‘Do you want to die?’ Suspect Anthony Williams asked stabbing victim - "A Nottingham Forest supporter has told how the suspected Huntingdon train knifeman asked him “do you want to die” as he stabbed him six times. Speaking to The Telegraph at his London home, Stephen Crean, 61, recalled leaving his seat to confront alleged attacker Anthony Williams, armed with nothing but his fists. Williams, 32, was charged on Monday with 11 counts of attempted murder... Hearing the screams of injured passengers, Mr Crean walked through the buffet car to the carriage where the knifeman had launched his attack and came face to face with him in the aisle. Mr Crean said the attacker was over 6ft 1in, wore a grey tracksuit, had short afro-style hair and spoke with a London or south-east accent. A door to the buffet car, where other passengers were hiding, was locked behind him as they fought – preventing potentially dozens of other injuries... Mr Crean said he was stabbed in his left hand, three times in his back, once on his bottom and twice in his head... He said he found an empty toilet and locked the door before lying on the floor as he lost blood. About 10 minutes later he opened the door to find armed police pointing guns at him... Asked why he ran towards danger to confront the attacker, he said: “I think there was no other choice. It just didn’t dawn on me not to... Mr Crean is now taking medication to guard against possible HIV infection after the attacker reportedly used the same knife on multiple victims. “Because it’s a deep stab wound they said I needed special tablets because I could catch Aids, and things like this,” he said."
The public will only feel safe if Labour ends this wave of violent crime - "The first thing we must do is ensure that more knife crime offenders are jailed. At present, some do not even get prison sentences. This is not only a moral outrage, but it also puts the public in danger. Those who carry knives, and those who use them, are clearly a serious threat to the public, and that should be reason enough to lock them up. The rising prison population is no excuse for inaction. If the Government can find space to imprison people for tweets, they should have no trouble finding cells for knife criminals. We also need to take far more knives off the street. That means we have to dramatically increase the use of stop and search. The Left says that stop and search is wrong because those searched are disproportionately black when compared to the whole population. Are they seriously saying that the perpetrator of the Huntingdon train atrocity should not have been stopped and searched if encountered? In fact, far from being disproportionate, Policy Exchange research shows the use of stop and search in London is proportionate to the offending population. In other words, it rightly reflects the demographics of people committing crime, not the whole population. And the success rate for stop and search – the proportion of searches where something illegal is found – is broadly the same across ethnic groups. That shows categorically that no one ethnic group is being unfairly picked on. Yet under Sir Sadiq Khan’s sorry mayoralty, the number of stop and searches in London fell by nearly 60 per cent between 2021 and 2024. At the same time, crime offences increased by 86 per cent from 2014 to 2024. The one seems to have caused the other."
Will Hutton on X - "The attack on the Doncaster London train on Saturday night was evil and unconscionable. Passengers may carry emotional and physical scars for years. But an arrest of a deranged murderous individual within 8 minutes? And all round heroism. On this occasion ‘broken’ Britain worked."
Kel Mansfield on X - "Except he had been at large for 18 hours after an attack on the Docklands Light Railway at Pontoon Dock station, where he slashed someone's face."
RacinSam on X - "The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them."
Huntingdon suspect ‘linked to four knife crimes before attack’
I'd hate to see how a broken country would've handled this
Mitchell on X - "2 Hours after Liverpool parade crash: police named 53 year old, white British man to kill terror rumours (“post-Southport lesson”). 2 Hours after Huntingdon stabbings: Home Secretary begs “don’t speculate”. Two-tier policing in plain sight."
