Sir Keir Starmer will meet Donald Trump at his Scottish golf course to discuss how to end starvation of kids in Gaza
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SIR Keir Starmer will meet Donald Trump at his Scottish golf course tomorrow — to discuss how to end the starvation of kids in Gaza.
The US President teed off his five-day visit with a round at his Turnberry resort, accompanied by a massive security team.
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Trump teeing off his five-day visit with a round at his Turnberry resort
Credit: Reuters
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Sir Keir Starmer will meet the US President at his Scottish golf course
Credit: EPA
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They will discuss how to end the starvation of kids in Gaza
Credit: Getty
The PM will fly up to see him tomorrow to hold wide-ranging talks — and could raise calls to recognise an independent Palestinian state.
The pair will discuss the suffering of people in Gaza and how to get aid and food trucks back into the region.
Sir Keir will also press Mr Trump on what can be done to restart Israel-Hamas ceasefire talks after their collapse late last week.
The US and Israel withdrew their negotiating teams, with Trump claiming Hamas 'didn't really want to make a deal'.
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Sir Keir is under massive pressure from Labour MPs to follow France and immediately recognise Palestine as a state.
But the PM has rejected the move and insisted it can only be done with allies as part of a concrete peace process.
A No10 source said: 'Sir Keir and the President will cover a wide range of topics in Scotland, building on strong links between our nations.
'From putting more money in working people's pockets through the UK-US trade deal, to discussing steps to end the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, everything this government does is delivering security for the British people.'
Britain is drawing up plans to airdrop aid into Gaza as the famine there worsens.
Confirming the plan, the PM tweeted yesterday: 'Israel must allow aid in over land to end starvation in Gaza. The situation is desperate.
First look at Donald Trump's armoured motorcade 'the Beast' as President whisked off to Turnberry
'We are working with Jordan to get aid in. And we are accelerating efforts to evacuate children who need critical medical assistance to the UK for treatment.'
Yesterday, the PM spoke with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz to discuss plans for a new peace process.
After touching down on Friday, Mr Trump warned that mass immigration was 'killing Europe'.
He added: 'You've got to stop this horrible invasion.'
Some 5,000 cops from across the UK have been drafted in to watch over the course, beach and perimeter of Turnberry.
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Trump, pictured hitting a golf shot, warned mass immigration was 'killing Europe'
Credit: AP
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Mr Trump's armoured presidential car, The Beast
Credit: Getty
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Trump was accompanied by a massive security team
Credit: EPA
Police boats are patrolling the sea while officers on quad bikes keep an eye on the beach.
And specialist firearms officers with high-powered sniper rifles look down on the course from a scaffold platform and the hotel roof.
Mr Trump's armoured presidential car, The Beast, yesterday left the hotel at around 9.45am.
He was then escorted around the course in his golf buggy by 24 others filled with staff and Secret Service agents.
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Economist
9 minutes ago
- Economist
The long-term effects of hunger in Gaza
FOR two weeks, the world has claimed it is working to end the widespread hunger in Gaza. The UN is pleading with Israel to allow more lorries of aid into the territory. Arab and Western states are airdropping food. On August 5th Donald Trump said America would take a larger role in distributing aid, though he was vague about the details. 'I know Israel is going to help us with that in terms of distribution, and also money,' he said. Yet on the ground, Gazans say little has changed. There is not enough food entering Gaza, nor is there law and order to allow its distribution. Airdrops are hard to reach. Convoys are looted soon after they cross the border. Finding food often requires making a risky trip to an aid centre, where hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in recent months, or paying exorbitant sums on the black market. This is a calamity in its own right, one that will have long-term consequences for many Gazans, particularly children. But it is also a glimpse of Gaza's future. Even after the war ends, it will remain at the mercy of others for years to come. Wedged between Israel and Egypt, the tiny territory was never self-sufficient. Its neighbours imposed an embargo after Hamas, a militant group, took power in 2007. The economy withered. Half of the workforce in the strip was unemployed and more than 60% of the population relied on some form of foreign aid to survive. The UN doled out cash assistance, ran a network of clinics that offered 3.5m consultations a year and operated schools that educated some 300,000 children. Still, Gaza could meet at least some basic needs by itself. Two-fifths of its territory was farmland that supplied enough dairy, poultry, eggs and fruits and vegetables to meet most local demand. Small factories produced everything from packaged food to furniture. The Hamas-run government was inept, but it provided law and order. After nearly two years of war, almost none of that remains. The UN's World Food Programme (WFP) says that Gaza's 2m people need 62,000 tonnes of food a month. That is a bare-bones calculation: it would provide enough staple foods but no meat, fruits and vegetables or other perishables. By its own tally, Israel has allowed far less in. It imposed a total siege on the territory from March 2nd until May 19th, with no food permitted to enter. Then Israel allowed the UN to resume limited aid deliveries to northern Gaza. It also helped establish the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a shadowy outfit that distributes food at four points in southern and central Gaza. In more than two months of operation, it has handed out less than 0.7 meals per Gazan per day—and that assumes each box of aid, stocked with a hotch-potch of dried and canned goods, really provides as many meals as the GHF claims it does. All told, Israel permitted 98,674 tonnes of food aid to cross the border in the five months through July, an average of 19,734 tonnes a month—just 32% of what the WFP says is necessary. Although the volume of aid has increased in recent days, it is still insufficient. 