23 October, 2023

In the headlines

Home Secretary Suella Braverman will meet the head of the Metropolitan Police today, to discuss why officers didn’t arrest pro-Palestine protesters who chanted “jihad”at a rally in London on Saturday. Responding to a video of one of the demonstrators, the Met said the word had “a number of meanings” and that no specific offence had been committed. Scientists have found a way to cut deaths from cervical cancer by 35%, says The Times. The new approach – a six-week course of chemotherapy before the standard combination of chemotherapy and radiotherapy – is “the biggest advance” in treatment for two decades. Competitors battled it out in giant pumpkin boats at a festival in Belgium yesterday. The Halloween-themed event near Antwerp saw contenders navigate a 100-metre river course in the hollowed-out squashes, some of which originally weighed over a ton. 🎃🛶

BBC

Comment

Putin and Xi in Beijing last week. Sputnik

America’s faltering grip on world order

At China’s latest Belt and Road conference last week, says Daniel Hannan in The Daily Telegraph, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping swaggered through “those vast marble halls that dictators love” surrounded by “sundry lesser despots” representing the likes of Egypt, Myanmar and the Taliban. They were united chiefly by their enthusiasm for the “coming overthrow of the Western order”. At the same moment, Joe Biden was declaring on TV that “American leadership is what holds the world together”. Strong words and true, but undermined by the way the 80-year-old kept “blinking in confusion at the autocue, a dotard president seeming to symbolise a nation past its prime”.

How vertiginously it has come upon us, “this sense that we are losing”. Only a month ago Vladimir Putin was reduced to “fawning over Kim Jong-un”, so desperate was he for allies against Kyiv. But since the horrors in Israel, previously well-disposed countries are raging at “Western hypocrisy”. We might see Ukraine and Israel as “pluralist states under attack from fascistic neighbours”, but that’s not how it looks to avowedly “anti-colonialist” leaders in the “Global South”. To them, there is “nothing special about free societies”. Liberal democracy spread, in their view, not because it was more appealing, but because “white men imposed it” – and if Western countries are finally losing ground, “so much the better”.

Photography

Winners of this year’s Nikon Small World photography competition include close-up snaps of a match setting alight; a purple mouse embryo; two “fruiting bodies” of slime mould; a cuckoo wasp standing on a flower; and crystallised sugar syrup. See the full list here.

Film

Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling in Barbie

Striking actors in Hollywood have been given strict instructions by their union on what they are and aren’t allowed to wear at Halloween. Sag-Aftra says dressing up as characters from buzzy movies like Barbie or Oppenheimer would count as promoting content made by studios the actors are in dispute with, and instead suggests costumes “inspired by generalised characters and figures (ghost, zombie, spider, etc)”. Actor Ryan Reynolds wrote on X (formerly Twitter): “I look forward to screaming ‘scab’ at my eight-year-old all night.”

Gone viral

A dog-walker in Scotland has captured footage of high winds lifting up a forest floor during Storm Babet. David Nugent-Malone told the BBC he and his dog Jake had walked through that particular section of Stirlingshire woodland “literally hundreds of times before” and never seen anything like it. He compared the rising mesh of roots and soil to a “muddy tablecloth”. See a longer video here.

Comment

Netanyahu (left) and Biden in the 1980s, when they first got to know each other. Gary A Cameron; Joe McNally/Getty

“I don’t agree with a damn thing you say, but I love ya”

When Joe Biden travelled to Israel as vice president in 2010, says Lexington in The Economist, he was “blindsided” by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government declaring that it would expand Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem. The announcement seemed a “deliberate humiliation”, and some of President Obama’s aides thought the delegation should immediately return home. But Biden “had his own ideas”. He issued a statement criticising the move, then he and his wife Jill went for “dinner with the Netanyahus”. After the dinner, he gave the Israeli PM a photograph scrawled with a message: “Bibi, I don’t agree with a damn thing you say, but I love ya.”

Biden has “long demonstrated unusual patience and forbearance” with his Israeli counterpart. In May 2021, when Israel responded to a barrage of Hamas rocket attacks with airstrikes on Gaza, he didn’t call for restraint. Instead, he voiced support for the strikes in public, while challenging Netanyahu in private over his endgame. “Hey man, we’re out of runway here,” Biden told him during the fourth call between them. “It’s over.” The Israeli PM agreed to a ceasefire. This chemistry between the two leaders is partly personal: Biden got to know Netanyahu when the latter was working at the Israeli embassy in Washington in the 1980s. But it’s more about history. Biden “remembers the six-day war, he remembers the ’73 war”, says Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the US during Obama’s first term. “There’s a saying, ‘He has Israel in his heart.’ It’s very personal with him.” Given the extent of the current crisis, Biden’s ability to influence Netanyahu is “in for a severe test”.

Noted

Letters

To The Times:

Sir Peter Rubin thinks it unwise for MPs to make decisions while under the influence of alcohol (letter, Oct 20). According to Herodotus, the ancient Persians would disagree. They would deliberate on important matters while drunk, and then reconsider on the following day when sober; only if the same result was achieved on both occasions would the decision stand. Of course, this does require that there are at least some days of abstinence.

Geoff Wilkins, Brixworth, Northants

Snapshot

Snapshot answer

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