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La Información Directa a tu Celular 📲 de HOY *Viernes 27 de Octubre 2023* *En El Plano Nacional e Internacional*:
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*Israel’s Army Is Ready to Invade Gaza. Its Divided Government May Not Be.*
In the 20 days since Hamas attacked, Israel’s Air Force has pounded Gaza and its troops have gotten into position. But its leaders disagree about what to do next.
Its troops are massed on the Gaza border and described as ready to move, but Israel’s political and military leaders are divided about how, when and even whether to invade, according to seven senior military officers and three Israeli officials.
In part, they say, the delay is intended to give negotiators more time to try to secure the release of some of the more than 200 hostages captured by Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups when they raided Israel three weeks ago.
But Israeli leaders, who have vowed to retaliate against Hamas for its brutal massacre of civilians, have yet to agree on how to do so, though the military could move as soon as Friday.
Some of them worry that an invasion might suck the Israeli Army into an intractable urban battle inside Gaza. Others fear a broader conflict, with a Lebanese militia allied to Hamas, Hezbollah, firing long-range missiles toward Israeli cities.
There is also debate over whether to conduct the invasion through one large operation or a series of smaller ones. And then there are questions about who would govern Gaza if Israel captured it.
“You have a cabinet with different opinions,” said Danny Danon, a senior lawmaker from Likud, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing party.
“Some would say that we have to start — then we can think about the next stage,” said Mr. Danon, a member of the foreign affairs and defense committee in the Israeli Parliament. “But we as the leadership, as statesmen, we have to set the goals, and the goals should be very clear,” he said. “It shouldn’t be vague.”
Disarray has swept Israel since terrorists from Gaza overran a swath of southern Israel, killing roughly 1,400 people, briefly capturing more than 20 villages and army bases and outmaneuvering the most powerful military in the Middle East.
The shock of the attack has shaken Israelis’ sense of invincibility and raised doubts and debate about how their country should best respond.
Immediately afterward, the government called up around 360,000 reservists and deployed many of them at the border with Gaza. Senior officials soon spoke of removing Hamas from power in the enclave, raising expectations of an imminent ground operation there.
But nearly three weeks later, the Netanyahu government has yet to give the go-ahead, though the military says that it has made a few brief incursions over the border and that it will make still more in the days ahead.
The United States has urged Israel not to rush into a ground invasion, even as it pledges full support for its ally, but domestic considerations have also played a role in the delay. Beyond the hostages, there is concern about the toll of the operation and uncertainty about what exactly it might mean to destroy Hamas, a social movement as well as a military force that is deeply embedded in Gazan society.
When asked what the military objectives of the operation are, an Israeli military spokesman said the goal was to “dismantle Hamas.” How would the army know it had achieved that goal? “That’s a big question, and I don’t think I have the capability right now to answer that one,” the spokesman, Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, said at news briefing a week after the attack.
*Democrats Splinter Over Israel as the Young, Diverse Left Rages at Biden*
As a raw divide over the war ripples through liberal America, a coalition of young voters and people of color is breaking with the president, raising new questions about his strength entering 2024.
The Democratic Party’s yearslong unity behind President Biden is beginning to erode over his steadfast support of Israel in its escalating war with the Palestinians, with a left-leaning coalition of young voters and people of color showing more discontent toward him than at any point since he was elected.
From Capitol Hill to Hollywood, in labor unions and liberal activist groups, and on college campuses and in high school cafeterias, a raw emotional divide over the conflict is convulsing liberal America.
While moderate Democrats and critics on the right have applauded Mr. Biden’s backing of Israel, he faces new resistance from an energized faction of his party that views the Palestinian cause as an extension of the racial and social justice movements that dominated American politics in the summer of 2020.
In protests, open letters, staff revolts and walkouts, liberal Democrats are demanding that Mr. Biden break with decades-long American policy and call for a cease-fire.
The political power of the Israel skeptics within the party is untested, with more than a year remaining until the 2024 presidential election. Their efforts have been fractious and disorganized, and they have little agreement on how much blame to lay at Mr. Biden’s feet or whether to punish him next November if he ignores their pleas.
And yet Mr. Biden is already struggling with low Democratic enthusiasm, and it would not take much of a slip in support from voters who backed him in 2020 to throw his re-election bid into question. His margin of victory in key battleground states was just a few thousand votes — hardly enough to spare a significant drop-off from young voters alienated by his loyalty to a right-wing Israeli government they see as hostile to their values.
At its heart, the turbulence over Israel is a fundamental disagreement over policy, setting it apart from challenges like voters’ dissatisfaction with the economy, which Mr. Biden’s allies believe can be solved with better messaging. The president, who has for decades positioned himself in the middle of his party and has navigated Democrats’ ideological and generational divide for the first half of his term, now confronts an issue that has no easy middle ground.