'We're trying to get 80 to 100 trucks in, every single day,' says Valerie Guarnieri of the WFP. 'It's not a high bar, but a realistic bar of what we can achieve.' On August 4th, though, Israel allowed only 41 of the agency's lorries to enter a staging area on the Gaza border, and it let drivers collect just 29 of them. Getting into Gaza is only the first challenge. Distribution is a nightmare. Since May 19th the UN has collected 2,604 lorryloads of aid from Gaza's borders. Just 300 reached their intended destination. The rest were intercepted en route, either by desperate civilians or by armed men. Aid workers are nonchalant about civilians raiding aid lorries, which they euphemistically call 'self-distribution': they reckon the food still reaches people who need it. 'There's a real crescendo of desperation,' says Ms Guarnieri. 'People have no confidence food is going to come the next day.' But the roaring black market suggests that much of it is stolen. Gaza's chamber of commerce publishes a regular survey of food prices (see chart). A 25kg sack of flour, which cost 35 shekels ($10) before the war, went for 625 shekels on August 5th. A kilo of tomatoes fetched 100 shekels, 50 times its pre-war value. Such prices are far beyond the reach of most Gazans. Those with a bit of money often haggle for tiny quantities: a shopper might bring home a single potato for his family, for example. Israel's ostensible goal in throttling the supply of aid was to prevent Hamas from pilfering any of it. Earlier this month the group released a propaganda video of Evyatar David, an Israeli hostage still held in Gaza. He was emaciated, and spent much of the video recounting how little he had to eat: a few lentils or beans one day, nothing the next. At one point a militant handed Mr David a can of beans from behind the camera. Many viewers noted that the captor's hand looked rather chubby. As much of Gaza starves, Hamas, it seems, is still managing to feed its fighters. The consequences of Israel's policy instead fall hardest on children—sometimes even before birth. 'One in three pregnancies are now high-risk. One in five babies that we've seen are born premature or underweight,' says Leila Baker of the UN's family-planning agency. Compare that with before the war, when 8% of Gazan babies were born underweight (at less than 2.5kg). There were 222 stillbirths between January and June, a ten-fold increase from levels seen before the war. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a UN-backed outfit that tracks hunger, said last month that 20,000 children were hospitalised for acute malnutrition between April and mid-July. Even before they reach that point, their immune systems crumble. Moderately malnourished children catch infections far more easily than well-fed ones, and become more seriously ill when they do, rapidly losing body weight. The body takes a 'big hit' when food intake falls to just 70-80% of normal, says Marko Kerac, a paediatrician at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who has treated children in famine-stricken places. Most children in Gaza are eating a lot less than that. In July the World Health Organisation reported an outbreak of Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare autoimmune disease that may have links to hunger. Gaza's health ministry says cases are multiplying, including among children. Give us our daily bread Nor is calorie intake the only concern. Although flour and salt in Gaza are fortified with some vitamins and minerals, such as iodine, they are consumed in limited amounts—especially now, since many bakeries have been closed for months, owing to a lack of flour and fuel. In February, during the ceasefire, Israel allowed 15,000 tonnes of fruits and vegetables and 11,000 tonnes of meat and fish into Gaza. Since March it has allowed just 136 tonnes of meat. All of this means there is widespread deficiency of essential nutrients that help children's brains develop. Every child in Gaza, in other words, will remain at lifelong risk of poor health because of today's malnutrition. There is consistent evidence for this from studies of populations that have lived through famine: during the second world war, the 1960s famine in China and, more recently, places like Ethiopia. Children who have suffered acute malnourishment have higher rates of heart disease, diabetes and other chronic diseases as adults. They are also at risk of worse cognitive development. A flood of aid cannot undo the damage, but it can prevent it from getting worse. It will have to be sustained. The devastation wrought by Israel's war has left Gazans with no alternative but to rely on aid. In February the UN estimated that the war had caused $30bn in physical damage and $19bn in economic disruption, including lost labour, forgone income and increased costs. Reconstruction would require $53bn. At this point, that is little more than a guess. The real cost is impossible to calculate. But it will be enormous. The first task will be simply clearing the rubble. A UN assessment in April, based on satellite imagery, estimated that there were 53m tonnes of rubble strewn across Gaza—30 times as much debris as was removed from Manhattan after the September 11th attacks. Clearing it could be the work of decades. The seven-week war between Israel and Hamas in 2014, the longest and deadliest before the current one, produced 2.5m tonnes of debris. It took two years to remove. Rebuilding a productive economy will be no less difficult. Take agriculture. The UN's agriculture agency says that 80% of Gaza's farmland and 84% of its greenhouses have been damaged in the war. Livestock have been all but wiped out. A satellite assessment last summer found that 68% of Gaza's roads had been damaged (that figure is no