*The Shake-up at OpenAI Reshapes the Industry’s Global Order*
Big Tech is reeling from the ouster of Sam Altman at a leading A.I. start-up and his subsequent jump to Microsoft, moves that reset the power dynamic underpinning the sector.
What next for an A.I. leader? Over just three days, the landscape for artificial intelligence has been reshaped drastically. On Friday morning, Sam Altman was the C.E.O. of OpenAI, the leader in commercializing generative A.I. through ChatGPT. By Monday, he had not only been fired by his board — he had also joined Microsoft, the start-up’s biggest backer.
What happened is more than just a juicy corporate tale. At stake are the fates of major A.I. players like OpenAI and Microsoft. And it’s a reminder of serious divides within the A.I. community — and questions about how that industry is led.
A recap:
OpenAI’s board fired Altman for not being “consistently candid.” Greg Brockman, another co-founder, was stripped of his chairman title and quit. The two began pitching a new A.I. start-up that evening.
Investors in OpenAI — who have little power because of the company’s quirky corporate governance structure (more on that below) — began plotting a way for Altman to return, with the encouragement of OpenAI executives. Altman returned to the office, marking the moment with a selfie that went viral.
Talks to bring Altman back broke down, with OpenAI’s board eventually naming Emmett Shear, the former C.E.O. of the streaming service Twitch, as its interim leader, replacing Mira Murati, the company’s C.T.O. who had replaced Altman.
Altman and Brockman are joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced research lab, and are likely to hire several former colleagues. (Some OpenAI employees workers wrote on X that “OpenAI is nothing without its people,” posts that Altman liked.)
OpenAI’s future is much murkier. According to The Information, rivals are looking to pick off workers. And a tender offer for OpenAI shares held by employees at an $86 billion valuation appears in doubt.
It’s unclear how much OpenAI’s strategy will change. Altman disagreed with board members — particularly Ilya Sutskever, another co-founder and the company’s chief scientist — about how quickly to commercialize new technologies. Sutskever, like Elon Musk and the A.I. pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, is deeply worried that A.I. could threaten humanity, and may now push the company to move much more slowly.
*The White House May Condemn Musk, but the Government Is Addicted to Him*
Rarely has the U.S. government so depended on the technology provided by a single technologist with views that it has so publicly declared repugnant.
The White House denounced Elon Musk on Friday for “abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate,” for his endorsement of what an administration spokesman called a “hideous lie” about Jews.
All of which might make one think the Biden administration was going to try to pull back from doing business with the world’s richest person. Except that, in recent weeks, the U.S. government has become more dependent on him than ever, agreeing to as much as $1.2 billion worth of SpaceX launches next year to put crucial Pentagon assets, including spy and command-and-control satellites, into space.
And in September, the Pentagon agreed to pay tens of millions of dollars for “Starshield,” a new, secure communications system his company has set up for the nation’s defense and intelligence systems, relying on the same clusters of Starlink satellites that have proved vital to Ukraine’s military during the war with Russia.
In private, administration officials say the Starlink satellites are critical to deterring China because they are far more resistant to Chinese efforts to disable them than the Pentagon’s own communications satellites.
These are only the latest examples of why the federal government has no viable way to break up with Mr. Musk, at least as long as the United States decides it is going to continue space exploration and deter its biggest superpower rivals. It may denounce him and declare that all Americans should reject his views. But it needs him, or at least his rockets and his satellites, more than ever.
And the White House and Pentagon both know that.
Rarely has the U.S. government so depended on the technology provided by a single, if petulant, technologist with views that it has so publicly declared repugnant. And yet, by the account of administration officials, they have no choice — and will not for a while. Because there are, right now, few viable alternatives.
It is an unusual predicament. If a top executive of one of the traditional publicly held defense contractors — Raytheon or Boeing or Lockheed Martin — had embraced an antisemitic conspiracy theory the way Mr. Musk did, there would be pressure from shareholders and customers alike for a resignation. In fact, advertisers like IBM and Apple and Warner Bros. Discovery have been announcing in recent days that they will pause doing business on X, formerly known as Twitter. Mr. Musk, rather than apologize, has threatened lawsuits.
But SpaceX is privately held, entirely controlled by Mr. Musk. (Tesla, his electric vehicle company, is publicly held.) And so far, while the White House has been outspoken, the Pentagon has been silent.
*Argentina Elects Javier Milei in Victory for Far Right*
Argentina’s next president is a libertarian economist whose brash style and embrace of conspiracy theories has parallels with those of Donald J. Trump.
Argentines on Sunday chose Javier Milei, a far-right libertarian who has drawn comparisons to Donald J. Trump, as their next president, a lurch to the right for a nation struggling under an economic crisis and a sign of the enduring strength of the global far right.
Mr. Milei, 53, an economist and former television personality with little political experience, burst onto the traditionally closed Argentine political scene with a brash style, an embrace of conspiracy theories and a series of extreme proposals that he says are needed to upend a broken economy and government.
Mr. Milei drew 56 percent of the vote, with 95 percent of the ballots counted, defeating Sergio Massa, Argentina’s center-left economy minister, who had 44 percent. Mr. Massa, 51, conceded defeat even before official results were released.
Mr. Milei has pledged to slash spending and taxes, close Argentina’s central bank and replace the nation’s currency with the U.S. dollar. He has also proposed banning abortion, loosening regulations on guns and considering only countries that want to “fight against socialism” as Argentina’s allies, often naming the United States and Israel as examples.
In his victory speech, he attacked the political “caste” that he says has enriched themselves at the expense of average Argentines, saying “today is the end to Argentine decadence.” But he also offered an olive branch.
“I want to tell all Argentines and all political leaders and all those who want to join the new Argentina: You’re going to be welcome,” he said.
*In Death Valley, a Rare Lake Comes Alive*
Visitors normally flock to Death Valley National Park to feel the searing heat and take in the barren landscape. This fall, they’ve been drawn by a different natural feature: water.
Furnace Creek and Stovepipe Wells are among the roadside outposts inside Death Valley National Park, while Dante’s View draws tourists at sunset and Hell’s Gate greets visitors arriving from the east.
In the summer, it is so hot here, along California’s southeastern spine, that some of the roughly 800 residents — nearly all of them park employees — bake brownies in their cars. A large, unofficial thermometer in recent years has ticked up to 130 degrees, making it a destination for travelers, and the park has endured some of the highest temperatures ever recorded on Earth.
But none of that is what prompted Lata Kini, 59, and her husband, Ramanand, 61, to pack their bags and drive about seven hours to get here on a whim this month. They were drawn instead by the mystique of another natural force.
“I’m here because of the water,” Ms. Kini, said at Zabriskie Point, a popular vista, as she watched the rising sun paint the undulating stone peaks in shades of pink and deep purple.
In the distance gleamed the white salt flats of Badwater Basin, the lowest place in North America, almost 300 feet below sea level. It was there, in the midst of salt-covered land, that a vast lake had appeared almost overnight, highlighting the ways in which a changing climate is altering life in one of the nation’s most remote landscapes.
On Aug. 20, cities across Southern California braced for a deluge from Tropical Storm Hilary, whose landfall in California was an exceptional occurrence. Many regions escaped with little damage. Not Death Valley.
*Shakira Reaches Deal in Spanish Tax Fraud Case*
Prosecutors had charged the pop star with failing to pay 14.5 million euros in income taxes. Her trial had been set to begin on Monday.
The international pop star Shakira reached a deal with Spanish prosecutors to settle a multimillion-euro tax evasion case on Monday, just before the trial was set to begin in Barcelona.
Prosecutors had accused Shakira of six counts of tax fraud, charging that she had failed to pay 14.5 million euros, about $15.8 million, in income taxes. The Associated Press reported on Monday that, in court, she told the presiding magistrate that she had accepted an agreement with prosecutors. The A.P. reported that, under the deal, she would receive a three-year suspended sentence and a fine of €7 million.
Shakira, whose full name is Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll, was accused of failing to pay income taxes to the Spanish government from 2012 to 2014. Shakira had repeatedly denied the accusations and said that she was not living in Spain during those years.
In a July indictment, prosecutors said that Shakira had spent more than half of each year in Spain from 2012-14 and had used a previously established “corporate framework” to hide income and assets during those years.
Prosecutors had sought an eight-year prison sentence and a fine of more than €23 million.
In a statement on Monday, Shakira said that she had always tried to “do what’s right and set a positive example for others.”
“While I was determined to defend my innocence in a trial that my lawyers were confident would have ruled in my favor, I have made the decision to finally resolve this matter with the best interest of my kids at heart,” she said.
*How to Know if You Have a Genetic Risk for Alzheimer’s*
Chris Hemsworth recently revealed that he’s predisposed to dementia. Here’s how to find out if you’re at risk — and what to do if you are.
The actor Chris Hemsworth announced last week that he’s taking a break from acting to focus on his health. The news came after Mr. Hemsworth learned through genetic testing that he has two copies of the APOE4 gene variant, which is associated with increased odds of developing Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia. The 39-year-old star of “Thor” has not reported having any symptoms, but he told Vanity Fair that he wanted to focus on mitigating his risk as much as possible.
Should you, like Mr. Hemsworth, undergo genetic testing to assess your risk for Alzheimer’s? And if you have the variant, what options are available to prevent or delay the condition? Here’s what to know.
What is APOE4? The APOE gene is important for the formation of a protein that helps carry cholesterol through the bloodstream. Nearly 30 years ago, scientists learned that APOE also influences a person’s chances of developing Alzheimer’s.
There are three variants of the gene, each conferring a different risk. People with the APOE2 variant appear to have a decreased risk of Alzheimer’s; the APOE3 variant — the most common type — is “neutral,” meaning it does not increase or decrease risk; and the APOE4 variant raises a person’s risk. Everyone has two versions of the gene, one inherited from their mother and one from their father.
About 25 percent of people carry one APOE4, increasing their chance of developing Alzheimer’s by two or three times. Another 2 to 3 percent of people have two copies of APOE4, as Mr. Hemsworth does. This is associated with a roughly 10-fold higher risk. Having APOE4 is also linked to earlier onset of the disease.
Scientists aren’t exactly sure why a gene involved in capturing cholesterol plays such a large role in Alzheimer’s disease. It’s possible that changes in cholesterol can damage brain cells or cause inflammation in the brain, which could lead to dementia.
Having the APOE4 gene variant, either one or two copies, does not mean you will definitely get Alzheimer’s disease. Some conditions, such as Huntington’s disease, are directly caused by a specific gene mutation. Alzheimer’s disease and APOE4 don’t work like that. The gene is just one factor that contributes to people’s risk. Some people with the gene variant are never diagnosed with the disease, and many people without APOE4 develop Alzheimer’s.
How do you know if you have the APOE4 variant? If you’re interested in knowing your status, you can ask your doctor or a genetic counselor about getting tested. You can also order a kit directly from 23andMe, which includes APOE4 on its health panel. However, Alzheimer’s experts are divided about whether testing for the gene is helpful for most people.
“Generally, in my clinical practice, I dissuade people from getting the test and getting the information,” said Dr. Gary Small, chair of psychiatry at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey. If you have a family history of dementia, you should assume you have an increased risk, he said, “so getting the genetic test is not going to tell you much more.”
Dr. Richard Isaacson, an adjunct associate professor of neurology at Weill Cornell Medical College, disagreed. “The reason that I believe in testing for APOE4 is that some people really want to know more about themselves, and it really democratizes the ability to learn about those risks,” he said. “Not about if they’re going to get the disease, but what we can do about it.”
If you do decide to get tested, Margaret Pericak-Vance, director of the John P. Hussman Institute for Human Genomics at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, said she would “suggest having a meeting with a genetic counselor afterward, because the risk is not straightforward.”
“By having one copy or two copies, it gives you an important part of the picture, but it’s just one part of a very complex risk picture,” Dr. Isaacson said. “Genes are not your destiny. You can win the tug of war against your genes.”
Escoltas en prisión EN FLAGRANCIA / Gustavo Fondevila EN REFORMA 3 MIN 30 SEG 20 noviembre 2023 Icono para compartir en redesIcono para compartir en redesIcono para compartir en redesIcono para compartir en redesIcono para compartir en redesAbrir en app La semana pasada, un video circuló por las redes sociales. En este puede apreciarse a tres hombres vestidos de traje,presuntamente escoltas, dar una paliza al conductor de una camioneta delante de su hija en pleno Paseo de la Reforma (a la altura de Lomas Altas, Alcaldía Miguel Hidalgo). MÁS DE EN FLAGRANCIA / Gustavo Fondevila Ascensores malditos13.11.2023 La salud de los pobres06.11.2023 Violación en los bosques de San Agustín30.10.2023 Las playas de Acapulco23.10.2023 Protección civil en el centro del País16.10.2023 El caso Montserrat09.10.2023 Material de reclutamiento02.10.2023 Corrupción en los tribunales25.09.2023 Rampas costosas18.09.2023 Violaciones al alza11.09.2023 Cancelaciones en el Aeropuerto04.09.2023 Milagros en la seguridad de la Ciudad28.08.2023 PUBLICIDAD
El tránsito detenido, dos camionetas blancas paradas y un grupo de escoltas privados dándose puñetazos y patadas con otro hombre delante de una niña con uniforme escolar que grita aterrada. Uno de ellos porta un arma con la que golpea en la cabeza a la víctima. Un hombre mayor entra en escena y hace que los escoltas se alejen del hombre y se suban a sus camionetas.
La Fiscalía General de Justicia (FGJ) entró en conocimiento del hecho, está buscando a los agresores mediante las cámaras del Centro de Comando y Control (C2). También, hizo un llamado público a la víctima para que denuncie la agresión ante el Ministerio Público. Mientras tanto, la indignación crece en las redes.
EN PRISIÓN
No es la primera vez que se ven imágenes de este tipo. ¿Usted recuerda el caso de Lord Ferrari (2016) o de los cuatro guardaespaldas que molieron a golpes a un conductor que accidentalmente chocó el auto de su protegido en Coyoacán (2018)?
En realidad, es una constante en el tránsito de la CDMX. Pero el tema de los golpes es menor cuando se analizan las actividades directamente delictivas de los guardias de seguridad privada. A nivel nacional, de las 50 mil 121 personas sentenciadas que, al momento de la detención pertenecían a la policía, fuerzas armadas o seguridad privada, más de la mitad (52 por ciento) eran guardias privadas.
Esto significa que hay 26 mil 158 ex guardias privados presos por haber cometido un delito (que amerita prisión) en todo el País (casi podrían ocupar una cárcel sólo ellos). En la CDMX se repite la situación: el 54 por ciento de todos los que prestaron servicio armados eran guardias de seguridad (2 mil 583 ex guardias).
La única diferencia importante entre este sector privado y el público es el tiempo servido. Mientras que el promedio de servicio de las fuerzas públicas es de cinco años, el de los privados es de dos Esta información es relevante porque implica que ese personal no pasó demasiado tiempo en el servicio de seguridad privado antes de delinquir. Lo que posiblemente señale que los procesos de selección para el ingreso al sector privado (y los filtros internos) no funcionaron correctamente. A los problemas del sector (el tamaño del universo de empresas patitos que resta mercado a las legales, la falta de controles del Estado, los sobreprecios, la falta de capacitación y los propios clientes que quieren matones y no profesionales de la seguridad), ahora hay que sumar la delincuencia común.
En la Ciudad de México hay 2 mil 583 ex guardias privados presos frente a 714 policías. Los guardias privados representan el 10 por ciento de la población en prisión en centros de la Ciudad (a nivel nacional es el 12 por ciento). El aumento de los servicios de seguridad privado en la Ciudad ha generado un aumento de esta población en prisión, al punto que ya representan un grupo poblacional importante y complejo dentro del Sistema Penitenciario (precisamente por su conocimiento de la seguridad y de las rutinas de los posibles objetivos). No sería extraño, que así como en el pasado, los ex policías organizaban secuestros desde prisión, en un futuro, lo hagan los guardias privados.
En fin, la próxima vez que se cruce en el tránsito con esas camionetas, no se moleste en discutir quién tiene la prioridad. Puede terminar mal (sólo para usted).
El desaire de Ebrard a Sheinbaum Bajo Reserva Bajo Reserva Claudia Sheinbaum Claudia Sheinbaum BAJO RESERVA | 20/11/2023 | 05:24 | Actualizada 05:24 El desaire de Ebrard a Sheinbaum Bajo Reserva
PERFIL El desaire de Ebrard a Sheinbaum
Se hizo costumbre en el Frente ungir candidato sin competencia
Presidencia de México “edita” discurso de Biden
La ceremonia en la que Claudia Sheinbaum se convirtió en la precandidata presidencial de la autollamada Cuarta Transformación, Claudia Sheinbaum, sirvió para evidenciar las lealtades y las divisiones. Nos hacen ver que de las tres corcholatas que perdieron la contienda con doña Claudia, solo dos acudieron al acto. El exsecretario de Gobernación, Adán Augusto López, y el excoordinador de los senadores morenistas, Ricardo Monreal, acompañaron a Sheinbaum a recibir la constancia de precandidata, no así el excanciller Marcelo Ebrard, quien envió en su representación a un diputado. Al parecer, don Marcelo sigue sin digerir su derrota en las encuestas que le dieron la candidatura a Sheinbaum, o tendría algo más importante que hacer para justificar el desaire de no asistir al acto de la candidata presidencial de su partido.
“Alito”, vivir sin fuero es vivir en el error Dirigentes precavidos valen por dos. Nos hacen ver el caso del presidente nacional del PRI, Alejandro Moreno, quien presentó su carta de intención para reelegirse como diputado federal. Don “Alito”, nos dicen en realidad está interesado en ser senador, pero por si alguna cosa llegara a pasar deja una vela encendida para mantenerse en el Poder Legislativo y conservar el fuero. Otro priista que también prendió su vela es Rubén Moreira, coordinador del tricolor en San Lázaro. Hasta ahora, son 460 los diputados aspirantes a la reelección, es decir, más del 90%. Vivir sin fuero, es vivir en el error, dicen algunos
Senadora regañada podría dejar bancada de MC Hasta los propios integrantes de Movimiento Ciudadano se sorprendieron con el maltrato del dirigente nacional Dante Delgado a la senadora Indira Kempis, nos dicen. La legisladora, que aspiraba a la candidatura presidencial, tuvo la osadía de decir que había una cargada en favor de Samuel García, lo que le valió una reprimenda pública y la descalificación del proceso interno. Nos aseguran que la senadora analiza la situación en que la deja este episodio dentro de la bancada naranja y la posibilidad de emigrar, por un tema de dignidad. Si esto ocurre, nos hacen ver, el grupo parlamentario de MC, que había crecido a 13 integrantes con la incorporación de Laura Ballesteros, suplente de Xóchitl Gálvez, volvería a tener 12 miembros.
San Lázaro en piloto automático Nos platican que, desde esta semana, la Cámara de Diputados entró en piloto automático, pues luego de aprobar el Paquete Económico 2024 del presidente Andrés Manuel López Obrador, prácticamente ya no tienen nada en el tintero para avalar en los próximos días. Tan es así, que el miércoles pasado citaron para sesionar este miércoles, es decir que se tomaron su puentecito de una semana entera por la conmemoración del Día de la Revolución. Tal parece que, a diferencia del Senado, en la cámara baja ya no hay urgencia por aprobar las miles y miles de reformas que duermen el sueño de los justos y están atoradas en comisiones, incluida la de las 40 horas laborales.
Ya alguno de ustedes sabía de esto? Hoy Xóchitl presentó el #PresupueXtoParaTodos. un presupuesto alterno que busca mejvorar la calidad de vida de las y los mexicanos. 20 beneficios tangibles, viables y necesarios del #PresupueXtoParaTodos: 1.Se garantiza la pensión para los mayores de 60 años. 🧓🏻 2.Se fomenta la igualdad entre mujeres y hombres.👩🏻👨🏻🦱 3.Se impulsa el financiamiento de las policías estatales y municipales.👮♀️ 4.Se regresa el seguro popular y se mejoran los servicios de salud.🏥 5.Se fortalece la capacidad y calidad educativa.👩🏫 6.Se impulsa el deporte y la excelencia deportiva.🤾♀️ 7.Se establece un fondo para el desarrollo de ciudades.🏢 8.Se atraen nuevas inversiones.💸 9.Se impulsa a las pequeñas y medianas empresas.🧑💼 10.Se fomentan sectores estratégicos y nuevas tecnologías. 👩💻 11.Se impulsa la cultura y las artes.📔 12.Se impulsa la sustentabilidad, el combate contra el cambio climático y el crecimiento verde.🌳 13.Se explota el potencial turístico del país🏖️ 14.Se rescatan los parques nacionales. 15.Se fortalecen estados y municipios. 16.Se reduce la deuda del gobierno federal.📉 17.Se elimina la discrecionalidad del presupuesto. 18.Se fomenta el crecimiento económico.💰 19.Se protege la independencia de los órganos autónomos.✅ 20.Se garantiza la constitucionalidad del presupuesto.✅
Ayúdanos a compartir con tus contactos estos beneficios 🤞 #PresupueXtoParaTodos Ver menos
*Acapulco Saw the Future of Hurricanes: More Sudden and Furious*
As of last Monday night in Acapulco, Mexico, no formal hurricane warning had been issued for what would become, barely a day later, the first Category 5 storm ever to make landfall on the Pacific Coast of North or South America.
Forecasts from 36 hours before landfall had projected maximum winds of 60 miles per hour. Sixteen hours before landfall, the National Hurricane Center still forecast only a Category 1 hurricane. Within hours, what had been a quotidian tropical storm grew into a record-breaking, city-splintering Category 5 monster. The wind reached 165 miles per hour, more than 100 miles per hour greater than had been forecast around bedtime on Monday. Dozens died. The resort city, home to one million people, was left “in ruins”: the electricity cut out, as did water and internet service. The damage was almost certain to make the storm the most expensive one in Mexican history. “In all of Acapulco there is not a standing pole,” President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico said on Thursday. One station registered wind above 200 miles per hour; the local forest was so thoroughly cleared of branches and leaves that satellite images flipped from green to brown. Some large high-rises had been ripped apart, others made skeletal; you could see clear through the building frames, an empty stack of boxes open to the winds. A day or two before, people living in those apartments might not have even heard about the storm.
The damage is, if spectacular, also tragically familiar. But the out-of-nowhere arrival is profoundly new. Hurricane Otis had the second-most drastic intensification of any storm on record in the eastern Pacific. The most dramatic one intensified much farther from shore, and did not make landfall as a Category 5.
In this way, Otis seems less like our conventional experience of hurricanes, according to which vulnerable communities are afforded by meteorologists perhaps a week of warning and a few calm days for evacuation, than of wildfires, which can spark so suddenly and spread so rapidly that those living in high-risk areas often spend weeks of summer on red-flag alert ready to evacuate on just a few hours’ notice. High water temperature is to hurricanes what low humidity and strong winds are to wildfires, and perhaps those living on hurricane-prone coasts will soon begin monitoring ocean heat like those living in the wildland-urban interface routinely track “fire weather,” knowing what unusually warm conditions offshore mean for what a new storm might quickly become.
*Here’s What Doesn’t Happen After a Mass Shooting*
A few things you can bet on when there’s been a terrible mass shooting in this country.
One is that the heartbreaking stories about victims and chilling ones about the craziness of the shooter will not necessarily be followed by a strong bipartisan drive for significantly better gun laws.
POP QUIZ
After an assault-rifle-brandishing madman killed 18 people and injured 13 more in Maine, the new House speaker, Mike Johnson, was asked what to do about mass shootings. He said:
A. “Let’s ban assault weapons, pronto.”
B. “Shooting? What shooting?”
C. “Hey, I thought you said you were going to ask about impeaching Biden.”
D. “The problem is the human heart, not guns.”
Did you guess it was D, people? Perhaps we should avoid complaining until we see if Speaker Johnson proposes new legislation requiring the police to stop and search all human hearts.
Gun control — or, as its proponents prefer, gun safety — always becomes a big topic of conversation after a horrific shooting. But nothing else necessarily happens.
One of the very few serious improvements came last year when Congress finally passed a reform bill drafted by Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut. Who had been working on that kind of legislation for nearly a decade, ever since one crazed man with an assault rifle killed 26 people, including 20 small children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in his congressional district.
Passing the bill was quite a leap forward from the time Murphy first brought up the idea and could find only one Republican colleague even willing to sit down and discuss it. But success didn’t come until after another mass shooting at a Texas school took the lives of 19 children and two teachers.
Murphy’s bill expanded background checks for gun buyers under 21 and made it easier to keep weapons out of the hands of domestic abusers. Great idea, right? Unfortunately, a federal appeals court recently declared that it’s unconstitutional to bar people from owning guns just because they have … domestic violence restraining orders against them.
Yes! That decision involved Zackey Rahimi, who was having a fight with his girlfriend in a Texas parking lot, began beating her head against the car dashboard, and then pulled his gun and fired at a bystander-witness. It was one of many, many shootings Rahimi had been accused of, and he was charged under that domestic violence restraining order law.
No no no no, said the appeals court: Remember the Second Amendment.
Now, the Rahimi case is on its way to — oh dear — the Supreme Court. A group that basically said last year that gun legislation will fly only if our founders had come up with an “analogous” measure.
“I don’t think anybody’s conceded the court will rule against us on Rahimi,” the ever-optimistic Murphy said when I called him. “If they did, it would be just an absolute, stunning blow to democracy.”
About the founders: Historians will tell you that when the Constitution was adopted, America had no significant standing army. Perfectly reasonable, therefore, that George Washington and his colleagues wanted the citizenry to be ready to rise up and fight if the British re-invaded.
I asked the senator what he thought Washington would say to him about our current gun laws if the two of them sat down for lunch. Murphy demurred: “He’d probably have a lot of other things he’d want to talk about.”
*Risk of a Wider Middle East War Threatens a ‘Fragile’ World Economy*
After shocks from the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there’s little cushion if the fighting between Hamas and Israel becomes a regional conflict.
Fears that Israel’s expanding military operations in Gaza could escalate into a regional conflict are clouding the global economy’s outlook, threatening to dampen growth and reignite a rise in energy and food prices.
Rich and poor nations were just beginning to catch their breath after a three-year string of economic shocks that included the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Stinging inflation has been dropping, oil prices have stabilized and predicted recessions have been avoided.
Now, some leading international financial institutions and private investors warn that the fragile recovery could turn bad.
“This is the first time that we’ve had two energy shocks at the same time,” said Indermit Gill, chief economist at the World Bank, referring to the impact of the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East on oil and gas prices.
Those price increases not only chip away at the buying power of families and companies but also push up the cost of food production, adding to high levels of food insecurity, particularly in developing countries like Egypt, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
As it is, nations are already struggling with unusually high levels of debt, limp private investment and the slowest recovery in trade in five decades, making it tougher for them to grow their way out of the crisis. Higher interest rates, the result of central bank efforts to tame inflation, have made it more difficult for governments and private companies to get access to credit and stave off default.
“All of these things are happening all at the same time,” Mr. Gill said. “We are in one of the most fragile junctures for the world economy.”
Mr. Gill’s assessment echoes those of other analysts. Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, said last month that “this may be the most dangerous time the world has seen in decades,” and described the conflict in Gaza as “the highest and most important thing for the Western world.”
The recent economic troubles have been fueled by deepening geopolitical conflicts that span continents. Tensions between the United States and China over technology transfers and security only complicate efforts to work together on other problems like climate change, debt relief or violent regional conflicts.
The overriding political preoccupations also mean that traditional monetary and fiscal tools like adjusting interest rates or government spending may be less effective.
The brutal fighting between Israel and Hamas has already taken the lives of thousands of civilians and inflicted wrenching misery on both sides. If the conflict stays contained, though, the ripple effects on the world economy are likely to remain limited, most analysts agree.
*Italy’s Prime Minister Broke Up With Her Boyfriend. It’s Actually Quite a Big Deal.*
Giorgia Meloni broke the glass ceiling again. After becoming the first woman and the first post-fascist leader to be prime minister of Italy, she recently became the first head of government to announce on social media that she had dumped her boyfriend.
“My relationship with Andrea Giambruno, which lasted nearly 10 years, ends here,” she wrote in October on X, formerly known as Twitter, informing the country that the couple had been drifting apart and it was time to call it a day. “I have nothing more to say on this,” she concluded.
But that wasn’t really true. She did have more to say.
In a postscript to that message, she addressed “those who hoped to weaken me by striking me in my private life.” “No matter how much a water drop may hope to carve the stone, the stone remains stone and the drop is only water,” she wrote, somewhat cryptically. The strange addendum made clear that behind the personal announcement was a political battle. For days, it was all the papers and news shows could talk about.