Tony on X - "All my life (I'm almost 50) knives have been readily available, there's some extremely sharp ones in the draw 2 Meters away from me as I sit in my kitchen. Knives have always been there, they haven't changed they're inanimate objects, tools, other dangerous tools can be found in my garage. Its not the knives or tools that have changed, its people that have, and if you can't see that, you're in denial and those people on that train last night, along with so many others keep paying the price of that denial. #Huntingdon"
Violent crime is spiralling out of control - "In the aftermath of Saturday’s horrific violence on a train, Heidi Alexander, the Transport Secretary toured studios to reassure the public. She insisted that our railways are a “low crime environment”, citing data which shows that “only 27 crimes” are committed for every one million passenger journeys.While this particular data point might be true, the latest British Transport Police Authority (BTPA) annual report includes a statement from its chair Ron Barclay-Smith, which describes “an overall challenging environment of increasing crimes ranging from higher reports of anti-social behaviour to our highest ever number of homicides”. That same report states that sexual offences increased by 10 per cent in the last year.These sorts of statistical debates are common when discussing crime, and especially in the aftermath of horrific attacks. Often, very worthy commentators will take to social media or the airwaves in order to insist that crime has always been a part of British life, and in fact crime is falling.Meanwhile, many look around at rampant theft in our towns and cities, consider how much less safe women and girls feel on our streets and remember that random stabbings were once not a feature of life in Britain.Who is right? Those who say that crime is falling often point to the Crime Survey of England and Wales (CSEW). This is an annual publication by the Office for National Statistics, which relies on surveying people across the country in order to ask them if they’ve been a victim of crime in the past year. This survey has its weaknesses. Despite crime being clustered in particular areas, it surveys the whole country equally, meaning it “oversamples” from peaceful, crime-free villages and “undersamples” from crime-ridden cities.Whatever its weaknesses, for a long time the CSEW has shown overall crime to be declining, from a peak in the mid 1990s. Given Britain’s ageing population, this is exactly what we would expect to see. Older populations commit less crime.However, at the same time, other data shows that some crimes in particular have soared, especially over the last decade. In particular, “selected knife offences” (murder, attempted murder, threats to kill, robbery, rape and sexual assault) have almost doubled, from 26,370 ten years ago to 53,047 in 2024/25. Similarly while in 2014/15 there were 29,420 rapes reported to the police, this number has more than doubled, with 71,667 reported last year. Against this backdrop, the fact that house burglaries are falling, or overall violence (especially that between men) is declining, is something of a distraction... What is also often missed is how much worse the police have become at solving crime. Since 2013 the Home Office has reported annual “crime outcomes” data. In that year almost 22 per cent of crimes resulted in either a charge or a caution. Last year, a mere 6.3 per cent of “victim-based offences” resulted in someone being charged. This means that the vast majority of crimes are not punished. The police do a little better with firearms and knife offences, but in both cases only one in nine crimes result in a charge. What this means in practice is that much crime is functionally legalised. Naturally, this emboldens criminals and contributes to a growing sense of lawlessness in Britain. The character of violent crime has changed too, becoming more unpredictable. Mass stabbing incidents are a very recent feature of life in the UK... What links each of these crimes is their unpredictability. It is possible to avoid the bad areas of cities after dark, leave pubs before closing time and not involve oneself in the drugs trade. It is not possible to live a decent life without going to work, walking a dog, queueing in the bank or catching a train. Unpredictable, random violence, and the potential for it, naturally makes us feel less safe. We are less safe. Instead of repeating misleading statistics, politicians should recognise that we don’t have to live like this, and confront the real causes of soaring crime."
Britain’s trains are gripped by violent crime. These numbers prove it - "Incidents like the mass stabbing on a train from Doncaster to London King’s Cross on Saturday are mercifully rare in Britain. But recent figures show that other types of violent crime on our rail network are not. According to Office for Rail and Road (ORR) statistics, in this past year the number of assaults on passengers hit a record high. In 2024 alone, there were 10,231 such instances registered on mainline rail – the greatest recorded in 20 years of data. This included 4,395 cases of harassment, 3,805 cases of common assault and 1,613 cases of actual bodily harm. It represented an increase of 6.9 per cent year-on-year, and was up from 3,211 cases a decade ago, according to the data released last month... what lies behind this rise in violence, perpetrated not only against passengers but also against rail staff? Trotter points to a “greater sense of disorder”: of public spaces not being looked after by anyone, and of offenders being able to operate with impunity. “I think it’s linked to a range of things, like shoplifters being unchallenged, people jumping barriers at stations, phones being snatched... There’s a general sense of police being overwhelmed and people getting away with things.” In the Department for Transport’s most recent National Travel Attitudes Survey, more than a quarter of people (29 per cent) who said they avoided travelling by train did so because the behaviour of other passengers made them feel unsafe."
Time to force more people to use public transport, because that's what everyone who's not a selfish asshole does
Chris Arnade 🐢🐱🚌 on X - "I'm in the pundit's no-man's land of both believing this is true — that Americans are comfortable by any economic measure — and yet a lot of their frustration is understandable, not because they are ungrateful, or deluded by negative press, or stupid, but rather because human fulfillment requires more than material wealth. It needs physical communities, and while the US excels at material wealth, it's achieved it, especially in the last forty years, at the expense of the aesthetic, communal, stable, and personal. Also, while I believe in individual agency, I also believe societies come with strong forces that shape expectations and even shape people's understanding of a 'good life.' That is, society provides citizens playbooks that they are urged to follow which are supposed to end in happily ever after. The dominant American one is that everyone can be whatever they want to be, and become a millionaire on their own terms as long as they hustle hustle hustle — and when that doesn't happen, it's very lonely and humiliating, because we as a culture have put all our eggs in that basket. So our inequality — large, and growing, by almost any metric compared to other wealthy countries — is more harmful, because it's more noticeable, since the top X% are the goalpost people measure themselves against far more than in less monomaniacal cultures. It becomes especially galling when that top X% seem to be getting wealthy not from the hustle hustle hustle, but from grifts where they're selling the country out. In the end, people need to feel like valued members of some community larger than themselves — what exactly is that now in the US?"