doubt higher today). The two main north-south roads—one along the coast, the other farther inland—are both impassable in places. Even if farmers can start planting crops for small harvests after the war, it will be hard to bring their produce to market. The picture is equally bleak in other sectors: schools, hospitals and factories have all been largely reduced to rubble. The Geneva Conventions are clear that civilians have the right to flee a war zone. Exercising that right in Gaza is fraught: Palestinians have a well-grounded fear that Israel will never allow them to return. Powerful members of Binyamin Netanyahu's government do not hide their desire to ethnically cleanse the territory and rebuild the Jewish settlements dismantled in 2005. Still, the dire conditions have led some people to think the unthinkable: a survey conducted in May by a leading Palestinian pollster found that 43% of Gazans are willing to emigrate at the end of the war. Mr Netanyahu may not follow through on his talk of reoccupying Gaza, which he hinted at in media leaks earlier this month. His far-right allies may not fulfil their dream of rebuilding the Jewish settlements dismantled in 2005. In a sense, though, the ideologues in his cabinet have already achieved their goal. Israel's conduct of the war has left Gazans with a grim choice: leave the territory, or remain in a place rendered all but uninhabitable. ■
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John Hipkin obituary
My father, John Hipkin, who has died aged 90, was a teacher, councillor and former mayor of Cambridge. He brought intelligence, compassion and moral clarity to his four decades serving in local government, first as a Labour county councillor for Romsey ward in 1977; later, as a founding member of the SDP, he became a Lib Dem city councillor for Castle ward in 1992. He then served as an independent until his retirement from local politics in 2021. He was chair of the planning committee for a period and was mayor in 2005-06. Choosing 'peace' as the focus of his year, he was touched to be invited to the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan to mark the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombings of those cities. John was also a co-founder of the Western Buddhist Order in 1967, and a founder, in 1960, and director for the Advisory Centre for Education, a service that gives advice to parents, carers, governors, local authorities and others on education law. He also did research at King's College Cambridge for the Public Schools Commission (1965-68), looking at the possibilities of integrating public schools into the maintained system of education. Born in Derby, John experienced adversity in his early life. His mother, Bunty (Elsie) Holloway, was forced to place John into the care of Dr Barnardo's when he was five; his two younger siblings, Anthony and Naomi, were adopted separately. His father, Jack Hipkin, a mounted police officer, was married, and during the second world war the relationship ended. After being placed with foster carers, education offered John a way forward. He passed the 11-plus, attended two grammar schools, first in Diss, Norfolk, and then in Surbiton, near Kingston upon Thames. He went to the London School of Economics, graduating with a first-class degree in history and economics. John became an English teacher and was determined to give back to the system that changed the direction of his life. In his first post at Senacre school in Maidstone, Kent, he developed his own English curriculum and wrote and produced a play, The Massacre of Peterloo (1968), which enlisted everyone in a collaborative production, with each student committed to a role. He later became head of English at Meridian school in Royston, Hertfordshire, and retired in 1995. He was reunited with his mother and his sister, who had changed her name from Naomi to Margaret, and his brother, Anthony, who died in 2014. Bunty had three other children, Hugh, David and Pamela. Rediscovering his siblings and their families was a healing experience. He is survived by his second wife, Marie-Louise (nee Holland), whom he married in 2004, and by his children Charlotte, Thomas, Joseph, Daniel and David, from his first marriage, to Bronwyn Dewey, which ended in divorce; me, from his relationship with Sylvie Chastagnol; and Imogen, from his marriage to Marie-Louise.
Reuters
9 minutes ago
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Exclusive: Lula plans new 'national sovereignty' policy for strategic minerals
BRASILIA, Aug 6 (Reuters) - Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva told Reuters on Wednesday of his plans for a new national policy treating strategic minerals as a matter of "national sovereignty" in order to avoid exporting minerals without adding value locally. "We won't allow what happened in the last century to happen again, where Brazil exports raw minerals and then buys products with very high added value," the president, known as Lula, said in the interview. "We want to add value in Brazil." Lula's comments came as a new 50% tariff hit U.S. imports from Brazil amid a political spat between the two countries linked to an investigation against the South American country's former president, Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro, under house arrest since late Monday, is standing trial on charges of plotting a coup to overturn his 2022 electoral defeat. Bolsonaro has denied wrongdoing. U.S. President Donald Trump, seen as a Bolsonaro ally, has decried what he calls persecution of Brazil's former leader. Trump has long sought to secure U.S. supplies of critical minerals, complaining of China's near-total control of the industry and striking deals with Ukraine to secure critical minerals in exchange for defense help. Currently, Brazil lacks a complete mapping of its mineral wealth, Lula said, adding that his government would start this process by setting up the national council on mineral materials and standards. The council will safeguard Brazil's control of its mineral wealth, allowing the country to become a global leader in the energy transition, Lula said, adding that businesses will not face difficulties following the council's creation. "Few countries in the world have the opportunity that Brazil has in this area," Lula said.