Perhaps it’s hard, from afar, to see what all the fuss is about. The ending of Ms. Meloni’s relationship may seem like a trivial — or at least personal — concern. Yet the whole drama, from the circumstances of the boyfriend’s fall from grace to the breakup itself, offers a window onto the nature of power in Italy, where politics, media and business interests are toxically entwined. It says a lot about how the country is run.
Mr. Giambruno and Ms. Meloni met nearly a decade ago in TV studios. She was the ambitious leader of a small far-right party constantly looking for visibility; he was a youngish anchorman on the rise. It seemed a perfect match. The two were open about their political differences on issues like cannabis legalization and same-sex marriage, and despite Ms. Meloni’s enthusiasm for the traditional family, they never married. In 2016 they had a daughter. It was a relationship made and lived in the media limelight. It would end that way, too.
In mid-October, damning off-air videos and audio recordings emerged of Mr. Giambruno. In the videos, he could be heard making inappropriate remarks and awkwardly flirting with a co-worker. (“Why didn’t we meet before?” he complained to her.) In the audio recordings, things went even further. Among many lewd comments, he invited female colleagues to join his team, where they would do “threesomes” and “foursomes.” Days after the recordings became public, Ms. Meloni announced their relationship was over.
The network where Mr. Giambruno works — he was suspended from his show last week but remains on staff — is the Mediaset group, the biggest private broadcaster in Italy. His fall was an inside job: Someone recorded the compromising scenes and leaked them to the popular satirical program “Striscia la Notizia,” also broadcast by Mediaset. The company is owned by the Berlusconi family.
When Ms. Meloni took office in October last year, Mr. Giambruno stepped down as anchor of a news program to avoid potential conflicts of interest and went to work behind the scenes on a different show. But it wasn’t long before Mediaset was encouraging him to take a more prominent role. In July he began hosting a daily show on current affairs, inevitably finding himself in the awkward position of commenting on a government led by his partner.
Ms. Meloni, who has always prided herself on being an independent, self-made politician who could not be blackmailed, was suddenly exposed to proxy political attacks as people criticized her partner. Mr. Giambruno didn’t make it difficult: Under heavy scrutiny, he made some serious missteps — like suggesting women should avoid getting drunk if they wanted to avoid sexual predators — and forced Ms. Meloni to publicly clarify that he did not speak on her behalf.
The leaked recordings, deeply embarrassing for the prime minister, were the last straw. Ms. Meloni reportedly read the whole operation as a conspiracy against her. Who was behind it? Marina Berlusconi — a 57-year-old businesswoman and the oldest child of Silvio Berlusconi, the four-time prime minister who died in June — was the obvious culprit. Though she does not have a role in Mediaset (the company is run by her brother Pier Silvio), Ms. Berlusconi is the chair of the company’s parent, Fininvest.
Ms. Berlusconi maintains that she has no intention of running for office, but that doesn’t mean she’s not interested in influencing politics. The family has a leading role in Forza Italia, a conservative party founded by Mr. Berlusconi that plays a small yet decisive role in the government coalition. (It helps that the children agreed to cover the party’s debt, worth $95 million, previously guaranteed by Mr. Berlusconi.) At the same time, the family, at the head of an estimated $6.8 billion empire, wants to make sure the government doesn’t interfere with its business interests.
In September, for example, Ms. Berlusconi sharply criticized the government’s proposed windfall tax on banks that would target the extra profits made from higher interest rates. The measure, a brainchild of Ms. Meloni, would have eaten into the earnings of Banca Mediolanum, which is partly controlled by the Berlusconi family and is central to its empire. Following Ms. Berlusconi’s lead, Forza Italia successfully worked to water down the bill.
*What to Know About the New Covid Variants*
HV.1 has overtaken EG.5 as the leading variant in the U.S.
Two closely related variants, EG.5 and HV.1, now comprise roughly half of the Covid-19 cases in the United States.
EG.5 became the dominant variant nationwide in August. At that time, the World Health Organization classified it as a “variant of interest,” meaning it has genetic changes that give it an advantage and its prevalence was growing. Since then, the variant appears to have plateaued, holding steady at about 20 to 25 percent of cases in September and October.
HV.1 emerged in the United States at the end of the summer and has progressively made up a larger proportion of the circulating virus. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it overtook EG.5 as the dominant variant last week, and now accounts for one in four Covid cases.
Experts have also been watching two other variants, BA.2.86 and JN.1, that make up only a tiny fraction of cases but scientists say carry an alarming number of mutations.
How worried should people be about these variants?
EG.5 & HV.1 While severe illness in older adults and people with underlying conditions is always a concern, as is long Covid in anyone who gets infected, experts say EG.5 and HV.1 do not pose a substantial threat — or at least no more of one than any of the other major variants that have circulated this year.
The EG.5 variant was identified in China in February 2023 and was first detected in the United States in April. It is a descendant of the Omicron variant XBB.1.9.2 and has one notable mutation that helps it to evade antibodies developed by the immune system in response to earlier variants and vaccines.
That mutation “may mean that more people are susceptible because the virus can escape a little bit more of that immunity,” said Andrew Pekosz, a professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health.
But EG.5, which has also been called Eris, does not appear to have any new capacities when it comes to its contagiousness, its symptoms or its likelihood of causing severe illness. Diagnostic tests and treatments such as Paxlovid continue to be effective against it. Perhaps more important, the new vaccines, which target a related XBB variant, appear to produce a sufficient number of antibodies that work against EG.5.
HV.1 is descended from EG.5 and is highly similar to it. There isn’t data yet on how well the new vaccines perform against HV.1, but Dr. Dan Barouch, the head of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, said he doesn’t anticipate it will be substantially different from their efficacy against EG.5.
Given the variants’ similarity, it’s unclear exactly how HV.1 has overtaken EG.5, but one of the few additional mutations in HV.1 has likely given it an edge over its predecessor. “Whenever a new variant dominates, then by definition it has an advantage,” Dr. Barouch said. “And the advantage is either increased transmissibility or increased immune escape.”
BA.2.86 & JN.1 Another variant that scientists were watching closely earlier this fall was BA.2.86, nicknamed Pirola. Experts were initially worried about this variant because of the number of mutations it carries in the spike protein, which is what the virus uses to infect human cells and what our immune systems use to identify it. According to Jesse Bloom, a professor at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center who specializes in virus evolution, the mutations in BA.2.86 represent “an evolutionary jump similar in size” to the changes in the first Omicron variant compared to the original coronavirus strain.
Adding to the concern, early data indicated that the new vaccines may not be very effective against BA.2.86. However, evidence has since emerged that antibody levels produced in response to BA.2.86 are on par with those developed in response to EG.5, suggesting that the vaccines will be sufficiently protective against it. Another study found that BA.2.86 may not be as transmissible as other forms of the virus.
Consequently, BA.2.86 has not taken hold like scientists worried it might; currently, there are no cases of it reported on the C.D.C. variant tracker. Dr. Bloom said that it is not uncommon for new variants to fizzle out instead of spreading widely.
Just like EG.5 evolved to produce HV.1, JN.1 has recently emerged from BA.2.86. According to data released Oct. 18 on X (formerly Twitter) by scientists in China, JN.1 carries a mutation that gives it extra immune-evading capabilities, but it doesn’t appear to bind to human cells as well. Time will tell if JN.1 gains traction or follows the path of BA.2.86.
More than the risk conferred by any individual variant, it is the rapid rate of virus evolution that is most concerning to Trevor Bedford, a professor in the vaccine and infectious disease division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. “No single variant has been that impactful,” he said, “but the overall accumulation of these mutations is having significant impact.”
*Is Arthritis Avoidable?*
Joint pain, stiffness and swelling aren’t always inevitable results of aging, experts say. Here’s what you can do to reduce your risk.
Q: What can we do to avoid getting arthritis as we age?
What was once an easy run may feel tougher to complete. Or perhaps a challenging game of tennis might leave your hip or ankle sore for days.
Painful, stiff or swollen joints are a common complaint among older adults — and for many, they’re the first sign of what may feel like an unavoidable diagnosis: arthritis.
In a recent survey of more than 2,200 people between ages 50 and 80 in the United States, 60 percent said they had been told by a health care provider that they had some form of arthritis. And about three-quarters considered joint pain and arthritis a normal part of aging.
But arthritis is not inevitable as we age, said Kelli Dominick Allen, an exercise physiologist at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine.
“Sometimes people will start to get aches and pains in their joints and not do anything about it because they think everyone gets arthritis as they get older,” Dr. Allen said. “We shouldn’t think about arthritis as something that we just have to deal with passively.”
Arthritis is a catchall term for the more than 100 kinds of inflammatory joint conditions, each of which can arise for different reasons. Many of those causes have little to do with age, Dr. Allen said.
One form of degenerative joint disease, though, known as osteoarthritis, is somewhat more likely to occur as a person gets older, said Dr. Wayne McCormick, a geriatrician at the University of Washington School of Medicine. “It’s basically just worn-out joints,” he said.
Osteoarthritis is most commonly seen among people over 50, particularly women, Dr. Allen said.
Scientists don’t know precisely why some people are more prone to joint inflammation and pain with age than others. But about 12 percent of osteoarthritis cases are a result of joint injuries, such as meniscus or ligament tears, from when they were young.
Arthritis is also more common among people who have a family history of the condition, or who have certain chronic conditions such as obesity, heart disease or diabetes.
Some people may find that their joint pain limits their activities as they age. But others, whose X-rays may show significantly worn-out joints, may experience no pain at all, Dr. McCormick said. As a result, he added, “each person has to develop their own plan of how to stay healthy and functional with the help of their physician.”
For most people, Dr. Allen said, preventing arthritis later in life should begin many years before it is a concern — by taking steps to prevent joint injuries during sports or exercise, and recovering properly when they occur.
For those who are not at risk of developing sports-related injuries, staying physically active and maintaining a healthy weight can help to prevent excessive wear and tear of your joints and to reduce pain if arthritis sets in later in life, Dr. Allen said.
In a 2015 review of 44 clinical trials, for instance, researchers found that participants who exercised regularly had reduced knee pain related to osteoarthritis and improved physical function and quality of life.
“It actually does help if you can do low-impact exercise, like a stationary bicycle where your knees, hips and joints aren’t receiving so much impact,” Dr. McCormick said. Strengthening muscles such as the quadriceps and hamstrings helps to support the joints, he added.
In addition to regular exercise, supportive knee or ankle braces, over-the-counter pain medications such as ibuprofen or acetaminophen, or steroid injections into a problematic joint can all help relieve joint pain to varying degrees, Dr. McCormick said.
Not every option works for everyone, he added, so it’s important to explore and find what helps you to stay active.
Similarly, dietary supplements such as glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate — or herbal remedies such as Boswellia (an herbal extract made from the bark of the Boswellia tree) — may help relieve symptoms for some people. But there isn’t much scientific evidence to support their use, Dr. Allen said.
“There have been a fair number of clinical trials, but really mixed evidence on their effects,” she said.
But Dr. McCormick said that, in his experience, it’s “very unusual for these supplements to be harmful,” so they could be worth trying — or stopping if they don’t seem to help.
Ultimately, finding ways to live a pain-free, active and healthy lifestyle is the best way to reduce your risk of developing arthritis later in life, Dr. Allen said.
Many of the actions that reduce the risk for other chronic conditions such as diabetes or heart disease “are really powerful tools” for lowering age-related joint disease risk too, Dr. Allen said.
“Somebody who’s trying to maintain a healthy lifestyle will already be doing the things that are most important for reducing arthritis risk,” she said.
🌄Excelente día, le compartimos las notas principales de esta mañana por parte de Cadena Política.
*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.
*After Hurricane Otis, Mexican Officials Race to Assess the Damage*
The storm was one of the strongest ever to hit the southwest coast, but the extent of the destruction in Acapulco and elsewhere was unclear early Thursday.
Security and medical officials on Thursday were confronting the destruction brought by one of the most powerful hurricanes ever to hit the southwest region of Mexico, one that struck a tourist haven with little warning.
Mexican officials have been working since Wednesday to restore communication and power to the states of Guerrero and Oaxaca after Otis, which made landfall as a Category 5 hurricane, cut off power for more than half a million residents, battered hotels and ripped the roofs from buildings.
The authorities were particularly concerned about Acapulco, a port city of more than 852,000 people on the Pacific Coast that was in the direct path of Otis. The city, in Guerrero State, was hosting an international mining industry convention when the storm hit; additionally, many hotels were packed with tourists. People stuck there posted videos on social media showing ravaged hotel rooms, doors ripped from hinges and collapsed ceilings.
With the region effectively cut off from the outside world, the extent of the injuries and deaths was still unclear.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador visited the region on Wednesday. Photographs showed him walking in the mud as he visited the Kilómetro 42 community, near Acapulco. Also on Wednesday, Zoé Robledo, the director general of the Mexican Social Security Institute, said he had sent an emergency team of nurses who had recently worked in Haiti.
“We are also preparing personnel teams for conservation issues: medicine supply, personnel strengthening, focusing on the patients,” Mr. Robledo said.
Otis rapidly intensified in the early hours of Wednesday; the storm made landfall with sustained winds of 165 miles per hour, before dissipating as it headed inland over southern Mexico. Just a day earlier, its sustained winds had been only 65 miles per hour.
Forecasters and the Mexican authorities were shocked by the magnitude of the storm. Their models largely failed to predict that it would intensify so abruptly, creating what Eric Blake, a forecaster with the National Hurricane Center, called a “nightmare scenario” in a forecast he wrote on Tuesday night, as the storm was approaching southern Mexico and its potential danger was becoming clear.
Guerrero State has also been plagued by violence in recent years. Just this week, an armed group ambushed and killed more than a dozen law enforcement officers, including a local security secretary and a police chief in Coyuca de Benítez.
*A Timeline of the Shootings in Lewiston, Maine*
Around 7 p.m. on Wednesday, shootings occurred at a bowling alley and a bar in Lewiston, Maine. The police said that a suspect was still at large on Thursday.
Around 7 p.m. Wednesday. A shooting at Just-In-Time Recreation, a bowling alley in Lewiston, Maine, led to “multiple casualties,” according to the authorities. That was followed by reports of a shooting at Schemengees Bar & Grille, a 12-minute drive away.
Around 8 p.m. The authorities released photos of an armed suspect and urged people to stay inside with their doors locked. Hundreds of officers were working across Maine to find the gunman, said Mike Sauschuck, who oversees public safety for the state.
8:30 p.m. Officials in Auburn, directly across the river from Lewiston, urged residents to shelter in place, lock all doors and report suspicious people.
Just before 9 p.m. The Lewiston police identified Schemengees Bar & Grille as a second shooting location. They asked drivers to stay off the roads to allow emergency responders access to hospitals.
Around 9:15 p.m. The Lewiston police released photos of a vehicle they were searching for, a small white car whose front bumper may be painted black.
Around 11 p.m. The police department in Lewiston named Robert R. Card of Bowdoin, Maine, as a person of interest in the shootings, saying that he “should be considered armed and dangerous.” They urged the public not to approach Mr. Card or make contact with him if they saw him.
Around 11:30 p.m. Mr. Sauschuck said that a vehicle of interest had been found in Lisbon, about eight miles from Lewiston. The person of interest remained at large.
After 6 a.m. Thursday: Maine’s State Police said it was expanding its shelter-in-place advisory for Lewiston, the state’s second-largest city after Portland, to include Bowdoin, about 15 miles away. Classes at Bates College in Lewiston, at Lewiston Public Schools and in neighboring school districts were canceled for Thursday.
*Tragedy Interrupted an American Pastime at a Maine Bowling Alley*
The first of two shootings in Lewiston, Maine, on Wednesday occurred at a bowling alley with a restaurant.
The first of the two shootings in Lewiston, Maine, took place at a bowling alley, interrupting an American pastime on an ordinary Wednesday evening.
The facility, which the police identified as Sparetime Recreation and whose website says its name is now Just-In-Time Recreation, has 22 lanes that host bowling leagues, corporate events and birthday parties with unlimited soda. Its restaurant’s offerings include nachos, wings and potato skins.
“Thanks for playing,” reads a sign on some glass doors near the exit, according to photograph posted on the venue’s Instagram page two years ago. “See you again in your spare time!”
On the bowling alley’s Facebook page, the management has posted photos of smiling customers and congratulated people for bowling perfect games. This month, there was a notice advertising an annual fund-raiser for fighting hunger.
In the predawn hours on Thursday, Lewiston was under lockdown and nearly deserted. Around 2 a.m., a few reporters were congregating near a sports bar and a Subway sandwich shop at the corner of Mollison Way, a road leading to the bowling alley. The Lewiston police said the road was among several near the locations of the shootings that would be closed.
“We all went bowling as kids growing up here,” said Mar Mcenery, 52, who lives four miles from the bowling alley and had come to see the scene for herself at 4 a.m. despite the citywide lockdown order. “Especially when the weather gets colder — the bowling alley and the ice rink, that’s what we do.”
Ms. Mcenery said the bowling center was a popular hangout for local teenagers. “There were a lot of kids there, children and teenagers,” she said. “Who do we know that was in there? We live in a town of 30,000 people — we have to know somebody.”
*The Speakership Is Yours, Mike Johnson. Good Luck With That.*
That House speaker mess was all Donald Trump’s fault. Yeah, yeah, I know you’re not going to argue with me if I blame him for something bad. (“Saturday night’s block party was canceled because of the threat of rain and … Donald Trump.”) Still, follow this thought.
The House Republicans are a rancorous crew, and they’ve got only a nine-member majority, one of the tightest in recent history. We’ve been hearing all week that a mere five rebels can halt progress on anything, even a basic task like electing a speaker. Interesting how narrow that majority is. Normally, in nonpresidential-election years, the party that didn’t win the White House gets a lift — often a huge one. Some voters are looking for balance, others are just kinda bored. Given the deeply nonelectric nature of Joe Biden’s victory, you’d figure the Republicans would have made a scary sweep in 2022.
But no — and one of the reasons was the completely loopy candidates running on Republican lines in districts that should have been up for grabs. Some had been handpicked by Trump, like Bo Hines, a 28-year-old former college football star who moved into a North Carolina swing district a month before the May primary, won the nomination with the ex-president’s enthusiastic support and then, well, went down the drain.
Trump endorsed three candidates in tossup districts last year; all of them lost. Plus there were lots of other dreadful Trump-backed contenders on the ballots — like Mehmet Oz, the longtime New Jersey resident who ran a disastrous race for the Senate in Pennsylvania and almost certainly pulled down the rest of his party’s ticket.
POP QUIZ:
Donald Trump, who’s facing 91 criminal charges around the country, is now on trial in New York for falsifying records to make himself look like an, um, non-failure in the real estate business. This week, he compared himself to a South African Nobel Peace Prize winner who served time in prison for his battles against apartheid. (“I don’t mind being Nelson Mandela, because I’m doing it for a reason.”) He’s also compared himself to:
A) Abraham Lincoln
B) Jesus
C) George Washington
D) The Mona Lisa
The answer is everybody but Jesus. And he did recently post a sketch on Truth Social showing Christ next to him in the courtroom.
All that flailing around over selecting a House speaker was due, in part, to the Republicans’ failure to corral their Flimsy Five around any of the original contenders. But it was also very, very much about Trump’s lack of enthusiasm for logical candidates like Tom Emmer, the House Republican whip, who’d made the dreaded mistake of voting to certify the results of the last presidential election.
“I have many wonderful friends wanting to be Speaker of the House, and some are truly great Warriors,” Trump declaimed. “RINO Tom Emmer, who I do not know well, is not one of them. He never respected the Power of a Trump Endorsement.”
RINO, of course, stands for Republican in Name Only, something Trump has truly hated ever since he registered as a Republican in Manhattan back in 1987. Until he registered with the Independence Party in 1999, followed by the Democratic Party in 2001. But hey, he became a Republican again in 2009, then dropped his party affiliation in 2011, and switched back to being a Republican in 2012. There is absolutely no reason to imagine he would ever switch again. Unless, you know, there was something in it for him.
Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who finally won the speaker’s job, is exactly the kind of guy you’d expect to come up on top. Right-wing anti-abortion activist who gets along with his colleagues and who, crucially, has items in his résumé that won Trump’s heart. A former radio talk show host who helped lead the Republicans’ battle to overturn the election results! What could be more perfect?
“GET IT DONE, FAST! LOVE, DJT!” our ex-president posted on Truth Social.
(Earlier, once Emmer had crashed, Trump praised all the possible successors to the ousted Kevin McCarthy as “fine and very talented men.” Quick question: What’s missing in that description? One minor detail — the candidate swarm was notably lacking in female representation. Just saying.)
So the beat goes on. Mike Johnson’s friends are celebrating. Much of the rest of the nation is wondering why the heck anybody would ever want to be speaker of the House with its current crush of Republican crazies.
Welcome to your new job, Mike. Hope you enjoyed your big day. Just remember that it won’t be long before Congress has to pass another bill to keep the government operating or send the country teetering into disaster.
*How Will Israel Pay for Its War?*
While the world’s eyes are on Gaza, another drama is unfolding in Jerusalem. There, lawmakers and government ministers are tussling over how to pay for the war against Hamas. There’s a debate over how much, if any, of the money should come from special allotments that were made earlier this year to the ultra-Orthodox and to settlers in the West Bank.
Eight days after the murderous Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, Bezalel Smotrich, the radical rightist who serves as finance minister in the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said at a news conference that he had issued instructions to change the order of budgetary priorities. At the time, he didn’t seem to exempt so-called coalition funds, much of which are earmarked for the ultra-Orthodox and the settlers. Coalition funds are an obvious potential source for the war effort because they’re not required for the basic operations of government.
More recently, though, Smotrich has shown little interest in diverting funds intended for the ultra-Orthodox and the settlers to pay for the war and for aid to displaced civilians. “There really isn’t a lack of money,” Smotrich said, according to an article in TheMarker, a business daily published by Ha’aretz. Pressed on whether some war funding would come from the ultra-Orthodox and the settlers, he said, “At least in the war, let’s put populism aside.”
Smotrich’s seeming protection of the special allocations to the ultra-Orthodox and the settler movement isn’t likely to sit well with many Israelis. Impatience with those two groups was rising even before the war. It’s likely even stronger now.
One reason is that nearly half of ultra-Orthodox men don’t work, and the vast majority don’t serve in the army. (The Hamas attack did produce a burst of enlistments.) The ultra-Orthodox have their own school system, funded by the government, that teaches few if any skills needed by the modern work force. The budget passed last spring increases state funding for religious seminaries by at least 50 percent and more than triples funding for the ultra-Orthodox school system, according to an assessment by the Berl Katznelson Center, a political research group.
As for the settlement movement, its rapid expansion in the West Bank, subsidized by the right-wing government, enrages Palestinians as well as Arabs in other countries. (The International Court of Justice has stated that the settlements violate international law — a stance the Israeli government rejects.) Smotrich is one of the settler movement’s strongest supporters. He obtained new powers over civilian life in the West Bank as a condition of joining Netanyahu’s government. He approved construction of thousands more homes in the occupied territories and made it harder for Palestinians to build homes and move around. He has written that his goal is a full Israeli takeover of the West Bank, with Arab residents given local self-governance but no right to vote, at least at first, in national elections.
While the political system hasn’t stopped Smotrich and other right-wing figures in the Netanyahu cabinet — including Itamar Ben Gvir, the minister of national security — economic reality might slow them down. As war expenses grow, there will be increasing pressure to take back some of the special aid promised to the ultra-Orthodox and the settlers.
Israel has mobilized about 360,000 soldiers for a possible invasion of Gaza and to defend Israel from a potential full-scale attack by Hezbollah across the northern border. That takes many prime-age workers out of the labor force. In addition, many Israelis have been evacuated from towns and villages near Gaza and the border with Lebanon. Some are being housed at government expense. Revenue from tourism has shriveled. In the long run, perhaps the biggest expense will be strengthening defenses so people feel safe returning to those areas. The supposedly impregnable fence on the border with Gaza clearly wasn’t.
The Israeli shekel, which was already losing strength, has fallen 5 percent against the dollar since the beginning of the month, before the Hamas attack. The value of the shekel is a “seismograph” of investors’ feelings about Israel, Karnit Flug, a former governor of the Bank of Israel, told me. Israeli stock indexes have slumped and the cost of buying protection against the default of government bonds has soared. Standard & Poor’s Global Ratings, Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings have warned that they may cut the credit ratings on those bonds.
It’s important not to overstate Israel’s financial woes. Before the Hamas attack, the economy was healthy, unemployment was low, inflation was under control, the government budget deficit was small (at around 1.3 percent of gross domestic product), foreign currency reserves were ample and what’s called the current account — a broad measure of trade in goods and services plus investment income — was in surplus. The Bank of Israel projected on Monday that if the war is mostly over by the end of December and is confined to Gaza, gross domestic product growth will come in at 2.3 percent this year (down 0.7 percentage point from its prewar projection) and 2.8 percent in 2024 (down 0.2 percentage point from its prewar projection). Those are healthy numbers.
On the other hand, things could turn out much worse — say, if the Iran-backed Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon attack on a large scale or if things go badly for Israel in Gaza. Even a prolonged period of uncertainty would be harmful. Manuel Trajtenberg, an Israeli economist who has served in the Knesset and in government advisory roles, told me that Israel’s predicament is unprecedented since the nation’s founding in 1948: lots of troops mobilized, many people displaced from their homes, and no idea when it will end. “People are so devastated by this,” he said. “The idea of Jews being refugees in their own country. It’s inconceivable and we are experiencing that now within Israel.”
As a small country in a dangerous neighborhood, Israel gets less benefit of the doubt from investors than, say, the United States does. With that in mind, Trajtenberg argues that Israel should keep its financial house in order in part by diverting funds from the ultra-Orthodox and settlers to pay for the war, rather than just borrowing the money. “Once you go that route,” of borrowing rather than reprioritizing, “it’s a very bad signal for a country that’s already going through a crisis,” Trajtenberg said. “You want to signal that you can be fiscally responsible.”
Flug, the former central bank chief who is now the vice president for research at the Israel Democracy Institute in Jerusalem, had a similar message. “I think it’s very irresponsible” to run a big budget deficit, she told me. “We can’t afford getting to a point where our debt sustainability will be questioned by the market.”
At the moment Israel remains in shock over the lethal Hamas attack and torn over how to deal with the threat that continues to emanate from Gaza. As the weeks go on, though, I predict, people will return to the issues that troubled the country before Hamas struck. And the public pressure for givebacks from the ultra-Orthodox and the settlers — overlapping groups, by the way — is bound to increase.
*The Palestine Double Standard*
I’ve moved back to the United States twice since my birth. Once as a child, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Then again for graduate school. I’d had the privilege of a youth — adolescence and young adulthood — in countries where being Palestinian was fairly common. The identity could be heavy, but it wasn’t a contested one. I hadn’t had to learn the respectability politics of being a Palestinian adult. I learned quickly.
The task of the Palestinian is to be palatable or to be condemned. The task of the Palestinian, we’ve seen in the past two weeks, is to audition for empathy and compassion. To prove that we deserve it. To earn it.
In the past couple of weeks, I’ve watched Palestinian activists, lawyers, professors get baited and interrupted on air, if not silenced altogether. They are being made to sing for the supper of airtime and fair coverage. They are begging reporters to do the most basic tasks of their job. At the same time, Palestinians fleeing from bombs have been misidentified. Even when under attack, they must be costumed as another people to elicit humanity. Even in death, they cannot rest — Palestinians are being buried in mass graves or in old graves dug up to make room, and still there is not enough space.
If that weren’t enough, Palestinian slaughter is too often presented ahistorically, untethered to reality: It is not attributed to real steel and missiles, to occupation, to policy. To earn compassion for their dead, Palestinians must first prove their innocence. The real problem with condemnation is the quiet, sly tenor of the questions that accompany it: Palestinians are presumed violent — and deserving of violence — until proved otherwise. Their deaths are presumed defensible until proved otherwise. What is the word of a Palestinian against a machinery that investigates itself, that absolves itself of accused crimes? What is it against a government whose representatives have referred to Palestinians as “human animals” and “wild beasts?” When a well-suited man can say brazenly and unflinchingly that there is no such thing as a Palestinian people?
It is, of course, a remarkably effective strategy. A slaughter isn’t a slaughter if those being slaughtered are at fault, if they’ve been quietly and effectively dehumanized — in the media, through policy — for years. If nobody is a civilian, nobody can be a victim.
*** In 2017, I published a novel about a Palestinian family. It was published by a respectable publisher, got a lot of lovely press, was given a book tour. I spoke on panels, to book clubs. I answered questions after readings. There was a refrain that kept coming up. People kept commenting on how human the story was. You’ve humanized the conflict. This is a human story.
Of course, literature and the arts play a crucial role in providing context — expanding our empathy, granting us glimpses into other worlds. But every time I was told I’d humanized the Palestinians, I would have to suppress the question it invoked: What had they been before?
