3 November, 2023

In the headlines

Sam Bankman-Fried has been convicted of fraud and money-laundering by a New York court. The 31-year-old former billionaire, who founded the now-collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, faces up to 110 years in prison. Elon Musk has told Rishi Sunak artificial intelligence will be “the most disruptive force in history”, and will one day remove the need for people to work. Speaking to the PM in London at the AI Safety Summit, the Tesla boss also said humanoid robots could become “real friends” to people, but would need a physical “off switch” in case they turned evil. The number of jellyfish seen in British waters increased by 32% over the past year, according to the Marine Conservation Society. The most commonly spotted were barrel jellyfish (known as the “dustbin-lid”), but warmer waters also tempted in crystal, compass and lion’s mane, and the odd Portuguese man o’ war.

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Comment

Army trucks on Westminster Bridge on day one of the first lockdown. Leon Neal/Getty

Lockdown: a wrecking ball that never needed to swing

The Covid Inquiry is more interested in finding swear words in people’s WhatsApp messages than uncovering the truth about lockdowns, says Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph. “But it’s starting to creep out anyway.” The written evidence submitted by Dominic Cummings, for example, revealed that the UK scientists advising the Sage committee were, at first, “unanimously against” lockdowns. Even doomsters like Prof Neil Ferguson fretted that they could be “worse than the disease”. But with Britain and Sweden the only major holdouts against Wuhan-style shutdowns, and “disaster-graphs” circulating online, public pressure mounted. Ferguson dutifully published his “doom models”, and Britain’s scientists “fell in behind”.

It was a different story in Sweden, where former state epidemiologist Johan Giesecke was “reading Ferguson’s models in disbelief”. He recalled Ferguson saying 200 million might die from bird flu, when just 455 did. Modellers had been “calamitously wrong” before. “Should society really be closed now on their say so?” Giesecke and his protégé Anders Tegnell pulled Ferguson’s models apart, finding “flaw after flaw”, and successfully argued to keep the country open. Yet no one was pulling apart the models in Britain. One internal report showed that 600,000 hospital beds would be needed; the actual number peaked at 34,000. The PM was told 90,000 ventilators were required; demand for them peaked at 3,700. And the wasted money is nothing compared to the millions of children needlessly denied education, and the economic and mental health impact of lockdowns. What we now know is that the virus was already in reverse before lockdown started, due to people behaving sensibly of their own accord. It was a “social and economic wrecking ball that never needed to swing”.

Photography

The finalists and winners of this year’s Dog Photography Awards, which received more than 1,400 entries from around the world, include a border collie leaping for his frisbee; an Australian shepherd relaxing in the snow; a collie jumping into a river; and a pair of three-week-old great dane puppies. See more here.

Noted

More than 100 of China’s generals were arrested by anti-corruption investigators between 2013 and 2017, says Bloomberg – that’s more than the number of senior commanders lost on the battlefield since 1949. The main reason for the widespread graft is that the People’s Liberation Army is linked to the Chinese Communist Party, not the state, so personal ties “play a crucial role in promotions”. This encourages bribery – when General Xu Caihou was investigated in 2013, officials found “more than a ton of cash, jade, and valuable antiques” in his basement.

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Noted

Helen H Richardson/Denver Post/Getty

Don’t worry if you can’t be bothered to clear leaves as they pile up in your garden, says The Washington Post – you’re doing wildlife a world of good. Fallen foliage provides an important habitat over winter for “critical pollinating species” including bees, butterflies and moths. Similarly, a “light scattering” of leaves on your lawn can keep the grass healthy. But don’t go overboard: too thick a layer will “smother the turf”.

Comment

Gilad Shalit (centre): freed in 2011 in exchange for over 1,000 Palestinians. Getty

Why Israel issued the “Hannibal Directive”

However the Israel-Hamas conflict ends, says Eyal Weizman in the London Review of Books, it will almost certainly involve a prisoner exchange. Hamas took around 200 captives during its attack on 7 October, and around 6,000 Palestinians are being held in Israeli prisons. The issue will be the “exchange rate”, which has ballooned over the decades. When a Palestinian militant group took 22 Israeli hostages after hijacking an El-Al flight in 1968, they secured the release of 16 Palestinians. In 1985, three captured Israeli Defence Force troops were swapped for 1,150 prisoners; in 2011, one IDF soldier, Gilad Shalit, was exchanged for 1,027 Palestinians.

This imbalance has led Israel to take extreme measures. In 1986, the army issued the so-called “Hannibal Directive” – a deeply controversial order that was taken by Israeli soldiers as a licence to “kill a comrade before they were taken prisoner”. It is thought to have been named after the Carthaginian general Hannibal, who killed himself in 181BC to avoid falling into Roman hands. On 1 August 2014, Palestinian fighters captured an Israeli soldier near Rafah, and “the Hannibal Directive came into effect”: rather than trying to rescue the hostage, the Israeli air force bombed the entire tunnel system where he had been taken. The army has since cancelled the directive. But the “indiscriminate bombing” of Gaza in recent weeks suggests the Israelis may have returned to the principle of “preferring dead captives to a deal”.

Quirk of language

Nice labonza. Godong/Universal Images Group/Getty

There’s no shortage of words for our bottoms, says Mental Floss, but there are many enjoyable terms that have “slipped through the crack” of lexical history. Some, such as suburbs and west side, are geographical. Others are more descriptive: the likes of downstairs, latter end, and back porch. In the 1940s, you might have talked about someone’s rusty-dusty (from all that sitting) or their labonza. Some even have “Shakespearean pedigree”: the line “I’ll tickle your catastrophe” in Henry IV loosely translates to “I’ll kick your ass”.

Inside politics

Clallam County in Washington State is America’s “last political bellwether”, says The Run-Up podcast. Of the more than 3,000 counties in the US, it is the only one that has voted for the winner of every presidential election since 1980. When we visited, we spoke to a range of people: “committed Biden voters, committed Trump voters, people who were hoping for anyone but Biden or Trump”. But every one of them thought Biden would win the county again in 2024 – and the election itself.

Snapshot

Snapshot answer

It’s Nidelven Blå, winner of the 2023 World Cheese Awards. The semi-solid blue is made not far from the Norwegian city of Trondheim – where, coincidentally or not, this year’s tasting ceremony was held. It beat more than 4,000 other fromages to take the top spot, says Time Out, including a Belgian hard cows’ cheese that came second and a Swiss hard cheese that finished third. Shockingly, neither France nor the UK – “two very proudly cheesy nations” – had any entries in the top 10. See the others here.

Quoted

“I didn’t like the play, but then I saw it under adverse conditions – the curtain was up.”