 12 May, 2021 In the headlines Israeli jets and Palestinian militants exchanged further air strikes and rockets overnight. As the death toll reached 49 in Gaza and six in Israel, the UN's Middle East envoy warned of an imminent "full-scale war". The Queen's Speech unveiled 30 government bills, including legislation on freedom of speech in universities and animal welfare. What was striking was the government's "lack of ambition", says The Times. David Cameron bombarded Rishi Sunak, Michael Gove and other ministers with 70 texts and emails last year on behalf of Greensill Capital, the House of Commons Treasury committee revealed. What a "cack-handed" series of attempts to gain access, says the I newspaper.
Comment of the day It's mad to go soft on Yemen's brutal rebels  A displaced family in Yemen. Ahmad Al-Basha/AFP/Getty The limits of "talking softly" to Yemen's brutal Houthi rebels should now be abundantly clear to President Biden, says Bobby Ghosh in Bloomberg. Wrongly believing he could create the conditions for peace, Biden overturned Donald Trump's designation of the Iran-backed Houthis as terrorists and cancelled US backing for the Saudi-led forces fighting against them. He didn't reckon with the Houthis' fanatical determination to keep fighting and Iran's eagerness to keep them "frothing at the mouth". Both have grown stronger because of Biden's soft-pedalling. The rebels are stepping up missile and drone attacks on US allies, including Saudi oil infrastructure, and have escalated their campaign to take control of the country. And the Iranians, in turn, are boosting their support of the rebels. While Biden's envoy to the region hops around the Gulf, talking to US allies about "the importance of peace", Iranian officials openly brag about handing advanced drone and missile tech to the rebels. The "inconvenient fact" is that the Houthis have never shown the slightest interest in peace. Egged on by Iran, they have repeatedly demonstrated their commitment to war. That leaves Tehran with a strong hand in nuclear negotiations – and Biden out of luck. Why it matters Read the full article here.
Novels help make us human We keep being told the novel is dying, says Kit Wilson in The Critic, and there's no doubt that over the past century it has come to play an "increasingly peripheral part in our lives". We have taken many of its organs, transplanting them into other bodies – story and spectacle into film, social commentary into documentary and journalism. But that leaves the heart, the most vital organ: the novel's unique ability to "describe the internal thoughts and feelings of other people". The novel allows us to "wriggle through the crannies of a stranger's cranium", experiencing the full range of someone else's feelings. By 1900, 95% of the population of England was literate. Through fiction, people could live for a moment in the minds of those very different to them and understand them as "fellow human beings". A deeper truth about humanity was revealed: that beneath the "ephemeral spume" of class and social category, we are broadly alike. Only novels let us fully inhabit the minds of others. If we stop reading them, our society will become less emotionally imaginative, less capable of empathy. We see this already in "stay in your lane" identity politics and the increasing political tribalism. But identitarians have everything back to front: there is more that unites us than divides us. It's an extraordinary thought that without the novel it's unlikely we'd be where we are today: we might never have embraced "political liberalism" or had universal suffrage. Read the full article here.
Inside politics Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner "have often relished their reputation as the Odd Couple of British politics", says Paul Waugh in HuffPost. Rayner, a northern former care worker, lists the Labour leader in her phone contacts as "Mr Darcy" – a joke about claims "he was the real-life inspiration for Bridget Jones's dashing young lawyer". After their falling-out over the weekend, when Rayner was sacked as party chairwoman, then given a mouthful of other titles in compensation, they went for a very public coffee in Westminster to prove that they had patched things up. "If you recall Bridget Jones's Diary," says one Labour source, "Bridget and Darcy did indeed have their ups and downs, but there was a solid partnership underneath it."
Data update  A surge in the price of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum is rippling through the whole "crypto" sector. The top 101 cryptocurrencies now have respective market caps of more than $1bn. One fast riser is Internet Computer, which was only "minted" on Monday, but is already worth more than $45bn. Bitcoin, created in 2009, is worth more than $1 trillion.
Noted The public appetite for edible insects will grow into a global market worth $6.3bn by 2030, according to Barclays. Bugs are healthy and far better for the environment than meat, and consumers are cottoning on to this. Even so, says Richard Godwin in The Observer, it's a tough sell. When I revealed that the tomato and oregano cracker bites we'd had with our G&Ts were laced with crickets, my wife asked: "What the hell is wrong with you?"
Snapshot 
On the way out Demand for first-class plane tickets fell by 45% from 2010 to 2019, says Toby Skinner in the FT. Covid anxieties are luring the super-rich into private jets, while lie-flat seats have made business class far more competitive. And as airlines turn towards smaller aircraft for long-haul flights, bulky first-class suites with butlers and showers – and a $30,000 round-trip price tag, in Etihad's case – are trickier to squeeze into planes.
Snapshot answer It's a cache of thousands of illicit weapons seized by the USS Monterey. The ship stopped a dhow off the coast of Oman for a routine registration check and found machineguns, missiles, assault rifles and grenade launchers stashed on board. The arms are thought to have been on their way to Houthi rebels in Yemen and were allegedly supplied by Iran.
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May 12, 2021
Novels help make us human
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