A couple of weeks ago, in a professional space, someone called Palestinians by name and spoke of the seven decades of their anguish. I sat among dozens of co-workers and realized my lip was quivering. I was crying before I understood it was happening. I fled the room, and it took 10 minutes for me to stop sobbing. I didn’t immediately understand my reaction. Over the years, I’ve faced meetings, classrooms and other institutional spaces where Palestinians went unnamed or were referred to only as terrorists. I came of professional age in a country where people lost all sorts of things for speaking of Palestine: social standing, university tenure, journalist positions. But in the end, I am undone not by silence or erasure but by empathy. By the simple naming of my people. By increasing recognition that liberation is linked. By spaces of Palestinian-Jewish solidarity. By what has become controversial: the simple speaking aloud of Palestinian suffering.
These days, everyone is trying to write about the children. An incomprehensible number of them dead and counting. We are up at night, combing through the flickering light of our phones, trying to find the metaphor, the clip, the photograph to prove a child is a child. It is an unbearable task. We ask: Will this be the image that finally does it? This half-child on a rooftop? This video, reposted by Al Jazeera, of an inconsolable girl appearing to recognize her mother’s body among the dead, screaming out, “It’s her, it’s her. I swear it’s her. I know her from her hair”?
*** Take it from a writer: There is nothing like the tedium of trying to come up with analogies. There is something humiliating in trying to earn solidarity. I keep seeing infographics desperately trying to appeal to American audiences. Imagine most of the population of Manhattan being told to evacuate in 24 hours. Imagine the president of [ ] going on NBC and saying all [ ] people are [ ]. Look! Here’s a strip on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea. That’s Gaza. It is about the same size as Philadelphia. Or multiply the entire population of Las Vegas by three.
This is demoralizing work, to have to speak constantly in the vernacular of tragedies and atrocities, to say: Look, look. Remember? That other suffering that was eventually deemed unacceptable? Let me hold it up to this one. Let me show you proportion. Let me earn your outrage. Absent that, let me earn your memory. Please.
I don’t hesitate for a second to condemn the killing of any child, any massacre of civilians. It is the easiest ask in the world. And it is not in spite of that but because of that I say: Condemn the brutalization of bodies. By all means, do. Condemn murder. Condemn violence, imprisonment, all forms of oppression. But if your shock and distress comes only at the sight of certain brutalized bodies? If you speak out but not when Palestinian bodies are besieged and murdered, abducted and imprisoned? Then it is worth asking yourself which brutalization is acceptable to you, even quietly, even subconsciously, and which is not.
Name the discrepancy and own it. If you can’t be equitable, be honest.
There is nothing complicated about asking for freedom. Palestinians deserve equal rights, equal access to resources, equal access to fair elections and so forth. If this makes you uneasy, then you must ask yourself why.
*Can’t Sleep? Try This Proven Alternative to Medication.*
Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia is considered the most effective treatment for people who continually struggle to fall or stay asleep.
About one in four adults in the United States develops symptoms of insomnia each year. In most cases, these are short-lived, caused by things like stress or illness. But one in 10 adults is estimated to have chronic insomnia, which means difficulty falling or staying asleep at least three times a week for three months or longer.
Sleep deprivation doesn’t just create physical health problems, it can also harm our minds. A recent poll from the National Sleep Foundation, for example, found a link between poor sleep health and depressive symptoms. In addition, studies have shown that a lack of sleep can lead otherwise healthy people to experience anxiety and distress. Fortunately, there is a well-studied and proven treatment for insomnia that generally works in eight sessions or less: cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, or C.B.T.-I.
If you cannot find a provider, C.B.T.-I. instruction is easy to access online. Yet it is rarely the first thing people try, said Aric Prather, a sleep researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who treats patients with insomnia.
Instead, they often turn to medication. According to a 2020 survey from the Centers for Disease Control, more than 8 percent of adults reported taking sleep medication every day or most days to help them fall or stay asleep.
Studies have found that C.B.T.-I. is as effective as using sleep medications in the short term and more effective in the long term. Clinical trial data suggests that as many as 80 percent of the people who try C.B.T.-I. see improvements in their sleep and most patients find relief in four to eight sessions, even if they have had insomnia for decades, said Philip Gehrman, the director of the Sleep, Neurobiology and Psychopathology lab at the University of Pennsylvania.
Sleep aids can carry risks, especially for older people, who may experience problems like falls, memory issues or confusion as a result of using the medication. C.B.T.-I., on the other hand, is considered safe for adults of any age. It can even be adapted for use in children.
What is C.B.T.-I.? Many people mistakenly assume that C.B.T.-I. is entirely focused on sleep hygiene — the routines and environment that are conducive to good sleep, said Shelby Harris, a psychologist with a private practice in the New York City area who specializes in C.B.T.-I.
C.B.T.-I. does use a series of treatments to target behaviors that are inhibiting sleep, like daytime naps or using digital devices before bed, and replaces them with more effective ones, like sticking to a consistent wake time. But it also aims to address anxieties and negative beliefs about sleep.
Much of the time, insomnia can lead to the feeling that sleep has become “unpredictable and broken,” Dr. Prather said. “Every day people with chronic insomnia are thinking about ‘How am I going to sleep tonight?’”
C.B.T.-I. teaches people different ways to relax, like deep breathing and mindfulness meditation, and helps patients develop realistic expectations about their sleep habits.
It is especially important that people with insomnia learn to view their bed as a place for restful sleep rather than associating it with tossing and turning. Patients undergoing C.B.T.-I. are asked to get out of bed if they are not asleep after around 20 or 30 minutes and do a quiet activity in dim lighting that doesn’t involve electronics. In addition, they are told to stay in bed only while drowsy or sleeping.
“C.B.T.-I. leads to more consolidated sleep and shorter time to fall asleep which is a major gain for many,” Dr. Harris said.
How do you find a provider? If you’re having problems sleeping, first visit your health care provider to rule out any physical problems (like a thyroid imbalance, chronic pain or sleep apnea) or a psychological issue such as depression that might require separate treatment, the experts said.
You can search for a provider who is a member of the Society of Behavioral Sleep Medicine or use the Penn International CBT-I Provider Directory. Your primary care doctor may also provide a referral. If you’re using a general online therapist directory like Psychology Today, be wary of those who claim to offer insomnia treatment but do not have specific training in C.B.T.-I., Dr. Harris warned.
Finding someone who specializes in C.B.T.-I. may prove difficult — especially one who takes insurance — because there are fewer than 700 clinicians trained in behavioral sleep medicine in the United States. And one 2016 study found they are unevenly distributed: 58 percent of these providers practicing in 12 states. The clinic where Dr. Prather works, for example, has hundreds of people on its waiting list.
Can you try C.B.T.-I. without a provider? A review of clinical trials found that self-directed online C.B.T.-I. programs were just as effective as face-to-face C.B.T.-I. counseling. If you are self-motivated, there are several low-cost or free resources that can teach you the main principles.
One option is the five-week program Conquering Insomnia, which ranges in price from about $50 for a PDF guide to $70 for a version that includes audio relaxation techniques and feedback about your sleep diary from Dr. Gregg D. Jacobs, the sleep and insomnia expert who developed the program.
You can also check out Insomnia Coach, a free app created by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs that can be used by anyone. It offers a guided, weekly training plan to help you track and improve sleep; tips for sleeping; an interactive sleep diary; and personal feedback.
Sleepio is another reputable app, Dr. Harris said. There are also free online resources from the A.A.S.M. and educational handouts from the National Institutes of Health, which include a sample sleep diary and a guide to healthy sleep.
And for those who prefer to avoid technology entirely, more than one expert recommended the workbook “Quiet Your Mind and Get to Sleep” by Colleen E. Carney and Rachel Manber.
*Por si le faltara algo a Guerrero*
Las desgracias caen sobre los guerrerenses un día sí y otro también.
No se tenía registro de un huracán que ingresara a tierra firme siendo categoría 5 y ahí están los resultados. Las primeras imágenes de los destrozos provocados por “Otis” son impactantes, pues la otrora alegre Costera “Miguel Alemán” se parece a la franja de Gaza. No quiero imaginar cómo están los habitantes de otros municipios.
¿Cuánto costará la reconstrucción? Difícil saber a estas alturas. Por lo pronto, el presidente de la Comisión de Turismo, el diputado Jericó Abramo (PRI), ha solicitado que la Secretaría de Hacienda redirija 10 mil millones de pesos para enfrentar el desastre. ¿Habrá tales fondos en las arcas públicas? En teoría deben estar en la Unidad de Política y Control Presupuestario de la SHCP ante la desaparición del FONDEN, pero con eso de que las megaobras siguen consumiendo recursos… Por su parte, Hacienda ha informado que el gobierno cuenta con seguros para enfrentar la catástrofe. Ya veremos.
El huracán “Otis” vendrá a exacerbar la de por sí lamentable situación de la entidad, al tiempo que ocultará temporalmente sus grandes deficiencias institucionales.
Según CONEVAL, 72 por ciento de la población se encuentra en condición de pobreza multidimensional y una cuarta parte está en pobreza extrema; es decir, las carencias campean lo mismo en las zonas urbanas que en las rurales (Reporte de Pobreza de Guerrero 2022).
Hay algunas dimensiones de la pobreza que no necesariamente tienen que ver con los ingresos de los guerrerenses, pues las autoridades estatales o federal las debieran atender. Me refiero al acceso a servicios de salud, el cual empeoró entre 2018 y 2020, al pasar de 14 a 33 por ciento, probablemente como efecto de la transición del Seguro Popular al INSABI. Una cuarte parte de la población sufre rezago educativo. Sería de esperar que el IMSS-Bienestar y la SEP se dieran una vuelta por ahí.
Poco más de la mitad de los habitantes tienen insuficiencia de servicios básicos en la vivienda, como un baño funcional o suministro diario de agua. Lo más grave es que una tercera parte está mal alimentada. Ninguna de estas carencias son de extrañar, pues 70 por ciento de los guerrerenses tienen un ingreso inferior a la línea de pobreza.
Desde hace varias décadas, en Guerrero se aplican programas sociales pero no han sacado adelante a la población. De hecho, la pobreza apenas disminuyó 1.5 por ciento en los últimos tres años.
En Guerrero, los programas sociales cumplen con 13 de las 14 normas que los rigen; la excepción es… ¡Adivinó usted!, el Padrón de Beneficiarios. Si no se sabe a quién se le entregan los apoyos, por muy bien que esté el resto de la normatividad, la transparencia en el manejo de los recursos se pone en duda. Y con los datos de pobreza que le comparto, pues no veo efectividad alguna de los programas. ¿Corrupción? Tal vez.
Lo anterior nos lleva a la debilidad institucional que, sumada a la pobreza, hace de Guerrero el lugar perfecto para el arraigo del crimen organizado.
Desde hace seis décadas, en la entidad se inició el cultivo de amapola y de marihuana, aprovechando su orografía y sus condiciones climáticas. Claro, las ganancias siempre han sido para los narcos, porque los campesinos siguen en la postración intergeneracional.
Al día de hoy, hay 16 bandas principales operando en siete regiones, como Los Tlacos, Los Ardillos y Los Rojos; hacia arriba, cada una de ellas se liga con alguno de los grandes cárteles y, hacia abajo, también cada una tiene bandas menores adheridas. Durante todo este año han sido notorios los enfrentamientos entre las bandas por la disputa de las plazas y sus alrededores, pero no solo por la producción y trasiego de droga, sino también ppr el derecho de piso, el control del transporte público, el abasto de alimentos y toda actividad económica legal de la cual puedan extraer alguna ganancia ilegal.
La debilidad institucional es tal que en julio pasado cuando fue detenido un líder transportista ligado al narco, Chilpancingo se paralizó por completo sin que la Guardia Nacional pudiera poner orden. Al final, la gobernadora tuvo que sentarse a negociar.
En Guerrero lo mismo asesinan taxistas que no se someten, que a delegados de la FGR y no pasa nada. El lunes pasado, 13 policías municipales de Coyuca de Benítez fueron emboscados y, en el colmo, la Fiscalía del Estado suspendió actividades en Tierra Caliente para no exponer a su personal. Si la Fiscalía no puede, ¿quién?
Corrupción, delincuencia organizada, negligencia gubernamental y pobreza han caracterizado a Guerrero por décadas. Y ahora, hasta la Naturaleza se sumó.
Me temo, señora secretaria, que Guerrero necesita mucho más que esos 10 mil millones de pesos.
*A Close Look at Some Key Evidence in the Gaza Hospital Blast*
A widely cited missile video does not shed light on what happened, a Times analysis concludes.
The video shows a projectile streaking through the darkened skies over Gaza and exploding in the air. Seconds later, another explosion is seen on the ground.
The footage has become a widely cited piece of evidence as Israeli and American officials have made the case that an errant Palestinian rocket malfunctioned in the sky, fell to the ground and caused a deadly explosion at Al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza City.
But a detailed visual analysis by The New York Times concludes that the video clip — taken from an Al Jazeera television camera livestreaming on the night of Oct. 17 — shows something else. The missile seen in the video is most likely not what caused the explosion at the hospital. It actually detonated in the sky roughly two miles away, The Times found, and is an unrelated aspect of the fighting that unfolded over the Israeli-Gaza border that night.
The Times’s finding does not answer what actually did cause the Al-Ahli Arab hospital blast, or who is responsible. The contention by Israeli and American intelligence agencies that a failed Palestinian rocket launch is to blame remains plausible. But the Times analysis does cast doubt on one of the most-publicized pieces of evidence that Israeli officials have used to make their case and complicates the straightforward narrative they have put forth.
The hospital blast has become a searing, contested episode in the war that began on Oct. 7 after Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, invaded Israel, an attack that the Israeli government says killed more than 1,400 civilians and soldiers, and seized 200 hostages who were taken back to Gaza. Israel has responded to the Hamas attack with a relentless artillery and bombing campaign that has killed 5,700 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-run Gazan Health Ministry, as the Israeli military prepares for a ground invasion.
Israeli officials and Palestinian militants blame each other for the Al-Ahli Arab explosion. Multiple videos assembled and analyzed by The Times show that militants were firing dozens of rockets from southwest of the hospital minutes before the blast, and the fiery explosion at the hospital is consistent with a failed rocket falling well short of its target with unspent fuel.
*Maps: Tracking the Attacks in Israel and Gaza*
Deadliest period for Palestinians in the West Bank in 15 years More Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in the past few weeks than in any similar period in at least the past 15 years, according to Palestinian health authorities and historical data from the United Nations.
Israeli forces and settlers have killed 95 Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank since the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, health officials said, a surge in violence in what was already a particularly deadly year in the West Bank. One Israeli soldier was also killed in clashes.
Most of the Palestinian deaths in the West Bank have been in clashes with Israeli forces, while others were the result of settler attacks.
Masked settlers shot and killed three Palestinians in the village of Qusra on Oct. 11, according to Palestinian health officials. At a funeral procession for the victims the next day, settlers attacked again, killing two more Palestinians, a father and son.
The Israeli military carried out a rare airstrike in the West Bank on a mosque in Jenin on Saturday night, killing two. Israel’s military said it was targeting a “terror compound” beneath the mosque that it said was being used to organize an attack.
A raid by Israeli forces on the Nur Shams refugee camp on Thursday ended in the deaths of 13 Palestinians, including five children, as well as an Israeli soldier. The soldier was the first Israeli to have died in the West Bank since Oct. 7, according to U.N. data.
“We are extremely alarmed by the rapidly deteriorating human rights situation in the occupied West Bank and the increase in unlawful use of lethal force,” said Ravina Shamdasani, a spokeswoman for the U.N. human rights chief, Volker Türk.
*Cohen Denounces Trump During Courtroom Face-Off*
Michael D. Cohen accused his onetime boss, Donald J. Trump, of manipulating his net worth as Mr. Trump stared blankly ahead. It was their first interaction in five years.
For five years, Michael D. Cohen has waged battle with Donald J. Trump from afar: on social media, on cable television and in the pages of his books.
But on Tuesday, Mr. Cohen confronted his onetime boss from the witness stand in a Manhattan courtroom, attacking the former president as a criminal and a cheat and defending his own credibility under a barrage of questions.
Mr. Cohen, once Mr. Trump’s loyal fixer and now his antagonist, was testifying in a civil fraud case that threatens to upend the former president’s family business and undermine his public image as a businessman. It was the first time the men had come face to face since 2018, and the reunion was tense. Mr. Trump, seated feet away at the defense table, scoffed and shook his head in apparent frustration.
Mr. Cohen had been called to testify about Mr. Trump’s annual financial statements, which are at the heart of the civil case that the New York attorney general, Letitia James, brought against Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump, Mr. Cohen testified, directed him to “reverse engineer” the statements to reach the former president’s desired net worth.
Although Mr. Cohen had leveled similar accusations before, he had not, until now, made them in the presence of the former president, a man he once idolized. Mr. Cohen nonetheless began calmly and in a clear voice, his New York accent emphasizing his statements about his role at the Trump Organization, where he reported directly to Mr. Trump.
“I was tasked by Mr. Trump to increase the total assets based upon a number that he arbitrarily elected,” Mr. Cohen testified, saying that it was his responsibility to “increase those assets in order to achieve the number.”
Later in the day, the temperature rose when Mr. Cohen was cross-examined by one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Alina Habba. She called Mr. Cohen’s credibility into question, noting that he had admitted to lying under oath when he pleaded guilty to federal crimes in 2018, wrongs that he had said he committed on Mr. Trump’s behalf.
“You have lied under oath numerous times, Mr. Cohen — isn’t that correct?” Ms. Habba asked, referring to his previous guilty pleas.
*Women Will Vote at a Vatican Meeting for the First Time*
Some women participating in a conference on sensitive church issues said they feel heartened by the discussions taking place, though change may remain slow.
When Helena Jeppesen-Spuhler, an advocate for the ordination of women, joined a major Vatican meeting this month, she was skeptical that an institution dominated by men for 2,000 years was ready to listen to women like her.
The gathering of some 300 bishops from around the world also included for the first time nuns and 70 lay people, women among them, who have voting rights. It was called by Pope Francis to discuss the future of the Roman Catholic Church, including sensitive topics — married priests, the blessing of gay couples, sacraments for the divorced and remarried, as well as the role of women.
As the confidential meeting approaches its end on Oct. 29, Ms. Jeppesen-Spuhler said she has been pleasantly surprised. Some clerics — priests, bishops and cardinals — openly supported the advancement of women, she said. Some even backed the ordaining of women as deacons.
There had been “really good discussions,” Ms. Jeppesen-Spuhler said, adding, “It hasn’t been the women against the bishops and cardinals. It’s not that.”
Catholic women have been clamoring for more equal footing and greater say in the workings of the church for years, and while consensus is building for different forms of advancement, there remains deep opposition to the ordination of women as deacons, let alone priests. Deacons are ordained ministers who can preach, perform weddings, funerals and baptisms, but only priests can celebrate Mass.
A decision that momentous rests ultimately with Pope Francis, who is not expected to make any big changes after this month’s meeting, formally called the Synod on Synodality, which will reconvene for a final phase next October.
Critics have said that making women deacons is a slippery slope to making them priests, which would violate 2,000 years of church doctrine and undermine the church’s authority.
“The ordination through sacraments of women as deacons, presbyters, priests and bishops is not possible,” Cardinal Gerhard Müller said in an interview on the eve of the synod, in which he is participating. No pope “can decide something different without undermining the authority of the teachings,” he added.
Still, Ms. Jeppesen-Spuhler, who works for a Swiss Catholic relief agency, said the discussions at the synod reflected what seemed to be a growing support for the idea that women should play a larger and better acknowledged role in the life of local churches.
Women already work in the Church’s hospitals, schools and charities, and in many countries fill ministerial gaps — running parishes and carrying out pastoral responsibilities — where there is a shortage of priests. Yet they are, in the end, subordinate to a male hierarchy.
In canvassing Catholics around world — a two-year process beginning in 2021 that led to this month’s meeting — the role of women emerged as a pressing issue.
Survey respondents cited as priorities “questions of women’s participation and recognition,” and said that “the desire for a greater presence of women in positions of responsibility and governance emerged as crucial elements.”
*Rishi Sunak Is Trying His Best. He’s Probably Still Doomed.*
When Rishi Sunak became prime minister of Britain a year ago, there was little sense of celebration. The markets were in free fall after the disastrous 49-day tenure of his predecessor, Liz Truss, and the government was in disarray. Mr. Sunak, who had been rejected by Conservative Party members earlier in the year, was inserted by lawmakers in the desperate hope he could calm the crisis. Given that the party had just ousted two leaders in quick succession, it was unclear how long he would even stay in the post.
One year later, he can take comfort that Britain is in a different place. It’s now possible, for a start, to have a conversation with visitors without being asked what on earth is going on. Projecting decency and stability, Mr. Sunak has calmed the markets, helped to repair relations with the European Union and sated his party’s appetite for regicide. The next election, due by January 2025, is on the horizon. Even party critics concede that Mr. Sunak will lead the Conservatives into it.
But that’s where the good news stops for the prime minister. While Mr. Sunak has moved his party out of crisis mode, he is yet to win over voters. Against hopes that a new leader would raise the party’s fortunes, Mr. Sunak’s approval ratings have sunk along with esteem for the Conservatives. The polls repeatedly suggest a 20-point lead for the opposition Labour Party, whose leader, Keir Starmer, businesses and the media view as the prime minister in waiting.
Adding to a sense of fatalism, a steady drip-feed of local elections — often set off by the bad behavior of Tory lawmakers — have cost the Conservatives once-safe seats. Two more, including one in Conservative hands since 1931, went over to the opposition last week. Mr. Sunak may be doing his best, in trying circumstances. But at the moment, it’s nowhere near enough.
There’s an argument that any leader would struggle with the conditions Mr. Sunak inherited: high inflation, increased borrowing costs and low growth. Across the world, incumbent governments of all stripes are finding their time is up — whether it’s the center-left Labour Party in New Zealand or the right-wing populist Law and Justice party in Poland. When Mr. Sunak has found success, it’s been by making his own weather. His renegotiation of the Northern Ireland protocol, an especially vexed post-Brexit arrangement, showed maturity and won him a brief popularity bounce.
Yet economic difficulties have been stubborn. Mr. Sunak, a former chancellor, was picked by lawmakers because of his economic credentials — and he has managed to win back some market confidence. But the government is still boxed in. The right of the party, including the outspoken Ms. Truss, wants tax cuts. Mr. Sunak won’t budge until inflation is down, which is not happening quickly enough. Facing a winter of high bills, Britons will be feeling the pinch for some time to come.
But Mr. Sunak’s biggest challenge is the length of time his party has been in power. The Conservatives, plagued by scandal, have overseen a country where discontent is legion: A survey taken this summer found that three-quarters of people in Britain believe it is becoming a worse place to live. After 13 years of Tory rule — the same amount of time New Labour, under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, enjoyed in office — the other side can’t be blamed for Britain’s woes.
Mr. Sunak’s attempts to overcome this fundamental problem are twofold. First, he has accepted that the country is not working and needs to change. His five priorities — halving inflation, stopping the boats carrying migrants across the Channel, cutting National Health Service waiting lists, growing the economy and reducing debt — are designed to reflect key voter concerns. But many are pessimistic that all the goals can be achieved. Continuing health worker strikes, for example, signal that unhappiness with the state of the N.H.S. is unlikely to subside ahead of the election.
His second move is more ambitious. In a bid to shake off the baggage of previous Tory governments, Mr. Sunak is trying to depict himself as the change candidate. He has axed David Cameron’s pet project, a high-speed rail network linking the Midlands and the North, and scaled down the net-zero commitments embraced by Boris Johnson and Theresa May. The goal is to show him as a man of action with his own convictions, someone prepared, as he recently put it, to “be bold.” But running against your party’s own record is tricky, and it is already causing resentment among colleagues who served in previous administrations.
Hope, strangely, could come from the opposition. Mr. Starmer is yet to be embraced by the public — his job satisfaction ratings remain stubbornly low — and support for his party largely stems from anti-Tory feeling rather than enthusiasm for Labour itself. By depicting Mr. Starmer as a flip-flopping leader at the helm of an ineffectual party, the Tories aim to claw back support. Yet it’s telling that conversations with Conservative lawmakers — some of whom have already begun planning for life after politics — tend to focus more on what will happen after defeat than on how they might win.
In Tory circles, a dinner party game is to debate who the next leader might be. The current favorite is Kemi Badenoch, the business secretary who has made a name for herself with attacks on identity politics. But the scale of defeat is key. A small one would see status quo candidates, like the foreign secretary, James Cleverly, or the defense secretary, Grant Shapps, emerge. A wipeout — winning fewer than 200 seats out of 650 — would give the edge to wild-card candidates from the party’s right. In that scenario Suella Braverman, the hard-line anti-immigrant home secretary, would come to the fore.
For the Tories, such a contest — full of bloodletting and bombast — could be a disaster, setting the stage for years in the wilderness. To prevent it and to forestall defeat, Mr. Sunak must change the narrative. Politics is unpredictable, as Britain has amply shown in the past eight years. But right now, one thing’s for certain: The prime minister is running out of time.
*The Palestinian Republic of Fear and Misinformation*
Many years ago, when I first started covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I got to know a gifted Palestinian journalist who, for reasons that will become apparent in a moment, I’ll refer to only by his first name, Said.
As with many other Palestinian journalists, Said’s primary source of income was working with foreign reporters as a “fixer,” someone who could arrange difficult meetings, translate from Arabic, show you around. Said had an independent streak and he was no fan of Yasir Arafat, which made him particularly helpful in cutting through the Palestinian Authority’s propagandistic bombast.
With Said, I interviewed senior Hamas leaders in Gaza, officials in Ramallah, retired terrorists in Nablus, political dissidents in Jenin and construction workers in Hebron. We developed a friendship. Then, shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, he called me in a panic because something I had written in The Wall Street Journal had met with the displeasure of officials in the Palestinian Authority. The goon squad, he said, had paid his family an admonitory visit in their apartment, and he wanted me to take the story down. That was out of the question, I told him. It was never safe for us to work together again.
I mention this anecdote in the wake of last week’s sensational story that an Israeli airstrike had killed some 500 people at a Gaza hospital — a story variously attributed to “Palestinian officials,” “the Gazan health ministry” and “health authorities in the besieged enclave.” The story sparked violent protests throughout the Middle East.
It has since become clear that nearly every element of that story is, to put it gently, highly dubious.
A missile did not hit the hospital but rather the parking lot next to it. Abundant evidence, confirmed by U.S. intelligence and independent analyses, indicates that the explosion was caused by a missile fired from Gaza, which was intended to kill Israelis but malfunctioned and fell to earth. There is no solid reason to believe the death toll reached anywhere near 500. And the “Gazan health ministry” is not some sort of apolitical body but a Hamas-owned entity, towing and promoting whatever the terrorist organization demands.
I’ll leave the media criticism to others. But Western audiences will never grasp the nature of the current conflict until they internalize one central fact. In Israel, as in every other democracy, political and military officials sometimes lie — but journalists hold them to account, tell the stories they want to tell, and don’t live in fear of midnight knocks on the door.
The Palestinian territories, by contrast, are republics of fear — fear of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and of Hamas in Gaza. Palestinians are neither more nor less honest than people elsewhere. But, as in any tyrannical or fanatical regime, those who stray from the approved line put themselves at serious risk.
This is a truth that only rarely slips out — but when it does, it’s revealing.
During the first major Israel-Hamas war, in 2008 and 2009, Palestinian groups claimed the death toll was mostly civilian, with roughly 1,400 people killed. But a Palestinian doctor working in Gaza’s Shifa hospital told a different story. “The number of deceased stands at no more than 500 to 600,” he said. “Most of them are youths between the ages of 17 to 23 who were recruited to the ranks of Hamas, who sent them to the slaughter,” he said. Tellingly, according to the Israeli news site YNet, “the doctor wished to remain unidentified, out of fear for his life.”
Or take the case of Hani al-Agha, a Palestinian journalist who was jailed for weeks and tortured by Hamas in 2019. In that case, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate took the extraordinary step of condemning al-Agha’s arrest and torture as “an attempt to intimidate journalists in Gaza Strip, who are subject to repressive police authority.” Yet, outside of a few news releases, the story received almost no coverage in the wider media.
Human rights organizations occasionally take a break from their incessant criticism of Israel to pay attention to this kind of atrocious repression. But only rarely do Western audiences understand the full extent to which information emerging from Gaza is suspect — at least until it has been extensively and independently corroborated by journalists who aren’t living in fear of Hamas, and don’t need to protect someone who is. Readers who wouldn’t normally be inclined to believe man-in-the-street interviews in, say, Pyongyang, or regime pronouncements coming out of the Kremlin, should be equally skeptical about the phrase “Palestinian officials say.”