Perhaps most concerning for Mr. Biden is that in the halls of Congress, the most critical Democratic voices are Black and Hispanic Democrats who helped fuel his 2020 victory. As of Thursday, all 18 House members who had signed onto a resolution calling for an “immediate de-escalation and cease-fire in Israel and occupied Palestine” were people of color.
*The Consequences of Elon Musk’s Ownership of X*
Now rebranded as X, the site has experienced a surge in racist, antisemitic and other hateful speech. Under Mr. Musk’s watch, millions of people have been exposed to misinformation about climate change. Foreign governments and operatives — from Russia to China to Hamas — have spread divisive propaganda with little or no interference.
Mr. Musk and his team have repeatedly asserted that such concerns are overblown, sometimes pushing back aggressively against people who voice them. Yet dozens of studies from multiple organizations have shown otherwise, demonstrating on issue after issue a similar trend: an increase in harmful content on X during Mr. Musk’s tenure.
The war between Israel and Hamas — the sort of major news event that once made Twitter an essential source of information and debate — has drowned all social media platforms in false and misleading information, but for Mr. Musk’s platform in particular the war has been seen as a watershed. The conflict has captured in full how much the platform has descended into the kind of site that Mr. Musk had promised advertisers he wanted to avoid on the day he officially took over.
“With disinformation about the Israel-Hamas conflict flourishing so dramatically on X, it feels that it crossed a line for a lot of people where they can see — beyond just the branding change — that the old Twitter is truly gone,” Tim Chambers of Dewey Square Group, a public affairs company that tracks social media, said in an interview. “And the new X is a shadow of that former self.”
The growing sense of chaos on the platform has already hurt Mr. Musk’s investment. While it remains one of the most popular social media services, people visited the website nearly 5.9 billion times in September, down 14 percent from the same month last year, according to the data analysis firm Similarweb.
Advertisers have also fled, leading to a sizable slump in sales. Mr. Musk noted this summer that ad revenue had fallen 50 percent. He blamed the Anti-Defamation League, one of several advocacy groups that have cataloged the rise of hateful speech on X, for “trying to kill this platform.”
Most of the problems, however, stem from changes that Mr. Musk instituted – some intentionally, some not. Studies about the state of X have been conducted over the past year by researchers and analysts at universities, think tanks and advocacy organizations concerned with the spread of hate speech and other harmful content.
Research conducted in part by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue concluded that anti-Semitic tweets in English more than doubled after Mr. Musk’s takeover. A report from the European Commission found that engagement with pro-Kremlin accounts grew 36 percent on the platform in the first half of this year after Mr. Musk lifted mitigation measures.
Mr. Musk disbanded an advisory council focused on trust and safety issues and laid off scores of employees who addressed them. For a monthly fee, he offered users a blue checkmark, a label that once conveyed that Twitter had verified the identity of the user behind an account. He then used algorithms to promote accounts of uncertain provenance in users’ feeds. He removed labels that identified government and state media accounts for countries like Russia and China that censor independent media.
“The entire year’s worth of changes to X were fully stress tested during the global news breaking last week,” Mr. Chambers said, referring to the conflict in Israel. “And in the eyes of many, myself included, it failed utterly.”
The company did not respond to a request for comment beyond a stock response it regularly uses to press inquiries: “Busy now, please check back later.”
X trails only Facebook’s 16.3 billion monthly visits and Instagram’s 6.4 billion visits, according to Similarweb. TikTok, which is rising in popularity among certain demographic groups, has roughly two billion visits each month. Despite voluble threats by disgruntled users to move to alternative platforms – Mastadon, BlueSky or Meta’s new rival to Mr. Musk’s, Threads – none of them have yet reached the critical mass to replicate the public exposure that X offers.
Keeping X at the center of public debate is exactly Mr. Musk’s goal, which he describes at times with a messianic zeal. The day after Hamas attacked Israel, Mr. Musk urged his followers to follow “the war in real time.”
He then cited two accounts that are notorious for spreading disinformation, including a false post in the spring that an explosion had occurred outside the Pentagon. Faced with a flurry of criticism, Mr. Musk deleted the post and later sounded chastened.
He urged his followers on X to “stay as close to the truth as possible, even for stuff you don’t like. This platform aspires to maximize signal/noise of the human collective.”
*Chinese Mourn the Death of a Premier, and the Loss of Economic Hope*
An outpouring on social media for Li Keqiang, the former premier who died Friday, reflected public grief for an era of greater growth and possibility.
