Angus Colwell

Mark Sedwill is a serious man. He has a master’s in economics from Oxford. He worked in Cairo, Nicosia, Baghdad and Islamabad over several decades as a diplomat. He was a UN weapons inspector, Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Afghanistan and served as the Nato senior civilian representative there. He became cabinet secretary in 2018 after the death of Jeremy Heywood, and left just two years later after the first wave of Covid. Throughout the document, thoughtless language produces thoughtless thinking A shame then, considering his pedigree, that he has entered the world of corpspeak and insubstantial guff.

One of the world’s most powerful men was trapped in a central London basement this morning. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, had come down to the lower ground floor of Chatham House to talk to the former chief mandarin of the Foreign Office about artificial intelligence. He had precisely 40 minutes, our host said, because he needed to catch a plane to Davos. ‘Thank you for choosing Chatham House for your London destination’, Nadella was told, in the same way that passengers are thanked for ‘choosing’ Ryanair to Dublin. Chatham House was the perfect stage: if you want somewhere to talk about the impact of things, how to harness things, and how to discover the potential of things, you come here. This is lanyard Valhalla.

The US and the UK have launched airstrikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen whose continued attacks are disrupting trade in the Red Sea. Rishi Sunak convened his cabinet on Thursday night to discuss what action would be taken. Strikes were reported in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, and the Houthi stronghold port of Hudaydah. Downing Street said that the strikes were carried out by the Royal Air Force on military facilities. The UK’s National Security Council met on Thursday, and an emergency meeting of Cobra was convened. The Leader of the Opposition and the Speaker of the House of Commons were briefed. It’s understood that Sunak will not recall parliament on Friday to discuss the intervention.

Britain and the US are getting ever more drawn in to the conflict in the Red Sea, as Iran-backed Houthis fire missiles at commercial ships. The USS Carney has downed 14 attack drones launched from Houthi-controlled territory and the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Diamond is also there shooting down missiles.  The Houthis are firing from Yemen, and the Iranian regime is reportedly sending them real-time intelligence and weaponry. The Houthis claim that they are only targeting ships headed to Israel, but evidence suggests otherwise. On Saturday a ship travelling from Saudi Arabia to India was struck. Christmas Eve was one of the busiest days yet: US Central Command said that it had ‘shot down four unmanned aerial drones originating from Houthi-controlled areas in Yemen’.

Welcome to our language: ‘rizz’. Here’s the OED definition: colloquial noun, ‘defined as ‘style, charm or attractiveness; the ability to attract a romantic or sexual partner’. It was announced on Monday as the Dictionary’s word of the year, and it’s here to stay sadly, because that’s how language works. That’s why we don’t speak like George Eliot characters. Rizz became popular the way all words do nowadays: they start somewhere opaque online, then filter effortlessly into real life. As a 23-year-old, I hear it semi-frequently, although I kind of wish I didn’t. What does it mean for a word to go ‘viral’? It means that everyone starts using them, and then we get a stale monoculture. These words, by definition, become clichés immediately.

This morning, OpenAI – the firm behind ChatGPT – rehired its chief executive, Sam Altman, after it fired him on Friday. Altman is the most prominent ambassador for the world of artificial intelligence, and was set to join Microsoft after leaving the company. After his sacking, more than 95 per cent of OpenAI’s employees demanded that the board leave and reinstate him. Many staff were threatening to quit the lab, and Microsoft had agreed to match their pay. Today, OpenAI caved and welcomed him back. What’s going on here? Did a firm that was set up to make AI ‘for the benefit of humanity’, whose whole idea was to not be dictated by the whims of the market, forget itself? I spoke to Gary Marcus, whose Substack is one of the most interesting around.

The Metropolitan Police today staged their largest-ever operation with two marches – the pro-Palestinian march and a smaller counter-protest – taking place in London. The latter, centred on Westminster, provided most of the arrests. The main route of the pro-Palestine march (which started in Park Lane and was moving towards the US Embassy in Vauxhall) passed more peacefully with fewer scuffles. The demonstration drew perhaps 300,000 (although Jeremy Corbyn claimed a million) and the main arrests seem to be those who decided to sit down at Waterloo station and not move when asked. No one person on the march can hope to give an account on the whole thing. But I can say what I observed and summarise some of the various reports.

At least Kamala Harris managed to avoid the dreaded phrase that we should ‘harness AI’s ‘potential’. But that was just about the only blessing in the Vice President’s impressively rubbish speech yesterday at the US embassy in London. Artificial intelligence, it is generally agreed, is the most important issue facing humanity, yet all we had was 14 minutes of waffle from the Veep. Still, it was nice of her to turn up. Joe Biden has put Harris in charge of artificial intelligence. You can read that one of two ways: either Biden thinks that Kamala Harris is perfectly suited to grappling with the gravest existential threat, or that he thinks this AI malarkey is all a bit airy, so that looks like a good one for giving Kamala something to do.

Who is responsible for the bombing of a hospital in Gaza? This evening as many as 500 people are thought to have been killed in one terrible act in a medical building in Gaza. Thousands of civilians were reportedly sheltering there, after fleeing their homes following an Israeli order to evacuate the northern part of the Gaza strip. Israel were quick to deny having a role in the attack, blaming Palestinian militants – and a misfired Palestinian rocket barrage – for the disaster. It follows an incident earlier on Tuesday, when – according to the UN – a school in central Gaza where 4,000 people were sheltering was hit, killing at least six people.

Just a week ago, Benjamin Netanyahu was urging Israelis to take a break. He said citizens should ‘go for a walk in our beautiful country’ during the Sukkot holiday. He posed for photographs with his wife Sara in the Golan Heights, the two of them smiling as the sun set. Tonight, he prepared citizens for an immense retaliation campaign against Israel’s foes. He said that the air strikes seen so far against Gaza are ‘just the beginning’, and that ‘what we will do to our enemies in the next few days will echo for generations.’ Earlier today, his defence minister ordered a ‘complete siege’ of the Gaza strip, cutting two million people off from the supply of electricity, food, water and fuel.