The news media still needs fixers and freelancers to tell the full story in war zones. But people consuming that media should know the threats, pressures and cultures that these journalists operate in — not because we necessarily distrust them individually, but because we appreciate the dangerous circumstances in which they find themselves.
The next time there’s a story about an alleged Israeli atrocity in Gaza, readers deserve to know how the information was acquired and from whom. It’s bad enough that Hamas tyrannizes Palestinians and terrorizes Israelis. We don’t need it misinforming the rest of us.
*Biden to Deliver Oval Office Address as He Seeks Aid for Israel and Ukraine*
President Biden is expected to ask Congress to approve about $100 billion in emergency funds to arm Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan and fortify the U.S.-Mexico border.
President Biden will deliver a prime-time speech on Thursday about the war in Ukraine and the terror attacks in Israel as his administration prepares to call on Congress to approve tens of billions of dollars in military aid for the two embattled nations.
The address will mark the second time Mr. Biden has delivered formal remarks from the Oval Office since becoming president. In June, he spoke from behind the Resolute Desk about a bipartisan agreement to avoid defaulting on the nation’s debt, an agreement that Republicans in the House later abandoned.
In Thursday’s speech, Mr. Biden will address the American response to the two grave struggles that he has said threaten democratic stability across the globe: the war that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year and the one that started this month after the brutal assault by Hamas on Israel on Oct. 7.
A senior White House official said Mr. Biden will seek to present the American people a broadly framed explanation for why two wars half a world away are critical to the national security of the United States.
The official, who asked not to be identified in order to discuss planning for the president’s speech, said the purpose of the address is for the president to reflect on the events of recent weeks in Israel and the 600 days that Ukraine has been fighting since Russia’s invasion.
In a whirlwind visit to Israel on Tuesday, Mr. Biden said he would soon “ask the United States Congress for an unprecedented support package for Israel’s defense.” He said the request would help supply Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system with the ammunition it needs to protect Israelis from missiles.
*Thomas L. Friedman on Israel’s ‘Morally Impossible Situation’*
What kind of war should we expect in the weeks to come?
This week, the Opinion columnist and former New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Thomas L. Friedman joins the “Matter of Opinion” hosts to discuss the rapidly evolving situation in the Middle East and the mistakes that led to this moment. (He’s looking at you, Benjamin Netanyahu.)
(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)
*Biden’s Aid, and Pointed Advice, to Israel*
To the Editor:
Re “U.S. Backs Israel, as Cause of Blast Remains Disputed” and “Biden Urges Caution in War on Hamas” (front page, Oct. 19):
President Biden offers good advice that one hopes will be heard by all: Do not let shock, pain and rage lead to counterproductive decisions, decisions that cause unnecessary loss of innocent life and squander the world’s sympathy.
Palestinians and Israelis have each been failed by their leaders. Palestinians and Israelis have each suffered unspeakable harm.
We pray that Palestinians and Israelis and their respective leaders and all of the people who empathize with them will remember that in the midst of righteous anger, ill-conceived actions can make matters much, much worse for everyone.
Ron Boyer Eugene, Ore.
To the Editor:
As an American Jew, I am horrified by President Biden’s response to Hamas’s horrific murder of Israelis on Oct. 7. By providing military aid to Israel, the U.S. government is fueling the Israeli government’s vastly disproportionate response, in which it has already killed more Palestinian civilians than Israeli civilians were killed by Hamas.
Mr. Biden may have urged the Israeli people not to be consumed by the rage they feel about the Hamas terror attacks, but that statement is completely contradicted by his sending the very weapons that the Israeli military is using to kill civilians.
The U.S. can stop this immoral violence, but instead is fanning the flames by providing support for the autocratic Israeli government. I am joined by many other American Jews in condemning the Israeli government’s killing of thousands and threatening millions of innocent lives in the name of the Jewish people.
Miriam Shakow Narberth, Pa.
To the Editor:
In this time of unbelievable misery and loss, it may be naïve to talk about international law. But some of the participants in the current fighting in Israel (and their allies) have represented that they are trying to respect the laws of war. Since many observers may not be familiar with those laws, I write simply to report two indisputable principles.
First, the same rules of conduct apply to the “aggressor” and to its victims. “They started it” is no excuse for doing things that would otherwise be illegal.
Second, the fact that the overall objective is permissible (like self-defense) or even laudatory does not excuse using methods that result in disproportionate harm to civilians.
Applying these principles, it is a violation of the laws of war to knowingly cut off food, water, fuel and medical supplies to entire trapped localities. The harm would fall disproportionately on civilians who have even less access to whatever supplies exist than those in authority. It cannot be justified.
Lea Brilmayer Branford, Conn. The writer is an emeritus professor of international law at Yale University.
To the Editor:
As an American Israeli living in Israel with a son in the Israel Defense Forces, I feel that I must speak out.
It was uplifting for Israelis to hear President Biden’s remarks after the attacks on Oct. 7. Israelis everywhere felt encouraged by the president’s unequivocal support, and the unambiguous message that the events of Oct. 7 constituted “pure, unadulterated evil” — because they truly did.
It is clear to Israelis that in carrying out these atrocities, Hamas was seeking to draw Israel into precisely the actions that Israel is now engaged in. The justification for those actions could be debated endlessly, but the world must know that Israel considers itself in existential peril. And in our hour of trial, we derive incredible strength from American support.
The objective of Israel’s war with Hamas is not the suffering of Gazans or Palestinians but the crippling of a murderous terrorist organization that has caused unprecedented suffering for Israelis and Palestinians alike.
David Gilmore Holon, Israel
How to Unify, and Save, the Country
To the Editor:
These are unprecedented times. Democracy, national security and the world order are at stake. Our nation has never been so divided.
While our young experiment in democracy faces a challenge to its very existence, our world faces heightened conflict from dangerous leaders who present existential threats, and our planet faces increased temperature extremes, violent destructive storms and devastating wildfires.
Considering all that is at stake, our nation must find its way to tamp down the noise from the extreme sides of both parties, the disinformation promulgated by partisan media and the contempt for others fueled by social media.
I propose a unique approach to ensure the continued success of our republic. As much as I respect and admire Vice President Kamala Harris, I would ask that for the greater good of our nation and the world, she step aside as President Biden selects a moderate Republican (such as Larry Hogan, the former Maryland governor) as his 2024 running mate.
Not only would this virtually guarantee his re-election, but it would also be a giant step in uniting the country.
Bradley S. Feuer Wellington, Fla.
Sadly, CBC Ends a Time-Honored Tradition
To the Editor:
Re “After 84 Years, Time Abruptly Runs Out on Canadian Radio Tradition” (news article, Oct. 18):
CBC’s dropping of its 84-year tradition of announcing the precise time at 1 p.m. day in and day out may seem like a trivial matter in the current world environment. But find me a Canadian who cannot finish the sentence “The beginning of the long dash …” (for the non-Canadian readers: “indicates exactly 1 o’clock Eastern Standard Time”).
It’s as common as eight months of winter and hockey, and always saying “I’m sorry.”
It was enough of a collective jolt when the middle of the announcement (“following 10 seconds of silence”) was abandoned. We grew up counting down that 10 seconds of radio silence while at the ready to instantly adjust our watches if necessary. And now we are completely on our own.
Go easy on us, world, if the lone Canadian invited to the party is now always early or late. We’re sorry.
Mary E. Campbell Ottawa
Over-the-Counter Medicines
To the Editor:
Re “We’ve Known for 20 Years This Cold Medicine Doesn’t Work,” by Randy C. Hatton and Leslie Hendeles (Opinion guest essay, Oct. 1):
Nonprescription, over-the-counter (O.T.C.) medicines are a cornerstone of our nation’s health care system, yet your essay draws sweeping conclusions and disregards decades of regulatory oversight, scientific review, and real-world evidence supporting their safety and efficacy.
Phenylephrine, the only O.T.C. oral decongestant available without purchase restrictions, has decades of use as a safe and effective option for temporary nasal congestion relief. The Food and Drug Administration has twice determined phenylephrine to be “generally recognized as safe and effective,” the regulatory standard for O.T.C. medicines.
However, the authors’ assessment discounts this history, and other evidence, while elevating their own limited research. No medicine works equally for everyone, and every medicine has unique considerations for therapeutic selection. Providing Americans with options that offer freedom of choice for personal health care needs is a core attribute of our health care system.
Consumers can have confidence in their O.T.C. medicines, and the regulatory framework that oversees them.
Scott Melville Washington The writer is president and C.E.O. of the Consumer Healthcare Products Association.
*Javier Milei, a ‘Mini-Trump,’ Could Be Argentina’s Next President*
The global far-right movement faces an important test in Argentina’s election on Sunday.
He made his name disparaging people on television. He levels harsh attacks against critics online. He sports an unruly hairdo that has become a meme. And he is now the leader of his country’s far right.
Donald J. Trump, and his rise to the American presidency in 2016, shares some striking similarities with the man behind the moment unfolding in Argentina, the nation’s new political sensation, Javier Milei.
Mr. Milei, a libertarian economist and television pundit, was once seen as a sideshow in Argentina’s presidential race, not taken seriously by the news media or his opponents. Now — after a brash, outsider campaign based on a promise that he alone can fix the nation’s deep economic woes — he is the favorite to win the election outright on Sunday or head to a runoff next month.
Mr. Milei, 52, has already upended the politics of this nation of 46 million. His pledges to eliminate Argentina’s central bank and ditch its currency for the U.S. dollar have dominated the national conversation, while also helping to fuel a further collapse in the value of the Argentine peso.
But it has been his bellicose political style that has attracted comparisons with Mr. Trump, as well as widespread concern in Argentina and beyond about the damage his government could inflict on Latin America’s third-largest economy.
Mr. Milei has attacked the press and the pope; declared climate change part of “the socialist agenda”; called China, Argentina’s second-largest trade partner, an “assassin”; pledged looser controls on guns; claimed he is the victim of voter fraud; questioned the most recent presidential elections in the United States and Brazil; and suggested that the far-right riots that followed those votes were leftist plots.
“He is quite clearly a mini-Trump,” said Federico Finchelstein, an Argentine who chairs the history department at the New School in New York and studies the far right around the world.
Mr. Milei, Mr. Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former president, are all leading practitioners of the modern strain of far-right politics, Mr. Finchelstein said, marked by vulgarity, attacks on institutions, discrediting of the news media, distrust of science, a cult of personality and narcissism.
“Trump is an icon of this new form of extreme populism,” Mr. Finchelstein said. “And Milei wants to emulate him.”
Mr. Milei has embraced comparisons to Mr. Trump, whom he has called “one of the best presidents in the history of the United States.” He has worn “Make Argentina Great Again” hats and, much like Mr. Trump, waged his campaign largely on social media. And in the two months before Sunday’s vote, he granted an interview to one American broadcast personality: the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Mr. Milei’s campaign declined repeated requests for an interview with The New York Times.
With two master’s degrees in economics, Mr. Milei can sound professorial at times, opining on monetary policy and a strain of libertarianism he follows called anarcho-capitalism.
He has called the state “a criminal organization” that collects taxes “at gunpoint.” And he says he is driven by a mission to shrink government and remove it from people’s lives, starting with Argentina’s central bank.
His libertarian ideals have also made him less conservative on some social issues. He has said that as long as the state doesn’t have to pay for it, he could support drug legalization, open immigration, sex work, transgender rights, same-sex marriage and selling organs.
Abortion, however, he calls “murder” and promises to put it to a referendum in Argentina, where it has been legal since 2020.
Mr. Milei surprised pollsters in August when he won Argentina’s open primaries with about 30 percent of the vote. He has since led his two main challengers in the polls: Sergio Massa, Argentina’s center-left economy minister; and Patricia Bullrich, a right-wing former security minister.
Mr. Milei has received nearly blanket news coverage during the campaign, both for his radical economic proposals and his eccentric personality. He is a self-proclaimed tantric-sex teacher with five cloned mastiff dogs. His girlfriend is a professional impersonator of one of his political archrivals. And his campaign manager and chief political adviser is his sister.
Like Mr. Trump, he speaks about the importance of image, telling Mr. Carlson that his past as a semipro soccer goalie and a singer in a Rolling Stones cover band “make for an attractive television product.” Mr. Milei makes nearly the same furrowed-brow, pursed-lip look for every selfie with voters, also calling to mind Mr. Trump.
Mr. Milei’s signature look — a leather jacket, an untamable mop of hair and long sideburns — is designed to conjure the comic-book character Wolverine, according to Lilia Lemoine, a professional cosplay performer who is Mr. Milei’s stylist and is running for Congress on his ticket. Because, like Wolverine, she said, “he is an antihero.”
The result is a cultlike following. At a recent event in Salta, a city in Argentina’s mountainous northwest, Mr. Milei rode in a truck bed as thousands of voters pushed in for a closer look. Supporters wore messy wigs, passed out fake $100 bills with his face and displayed art of his dogs, four of which are named for conservative economists.
“Yes, everyone describes him as crazy, for everything, but who better than a crazy person to move the country forward?” said María Luisa Mamani, 57, a butcher-shop owner. “Because the sane ones didn’t do anything.”
*Setback for Sunak as Conservatives Are Trounced in Two Local Elections*
Britain’s Labour party overturned large majorities in two parliamentary elections, underlining its revival in an ominous sign for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
Britain’s governing Conservative Party on Friday lost two of its safest parliamentary seats in a significant and ominous setback for the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, who must call a general election that will decide his fate within the next 15 months.
Voting in the Conservative strongholds of Mid Bedfordshire and Tamworth took place on Thursday to replace two of the party’s lawmakers — one of whom quit after an allegation of sexual assault — and came as Britain’s health care system faces acute strain and its economy stagnates amid high inflation.
While that was always likely to put the Conservatives under pressure, the double defeat in the party’s heartlands was a stunning blow to Mr. Sunak and a striking success for the opposition Labour Party and its leader, Keir Starmer.
In Tamworth, northeast of Birmingham, Labour overturned a majority of almost 20,000 in the last general election to win narrowly, while in Mid Bedfordshire, around 50 miles north of London, the main opposition party overcame an even bigger deficit to seize the seat.
Mr. Starmer described the vote as “a phenomenal result that shows Labour is back in the service of working people and redrawing the political map.”
In a statement, he added: “To those who have given us their trust, and those considering doing so, Labour will spend every day acting in your interests and focused on your priorities. Labour will give Britain its future back.”
Analysts caution against over-interpreting these types of local contests — known as by-elections — where there is no prospect of the result changing the government, and voters often cast their ballots to register a protest against the governing party. Less than 36 percent of registered voters turned out to vote in Tamworth; in Mid Bedfordshire the number was higher, at 44 per cent.
Because the Conservatives won so convincingly in the last general election, in 2019, Labour has an electoral mountain to climb if it is to win a clear majority the next time Britons are asked to decide who should govern them.
Yet, the scale of the switch of votes revealed on Friday does not bode well for Mr. Sunak, suggesting that even some of his Conservative Party’s more secure strongholds are no longer impregnable. It will also increase Mr. Starmer’s confidence that, having shifted his party to the political center ground, he can win an outright majority in the next general election.
“This isn’t destiny, but it is a pointer that unless the Conservatives can fairly dramatically and fairly radically turn things around, then they are, in truth, staring defeat in the face in 12 months’ time,” John Curtice, a professor at the University of Strathclyde and a leading polling expert, told the BBC early Friday.
The first result to be declared was from Tamworth, where voters were choosing a successor to Chris Pincher, the former Conservative lawmaker who had represented the district. He resigned from Parliament after a drunken incident in which, it was alleged, he had groped two men.
In the last general election in 2019, Mr. Pincher won with a majority of 19,634, but on Friday that was overturned when the Labour candidate, Sarah Edwards, won 11,719 votes, and the Conservative candidate, Andrew Cooper, 10,403.
“Tonight the people of Tamworth have voted for Labour’s positive vision and a fresh start,” Ms. Edwards told her cheering supporters after the result. “They have sent a clear message to Rishi Sunak and the Conservatives that they have had enough of this failed government.”
Support for Brexit was strong in Tamworth, and Labour’s victory will encourage it to think it is winning back voters who had deserted it for the Conservatives because they favored Britain’s exit from the European Union.
In Mid Bedfordshire the contest was to replace Nadine Dorries, a former cabinet minister and prominent supporter of Boris Johnson, who quit as prime minister last year. Ms. Dorries announced her intention to leave Parliament in June when Mr. Johnson stood down as a lawmaker, but she caused confusion by delaying her formal resignation and faced accusations of absenteeism and failing to represent local voters.
In the 2019 general election, Ms. Dorries won a majority of 24,664 over Labour, and the Conservatives had represented the district since 1931.
That ended on Friday when Labour’s candidate, Alistair Strathern, won 13,872 votes, the Conservatives came second with 12,680, and the smaller, centrist Liberal Democrats won 9,420.
Both results were a stinging blow to Mr. Sunak, who, since he became prime minister last year following the brief and disastrous leadership of Liz Truss, has failed to close a persistent double-digit deficit in the opinion polls against the opposition Labour Party.
Mr. Sunak was praised for restoring some measure of stability after Ms. Truss’s economic plans roiled the financial markets and she became the country’s shortest-lived prime minister in history. But he has struggled to win over the British public after 13 years of Conservative government.
In recent weeks, Mr. Sunak has tried to seize the political initiative with a series of eye-catching decisions: scaling back climate change targets, canceling the second phase of a high-speed rail project, announcing new measures to phase out the sale of cigarettes to young people and proposing a shake-up to the high school examination system.
Little electoral reward appears to have flowed from these announcements, however, three of which were made at the Conservative Party’s annual conference in Manchester earlier this month.
That meeting was distracted by a high-profile appearance by Ms. Truss, and by scarcely concealed jockeying from those who see themselves as contenders for the party leadership, should the Conservatives lose the general election.
*What El Niño Means for This Winter’s Weather*
Forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said this week they expect a warmer winter in the North and a wetter one across the South.
Temperatures are likely to be above average this winter across most of the northern tier of the United States, including in the Northeast and much of the West Coast, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said on Thursday in its seasonal forecast.
But a slightly warmer winter doesn’t necessarily mean there is going to be less snow. A strong El Niño is expected to be the driving force behind the overall forecast this winter, pushing temperatures above normal across much of the country and raising precipitation levels in the southern United States, particularly the Southeast.
The outlook, from the Climate Prediction Center at NOAA, comes after the winter of 2022-23 was the second-warmest ever in the Northeast, and after New York City’s first measurable snow of the season arrived later than ever recorded. Though warmer temperatures may prevail again in the Northeast, more nor’easters could hit major East Coast cities this winter.
El Niño also could bring wetter-than-average conditions across California, a year after parts of the state received over 20 inches of rain and experienced landslides, heavy snow and blizzard conditions that stranded some residents and tourists for days.
“There is some hope for snow lovers,” Jon Gottschalck, chief of the operational prediction branch of the Climate Prediction Center, told reporters on Thursday.
But this is likely to be the case only in some places.
Northeast: Forecasts are leaning toward a warmer-than-average winter, particularly farther north, into New England. Most of the Northeast is likely to have normal precipitation. Still, forecasters believe that above-average precipitation is likely along the Interstate-95 corridor, including the Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston areas. This increased precipitation is likely to come in the form of major storms along the East Coast.
South: Above-average precipitation is likely across the region, easing drought from Texas to Tennessee, with higher confidence among forecasters of increased precipitation in Florida. Despite the strong El Niño influence, which would typically bring cooler temperatures to the region, forecasters believe there is an equal chance that temperatures will be above or below average.
Great Lakes: After a winter of big lake-effect snow events, including the fourth-snowiest day ever in Buffalo, forecasters believe a season of below-average precipitation is in store this year. Temperatures are expected to be above average, which will probably mean less snow.
Southern Plains and Southern Rockies: There is at least some indication that precipitation will be above normal and that there could be an increase in snowfall. Temperatures are expected to be near normal.
Midwest, Northern Plains and Northern Rockies: Temperatures are likely to be above average across the northern tier of the country. Parts of the Midwest and the Northern Plains could have below-average precipitation, including less snow. Across the Northern Rockies, drier conditions are more likely and drought could continue.
Northwest: Precipitation may stay near normal levels, but there is a strong indication that temperatures will be above average.
Southwest: Temperatures are expected to be above average, especially across Southern California and Nevada, where forecast models are calling for slightly above-average precipitation.
Alaska and Hawaii: Temperatures are likely to be above average. Precipitation could be above average in Alaska’s northern tier. Drought is expected to persist in Hawaii, as below-average precipitation is likely.
Believe the forecast, but with a grain of road salt. When meteorologists produce these forecasts, they are giving an educated probability that temperatures and precipitation will be above or below average. But if there is a 20 percent chance that temperatures will be above average, that doesn’t mean that there won’t be a record-breaking cold outbreak. Likewise, if a dry winter is expected, that doesn’t mean that there won’t be a blockbuster snowstorm.
Last year, forecasters predicted that California’s winter would be warmer and drier than average. But the Southwest was hit with cooler temperatures and back-to-back atmospheric rivers, inundating the region with precipitation. To be fair to the forecasters, seasonally unpredictable conditions like these can occur in any season.
El Niño will drive weather patterns. The stronger an El Niño event, the more likely it is to affect temperature and precipitation across the globe because it influences the jet stream, a swift river of wind at a level of the atmosphere where airplanes often cruise. During North America’s winter months, it plays a major role in separating warm and cool air masses, all while steering storms from the Pacific across the continent. The change in the jet stream’s position will have a considerable effect on the weather that occurs across the United States.
Forecasters caution, though, that there are many other factors at play: The Arctic Oscillation, for example, can cause a sudden Arctic outbreak that allows for nor’easters to develop, or the Madden-Julian Oscillation could increase the amount of precipitation in the Northwest.
Then there is the influence of climate change, which meteorologists take into account when making their forecasts. “Winter is one of the warmest, fastest warming seasons for many places across the country,” Tom Di Liberto, a NOAA climate scientist, said.
*Fallece Carlos Romero Deschamps, exlíder del Sindicato de Pemex*
El otrora líder petrolero Carlos Romero Deschamps falleció a los 79 años, según confirmaron fuentes cercanas.
El exlíder del Sindicato de Trabajadores Petroleros de la República Mexicana (STPRM), Carlos Antonio Romero Deschamps, falleció este jueves 19 de octubre a los 79 años, confirmaron fuentes cercanas al también exsenador priista.
Romero, quien renunció a su cargo en octubre de 2019, era originario de Tampico, Tamaulipas, y fue electo por primera vez el 25 de junio de 1993, en sustitución de Sebastián Guzmán Cabrera, quien estuvo al frente del sindicato a la caída de Joaquín Hernández Galicia, La Quina, en enero de 1989. Desde su renuncia, cuatro años antes de la conclusión de su último periodo al frente del STPRM, Romero se mantuvo alejado de toda actividad política.
El otrora líder llegó a Pemex a los 26 años, cuando fue contratado como chófer de pipa y fue hasta los 76 que anunció su salida de uno de los sindicatos más grandes y poderosos de América. Según datos, el STPRM tiene casi 100 mil afiliados que gozan de las mejores condiciones de trabajo del sector.
PERFIL: Carlos Romero Deschamps Carlos Romero Deschamps (1944-2023) fue uno de los personajes más relevantes de la historia política y sindical del México reciente. Nació en Tampico, Tamaulipas (al norte del país), donde estudió la carrera de Contaduría en la Escuela Bancaria y Comercial.
A los 26 años, el exlíder sindical llegó a la paraestatal petrolera donde fue contratado como chófer, y escaló hasta el Sindicato de Trabajadores Petroleros de la República Mexicana. Ahí se mantuvo por casi 30 años. Deschamps se unió a las filas del Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) al cual representó en la Cámara de Diputados y Senadores.
Comparto con ustedes mi columna en El Universal, mucho agradeceré su difusión
No debemos olvidar que estos 13 fideicomisos se suman a los 109 que desaparecieron en 2020 y cuya eliminación perjudicó a la ciencia, la educación, el arte, la cultura, la atención al cáncer y a los desastres naturales. Ahora esta decisión también viola la seguridad social de los trabajadores del poder judicial, que ven como se esfuman -por mandato de un solo hombre y complicidad de las bancadas legislativas afines al oficialismo-, sus derechos a prestaciones por las que han trabajado durante muchas décadas.
Es falso que estos fideicomisos estén destinados para beneficiar a los ministros en funciones o en retiro. Son corruptos los que utilizan información tendenciosa. Cada fondo tiene objetivos específicos que no permiten un uso distinto para el que fueron creados.
Y mientras el ataque artero va contra estos fideicomisos, los de los militares aumentan peligrosamente. Un día después de que los diputados morenistas y aliados festejaran el golpe al poder judicial, aprueban un fideicomiso “turístico” para el tren maya, manejado por el ejército. Hay que recordar que en lo que va de esta administración, los recursos de estos fideicomisos han aumentado en 1,048%. ¡Que contentos deben estar el General Luis Cresencio Sandoval y el recién condecorado y exonerado General Salvador Cienfuegos!
*Biden to Deliver Oval Office Address as He Seeks Aid for Israel and Ukraine*
President Biden is expected to ask Congress to approve about $100 billion in emergency funds to arm Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan and fortify the U.S.-Mexico border.
President Biden will deliver a prime-time speech on Thursday about the war in Ukraine and the terror attacks in Israel as his administration prepares to call on Congress to approve tens of billions of dollars in military aid for the two embattled nations.
The address will mark the second time Mr. Biden has delivered formal remarks from the Oval Office since becoming president. In June, he spoke from behind the Resolute Desk about a bipartisan agreement to avoid defaulting on the nation’s debt, an agreement that Republicans in the House later abandoned.
In Thursday’s speech, Mr. Biden will address the American response to the two grave struggles that he has said threaten democratic stability across the globe: the war that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year and the one that started this month after the brutal assault by Hamas on Israel on Oct. 7.
A senior White House official said Mr. Biden will seek to present the American people a broadly framed explanation for why two wars half a world away are critical to the national security of the United States.
The official, who asked not to be identified in order to discuss planning for the president’s speech, said the purpose of the address is for the president to reflect on the events of recent weeks in Israel and the 600 days that Ukraine has been fighting since Russia’s invasion.
In a whirlwind visit to Israel on Tuesday, Mr. Biden said he would soon “ask the United States Congress for an unprecedented support package for Israel’s defense.” He said the request would help supply Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system with the ammunition it needs to protect Israelis from missiles.
The White House official said Mr. Biden was not expected to reveal specific details about the congressional funding request. The administration will provide more details on Friday, the official said.
Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, said this week that the request for aid to Israel would be made alongside another request for more military equipment for Ukraine, which has been struggling to take back territory that Russia seized in the 20 months since the war began.
*The 5 Clones in Argentina’s Election*
Javier Milei, a far-right libertarian, might soon be Argentina’s next president. He credits his cloned “four-legged children.”
After finishing a surprising first in Argentina’s presidential primaries in August, Javier Milei grabbed a microphone in front of a raucous crowd and thanked Conan, Murray, Milton, Robert and Lucas.
“Who else?” he said. “My four-legged children.”
Mr. Milei, a far-right libertarian who is the favorite in Argentina’s presidential election on Sunday, would head to the country’s presidential offices, the Casa Rosada, not with a spouse and children, but with five mastiffs he has long called his children.
He is, of course, speaking figuratively. Technically speaking, however, those five dogs are not traditional offspring of any animal. They are genetic copies of Mr. Milei’s former dog, also named Conan, and were created in a laboratory in upstate New York.
Mr. Milei’s five cloned dogs have become objects of fascination in Argentina’s presidential election and a window into his unusual candidacy. For months the national debate has revolved around his ascent, his eccentric personality and his radical economic proposals — like eliminating Argentina’s central bank and replacing its currency with the U.S. dollar — to save the nation of 46 million from one of its worst financial crises in decades.
Mr. Milei has made his original dog, Conan, named for the movie “Conan the Barbarian,” a central player in his back story, saying the dog saved his life and spent numerous Christmases alone with him when he felt abandoned by others.
He has made the cloned dogs symbols of his libertarian ideals by naming four of them for three conservative American economists: Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas.
And at his rallies, he has held aloft paintings of his dogs, which he passes out to the crowd before picking up a roaring chain saw, his go-to metaphor for the deep cuts he wants to deliver to the Argentine government.
Mr. Milei has also signaled that cloning could find a place in his government. Last month he said that, if elected, he would appoint an Argentine scientist who has dedicated his career to cloning animals as the chairman of an influential national scientific council.
“He is considered the national cloner,” Mr. Milei said of the scientist, Daniel Salamone. “This is the future.” Mr. Milei’s scientific beliefs, including denying humans’ role in climate change, have worried scientists.
Mr. Milei is the front-runner in Sunday’s election, but polls suggest that he will not receive enough votes to win outright and avoid a runoff in November.
Mr. Milei’s cloned dogs are also an example of a growing trend among wealthy pet owners that is raising tricky ethical questions.
