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15 December, 2023

Hungary has blocked a €50bn EU aid package for Ukraine at a crunch summit in Brussels. Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, vetoed the four-year package shortly after the bloc voted to open membership talks with Kyiv. Tobacco giants have been quietly bankrolling scientific papers downplaying the risks of children vaping, says The Times. The “secretive” lobbying effort, which also included running a supposedly grassroots campaign presenting itself as the “voice of ordinary vapers”, is a bid to boost e-cigarette sales and prevent the introduction of public health measures in the UK. A skier in Lake Tahoe, California had a lucky escape when a black bear dashed across the slope in front of him. Tao Feng, who filmed the ursine encounter (below), says he saw the fuzzy interloper reunite with its mother on the other side of the piste. 🐻⛷

Ruins in Gaza City. Yahya Hassouna/AFP/Getty

Israel is radicalising young Arabs

Joe Biden finally dropped the “I” word on Israel this week, says Marc Champion in Bloomberg, describing its assault on Gaza as “indiscriminate”. As Israel’s critics were quick to point out, the US president was effectively accusing its ally of a war crime. The death toll in Gaza certainly appears to be shockingly high – more than 18,000, according to the Hamas-run health authority. While the terrorist group has an interest in inflating those figures, its numbers in previous conflicts have proved “remarkably accurate”, and Israel has done little to rebut them. It’s impossible to know how many of the dead are militants – the Israelis claim it’s 5,000 – and thus how “indiscriminate” the bombing really is. But it almost doesn’t matter. When the body count is this high, it risks “turning the world against Israel”.

The “death and destruction” is already radicalising young people elsewhere in the Arab world, says Tom Friedman in The New York Times. I’ve been travelling around the region, and what struck me was how much the Saudis, in particular, want an end to the war for that very reason. Riyadh is “not the least bit sympathetic to Hamas”, but it worries that Israel’s actions will trigger unrest elsewhere. The other big concern is who will fund the “multibillion-dollar, multiyear” effort to rebuild Gaza once the fighting is over. Gulf Arab states are the obvious candidates. But they’re adamant they’ll do no such thing until Israel has a legitimate Palestinian partner and “commits to one day negotiating a two-state solution”. As things stand, neither looks likely. 

🙏🕊 People always say UN resolutions are powerless, says Tom Fletcher on X (formerly Twitter), but that’s not true. I was a No 10 advisor in 2009, when the Security Council was voting on a resolution calling for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. At the last minute, Gordon Brown decided that the UK would back the resolution, rather than abstaining. He did so despite “massive” pressure from the US and Israel – I remember being yelled at by the Israeli PM in the middle of the night. The US then changed its position from opposing the resolution to abstaining, and “we had a ceasefire within a week”.

Victoria Rose Richards, an embroidery artist from Devon, recreates aerial shots of the UK countryside in felt form, says Messy Nessy. Works by the textile whizz include picture-perfect clouds hovering over grassland; a river cutting through snow in winter; green and periwinkle blue fields; a rainbow sunrise over a crop of poppies; and flowers blooming among dense green foliage. See more here.

David Cameron was surprisingly prescient about his career trajectory. In her 2020 book Diary of an MP’s Wife, Sasha Swire recounts a conversation with the then PM in September 2010: “As for his own personal game plan, he tells us seven years, then a return to the back benches, some outside interests, and then leave all together, but also adds he would quite like to be foreign secretary one day.”

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Terrible queues, though. Getty

A travel site has scanned TripAdvisor reviews for the world’s top tourist attractions to find out which ones have the worst queues, says Digg. The Eiffel Tower takes the top spot, with 4,799 complaints about long lines, while Disneyland Paris comes in at number nine with a whopping 2,453 whines. Perhaps unsurprisingly, three of the top 10 are in the UK – where both queuing and complaining are favoured national pastimes. The London Eye is number two, with 4,756 complaints, followed by Legoland Windsor at four and Alton Towers at seven.

“Drier than a month in the Priory”: roast turkey in The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)

Spare us this “insipid, flavourless fowl”

Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol was such a hit that when it was published in December 1843, “it had sold out by Christmas Eve”, says Alec Marsh in The Spectator. “And it has a lot to answer for.” The emotional high point of the iconic festive fable is Scrooge sending his clerk Bob Cratchit a turkey – and as a result, we’re now stuck with the tradition of “turkey as a festive staple”. Within a few years of the book’s publication, Mrs Beeton had declared: “A Christmas dinner, with the middle classes of this empire, would scarcely be a Christmas dinner without its turkey.” What a stitch up.

“Drier than a month in the Priory”, Christmas turkey is proof of man’s “slavish submission to tradition”. How on earth can this “pale, insipid, flavourless fowl” be considered worthy of celebrating the birth of the saviour of humanity? Regardless of how you “dress it, cook it or reheat it”, a roasted turkey is a fundamentally “bland disappointment of a dish” whose “greatest culinary destiny” is to be smothered in mayonnaise on Boxing Day. “Beef, lamb, pork, duck or goose” are all superior options. “Dare I say it, even chicken – the Ford Fiesta of the animal kingdom – boasts a superior flavour and texture.” Turkey is also shockingly wasteful – even a relatively small one produces about four chickens’ worth of meat, “with an eighth of the flavour”. We should authorise the publishers of A Christmas Carol – “like those who would seek to posthumously edit Agatha Christie, Roald Dahl or Ian Fleming” – to rewrite the ending. Perhaps this time Scrooge could send poor old Cratchit a goose.

Jilly Cooper’s books depict a world where “left-wing women have hairy legs and bad manners”, and sexy, posh ones say “I can’t cope with all this #MeToo business” before undoing another button, says The Spectator. So when the author mentioned earlier this year at the Cheltenham Festival (the horse one, not the literary one) that the publication of her new book Tackle! had been held up, “some assumed this was because of the strictures of sensitivity readers”. Thankfully, “she clarified that it was in fact because of demands from her editors for more sex”.

To The Times:

The Times always gets the right correspondent for the subject at hand. This opinion was reinforced in reading the article “A bit glum? German people know how you feel”, by Oliver Moody, and confirmed a few pages later by “Next year set to be ‘hottest on record’, says Met Office”, by Ben Cooke. 

Tom Stubbs, Surbiton

The “name games” continue (letter, Dec 9). I was cheered to see your interview with the MasterChef winner was written by Susannah Butter. I’m looking forward to today’s edition of this new Christmas game in The Times.

Rosie Watkins, Suffolk

It’s Pantone’s colour of the year for 2024: Peach Fuzz. The “gentle and nurturing” peach shade – PANTONE 13-1023, to be precise – was chosen as an antidote to a year of “global conflicts and endless sources of stress”. The firm’s executive director Leatrice Eiseman says the colour is a reminder of our need for compassion, connection and internal tranquillity, evoking “the warm colours of a sunrise” and “the cosiness of a fuzzy blanket”.

“There is always a well-known solution to every human problem – neat, plausible and wrong.”

American writer HL Mencken

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