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25 October, 2023

Israel says it will deny UN officials visas to “teach them a lesson” after the organisation’s secretary general called for an immediate ceasefire to end the “epic suffering” in Gaza. António Guterres said the Hamas attack on 7 October “did not happen in a vacuum”, and that Israel’s response had included “clear violations of international humanitarian law”. Britons are eating less meat than at any point since records began in the 1970s, according to new government data. The average person ate 854g at home in the year to March 2022, 14% less than a decade earlier. Astronaut Tim Peake is set to come out of retirement to lead the first all-British space mission. The 51-year-old told the Today programme that while there are still “several hurdles to overcome”, it is “fantastic that we have started the ball rolling”.

Tim Peake larking about on the International Space Station in 2016

David and Samantha Cameron entering No 10 after the 2010 election. Stefan Rousseau/Getty

Thirteen years of Tory failure

The disintegration of the Tories is happening “faster than the Conservatives feared and Labour dared hope”, says Adrian Wooldridge in Bloomberg. Politicos are circulating a “Portillo list” of leading ministers in danger of losing their seats, including Grant Shapps, Michael Gove and Jeremy Hunt; there are even rumours Hunt won’t contest his seat at the next election. After the by-election “double defeat” last week, where the swings against the Conservatives were both over 20 percentage points, some Tories want the party to “turn hard right” on issues like tax and immigration. And sure, that would help neutralise the threat from Reform, the successor to the Brexit Party. But it would also push many moderate voters over to the Lib Dems, since they “don’t feel the same need” to keep Labour out of power as when Jeremy Corbyn was in charge.

Rishi Sunak, whose polling after a year as PM is “brutal”, has hardly helped things, says Tom McTague in UnHerd. “Going to Manchester to cancel a train line to Manchester doesn’t suggest a particular proficiency in the fine art of winning people over.” But blame needs to be shared among the entire recent run of Tory leaders. “We have never been as badly governed as we have over the past 13 years.” Living standards have never grown so weakly over such a sustained period. Taxes have risen to their highest level on record; public services are a shambles. Structural problems, like regional inequality and the “productivity slump”, have gone untouched. “There is no law that says we must accept decline,” David Cameron declared before he took over from New Labour in 2010. His party seems to have done so anyway.

Despite being allergic to pumpkins, American artist Adam Bierton expects to carve up more than 100 of the spooky squashes this Halloween, says The New York Times. His intricate designs take about six hours to complete, and sell for anything between $400 and $5,000, with corporate clients including Starbucks and the BBC. In what he admits makes for a creepy sight, he stores the finished works in a glass-fronted industrial fridge wrapped in clingfilm. “I have all my guys in there,” he says, “and they’re screaming at me.” See more of his carvings here. 

American conservatives are squarely behind Benjamin Netanyahu, says Gabriel Sherman in Vanity Fair, with one notable exception: Donald Trump. The former president has torn into the Israeli PM since the Hamas attack, chiding him for not being “prepared”, and for refusing to help with the American drone attack that killed Iranian general Qasem Suleimani in 2020. He has even praised Hezbollah as “very smart”. What’s behind this animus? Like virtually every position he takes, it’s “driven by grievance” – specifically, Netanyahu’s refusal to endorse his lie that the 2020 election was stolen. In a 2021 interview, Trump noted that the Israeli leader had been among the first to congratulate Joe Biden. “I haven’t spoken to him since,” he said. “Fuck him.”

Taylor Swift (left) and Natalie Portman getting it right. Jason Merritt/Getty; Emma McIntyre/WireImage/Getty

The secret to the perfect outfit is “all in the eyes”, says The Daily Telegraph. Previously, experts thought matching colours to your skin tone was the more important factor in whether a particular garment would look good, but new research shows that the key component is eye colour. Apparently those with “bright baby blues” should stick to shades like teal and turquoise, whereas individuals with brown eyes should opt for warmer reds and oranges.

A Palestinian protester last week. Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times/Getty

Hamas has appalled its friends as well as its enemies

Hamas’s 7 October attacks were meant to “set off a chain reaction”, says Nelly Lahoud in Foreign Affairs, “drawing the broader Middle East into a conflict for Palestinian freedom”. Mohammed Deif, leader of the group’s militant wing, called on Palestinians to “ignite the earth with flames beneath the feet of the oppressive occupiers”, and appealed to Islamic “resistance” groups in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen to “unite with their brethren in Palestine”. But so far, that hasn’t happened. Arab governments have not offered support for Hamas. Iran has done nothing. Even Hezbollah has been “more restrained than Hamas wanted”.

Instead, the “heart-wrenching images” from the attack were so distressing that some jihadi groups actually distanced themselves from the horror. Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent issued a statement claiming it had seen mujahideen defending Israeli women and children, assuring them that “we would treat you humanely for we are Muslims”. One Hamas leader, Saleh al-Arouri, blamed the violence against civilians on ordinary Gazans who, he told Al Jazeera, must have rushed through the border behind his “disciplined” soldiers. Hamas appears surprised, and worried, at its own success. “With two abductees, they could have negotiated with Israel for permission to build a seaport and freedom for hundreds of prisoners held in Israeli jails,” one anonymous diplomat told the US-based website Al-Monitor. With more than 200, “they will face the entire Israeli army inside Gaza”.

🇸🇦🇪🇬🇧🇭 Even before the recent attacks, says Jake Wallis Simons in The Spectator, the Arab world had gone right off Hamas. An August poll found that just 10% of Saudis expressed a positive view of the terror group, while 48% said their opinion was “very negative”. In Bahrain, Egypt and even Qatar, support for Hamas dropped 10 points leading up to 2020, while in Gaza itself, in July, 50% were brave enough to tell pollsters: “Hamas should stop calling for Israel’s destruction, and instead accept a permanent two-state solution.”

A new restaurant in Mayfair is selling “the UK’s most expensive steak”, says Damian Whitworth in The Times: a 14oz sirloin for £900. Aragawa, the first overseas branch of a fancy Japanese steakhouse, imports the big-budget beef (pictured) from Nishizawa Farm in Japan’s Hyogo prefecture. It is cut from the “super-premium Tajima strain of wagyu cattle”, which are reared indoors with “all manner of fussing”: massages, soothing music, special rice stalks for feed. The chef cooks the steaks in a special kiln fired by Japanese charcoal, and claims he can tell when it’s ready “by the sound of the sizzle on the coals”.

In 1931, in response to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, a group of sceptics published a pamphlet entitled 100 Authors Against Einstein. When the physicist was told about the book, he is said to have responded: “Why a hundred? If I were wrong, one would have been enough.”

It’s the wrestler-turned-actor Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, right, and his rather pale-looking waxwork. The figure was unveiled by Paris’s Musée Grévin last week, and immediately came under fire for being, as one Instagram user put it, “melanin deficient”. Johnson, who has a black father and Samoan mother, kicked up a fuss, and the museum has now said it is “improving” his light-skinned likeness.

“I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn’t ever have to rely on the press for my information.”

Christopher Hitchens

That’s it. You’re done.

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