A handful of companies in the United States, China and South Korea have cloned hundreds of dogs since the first cloned canine in 2005. Barbra Streisand owns two clones of her Coton de Tulear, while Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg have three clones of their Jack Russell terriers.
To clone his dogs, Mr. Milei hired PerPETuate, a company run by Ron Gillespie, 75, who got his start in the world of livestock insemination and now runs a “genetic preservation” firm from the Big Island of Hawaii.
Mr. Gillespie said he received an email from Mr. Milei in 2014, saying he was interested in cloning Conan. “He said that this dog was his life,” Mr. Gillespie said.
For $1,200, Mr. Milei sent a sample of Conan’s tissue to Mr. Gillespie’s business partners, scientists at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Mass., who used that tissue to grow cells full of Conan’s DNA and then cryogenically freeze them. (Some cells remain frozen in Worcester.)
*Why South Korea Has So Many Protests, and What That Means*
Part rock concert, part revival meeting, the rallies reveal a country increasingly polarized over its leader, Yoon Suk Yeol.
A recent rally in Seoul carried the sound of a rock festival — high-amp speakers throbbing with the K-pop hit “Gangnam Style” — if not the look of one. The crowd of mostly elderly people waved South Korean and American flags to the song’s revised refrain: “Anti-communist style!” When speaker after speaker revved up the crowd with pro-American, anti-communist chants, the crowd shouted, “Hooray for President Yoon Suk Yeol!”
Days later, when thousands of mostly younger protesters marched through the same city center, they shook handheld signs and chanted, “Out with Yoon Suk Yeol!”
Park Yeol, a regular at such rallies, showed up as an inflatable caricature of the South Korean leader. Fellow protesters took selfies while putting him in a headlock.
“Some people try to punch me,” said Mr. Park, 50. “But that’s the point: I want to demonstrate how mad people are at Yoon.”
Protest rallies have been a fixture of this capital city of Asia’s most vibrant democracy for decades, born during South Korea’s difficult march toward democracy in the 1980s when massive crowds, often armed with rocks, firebombs and even stolen rifles, clashed with riot police, tanks and paratroopers. Distrustful of their government, South Koreans have a penchant for taking all manner of grievances to the streets, so much so that it has turned demonstrating into a kind of national pastime.
As the coronavirus pandemic has receded, protest rallies have returned to Seoul with a vengeance. Barely a weekend passes without the city center turning into a raucous bazaar ringing with livestreamed protest songs, slogans and speeches that reveal a country increasingly polarized over its president.
The vast majority of protests now are organized by rival political activists who use social media, especially YouTube, to mobilize supporters and livestream their gatherings. With churchgoers and other elderly citizens on the right, and mostly younger progressives on the left, they have become a public referendum on Mr. Yoon and his policies.
Left-wing protesters call Mr. Yoon a “national traitor” and demand his impeachment, holding him accountable for policies they see as anti-feminist and anti-journalist; for the crowd crush last fall that killed 159 people; and for his attempt to improve ties with Tokyo, Korea’s historical enemy, despite Japan’s release of treated radioactive water from its Fukushima nuclear power plant.
But Mr. Yoon has found a sorely needed ally in right-wing, mostly Christian and elderly South Koreans who rally to defend him and the country from “pro-North Korean communists.” That is a Cold War-era moniker that still packs a punch in a country that remains technically at war with North Korea and still enforces a draconian anti-Communist “national security act.”
A typical demonstration features colorful banners and dance troupes romping on a temporary platform as concert speakers dangling from crane trucks blare protest songs. Organizers lead the crowd in chanting slogans, pumping their fists in unison or waving national flags. Peddlers weave through the throng hawking rain cover in summer and plastic cushions in winter. The hourslong rally usually ends with a march. Police officers walk alongside the demonstrations to keep order.
Massive protests spearheaded by progressives in 2017 triggered the impeachment of Park Geun-hye, who was then the country’s conservative president. Monthslong protests led by Christian evangelicals galvanized a conservative pushback against Ms. Park’s progressive successor, Moon Jae-in, and helped Mr. Yoon win election as a conservative candidate in 2022.
“We cannot hand over our country to North Korea,” said the Rev. Jun Kwang-hoon, the organizer of the largest conservative rallies, during an interview at his Sarang Jeil Presbyterian Church in Seoul. “We church people cannot sit still.”
Until Mr. Jun began mobilizing large conservative rallies several years ago, the outdoor protest scene had been dominated for decades mostly by students and unionized workers who waged often violent campaigns against dictatorship, corruption and inequality. But in this rapidly aging society, the votes of older people wield more power than ever, and conservative churches have the resources to channel their hostility toward North Korea and South Korean progressives who favor inter-Korean reconciliation into a nationwide political movement.
In sermons and speeches, Mr. Jun has repeatedly warned that if progressives take power, South Korea will be “communized” by North Korea, and China will replace the United States as its main ally. If that happens, he says, there will be “10 million South Koreans massacred” and “another 10 million fleeing to the sea as boat people.”
“I know all this because the Lord told me,” he said during a rally in August, calling himself a “prophet.”
Protest rallies in South Korea share elements of the populism sweeping much of the world. Both right- and left-wing activists accuse traditional news media of spreading fake news and political bias. They rely on social media platforms like YouTube for alternative news sources, using them to spread fears that South Korea is being dominated by a deep state (of corrupt conservatives or pro-North Korean progressives, depending on which YouTube channel one listens to).
Livestreaming protest rallies has become a staple for partisan YouTube channels. Mr. Jun uses such channels to propagate his viral narratives and draw older people to his rallies. “We must fight through YouTube,” Mr. Jun said during a large indoor gathering of followers, calling them “YouTube patriots.”
In this social media-obsessed, factionalized country, conservative influencers like Mr. Jun have become so powerful that they helped “radicalize” Mr. Yoon’s government, Ahn Jin-geol, a longtime progressive activist, said in an interview.
In recent months, Mr. Yoon has delineated the political divide more bluntly than ever. In a nationally televised speech on Aug. 15, he attacked “anti-state forces” who blindly followed “communist totalitarianism” and “always disguised themselves as democracy activists, human rights advocates or progressive activists while engaging in despicable and unethical tactics and false propaganda.”
His remarks were replayed to wild cheers during a conservative rally on the same day.
Lee Jae-myung, the leader of the main opposition Democratic Party, has accused Mr. Yoon of depending on “flag-wavers and right-wing YouTube extremists” to sow political polarization. Mr. Lee went on a 24-day hunger strike last month to double down on his claim that Mr. Yoon is splitting the country into friends and foes.
“Yoon Suk Yeol is nuclear wastewater himself!” read another protest slogan, criticizing his government’s acceptance of Japan’s release of Fukushima water.
“From history, we know we can make a decisive change when we join forces out on the streets,” said Lim Jae-kyong, 30, a progressive protester.
Progressives’ rallies often employ pageantry, reflecting a celebration of the democracy they won from a past military dictatorship. Singers satirize government policies. Young activists stage song-and-dance performances depicting Mr. Yoon as a clueless drunkard. Families often attend the rallies with children. Some dance while marching.
*The Seeds Strike Back*
Chia seeds are back (again) — and nutritionists and doctors say there are good reasons for it.
Chia seeds are making a comeback — again.
They’re sprouting up on store shelves and packed into puddings and pretzels and even jams. According to forecasts from Grand View Research, a firm that tracks the food industry, the market for chia seeds is expected to grow by more than 22 percent per year between 2019 and 2025.
Such is the life cycle of the chia seed — always popping up in one trend or another. The seeds have long been a staple in Latin America, and were even offered to Aztec gods during religious ceremonies, but every generation in America seems to think they’ve discovered them for the first time, said Beth Czerwony, a registered dietitian with the Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Human Nutrition.
During the last 40 years, chia has maintained a fairly constant presence in the public consciousness. They appeared as the furry plant Chia Pets in the late 1970s, and by the ’90s, health food companies started marketing them as a nutritional powerhouse. Over the past decade in particular, the tiny seeds have garnered an outsized reputation: as a purported hack for weight loss, a protein supplement and a staple of the ultra-healthy.
Now, thanks in part to social media, chia seeds are again on many people’s minds. Some TikTok users tout the purported benefits of an “internal shower” — a viral trend that involves drinking a supposedly cleansing sludge of chia seeds, water and lemon to relieve constipation and aid with weight loss. The hashtag #internalshower has been viewed more than 100 million times.
“When it was trendy in the early 2000s, the kids talking about it now might not have even been born,” Ms. Czerwony said. “Everything old comes back.”
We asked nutritionists and doctors if the latest chia craze lives up to its healthy hype.
Are chia seeds really that good for you? Chia seeds are not a magic conduit to weight loss or a cure for disease, but they are “incredibly healthy as a natural food source,” said Dr. Melinda Ring, an integrative medicine specialist at Northwestern Medicine.
As with anything, though, you have to be careful to not overdo it, said Dr. Lisa Ganjhu, an associate professor at the N.Y.U. Grossman School of Medicine who specializes in gastroenterology. She warned against eating the seeds straight, which can upset digestion. Instead, soak them in water or plant-based milk for several hours until they expand to a gelatinous slime, or add ground chia seeds to baked goods. You can also swirl them into a smoothie, where they can absorb the liquid, or else mix them into a pudding.
If you eat too many chia seeds — say, several pounds in a sitting — you run the risk of bloating, cramping, discomfort and diarrhea, she said.
What are the health benefits of chia seeds? A serving of chia seeds — roughly two tablespoons — won’t transform your entire diet, or replace the vitamins you should be getting from vegetables. But doctors and dietitians point to a few key health benefits:
They’re high in fatty acids. Chia seeds contain remarkably high levels of an omega-3 essential fatty acid known as alpha-linolenic acid, or A.L.A. You can only get these acids from your diet, Dr. Ring said, and eating foods that are rich in A.L.A.s can help prevent heart disease. In fact, the seeds are one of the richest plant sources of omega-3 fatty acids; one serving has more than twice the daily amount of A.L.A. recommended by the National Institutes of Health.
They have lots of fiber. Two tablespoons of chia seeds have around ten grams of dietary fiber — more than twice that of an apple. Fiber-rich foods promote gut health by encouraging bowel movements — hence, the thought behind the “internal shower.” But Dr. Ganjhu said she thinks of chia seeds as more of an “internal Brillo pad.”
*Jimmy Kimmel Recaps Biden’s Big Day in Israel*
Kimmel joked that President Biden and Israel “go way back”: “You know how Moses parted the Red Sea? Joe was the guy who dared him to do it.”
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.
Biden in Wartime President Joe Biden flew to Israel on Wednesday, meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Jimmy Kimmel noted that White House officials say Biden prefers to meet other world leaders face to face, particularly in times of crisis — “which is a nice way of saying he still doesn’t know how to Zoom.”
“It’s very rare for an American president to fly into a combat zone. They say the last time Biden was in this much danger, he was rolling with Corn Pop.” — JIMMY KIMMEL
“President Biden arrived this morning in Israel, making him the first president to visit Israel during a time of war — which is pretty dangerous, but he should be OK once he makes it down the stairs.” — SETH MEYERS
“The president gave a surprisingly strong speech. He told the Israeli people the United States stands with them. He condemned the disgusting attacks by Hamas and cautioned Israel to learn from the mistakes we made after 9/11. This kind of thing is where Biden really shines. He and Israel go way back. You know how Moses parted the Red Sea? Joe was the guy who dared him to do it.” — JIMMY KIMMEL
The Punchiest Punchlines (Worse Than the First Edition) “Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan failed to secure enough votes today in the second round of voting to become House speaker and received only 199 votes. That’s worse than he did yesterday! If they keep doing votes, he’s eventually going to get to zero, and then he’ll fade away like Marty McFly in a family photo.” — SETH MEYERS
“That’s like retaking the S.A.T. and finding out you got dumber somehow.” — JIMMY FALLON
A presidential trip to Israel at such a critical moment poses enormous challenges for the White House, in terms of both politics and security.
President Biden will travel to Israel on Wednesday to show solidarity with America’s closest ally in the Middle East, in a wartime trip to bolster the country’s resolve to eradicate Hamas but also to urge limits on what seems bound to be a casualty-filled ground invasion of the Gaza Strip.
It will be a trip fraught with risks, both political and physical.
The White House announced the visit on Monday evening after Mr. Biden met with his top intelligence officials and his closest advisers in the Oval Office to debate whether to accept the invitation that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu extended over the weekend.
In a briefing to reporters Monday night, John F. Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said Mr. Biden would focus on “the critical need for humanitarian assistance to get into Gaza, as well as the ability for innocent people to get out.”
He said the president would have meetings in Tel Aviv and in Amman, Jordan, with the leaders of Jordan, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority.
While Mr. Biden and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken have backed the overthrow of Hamas, they have also stressed to Mr. Netanyahu’s government that once Israel is seen blowing up buildings and triggering Palestinian casualties, public sentiment around the world could change dramatically. It would focus less on the Oct. 7 terrorist attack, with its scenes of burned bodies and massacred children, and more on the brutality of the response.
“We obviously don’t want to see any additional civilian suffering,” Mr. Kirby said, though he added that there were no conditions being put on the arms and other aid being shipped to Israel.
Before the announcement, two administration officials, noting the pro-Palestinian marches in Europe, in New York and on some American college campuses, said in interviews that they could already sense the narrative shifting. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the administration’s internal assessments.
Mr. Biden’s visit is an extraordinary show of support to Israel in the midst of war, akin to Mr. Biden’s brief trip to Ukraine in February to shore up international support for President Volodymyr Zelensky. And just as Mr. Biden’s trip to Kyiv came as Ukraine was on the cusp of a major military operation, the visit to Jerusalem comes as hundreds of thousands of Israeli troops are poised to fight their way through the jammed urban landscape of Gaza to carry out Mr. Netanyahu’s vow to eliminate Hamas.
The security risk of such a trip was clear on Monday when sirens warning of incoming rockets or missiles went off while Mr. Blinken, who was in Israel for his second visit in a week, was meeting at a military base with Mr. Netanyahu and his war cabinet. Mr. Blinken and his hosts were rushed to a bunker and sheltered there for five minutes before resuming their discussions. (There was a similar warning when Mr. Biden was touring a few blocks of Kyiv with Mr. Zelensky in February.)
But the physical risks in Tel Aviv were considered low enough, Mr. Kirby said, that “it was deemed appropriate that we can talk about it beforehand.” The trip to Kyiv, where there were no American forces present to back up the Secret Service, was kept secret.
Mr. Biden has often said he feels very comfortable in Israel, as was evident during his one visit as president in July 2022. Mr. Netanyahu was out of power at the time, which was fine with Mr. Biden’s team. The administration has been in constant conflict with the Israeli leader over his efforts to strengthen his power by overhauling the judiciary, and the efforts of his far-right coalition to expand settlements in disputed lands.
Now, though, Mr. Netanyahu is at the head of a unity government that has come together specifically to prosecute the war, combining with the former Defense Minister Benny Gantz and his centrist party. Mr. Biden’s aides are hoping that the central role for Mr. Gantz, a former general who served in the Israel Defense Force for 38 years, will change the dynamic of their discussions.
10 Stops in 5 Days, Plus an Air Raid Shelter, for Blinken The secretary of state’s chaotic trip in the Middle East has underscored the scale and complexity of the diplomatic crisis he faces.
*10 Stops in 5 Days, Plus an Air Raid Shelter, for Blinken*
The secretary of state’s chaotic trip in the Middle East has underscored the scale and complexity of the diplomatic crisis he faces.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken hurried into a bunker as air raid sirens wailed in Tel Aviv on Monday, in the most dramatic moment of a whirlwind — and unusually chaotic — Middle East tour for America’s top diplomat.
After his second visit to Israel in five days, Mr. Blinken was scheduled to land in Amman, Jordan, on Monday night, but he ended up stuck in a marathon overnight negotiation session in Tel Aviv, and his next destination was uncertain. A trip originally scheduled for two days has now extended into its sixth, with 10 stops and counting.
For an official whose travel schedule is meticulously planned and rarely revised, Mr. Blinken’s frenetic journey has underscored the scale and complexity of the diplomatic crisis he faces.
Mr. Blinken is at once trying to show U.S. support for Israel after it was attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7; limit Arab criticism of Israel’s military response; win the freedom of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza; and prevent an escalation of the conflict, perhaps to include Hezbollah and Iran, that might draw in the United States.
It has been a grim voyage for Mr. Blinken, who at times appeared haunted as he described the slaughter of Israeli citizens and a growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Speaking to reporters in Cairo on Sunday, two days after his first stop in Israel, Mr. Blinken conceded that things had become a blur even for him. “I think I’ve lost track” of how many countries he had visited, Mr. Blinken said, before correctly putting the count at seven since his departure from Washington on Wednesday afternoon: Egypt, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, plus two stops each in Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
For State Department veterans, Mr. Blinken’s travel was reminiscent of a recent predecessor. John Kerry, who was secretary of state during the Obama administration, frequently extended and improvised his trips — even changing destinations midflight, in what was branded “seat-of-the-pants diplomacy.” Not so Mr. Blinken, who typically travels from Monday to Friday, returning in time to spend the weekend at home with his two young children.
The ad hoc nature of the trip began just days after the massacres by Hamas. Mr. Blinken immediately moved up a visit to the region that he had planned for the following week. The State Department announced that he would depart on Oct. 11 for Israel and Jordan, and return on Friday, Oct. 13.
That plan was soon torn up as State Department officials, in consultation with the White House, expanded Mr. Blinken’s itinerary to include several other major capitals.
“Henry Kissinger’s 33-day trip to reach an Israeli-Syrian disengagement accord following the 1973 October War holds the Middle East shuttle record,” said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former longtime State Department Middle East negotiator. “Blinken’s recent wild ride through the region doesn’t quite compare. But it does reflect the uncertainty and chaos of a crisis the administration didn’t see coming and the complexity of the challenges it faces going forward.”
“From here on in,” he added, “the secretary might want to pack a few extra shirts. If the administration wants to make a difference in this region, there are likely going to be more than few wild rides in his future.”
Making a difference will not be easy. Mr. Blinken has not yet succeeded in one of his goals: securing the free passage of American citizens in Gaza through a border crossing into Egypt. Hundreds remained stuck at the sealed border on Monday.
*The rainforest holds a fifth of the world’s fresh water, but deforestation, dwindling rain and unrelenting heat are sucking it dry.*
The planet’s biggest freshwater tank is in trouble.
The Amazon rainforest, where a fifth of the world’s freshwater flows, is reeling from a powerful drought that shows no sign of abating.
Likely made worse by global warming and deforestation, the drought has fueled large wildfires that have made the air hazardous for millions of people, including Indigenous communities, while also drying out major rivers at a record pace.
One major river reached its lowest level ever documented on Monday, while others are nearing records, suffocating endangered pink dolphins, shutting down a major hydropower plant and isolating tens of thousands living in remote communities who can only travel by boat.
“There’s just dirt now where the river used to be,” said Ruth Martins, 50, a leader of Boca do Mamirauá, a tiny riverside community in the Amazon. “We’ve never lived through a drought like this.”
The drier conditions are accelerating the destruction of the world’s largest and most biodiverse rainforest where parts have started to transform from humid ecosystems that store huge amounts of heat-trapping gases into drier ones that are releasing the gases into the atmosphere. The result is a double blow to the global struggle to fight climate change and biodiversity loss.
“This is a catastrophe of lasting consequences,” Luciana Vanni Gatti, a scientist at Brazil’s National Institute of Space Research who has been documenting changes in the Amazon. “The more forest loss we have, the less resilience it has.”
Recent studies have shown that climate change, deforestation and fires have made it harder for the Amazon to recover from severe droughts.
And, Ms. Gatti warned, the worst may be yet to come. The rainy season is expected to start in the next weeks and if the drought, which started in June, persists it would mark the first time such extreme conditions took hold in the Amazon’s driest period and continued into its wettest.
In Tefé, a rural municipality in the northwestern Amazon, residents are crossing muddy stretches of lake bed on motorcycles and paddling canoes down narrow streams that were once rivers. Some 158 riverside villages in the same region have been left stranded as waterways linking them to bigger towns have dried up, said Edivilson Braga, coordinator of the local civil defense service.
*Why a Gaza Invasion and ‘Once and for All’ Thinking Are Wrong for Israel*
When The Times’s Israel correspondent Isabel Kershner recently asked an Israeli Army tank driver, Shai Levy, 37, to describe the purpose of the looming Israeli invasion of Gaza, he said something that really caught my ear. It was “to restore honor to Israel,” he said. “The citizens are relying on us to defeat Hamas and remove the threat from Gaza once and for all.”
That caught my ear because, over the years, I’ve learned that four of the most dangerous words in the Middle East are “once and for all.”
All these Islamist/jihadist movements — the Taliban, Hamas, ISIS, Al Qaeda, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Houthis — have deep cultural, social, religious and political roots in their societies. And they have access to endless supplies of humiliated young men, many of whom have never been in a job, power or a romantic relationship: a lethal combination that makes them easy to mobilize for mayhem.
And that’s why, to this day, none of these movements have been eliminated once and for all. They can, though, be isolated, diminished, delegitimized and decapitated — as America has done with ISIS and Al Qaeda. But that requires patience, precision, lots of allies and alternatives that have legitimacy within the societies from which these young men emerge.
And so let me say loudly and clearly what I have been saying quietly in my past few columns: I am with President Biden when he told “60 Minutes” that it would be a “big mistake” for Israel “to occupy Gaza again.”
I believe that such a move could turn Israel’s humiliating tactical defeat at the hands of Hamas, which included unimaginable barbarism, into a long-term moral and military strategic crisis. It’s one that could entrap Israel in Gaza, draw the U.S. into another Middle East war and undermine three of America’s most important foreign policy interests right now: helping Ukraine wrestle free of Russia to join the West, containing China and shaping a pro-American bloc that includes Egypt, Israel, moderate Arab countries and Saudi Arabia, which could counterbalance Iran and fight the global threat of radical Islam.
If Israel goes into Gaza now, it will blow up the Abraham Accords, further destabilize two of America’s most important allies (Egypt and Jordan) and make normalization with Saudi Arabia impossible — huge strategic setbacks. It will also enable Hamas to really fire up the West Bank and get a shepherd’s war going there between Jewish settlers and Palestinians. Altogether, it will play directly into Iran’s strategy of sucking Israel into imperial overstretch and in that way weakening the Jewish democracy from within.
Iran’s No. 1 strategic objective with Israel has always been to ensure that Israel remains enmeshed in the West Bank, gets drawn into reoccupying southern Lebanon and, in Iran’s most fevered dreams, reoccupies Gaza. Such an Israel would be so morally, economically and militarily enfeebled, it could never threaten Iran’s nuclear program and hegemonic ambitions.
What should Israel do to ensure that an attack like the one launched by Hamas never happens again? I don’t know right now. I just know that whatever the answer is, it’s not mobilizing 360,000 traumatized Israeli reservists to launch into an urban war in one of the most densely populated places in the world. This will crush the Israeli economy and its international standing.
All these dilemmas must push Biden to sharpen his stance on the crisis.
Biden must realize that Benjamin Netanyahu is unfit to manage this war as a rational player. After such a colossal defeat, the most powerful and unifying thing Netanyahu could have done was call new Israeli elections in six or nine months — and announce that he would not be running; he is ending his career in politics, and therefore Israelis can trust that whatever decisions he makes about Gaza and Hamas now will have only the Israeli national interest in mind; he will not have in mind his own interest in staying out of jail on corruption charges, which requires his holding on to the right-wing crazies in his government (who actually fantasize about Israel reoccupying Gaza and rebuilding the Israeli settlements there) by chasing some big, short-term military victory that he can take to the Israeli electorate as a compensation for the debacle that just happened.
As one of Israel’s best military writers, Amos Harel of Haaretz, wrote on Friday: “There is an unusual combination of people at the top in Israel. On one hand, there is an unfit prime minister, a nearly Shakespearean figure who is facing the personal danger of an ignominious conclusion to an arguably brilliant career. Facing him are a military brass who are smitten and consumed with guilt feelings (and if only Netanyahu would bother displaying a smidgen of that). That’s not a perfect recipe for considered decision making.”
If Israel were to announce today that it has decided for now to forgo an invasion of Gaza and will look for more surgical means to eliminate or capture Hamas’s leadership while trying to engineer a trade for the more than 150 Israeli and other hostages whom Hamas is holding, it would not only avoid further traumatizing its own society, as well as Palestinian civilians in Gaza; it would also give Israel and its allies time to think through how to build — with Palestinians — a legitimate alternative to Hamas.
*Biden Has a Critical Advantage for 2024. He Should Make It Known.*
President Biden’s age is on the minds of American voters as they think about the 2024 election. It’s no wonder: In a poll I did last year, there was broad support (63 percent of Democrats, 55 percent of Republicans and 61 percent of independents) for establishing an upper age limit of 70 for any person to be sworn in as president. This past July, a Pew Research Center survey found that about half of respondents believed the best age range for a U.S. president was in the 50s — well below Mr. Biden’s 80 and Donald Trump’s 77.
As a pollster and strategist who has been involved in four Democratic presidential campaigns, including Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012, I don’t believe that age will determine this election. But it is a formidable reality that Mr. Biden and his team must deal with and transcend, just as Ronald Reagan did at age 73 in his 1984 re-election race. Mr. Reagan passed that test, removing age as a distraction for his campaign and voters and making the contest about “morning in America,” our economic turnaround and our leadership in the world. The 2024 election is going to hinge similarly on core issues and a vision that speaks directly to the lives and hopes of voters.
Getting past the age question won’t be easy. It will involve persuading voters in memorable ways and will require a deft touch. But this is a winnable race for the president, even if it sometimes seems his team is shielding him from the public. The fact is, he’s old. A failure to confront the issue risks reinforcing that impression rather than overcoming it. Americans will be watching him closely in big moments, like his trip to Israel this week to deal with one of the most significant crises of his presidency. The Biden team needs to get the president out in front of the public more, finding opportunities for him to talk about age with a directness and confidence that convinces people it isn’t the core issue. Talk about it now so you aren’t talking about it next summer, then use the fall debates in 2024 to deliver a Reaganesque line that puts the topic to bed.
If Mr. Trump becomes Mr. Biden’s opponent, this task is simpler. They’re both old, so I think the question of age will become moot for a lot of voters. Winning presidential candidates learn quickly not to launch attacks that can come back and bite them. Take Mitt Romney’s debate-stage effort in 2012 to cast Mr. Obama as unfit to be commander in chief over his handling of a deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. Mr. Obama’s stinging response won the president headlines praising his smackdown performance: “While we were still dealing with our diplomats being threatened, Governor Romney put out a press release, trying to make political points, and that’s not how a commander in chief operates,” Mr. Obama said.
*W.H.O. Chief: Doctors and Patients Face Impossible Choices in Gaza*
Today, Al Shifa Hospital, the largest health care facility in the Gaza Strip, is emblematic of an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. Already underresourced and overcrowded, it is now home to thousands of people who have sought refuge from Israeli airstrikes that rained down on their neighborhoods after the horrific and unjustified attacks by Hamas on Israeli civilians on Oct. 7.
Al Shifa Hospital has always been under tremendous strain. When I visited in 2018, I met with patients and health workers and toured a dialysis unit and a neonatal intensive care ward, full of newborns in incubators. Their tentative grasp on life was sustained by diesel generators that powered the hospital when the electricity went off, as it did for several hours every day. Staff members, patients and their families faced difficult choices to make daily.
These choices are now seemingly impossible in the fallout from Oct. 7 — not just at Al Shifa Hospital but at northern Gaza’s other hospitals and clinics as well.
With no electricity and fuel running out in Gaza, within days hospital generators will fall silent, and the incubators, dialysis machines and other lifesaving medical equipment will shut down. Many of the most critically ill patients, including babies, whose lives have only just begun, will probably die. Attempting to move them is equally hazardous. Water scarcity is a grave concern for struggling patients, especially newborns.
Israel’s order to empty 23 hospitals treating over 2,000 patients in Gaza presents health workers with a horrifying choice: Force those in their care to make a journey that for many will be their last or stay and treat their patients under the impending threat of bombardment.
Health workers should never have to make choices like that, nor should they ever be targeted. Under international humanitarian law, all armed actors are obliged to proactively protect health facilities from intentional or collateral attack. But in this conflict, health facilities and health care have been struck repeatedly.
I deplore the attacks on health facilities in both Gaza and Israel, which have led to the deaths and injuries of health workers on both sides. The deaths of colleagues from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Gaza brought even closer to home the dangers faced by humanitarian workers, including those providing health relief.