Marvel films costume designer who raped a woman after she put a banana skin in the 'wrong bin' is jailed for 12 years - "Marvyn Marques, 38, launched the sickening attack after raging that his victim had put the peel in the wrong rubbish bin and later raped her again as punishment."
Ellen DeGeneres, Portia De Rossi Reportedly Leave UK After Finding Country Life 'Boring' - "Just one year after making an emphatic, cross-continental move to escape the political furore of the United States, television personality Ellen DeGeneres and her wife, actress Portia de Rossi, are reportedly packing their bags and heading back across the Atlantic. Sources reveal exclusively to the National Enquirer that the couple has grown profoundly 'bored' of the UK, trading their sprawling, multi-million-pound rural retreat for the familiar, frenetic pace of American life."
The truth about halal slaughterhouses - "Halal abattoirs serving strict Muslims are much more likely to have poor hygiene and animal welfare than non-religious ones, Telegraph analysis shows. The slaughterhouses, which slit conscious animals’ throats to kill them in accordance with Islamic rites, were almost three times more likely to be given negative inspections than others, according to data from the Food Standards Agency (FSA). Common causes for concern cited by inspectors were substandard hygiene practices, poor animal welfare and risks of cross contamination. In one instance, chickens were “kicked and thrown”, and in another animals were abused, with workers appearing to mock the animals before they were slaughtered. The FSA data reveals that in the past decade, 26.9 per cent of inspections of slaughterhouses permitted to perform religious non-stun slaughter concluded with a rating of “improvement necessary” or “urgent improvement necessary”. This compares with just 10.2 per cent of all other establishments."
Man fined £100 for calling neighbour ‘fat’ - "A judge fined a man £100 after he called his neighbour “fat”. Aaron Quinn, of Warrington, Cheshire, is said to have berated Sarah Allen, a mother of two, about her weight during an argument. Warrington magistrates’ court heard that he had been “generally abusive” and caused “her harassment and distress”. Quinn admitted in court to using insulting words or behaviour to cause harassment, alarm or distress, as well as criminal damage to a wall light. As well as the fine he was issued with a £114 surcharge and a 12 month restraining order banning him from contacting Ms Allen, a barmaid."
Young Canadians’ happiness has nosedived. They’re coping by redefining a meaningful life - The Globe and Mail - "Until recently, decades of responses on subjective life satisfaction across dozens of mostly Western, industrialized countries suggested that lifetime happiness followed a U-curve. People, on average, hit the road happiest in their free-wheeling 20s, tumbled down in life satisfaction during the early child-raising and career-juggling middle age, and then climbed back up, puttering into old age relatively content with life again. But happiness isn’t what it used to be. Between 2006 and 2024, the average self-reported life satisfaction of Canadians under 35 has nosedived – and it now takes a long march to retirement age to reach those previous levels of happiness. As described in a recent working paper by a trio of researchers at the University of Alberta and the University of British Columbia, the U-shape “has been replaced with a mountain for youth to climb.” “Instead of a mid-life crisis, we now have a crisis of the young,” the authors write." And the collapse of youthful life satisfaction is the main reason Canada has fallen out of the top ten list of happiest nations. In this year’s World Happiness Report, Canada landed 18th out of 134 countries, the country’s worst showing ever. When only Canadians below the age of 30 are included – the age range used by the report – the country falls to 58th place... The seismic drop in young adult happiness has been recorded in many Western, industrialized countries, including Britain and the United States. But to get a sense of the relative significance of Canada’s happiness collapse, Haifang Huang, a University of Alberta economics professor who co-authored the working paper, ranked countries by the change in life satisfaction among young adults. By that measure, out of 134 countries, Canada shows up near the very bottom, ahead of just four others – Jordan, Venezuela, Lebanon and Afghanistan. In other words, according to this particular dataset, Canada has had just about the largest drop in happiness in the world. It’s easy to blame the pandemic, but as Dr. Huang points out, happiness among young people was already falling before the COVID-19 lockdowns... There’s a convincing case to cast social media as the headliner villain, especially with other research suggesting that mental health among young people took a dive once they started spending larger chunks of their day on their smartphones. But that’s not so simple either, says Dr. Huang, who has provided research for the annual World Happiness reports since 2015. Life satisfaction hasn’t fallen in every European country, even though, he notes, young people in those places “probably use the internet as often as their Canadian and American peers.” Instead, Dr. Huang proposes an explanation highlighted in the narrative of Ms. Farnum and so many of their peers struggling to stick the landing that came sooner and more easily to previous generations. In his ongoing analysis of the data, he finds a clear connection between more young people reporting financial hardship and the decline in subjective well-being... In an Ipsos-Reid poll, taken as the trade war with the U.S. escalated this past January, four out of ten respondents between the age of 18 to 34 said they would vote to join the United States if they were guaranteed citizenship and a conversion of their assets to the American dollar. One third agreed that a merger between the two countries was inevitable, three times more than respondents over age 55.
