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Lawrence Murray Dixon – the man who made the Magic City

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The Lawrence Murray Dixon-designed Grossinger Beach Hotel (today the SLS South Beach hotel) opened in 1939

The cocktail bar of The Raleigh used to look a little louche. And not in a hip way. A decade ago it could have been the lounge of a seaside B&B or a small yacht club in a small coastal town. But somehow, surprisingly, it always seemed to remain one of Miami’s places to be. 

Very little was visible of the bar’s original and glamorous art deco incarnation, in which there had been extravagant murals of some Hollywood-imagined renaissance forest feast. The mirrors behind the bar had gone; the bar itself had been replaced, along with the built-in banquette. But just at the entrance to this intimate room, one thing had survived intact – and oddly, it’s the thing I remember most vividly: set into the terrazzo floor was an image of a cocktail glass with bubbles fizzing into the now slightly stale air. It was a little reminder of a kind of kitsch glamour that made Miami Beach the coolest destination in the US, a cool that seems to linger, set not only by its icy cocktails but by its architecture. 

The Lawrence Murray Dixon-designed Grossinger Beach Hotel (today the SLS South Beach hotel) opened in 1939
The Lawrence Murray Dixon-designed Grossinger Beach Hotel (today the SLS South Beach hotel) opened in 1939 © Moser & Son. Image courtesy of The Bass, Miami Beach, Florida
The Raleigh’s famed pool, built in the 1940s and designed by  Dixon
The Raleigh’s famed pool, built in the 1940s and designed by Dixon © The Boundary
The neon “R” on the roof of the Raleigh, which is now being extensively renovated to restore it to its 1940s glory
The neon “R” on the roof of the Raleigh, which is now being extensively renovated to restore it to its 1940s glory © The Boundary

Built in the 1940s, The Raleigh was designed by Lawrence Murray Dixon, one of the most prolific and inventive architects of the era and, arguably, the architect who did more than any other designer to make Miami Beach the instantly recognisable art deco cityscape so familiar to us today. The hotel has languished since it was damaged by Hurricane Irma, which came out of the Caribbean in 2017 and smashed into Florida in what became known as “Irmageddon”. Over the past few decades, The Raleigh washed through developers’ hands like seawater, having been bought by boutique-hotel pioneer André Balazs in 2002 (for $25.5mn) and again in 2014 by Tommy Hilfiger (who had plans to turn it into a membership-based hotel) for $56.6mn. Now it – along with two other adjacent hotels, also designed by Dixon – is finally being extensively and expensively reconstructed into something resembling the original deco finery. They will also be supplemented (if that’s the right word) with a huge condo tower designed by architect Peter Marino to create a new architectural ensemble at the heart of the Beach. 

It’s a good moment, then, to reconsider Miami’s incredible architectural legacy. At the beginning of the 20th century it was Nowheresville. By the 1920s it had grown into a small city of Mediterranean revival mansions and upmarket holiday homes. When developers arrived with bigger ideas in the 1930s to make it into an affordable but elegant destination for East Coasters escaping harsh winters, they realised they needed to make it look like a city rather than a suburb. And that’s when two architects in particular, Henry Hohauser and Lawrence Murray Dixon, came down from New York to inject some of that city’s grandeur, swagger and modernity into Miami’s sleepy, palm-lined plan.

Hohauser (1895-1963), who built a series of superb hotels and apartment houses, was a transplanted New Yorker. The younger Dixon (1901-1949) had gone north from Florida to work with architects Schultze & Weaver (architects of the Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel and New York’s towering Waldorf Astoria and the Pierre), picking up the scenography of the city, the newly emerging skyscraper aesthetic, the stepped crowns and parapets, the setbacks and masts, the neons and the rich deco decorations. He was coming home to Florida, determined to make an impression. 

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Dixon’s The Senator hotel was built in 1939 and demolished in 1988
Dixon’s The Senator hotel was built in 1939 and demolished in 1988 © Steven Brooke
A 1939 apartment block by Dixon at 1525 Meridian Avenue, Miami Beach
A 1939 apartment block by Dixon at 1525 Meridian Avenue, Miami Beach © Steven Brooke

At first, when Dixon returned from Manhattan in 1929, leaving the city in the throes of the Wall Street crash, he was designing modest neo-Mediterranean homes in the Hollywood style. But Miami needed its own image, and it needed to make itself look successful and desirable in double-quick time. Its developers and its architects, with Dixon at the forefront, settled on art deco to do the job: the blocky, cheery, moderne style then so fashionable, an architecture designed to be seen from automobiles and streamlined so it looked like it was going places. For a decade from the mid-1930s, Dixon designed a succession of inventive, distinctive and sleek buildings, which brought a taste of Manhattan to Miami. He also brought with him Manhattan’s totem, the stepped, set-back form of the skyscraper. 