There’s still time and opportunity to prevent the worst-case scenario. The World Health Organization calls for the immediate and safe release of hostages seized from Israel and taken into Gaza by Hamas. According to the Israeli military, some 199 hostages seized from Israel that day — children, adults and older people — remain hostage in Gaza, many in need of medical treatment. And we hope for attacks on Israeli hospitals to cease as well; Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon, which has treated both Israelis and Palestinians for years, has been hit by Hamas rocket attacks, damaging one of the few medical reference centers available to the people of Gaza.
We continue to appeal to all parties to abide by their obligations under international law to protect civilians and health facilities. We appeal to Israel to restore supplies of electricity and water and to support the establishment of a humanitarian corridor into Gaza.
In Cairo last week, I met with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, who generously agreed to facilitate the delivery of medical supplies to Gaza through the Rafah border crossing with the help of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.
On Saturday, the W.H.O. delivered a planeload of supplies to Egypt from our logistics hub in Dubai, and we are working to move these supplies into Gaza as rapidly as possible.
We appeal for sustained, unhindered and protected humanitarian access. This will help civilians to move to safety in Gaza, health facilities to be restocked with medicines and other supplies, fuel to reach hospitals to keep generators and the lifesaving equipment they support running, and clean water and food to arrive to sustain the weak and weary.
To be clear, as a United Nations agency, the W.H.O. is politically impartial and is committed to supporting the health and well-being of all Israelis and Palestinians. To that end, the agency established an official presence in Israel in 2019, adding to our existing office in the occupied territory. On my visits in 2018 and last year, I met with the ministers of health of both Israel and the occupied territory to discuss how the W.H.O. can better support both governments to promote, provide and protect the health care of their people. This included a visit to the Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv, where I was encouraged by Israeli health specialists developing digital health initiatives in partnership with Palestinian communities.
Since Oct. 7, however, so many horrifying choices have been made — abhorrent attacks on civilians in Israel by Hamas and other armed groups, the seizing of hostages, the attacks on populated areas of Gaza.
What is needed now is another kind of decision making, one that ensures hospitals are kept operational, supplies are safeguarded and health workers and civilians in Israel and Gaza are protected and sustained.
Nelson Mandela once said, “May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.” At this fearful time, I appeal to all who have the power to make decisions that affect the health and well-being of so many people to choose, as Mr. Mandela implored, the way of hope.
*This Is What America Is Getting Wrong About China and Taiwan*
For a half-century, America has avoided war with China over Taiwan largely through a delicate balance of deterrence and reassurance.
That equilibrium has been upset. China is building up and flexing its military power; hostile rhetoric emanates from both Beijing and Washington. War seems likelier each day.
It’s not too late to restore the kind of balance that helped to keep the peace for decades, but it will require taking steps to ease China’s concerns. This will be difficult because of Chinese intransigence and the overheated atmosphere prevailing in Washington. But it is worth the political risk if it prevents war.
Deterrence came in the form of the implied use of U.S. military force to thwart a Chinese attack on Taiwan. Reassurance was provided by the understanding that the United States would not intrude on decisions regarding Taiwan’s eventual political status.
The United States and its regional allies must continue to create a robust military deterrence. But U.S. leaders and politicians also need to keep in mind the power of reassurance, try to understand China’s deep sensitivities about Taiwan and should recommit — clearly and unequivocally — to the idea that only China and Taiwan can work out their political differences, a stance that remains official U.S. policy.
During the Cold War, Beijing and Washington signed a series of communiqués related to Taiwan. One of them said the United States “reaffirms its interest in a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question by the Chinese themselves.” This and other wording was deliberately ambiguous, but it was accepted by all sides as a commitment to avoid rocking the boat. China still views this arrangement as binding.
To be clear, it was China that began rocking the boat first.
Since 2016, when Tsai Ing-wen of the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party was elected president of Taiwan (succeeding a more China-friendly administration), Xi Jinping has repeatedly brandished China’s military power with large-scale military exercises and other pressure tactics apparently meant to discourage independence sentiment on Taiwan.
U.S. political figures have rightly responded with rhetorical support for democratic Taiwan, by supplying it with weapons and by strengthening the U.S. military presence in the region. But the American reaction is also pouring fuel on the fire.
I have worked on U.S. defense strategy in various military roles for more than a decade. I recently traveled to Beijing, where I met with Chinese government and military officials, leading academics and experts from Communist Party-affiliated think tanks. During these talks it was clear that Beijing is far less concerned with U.S. efforts to enhance its military posture in the region — the deterrence side of the equation — than with the political rhetoric, which is seen in China as proof that the United States is moving away from past ambiguity and toward supporting Taiwan’s de facto independence.
They have plenty of evidence to point to.
In December 2016, Donald Trump became the first U.S. president or president-elect since the normalization of China-U.S. relations in 1979 to speak directly with a Taiwanese leader, when Ms. Tsai called to congratulate him on his election victory. President Biden has, on four occasions, contradicted the U.S. policy of ambiguity by saying we would support Taiwan militarily if China attacked. The number of U.S. Congress members visiting Taiwan — which China views as overt support for the island’s independence — reached a decade high last year, including an August 2022 trip by Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House at the time and the highest-ranking U.S. official travel to Taiwan since the 1990s. That has continued this year: In June a nine-member congressional delegation, the largest in years, arrived in Taipei.
Provocative legislation has not helped. Last year the Taiwan Policy Act, which articulated support for Taiwan’s role in international organizations, was introduced in the Senate, and in July of this year the House passed a similar act. House Republicans introduced a motion in January to recognize Taiwan as an independent country.
Actions like these put great pressure on Mr. Xi, who won’t tolerate going down in history as the Chinese leader to have lost Taiwan. That would be seen in Beijing as an existential threat, potentially fueling separatist sentiment in restive regions like Tibet and Xinjiang.
For now, lingering doubts over Chinese military capabilities and the specter of U.S. and allied retaliation are enough to restrain Mr. Xi. But if he concludes that the United States has broken, once and for all, from its previous position on Taiwan and is bent on thwarting unification, he may feel that he must act militarily. The United States might be able to build the necessary military power in the region to deter a Chinese war of choice. But the level of dominance needed to stop Mr. Xi from launching a war he sees as necessary might be impossible to achieve.
Reassuring China would require Mr. Biden to reiterate that the United States does not support Taiwanese independence or oppose the island’s peaceful unification with China and that, ultimately, Taiwan’s fate is up to Taipei and Beijing. It would mean moving away from attempts to create international space for Taiwan and chastising Beijing when it pulls away Taipei’s diplomatic partners. The White House would also need to use what leverage it has to discourage members of Congress from visiting Taiwan and threaten to veto provocative legislation.
There would doubtless be blowback in Washington and Taipei, and Mr. Xi may already have made up his mind to seize Taiwan, regardless of the U.S. stance. But a politically neutral position on Taiwan is what the United States has followed for decades. Presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and George H.W. and George W. Bush advocated peaceful dialogue between Taipei and Beijing to resolve their differences.
There also are longer-term repercussions to consider: If the combination of deterrence and reassurance fails and China attacks Taiwan, it will set a precedent in which Chinese leaders kill and destroy to achieve their goals. But if a pathway remains for China to eventually convince Taiwan’s people — through inducements or pressure — that it is in their interest to peacefully unify, then that may be a China that we can live with.
In the best-case scenario, the United States and China would reach a high-level agreement, a new communiqué, in which Washington reiterates its longstanding political neutrality and China commits to dialing back its military threats. This would avert war while giving China political space to work toward peaceful unification. That might mean using its clout to isolate Taiwan and eventually convince the island’s people that it should strike a deal with Beijing. But it isn’t Washington’s place to prevent the unification of the two sides — only to ensure that doesn’t happen through military force or coercion.
A war between the United States and China over Taiwan could be the most brutal since World War II. As politically difficult as it may be, U.S. leaders have a duty to try to prevent conflict, and that means speaking more softly but carrying a big stick.
1. Ya párenle. Tras la avalancha de renuncias en el gobierno federal, las aguas vuelven a su cauce. Salvo que haya más sorpresas, la renuncia de Rocío Nahle como secretaria de Energía será la última al interior del gabinete federal, indicó el presidente de México, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Los actuales secretarios y secretarias de Estado lo acompañarán hasta el fin de su mandato. El Presidente la despidió con palabras honrosas. Restó importancia a los comentarios de quienes sostienen que, por haber nacido en Zacatecas, las aspiraciones políticas para contender por la gubernatura de Veracruz de Nahle se verán afectadas. Ha dicho.
2. A la baja. En Zacatecas, David Monreal evade la rendición de cuentas, a pesar de que vive un panorama adverso en todos los órdenes. Ha perdido el control en temas cruciales como seguridad, educación y salud, además de pobreza, infraestructura y medio ambiente. O sea, todo. Monreal evade responsabilidades, ignorando problemas actuales y culpando al pasado. Zacatecas enfrenta altos índices de violencia, desapariciones forzadas y enfrentamientos entre bandas criminales. Incidentes graves, como adolescentes secuestrados y personas sometidas a trabajos forzados. Pero el gobernador se escuda bajo la frase: tenemos otros datos.
3. Toma forma. PAN, PRI, PRD y su inédita candidatura del Frente Amplio por México, encabezada por Xóchitl Gálvez, se mueven. En el “Manifiesto por las causas sociales y la democracia; iniciativa colibrí por Xóchitl”, que se difunde entre “los mexicanos de bien, progresistas, liberales, pensadores, dirigentes sociales”, y del cual Excélsior obtuvo una copia, personajes de la izquierda, como Marco Rascón, advierten que su suma a Gálvez “no es para restablecer viejos vicios, sino para que una nueva fuerza social y civil hecha gobierno construya las bases para una reconstrucción de la vida democrática”. Lo que viene es un bombardeo de ideas. ¡Prepárense!
4. Equidad astral. El eclipse solar 2023 que se registró el pasado sábado sirvió de propaganda a los políticos. El dirigente de Morena, Mario Delgado, compartió en sus redes que lo presenció junto a la coordinadora de la Defensa de la 4T, Claudia Sheinbaum, y otros políticos del partido guinda. Y lo admirable es que encontró una respuesta sobre quién será la próxima presidenta de México. “Cielo, danos una señal, es una C”, dijo, a lo que los presentes respondieron “es Claudia”, mientras aplaudían. Del otro lado bromearon con eclipsar a Morena en el 2024. Unas por otras. Equidad astral.
5. Por el combo. Aquello del “carro completo” era una cualidad del PRI que podría replicarse el año próximo. Ayer, Claudia Sheinbaum, coordinadora nacional de los Comités de la Defensa de la Cuarta Transformación, hizo un llamado a la unidad en Tabasco, tierra natal del presidente Andrés Manuel López Obrador, ante destacados morenistas, con miras al 2024. “Vamos a ganar la Presidencia de la República, las dos terceras partes del Senado, la Cámara de Diputados, los municipios, las gubernaturas y las diputaciones locales”, presagió. Sin descanso, consolida el futuro de la democracia.
*U.S. Response to Israel-Hamas War Draws Fury in Middle East*
The staunch support for Israel has stoked accusations of American hypocrisy, with Arab critics fearing a wholesale massacre of Palestinians in response to the deadly Hamas attack on Israel.
President Biden’s trip to Israel on Wednesday has landed him in a region where grief and fury are mounting, not only toward Israel, but also toward the United States, which has declared unyielding support for its chief Middle East ally.
On Tuesday, widespread condemnation of Israel rippled across the Arab and Muslim world after a huge blast at a hospital in the Gaza Strip killed hundreds of Palestinians who had been seeking treatment or refuge. Palestinian authorities accused Israel of striking the hospital, while Israel blamed a Palestinian group, Islamic Jihad, for an errant rocket launch.
Regardless of whatever evidence emerges, few people in the wider Middle East are likely to believe Israel’s version, as protesters took to the streets in Jordan, Lebanon, Yemen and Oman to condemn the country.
Even before Tuesday’s disaster, many people across the region had come to see Israel’s war with Hamas — the Palestinian armed group that carried out a shocking attack on southern Israel last week, slaughtering roughly 1,400 people — as an American-backed massacre of Palestinian civilians in the blockaded territory of Gaza.
Israel has cut off water, medicine and electricity in the enclave and targeted Gaza with airstrikes, killing more than 3,500 Palestinians, according to Gazan authorities.
Many Arabs say the American government is not only indifferent to the agony of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, but also complicit in it. American pledges of “ironclad” support for Israel — and no-strings-attached security assistance — have stoked those feelings as all signs point to Israel preparing for a ground invasion of Gaza.
“There is tremendous anger in the Arab world, even by those who do not support Hamas,” said Nabil Fahmy, a former foreign minister of Egypt. “They are giving Israel a green light,” he said of Western powers, “and as this gets increasingly bloody, the West will have blood on its hands.”
So intense is the anger that a refrain, “Death to America,” has found renewed resonance in the region, including during a protest on Friday in Bahrain, a close American ally.
“America has to do something and stop these heinous crimes against Palestinians,” said Ahmed al-Asmi, 36, an Omani who participated in a demonstration in the country’s capital, Muscat, on Wednesday.
Many Palestinians and other Arabs said in interviews that the rhetoric coming from senior Israeli and American officials has been dehumanizing and warmongering.
*For Hezbollah and Israel, the Stakes in Any Broader War Are High*
The fighting between Israel and Hamas has raised fears that the violence will spill into Lebanon as a wider conflict with Hezbollah. Such a war would be dangerous for all involved.
The sounds of battle echo on both sides of Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. Sirens blare in Israeli towns, warning of incoming rockets fired by Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group. Lebanese civilians have fled their villages, fearing Israeli shelling and the possibility of a new war.
Since Hamas launched its deadly attack in southern Israel, tensions have surged along Israel’s northern border, increasing fears of a new conflagration between Israel and Hamas’ Iranian-backed ally Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon.
Such a war poses great risks to everyone involved, experts say. Israel, which appears poised to launch a ground invasion in Gaza, could struggle to fight on two fronts and defend itself against Hezbollah’s skilled guerrillas. Lebanon, already reeling from a deep economic crisis, could face intense Israeli airstrikes that destroy infrastructure and could kill large numbers of people.
The potential for international involvement raises the stakes even further. The United States has dispatched two aircraft carriers to the Mediterranean in support of Israel that could strike targets on land. And other groups in the so-called axis of resistance, the network of Iranian-backed forces across the Middle East, could be drawn into a new war.
“The calculations in great wars are not calculations about states,” Gen. Abbas Ibrahim, Lebanon’s former security chief, said in an interview on Monday. “This is a war of existence: Either Israel remains or this axis remains.”
Leaders on both sides of the divide have issued stark warnings, emphasizing the stakes.
On Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel told Hezbollah not to get involved. “I have a message for Iran and Hezbollah: Don’t test us in the north,” he told Israeli lawmakers. “Don’t repeat the same mistake, because today, the price you’ll pay will be much heavier.”
Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, warned in an interview on Iranian state television late Monday that Iran’s allied regional militias could attack Israel if it continued its attacks on Gaza.
“Time is running out very fast,” he said. “If the war crimes against the Palestinians are not immediately stopped, other multiple fronts will open and this is inevitable.”
One motivation for the Biden administration’s bringing the aircraft carriers closer to Israel is to try to convince Hezbollah to stay out of the fighting to avoid any possible intervention by the United States.
Changes in the Middle East in recent years have made it more likely that violence in one place could ignite violence elsewhere. That’s because Iran has worked to knit anti-Israel forces in different countries into an increasingly tight web.
Armed groups in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen that once largely fought separately now see themselves as being on the same team. Many of their commanders have received similar training from Iran or Hezbollah and their members share knowledge on how to increase the firepower of rockets and to surveil their enemies with drones.
*Facing Risky Options for Gaza Hostages, U.S. Turns to Longtime Mediator*
Hamas is believed to hold at least 199 people in Gaza, a dense territory descending into a chaotic crisis, where many officials believe a military rescue would be dangerous for soldiers and hostages alike.
In the dense warrens of Gaza, Hamas is believed to hold at least 199 people hostage, guarded by gunmen and booby traps, likely scattered and hidden from any would-be rescuers as Israel readies a ground invasion.
Israeli and U.S. commandos have pulled off extraordinary hostage rescues before. But the chaotic environment of Gaza, which is descending into a humanitarian crisis and the base where Hamas launched devastating attacks on Israel this month, has made such a mission unlikely because of the dangers to hostages and soldiers alike.
That has left desperate, complex diplomacy — led by the United States and Qatar, a tiny nation with extensive ties to militant groups — as the best option to save hostages in the eyes of many current and former officials.
In the talks so far, Qatar is acting as a mediator between Hamas and officials from the United States, which like Israel and the European Union considers Hamas a terrorist group. Adding even more complexity to the talks, people from more than 40 countries are among the hostages.
If Hamas thought taking hostages was a hedge against an Israeli invasion, the group might have misplayed its hand. Although Western and U.S. officials have urged restraint to limit the danger to hostages and Gazan civilians, Israeli leaders have vowed to destroy Hamas, amassing troops and tanks on the border and calling up about 360,000 reservists.
“To sacrifice hostages and soldiers seems to be the psychology today,” said Gershon Baskin, who negotiated the release of the Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit in 2011 after more than five years in captivity. “No one is thinking about the day after: What do you do with Gaza?”
*Why a Gaza Invasion and ‘Once and for All’ Thinking Are Wrong for Israel*
When The Times’s Israel correspondent Isabel Kershner recently asked an Israeli Army tank driver, Shai Levy, 37, to describe the purpose of the looming Israeli invasion of Gaza, he said something that really caught my ear. It was “to restore honor to Israel,” he said. “The citizens are relying on us to defeat Hamas and remove the threat from Gaza once and for all.”
That caught my ear because, over the years, I’ve learned that four of the most dangerous words in the Middle East are “once and for all.”
All these Islamist/jihadist movements — the Taliban, Hamas, ISIS, Al Qaeda, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Houthis — have deep cultural, social, religious and political roots in their societies. And they have access to endless supplies of humiliated young men, many of whom have never been in a job, power or a romantic relationship: a lethal combination that makes them easy to mobilize for mayhem.
And that’s why, to this day, none of these movements have been eliminated once and for all. They can, though, be isolated, diminished, delegitimized and decapitated — as America has done with ISIS and Al Qaeda. But that requires patience, precision, lots of allies and alternatives that have legitimacy within the societies from which these young men emerge.
And so let me say loudly and clearly what I have been saying quietly in my past few columns: I am with President Biden when he told “60 Minutes” that it would be a “big mistake” for Israel “to occupy Gaza again.”
I believe that such a move could turn Israel’s humiliating tactical defeat at the hands of Hamas, which included unimaginable barbarism, into a long-term moral and military strategic crisis. It’s one that could entrap Israel in Gaza, draw the U.S. into another Middle East war and undermine three of America’s most important foreign policy interests right now: helping Ukraine wrestle free of Russia to join the West, containing China and shaping a pro-American bloc that includes Egypt, Israel, moderate Arab countries and Saudi Arabia, which could counterbalance Iran and fight the global threat of radical Islam.
If Israel goes into Gaza now, it will blow up the Abraham Accords, further destabilize two of America’s most important allies (Egypt and Jordan) and make normalization with Saudi Arabia impossible — huge strategic setbacks. It will also enable Hamas to really fire up the West Bank and get a shepherd’s war going there between Jewish settlers and Palestinians. Altogether, it will play directly into Iran’s strategy of sucking Israel into imperial overstretch and in that way weakening the Jewish democracy from within.
Iran’s No. 1 strategic objective with Israel has always been to ensure that Israel remains enmeshed in the West Bank, gets drawn into reoccupying southern Lebanon and, in Iran’s most fevered dreams, reoccupies Gaza. Such an Israel would be so morally, economically and militarily enfeebled, it could never threaten Iran’s nuclear program and hegemonic ambitions.
What should Israel do to ensure that an attack like the one launched by Hamas never happens again? I don’t know right now. I just know that whatever the answer is, it’s not mobilizing 360,000 traumatized Israeli reservists to launch into an urban war in one of the most densely populated places in the world. This will crush the Israeli economy and its international standing.
All these dilemmas must push Biden to sharpen his stance on the crisis.
Biden must realize that Benjamin Netanyahu is unfit to manage this war as a rational player. After such a colossal defeat, the most powerful and unifying thing Netanyahu could have done was call new Israeli elections in six or nine months — and announce that he would not be running; he is ending his career in politics, and therefore Israelis can trust that whatever decisions he makes about Gaza and Hamas now will have only the Israeli national interest in mind; he will not have in mind his own interest in staying out of jail on corruption charges, which requires his holding on to the right-wing crazies in his government (who actually fantasize about Israel reoccupying Gaza and rebuilding the Israeli settlements there) by chasing some big, short-term military victory that he can take to the Israeli electorate as a compensation for the debacle that just happened.
As one of Israel’s best military writers, Amos Harel of Haaretz, wrote on Friday: “There is an unusual combination of people at the top in Israel. On one hand, there is an unfit prime minister, a nearly Shakespearean figure who is facing the personal danger of an ignominious conclusion to an arguably brilliant career. Facing him are a military brass who are smitten and consumed with guilt feelings (and if only Netanyahu would bother displaying a smidgen of that). That’s not a perfect recipe for considered decision making.”
If Israel were to announce today that it has decided for now to forgo an invasion of Gaza and will look for more surgical means to eliminate or capture Hamas’s leadership while trying to engineer a trade for the more than 150 Israeli and other hostages whom Hamas is holding, it would not only avoid further traumatizing its own society, as well as Palestinian civilians in Gaza; it would also give Israel and its allies time to think through how to build — with Palestinians — a legitimate alternative to Hamas.
Such a move would earn Israel a lot of support globally and enable the world to see Hamas for what it is: the ISIS of the Palestinian territories.
“In today’s world, whatever happens on the battlefield can be overturned in the information realm, so the battle of the story matters as much as the battle on the ground,” said John Arquilla, a retired professor of strategy at the Naval Postgraduate School. “If Israel overreacts in Gaza, it will drain out whatever residual good feelings toward Israel exist, and that is Hamas’s big bet. Israel has built so much, enjoys so much and contributes so much to the world and has so much more to contribute. To risk all that in an act of revenge or rage that will not fundamentally alter its strategic dilemmas is exceptionally unwise.”
But, as I said, if Israel still decides it must enter Gaza to capture and kill Hamas’s leadership, it must only do so if it has in place a legitimate Palestinian leadership to replace Hamas — so Israel is not left governing there forever. If that happens, every day that the sun doesn’t shine in Gaza, the water doesn’t flow, the electricity doesn’t operate and hunger or disease becomes widespread will be the fault of every Israeli and even every Jew in the world. Is Israel ready for that burden?
While Biden is right to support Israel, he must get clear answers from Netanyahu now, before it’s too late: Once Israel topples Hamas, who will govern Gaza? If Israel intends to govern Gaza, will it pay for the rebuilding of the infrastructure that it is destroying? And if not, who will? How long does Israel intend to allow the humanitarian crisis to unfold in southern Gaza? Does Israel plan to build settlements in Gaza? Does Israel respect Gaza’s borders? Does it have a plan to help rebuild the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank?
The West Bank Palestinian Authority, under President Mahmoud Abbas, is weak, corrupt and increasingly illegitimate; it can’t manage the West Bank, let alone Gaza — which is how Netanyahu wanted it, so he could always say he did not have any partner for peace.
But this is not all on Netanyahu. Believe it or not, folks, Palestinians have agency, too, and the corruption that the Palestinian Authority has tolerated, and the fact that Abbas banished the most effective leader it ever had, the former prime minister Salam Fayyad, is also a huge factor — something every friend of the Palestinians should be saying loudly, not just blaming Israel.
But all that said, Israel has to completely rethink how it relates to the Palestinians in the West Bank — and therefore the whole settler movement as well — if it wants to replace Hamas in Gaza. If the settler movement continues to set the terms of what is permissible in Israeli politics, another disaster is looming in the West Bank.
My bottom line? Just ask this question: If Israel announced today that it was forgoing, for now, a full-blown invasion of Gaza, who would be happy, and who would be relieved, and who would be upset? Iran would be totally frustrated, Hezbollah would be disappointed, Hamas would feel devastated — its whole war plan came to naught — and Vladimir Putin would be crushed, because Israel would not be burning up ammunition and weapons the U.S. needs to be sending to Ukraine. The settlers in the West Bank would be enraged.
Meanwhile, the parents of every Israeli soldier and every Israeli held hostage would be relieved, every Palestinian in Gaza caught in the crossfire would be relieved, and every friend and ally Israel has in the world — starting with one Joseph R. Biden — would be relieved. I rest my case.
*Possible Paths to Israeli-Palestinian Peace*
Mr. Beinart expresses outrage at the savagery of Hamas terrorists against Israeli civilians. At the same time, he outrageously proposes that what set the stage for the horrific displays of Hamas savagery was the failure of the international community over the years to support Palestinian nonviolent resistance, such as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
This conveniently whitewashes the fact that many supporters of B.D.S. and other forms of Palestinian resistance reject Israel’s very legitimacy and recognition of the Jewish right to nationhood. These activists see resistance as a means toward Israel’s complete elimination, and call for a refusal to engage with Israel — all of which provide the backdrop to the bloody massacre of more than 1,400 Israelis, most of them civilians, on Oct. 7.
What is needed now is a true commitment to nonviolence, one that speaks to viable peace, a recognition of Israel’s right to exist and ultimately two peoples living side by side with security.
Peter Beinart’s essay is an exemplary reflection of the appeals for compassion for the Palestinians that are coming from all sides, now that Israel is going after Hamas.
Therefore it would be good to remind ourselves of what those who actually care about the Palestinians, and aren’t just progressive poseurs, could do to help them in practical ways.
First, they should put pressure on Arab states to allow the descendants of Palestinian refugees from 1948 to assimilate and be granted citizenship in their countries. Second, they should exert whatever influence they have on the Palestinian Authority finally to begin negotiating seriously to accept part of Palestine as an independent state and to live in peace with Israel. It may well be too late after the recent catastrophe, but better to try late than never.
What happened just over a week ago clarifies who in fact cares about the well-being of the Palestinian people and who just uses the pose of compassion to denigrate Israel.
Peter Beinart presents a false dichotomy of Palestinian options for pursuing a state of their own — political pressure or terrorism — arguing that failing to gain traction in the former has led to the latter.
But there’s another avenue the Palestinians can try: accepting the legitimacy of the Jewish state and renouncing violence, two things the Palestinian leadership has failed to do time and time again during peace negotiations over the decades.
Israelis want peace more than anything, and the recent events are a horrid reminder of its necessity, but they will never pursue it with a literal or political gun to their heads.
Noam Safier Teaneck, N.J.
To the Editor:
Re “The U.S. Should Think Twice About Israel’s Plans for Gaza,” by Rashid Khalidi (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, Oct. 15):
In Professor Khalidi’s telling, the Palestinians are always blameless victims without agency over their own behavior. He ignores the Palestinians’ 100 years of rejecting, often violently, offers of compromise and statehood from the international community and Israel.
*I Saw What Happened to America’s Postwar Plans for Iraq. Here’s How Israel Should Plan for Gaza.*
I headed postwar Iraq planning for the U.S. State Department in 2002 and 2003. Once the White House decided in 2002 to remove Saddam Hussein by force, I cautioned my superiors that there needed to be serious planning for what would follow. The study I led — the Future of Iraq Project, only some of which is now public — gave U.S. leaders an understanding of what postwar Iraq would need.
But before we could put plans into effect, we were thrown out of the Pentagon by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at Vice President Dick Cheney’s orders in a dispute over what to do in Iraq. As a result, many of the American civilians who went there had little experience and even less knowledge of what Iraq needed to recover from decades of brutal and corrupt rule under Mr. Hussein and his Baath Party. The result contributed to the tragedy for Iraq, the United States and the entire Middle East.
What we’re seeing now in Israel and Gaza gives me the same grave concern so many of us felt 20 years ago: a lot of talk about military plans and the devastation of war and not enough about what will need to come after. I have not written publicly before about the lessons the United States should have learned from what happened to postwar plans for Iraq. With the humility of hard-won experience, I would like to offer those lessons as advice to whoever assumes this role in Israel today: the official in charge of developing a plan for a post-Hamas Gaza.
Your job will be hard, but it’s not hopeless. Reject the cynics’ advice that Israel’s job begins and ends when it defeats Hamas militarily and destroys its ability to harm Israelis again. If you fail to try to build something better in Hamas’s place or try in a halfhearted way, Israel will gain only a few years’ respite. Destruction is easy, but building is hard. That does not mean it is impossible.
The self-defeating mind-set that took hold in the United States not long after Iraq’s occupation was that the decision to invade Iraq was an original sin — something so wrong that it could never have come out better than it did. That mentality is damaging because it cuts off any serious effort to understand what went wrong and why.
