One can only expect bad news to emerge from America. these days but there is one persistent story that fails to go away. These are reports about conditions on board the USS aircraft carrier, USS Abraham Lincoln, which has been at sea sine November 2025. The extended deployments of carriers during the war have raised concerns about the impact on service members away from home for long periods, as well as the increasing strain on the ships and their equipment. Naval deployments are typically between six and nine months, but can be extended in times of conflict. Democratic lawmakers have called for a Pentagon briefing regarding the conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln, which defence secretary Pete Hegseth has dismissed as ‘completely misrepresented’. At least one sailor has attempted suicide by throwing himself overboard and the ship appears to be running short of basic supplies such as food, toiletries and other life essentials and morale is said to be at a rock bottom. Donald Trump has dismissed any adverse reports (well, he would, wouldn’t he) but military commentators are talking about dire the situation is becoming for the 5,000 men onboard. It looks as though the ship will shortly be replaced by another, the USS George Washington but a military deployment of this length is unprecedented and there is no clear end in sight to the Iran conflict. Some are laying the blame squarely at the door of Pete Hegseth the ex-Fox News anchor and a Trump ideologue who was promoted to the post of Secretary of State for Defense although he himself has no military experience of which to speak. The week ahead is going to be a slightly unusual one as there is no Pilates class for me this week as my teacher is on holiday and the Tai Chi class which I normally undertake later in the week is being displaced this week as I shall be attending the funeral of a a prominent parishioner with whom I used to serve on the committee of the Church parochial Council before Meg’s final illness. After the excitement of the Football World Cup and then the European Athletics world championships held in Birmingham, the evenings are going to be a little bereft of our usual excitement. But is is true to say that my American friend and I are enjoying the spell of somewhat cooler weather and looking forward to our four-day stay in Harrogate in about ten days time. In a few days time, I shall no doubt have to start thinking about packing my suitcase which will contain not only clothes but other essentials such as good supplies of tea and coffee and other essentials to make hotel life enjoyable. I am very much assisted in all of this because across the road from a hotel is one of those shops, much frequented by bed-and-breakfasters in the area of some essential supplies such as newspapers and even some foodstuffs if we decide to forego a full English breakfast. We may even have to cater for some wet weather as well although one forecast has predicted that the country as a whole may not receive any supplies of deluging type rain until about October. Every time I visit Harrogate, the town in which I lived from the age of about 4 to 18, I often wonder whether I shall chance across anyone I knew with whom I was at school. But I suppose most of my contemporaries may have moved away, died or be restricted in their mobility and Harrogate is such a very different place now to the town in which I grew up in my teens before the family moved to Leeds (where my mother was employed as a school teacher)
I had decided that I ought to resume regular walking down into town as used to be my custom. I had previously made a quick visit into town by car to ensure that I picked up a copy of my newspaper before supplies ran out. I was interested to read the page-long obituary to Jason Arday (the ex-Cambridge professor of sociology who committed suicide) and reckoned that most of the obituary was taken from the Wikipedia entry which shows how Times journalists source their stories. During the course of the morning, I viewed a podcast by James O’Brien, the iconoclastic podcaster who presents on LBC each day. He always finds o different topic upon which to fulminate but this video clip was particularly interesting. He had noted that the ‘Daily Telegraph‘ had written a vituperative piece in which the newsoaper had accused the BBC of a basic lack of good journalistic practice and editorial control when they had (wrongly) pieced together parts of the Donald Trump speech which immediately preceded the invasion of the Capital Building on January 6th, 2021. But O’Bren went back to the original Donald Trump broadcast attacking the BBC and claiming, amongst other things, that the BBC used AI and other sources of ‘fake news’ in order to discredit him. Bt what O’Brien discovered was that some of the most egregious lies uttered by Trump in his attack on the BBC were omitted in the Daily Telegraph account, whose readers would have been given a completely misleading impression of what Trump had actually said. So whilst the BBC were being sued by Trump for misleading journalism, the Daily Telegraph was deploying completely misleading journalism by omitting parts of the Trump diatribe that were palpably false. O’Brien explained that this rampant hypocrisy had not been noted by any parts of the British media and was particularly ironic as it was on precisely the grounds of misleading reporting that constituted the grounds of the Daily Telegraph attack on the BBC. During the late morning, I walked down into town and availed myself of a free coffee before walking back and cooking myself a ham omelette for lunch. After lunch, I caught up with the later episodes of ‘Ann Droid’ which is an innovative, comic but poignant account of a recent widow and her robot companion. The whole series may well be a humour-filled programme of what may become common-place in about ten years time given the advances in AI and robotics and the demands of a rapidly ageing population. After catching up on some emails and texts, I shall be undertaking my normal visit to the park later in the day for my evening stroll but have some domestic chores upon which I need to catch up to occupy my late afternoon, not least going through a pile of recent newspapers to see if there are any articles that need to be retained.