It was a curious transplant. The skyscraper was a product of the land values in the constricted centres of Chicago and NYC; Miami had no real shortage of land, so the skyscraper forms here were really for show – theatrical representations of an emerging, modern metropolis. The Grossinger Beach Hotel (1939), for instance, was piled into a skyscraper form with an offset stack of towers to give a little extra height, while the Tiffany Hotel attenuated its curved corner with a tall neon sign. These crowns and masts were more signposts – efforts to make the buildings stand out against the skyline and give them a recognisable profile on postcards and matchbooks. The Atlantis, demolished in 1973, was also stacked into a mini-Manhattan tower. 


Those semi-skyscrapers were complemented by dozens more low-rise buildings, the sort of small hotels, apartment houses and stores that constituted the fabric of Miami’s emerging streetscape. That those streets today look so coherent and survived so well is one of the wonders of South Beach. Allan Shulman, an architect and professor at the University of Miami School of Architecture, explains the moment. “These architects, particularly Dixon and Hohauser, were moving towards a collective position,” he says. “This was a still-peripheral American city, and they were not so much trying to express their personal styles but developing something together, with the other architects.”

The McAlpin Hotel on Ocean Drive, Miami Beach, designed by   Dixon in 1940
The McAlpin Hotel on Ocean Drive, Miami Beach, designed by Dixon in 1940 © Steven Brooke

It’s an unusual proposition that these competitive commercial architects conceived South Beach as a collective project. The interesting thing is that Dixon – who remains a figure unilluminated by history – was a rather conservative designer. You only need to look at the house he designed for himself on Fairgreen Drive, an extremely modest little Mediterranean revival home with a kind of Regency porch, its interior filled with Biedermeier-type furniture, remarkably understated for the architect who was at that moment defining the deco dazzle of the Beach. “He was also the first to reintroduce that more conservative Georgian style during the war,” Shulman tells me. “A change to match the different times.” The Betsy Ross Hotel (now The Betsy), with its southern-style porch, exemplifies the shift. Dixon was a magpie, happy to switch styles and flit between designs, taking what he needed from wherever he needed it. 

In 2019, real estate developer Michael Shvo bought The Raleigh and its neighbouring hotels in a joint venture for $103mn. “There are two types of architects,” Shvo tells me over Zoom from his yacht moored on a dazzling Greek island. “There are architects who build the same work wherever it is, and there are architects who build what is appropriate to the place they are designing for.” He points to Dixon’s designs for the hotel’s extraordinary pool. “I think Life magazine called it the most beautiful pool in America. Its shape was inspired by Walter Raleigh’s coat of arms. It’s so random, but it’s also become a symbol of Miami Beach.”

920 Euclid Avenue, designed by Dixon and completed in 1935
920 Euclid Avenue, designed by Dixon and completed in 1935 © Steven Brooke

Dixon clearly fancied a bit of medieval or renaissance. There were pictures of Raleigh in the hotel and there were those curious wooded murals in the cocktail bar. Shulman says: “Dixon had a softer approach to modernism, blending it with more traditional influences.” But he could also handle just about every manifestation of modernism itself, from the avant-garde European to the curves of expressionism. Take the 1937 Seymour Building, with its gorgeous, curved glass storefront – it could easily be the lower floors of something designed by German modernist Erich Mendelsohn. In fact, The Raleigh itself, with its curved corner and asymmetrical massing, could be a Mendelsohn. Certainly, Dixon would have been aware of his work, perhaps particularly his British period in which he co-designed the 1935 De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea (you will not often find South Beach and Bexhill in the same sentence). You can see the influence in The Raleigh’s lovely pool pavilion, currently being restored, with its squat round tower and nautical decks. 

In his run of late-1930s buildings like the Forde Ocean, the Flamingo and the Fairview Apartments, Dixon experimented with a kind of continental modernism: sleek and chic, very different from the pistachio and strawberry ice-cream kitsch of most of Miami Beach. The Caribbean apartments, for instance, could almost be in Hove or Hastings.

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But mostly Dixon did deco. He gave the clients what they wanted, the tourists what they expected and Miami what it needed. Those small hotels and apartment buildings (such as the McAlpin and South Seas Hotels and 1525 Meridian Avenue) are symmetrical, friendly and sherbet-coloured. And a big part of his success was cost. Deco was cheap, easy to build (shoddy workmanship could be covered by a layer of plaster slathered on like ice-cream). Builders could knock it out and deco became ubiquitous. They stripped the expensive ornaments from the Paris and New York versions but they adopted the stepped profiles and setbacks – those little tricks stolen from the skyscrapers also worked for creating terraces and balconies (better than they did 40 storeys up in New York, where the wind would strip your stubble off). 

The names themselves – the Fairmont, the South Seas and the Beach Plaza, the Tides and the Senator – strain to evoke exactly the right mix of exoticism and familiarity, classiness and brassiness. Each was topped by neon, contributing to a new kind of architecture – what the German expressionists called Lichtarchitektur or light architecture – in which neon created new combinations of form so that, after dusk, the architecture could become something else. The Raleigh’s big slender letter “R” was a perfect example, its cool glow accentuating its height. 

