An unprecedented record of medieval live comedy performance has been identified in a 15th-century manuscript. Raucous texts—mocking kings, priests and peasants; encouraging audiences to get drunk; and shocking them with slapstick—shed new light on Britain's famous sense of humor and the role played by minstrels in medieval society.

The texts contain the earliest recorded use of "red herring" in English, extremely rare forms of medieval literature, as well as a killer rabbit worthy of Monty Python. The discovery changes the way we should think about English comic culture between Chaucer and Shakespeare.

Throughout the Middle Ages, minstrels traveled between fairs, taverns and baronial halls to entertain people with songs and stories. Fictional minstrels are common in medieval literature but references to real-life performers are rare and fleeting. We have first names, payments, instruments played and occasionally locations, but until now virtually no evidence of their lives or work.

After expressing zero remorse and heralding himself to a federal judge as a “political prisoner” who “like Donald Trump only committed the crime of opposing those who are destroying our country,” Oath Keeper Elmer Stewart Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years in prison for his role leading and orchestrating a seditious conspiracy to stop America’s transfer of presidential power by force on Jan. 6, 2021.

It would have been surprising if Rhodes took any other tack when it was his chance to speak.

But Rhodes offered no surprises at the Prettyman courthouse in Washington, D.C. on Thursday.

He was unrepentant, just as he was at trial when he testified on his own behalf for a little over a day. Even then, as a jury actively held his fate in their hands, he publicly smeared proceedings in jailhouse interviews while comparing himself to Nelson Mandela. And just four days ago, in yet another interview from jail, Rhodes kept up The Big Lie.

Members of the public watching the coronation on television, online and in parks and pubs will be invited to swear aloud their allegiance to the monarch in a “chorus of millions of voices” to be known as the Homage of the People.

People around the UK and abroad will be invited to say the words “I swear that I will pay true allegiance to your majesty, and to your heirs and successors according to law. So help me God”, in a declaration that replaces the traditional homage of peers.
Saturday’s service will also involve for the first time the active participation of representatives of faiths other than Christianity. Rishi Sunak, a Hindu, will give a reading from the Bible in his capacity as PM, despite Church of England law in effect barring other faiths from taking an active role in its services. “There is no issue about [Sunak’s] personal faith, we’re delighted that he is doing [this],” said a Lambeth Palace spokesperson.

The service will start with a procession of faith representatives of the Jewish, Sunni and Shia Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, Bahá’í and Zoroastrian communities. Peers from different faiths will take part in the presentation of regalia, and at the end of the service the newly crowned king will receive a greeting spoken in unison by representatives of Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Muslim and Buddhist communities. This will be unamplified because of the prohibition on using electricity on the Jewish sabbath.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has rekindled Poland’s old fear of its giant neighbor. Amid escalating tensions, the Kremlin is now rewriting one of its darkest chapters ― the 1940 massacre of over 22,000 Poles in the Katyn Forest (in Russia’s Smolensk region) by Soviet forces. This comes 13 years after the Duma (the Russian Parliament) apologized to Poland for that war crime during the early years of World War II. The Federal Security Service (FSB), the principal security force of Russia and successor agency to the Soviet Union’s KGB, has now released a document attributing this war crime to Nazi Germany and exonerating the USSR.

The debate on responsibility for that bloodbath seemed to have been settled during the rapprochement between Warsaw and Moscow more than a decade ago, but times have changed and friction between the two countries is red hot. “The debate in Russia over the unclear circumstances of the Katyn case continues,” states an article published in the Russian Foreign Ministry’s official journal. “This is partly because of the openly hostile position Poland has taken towards Russia in recent years and the destruction of monuments to Red Army soldiers who died during the liberation of that country from the Nazis,” says the article, echoing the publicly released FSB document.

A team of United Nations experts has arrived in the US on a tour that will focus on racial justice, law enforcement and policing.

On Monday, the Expert Mechanism to Advance Racial Justice and Equality in the Context of Law Enforcement, an independent panel appointed by the UN human rights council, began its two-week visit to the US.

