The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Thursday, July 3, 2025

Notably: While staying at a guest house at the edge of Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley in the summer of 2019, Theodore Ell and his wife Caitlin Bell, then Australia’s deputy ambassador to Lebanon, stole–kidnapped–a kitten that belonged to the guest house.  They guessed, on zero evidence, that in Ell’s words, “this dust-covered, malnourished and terribly thirsty creature belonged to no one here and must have lost her mother,” that she “posed some irritation” to the owners since the owner’s daughter had once “cringed and sidestepped her” (as I do about a dozen times a day when any of my four cats insist on wrong-footing me on the stairs) and that, obviously, left there, the cat “must soon die.” So they “successfully smuggled her away.” If she belonged to no one, why that elaborate scheme to steal her? Why not ask the owners if they wished to be rid of the cat? Because grave-robbers and art thieves from the crusades to Napoleon to the French and British mandates over these lands shrugged and trampled likewise when they raided local property, veiling larceny in virtue while splurging on societies like Lebanon that special gift of Anglo-European societies: supreme condescension. It would have been beneath Ell and Bell to ask the owners what they thought. They didn’t want to risk their loot. And off they took the cat back to Beirut, where they called her “Jazzy,” never once thinking who might be missing her. The scene is described in Ell’s Lebanon Days (Atlantic Books), a book published in Australia last year. Ell, a researcher, teacher and poet, lived in Lebanon from the end of 2018 to the beginning of 2021. His wife Caitlin Bell was posted to Beirut as Australian Ambassador Rebekah Grindlay’s deputy five months before Ell’s arrival. We can do without cat kidnappers. 

—P.T.