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15 November, 2023

The Supreme Court has ruled that the government’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda is unlawful. Britain’s highest court found that there was a “real risk” deportees would subsequently be returned to their home countries, where they could face persecution and inhumane treatment, in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights. Israeli forces have entered Gaza’s largest hospital. Israel has accused Hamas of running a command centre in tunnels underneath al-Shifa, a claim backed by US intelligence. UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths says he is “appalled” by the military operation, adding: “Hospitals are not battlegrounds.” UK inflation has dropped sharply to 4.6%, the lowest figure for nearly two years. The fall is largely due to cheaper energy, with the price of gas now almost a third less than it was 12 months ago.

Teachers at a Hand in Hand school in 2016. Craig Stennett/Getty

A ray of light in the darkness

History’s “default setting” is carnage and suffering, says Simon Schama in the FT – “the plague in Athens; slave ships; Passchendaele; the Gulag; Hiroshima”. But we shouldn’t overlook the “small points of radiance” that remain lit amid the darkness. One example is the Max Rayne school in Jerusalem – a “visionary” enterprise where Jewish and Arab children are taught together in Arabic and Hebrew, by teachers from both communities. Founded in 1998, and run by the “inspirational” Hand in Hand Centre, the school hasn’t had an easy time of it – it was burned to the ground by Jewish fanatics in 2014. But it was rebuilt and reopened, and today there are six Hand in Hand schools across Israel, all devoted to “sowing the seeds of a future free of mutual demonisation”.

You might assume these ambitious ideals have “taken a beating in the present calamity”. But the war has made the need for this kind of cooperation “more urgent than ever”. After a two-week break following the October 7 atrocity, all six schools re-opened. Arab students have family members who have been killed in Gaza; many of the Israelis know someone kidnapped, or worse. It’s the ultimate test of their ideals – but it’s also “the picture of a possible shared future”. The Israeli writer Amos Oz once compared the conflict to a consuming fire. You can either run away, or you can pour water on the flames using whatever you have – a bucket, a cup, even just a teaspoon. The fire is huge, but these schools demonstrate that “everyone has a teaspoon”.

Now that the “low-interest-rate-fuelled” property buying spree is over, many of Manhattan’s super-expensive “trophy apartments” are languishing unsold, says Curbed. On “Billionaires’ Row”, a group of luxury skyscrapers near Central Park, about half of all properties are on the market. This means some (relative) bargains are available. In MoMA Tower, sales this year have averaged a 20% discount off their multi-million-dollar asking prices, while Central Park Tower’s 17,545 sq foot penthouse – a “once-in-a-generation residence” – has had 22% knocked off its original $250m listing fee.

Though some ultra-processed foods (UPFs) increase your risk of developing cancer, heart disease and diabetes, others are good for you, says The Guardian. New research into the “demonised foodstuffs” suggests breads and cereals actually reduce the risk of these conditions, thanks to their fibre content. Eating other types of UPFs – including ready meals, savoury snacks and plant-based meat alternatives – does not appear to increase the risk of having more than one of these chronic conditions at the same time. But the likes of sugary drinks and processed meats are still best avoided.

The Knowledge Book of Notes & Quotes

“Smile. Tomorrow will be worse,” said American engineer Edward Murphy. Well, at least you can make your Christmas easier by ordering the perfect present from us here at The Knowledge – a book which pulls together all our favourite notes and quotes. It will be published on 30 November, for £12.99 incl P&P (UK only). Click here to pre-order.

Ed Marshall/Fauna & Flora

The uninhabited Caribbean island of Redonda was once filled with wildlife, says the I newspaper – until 1865, when European miners introduced rats and goats, which ate all the native vegetation. But since 2016, the Antigua and Barbuda government has worked on restoring Redonda’s habitat. The rats were killed with poisoned bait and the goats herded up and removed. Plants slowly began to grow again, and now “Redonda’s whole ecosystem has rebounded on every level”. Researchers are required to clean their clothes and shoes before setting foot on the island, lest they carry over even a seed.

Leon Neal/Getty

Can Tory liberals see off “Suella-ism”?

Sacking Suella Braverman is best understood as Rishi Sunak’s “coming-out party”, says Tom McTague in UnHerd. He is, in effect, “defenestrating the right” from his cabinet and announcing that he will fight the next election as a “moderate, liberal conservative”. The problem is that while Braverman might be easily discarded, “Suella-ism” will prove much harder to dislodge. For all the melodrama, she expressed a feeling about modern Britain that is shared beyond the far fringes of the Tory right, and it’s a more coherent story than Sunak has come up with. Her story is this: “The Conservative Party has failed.”

The party might have won elections, but it has “failed to change the country”. It got Britain out of Europe, but “the Blob remains in charge”. This is the “essence of Suella-ism”. The courts are still “all-powerful”, schools promote their own ideology, police declare that “jihad doesn’t mean jihad”. It’s time, she says, to “take back control”. A common mistake is to dismiss politicians you don’t like as a “throwback to some distant era”– to see Braverman as just a “modern-day Enoch Powell”, born of the party’s “unchanging, loopy hard right”. In reality, she is a product of Britain as it exists now, with all its “anxieties, paranoias, prejudices and complexities”. If she wants to win the Tory leadership, the former home secretary will have to explain why she achieved so little in office. But Tory liberals are going to need a better story to explain their failure to remake Britain if they are to defeat Suella-ism in the long run.

Gen Alpha, the cohort born between 2010 and 2025, have now begun a “generational rite of passage”, says The New York Times: befuddling their elders with new slang. A “rizzler”, for example, is someone who is excellent at flirting. A “Fanum tax” is when you take a bite of someone else’s food, in reference to the popular YouTuber Fanum. Then there’s “gyat” – which rhymes with “yacht” but with a hard “g” at the start. “There’s no cute way to say it – it’s just a word for a big butt,” says Alta, a 13-year-old in Pennsylvania. “If someone has a big butt, someone will say ‘gyat’ to it.” 

It’s a laser display projected on the hand of someone using an Ai Pin, a much-hyped new device made by American startup Humane. The AI kit – created by two former Apple employees and worn like a badge on the owner’s chest – can also be controlled by talking to it, but it has no screen, so no endless scrolling. That doesn’t stop the $699 device from being able to send text messages, answer questions, play songs, snap photos, make calls and even translate real-time conversations into different languages. The aim, says The New York Times, is “liberating the world from its smartphone addiction” – albeit with more technology.

“If you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.”

Warren Buffett

That’s it. You’re done.

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