London: One person is dead and 10 injured after a van slammed into pedestrians outside a London mosque after Ramadan prayers. Witnesses said that the driver, who is in custody, shouted that he wanted to kill Muslims. Authorities are describing it as an act of terrorism.

Permawar: An American fighter jet shot down a Syrian warplane yesterday in an escalation of conflict between the US and Syria in its civil war. The incident happened when US-backed Syrian rebels came under attack by Syrian forces. The rebels are accompanied by US advisers.

Also yesterday in a separate incident, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard fired missiles at Syrian forces inside Syria.

In Mosul, Iraq, government forces are closing in on the old section of the city as Islamic State forces continue a tenacious fight to the death.

What About Donald: One of President Trump’s lawyers said on television yesterday that his client is not under investigation by the special counsel, despite Trump’s evident admission in a tweet that he is. Attorney Jay Sekulow said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that “the president has not been and is not under investigation.”

The President tweeted Friday, “I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt.”

It’s another case in which the President’s paid defenders have been sent out to defend or deny something he’s said. It establishes that someone is lying, either the President or his shield-bearers.

  New Yorker Editor David Remnick writes, “Trump’s egotism, his demand for one-way loyalty, and his incapacity to assume responsibility for his own untruths and mistakes were, his biographers make plain, his pattern in business and have proved to be his pattern as President.”

Remnick says, “Veteran Washington reporters tell me that they have never observed this kind of anxiety, regret, and sense of imminent personal doom among White House staffers—not to this degree, anyway. These troubled aides seem to think that they can help their own standing by turning on those around them—and that by retailing information anonymously they will be able to live with themselves after serving a President who has proved so disconnected from the truth and reality.”

Inferno: A raging forest fire in central Portugal over the weekend killed at least 61 people, 30 of them trapped when their cars were overtaken by flames. Seventeen bodies were found in the road.

No cause has been determined, but it may have been started by dry lightning, a common spark for wildfires. Prime Minister António Costa said the fire brought “a dimension of human tragedy that we cannot remember.”

Small Screen: NBC’s Megyn Kelly last night profiled conspiracy-theorist Alex Jones of Infowars and showed him for what he is — a lying nut — but failed to bring him to his knees. Jones has said that the Sandy Hook school massacre was a hoax, but Kelly was unable to get him to admit that his claim is fiction. Equivocating, Jones said, “I tend to believe that children probably did die there. But then you look at all the other evidence on the other side.”

Kelly pointed out that there is no evidence on the other side. In her defense, Jones is a facile dodger, but she spent too much time on the personality and too little on crushing him.

 The Obit Page: Actor Stephen Furst, who played the dumpy beanie-wearing frat boy Flounder in the 1978 movie “Animal House,” has died at age 63 of complications of diabetes. The movie, and its characters including John Belushi, who played Bluto, is an evergreen that paved the way for raunchy humor. It was Furst’s character who prompted the line from Dean Wormer, “”Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.”

Fellow cast member Jamie Widdoes, who played the tie-wearing house president Hoover, tells the Report, “He was a sweet funny guy who constantly regaled us with one funny true story of his life after another. One of the best being that he genuinely got the role of Flounder after delivering a pizza to Matty Simmons’ (one of the producers) house. True Hollywood success story.”

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