazine, has been described as “insane” and “through the looking glass” by critics.

Well, duh.

The Telegraph (UK).

Of course they do. They’re Muslims.

The Telegraph (UK).

One 20-year-old student says barriers he faces in education and employment because of his race have left him wanting to leave the UK.

And who could blame him?

The Telegraph (UK).

White working-class students are excluded from almost all Oxbridge diversity scholarships, an analysis by The Telegraph has found.

More than a dozen scholarships, bursaries and financial aid schemes are available to Oxford and Cambridge university students based on their ethnicity and not their socioeconomic backgrounds.

While all of the schemes can be used by students from black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds, they almost entirely exclude white working-class students, who are one of the most under-represented groups in higher education.