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Israeli negotiators said to believe chance of hostage deal ‘close to zero’

Israeli negotiators said to believe chance of hostage deal ‘close to zero’

The Times of Israel reports: The chances of a phased hostage-ceasefire agreement being achieved on the basis of Israel’s May proposal are “close to zero” and there is “very broad pessimism” among the Israeli negotiators, Channel 12 reported Sunday, citing unnamed sources in the Israeli security establishment. The US, which had indicated it was planning to present a new bridging proposal in the next two or three days, is now regarded as unlikely to do so, it added. The report…

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Under cover of war, Israel is demolishing home after home in Silwan

Under cover of war, Israel is demolishing home after home in Silwan

+972 Magazine reports: Younes Odeh and his 3-year-old grandson stand atop the remains of a house in Silwan, a Palestinian neighborhood in the shadow of Jerusalem’s Old City. “This is where he slept,” Odeh says, pointing to a pile of broken drywall and crumbled concrete — all that’s left of his grandson’s bedroom. On Aug. 27, Israeli bulldozers tore apart the house belonging to Odeh’s son, also named Younes, which he built adjacent to his father’s home in 2015. The…

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Surveying trees to better understand how much planet-warming carbon the Amazon actually stores

Surveying trees to better understand how much planet-warming carbon the Amazon actually stores

The New York Times reports: With the help of a small rope tied around his ankles, Eugenio Sánchez, lithe at age 50, shimmied himself all the way up a towering tree like a human inchworm, his chest heaving from the exertion, just to pick a few leaves. The leaves, found only on the highest branches, would help the scientists waiting below identify the species. And that, along with the tree’s exact size (or at least as close as one can…

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The unprecedented grand coalition

The unprecedented grand coalition

Jeff Jarvis writes: As Nicolle Wallace exclaimed on her show Friday, Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders have all gathered together around a cause. That cause is democracy and its standard bearer is Kamala Harris. This is a momentous time in the United States, unprecedented at least in this century and likely since long before the Civil War. It is the biggest story in my journalism career. The question is whether our national media will understand…

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Donald Trump gets everything wrong about the climate crisis

Donald Trump gets everything wrong about the climate crisis

Bill McKibben writes: Here is the biggest thing happening on our planet as we head into the autumn of 2024: the Earth is continuing to heat dramatically. Scientists have said that there’s a better than 90% chance that this year will top 2023 as the warmest ever recorded. And paleoclimatologists were pretty sure last year was the hottest in the last 125,000 years. The result is an almost-cliched run of disasters: open Twitter/X anytime for pictures of floods pushing cars…

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Trump refuses to answer questions about the many women he is believed to have sexually abused

Trump refuses to answer questions about the many women he is believed to have sexually abused

Maggie Haberman writes: If any voters had forgotten that Donald J. Trump was accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct, he spent roughly 45 minutes reminding them on Friday, eight weeks before Election Day. At a lectern in the lobby of Trump Tower, Mr. Trump, flanked by seven of his lawyers, laid out years-old allegations from the women in detail as he denied that they were telling the truth. He had just attended a federal appeals court hearing related to…

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Heritage Foundation video ‘stunt’ promotes racist myth of ‘non-citizen voters’

Heritage Foundation video ‘stunt’ promotes racist myth of ‘non-citizen voters’

The New York Times reports: In July, two men went door to door at a sprawling apartment complex in Norcross, Ga., an Atlanta suburb that is a hub for the region’s fast-growing Latino population, asking residents if they were U.S. citizens and whether they were registered to vote. Speaking in Spanish, often peeking from behind half-closed doors, seven people told the men that they were not citizens but that they were registered to vote. Although the two men claimed to…

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Medhi Hasan: Trump isn’t anti-war. It’s time to debunk this dangerous myth

Medhi Hasan: Trump isn’t anti-war. It’s time to debunk this dangerous myth

  “Trump did try and start new wars, expanded old wars, increased drone strikes, and helped do a genocide in the Middle East.” Mehdi debunks the claim that Trump was an anti-war president. Trump almost started a new war in his first year in office, when he picked a fight with nuclear-armed North Korea. He called Kim Jong Un, “little rocket man”, called him “short and fat,” and threatened him with “fire and fury”. When it comes to drones, Trump…

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Russia secretly worms its way into America’s conservative media

Russia secretly worms its way into America’s conservative media

The New York Times reports: In early 2022, a young couple from Canada, Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan, registered a new company in Tennessee that went on to create a social media outlet called Tenet Media. By November 2023, they had assembled a lineup of major conservative social media stars, including Benny Johnson, Tim Pool and Dave Rubin, to post original content on Tenet’s platform. The site then began posting hundreds of videos — trafficking in pointed political commentary as…

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Hints of a hidden structure detected at the edge of the Solar System

Hints of a hidden structure detected at the edge of the Solar System

Science Alert reports: If you travel far enough away from the Sun, the Solar System becomes a lot more populated. Out past the orbit of Neptune lies the Kuiper Belt, a vast, ring-shaped field of icy rocks. This is where Pluto resides, and Arrokoth, and countless other small objects in the cold and the dark. These are known as Kuiper Belt objects or KBOs, and astronomers have just found hints of an unexpected rise in their density, between 70 and…

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‘Beyond catastrophic’: UN issues dire warning on Gaza as Israel hinders polio vaccination drive

‘Beyond catastrophic’: UN issues dire warning on Gaza as Israel hinders polio vaccination drive

  The United Nations is warning the humanitarian situation in Gaza remains “beyond catastrophic” as more than 1 million Palestinians in Gaza did not receive any food rations in August amid Israel’s relentless assault. Israel’s 11-month campaign has killed more than 15,000 children and enabled the besieged territory’s first polio outbreak in a quarter-century. INARA founder Arwa Damon just got back from spending two weeks in Gaza, where the nonprofit currently provides medical and mental healthcare to Palestinian children. “Israel…

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Israeli forces kill American-Turkish activist in the occupied West Bank

Israeli forces kill American-Turkish activist in the occupied West Bank

Al Jazeera reports: Israeli forces have fatally shot an American-Turkish activist at a demonstration in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian news agency Wafa and a hospital official say. Twenty-six-year-old Aysenur Ezgi Eygi was taking part in the protest against illegal Israeli settlements on Mount Sbeih in Beita, south of Nablus, on Friday when she was shot. Fouad Nafaa, the head of the Rafidia Hospital in Nablus, told the news agency Reuters that Ezgi Eygi arrived at the hospital in…

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Inside Tenet Media, the pro-Trump ‘supergroup’ allegedly funded by Russia

Inside Tenet Media, the pro-Trump ‘supergroup’ allegedly funded by Russia

The Washington Post reports: Even by the standards of right-wing social media, last year’s rollout for Tenet Media was strange. Videos of the event featured influencers such as Benny Johnson and Dave Rubin talking portentously about freedom and censorship while bathed in a nightclub-style purple light. Tim Pool, a much-followed right-wing commentator, proclaimed that Tenet would be a kind of YouTube “supergroup” that would compete with the untrustworthy mainstream media. “I worked for several massive corporate news organizations,” Pool, a…

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‘A huge mistake’: Trump’s crypto allies cringe over family’s startup

‘A huge mistake’: Trump’s crypto allies cringe over family’s startup

Politico reports: Donald Trump’s sons want to turn their father’s growing bromance with the cryptocurrency industry into the new family business. So far, the project’s troubled rollout has succeeded in creating only one thing: a potential political liability for the former president. Trump’s eldest sons — Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump — have been teasing their plans to unveil a crypto startup called World Liberty Financial for weeks. But the launch has been marred in recent days by a…

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