The Times

• “If you aim at the driver’s side, you will hit the driver full-on,” Chris Lincoln-Jones told the newspaper.
• It is also thought probable that they were launched from a Hermes drone, made by Elbit Systems – also an Israeli manufacturer.
• The letter, which the newspaper reports amounts to a legal opinion, says UK arms sales to Israel breach international law and must stop.
• One obvious way to do that is to stop selling them weapons.

Now many of the aid agencies operating in Gaza have suspended their activities. As Stavropoulou and Schiffling write here, the difficulty of getting aid to the population threatens to make the famine that is engulfing the Gaza Strip worse than it already is.

Read more:
More than 200 aid workers have been killed in Gaza, making famine more likely

UN resolution

• We spoke with John Strawson, an expert in Israeli politics at the University of East London, who kindly answered our questions about the politics of the situation, especially the US decision not to use its veto to block the resolution after decades of faithfully supporting successive Israeli governments in the security council.
• Expert Q&A

  Given that Netanyahu has indicated that Israel will not abide by security council resolution 2728 – and the US has said that it’s a non-binding resolution in any case – what does international law say about the enforceability of US resolutions?

• There appears no reason why resolution 2728 is not legally binding and, if push comes to shove, the security council could order that UN members “take such action by air, sea, or land forces as may be necessary to maintain or restore international peace and security”.

Starvation behind the ‘Iron Wall’

• According to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry the total has now passed 33,000 people.
• Nnenna Awah, whose PhD research at Sheffield Hallam University is in optimising food supply chains, walks us through the different classifications of food insecurity.
• Kaplan says it is the embodiment of Israel’s “Iron Wall” ideology, developed even before statehood was declared in 1948.
• Kaplan says that Jabotinsky’s ideological heirs in Likud (including Netanyahu) have rejected more liberal Israeli compromise positions ever since.

• Ophorst van Marwijk Kooy Vermogensbeheer N.V. (Hence: OVMK) has taken note of the press release issued by Kelso Group Holdings Plc yesterday and read the article published in The Times (published December 7th, 2023).
• OVMK has been a shareholder in THG Plc since December 2021 and currently owns close to 2% of the outstanding shares.
• We admire the way THG Plc has evolved since the company was founded.
• All three underlying divisions are high-quality players in their individual niche markets and excellently positioned for further growth.

• They say the COVID pandemic worsened the situation as public resources had to be redirected from developmental commitments to address the emergency.
• The universities responsible for producing the human capital needed for building state capacity must shoulder much of the blame.
• In our view the biggest problem facing South Africa is that the training of current and future civil servants is not delivering what the country needs.

lacks the interdisciplinary approach needed to meet the country’s complex challenges
fails to grasp that technology will play a far greater role in the future
remains trapped in colonial theorisations.
We say this taking our cue from business administration education.

Self reflection

• The dean of the Harvard Business School subsequently called for “great introspection”.
• Harvard’s courage in dealing with the question of its business education is an inspiring lesson on how to confront the flaws of teaching for other fields.

Worrying trends in the teaching of public administration

• Our analyses indicate that much of what is taught in public administration is not what the country needs to become a capable and developmental state.
• Public administration education does not appreciate the imperative of socioeconomic transformation for social and ecological justice, or the role of technology.
• In the 1980s, “New Public Management” become a staple diet pushed down the throats of students of public administration.
• All this occurred because of the void in the teaching of public administration.

But what must be done

• Professional associations exist to inculcate a culture of professionalism that many lament is lacking in the management of state affairs.
• For far too long, collaborative efforts in the teaching of public administration have been a cursory pursuit bereft of strategic intent.
• Theories of the state and citizenship, and the principles of democracy, need to underpin the teaching of public administration too.
• Public administration needs to go beyond studying systems and processes, and the neoliberal logic associated with New Public Management.

• He is affiliated with the South African Association of Public Administration and Management(SAAPAM).
• He is the outgoing chief editor of the Journal of Public Administration and serves in the National Planning Commission.

• The theft is suspected to be an inside job that took place over a period of twenty years.
• This is not the first time the Museum has come under fire and its custodianship has been questioned.

The Duveen scouring

• There can be little doubt that the most notorious of them is the Duveen scouring scandal, so-named after Joseph Duveen, an ultra-rich art dealer of dubious ethics and benefactor of the British Museum.
• The marbles were later placed in the Duveen Gallery, named in honour of the man responsible for the damage to their historic surface.
• The Duveen scouring was not the only cleaning of the marbles to cause consternation.
• It is probable that, if these early warnings had been headed, the Duveen cleaning could have been avoided.

Other controversies

• During a 1999 conference in the museum, a sandwich lunch was served in the Duveen Gallery, and the delegates were encouraged to touch the ancient sculptures.
• Many among those present found the gesture so inconsiderate that they walked out of the gallery.
• A controversy of a different kind concerns contested objects in the Museum’s collection that are the object of repatriation requests.

The Museum’s current troubles

• About half of the Museum’s 8 million items are uncatalogued and this lack of an inventory has certainly facilitated the thefts.
• The fact that it took so long to discover the thefts also raises the question of what else might have gone missing without a trace.
• Yet one can’t help but wonder: Do the Museum’s current woes have other museum directors fretting with anxiety?
• What if some of the identified stolen items are contested items that have been the object of restitution requests?

Crisis as an opportunity

• Every crisis is an opportunity, and here too there is an opportunity.
• After the resignation of the director Hartwig Fischer, an interim director, Sir Mark Jones, has been appointed.