Miami Beach apartment blocks by Dixon at 1050 Michigan Avenue
Miami Beach apartment blocks by Dixon at 1050 Michigan Avenue © Steven Brooke
The Tides hotel, 1936, on Ocean Drive
The Tides hotel, 1936, on Ocean Drive © Samuel H Gottscho. Image courtesy of The Bass, Miami Beach, Florida

A huge restoration project is now being initiated by Shvo. “It was important to get all three of these hotels together,” he says of the development, “because they form a kind of masterplan – the best of Dixon’s work. But the buildings had a lot of changes made to them. Years of additions. We obsessed for three years about how to restore The Raleigh with all its details. We used diagnostics to find which surfaces out of all the layers were the originals and peeled them back like an onion. The buildings were often put up cheap and quick, so we’ve replaced them using the same materials but better quality.” The restoration and rebuilding is being overseen by the knowledgeable, flexible and biker-leather-clad Peter Marino, an architect who has become one of the favourites of the super-rich and the art elite. “It is a great challenge to reimagine Murray Dixon’s masterpiece,” he says of his involvement. “Our goal was to reinvigorate the jewel from 1940, with a fresh perspective that honours Miami Beach’s art deco style but also modernises the design for today’s world.”

A couple of years after he completed The Raleigh, Dixon signed up, becoming a major in the Corps of Engineers where he switched his talents to designing a more functional architecture for the military. By the time he returned after the war, styles had shifted again. Others designed the big blockbusters, The Delano, The Fontainebleau and The Eden Roc, in a more midcentury manner. Dixon died at the surprisingly young age of 48. His career coincided perfectly with the rise and perfection of Miami style. The Raleigh, though, encapsulates his enduring legacy. It’s true that it had a stint as a kosher hotel, where its ballroom was adapted as a synagogue. It’s true that the richness of its details was slowly stripped away by time and obscured by the accretions of the years. But it somehow always managed to be an epicentre of cool, the place to be – until, that is, it met Irma. Now it’s coming back, the centrepiece of a perfect ensemble of Lawrence Murray Dixon, and a great testament and monument to Miami’s most influential designer. 

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executive getaways that fight stress with science

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Mark Rivers, CEO of Canyon Ranch, says his programme is not just a quick fix, but equips people for a more balanced lifestyle in the long term: ‘We take a lot of pride in giving people a road map’

At a luxury spa facility in Tucson, Arizona, a select group of participants undergo a suite of diagnostic tests, from sleep screening and glucose monitoring to full musculoskeletal assessments and ultrasounds.

It hardly sounds relaxing. But the four-day “retreat” organised by US wellness company Canyon Ranch is one of a growing number of executive getaways looking to bring a scientific edge to their efforts to de-stress.

Its “Longevity8 programme”, which costs $20,000, will offer access to physicians, dietitians and performance scientists, who will provide participants with more than 200 “biomarkers” to build a snapshot of their health.

Mark Rivers, a 59-year-old Texan who joined Canyon Ranch as chief executive last year after a career of high-stress jobs in hospitality and real estate development, recently attended the trial event before the programme officially launches this month. He left knowing his sleep was out of whack, his hydration poor and that more hobbies would help him “find balance and emotional clarity”.

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“Like many people, I’ve been guilty of seeking a fast fix; drop a quick eight pounds, get in shape for ski season, fast in the mornings, play this app to sleep better,” says Rivers. “Now I see I can be more intentional around my work-life balance, and I have some tools to help.”

In the UK, stress and other work-related mental health issues cost companies more than £57bn in lost productivity in 2023, according to the latest study by AXA.

Executive retreats have long tried to provide a tonic for senior business people who may be experiencing the effects of burnout and stress. What has changed is the ability of clinicians to pinpoint the repercussions of living in a high-stress environment.

Mark Rivers, CEO of Canyon Ranch, says his programme is not just a quick fix, but equips people for a more balanced lifestyle in the long term: ‘We take a lot of pride in giving people a road map’
Mark Rivers, CEO of Canyon Ranch, says his programme is not just a quick fix, but equips people for a more balanced lifestyle in the long term: ‘We take a lot of pride in giving people a road map’ © Cassidy Araiza/FT
Personal trainer Bailey Walts uses a machine which measure bone density and body fat as part of Longevity8
Personal trainer Bailey Walts uses a machine which measure bone density and body fat as part of Longevity8 © Cassidy Araiza/FT

Since 2021, biometric assessments have also formed a central part of “reset retreats” at the 11,000-acre Goodwood House estate in the West Sussex countryside. At the last three-day residential this year, participants were invited to use an app to create a baseline for their sleep quality, physical fitness, and stress recovery rates, among other key health indicators.

