As you drive south from Derry and turn right to cross the Foyle river by the Asda outside Strabane, nothing tells you that you are about to leave one country and enter another. There are no signs, no flags, no police and, though I may have missed them, no security cameras either. It's only when you see the words Bus Éireann on the stop on the far side of the bridge that you get any inkling that you have left the United Kingdom and are now in the Irish Republic.

A couple of weeks ago I took a road trip around the British Isles. We went from London up to southwest Scotland, then on through Northern Ireland - via Derry and Strabane - to County Sligo, before returning via Dublin and Holyhead and home through north Wales. We took in five countries in six days, crossed five borders, and I never once had to show my passport at any of them. I hadn't expected to do so. But for how much longer will this be so?

Though the countries of these islands are very different in many ways, and all are assertive about their identities, we are all used to the boundaries between them being more cultural than political. Only Scotland had even erected a road sign that announced that here was a different place from the one we had just been. The others simply merged into one another. I increasingly came to suspect that this is because, in spite of their differences and their histories, all five countries of these islands still have at least as much in common as they do that separates and divides them.

My father taught me a simple lesson: when the alarm clock goes off, you get out of bed, have a shave, wash yourself, put your clothes on and go to work. You've got to be resilient and you've got to be focused on what you want to achieve.

Dad believed the measure of a person was whether or not they were a worker. He believed that working was a virtue. So do I.

White South African farmers are reportedly interested in moving to Russia's Crimean Peninsula as their government at home seeks to amend the constitution to allow for land seizures.

Crimea is a good option for South African farmers, according to farmer Adi Schlebusch, who has already visited Russia. About 30 families of Boer descendants of Dutch colonists in South Africa have expressed their willingness to move to the southern regions of Russia.

Meet Sarah Jeong. She's the newest member of the New York Times editorial board. She also has a history of saying pretty vile, racist things on Twitter.


A sample of Ms. Jeong's "Old-Gray-Lady-Worthy" opinions:

Right-wing activist Lauren Southern has fallen victim to yet another last-minute venue cancellation, after the owner of a New Zealand building recieved complaints about Southern and co-speaker Stefan Molyneux's platform.

The self-described "alt-media" pair was swinging by Auckland on the final stop in their antipodean tour, fresh off the back of visiting Australia, where Southern begged God not to "nuke Melbourne" for it's supposed Biblical sins. Dogged by controversy, it appears that strife followed them across the Tasman with their only New Zealand venue canceling at the last minute.

Due to a raft of complaints, owner of Auckland's Powerstation venue Gabrielle Mullins canceled the event, citing a disagreement with the speakers' message. "As soon as we found out [what their message was], we weren't comfortable at all because it goes against quite a lot of things that we say," the owner told the NZ Herald. "They can say whatever they want but personally I don't want it in my venue."

Southern took to Twitter, lampooning yet another cancellation by quoting the Lord of the Rings, a film New Zealand is famous for. "One does not simply walk into a venue in New Zealand," she wrote to her 387,000 followers.

"For American Jews we have gone from a duty to support Israel to a duty to question Israel to a duty to oppose Israel. This law did that," foreign policy maven David Rothkopf wrote yesterday, about the new law declaring Israel the "nation-state of the Jewish people."

The Carnegie Endowment scholar and former editor of Foreign Policy had a dialogue on twitter with Jerusalem journalists who blamed Netanyahu's government for the law. One of them, Noga Tarnopolsky, responded that American Jews have "a duty to save Israel by standing firm vis-à-vis the Israeli government."

"Why? Why is there a duty? How long does that duty remain?" Rothkopf shot back.

We Have Overcome: An Immigrant's Letter to the American People by Jason Hill, Bombardier Books, New York, July 10, 2018 (192 pages, $19.07, hardcover)

One can scarcely imagine the ideological venom generated among leftists by a well-spoken black professor with a doctorate in philosophy who has the temerity to make public statements like these:

Police in Manchester have released footage of the moment 'manic' knife attacker Michael Marler attempted to escape the scene of a murder by leaping from an upstairs apartment window onto a parked car.

Oldham resident Michael Marler was sentenced to life in prison at Manchester Crown Court on Friday. He will now serve a minimum of 21 years behind bars for the "brutal" killing of Danielle Richardson, who he stabbed multiple times in February 2018 in what investigators described as a manic attack.

The moment Marler desperately attempted to evade justice has now been released by the Greater Manchester Police, showing how the killer jumped from a second story window. Police say Marler had only seconds earlier stabbed his girlfriend Richardson, "leaving her with no chance of survival".

Andrew Sullivan, a self-styled conservative writer who backed Barack Obama and same-sex-marriage, ran afoul of the social justice crowd for criticizing New York Times' hiring of an Asian-American reporter who wrote racist tweets.

Sullivan's article, published in the New York Magazine on Friday under the headline "When Racism Is Fit to Print," points out that conservatives consider Sarah Jeong's tweets racist, while the political left considers that "simply impossible... by virtue of being an Asian woman."

Making it clear that he doesn't want Jeong fired, Sullivan then says "we all live on campus now," a society in which "we are all mere appendages of various groups of oppressors and oppressed, and in which the oppressed definitionally cannot be at fault."

'How dare he!' thundered the representatives of what Sullivan called the "liberal media," denouncing his column as "complete garbage," his worldview "stupendously dishonest" and his entire opus "a long jam of reactionary bad columns."

A British victim of forced marriage has hit out at the government's inaction in investigating claims of unwanted spousal visas, telling RT that the scale of men coming to the UK through the practice is "massive."

Sunny Angel, twice a victim of forced marriage, described that Indian men asking her family to marry her had hoped to "use her as a ticket" to the UK by gaining a visa through marriage.

"[As] the victims, we don't want them here," she added.