Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib writes: My brother, Mohammed, has survived nearly a year of war in Gaza while working to aid its people. He has scrambled out of the rubble of an air strike that destroyed our family home, and he has seen far too many of our relatives wounded or killed. Through it all, he has somehow remained unscathed. However, he recently fell severely ill battling a hepatitis infection. Mohammed is a deputy director of programs for one of the…
Ryu Spaeth writes: It was mid-August, roughly a month and a half before his new book, The Message, was set to be published, and Ta-Nehisi Coates was in my face, on my level, his eyes wide and aflame and his hands swallowing his scalp as he clutched it in disbelief and wonder and rage. At the Gramercy Park restaurant where we’d met for breakfast, Coates, now 48, looked noticeably older than the fruit-cheeked polemicist whose visage had been everywhere nearly…
The New York Times reports: The Nebraska state senator who Republicans hoped would help ease former President Donald J. Trump’s path to the White House by agreeing to change how the state allocates its Electoral College votes said on Monday that he would not do so, ending a brief but intense lobbying effort from allies of Mr. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. The state legislator, Mike McDonnell, a Democrat turned Republican from Omaha, said that he would not agree…
Lesley Stahl reports: Everywhere you go people are complaining about inflation: voters say it’s their number one issue. Enter trustbuster Lina Khan – the youngest chair ever of the Federal Trade Commission – just 32 when she was named. She says much of the blame for the exorbitant prices on everything from food to concert tickets, is widespread corporate consolidation. The FTC’s mission is breaking illegal monopolies, blocking mergers that stifle competition, and protecting consumers from a system Lina…
The Guardian reports: Industrial civilisation is close to breaching a seventh planetary boundary, and may already have crossed it, according to scientists who have compiled the latest report on the state of the world’s life-support systems. “Ocean acidification is approaching a critical threshold”, particularly in higher-latitude regions, says the latest report on planetary boundaries. “The growing acidification poses an increasing threat to marine ecosystems.” The report, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), builds on years of research…
The Observer reports: In hospitals around Lebanon, hundreds of patients were adjusting to a new life, many of them now with permanent disabilities. The pager explosions resulted in many being blinded and losing a hand. The pagers had beeped twice, and then there was a pause, giving people enough time to bring them to their face before they exploded. “Enucleation [removal of the eye] is a procedure that is rarely performed these days. One of our senior ophthalmologists was saying…
Ori Goldberg writes: Israel has not claimed responsibility for the rolling “pager attack” in Lebanon. Israeli social discourse, however, is not even debating the issue. It is clear that “we did it” (exclamation point optional). What is it that we actually did? One can surmise that Israeli intelligence established a company that produced pagers and walkie-talkies and managed to pique Hezbollah’s interest in these devices. Hezbollah prides itself on its low-tech approach to communications, assuming that this makes its network…
Armed Israeli soldiers storm and shut down Al Jazeera’s bureau in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank for 45 days, forcing staff to leave the premises and destroying equipment. During the raid on Al Jazeera’s office, Israeli soldiers tear down a large banner of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed by an Israeli sniper in the West Bank two years ago. Al Jazeera’s Zein Basravi has more from Amman, Jordan, because the Israeli government has also banned Al…
Carole Cadwalladr writes: The last time I met Evgenia Kara-Murza, it was a grim day in early March. The timing couldn’t have been worse. As we spoke, Alexei Navalny’s coffin was being lowered into the frozen ground in a Moscow cemetery. Meanwhile Evgenia’s husband, Vladimir Kara-Murza, was still incarcerated in a Siberian prison cell almost identical to the one in the Arctic Circle in which Navalny had been found dead, presumed murdered. The parallels were eerie. Because Vladimir, a journalist…
Joshua Yaffa writes: Volodymyr Zelensky’s situation room, where the Ukrainian President monitors developments in his country’s war with Russia, is a windowless chamber, largely taken up by a rectangular conference table and ringed by blackened screens, deep inside the Presidential Administration Building, in central Kyiv. On a recent afternoon, as I sat inside, waiting for Zelensky, I heard his voice—a syrupy baritone, speckled with gravel—before he entered, dressed in his signature military-adjacent style: black T-shirt, olive-drab pants, brown boots. He…
Politico reports: The November election could come down to a hair’s breadth margin, and both Democrats and Republicans are looking to rack up as many votes as they can from American voters abroad. For the first time in a presidential cycle, Democrats are allocating significant money to the effort to help push their party over the finish line. The Democratic National Committee and private donors are putting more than $450,000 into a get-out-the-vote campaign aimed at reaching Americans from swing…
Robyn Speer, the creator of wordfreq, writes: The wordfreq data is a snapshot of language that could be found in various online sources up through 2021. There are several reasons why it will not be updated anymore. Generative AI has polluted the data I don’t think anyone has reliable information about post-2021 language usage by humans. The open Web (via OSCAR) was one of wordfreq’s data sources. Now the Web at large is full of slop generated by large language…
HuffPost reports: Last weekend, former President Donald Trump posted another anti-immigrant screed to Truth Social. It would have been unremarkable ― at least, graded on the Trumpian curve of extreme xenophobia ― except for one word. “[We will] return Kamala’s illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration),” he wrote. “I will save our cities and towns in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and all across America.” Many people might have glossed over his use of “remigration.”…
David Runciman writes: On 6 January 2021, two weeks before he was due to leave office, Trump encouraged his supporters to march on the Capitol in a bid to prevent the congressional ratification of his election defeat. Though Trump claims he was not responsible for what happened next, the riot that followed – with his supporters storming government buildings and elected officials fleeing for their lives – echoed some of the darkest chapters of modern European history. This is how…