The detailed health audit amounted to “an annual MOT”, says Julie Stokes, a clinical psychologist and executive coach with UK-based Preston Associates, who helped design the retreat. Attendees also enjoyed “information-heavy” talks from experts on nutrition, work-life balance and other aspects of low-stress living, as well as more old-style pampering. When they returned home, they continued to use the app to monitor their vital statistics, giving Goodwood’s physicians an array of data for a follow-up consultation or visit.

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Stokes also offers the health monitoring services on a one-to-one basis for executives, and uses the app herself. She says it helped her realise the effects stress was having on her body. “Although I’ve got a bit of a pacy, zigzag brain, I don’t get many visible symptoms of stress. So it’s astonishing for me to actually see hard evidence in my heart rate variability.”

Such retreats leave attendees feeling more relaxed and also better equip them to spot stress triggers in the future, says Stokes.

Canyon Ranch applies the same logic, says Rivers: “We take a lot of pride in giving people a road map. ‘Try this, do this, focus on this.’”

Not all retreat providers are so fixed on science. The Craigberoch Business Decelerator, held on the remote Isle of Bute, off the west coast of Scotland, for example, is designed to counter tech-centred, “always on” work life. Attendees spend a week immersed in distinctively low-tech activities: journaling; beach combing; walks in the woods; songs around the campfire; even Scottish country dancing.

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“The idea was to remove myself from the hectic day-to-day of my usual work and just reflect a little on what’s possible and where my real passions lie,” says Nataliia Kushnir, a sales leader at Google who recently took the ferry to Bute for a reset.

Gib Bulloch, Craigneroch’s founder, explains the retreat’s format is rooted in empirical research around the physical and neurological benefits of close contact with nature.

He references a Stanford University study that revealed a 60 per cent increase in people’s creativity when walking outdoors. Another research paper shows that a regular “nature experience” of 20-30 minutes can reduce levels of salivary cortisol and alpha-amylase — two physiological biomarkers of stress — by more than 20 per cent.

“We don’t go in for heavy metrics,” says Bulloch. “But, anecdotally, we’ve had people look at their own health stats and see markers like their biological age reduce by 10 years over the course of a week.”

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However a retreat is structured, a key question is how long its benefits last. Like the post-holiday glow, they can be quick to fade.

Some retreat providers are trying to tackle this by offering tips to deal with stress in the longer term. Some go further, looking to use the change of scene to provoke attendees to more deeply question their work habits and perspectives.

Reboot, for example, run by a US-based coaching service that specialises in “radical self-inquiry”, offers multi-day boot camps targeted at helping senior executives.

A large part of the process centres on asking difficult questions about their inherited belief systems and the social expectations that drive their behaviour, says Reboot’s co-founder, Jerry Colonna, a former venture capitalist turned leadership coach.

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Nathan Barry, chief executive of Kit, an operating platform for the creative industry, credits one of Reboot’s two-day retreats in Colorado with helping him become “more deliberate” and confident as a leader.

Nataliia Kushnir, a sales leader at Google, says she took part in the Craigberoch Business Decelerator on the Isle of Bute ‘to remove myself from the hectic day-to-day of my usual work and just reflect a little on what’s possible’
Nataliia Kushnir, a sales leader at Google, says she took part in the Craigberoch Business Decelerator on the Isle of Bute ‘to remove myself from the hectic day-to-day of my usual work and just reflect a little on what’s possible’ © Handout
Participants in the Craigberoch Business Decelerator discover Bute. Attendees spend a week immersed in low-tech activities such as journaling and beach combing
Participants in the Craigberoch Business Decelerator discover Bute. Attendees spend a week immersed in low-tech activities such as journaling and beach combing © Handout

“It was less about understanding the tactics of how to lead or operate a business, and more about really seeing, ‘Oh, these are the deep underlying reasons of why I do the things the way I do,’” he says.

Ryan Renteria, an executive coach and author of the book Lead without Burnout, runs two-day mini-breaks for a group of CEOs recruited from a monthly peer group he co-ordinates.

Renteria’s excursions, set in bucolic locations such as the Napa Valley and Lake Tahoe, aim to strike a balance between pseudoscience and “going to a monastery and staring into space for 12 hours”.

Day one focuses mostly on “bucketing” stress factors and discussing how to resolve them, while day two prioritises “deep strategic thinking” about how to maximise business opportunities.

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“It’s not about going out in the middle of nowhere with someone who may or may not know what they’re doing,” he says, noting that “everyone present is going through similar things personally and professionally”.

Returning regularly to this sense of collective experience can help benefits last longer. Some participants find an occasional phone call or get-together with fellow attendees can refresh the insights gained from a retreat.

René Carayol, a British executive coach, recalls one “very powerful” example when guests were asked to consider how they might be remembered, by writing their own funeral eulogy and reading it out.

“People speak together regularly afterwards. They meet up. In some ways, this connection becomes even more important than the actual retreat,” he says.

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Back at Canyon Ranch, and inspired by his biomarkers, Rivers has plans to return to cycling and rowing, take up a racket sport, practise meditation, and perfect his breathing rituals before bed. To de-stress, it would seem, is a job in itself.