This doesn't stop out of touch Canadians boasting about how great Canada is, that being 18th in world happiness shows it is wonderful and that there's nothing to complain about, and hating on the US
Ironically, the article mentions climate anxiety - when climate change hysteria is one reason young Canadians have poorer lives than before. It also mentions how activism is giving some young Canadians meaning, neglecting to explore how this suggests that anomie, the left wing ideal, is making people miserable (there is an interesting moment where one could suggest that LGBTQ activism is a modern religion)
Caroline Elliott on X - "CTV: “How did Canada’s young people become its unhappiest generation?” The World Happiness Report says Canadians under 30 were the happiest age group in the country as recently as 2011. Now, they’re the unhappiest. ❗️Only 4 countries have seen a worse decline in young people’s happiness levels: Jordan, Venezuela, Lebanon and Afghanistan❗️ Why? It really isn’t a mystery. Let’s start with this chart from @AristotleFdn showing immigration arrivals vs housing completions. In 2015 it was already 2-1. By 2023 it was 5-1, pushing prices up and homes totally out of reach for an entire generation. Add in the fact they’ve spent their lives being inundated with climate alarmism that told them their world would either drown or burn due to their own choices. On top of that, they’ve been steeped in an ideologically-driven education system that insists they live in an actively genocidal, systemically racist nation, and that the very land they stand on isn’t theirs. Add in unprecedented numbers of temporary foreign workers to occupy the summer jobs they used to do, layer on mountains of government debt with nothing to show for it that they’ll spend their working lives paying down, and stymie the entire economy through anti-investment policies, and, yeah, it’s not a mystery. An entire generation has been utterly failed by governments that have acted entirely in their own generation’s self-interest at the expense of the one coming up behind it. Young Canadians are devastated - and rightfully outraged - and they are driving hard for serious change. The status quo just isn’t going to cut it."
KLEIN: Canada Falls to #27 — And I’m Not Surprised. Are You? | Winnipeg Sun - "Canada has just fallen to 27th place in the global Quality of Life Index, dropping from ninth a decade ago. It’s the largest decline among the world’s top thirty countries... What once defined Canada as a land of opportunity and fairness has slowly eroded, replaced by growing division, bureaucracy, and distrust. That last word—distrust—is perhaps our biggest problem. Canadians no longer trust their elected officials, and who can blame them? We’ve watched one government after another make promises, raise taxes, and spend more, only to deliver less. Every election brings speeches about change and hope, followed by disappointment and excuses. The result is a country that feels more cynical and less confident in its leaders than ever before. And trust, once lost, is hard to earn back... It would be easy to blame one level of government, but the truth is they all share responsibility. Municipal governments have lost focus on their core responsibilities—safety, infrastructure, and housing. Instead, they pour time and money into social experiments and activism projects that fall far outside their jurisdiction. Provincially, we’re told that healthcare is a top priority, yet the system continues to fail those who depend on it most. Federally, we see billions of taxpayer dollars sent abroad while millions of Canadians visit food banks just to get by. It’s fair to ask: what have our leaders done that has truly made life more affordable, safer, or more hopeful? What tangible result can anyone point to?... Instead of empowering people, our governments have made us increasingly dependent on them. Instead of rewarding productivity and innovation, they burden businesses with red tape and regulation. Instead of strengthening unity, they play politics with division. That dependency on government is not compassion — it’s control. And control, once entrenched, becomes the enemy of freedom and prosperity. Mark Carney wrote in his book Values about the need for greater government direction and oversight. We’re living that vision now, and it’s failing us. More government control has not produced better outcomes; it has produced stagnation. It has created a culture where accountability disappears behind layers of bureaucracy and slogans. And it has allowed politicians to focus on how they are perceived, rather than on what they achieve. That’s how a country that once ranked ninth in the world for quality of life ends up twenty-seventh. Not because Canadians stopped caring, but because our governments stopped performing."
