20 November, 2023

In the headlines

Israel and Hamas may be edging towards a deal that would see some of the estimated 240 Israeli hostages freed, potentially in exchange for a temporary ceasefire. Michael Herzog, Israel’s ambassador to the US, says he is hopeful an agreement will be reached “in the coming days”. Javier Milei, a self-described “anarcho-capitalist”, has won Argentina’s presidential election. The far-right libertarian outsider, who has vowed to “exterminate” inflation and take a chainsaw to the state, secured 56% of the vote in a run-off against the centre-left candidate Sergio Massa. Rosalynn Carter, wife of former US president Jimmy Carter, has died aged 96. The couple, who grew up in the same rural town in Georgia, were married for 77 years. “As long as Rosalynn was in the world,” Carter said in a statement, “I always knew somebody loved and supported me.”

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter in 1976. Rick Diamond/Getty

Comment

Tony Blair with Colonel Gaddafi in 2007. Peter Macdiarmid/Getty

One way of fixing the West’s broken asylum system

Most western nations feel utterly stumped by the issue of asylum, says Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times. There are tens of millions of people who qualify as refugees, “far more than the West could ever accommodate”, and climate change is making the problem worse. When the refugee convention was signed in 1951, the global population was much smaller and it was infinitely harder for asylum-seekers to make it to Europe. Today, the continent is “marketed by people-smugglers” with “travel routes, prices and false promises”. The West’s legal but hypocritical solution has been to stop refugees ever making it here. The EU pays billions to Turkey and “transit” countries in north Africa to stem the flow. Tony Blair was a “pioneer of these dark arts”: in 2004, he lavished weapons on Colonel Gaddafi in exchange for tightening the Libyan border.

The West’s enemies look on at all this with glee. No one wants to move to China, Russia or Iran. So the likes of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have “every incentive” to stoke conflict, because they know it will worsen the West’s immigration problems. One solution to all this would be to abandon the principle of “non-refoulement”, the legal bar on deporting people anywhere where they might face persecution. This was the legal basis for the Supreme Court’s rejection of the government’s Rwanda policy last week – and it’s what keeps people-smugglers in business. Who wants to pay £5,000 to get here if you can’t stay? Removing non-refoulement from our conventions and laws wouldn’t be easy. But the current system is “no longer fit for purpose”.

Photography

The finalists and winners of this year’s Nature Photographer of the Year awards, which received more than 21,000 entries from around the world, include a spectacled bear in a canopy of Spanish moss in the Andes; a mob of rays shot through with sunbeams in Mexico; a perfectly camouflaged chameleon in Madagascar; and a close-up of an endangered jaguar in the Mayan Jungle. See more here.

Zeitgeist

At many American colleges, the parents of students have set up Facebook and WhatsApp groups, says Juno DeMelo in The Cut. These are sometimes used for reasonable things – “to get details on graduation or crowdsource the name of a doctor”. But more often they’re filled with extreme over-parenting: asking where their “Dear Daughter” should get a haircut; arranging playdates for their adult children; or recommending the use of a pool noodle in the gap between the wall and their bed, to stop their phone falling on the floor. It’s “the final frontier for helicopter parents”.

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Television

Nigel Farage made his debut on I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! last night, says Ben Dowell in The Times, and he “came across rather well”. Deploying his best “pub landlord” persona, the former UKIP leader brushed off quips about Brexit and helped secure some food for everyone by completing a task in a van full of snakes (above). What many of Farage’s critics forget is that he can be “intensely smart, affable and charming”. It’d be a brave man to bet against him going the distance in the Australian jungle. “Being underestimated is what he does.”

Comment

Biden with Netanyahu last month. GPO/Handout/Anadolu/Getty

Netanyahu makes peace impossible

The “deeply distressing and unrelenting human suffering” in Gaza caused by Israel’s response to Hamas’s 7 October atrocities will leave a “permanent mark on all who witness it”, says Simon Tisdall in The Observer. The resulting “worldwide revulsion” is inflicting serious political damage on Israel’s main ally Joe Biden, and on the western-led international order, which may prove “irreparable”. Biden continues to offer his staunch support to Benjamin Netanyahu, telling reporters last week he did not know when the assault on Gaza would end and that a ceasefire is not “realistic”. But he’s increasingly out of step with Americans. Polls show that 68% of the country want a ceasefire, and 56% of Democrats say Israel’s military response has “gone too far”.

Public outrage over Gaza is also “roiling the domestic politics of America’s close allies”. In the UK, the ceasefire issue has sharply divided Keir Starmer’s “government-in-waiting”. France and Germany are internally “at odds” too. Elsewhere, in Arab countries and beyond, fury at the intolerable human toll is “visceral”, and may have profound, long-term consequences. Biden was always bound to back Israel, but his mistake has been failing to rein in Netanyahu. The “unscrupulous hard-right nationalist” talks frequently about a “long war”, which happens to be his “best hope of staying in office and out of jail”. Fewer than 4% of Jewish Israelis trust him to tell the truth about the war. As long as he remains in power, Biden and other Western leaders will face a “wall of defiance” in Jerusalem that prolongs the suffering in Gaza, disrupts their politics at home and harms their interests abroad.

Food and drink

Getty

As seems to happen every year, a couple of supermarket own-brand champagnes have beaten the big-name competition in Which? magazine’s Christmas taste tests. Top of the rankings was Co-op’s £22.75-a-bottle Les Pionniers, which wowed judges with its “smoky notes” and “smooth creaminess”, followed by Aldi’s £22 Veuve Monsigny Premier Cru (“fresh fruit flavours against a savoury backbone”). The panel also praised the most expensive fizz they tasted, the £47-a-bottle Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label, but concluded that plenty of cheaper options were “just as, if not more, delicious”.

Gone viral

This decade-old video of a wall of fog rolling over a mountain on the Canadian island of Newfoundland has resurfaced on X (formerly Twitter), racking up more than 650,000 views. “That would scare the living s*** out of me,” says one user, while another adds that from this distance, it’s virtually “indistinguishable from a tsunami”.

Snapshot

Snapshot answer

It’s a planet where it rains sand, says The Guardian. The celestial body, named Wasp-107b, lies about 200 light-years from Earth. Data from Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope shows that the off-putting orb has 1,000C temperatures, raging winds, and silicate sand clouds which fall like precipitation. There’s also evidence of water vapour and sulphur dioxide, which would give the whole place a rather distinctive smell of burnt matches.

Quoted

“I’m proud to pay taxes in the United States. The only thing is, I could be just as proud for half the money.”