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The demolitions clearing Israel’s ‘first belt’ in Lebanon

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Lubnan Baalbak and his family outside the grand two-storey house on a clear evening

During a year of simmering conflict, Lubnan Baalbaki watched as his ancestral village came under repeated fire, caught up in the fighting between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hizbollah.

Baalbaki, the conductor of Lebanon’s philharmonic orchestra and the son of a prominent Lebanese artist, had hoped his family’s museum — a rare cultural centre in the rolling hills of southern Lebanon — would be spared. 

Lubnan Baalbak and his family outside the grand two-storey house on a clear evening
The Baalbaki family house in Odaisseh had become a cultural centre for the arts © Lubnan Baalbaki
Sketches of the house’s archways and facade
Lubnan Baalbaki’s father, Abdel-Hamid Baalbaki, designed the house himself in sketches © Lubnan Baalbaki

But last week, his hope was crushed by a video showing a controlled demolition by the Israeli military in Odaisseh.

Watching from the relative safety of Beirut, he saw the house that his father had painstakingly built over 25 years and where both his parents are buried had been reduced to rubble.

“It was devastating for all of us,” said Baalbaki, referring to the impact on his six siblings — among them his sister Soumaya, a singer, and his brother Oussama, a well-known artist. “I’m 43 years old, so I feel that I have lost 43 years of my life with this destruction.”

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Satellite imagery analysed by the Financial Times shows the building was destroyed by Israel between October 21 and 23. Video footage captured the buildings collapse amid a series of simultaneous explosions.

Odaisseh is one of at least 30 ancient towns and villages on the border that Israel has damaged since the start of October, many of them extensively, according to FT analysis of satellite imagery and video. At least 12 have had lines of buildings demolished in controlled detonations by the IDF.

The series of village demolitions suggests that Israel is clearing a roughly 3km strip along the two countries’ informal border — a belt of land that bears the hallmarks of a buffer zone.

Footage shared on social media over the past month reveals several controlled detonations — many involving multiple buildings — that have flattened swaths of residential neighbourhoods in one fell swoop.

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Moments captured on video include a series of structures being detonated in Aitaroun and the destruction of the mosque in the village of Yaroun.

While the border area is home to scattered villages with majority Christian, Sunni Muslim and Druze populations, those Israel has targeted have primarily been Shia Muslim — communities where Hizbollah exercises control and from which it draws support.

In Mhaibib, a collection of hilltop buildings was blasted away; in Dheyra, a remote detonation destroyed at least one of the town’s three mosques and multiple surrounding buildings. In Odaisseh, there were five simultaneous explosions, each with multiple clusters of blasts.

Israel’s defence minister Yoav Gallant told the FT that the 3km strip, what he called “the first belt”, was “progressing in terms of being cleaned of Hizbollah’s attack infrastructure”. He added that his troops’ ground offensive into Lebanon would continue “as long as it’s needed”.

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Earlier this year, the FT documented how Israeli air strikes had already rendered those areas largely uninhabitable.

But in September, Israel’s objectives shifted, as it ramped up its campaign to debilitate Hizbollah, killing the group’s senior leadership and launching thousands of air strikes across the country as well as a ground invasion in southern Lebanon. 

Israel now wants southern Lebanon to be free of Hizbollah, warning it would use force if necessary to uphold any ceasefire. The militant group began launching projectiles towards Israel “in solidarity” with Gaza the day after Hamas’s deadly assault last year on October 7, displacing 60,000 Israelis.

Over a year of near-daily barrages, Hizbollah rockets have destroyed homes and sparked fires that have spread across wide swaths of Israel’s northern regions.

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The destruction caused in Lebanon during October stretches right along the border.

More than 12 per cent of buildings on the Lebanese side have been damaged or destroyed in the past four weeks, according to FT analysis of satellite images and radar data provided by Corey Scher, a researcher at CUNY graduate centre, and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University.

Southern villages have been on the frontline throughout the past year of cross-border fire between Israel and Hizbollah. This intensified after October 1 this year, when invading Israeli troops began ground operations.

Israel’s military did not respond to a request for comment, but says it only targets Hizbollah militants and infrastructure, accusing the group of embedding itself in civilian areas.

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One Israeli military official on the northern front told the FT that its recent operations in “the first line of Shia villages across the border [were] against very highly selected assets of Hizbollah”.

The official said Israel had the “very clear objective” of targeting elite Hizbollah forces to remove “the threat of any ground attack” in the future.

The group’s military infrastructure, the official added, was mostly within civilian populations in villages, both above and below ground, including what the IDF says are tunnel networks. “In that essence, we are dealing with what we call a militarised village,” the official said.

Over the past month, many of these villages have suffered extensive damage as a result of Israel’s more aggressive strategy.

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While Israeli officials repeat that their war is with Hizbollah and not with the Lebanese people, experts questioned Israel’s systematic attempt to clear the area.

