RUTHFULLY YOURS

One of the most beautiful towns in England, Lewes is relatively unspoiled by the twentieth-century British architectural incompetence that has proved so destructive of urban grace, spreading the most hideous ugliness almost everywhere as a kind of metonym for social equality. From Lewes’s streets can be seen the lovely, rolling downs of Sussex, and it is curious how the sight of green hills from the center of a town or city (still possible in Dublin, for example) soothes the mind. Among Lewes’s most famous residents were Thomas Paine, author of The Rights of Man, and Charles Dawson, the man most likely to have forged Piltdown Man, the hoax human fossil whose inauthenticity was not exposed until 40 years after its “discovery” in 1912. To my great delight, Lewes’s High Street has three excellent secondhand or antiquarian bookshops.

I had been invited down to a literary event, the Lewes Speakers Festival, to talk about my recently published memoir of life as a prison doctor, The Knife Went In. I was to be the penultimate speaker, followed by a controversial conservative journalist, Katie Hopkins, who was to talk about her own recently published memoir, Rude.

The event ended in violence.

The festival organizer, Marc Rattray, had informed me in advance that there might be trouble from demonstrators who would want to prevent Hopkins from speaking. No doubt it is a measure of how detached I am from the ordinary life of my country that I had until then scarcely heard of her, for she is either loved or abominated by millions of my fellow countrymen. (I would have guessed, if put to it, that she was an actress or a pop singer.) Some love her because she says things that many think but dare not say, while others abominate her, accusing her of bigotry and spreading hatred—hatred directed at the wrong people, that is.

To say that she is unafraid of controversy or criticism is to understate the case. They are her stock-in-trade. Whatever her other qualities, she is certainly valiant. Now 42, she suffered most of her adult life from severe nocturnal epilepsy, enduring many dislocations of her shoulder as a result, until she underwent a successful operation to remove the epileptic focus in her brain. Many people with such a condition would have retired from life, as it were, especially when the state makes it possible for them to do so, but Hopkins carved out an eminent, or at least a prominent, career in journalism for herself instead.

Donald J. Trump

✔ @realDonaldTrump

Kim Jong Un talked about denuclearization with the South Korean Representatives, not just a freeze. Also, no missile testing by North Korea during this period of time. Great progress being made but sanctions will remain until an agreement is reached. Meeting being planned!

President Donald Trump has accepted an invitation to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the White House said Thursday, a meeting that would mark the first time a serving U.S. president has sat down with the leadership of the heavily militarized and diplomatically isolated country.

The leader-to-leader meeting, which American officials said would take place within the next “couple of months” at a location yet to be determined, is a potential turning point after more than six decades of confrontation involving North Korea, its southern neighbor and South Korea’s allies.

But it also stands to sharply raise the diplomatic stakes in one of the world’s most volatile standoffs.

American officials acknowledged that it was unusual for such a face-to-face session to be arranged without an extensive series of preparatory meetings between lower-ranking officials. But they asserted that it was justified because Mr. Kim was the only person able to make decisions in his “uniquely authoritarian” regime and that Mr. Trump was known as a deal maker.

“At this point we are not even talking about negotiations,” a senior U.S. official said, while stressing that the U.S.’s ultimate goal was complete denuclearization by North Korea, subject to stringent verification. CONTINUE AT SITE

The annual session of China’s rubber-stamp legislature opened this week, and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang announced an 8.1% increase in defense spending, the largest in three years. Lawmakers are expected to approve the military budget and constitutional changes to let supreme leader Xi Jinping serve as President indefinitely. All of this will amplify the angst in Asia about Beijing’s military buildup.

The budget of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) isn’t transparent, and the U.S. Defense Department estimates that spending is about 25% higher than Beijing’s figure. More important, Mr. Xi is remaking the military into an effective fighting force. Under previous leaders, the PLA became top-heavy with generals whose main mission was to line their own pockets. They padded the ranks with followers and offered promotions in return for bribes. An anticorruption campaign has netted 16 top generals in the past six years.

Mr. Xi has replaced them with loyalists, giving him the clout to reform the PLA. He replaced regional commands that were personal fiefdoms with theater commands that require the army, navy and air force to work together, much as the U.S. did after the Goldwater-Nichols Act in 1986. Beijing is reducing the military’s headcount and investing the savings in sophisticated weapons. Since 2015 the PLA has shed 300,000 troops. Instead of relying on human-wave attacks, it is racing the U.S. to develop artificial intelligence for the battlefield.