The label of “forever wars” that has been firmly attached to America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan fails to acknowledge that poor planning and scant resources will always fail to secure postwar peace. It astounds me that anyone could be surprised by this. But the lessons of postwar Germany and Japan that led to their prosperous democracies today, including well-resourced physical and political reconstruction and the time to succeed, were utterly misunderstood and misapplied by Washington in 2003 and 2004. Israel has faced its own forever war since 1948. Poor planning and scant resources are also your enemy.
Just as Iraqis rightly told us before the 2003 invasion that Iraq is not Afghanistan, Gaza is neither Iraq nor Afghanistan. Factors unique to Gaza, such as decades of Hamas’s anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish propaganda and Israel’s treatment of Gazan civilians since 1967, will make both physical and political rebuilding especially challenging to Israel and even more challenging than southern Lebanon was to Israel from 1985 to 2000. The deep-seated hatred that many Gazans have for Israel today has no parallel to what U.S. forces faced entering Kabul or Baghdad. Anything Israel touches in a post-Hamas polity in Gaza risks becoming toxic; you must plan for this. Your plans need to understand what Gaza needs and to recognize that the government of Israel may not be the best means to deliver that.
Plan for the length of time you will need to bring about the fundamental changes that will break the cycle of violence Israel and Gaza have inflicted on each other over the past 50-plus years — not the time politicians think you will need. One reason the State Department’s best postwar plan for Iraq, which has still never been made public, was rejected by the White House was that Pentagon officials argued that a three-year timeline was too long. Decision makers opted for the siren song of one year or less and vastly inadequate physical or political reconstruction money, without regard for the reality that fast and cheap was doomed to fail. Instead, the United States expended more in blood and treasure from 2003 to 2011 and ended up strategically worse off than if a better postwar plan had been given the resources and time needed upfront. A repeat of Israel’s 15-year occupation of southern Lebanon is neither realistic nor desirable, but neither is the more recent pattern of quick ground incursions followed by withdrawals, or what’s called mowing the grass.
Finally, remember that military victory is an asset whose power decreases over time. If and when Israel succeeds in defeating Hamas, use that limited time wisely. What you decide to prioritize may be all you get done, so it has to lay the groundwork for constructive steps, not chaos, to follow. Recovery from disastrous decisions at the outset — like the U.S. decisions to disband the Iraqi Army and to fire tens of thousands more Baath Party members than necessary from their government jobs, thus largely creating the Sunni insurgency — is almost impossible.
So what should you prioritize at the outset? Consider these six points, however difficult some may seem before a ground war even starts:
1. End Hamas’s culture of economic corruption in Gaza. Corruption is at the heart of what Hamas uses to keep the Gazan people in line. This needs to end. You may have a chance to put in place once-in-a-generation root-and-branch reforms in public integrity in government contracting, civil service hiring and business practices in Gaza.
2. Listen to what Gaza’s residents want. Ordinary Gazans must have a say in their future.
3. Change the educational curriculum. This has been Hamas’s basis for ensuring enduring hatred of Israel. But don’t listen to the equally poisonous voices in Israel that would overplay your hand and undermine lasting educational reforms that would work for Gaza. There are many experts today in the Middle East and outside it who have constructive ideas for an educational curriculum that is true to Palestinian history and in the best interests of lasting coexistence.
4. Find a path for Gazans to write a constitution that will lead toward a more democratic state that can live in peace side by side with Israel. Israel needs to demonstrate that it is committed to a two-state solution. This is one way to do that.
5. Show Gazans that Israel is prepared to help Gaza rebuild economically. This close to Oct. 7, Israelis cannot readily conceive of committing to a Marshall Plan for Gaza. But Israel needs to think through what conditions would make this the right thing to do.
6. Border security for Gaza that Israel can live with — not a siege — is vital. The U.S. failure to plan for security along the Iran-Iraq border was one of the most egregious flaws in the entire U.S. postwar plan. Iran poured money, explosives and operatives into Iraq, undermining any hope for a more stable Iraqi government. It is obvious that the measures Israel has had in place since 2007 have not prevented Iran from funding, arming and helping train Hamas. Israel needs now to do better. Even when Israeli ground forces ultimately pull back from Gaza and Gazans start to provide their own police force, Israel will want to ensure for at least three decades, as unobtrusively as possible, that neither Iran nor anyone else has the ability to smuggle into Gaza the means of waging war. At the Department of Homeland Security, I helped draft this kind of plan for Israeli-Palestinian border security that could be retrieved from storage and updated — and be made real.
As David Fromkin wrote in “A Peace to End All Peace,” it took Europe well over a thousand years to settle the fall of the Roman Empire. No one should be surprised that it is taking the Middle East more than a hundred years to settle the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
To the Israeli official looking back at history and ahead at what needs to get done: If Israel’s government does seek, as the prime minister’s official account on X (formerly Twitter) put it, “the destruction of the military and governing capabilities of Hamas and Islamic Jihad,” you must start today to lay the groundwork for a more durable peace. It will be hard, but it is not impossible.
“We have no choice,” Golda Meir said to an American TV audience in September 1973. “We do everything that is really impossible — and we remain alive.”
+ Morena reitera: obtendrán el “carro completo”; el buen resultado de gobierno, la mejor motivación para el elector; cancelar o no la presa, lo determinará un análisis técnico; el negocio de los uniformes escolares; promueven candidatos a la alcaldía; Luis Fuentes inaugura el HISAR 2023
*ATENTAMENTE* *MAESTRO FEDERICO LA MONT*
Sent from my iPod
*LAS NOTICIAS CON LA MONT* 📰
📃 *Premio Internacional Periodismo Y Periodismo Migrante*📃
La Información Directa a tu Celular 📲 de HOY *Martes 3 de Octubre 2023* *En El Plano Nacional e Internacional*:
*Ahora también ya estamos en la redes y síguenos a través de nuestros siguientes medios:*
*Fearing Escalation, Biden Seeks to Deter Iran and Hezbollah*
The administration has grown increasingly anxious that Israel’s enemies may seek to widen the war with Hamas and has both sent diplomatic messages and deployed military assets to prevent it.
The Biden administration has grown increasingly anxious in recent days that Israel’s enemies may seek to widen the war with Hamas by opening new fronts, a move that could compel the United States to enter the conflict directly with air and naval forces to defend its closest ally in the region.
The administration has sought to use diplomatic and military avenues to head off any expansion. The Pentagon dispatched a second aircraft carrier to the region over the weekend along with additional land-based warplanes, even as Washington sent back-channel messages to Iran through intermediaries in Qatar, Oman and China warning against escalation.
Fears of a second front deepened on Sunday as intense clashes broke out along Israel’s northern border. Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia that controls southern Lebanon, fired missiles into Israel, and Israel responded with artillery fire and airstrikes. A full-fledged attack on the north could overwhelm Israel, as most of its forces are focused on a potential ground invasion of Gaza, in the south.
“We can’t rule out that Iran would choose to get directly engaged some way,” Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “We have to prepare for every possible contingency. That’s exactly what the president has done. That is part of what has motivated the president’s movement of these assets, to send that clear message of deterrence to make clear that this war should not escalate.”
Some experts warned that such a scenario remains frighteningly possible because Israel’s vulnerability was exposed by Hamas’s surprise attack that killed more than 1,300 people, including at least 29 Americans. Hezbollah poses a markedly more serious threat to Israel than Hamas because of its vast arsenal of precision-guided missiles and thousands of experienced and well-trained fighters. Iran and Hezbollah may decide this is a moment of maximum opportunity to take on a wounded Israel, which is focused on recovering 150 hostages and destroying Hamas as a viable organization in Gaza.
Martin S. Indyk, a former ambassador to Israel and Middle East special envoy, put the odds of a wider war at 50-50. “The potential for it to spread not only to Lebanon but beyond Lebanon is very high,” he said in an interview. “That’s why you see the administration so actively engaged in trying to fend them off, which they normally wouldn’t have to do if there hadn’t been such a big blow to Israel’s deterrence.”
An Iranian close to the government said that no decision had been made about whether to open a new front against Israel but added that a meeting was to be held on Sunday night in a Hezbollah command center in the Lebanese capital, Beirut, to deliberate.
After Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, Iran’s proxy militias throughout the region were placed on high alert, as was Tehran’s own military, according to two people familiar with Iran’s military calculations.
Iran itself does not plan to attack Israel if it is not attacked, the people said, but the leaders of the so-called resistance axis supported by Tehran have been discussing whether Hezbollah should enter the war. The final decision, they added, may depend on what happens if Israel’s ground forces enter Gaza as expected.
Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, has been on a diplomatic tour around the region to Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Qatar, countries aligned with or friendly to Iran, according to Iran’s state media. He openly displayed Iran’s support for Hamas by meeting with its political head, Ismail Haniyeh, in Doha, Qatar. He also met with Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in Beirut.
After Mr. Amir Abdollahian’s three-hour meeting with Mr. Haniyeh, a Hamas representative, Khalil al-Hayya, said the two had agreed to create “a wider front against Israel” and discussed how to prevent Israel’s anticipated assault on Gaza, according to IRNA, Iran’s state news agency.
In his public statements over the past week, Mr. Biden has repeatedly made clear that he stands solidly with Israel and has sought to send a clear message to Iran through military deployments. He ordered the Gerald R. Ford, the Navy’s largest and most advanced aircraft carrier, to the eastern Mediterranean along with its escort group last week. Then on Saturday, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III ordered the Dwight D. Eisenhower carrier to join it.
The Air Force is similarly rushing more warplanes to the region, doubling the number of F-16, A-10 and F-15 squadrons on the ground. Combined with the four squadrons of F/A-18 jets aboard each of the two carriers, the United States will have an aerial armada of more than 100 attack planes, according to military officials.
The Pentagon has also sent a small team of Special Operations forces to Israel to assist with intelligence and planning to help locate and rescue the hostages held by Hamas, who are believed to include some Americans.
Israel has historically resisted foreign ground troops participating in operations on its territory, and White House officials have said they are not contemplating any action on the ground by American forces. But if Hezbollah opens a major assault, the United States could come to Israel’s aid by using naval and air units to bombard the militia in Lebanon.
“Moving the two carriers into the region sends a very strong signal,” Gen. Frank McKenzie, the retired commander of the U.S. Central Command, said on “Face the Nation.” “There is ample historical evidence that Iran respects the flow of combat forces into the theater. It does affect their decision calculus. And as Iran’s decision calculus is affected, so is Lebanese Hezbollah’s calculus affected.”
Still, an Iranian close to the government said the U.S. diplomatic messages sent through intermediaries indicated that the United States had no intention to get into a war with Iran and that the warships were meant for moral support of Israel. That may suggest a difference in interpretation. American officials said they do not want war with Iran but were explicitly sending the military forces to deter Tehran with the option of using them if provoked.
Analysts wondered if the message had truly gotten through. They said the fact that Mr. Biden felt compelled to send a second carrier group suggested that the deployment of the first one did not produce the kind of response from Iran that Washington had expected or wanted.
*Voices From Gaza*
As hundreds of thousands flee south from northern Gaza, we hear from two people caught in the chaos.
*Why Israel Is Acting This Way*
With the Middle East on the cusp of a full-blown ground war, I was thinking on Friday morning about how Israel’s last two major wars have two very important things in common: They were both started by nonstate actors backed by Iran — Hezbollah from Lebanon in 2006 and Hamas from Gaza now — after Israel had withdrawn from their territories.
And they both began with bold border-crossing assaults — Hezbollah killing three and kidnapping two Israeli soldiers in 2006 and Hamas brutally killing more than 1,300 and abducting some 150 Israeli civilians, including older people, babies and toddlers, in addition to soldiers.
That similarity is not a coincidence. Both assaults were designed to challenge emerging trends in the Arab world of accepting Israel’s existence in the region.
And most critically, the result of these surprise, deadly attacks across relatively stable borders was that they drove Israel crazy.
In 2006, Israel essentially responded to Hezbollah: “You think you can just do crazy stuff like kidnap our people and we will treat this as a little border dispute. We may look Western, but the modern Jewish state has survived as ‘a villa in the jungle’” — which is how the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak described it — “because if push comes to shove, we are willing to play by the local rules. Have no illusions about that. You will not outcrazy us out of this neighborhood.”
So the Israeli Air Force relentlessly pounded the homes and offices of Hezbollah’s leadership in the southern suburbs of Beirut throughout the 34 days of the war, as well as key bridges into and out of the city and Beirut International Airport. Hezbollah’s leaders and their families and neighbors paid a very personal price.
The Israeli response was so ferocious that Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said in a now famous interview on Aug. 27, 2006, with Lebanon’s New TV station, shortly after the war ended: “We did not think, even 1 percent, that the capture [of two Israeli soldiers] would lead to a war at this time and of this magnitude. You ask me, if I had known on July 11 … that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not.”
Indeed, since 2006, the Israel-Lebanon border has been relatively stable and quiet, with few casualties on both sides. And while Israel did take a hit in terms of its global image because of the carnage it inflicted in Beirut, it was not nearly as isolated in the world or the Middle East over the short term or long run as Hezbollah had hoped.
Hamas must have missed that lesson when it decided to disrupt the status quo around Gaza with an all-out attack on Israel last weekend. This is in spite of the fact that over the past few years, Israel and Hamas developed a form of coexistence around Gaza that allowed thousands of Gazans to enter Israel daily for work, filled Hamas coffers with cash aid from Qatar and gave Gazans the ability to do business with Israel, with Gazan goods being exported through Israeli seaports and airports.
Hamas’s stated reasons for this war are that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has been provoking the Palestinians by the morning strolls that Israel’s minister for national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, was taking around Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and by the steps that he was taking to make imprisonment of Palestinians harsher. While these moves by Israel were widely seen as provocations, they are hardly issues that justify Hamas putting all its chips on the table the way it did last Saturday.
The bigger reason it acted now, which Hamas won’t admit, is that it saw how Israel was being more accepted by the Arab world and soon possibly by the birthplace of Islam, Saudi Arabia. Iran was being cornered by President Biden’s Middle East diplomacy, and Palestinians feared being left behind.
So Hamas essentially said, “OK, Jews, we will go where we have never gone before. We will launch an all-out attack from Gaza that won’t stop with soldiers but will murder your grandparents and slaughter your babies. We know it’s crazy, but we are willing to risk it to force you to outcrazy us, with the hope that the fires will burn up all Arab-Israeli normalization in the process.”
Yes, if you think Israel is now crazy, it is because Hamas punched it in the face, humiliated it and then poked out one eye. So now Israel believes it must restore its deterrence by proving that it can outcrazy Hamas’s latest craziness.
Israel will apply Hama Rules — a term I coined years ago to describe the strategy deployed in 1982 by Syria’s president, Hafez al-Assad, when Hamas’s political forefathers, the Muslim Brotherhood of Syria, tried to topple Assad’s secular regime by starting a rebellion in the city of Hama.
Assad pounded the Brotherhood’s neighborhoods in Hama relentlessly for days, letting no one out, and brought in bulldozers and leveled it as flat as a parking lot, killing some 20,000 of his own people in the process. I walked on that rubble weeks later. An Arab leader I know told me privately how, afterward, Assad laconically shrugged when he was asked about it: “People live. People die.”
Welcome to the Middle East. This is not like a border dispute between Norway and Sweden or a heated debate in Harvard Yard. Lord, how I wish that it were, but it’s not.
This Israel-Hamas war is part of an evolving escalation of craziness that has been underway in this neighborhood but getting more and more dangerous every year as weapons get bigger, cheaper and more lethal.
Like Biden, I stand 100 percent with Israel against Hamas, because Israel is an ally that shares many values with America, while Hamas and Iran are opposed to what America stands for. That math is quite simple for me.
But what makes this war different for me from any war before is Israel’s internal politics. In the past nine months, a group of Israeli far-right and ultra-Orthodox politicians led by Netanyahu tried to kidnap Israeli democracy in plain sight. The religious-nationalist-settler right, led by the prime minister, tried to take over Israel’s judiciary and other key institutions by eliminating the power of Israel’s Supreme Court to exercise judicial review. That attempt opened multiple fractures across Israeli society. Israel was recklessly being taken by its leadership to the brink of a civil war for an ideological flight of fancy. These fractures were seen by Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah and may have stirred their boldness.
If you want to get just a little feel for those fractures — and the volcanic anger at Netanyahu for the way he divided the country before this war — watch the video that went viral in Israel two days ago when Idit Silman, a minister in Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, was tossed out of the Assaf Harofeh Hospital in Tzrifin when she went to visit some wounded.
“You’ve ruined this country. Get out of here,” an Israeli doctor yelled at her. “How are you not ashamed to wage another war?” another person told her. “Now it’s our turn,” the doctor can be heard screaming in a video published on X, formerly known as Twitter, and reported by The Forward. “We are in charge. We will govern here — right, left, a nation united — without you. You’ve ruined everything!”
Israel has suffered a staggering blow and is now forced into a morally impossible war to outcrazy Hamas and deter Iran and Hezbollah at the same time. I weep for the terrible deaths that now await so many good Israelis and Palestinians. And I also worry deeply about the Israeli war plan. It is one thing to deter Hezbollah and deter Hamas. It is quite another to replace Hamas and leave behind something more stable and decent. But what to do?
Finally, though, just as I stand today with Israel’s new unity government in its fight against Hamas to save Israel’s body, I will stand after this war with Israel’s democracy defenders against those who tried to abduct Israel’s soul.
*An Israeli Doctor, Off to War: ‘We Have Nothing Against the People of Gaza’*
Hamas viciously slaughtered Israeli men, women and children in their homes, but we have nothing against the people of Gaza, who are brutally oppressed by a terrorist organization.
Like many other Israelis, I received a call telling me to immediately report for duty after the attack. All reservists know this call, which comes without any notice and could instantly change your life.
A decade ago, during Operation Protective Edge in Gaza, I served as a military doctor. The same day that the United Nations announced a cease-fire, I found myself in the twilight near the Gaza border in a field that burst into flames. My brigade’s medical armored personnel carrier had been hit by a rocket. Five soldiers, most of them medics, died while fiercely defending our sovereignty.
The latest escalation in the region brings us to the verge of another military ground operation. It seems that our enemies mistakenly decided to take advantage of the rift in Israeli society.
But those who seek our destruction will find us united against any adversary. They should listen to Joe Biden’s story about his meeting as a young senator with Golda Meir, then the prime minister, in the 1970s.
Before we turned a surprise attack by all our neighbors in the Yom Kippur War into a victory, she revealed to him our “secret weapon”: “We have no place else to go.”
Tomer Saad Kiryat Ono, Israel The writer, an internist, is a reservist officer in the Israel Defense Forces.
“We’re Teaching Music in Schools All Wrong,” by Sammy Miller (Opinion guest essay, Sept. 28), got so many things right! We need to instill musical joy in children from birth as parents and teachers by modeling passion for making and listening to music together.
During Covid, we witnessed people turning to music as an antidote to isolation, singing from the rooftops and jamming on neighborhood stoops. Parents curated playlists to bring emotional order to a child’s day.
As a lifelong early childhood music teacher, I know that music is an incredibly powerful tool for self-understanding, self-care and community building.
When we guide very young children to experience the deep emotion of music — before they even have words — we nurture lifelong passion that yields a temperamental disposition to learn an instrument.
Children who eat, sleep and breathe music for fun, especially in early childhood, will run toward any opportunity to be part of a social music scene, even if it means squeaking away at the clarinet for endless hours alone practicing in the basement.
Let’s give our infants and toddlers a rich diet of listening to and making music — to ready our next generation of avid concertgoers and incredible performers.
Renee Bock Bronx The writer is the early childhood director at the Riverdale Y.M.-Y.W.H.A.
To the Editor:
How heartening to see such humane, sensible suggestions for addressing music lesson attrition! Within the instrumental lesson parameters, these are excellent ideas. Taking this further, suppose we could actually broaden those parameters?
Twenty years ago I began to experiment with a child-centered music lesson. The idea was to help each learner discover their particular musical inclination — whatever that might be — and keep the learning attached to that inclination.
For some, the entry point was songwriting. For others it was improvisation or figuring out tunes by ear. One little fellow was obsessed with composers and music history: a pint-size musicologist!
Each student learned skills and concepts as needed to support their passion. Extraordinary transformations occurred. Children who had failed miserably in their previous lessons became competent, joyful music makers. Parents often reported that lessons had become the high point of their children’s week — sometimes of their lives.
This is not to suggest that we replace the standard instrumental lesson! We need both models: one designed for instrument mastery, the other as a personalized alternative for those who could benefit.
Kudos to the author for opening the door to new possibilities.
Meryl Danziger New York
To the Editor:
I am grateful for Sammy Miller’s guest essay.
As a music educator, I too have advocated a more inclusive pedagogical approach, moving beyond the narrow, misguided emphasis on literacy in staff notation, which too often displaces the ways that humans have engaged with music throughout history: with our bodies, and with a sense of belonging.
But Mr. Miller skirts a critical issue: Too many students lack access to any music instruction, especially in early childhood. Disconcertingly, my research reveals that these disparities are linked to the geography of race and social class.
In New York City, elementary-age students deprived of music are disproportionately concentrated in Upper Manhattan, the South Bronx and Central Brooklyn, in schools where parent associations cannot afford “supplemental” arts programming.
By all means, we should focus on the joys of listening to and learning music together, improvising on an instrument, making beats, composing songs, etc. First, though, we need to make sure everyone has access to music education.
*He Called the Pope a ‘Filthy Leftist.’ Now He Wants to Be President.*
Javier Milei is leading the race to be Argentina’s next president. But he is dogged by his past broadsides against a fellow countryman: Pope Francis.
Javier Milei, a far-right libertarian leading the polls in Argentina’s presidential election this month, has made a lot of contentious statements in recent years: Humans did not cause climate change; people should be able to sell their organs; his nation’s currency “is not even good as manure.”
But, to many Argentines, he has done something far worse: attacked the pope.
In 2020, Mr. Milei, a self-identifying Catholic, called Pope Francis an “imbecile” and “the representative of the Evil One on earth” because he defends “social justice.” Last year, Mr. Milei said the pope “always stands on the side of evil” because he supports taxes.
And last month, in an interview with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Mr. Milei said the pope “has an affinity for murderous communists” and is violating the Ten Commandments.
Those are bold words for a man trying to become president in Argentina, where nearly two out of three people identify as Catholic, where the state is officially Catholic and where the Argentine pope is, to many, a national hero.
But Mr. Milei — a Rolling Stones cover band singer turned libertarian economist turned television pundit turned politician — is not your average presidential candidate.
He has run with little party structure around him. He has vowed to decimate the government he is vying to lead. He promises deep cuts to social services. He wants to discard his nation’s currency.
And instead of campaigning with a spouse and children, Mr. Milei has an immediate family that consists of his sister (who runs his campaign), his girlfriend (who gets paid to impersonate a political archrival) and his five Mastiff dogs (which are clones of his previous dog).
The approach may be unorthodox, but it is working.
In August, Mr. Milei won open primaries with 30 percent of the vote, ahead of candidates from the center-left party running the country and the establishment conservative party.
*Why Israel Is Acting This Way*
With the Middle East on the cusp of a full-blown ground war, I was thinking on Friday morning about how Israel’s last two major wars have two very important things in common: They were both started by nonstate actors backed by Iran — Hezbollah from Lebanon in 2006 and Hamas from Gaza now — after Israel had withdrawn from their territories.
And they both began with bold border-crossing assaults — Hezbollah killing three and kidnapping two Israeli soldiers in 2006 and Hamas brutally killing more than 1,300 and abducting some 150 Israeli civilians, including older people, babies and toddlers, in addition to soldiers.
That similarity is not a coincidence. Both assaults were designed to challenge emerging trends in the Arab world of accepting Israel’s existence in the region.
And most critically, the result of these surprise, deadly attacks across relatively stable borders was that they drove Israel crazy.
In 2006, Israel essentially responded to Hezbollah: “You think you can just do crazy stuff like kidnap our people and we will treat this as a little border dispute. We may look Western, but the modern Jewish state has survived as ‘a villa in the jungle’” — which is how the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak described it — “because if push comes to shove, we are willing to play by the local rules. Have no illusions about that. You will not outcrazy us out of this neighborhood.”
So the Israeli Air Force relentlessly pounded the homes and offices of Hezbollah’s leadership in the southern suburbs of Beirut throughout the 34 days of the war, as well as key bridges into and out of the city and Beirut International Airport. Hezbollah’s leaders and their families and neighbors paid a very personal price.
The Israeli response was so ferocious that Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said in a now famous interview on Aug. 27, 2006, with Lebanon’s New TV station, shortly after the war ended: “We did not think, even 1 percent, that the capture [of two Israeli soldiers] would lead to a war at this time and of this magnitude. You ask me, if I had known on July 11 … that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not.”
Indeed, since 2006, the Israel-Lebanon border has been relatively stable and quiet, with few casualties on both sides. And while Israel did take a hit in terms of its global image because of the carnage it inflicted in Beirut, it was not nearly as isolated in the world or the Middle East over the short term or long run as Hezbollah had hoped.
Hamas must have missed that lesson when it decided to disrupt the status quo around Gaza with an all-out attack on Israel last weekend. This is in spite of the fact that over the past few years, Israel and Hamas developed a form of coexistence around Gaza that allowed thousands of Gazans to enter Israel daily for work, filled Hamas coffers with cash aid from Qatar and gave Gazans the ability to do business with Israel, with Gazan goods being exported through Israeli seaports and airports.
Hamas’s stated reasons for this war are that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has been provoking the Palestinians by the morning strolls that Israel’s minister for national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, was taking around Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and by the steps that he was taking to make imprisonment of Palestinians harsher. While these moves by Israel were widely seen as provocations, they are hardly issues that justify Hamas putting all its chips on the table the way it did last Saturday.
The bigger reason it acted now, which Hamas won’t admit, is that it saw how Israel was being more accepted by the Arab world and soon possibly by the birthplace of Islam, Saudi Arabia. Iran was being cornered by President Biden’s Middle East diplomacy, and Palestinians feared being left behind.
So Hamas essentially said, “OK, Jews, we will go where we have never gone before. We will launch an all-out attack from Gaza that won’t stop with soldiers but will murder your grandparents and slaughter your babies. We know it’s crazy, but we are willing to risk it to force you to outcrazy us, with the hope that the fires will burn up all Arab-Israeli normalization in the process.”
Yes, if you think Israel is now crazy, it is because Hamas punched it in the face, humiliated it and then poked out one eye. So now Israel believes it must restore its deterrence by proving that it can outcrazy Hamas’s latest craziness.
Israel will apply Hama Rules — a term I coined years ago to describe the strategy deployed in 1982 by Syria’s president, Hafez al-Assad, when Hamas’s political forefathers, the Muslim Brotherhood of Syria, tried to topple Assad’s secular regime by starting a rebellion in the city of Hama.
Assad pounded the Brotherhood’s neighborhoods in Hama relentlessly for days, letting no one out, and brought in bulldozers and leveled it as flat as a parking lot, killing some 20,000 of his own people in the process. I walked on that rubble weeks later. An Arab leader I know told me privately how, afterward, Assad laconically shrugged when he was asked about it: “People live. People die.”
Welcome to the Middle East. This is not like a border dispute between Norway and Sweden or a heated debate in Harvard Yard. Lord, how I wish that it were, but it’s not.
This Israel-Hamas war is part of an evolving escalation of craziness that has been underway in this neighborhood but getting more and more dangerous every year as weapons get bigger, cheaper and more lethal.
Like Biden, I stand 100 percent with Israel against Hamas, because Israel is an ally that shares many values with America, while Hamas and Iran are opposed to what America stands for. That math is quite simple for me.
But what makes this war different for me from any war before is Israel’s internal politics. In the past nine months, a group of Israeli far-right and ultra-Orthodox politicians led by Netanyahu tried to kidnap Israeli democracy in plain sight. The religious-nationalist-settler right, led by the prime minister, tried to take over Israel’s judiciary and other key institutions by eliminating the power of Israel’s Supreme Court to exercise judicial review. That attempt opened multiple fractures across Israeli society. Israel was recklessly being taken by its leadership to the brink of a civil war for an ideological flight of fancy. These fractures were seen by Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah and may have stirred their boldness.
If you want to get just a little feel for those fractures — and the volcanic anger at Netanyahu for the way he divided the country before this war — watch the video that went viral in Israel two days ago when Idit Silman, a minister in Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, was tossed out of the Assaf Harofeh Hospital in Tzrifin when she went to visit some wounded.
“You’ve ruined this country. Get out of here,” an Israeli doctor yelled at her. “How are you not ashamed to wage another war?” another person told her. “Now it’s our turn,” the doctor can be heard screaming in a video published on X, formerly known as Twitter, and reported by The Forward. “We are in charge. We will govern here — right, left, a nation united — without you. You’ve ruined everything!”
Israel has suffered a staggering blow and is now forced into a morally impossible war to outcrazy Hamas and deter Iran and Hezbollah at the same time. I weep for the terrible deaths that now await so many good Israelis and Palestinians. And I also worry deeply about the Israeli war plan. It is one thing to deter Hezbollah and deter Hamas. It is quite another to replace Hamas and leave behind something more stable and decent. But what to do?