Alonso Gurmendi Dunkelberg, an expert on international law at the London School of Economics, disputed Israel’s notion that these villages are valid military targets, saying that the existence of Hizbollah infrastructure in a civilian area is not enough to justify its controlled demolition — even if the assets could be used against Israel in the future. 

“It cannot be considered proportionate,” said Gurmendi Dunkelberg. “Many other countries, including Israel’s allies, have encountered counter-insurgency operations, like the US in Iraq and Afghanistan — and they did not blow up entire towns. What makes this different?”

To comply with the principle of proportionality in international law, Gurmendi Dunkelberg said that the military advantage Israel would need to get from demolishing entire villages “should be enormous”.

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In Lebanon, Israel’s actions are being regarded cynically. More than 1mn people, or one in five, have been displaced by fighting and by Israeli evacuation orders.

“There are two reasons Israel is using this detonations strategy,” said retired Lebanese armed forces general Akram Kamal Srawi. The first is to clear lines of sight for potential incursions deeper into Lebanon in an area where Hizbollah maintains the upper hand and has caused significant losses for Israel.

“The second is that Israel has adopted a scorched earth strategy in order to wage psychological warfare on Hizbollah’s base people by televising these detonations and weaken support for the group — which will never work,” he added.

While detonation was the fastest way to destroy the tunnels, Srawi said there were other means, such as pouring concrete. “If you’re trying to demolish them that quickly, it’s because your troops are having a hard time fighting in the south,” he added.

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In Dheyra, a picturesque farming village less than 1km from the border, recent controlled demolitions levelled much of the town centre, including at least one of its three mosques.

“What an event,” an Israeli soldier said in a video as the mosque crumples, before members of the group break into religious song.

From Beirut, Baalbaki has already started thinking about returning to Odaisseh and rebuilding.

His father, the late artist Abdel-Hamid Baalbaki who was known for his figurative paintings, had made it his life’s work to transform the Odaisseh house into a cultural centre and exhibition space, using his art teacher’s salary to pay for construction while bringing up his seven children. It was full of his collection of fine art and pottery as well as 2,000 books and manuscripts. 

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Now the family fears the separate building where their parents are buried has also been destroyed.

“It was a very emotional project for him and for all of us because we grew up . . . with this dream,” said Baalbaki, whose first name Lubnan is Arabic for Lebanon. “I think now more than ever, we believe in the importance of rebuilding this museum.”

Additional reporting by Jana Tauschinski

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Davos entourages will face 10-fold price increase next year

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The World Economic Forum has increased the price of admission 10-fold for some guests at its annual meeting in Davos as it tries to grab a greater share of the corporate activity on the sidelines of the elite gathering.

The organisation is also expanding the number of passes available and revamping the access they provide. The shake-up, planned for the 2025 meeting in January, was discussed with sponsors at a meeting in Geneva this week, according to people who were there.

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The WEF offers access passes, or badges, for second-tier attendees in the entourage of the corporate leaders who make up Davos’s official participants. These will rise in price from SFr100 ($115) in previous years to SFr1000 from 2025.

The badges provide access to some parts of the WEF meeting but not the main conference centre where world leaders and chief executives can hobnob in between panels on the global economy, inequality and climate change. An elite badge costs SFr27,000 per person.

The lower-tier badges will be made available to a wider range of participants than in previous years, including much smaller sponsors, and are designed to lure mid-tier executives with the promise of new opportunities to network with other attendees.

“It feels like a cash grab,” said an executive at one large WEF sponsor.

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“As if a marketing person has gone in and told them they are underselling Brand Davos. Frankly, I have no idea where they are going to put all these people. You already cannot move.”

The WEF meeting overwhelms the little Swiss ski resort every year for one week in January, when local businesses rent out space to corporations who want to set up “store fronts” where they can market their services and host client meetings.

For 2025, the WEF is erecting a new building near the conference centre in the middle of town to house its own administrators and to get in on the real estate frenzy. It has told sponsors they can rent meeting space in the container-style modular building for about SFr150,000 for the week.

The non-profit WEF counts many of the world’s largest companies among its top tier of 120 “strategic partners”, from tech giants to banks to professional services firms. But it also has a growing number of smaller corporate sponsors, taking the total number of partner companies to 900.

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The WEF is also launching a programme allowing this wider circle of corporate sponsors to put on events of their own under the official Davos umbrella — for a fee. Under the plan, companies would be able to livestream and market up to 10 panel sessions on the app for Davos participants if they pay SFr45,000, although the fee structure is likely to change after feedback in Geneva this week, according to people familiar with the discussion.

The WEF will have to vet that the sessions align with its mission of promoting human ingenuity, entrepreneurship and innovation. They will remain distinct from the official programme involving world leaders and CEOs. The idea is to put a WEF stamp of approval on some of the activities that have sprung up on the outskirts of the event in recent years and sideline the opportunistic corporate marketing gimmicks that have also crowded into Davos.