They posted videos on social media of the time he promised that China would remain open to the outside world. They shared photos of him, standing in ankle-deep mud, visiting victims of a flood. They even noted the economic growth target for the first year of his premiership: 7.5 percent.
The death Friday of Li Keqiang, 68, prompted spontaneous mourning online. Mr. Li served as premier, China’s No. 2 official, for a decade until last March.
Among many Chinese, Mr. Li’s death produced a swell of nostalgia for what he represented: a time of greater economic possibility and openness to private business. The reaction was jarring and showed the dissatisfaction in China with the leadership of Xi Jinping, China’s hard-line leader who grabbed an unprecedented third term in office last year after maneuvering to have the longstanding limit of two terms abolished.
In post after post on social media, people praised Mr. Li more for what he stood for and said than for what he was able to accomplish under Mr. Xi, who drove economic policymaking during Mr. Li’s period in office.
Mr. Li was possibly the least powerful premier in the history of the People’s Republic of China. The grief over his passing reflected the public’s sense of loss for an era of reform and growth that has been abandoned, and their deep sense of powerlessness in the China of Mr. Xi, the most authoritarian leader since Mao Zedong.
*A New Threat: Surprise Hurricanes*
Hurricane Otis transformed from a tropical storm to a deadly Category 5 hurricane in a day, defying forecasts.
Hurricane Otis, which killed more than two dozen people in southern Mexico this week, exemplified a phenomenon that meteorologists fear will become more and more common: a severe hurricane that arrives with little warning or time to prepare.
Judson Jones, who covers natural disasters for The Times, explains why Hurricane Otis packed such an unexpected punch.
Background reading
On Tuesday morning, few meteorologists were talking about Otis. By Wednesday morning, the “catastrophic storm” had left a trail of destruction in Mexico and drawn attention from around the globe. What happened?
The hurricane, one of the more powerful Category 5 storms to batter the region, created what one expert called a “nightmare scenario” for a popular tourist coastline.
*Chinese Jet Flies Within 10 Feet of U.S. Bomber, Pentagon Says*
The fighter jet neared a B-52 during a maneuver over the South China Sea on Tuesday night, the U.S. military said. China had no immediate response.
A Chinese fighter jet came within 10 feet of a U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber over the South China Sea this week in a nighttime maneuver that nearly caused a collision, the United States military said on Thursday.
The pilot of the J-11 jet that drew close to the B-52 in international airspace on Tuesday night “flew in an unsafe and unprofessional manner” and with “uncontrolled excessive speed,” the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said in a statement.
The U.S. military also released a grainy, black-and-white video that it said showed the encounter. The midair clip, apparently filmed from the bomber, appears to show the jet drawing perilously close. The New York Times has not independently verified the video.
The statement and video were released on the same day that China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, arrived in the United States for meetings with U.S. officials — including Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser — and at a time of tension between the two countries over national security, economic competition and other issues.
Mao Ning, a spokeswoman for China’s Foreign Ministry, said on Friday that “U.S. military planes have traveled thousands of miles to show off their force at China’s doorstep, which is the root cause of sea and air security risks.”
“It is also not conducive to regional peace and stability,” she added, speaking at a regular news briefing in Beijing. “China will continue to take resolute measures to safeguard national sovereignty security and territorial integrity.”
Chinese officials have previously depicted Chinese air intercepts of U.S. aircraft as reasonable responses to foreign military patrols that threaten the country’s security.
In June, China’s defense minister at the time, Gen. Li Shangfu, downplayed an episode in which an American naval destroyer slowed to avoid a possible collision with a Chinese Navy ship that had crossed its path as it moved through the strait between China and Taiwan, the self-governed island that Beijing claims as its own.
Speaking at a conference in Singapore, General Li said in June that the best way to avoid an accident was for countries outside the region, like the United States, to leave and “mind your own business.”
But the Indo-Pacific Command’s statement on Thursday said that the latest near miss was part of a “dangerous pattern of coercive and risky operational behavior” by Chinese military jets against U.S. aircraft in international airspace over both the South China Sea and the East China Sea, which separates China from Japan.
“The U.S. will continue to fly, sail and operate — safely and responsibly — wherever international laws allow,” it said.
The Pentagon told Congress in a report this month that it had recorded more than 180 intercepts of U.S. aircraft by Chinese military forces in the Asia-Pacific region since the autumn of 2021 — more than in the previous decade. Some of those intercepts were in the South China Sea.
China claims 90 percent of the South China Sea, including waters thousands of miles from the Chinese mainland. It has alarmed much of Asia and the United States over the past decade by asserting ever-greater control over sea, in part by building and fortifying outposts and airstrips on disputed island chains.
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