Finally, though, just as I stand today with Israel’s new unity government in its fight against Hamas to save Israel’s body, I will stand after this war with Israel’s democracy defenders against those who tried to abduct Israel’s soul.
1. Política exterior 1: Joe Biden nuevamente conversó telefónicamente con Benjamin Netanyahu, primer ministro de Israel, para reiterarle el apoyo de EUA y actualizarle sobre el envío de equipo militar. Comentaron sobre la coordinación entre EUA, Israel, Jordania, Egipto y la ONU en torno a los esfuerzos para asegurar que los civiles afectados por la guerra con Hamas tengan acceso a agua, alimentos y medicamentos. Biden confirmó su “apoyo a todos los esfuerzos para proteger a la población civil.” También habló con Mahmood Abbas, presidente de la Autoridad Palestina. En la llamada, condenó el ataque terrorista de Hamas y señaló que no representa el derecho del pueblo palestino a la autodeterminación. Abbas comentó sobre sus esfuerzos para hacer llegar ayuda humanitaria a la población palestina, en particular en Gaza. En entrevista con 60 Minutes de CBS News, Biden dijo que la ocupación de Gaza por parte de Israel sería un grave error. De acuerdo con CNN, AP, Politico y Bloomberg, la Casa Blanca evalúa la posibilidad de que Biden lleve a cabo próximamente una visita a Israel en atención a una invitación de Netanyahu. 2. Política exterior 2: después de visitar Israel, Antony Blinken continuó con su gira por el Medio Oriente con actividades en Jordania (en donde se reunió con el presidente de la Autoridad Palestina), Bahréin, Qatar, los Emiratos Árabes Unidos, Arabia Saudita (2 veces) y Egipto. Hoy se encuentra nuevamente en Israel. Antes de partir de El Cairo, en breves declaraciones, Blinken dijo que los objetivos de sus contactos con líderes árabes eran cuatro: transmitir la unidad de EUA con Israel, prevenir que el conflicto se extienda a otras partes de la región, trabajar para la liberación de los rehenes y atender la crisis humanitaria en Gaza para evitar que los civiles sufran como consecuencia de las atrocidades de Hamas. 3. Congreso: la bancada republicana de la Cámara de Representantes eligió a Jim Jordan (Ohio) como su nueva propuesta para la presidencia de dicha instancia. Durante el fin de semana Jordan se acercó con sus colegas para tratar de asegurar al menos 217 votos en una bancada de 221 miembros para obtener la mayoría. Hoy los congresistas republicanos se reunirán para abordar el tema con la expectativa de poder presentar mañana al Pleno la candidatura. El resultado es incierto pues Jordan es de orientación conservadora y hay representantes republicanos del ala moderada opuestos a su elección. Algunos lo rechazan por su cercanía a Donald Trump, y en particular, su conocimiento de los preparativos de la insurrección en el Capitolio el 6 de enero de 2021. Sobre el tema, notas de AP, Reuters, CNN y Mother Jones. 4. Temas bilaterales: EUA es el país invitado de honor a la 51 edición del Festival Internacional Cervantino (FIC) que comenzó el viernes 13. En su mensaje, el embajador Ken Salazar resaltó que la invitación “refleja la cooperación y el diálogo histórico” y “realza el bicentenario” del establecimiento de las relaciones diplomáticas entre ambos países. Para apoyar la participación de EUA en el FIC, su gobierno destinó $1 millón de dólares; para programa, ver Cervantino – Embajada y consulados de Estados Unidos en México (usembassy.gov).
*ATENTAMENTE* *MAESTRO FEDERICO LA MONT*
Sent from my iPod
*LAS NOTICIAS CON LA MONT* 📰
📃 *Premio Internacional Periodismo Y Periodismo Migrante*📃
La Información Directa a tu Celular 📲 de HOY *Viernes 13 de Octubre 2023* *En El Plano Nacional e Internacional*:
*Ahora también ya estamos en la redes y síguenos a través de nuestros siguientes medios:*
*Hamas Attack on Israel Brings New Scrutiny of Group’s Ties to Iran*
Officials from Iran and Hezbollah helped plan the attack, people familiar with the operation said, but the U.S. and its allies have not found evidence directly linking Tehran.
Last weekend’s attack on Israel by Hamas has brought renewed scrutiny of the armed Palestinian group’s longstanding relationship with Iran, and questions about whether the Gaza-based group could have pulled off such a sophisticated and devastating operation on its own.
Iran has a long history of training and arming proxy militia groups in the region, from Gaza to Lebanon, Iraq and Syria. It supports Hamas militarily and has helped it design and produce a domestic missile and rocket system to match the capabilities and material available in Gaza — an impoverished, densely populated coastal strip that has been blockaded by Israel and Egypt for the past 16 years.
And over the past year, there have been signs that Iran and its proxies were preparing to take a more aggressive approach toward Israel.
Gen. Esmail Ghaani, who is in charge of supervising Iran’s network of proxy militias as head of the country’s paramilitary Quds Force, repeatedly traveled to Lebanon for covert sessions with leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, a Shiite Lebanese militia that Iran also supports.
Some people familiar with the operation said that a tight circle of leaders from Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas helped plan the attack starting over a year ago, trained militants and had advanced knowledge of it. That account is based on interviews with three Iranians affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards, one Iranian connected to senior leadership and a Syrian affiliated with Hezbollah.
Other people say they believe Iran had some involvement but it was not as deep. “The implementation was all Hamas, but we do not deny Iran’s help and support,” said Ali Barakeh, a senior Hamas official based in Beirut.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has publicly denied the country played a role, even as he and other Iranian leaders praised the carnage. “We kiss the foreheads and arms of the resourceful and intelligent designers,” Mr. Khamenei said this week in his first televised speech since the attack. But he added: “Those who say that the recent saga is the work of non-Palestinians have miscalculated.”
The United States, Israel and key regional allies have said they have not found evidence in early intelligence gathering that Iran directly helped plan the attack. The United States has collected multiple pieces of intelligence that show that key Iranian leaders were surprised by it, according to several American officials, including people who would typically be aware of operations involving the Quds Forces.
*Airstrikes Intensify in Gaza, and More*
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*New York Is Starting to Act Like a Southern Border State*
For far too long, too many Americans considered the border to be someone else’s problem — someone in Texas, maybe, or Arizona or California. People who didn’t live near the border might have condemned harsh tactics used there or offered their communities as sanctuaries for those who managed to slip across it. But for the most part, the challenges of the border remained at the border. Out of sight, out of mind.
That changed this year with the influx of hundreds of thousands of migrants in Northern cities, which is forcing even the most big-hearted places to grapple with what happens when too many migrants and asylum seekers show up on their doorstep overnight, a problem border communities know all too well. Chicago has housed migrants in abandoned schools, police stations and airports, sparking protests and at least one lawsuit. Portland, Maine, briefly commandeered a convention center. Massachusetts is putting up more than 6,000 families in emergency shelters and hotels, at an estimated cost of $45 million per month. About half are migrants.
Now a major reassessment is underway of what these cities can reasonably be expected to provide to people who have just crossed the border in search of safety and a better life and whether efforts to house and support them will encourage more to come. In a recent survey by Siena College Research Institute, 82 percent of New Yorkers called the arrival of so many migrants a “serious problem,” with 58 percent saying it’s time to slow the flow. New York is starting to think — and act — like a Southern border state now.
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas must be pleased. This is exactly what he hoped for when he started sending busloads of migrants into so-called sanctuary cities in the North last year. “Bringing the border to Biden,” is what he called it. I’m no fan of Mr. Abbott. But his tactic is working.
Nowhere is this more apparent than New York City, where the emergency housing social safety net is being stretched to the breaking point. More than 10,000 migrants arrive in the city each month, about half of whom are being housed in shelters or hotels. Mayor Eric Adams has said that the $5 billion price tag of caring for migrants this year may force cuts to social services on which the neediest New Yorkers depend, including meals for older adults.
It’s gotten so dire that Mr. Adams — who campaigned on a pledge to keep the sanctuary policy in place — just wrapped up a whirlwind trip to Mexico, Colombia and Ecuador, where he begged people not to come. New York is full, he told people in Puebla, Mexico. “There’s no more room.” I doubt migrants will listen. Why would they? New York City is spending $383 per family per night to house homeless new arrivals, thanks to a consent decree from a state court that requires the city to provide shelter to those who need it.
People who apply for asylum in New York are more likely to get it than those who apply in other places. New York immigration judges deny only 26 percent of asylum cases, compared with 92 percent in Houston and 86 percent in Miami, according to TRAC, an information clearinghouse at Syracuse University. And migrants who make it to New York are less likely to be deported. Since 2014, sanctuary city and state laws have limited cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
It’s clear that the city’s well-earned reputation for welcoming immigrants has played a role in making New York the top destination. Nevertheless, Mr. Adams blames that “madman” — Mr. Abbott — for the crisis, even though only about 13,100 of the roughly 140,000 migrants who arrived over the past year were sent on buses chartered by Texas. (Mr. Abbott shot back on Fox News that New York and other liberal cities are to blame for the migrant crisis by offering sanctuary and “letting everybody live for free.”)
*The Massacre in Israel and the Need for a Decent Left*
On Tuesday evening, I was drinking on the porch of my friend and neighbor Misha Shulman, the Israel-born rabbi of a progressive New York synagogue called the New Shul. All day, he’d been on the phone with congregants deeply distraught over the massacres and mass kidnappings in Israel. Of all the people he spoke to, he said, those most devastated were either people who had lost close friends or family, or young Jews “completely shattered by the response of their lefty friends in New York,” who were either justifying Hamas’s atrocities or celebrating them outright.
This sense of deep betrayal is not limited to New York. Many progressive Jews have been profoundly shaken by the way some on the left are treating the terrorist mass murder of civilians as noble acts of anticolonial resistance. These are Jews who share the left’s abhorrence of the occupation of Gaza and of the enormities inflicted on it, which are only going to get worse if and when Israel invades. But the way keyboard radicals have condoned war crimes against Israelis has left many progressive Jews alienated from political communities they thought were their own.
By now, you’ve probably seen examples. There was the giddy message put out by the national committee of Students for Justice in Palestine, which proclaimed, “Today, we witness a historic win for the Palestinian resistance: across land, air and sea.” New York’s chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America promoted a rally where speakers applauded the attacks, and the Connecticut D.S.A. enthused, “Yesterday, the Palestinian resistance launched an unprecedented anticolonial struggle.” The president of N.Y.U.’s student bar association wrote in its newsletter, “I will not condemn Palestinian resistance,” leading to the withdrawal of a job offer. Over the otherwise benign slogan “I stand with Palestine,” Black Lives Matter Chicago posted a photo of a figure in a paraglider like those Hamas used to descend on a desert rave and turn it into a killing field.
“I think what surprised me most was the indifference to human suffering,” said Joshua Leifer, a contributing editor at the left-wing magazine Jewish Currents and a member of the editorial board at the progressive publication Dissent.
“I’m trying to hold on, personally, to my commitments, my values, which now feel in conflict, in a way, with the political community that I lived alongside in the United States for basically my whole adult life,” he said. “It certainly has begun to feel like a breaking point.”
Conservatives reading this might take a jaundiced satisfaction in what some surely view as naïve progressives getting their comeuppance. But part of what makes the depravity of the edgelord anti-imperialists so tragic is that a decent and functional left has rarely been more necessary. As I write this, Israel has imposed what the Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant, called a “complete siege” of Gaza’s two million people, about half of whom are under 18. “No electricity, no food, no water, no gas — it’s all closed,” said Gallant. “We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.” Such collective punishment is, like the mass killing of civilians in Israel, a war crime.
Hunger was already rampant in Gaza before this conflict broke out; today the World Food Program estimates that 63 percent of its population, living in one of the most densely populated places in the world, is “food insecure.” “If there is a hell on earth, it is the lives of children in Gaza,” António Guterres, the secretary general of the United Nations, said in 2021.
If Gaza was already hell, we lack the language for what it’s about to become. Over the weekend, Ariel Kallner, a member of the Knesset from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, called for a new “nakba,” Arabic for “catastrophe,” which Palestinians use to describe being driven from their homes at Israel’s creation in 1948. This time, Kallner said, the catastrophe befalling Palestinians would “overshadow” the last.
*Biden Administration Awards $7 Billion for 7 Hydrogen Hubs Across the U.S.*
Clean hydrogen could help fight climate change, but it barely exists today. Now the administration wants to build an entire industry from scratch.
The Biden administration announced plans on Friday to award up to $7 billion to create seven regional hubs around the country that will make and use hydrogen, a clean-burning fuel with the potential to power ships or factories without producing any planet-warming emissions.
Hydrogen is widely seen as a promising tool to fight climate change, as long as it can be produced without creating any greenhouse gases. When burned, hydrogen releases just water vapor. But very little of this so-called clean hydrogen is used today. By awarding the grants, the Biden administration is trying to stand up an entire industry from scratch.
Dozens of regions competed for the money, which will be awarded to proposed hydrogen projects on the Gulf Coast (Texas and Louisiana) and in the Mid-Atlantic (Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey), Appalachia (Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio), the Midwest (Illinois, Indiana and Michigan), the Upper Midwest (Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota) and the Pacific Northwest (Washington, Oregon and Montana). A proposed hub in California will also receive funding.
President Biden and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm were expected to travel to the Port of Philadelphia on Friday to discuss the announcement.
“Clean hydrogen is one of our most versatile, sharpest tools to slash emissions,” Ms. Granholm wrote in June when she outlined the administration’s hydrogen strategy.
In theory, hydrogen could be used to help produce steel, cement, chemicals and fertilizer. It could also be used to power trucks, ships or airplanes or to produce electricity, all without emitting the greenhouse gases that are dangerously heating the planet.
The challenge, however, is figuring out how to manufacture that hydrogen cleanly. Today, companies usually extract hydrogen from natural gas in a process that emits large amounts of carbon dioxide. But it is also possible to produce hydrogen without any emissions — by, for instance, using wind turbines or solar panels to power electrolyzers that can split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The catch is that making hydrogen this way is still two to three times as expensive as making it with natural gas.
To help jump-start a clean hydrogen economy, Congress approved $8 billion to create regional hydrogen hubs as part of the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. As part of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, lawmakers approved a hefty tax credit for companies that produce low-emissions hydrogen, in the hopes of driving down the cost of production.
Partly as a result of those laws, the Department of Energy estimates that the use of clean hydrogen could grow to 10 million tons per year by 2030, up from virtually nothing today.
The gusher of federal money also kicked off a furious competition among states. The Department of Energy initially received 79 proposals for hydrogen hubs from states across the country before selecting seven. The hubs typically consist of networks of businesses, labor groups, researchers and local governments that have pledged to work together to produce, transport and use clean hydrogen.
Each of the award winners plans to take a slightly different approach. The proposed hub in California, for instance, aims to produce hydrogen from renewable energy and use the fuel to power heavy-duty trucks and port operations in Long Beach, Los Angeles and Oakland.
By contrast, the Appalachian hub, which will span parts of Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio, is expected to continue to use natural gas to produce hydrogen, but companies will seek to capture carbon dioxide emissions from the process and bury it underground. That proposal was backed by Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia.
Some environmentalists and researchers have criticized that method, known as “blue hydrogen,” and warned that it could still lead to high emissions if methane leaks from the process.
The Energy Department estimates that nearly two-thirds of the investments will eventually go toward hydrogen made by renewable electricity.
Not all of the $7 billion in funding will be spent at once. As a first step, the Energy Department will give awardees initial grants to create more detailed proposals for their hydrogen hubs. If the agency deems the projects viable, it will disburse more money over time — but that money is not guaranteed if any of the hubs prove unworkable.
*¡Buenos días, excelente fin de semana!* 🔹Ven en Banxico riesgo para la inflación por más gasto fiscal. 🔹Inflación en EU no cede: avanza 3.7% en septiembre. 🔹Silencio no implica inacción sobre fideicomisos: Piña. 🔹Presidente propone que los 15 mil mdp de fideicomisos sean para becas. 🔹Para sacar a 764 mexicanos de Israel harán ‘puente aéreo’. 🔹Hay 10 finalistas para encabezar la rectoría de UNAM; son 7 hombres y 3 mujeres.
Palestinian militants launched the biggest attack against Israel in 50 years, prompting intense retaliation.
Warning: this episode contains descriptions of violence.
Over the weekend, Palestinian militants with Hamas, the Islamic group that controls the Gaza Strip, mounted a stunning and highly coordinated invasion of Israel, rampaging through Israeli towns, killing people in their homes and on the streets, and taking hostages.
Isabel Kershner, who covers Israeli and Palestinian politics and society for The Times, talks about the attack and the all-out war that it has now prompted.
Evgenia Simanovich runs to the reinforced concrete shelter in her home in Ashkelon, Israel, moments after a rocket siren was sounded.Credit…Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
*Israel’s Plan to Destroy Hamas*
The country’s leaders long believed they could coexist with Hamas. The weekend’s attacks have changed that.
For years, Israel’s leaders believed that they could coexist with Hamas. After this weekend’s massacre, that belief is over.
Steven Erlanger, a former Jerusalem bureau chief at The New York Times, explains what Israel’s plan to destroy Hamas will mean for Palestinians and Israelis.
A rally in Gaza City in 2021 marking the 34th anniversary of Hamas’s founding. The group has controlled the territory for more than a decade.Credit…A rally in Gaza City in 2021 marking the 34th anniversary of Hamas’s founding. Photo: Mohammed Salem/Reuters
*How the Left Is Reacting to the Hamas Atrocities*
To the Editor:
Re “The Anti-Israel Left Needs to Take a Hard Look at Itself,” by Bret Stephens (column, Oct. 11):
Hamas’s systematic and indiscriminate rape, torture, murder and kidnapping of children, grandmothers, ravers and peace activists are brutal enough. What compounds the despair, however, has been the response in the immediate aftermath by some of my fellow liberals.
These are the people who reflexively see “microaggressions” everywhere, yet are blind to this macroaggression. The people who insist that “words are violence,” yet celebrated actual violence against innocents as a form of “resistance.” The people who are quick to accuse so many institutions of systemic racism, yet glorify an institution (Hamas) that has been publicly and unapologetically antisemitic for decades.
It is possible, as I do, to support and sympathize with ordinary Palestinians, and strive for a future of peaceful coexistence, while also recognizing the unequivocal depravity of these terrorist attacks. This was not a difficult moral test. Yet liberals failed miserably.
Mark Bessoudo London
To the Editor:
Bret Stephens is right to call out supporters of Palestinian rights who minimize or even celebrate the atrocities committed by Hamas, and to point to the explicit or implicit antisemitism of some anti-Zionist arguments.
However, his claim that to call for a cease-fire is pro-Hamas is wrong. It is rather to call for the taking of innocent life on both sides to cease. Israeli officials made it clear that they would exercise no restraint in their bombardment of Gaza, and Israeli actions have followed through on these words.
Let’s leave aside questions of “moral equivalence” between actors, and focus on actions. Deliberately killing civilians and deliberately failing to avoid killing civilians are both war crimes under international law.
Stopping criminal killing on all sides and releasing hostages are not only vital for upholding the increasingly fragile and widely disregarded framework of international law, but also an essential step toward attempting to bring a just peace to the Middle East.
Chris Sinha Norwich, England The writer is an honorary professor in the School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication, University of East Anglia.
To the Editor:
Thanks to Thomas L. Friedman (“Israel Has Never Needed to Be Smarter Than Now,” column, Oct. 11) and Bret Stephens for their brilliant analyses of the situation in the Middle East. I am a secular American Jew, a proud liberal who is appalled at the authoritarian tendencies of the Netanyahu regime.
There is no doubt in my mind that decades of harsh treatment of Palestinians by Israel has led to tremendous frustrations, and that Benjamin Netanyahu has exacerbated the problem, but nothing justifies the terrorist actions taken by Hamas.
Israelis must boot Mr. Netanyahu and his ilk, and elect leaders who will offer Palestinians respect and some measure of hope. The Middle East powers such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan must dislodge Hamas, and blunt the influence of Iran in the area.
New leadership is the only way to achieve a lasting peace. I am not holding my breath.
Bill Gottdenker Mountainside, N.J.
*Feeling Terrible After Your Covid Shot? Then It’s Probably Working.*
Fever, chills and fatigue may all be signs of vigorous antibody production, a new study finds.
A new study has an encouraging message for Americans who shy away from Covid shots because of worries about side effects: The chills, fatigue, headache and malaise that can follow vaccination may be signs of a vigorous immune response.
People who had those side effects after the second dose of a Covid vaccine had more antibodies against the coronavirus at one month and six months after the shot, compared with those who did not have symptoms, according to the new study. Increases in skin temperature and heart rate also signaled higher antibody levels.
“We know that vaccine uptake can be challenging, and in some cases, it can be so because some people have strong reactions to the vaccine,” said Aric Prather, a clinical psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who led the study.
“My hope is that this actually helps assuage some of those concerns,” said Dr. Prather, who studies how behavioral factors affect the immune system. “In fact, those symptoms, though they may be unpleasant, may actually be working for you.”
The study was posted online last week. It has not been reviewed for publication in a scientific journal. But several experts said it was well done, and its results were consistent with those from other research.
The relative increase in antibody levels among those who experienced side effects was small and doesn’t mean that people without symptoms don’t muster a strong immune response, experts said.
“Lack of side effects should not be taken as a sign that the vaccine’s not working,” said Alessandro Sette, co-director of the La Jolla Institute of Immunology’s Center for Vaccine Innovation, who was not involved in the work.
An earlier study found that 98 percent of people who felt no ill effects still produced copious amounts of antibodies, compared with 99 percent of those who had localized symptoms or worse, Dr. Sette said.
*Republicans Choose a New Speaker Nominee, Then Quickly Undercut Him*
Multiple lawmakers refused to honor their party’s internal selection of Steve Scalise, continuing the chaos over the speakership with no end in sight.
Republicans used to consider themselves the orderly party, the one that assiduously adhered to the rules and respected the will of the majority. But the traditional rule book has been thrown out the window when it comes to the extraordinary tumult in the House.
In what would have been unthinkable in the past, numerous House Republicans on Wednesday refused to honor the results of their internal election of Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana for speaker — historically a given. They threatened a mutiny on the House floor that had factions of the party in open conflict amid the unrelenting chaos on Capitol Hill.
After the weekend assault on Israel by Hamas, House Republicans had clamored for unity to allow lawmakers to get back to business and rush assistance to the nation’s closest ally in the Middle East. Just days later, they were back at one another’s throats after Mr. Scalise, the party’s No. 2 in the House, bested Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio in the party showdown for the post.
“I’m frankly a little taken aback that we have some Republicans who don’t seem to want to follow anyone,” said Representative Mario Diaz-Balart, Republican of Florida. He and other veteran lawmakers expressed exasperation that the closed-door election did not end the bitter acrimony and rampant uncertainty that has engulfed House Republicans.
*Ecuador, Reeling from Violence, Seeks Change. Is a Banana Heir the Answer?*
Daniel Noboa, a presidential candidate who has been leading in the polls, at a campaign rally last month in Sangolquí, a suburb of Quito, the capital of Ecuador.Credit…Karen Toro/Reuters Daniel Noboa, a center-right businessman whose family business includes a globally known banana brand, is facing an establishment leftist, Luisa González, in Sunday’s presidential election.
For generations, the Noboa family has helped shape Ecuador, overseeing a vast economic empire, including fertilizers, plastics, cardboard, the country’s largest container storage facility and, most famously, a gargantuan banana business featuring one of the world’s most recognizable fruit brands, Bonita.
One notable position has escaped them, however: the presidency. On five occasions, the head of the family conglomerate, Álvaro Noboa, has run for president and lost — in one case by two percentage points.
On Sunday, the Noboas may finally get their presidency. Mr. Noboa’s son, Daniel Noboa, a 35-year-old Harvard Kennedy School graduate who has used the same campaign jingle as his father, is the leading candidate in a runoff election. His opponent is Luisa González, the handpicked candidate of former President Rafael Correa, who beat the elder Noboa in 2006.
The legacy of the banana company — and Daniel Noboa’s association with it — is just one aspect of an election that centers on issues of employment and security in this country of 17 million on South America’s western coast that has been jolted by the extraordinary power gained by the drug trafficking industry in the last five years.
International criminal groups working with local gangs have unleashed an unprecedented surge of violence that has sent tens of thousands of Ecuadoreans fleeing to the U.S.-Mexico border, part of a migration wave that has overwhelmed the Biden administration.
Mr. Noboa rose unexpectedly from the bottom of the polls to a second-place finish in the first round of presidential elections in August, helped, experts said, by a widely lauded debate performance and the upending of the race by the shocking assassination of another candidate, Fernando Villavicencio, days before the vote.
Mr. Noboa has galvanized a base of frustrated voters on the back of a campaign promising change.
“He has been able to say that ‘I represent renewal in Ecuador,’” said Caroline Ávila, an Ecuadorean political analyst. “And that is why people are buying his message.”
Sunday’s election pits Mr. Noboa, a center-right businessman, against Ms. González, 45, a leftist establishment candidate, at a moment of deep anxiety in a country once a relatively peaceful island in a violent region.
Mr. Noboa, who declined several requests for an interview, has had a consistent lead in multiple polls since August, though it has narrowed slightly in recent days.
He has positioned himself as “the employment president,” even including a work application form on his website, and has promised to attract international investment and trade and cut taxes.
His opponent, Ms. González, has pledged to tap central bank reserves to stimulate the economy and increase financing for the public health care system and public universities.
On security, both candidates have talked about providing more money for the police and deploying the military to secure ports used to smuggle drugs out of the country and prisons, which are controlled by violent gangs.
Ms. González’s close association with Mr. Correa has helped elevate her political profile, but also hurt her among some voters.
Her first place finish in the first round was propelled by a strong base of voters nostalgic for the low homicide rates and commodities boom that lifted millions out of poverty during Mr. Correa’s administration. Ms. González’s campaign slogan in the first round was “we already did it and we will do it again.”
But building on that support is a challenge. Mr. Correa’s authoritarian style and accusations of corruption deeply divided the country. He is living in exile in Belgium, fleeing a prison sentence for campaign finance violations, and many Ecuadoreans fear that a González presidency would pave the way for him to return and run for office again.
Daniel Noboa is part of the third generation of his family that today operates a sprawling venture, but whose roots were in agriculture.
The Noboa family’s rise to prominence and wealth began with Luis Noboa, Daniel’s grandfather, who was born into poverty in 1916, but started building his business empire in the second half of the 20th century by exporting bananas and other crops.
His death in 1994 set off a bitter court battle on three continents among his wife and children for control of the business that finally ended in 2002, when a judge in London awarded Álvaro Noboa a 50 percent stake in the family’s holding company.
Álvaro expanded the company internationally, while also fighting multiple legal battles over back taxes and disputed payments to shipping companies.
As a politician, he described himself as a “messiah of the poor,” handing out free computers and fistfuls of dollars at his rallies, while also fending off accusations of child labor, worker mistreatment and union busting at his banana business. (He has claimed that the accusations were politically motivated.)
His son, Daniel, was raised in the port city of Guayaquil, where he founded an event promotion company when he was 18, before moving to the United States to study at New York University. Afterward he became commercial director for the Noboa Corporation and earned three more degrees, including a master’s in public administration from the Harvard Kennedy School.
He ran successfully for Ecuador’s Congress in 2021, positioning himself as a pro-business lawmaker, until President Guillermo Lasso disbanded the legislature in May and called for early elections.
Mr. Noboa has promoted a more left-leaning platform, railing against the banking industry and calling for more social spending.
A Harvard classmate and close friend of Mr. Noboa, Mauricio Lizcano, a senior official in Colombia, described the candidate as someone “who respects diversity and respects women, who believes in social issues” but is also “orthodox in economics and business.’’
Still, Mr. Noboa has not raised social issues on the campaign trail, and his running mate, Verónica Abad, is a right-wing business coach who has spoken out against abortion, feminism and L.G.B.T.Q. rights and expressed support for Donald J. Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former far-right president.
Ms. Abad is “a really odd choice for someone like Noboa who’s trying to transcend this kind of left-right divide,” said Guillaume Long, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Ecuador’s former foreign minister under Mr. Correa.
Despite his family pedigree, Mr. Noboa has tried to set himself apart, pointing out that he has his own business and that his personal wealth is valued at less than $1 million.
While Álvaro frequently referred to Mr. Correa as a “communist devil,” his son has avoided directly attacking “correísmo.’’
“I never voted for his father, but this guy has a different aura, new blood, a new way of thinking,’’ said Enrique Insua, a 63-year-old retiree in Guayaquil. “He is charismatic.”
Mexico Today USA 