“The goal is to give more opportunities to recognise partners’ thought leadership outside of the official programme,” a WEF spokesperson said.

The expanded badge system “will offer access to exclusive locations within the security zone and full-event digital services to navigate the Davos ecosystem, interact with each other and be listed on the World Economic Forum app alongside official participants”.

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The spokesperson added: “The accredited programme, accredited badges and offices are provided to partners at cost.”

The WEF says that the 2025 annual meeting, which takes place from January 20 to 24, will address challenges “responding to geopolitical shocks, stimulating growth to improve living standards, and stewarding a just and inclusive energy transition”.

Preparations are unfolding against a backdrop of scrutiny of the WEF’s own culture, after allegations of workplace discrimination and sexual harassment against founder Klaus Schwab, which it denies. Its board of trustees has engaged an outside law firm to conduct a review of its workplace culture, which is yet to conclude.

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Cruise companies pour money into lucrative private resorts

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The world’s biggest cruise groups are pouring money into private destinations for their customers as booming demand rubs up against a backlash against overtourism in many popular spots.

The biggest operator, Carnival, is in the midst of developing the $600mn Celebration Key on the island of Grand Bahama. The “first-ever exclusive destination to be purpose-built” for the company will open next year.

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Meanwhile, rival Royal Caribbean is planning to spend a similar amount building the 200-acre Perfect Day Mexico resort on Mexico’s Caribbean coast in Mahahual. It will have beaches, water parks and other entertainments and is scheduled to open in 2027.

Another major operator, Norwegian Cruise Line, is building a two-ship pier to its own private island Great Stirrup Cay to allow it to double visitor numbers to 700,000 from 2026.

By 2025 passenger capacity at cruise company-owned private islands in the Caribbean will have more than doubled from 2019, according to Christian Savelli, cruise analytics director at Tourism Economics.

The industry is hoping to emulate the success of Royal Caribbean’s Perfect Day CocoCay private island, which reopened in 2019 after a $250mn redevelopment. Barclays’ analysts attribute a nearly 8 per cent rise in the cruise operator’s net yield — the main industry measure of profitability — to this relaunch.

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“One of the value points of us adding more [of] these destinations or creating them is to really spread or distribute our guests more broadly,” chief executive Jason Liberty told the Financial Times. This can help reduce congestion in traditional hotspots.

Royal Caribbean is also developing two beach clubs on islands in the Bahamas and Mexico to be opened by 2026, which are smaller than the larger Perfect Day resorts.

The Miami-based cruise line is “taking pressure off of the system . . . [by] putting up new experiences” for its guests at destinations where otherwise “there is not enough to do”, Liberty added. 

“You deliver the experience, you have the [passenger] volume, and people want to pay more money to go to those destinations. So we see a higher return profile on the destination than we do on the ships.”

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Norwegian chief executive Harry Sommer recently said the new pier on Great Stirrup Cay should ultimately generate “higher guest satisfaction, higher revenue, higher repeat rates [that] becomes a virtuous cycle”.

Operators are spending money to build their own resorts as they try to balance a rise in demand since the pandemic and a backlash against the growing number and size of cruise liners in crowded tourist destinations.

In 2023, 31.7mn people worldwide went on cruise trips, up 7 per cent from 2019, according to the Cruise Lines International Association. It expects passenger numbers to have reached 39.7mn by 2027. Carnival, Royal Caribbean and Norwegian all recently increased their profit forecasts for this year, driven by rising bookings.

Savelli said passenger numbers were growing faster in the Caribbean than in all other major regions including the Mediterranean, driven by the popularity of private resorts.

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While more people want to go on cruise trips, fewer locals are happy to see big ships full of people in places that already have a lot of tourists.

Larger cruise ships have been banned from docking in Venice and earlier this year the city started charging day-trippers an entrance fee of €5. In September, authorities in Ibiza announced that no more than two cruise ships would be allowed to dock at the same time. Alaska is set to impose a cap on the number of cruise passengers visiting the major port of Juneau from 2026.

Royal Caribbean’s Liberty played down congestion caused by cruise ships, blaming Airbnb and local population growth instead. But Bob Levinstein, chief executive of cruise holiday marketplace CruiseCompete.com, said overtourism worries had “cruise lines thinking more seriously about how they can have more control over the destinations, and private islands are a smart way to do that”.

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Kamala Harris stakes closing election pitch on joy, warnings and women voters

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Kamala Harris stakes closing election pitch on joy, warnings and women voters

With only days to go until the election, Kamala Harris made a closing pitch to voters that sought to balance joyful optimism with dire warnings about the threat posed by her Republican opponent.

“We have an opportunity in this election to finally turn the page on a decade of Donald Trump, who spends full time trying to keep us divided and afraid of each other,” the Democratic vice-president told an estimated crowd of 12,000 at a park in downtown Atlanta on Saturday.

It is a message Harris has hammered home in the final stretch of a presidential campaign powered by surging support from women and younger voters that would have seemed improbable at the start of the year.

