More than 100 aid organisations have signed a statement warning that “mass starvation” is spreading across Gaza. Agencies, including Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children and Oxfam, said aid workers and ordinary Palestinians alike were “wasting away”. The UN said yesterday that Israeli forces had killed more than 1,000 Palestinians trying to get food aid in the past two months. Protesters have gathered in Kyiv after the Ukrainian government passed a controversial bill to remove the independence of the national anti-corruption bureau, making it easier for the government to control which cases it pursues. Volodymyr Zelensky has defended the decision, while critics say it could derail the country’s bid to join the EU. Ozzy Osbourne has died aged 76, less than three weeks after his band’s farewell show. “He was a dear friend and huge trailblazer who secured his place in the pantheon of rock gods,” said Elton John in a tribute to the Black Sabbath singer who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2019. “A true legend.”

Hollowing out the hospitality sector is crazy

Last October, Rachel Reeves announced a rise in employers’ National Insurance, says Libby Purves in The Times, creating a “tsumani of lost opportunities”. The “pig-headed” policy, bunglingly aimed at protecting individual pay packets, brought on the fastest contraction in job vacancies in recent history, many of which are, “or were”, in the retail and hospitality sectors. HMRC figures confirm it, but so too do the boarded-up shops, the closed-down cafés, and the increasingly dehumanised fast-food outlets packed with touchscreen ordering points. What’s most ludicrous about all this, is that those are the exact jobs that teach young folk the dignity of work.

Helping customers in a shop, tending a bar, waiting tables and sweating in a kitchen are the “bread-and-butter” jobs that nearly everyone does at some point in their lives. They’re real, visible and often cheerful jobs. They’re full of human contact and dependent on timekeeping, system and careful honesty. They are handy for first-time job seekers who may need to be taught by a decent supervisor to “get their head of out of their phone” and pay attention to a customer. But they’re also obvious routes out of the “stultifying idleness” of minor disability or depression, and they offer normality and sociability, including to care leavers and ex-offenders. Ask any now-prosperous adult about their early life, and you’ll find their fondest, funniest, and “occasionally bracingly resentful” memories are about working behind a bar or walking a shop floor with pretend confidence. Future bosses get to see how training and hierarchy work, and “social corners are knocked off”. Advances in tech might create some “newish” jobs, but it is hugely valuable, at any stage of life, to learn how to say “Can I help you?” to a stranger “and mean it”.