The panel, which was established in response to widespread outcry following the killing of the Black man George Floyd in 2020 by a white police officer, is set to visit Washington DC, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis and New York City.

Floyd’s death was just one of many instances of racist killings by police in the US but – spurred by powerful video shot by bystanders – it triggered widespread protests across America, which then spread internationally.

The UN trip is to “further transformative change for racial justice and equality in the context of law enforcement for Africans and people of African descent”, said the UN.

In addition to visiting government officials at federal, state and local levels, the team will also visit law enforcement authorities, civil society organizations and places of detentions.

“We look forward to gaining first-hand insight about the lived experiences of people of African descent in the United States, and to offer recommendations to the government at all levels, to support efforts in combating systemic racism and excessive use of force, and ensure accountability and justice,” Juan Méndez, a panel member said in a statement.

Why can’t we have the nice things that other wealthy nations have few problems providing them for their populations? It’s not just the greed and the power-hungriness of America’s richest. It’s race. But that’s impolite to mention.

The nation’s trouble is not that it has a racist bone that simply needs removing but that it is disturbingly slow to recognize that racism is the sharp pain that helps us locate the fractures. I write about race because finding the fractures in our society and our democracy is a necessary step toward healing and strengthening, not destroying, the whole of the nation.

Race is that locked door of the mind behind which our macho, therapy-averse culture refuses to look. Until it does, the pathologies will pass from generation to generation as in dysfunctional families.

“Shame is a toxic emotion, and it often causes people to direct hostility outward rather than inward,” Peter Wehner wrote last week.

We have yet to break the chain.

This is a great editorial based largely on Theodore Johnson's piece in the WaPo "You cannot love America and avoid the topic of race"

Millions of lives could be saved by a groundbreaking set of new vaccines for a range of conditions including cancer, experts have said. A leading pharmaceutical firm said it is confident that jabs for cancer, cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases, and other conditions will be ready by 2030.

Studies into these vaccinations are also showing “tremendous promise”, with some researchers saying 15 years’ worth of progress has been “unspooled” in 12 to 18 months thanks to the success of the Covid jab.

Dr Paul Burton, the chief medical officer of pharmaceutical company Moderna, said he believes the firm will be able to offer such treatments for “all sorts of disease areas” in as little as five years.

The firm, which created a leading coronavirus vaccine, is developing cancer vaccines that target different tumour types.

Burton said: “We will have that vaccine and it will be highly effective, and it will save many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives. I think we will be able to offer personalised cancer vaccines against multiple different tumour types to people around the world.”

Burton said :“I think we will have mRNA-based therapies for rare diseases that were previously undruggable, and I think that 10 years from now, we will be approaching a world where you truly can identify the genetic cause of a disease and, with relative simplicity, go and edit that out and repair it using mRNA-based technology.”

But scientists warn that the accelerated progress, which has surged “by an order of magnitude” in the past three years, will be wasted if a high level of investment is not maintained.

The mRNA molecule instructs cells to make proteins. By injecting a synthetic form, cells can pump out proteins we want our immune system to strike. An mRNA-based cancer vaccine would alert the immune system to a cancer that is already growing in a patient’s body, so it can attack and destroy it, without destroying healthy cells.

This involves identifying protein fragments on the surface of cancer cells that are not present on healthy cells – and which are most likely to trigger an immune response – and then creating pieces of mRNA that will instruct the body on how to manufacture them.

First, doctors take a biopsy of a patient’s tumour and send it to a lab, where its genetic material is sequenced to identify mutations that aren’t present in healthy cells.

A machine learning algorithm then identifies which of these mutations are responsible for driving the cancer’s growth. Over time, it also learns which parts of the abnormal proteins these mutations encode are most likely to trigger an immune response. Then, mRNAs for the most promising antigens are manufactured and packaged into a personalised vaccine.

Burton said: “I think what we have learned in recent months is that if you ever thought that mRNA was just for infectious diseases, or just for Covid, the evidence now is that that’s absolutely not the case.

“It can be applied to all sorts of disease areas; we are in cancer, infectious disease, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune diseases, rare disease. We have studies in all of those areas and they have all shown tremendous promise.”