World

Ukrainian military have destroyed a ‘significant’ part of a Russian military column that crossed into the country on Thursday night, the country’s president has claimed. A Ukrainian military spokesman told journalists that ‘appropriate actions were taken and a part of it no longer exists’. In a statement on his website, President Poroshenko said he had discussed the ‘entry of Russian military machines to the territory of Ukraine’. Commenting on reports of this, the President ‘informed that the given information was trustworthy and confirmed because the majority of that machines had been eliminated by the Ukrainian artillery at night’, the statement said. More to follow…

The old cliché that ‘nothing happens in August’ has again been brutally disproved. From the centenary of the outbreak of the first world war to the Russian invasion of Georgia six years ago, August is a month often packed with violence — but rarely more so than this year. In Syria, Christians are being crucified for refusing to convert to Islam. In northern Iraq, there are reports of mothers throwing their children from mountains rather than leaving them to the jihadis who are parading the severed heads of their victims. Russian convoys are rolling towards the Ukrainian border as Vladimir Putin tests the resolve of the West. Barack Obama has

When Robin Williams killed himself, his spokesman revealed that he’d been suffering from depression. Cue well-meaning advice about this mysterious and deadly condition – the need to seek help, etc. Then the media caught up with his addiction: he was a recovering alcoholic and cocaine addict who’d been with John Belushi on the night Belushi died (‘comedian Robin Williams popped in and snorted a few lines of coke,’ says one account). Now we learn that Williams was on the verge of bankruptcy. Depression, addiction, money worries: that’s a cocktail familiar to anyone in Hollywood or the music industry. And once the ingredients are shaken they can’t be separated out. For

John McTernan’s column in today’s Telegraph about Kurdistan – and our, that is the West’s, debt of honour to the Kurds – is a piece of which, I think, the late Christopher Hitchens would have been proud. The Kurds had no greater western defender than Christopher and he would, I believe, have been appalled by the pusillanimity on display in Whitehall and the White House alike in recent days. Granted, ‘because Christopher Hitchens would have supported it’ is an insufficient justification for military action. Then again, the witless self-abasement of the so-called Stop the War coalition is no reason to oppose it either. (By Stop the War, of course, they mean let someone vile win

Owen Jones’s column in the Guardian is headlined ‘Anti-Jewish hatred is rising – we must see it for what it is.’ Sadly the article falls well short of that headline’s aspiration. At one point in the piece Owen singles me out for criticism: ‘Take Douglas Murray, a writer with a particular obsession with Islam.’ (I suppose ‘obsession’, rather than ‘interest’, say, is intended to suggest something untoward. But I confess that I am indeed especially interested in one of the major stories of our day.) Owen goes on to say of me: ‘“Thousands of anti-Semites have today succeeded in bringing central London to an almost total standstill” was his reprehensible

In this week’s magazine, Martin Gayford interviews the trumpeter and jazz legend Wynton Marsalis, who founded ‘Jazz’ at Lincoln Center in New York City. Here are some quotes from his piece. ‘One of the things we talked about was the difficulty of playing jazz — especially in front of an audience. ‘The pressure of playing in public makes it all for real, I love the pressure of it. That’s what makes it fun.’ ‘Marsalis has dedicated his career to keeping the jazz tradition alive: not just part of it but all of it. That is what Jazz at Lincoln Center is about. The most difficult aspect of his mission, he believes, is

STV were left red faced after the live streaming of the independence debate between Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling broke down, which meant viewers outside Scotland were unable to watch it on TV. The broadcaster has just issued an apology to anyone who signed up – the majority of whom were presumably English. Mr S was most heartened to receive this mea culpa. More heartening though was the seemingly coded pro-union message embedded in the email. Beneath the images, a rather desperate message appeared: ‘Don’t leave us!’ Now Mr S knows how important impartiality is to the broadcaster, given that earlier this year STV left the CBI after the body formally backed the campaign against independence. And while he would never dream