When Pablo Escobar's Daughter Wanted a Unicorn He Simply "Made" Her a Live One - "Escobar’s daughter Manuela features the most in stories about his kindness and willingness to make her feel loved. According to stories from his former acquaintances he did not hesitate to do anything for her well-being. Once while the family was hiding-out in the Medellin mountainside, according to Business Insider, Manuela got sick so they needed to find a way to keep her warm. He built a fire using what he had at hand — around $2 million worth of banknotes — in order to make the place warm and protect her from hypothermia. However, that was far from the weirdest or most outrageous act he undertook to keep his daughter happy. When Manuela decided she wanted a unicorn, Pablo would not get a little thing like reality stop her from having one. Obviously a real unicorn was out of the question, so he ordered that one should be “made.” People who worked for him bought a small white horse and set about figuring how to endow it with a horn typical for the mythical animal. The brilliant solution? Simply staple a horn to the animal’s head, and colorful wings on its back. After undergoing this physical trauma the poor animal died from an infection in the wounds. Once when Manuela asked his father what is the worth of billion dollars, he responded “the value of your eyes, princess,” reports Entity Magazine. Escobar even went so far as to force one of his mistresses to abort their baby as he had promised Manuela she would be the last child in his line. She had it all, love and things that she wanted. Unfortunately, Escobar did not manage to grant her one important thing: Manuela did not have that what children need the most and that is peace and stability. She is now secluded from the media spotlight and does not talk about her past and childhood."
The Worst Sandwich Is Back - The Atlantic - "Wraps are awful. At best, they ruin perfectly serviceable fillings by bundling them up in a gummy, cold tortilla. At worst, they do this with less-than-serviceable fillings. They’re like a salad, but less refreshing, or like a sandwich, but less filling—a worst-of-all-worlds Frankenstein’s monster, an indistinguishable food slurry wrapped in edible cardboard, like the world’s rudest present. They’re desperation food—“the stuff,” Lesley Suter wrote a few years ago in the food publication Eater, “of refrigerated airport deli cases, conference center lunch trays, and the dark side of a Subway menu.” Every single part of them is the wrong texture. And yet: This month, McDonald’s announced that it would be bringing back its chicken Snack Wrap, after nearly 19,000 people signed a Change.org petition arguing that it was “easily the best thing” on the chain’s menu. The announcement came a day after Popeyes introduced three new chicken wraps. TikTok is now filled with wrap-recipe cook-alongs and clips of attractive young people hunting for the best chicken-Caesar wrap in their given city. If you are over 40, this might sound a bit familiar. Wraps were one of the biggest eating fads of the 1990s, after a group of enterprising friends decided to put Peking duck inside a tortilla and see if San Franciscans would buy it. They would, and they did, and then so did the rest of the country. Soon enough, the nation’s leading newspapers were running careful, anthropological explainers about wraps, as though a sandwich were a newly discovered animal species... Wraps, like garbage cans, can hold anything; for this reason, they aligned perfectly with the ’90s fascination with so-called fusion food, which combines dishes from different culinary traditions. But more important, they were a vessel for the era’s body anxieties. Extreme thinness was trending; Dr. Robert Atkins had recently reissued his diet guide, one of the best-selling books in history. Wraps were—in marketing, if not always in reality—lower-calorie and lower-carb than normal sandwiches, all that pillowy, delicious bread having been replaced with a utilitarian tortilla forgery that tasted and looked virtuous, especially when it was flecked with spinach or tomato. If traditional sandwiches were greasy and chaotic, the province of children and cartoon slobs, wraps were tidy and sensible, the province of working women with slim hips and pin-straight hair. They were fuel more than food, practicality more than pleasure. The fact that they didn’t taste good was maybe even part of the point... Trends are pendulums. Wraps and extreme thinness eventually became less fashionable, but not because they were a terrible waste of time and imagination—they became less fashionable simply because new orthodoxy about how to eat and how to look replaced them. Bowls became the dominant healthy-ish working lunch, and a curvier silhouette—less ruler, more Jessica Rabbit; less Kate Moss, more Kim Kardashian—became the aspirational female body type. Third-wave feminism and its attendant media turned dieting (or at least talking about it) into something archaic and deeply uncool... Everywhere I look, the aesthetic values of the ’90s have returned, even if the vocabulary has changed: Low-carb has been replaced with high-protein; dieting has been replaced with wellness; starvation has been replaced with fasting. Diet culture is being revived, repackaged, and resold for a new era, and so are the foods that fed it."