But Harris now has an even chance of becoming America’s first female president after a frenetic four months that started with a disastrous debate performance from Joe Biden that led him to step aside in favour of his vice-president.

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What followed was a mad-dash autumn of campaigning in which Harris has erased Trump’s polling lead and surpassed his fundraising advantage.

The Financial Times poll tracker now shows Harris leading the former Republican president nationally by just over one point.

Critically, the candidates are in a statistical tie in the seven swing states that are likely to determine the election. That has led many analysts to conclude the next US president could be decided by a few thousand voters in just a handful of states. Four years ago, Biden won Georgia’s 16 electoral college votes by a razor-thin margin of less than 12,000 votes.

Harris and her advisers insist they have the momentum heading into polling day and that undecided voters making their choice in the final days were breaking their way.

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“Every single one of our battleground states are absolutely in play,” said a senior Harris campaign official. “We continue to see multiple pathways to 270,” the official added, referring to the number of electoral college votes needed to win the White House.

Harris has criss-crossed the country in the final days of her campaign, hitting every swing state at least once.

On Thursday and Friday, Harris whipped through Nevada, Arizona and Wisconsin. On Saturday, she flew straight from Georgia to North Carolina. On Sunday, she is expected to run through Michigan before rounding out her last day of campaigning on Monday with three major rallies in Pennsylvania.

“We still have work to do,” Harris told the crowd in Atlanta. “But here’s the thing, we like hard work . . . and make no mistake, we will win.”

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Kamala Harris at a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Saturday © Charly Triballeau/AFP/Getty Images

The Harris campaign has for weeks sought to craft a message that paints an optimistic vision of America’s future and warns of what they see as the threat Trump — who is already casting doubt on the results of next week’s election — poses to US democracy.

Harris has made overtures to female voters by vowing to restore abortion access and protect reproductive freedoms that were stripped away after Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices helped overturn Roe vs Wade in 2022. She has extended an olive branch to centrist Republicans who are disillusioned with Trump, insisting she would put “country over party” as president.

Top Harris advisers maintain the strategy is working, in part because Trump has spent the final days of his own campaign wrestling with a backlash to racist and misogynistic remarks from speakers at his Madison Square Garden rally. He has courted controversy with a series of vulgar and incendiary comments, including musing over how anti-Trump former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney would react if she had “guns trained on her face” and “nine barrels shooting at her”.

By contrast, the mood at Harris rallies has been relentlessly upbeat, with live music and celebrity appearances serving as warm-up acts. At the campaign stop in Atlanta on Saturday, throngs of voters — including many women who showed up with their young children in tow — coloured home-made signs and assembled friendship bracelets to show their support for Harris.

On Saturday night, she made an unscheduled stop in the Democratic stronghold of New York City for an appearance on Saturday Night Live.

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“We are so ready for a fresh change,” said Phyllis Hernandez, a 63-year-old Atlanta voter. “We are not going to be taken back into the dark ages. We are moving forward with hope and joy.”

A senior Harris campaign official said their private polling showed Trump’s antics were undercutting his own support.

“We are winning battleground voters who have made up their minds in the last week, and we are winning them by double-digit margins,” the official said.

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“We have believed all along that there were still undecided voters here, and that the close of this race was really, really important, and we are seeing that to be the case.”

Harris aides were also buoyed by Gallup polling out this week showing Democrats had a 10-point advantage over Republicans when it came to energy, with 77 per cent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents saying they were more enthusiastic about voting this year than in previous years, compared with 67 per cent of Republicans.

Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at Salem Civic Center in Virginia on Saturday © Hannah McKay/Reuters

If Harris wins on Tuesday, it could well be because of women. Her campaign cites data showing more women have submitted their ballots by mail or in-person ahead of election day than men. Polls have consistently shown women overwhelmingly back Harris, while a similar percentage of men support Trump.

Still, many presidential campaign veterans caution that opinion polling and early voting figures in the final days of such a tight race are not necessarily predictive.

“We are all in a dark tunnel. That is the reality,” said Bob Shrum, a longtime Democratic consultant who worked on Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign and John Kerry’s 2004 bid for the White House. “But there are some emerging signs that she is doing very well.”

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The Harris team maintains that their hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of spending on targeted advertising and a robust “ground game” — the vast network of campaign volunteers and party organisers across the country — will help them turn out enough voters on Tuesday to push Harris over the line.

The senior Harris official said the campaign had knocked on more than 13mn doors across the seven battleground states to date. The Gallup poll found 42 per cent of registered voters nationwide said they had been contacted by Harris’s campaign, compared with 35 per cent who said they had heard from the Trump team.

“She has done the work. She has laid out what people need to hear,” said Brandi Wyche, chair of the local Democratic party in DeKalb County, just outside of Atlanta, who has worked for months to rally support for Harris. “Now it is just about making sure to get people to the polls to elect her as our next president.”

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Additional reporting by James Politi and Steff Chávez in Washington

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