Madeleine Speed’s report “Worker shortages pose risk to food supply, warns Arla” (September 24) highlights how dairy farmers are quitting the industry. Herdspeople need to live near their work, but rural homes are invariably occupied by retirees or become holiday homes. Affordable rural homes can be built on so-called “rural exception sites”, but local authorities often require housing needs surveys to prove a need. These surveys cost a lot of money and only go to families who already have a home! Local authorities refuse to recognise numbers on their housing waiting list as proving need.

Only three parishes in the whole of East Devon have had such a survey in the past two years, so it is not a surprise that affordable rural homes are not being built. There are over 5,000 families in East Devon who are desperate for a home, but our council refuses to recognise them as being in need. The problem is the Nimbys.

Robert Persey
Honiton, Devon, UK

You wrote about Kemi Badenoch’s controversial comments on maternity pay at the Conservative party conference (Report, October 1), yet over the past two weeks a broader and ongoing clash of opinions over parental rights has been unfolding.

Deloitte made a clear statement by equalising parental leave, Campaign group The Dad Shift called for longer paternity leave and Badenoch argued statutory maternity pay is “excessive”. What’s clear is the lack of consensus on how best to support working parents.

But this isn’t about pitting genders against each other over caregiving roles or trading the “motherhood penalty” — the term used to describe the disadvantages that working mothers face in the workplace compared to childless women or men — for a broader “parenthood penalty”.

The choice hinges on organisations offering extended or equalised parental leave to encourage fathers to share responsibilities — critical to reducing the motherhood penalty, which accounts for 80 per cent of the gender pay gap. A cultural shift is needed where senior leaders model and endorse active parenthood to create an environment where both men and women feel confident using parental support without fear of damaging their careers or reputations.

Emma Spitz
Chief Client Officer and Parental Transition Coach, The Executive Coaching Consultancy, London EC3, UK

By Timour Azhari and Ari Rabinovitch

BEIRUT/JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel bombed central Beirut in the early hours of Thursday, killing at least six people, after its forces suffered their deadliest day on the Lebanese front in a year of clashes against Iran-backed armed group Hezbollah.

Israel said it conducted a precise air strike on Beirut. Reuters witnesses reported hearing a massive blast, and a security source said it targeted a building in central Beirut’s Bachoura neighbourhood close to parliament, the nearest Israeli strikes have come to Lebanon’s seat of government.

At least six people were killed and seven wounded, Lebanese health officials said. A photo being circulated on Lebanese WhatsApp groups, which Reuters could not immediately verify, showed a heavily damaged building with its first floor on fire.

Three missiles also hit the southern suburb of Dahiyeh, where Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed last week, and loud explosions were heard, Lebanese security officials said. The southern suburbs came under more than a dozen Israeli strikes on Wednesday.

A day after Iran fired more than 180 missiles into Israel, Israel said on Wednesday eight soldiers were killed in ground combat in south Lebanon as its forces thrust into its northern neighbour.

The Israeli military said regular infantry and armoured units joined its ground operations in Lebanon on Wednesday as Iran’s missile attack and Israel’s promise of retaliation raised concerns that the oil-producing Middle East could be caught up in a wider conflict.

Hezbollah said its fighters engaged Israeli forces inside Lebanon. The movement reported ground clashes for the first time since Israeli forces pushed over the border on Monday. Hezbollah said it had destroyed three Israeli Merkava tanks with rockets near the border town of Maroun El Ras.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a condolence video, said: “We are at the height of a difficult war against Iran’s Axis of Evil, which wants to destroy us.

“This will not happen because we will stand together and with God’s help, we will win together,” he said.

Lebanon’s health ministry said Israeli air raids killed at least 46 people in the south and centre of the country over the past 24 hours.

Iran said on Wednesday its missile volley – its biggest ever assault on Israel – was over barring further provocation, but Israel and the United States promised to hit back hard.

U.S. President Joe Biden said he would not support any Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear sites in response to its ballistic missile attack and urged Israel to act “proportionally” against its regional arch-foe.

Biden joined a call with Group of Seven major power leaders on Wednesday to coordinate a response, including new sanctions against Tehran, the White House said.

G7 leaders voiced “strong concern” over the Middle East crisis but said a diplomatic solution was still viable and a region-wide conflict was in no one’s interest, a statement said.

Hezbollah said it repelled Israeli forces near several border towns and also fired rockets at military posts inside Israel.

The paramilitary group’s media chief Mohammad Afif said those battles were only “the first round” and that Hezbollah had enough fighters, weapons and ammunition to push back Israel.

Israel’s addition of infantry and armoured troops from the 36th Division, including the Golani Brigade, the 188th Armoured Brigade and 6th Infantry Brigade, suggested that the operation might expand beyond limited commando raids.

The military has said its incursion is largely aimed at destroying tunnels and other infrastructure on the border and there were no plans for a wider operation targeting the Lebanese capital Beirut to the north or major cities in the south.

1.2 MILLION LEBANESE DISPLACED

Nevertheless, it issued new evacuation orders for around two dozen towns along the southern border, instructing inhabitants to head north of the Awali River, which flows east to west some 60 km (37 miles) north of the Israeli frontier.

More than 1,900 people have been killed and over 9,000 wounded in Lebanon in almost a year of cross-border fighting, with most of the deaths occurring in the past two weeks, according to Lebanese government statistics.

Caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati said that about 1.2 million Lebanese had been displaced by Israeli attacks.

Malika Joumaa, from Sudan, was forced to take shelter in Saint Joseph’s church in Beirut after being forced from her house near Sidon in coastal south Lebanon with her husband and two children.

“It’s good that the church offered its help. We were going to stay in the streets; where would we have gone?”

Iran described Tuesday’s missile assault as a response to Israeli killings of militant leaders, including Nasrallah, attacks in Lebanon against the group and Israel’s war against Palestinian Hamas militants in Gaza.

There were no casualties from the missile onslaught in Israel, but one person was killed in the occupied West Bank.

(Reporting by James Mackenzie and Steven Scheer in Jerusalem; Maya Gebeily and Timour Azhari in Beirut; Parisa Hafezi in Istanbul; Phil Stewart, Jeff Mason and Idrees Ali in Washington; Michelle Nichols in New York; Adam Makary, Jaidaa Taha and Enas Alashray in Cairo; and Tala Ramadan, Jana Choukeir and Jack Kim in Seoul and Matthias Williams in Berlin, Elwely Elwelly and Clauda Tanios in Dubai and Angelo Amante and Giuseppe Fonte in Rome and Parisa Hafezi in Dubai; writing by Cynthia Osterman; editing by; Deepa Babington)

Andrew Jack’s article on the Model UN for schools (“Students learn from Model UN to handle disagreements diplomatically”, Outlook, September 26) says Model United Nations was created at Georgetown University in 1963.

As the organiser of the Model UN General Assembly held at Cambridge university in 1964, that claim comes as a surprise, as when contacted back in 1963, we were told by the UN that we were the first to host such an event. Such is British-American rivalry!

The Cambridge version was funded by a £20,000 donation from Roy Thomson, owner of the Sunday Times, and this paid for student delegations to come for a week from further and higher education institutions across the UK. The 7,000-strong membership of the Cambridge University United Nations Association (CUUNA) was an example of the international idealism that then permeated the university.

Attending this year’s UN General Assembly and the Summit of the Future event and recalling the frequent cynicism about the ability of the UN to resolve major issues in today’s world, I am pleased to see the Model UNGA format continues, albeit now more at high school than university.

Anthony Colman
Chair, CUUNA 1963-64, Aylmerton, Norfolk UK