Browsed by
Author: From elsewhere

Israel should make Gaza look like Auschwitz, says council head

Israel should make Gaza look like Auschwitz, says council head

The Jerusalem Post reports: Israel should be sending Palestinian Gazans fleeing the fighting to refugee camps in Lebanon, with the entire Gaza Strip being emptied and leveled and turned into a museum like the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, Metula Council head David Azoulai told 103FM. “After October 7, instead of urging people to go south, we should direct them to the beaches. The Navy can transport them to the shores of Lebanon, where there are already sufficient refugee camps….

Read More Read More

Why Samantha Power would resign over Gaza — if she had any integrity

Why Samantha Power would resign over Gaza — if she had any integrity

Jon Schwarz writes: A State Department official resigned on October 14, writing in a letter that the U.S. support for Israel’s assault on Gaza “will only lead to more and deeper suffering for both the Israeli and Palestinian people.” The director of the New York office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights resigned on October 31, stating that “once again we are seeing a genocide unfolding before our eyes and the organization we serve appears powerless to…

Read More Read More

Trump quotes Putin condemning American democracy, praises autocrat Orban

Trump quotes Putin condemning American democracy, praises autocrat Orban

The Washington Post reports: Republican polling leader Donald Trump approvingly quoted autocrats Vladimir Putin of Russia and Viktor Orban of Hungary, part of an ongoing effort to deflect from his criminal prosecutions and spin alarms about eroding democracy against President Biden. His speech at a presidential campaign rally here on Saturday also reprised dehumanizing language targeting immigrants that historians have likened to past authoritarians, including a reference that some civil rights advocates and experts in extremism have compared to Adolf…

Read More Read More

Like Putin, Viktor Orbán is learning he can act with impunity: the cash keeps flowing

Like Putin, Viktor Orbán is learning he can act with impunity: the cash keeps flowing

Katalin Cseh writes: The decision by European leaders to open formal EU membership negotiations with Ukraine is historic – it offers hope to a people who are courageously fighting Russian aggression and sacrificing their lives for a European future. The agreement marks a historic new chapter for the EU. But legally, it required the unanimity of all 27 leaders, and it only became possible because Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán – who had threatened to block the opening of talks…

Read More Read More

Could the universe be finite?

Could the universe be finite?

Eric Schwitzgebel and Jacob Barandes write: On recent estimates, the observable universe—the portion of the universe that we can detect through our telescopes—extends about 47 billion light-years in every direction. But the limit of what we can see is one thing, and the limit of what exists is quite another. It would be remarkable if the universe stopped exactly at the edge of what we can see. For one thing, that would place us, surprisingly and un-Copernicanly, precisely at the…

Read More Read More

‘Poisoning the blood of our country’: Trump’s fascist attack on immigrants

‘Poisoning the blood of our country’: Trump’s fascist attack on immigrants

Politico reports: With a border deal hanging in the balance and the Iowa caucuses a month away, Donald Trump amplified his attack on immigrants at a rally in New Hampshire on Saturday. “They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” the former president said. “They’ve poisoned mental institutions and prisons all over the world. Not just in South America, not just the three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world they’re coming into our country from…

Read More Read More

Why a Trump conviction might not save Biden’s reelection

Why a Trump conviction might not save Biden’s reelection

Politico reports: It’s the go-to refrain for Democrats watching Joe Biden fall behind Donald Trump in polls: Just wait until Trump is convicted. Yes, Biden’s historically unpopular. Yes, views of his job performance are growing increasingly negative. But if a jury of Trump’s peers in Manhattan, or South Florida, or Atlanta or Washington convicts him before Election Day, they say, it would have a dramatic impact on the race. They’re probably wrong. The evidence so far suggests the race might…

Read More Read More

‘The venom of our age’: James Carville on the danger of Mike Johnson’s Christian nationalism

‘The venom of our age’: James Carville on the danger of Mike Johnson’s Christian nationalism

The Guardian interviews James Carville: As hard-right movements rattle or control European governments, the words of George Steiner animate James Carville. “Nationalism is the venom of our age,” Steiner wrote in his 1965 essay on the Holocaust, A Kind of Survivor. “It has brought Europe to the edge of ruin.” Those words prompted Carville, the centrist Democratic political consultant who guided Bill Clinton to the presidency, to say: “The greatest distinction in the world is between patriotism, which is positive…

Read More Read More

Microsoft’s AI chatbot replies to election questions with conspiracies, fake scandals, and lies

Microsoft’s AI chatbot replies to election questions with conspiracies, fake scandals, and lies

Wired reports: With less than a year to go before one of the most consequential elections in US history, Microsoft’s AI chatbot is responding to political queries with conspiracies, misinformation, and out-of-date or incorrect information. When WIRED asked the chatbot, initially called Bing Chat and recently renamed Microsoft Copilot, about polling locations for the 2024 US election, the bot referenced in-person voting by linking to an article about Russian president Vladimir Putin running for reelection next year. When asked about…

Read More Read More

Israel tempers claims of imminent Hamas defeat as both sides seem set on long war

Israel tempers claims of imminent Hamas defeat as both sides seem set on long war

Peter Beaumont writes: Israel’s insistence to the Biden administration that it needs more time to defeat Hamas has raised questions over the level of damage inflicted on the Islamist militant organisation, and whether it is changing tactics in its fight against the Israel Defense Forces. In a week in which nine Israeli soldiers were killed, including two senior commanders and several other officers in a single complex ambush in the Shejaiya neighbourhood of Gaza City, analysts and commentators have begun…

Read More Read More

Russia’s Hamas stance puts it on a collision course with Israel

Russia’s Hamas stance puts it on a collision course with Israel

  Battle lines are being drawn around the war with Hamas as the United States and Russia comfortably slide into their Cold War-era roles as backers of opposite sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Insider’s Simon Ostrovsky gets to the bottom of what Russia’s deteriorating relationship with Israel could mean for the war in Ukraine as well as its position in the Middle East.

New cell atlases reveal untold variety in the brain and beyond

New cell atlases reveal untold variety in the brain and beyond

Yasemin Saplakoglu writes: In the 16th century, the Belgian cartographer Abraham Ortelius created the world’s first modern atlas — a collection of maps that he called “The Theater of the World.” The maps, drawn by Ortelius and others, detailed what was at the time the best knowledge of the world’s continents, cities, mountains, rivers, lakes and oceans and helped usher in a new understanding of global geography. Similarly, the creation of cell atlases — maps of organs and bodies constructed…

Read More Read More

Bernie Sanders demands answers on Israel’s ‘indiscriminate’ Gaza bombing

Bernie Sanders demands answers on Israel’s ‘indiscriminate’ Gaza bombing

The Guardian reports: The US’s support for Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza is facing new scrutiny in Washington following a proposed resolution by the independent senator Bernie Sanders that could ultimately be used to curtail military assistance. It is far from clear whether Sanders has the support to pass the resolution, but its introduction in the Senate this week – by an important progressive ally of the US president, Joe Biden – highlights mounting human rights and political concerns by…

Read More Read More

U.S. has collected intel that could be used to judge the legality of Israel’s conduct of war

U.S. has collected intel that could be used to judge the legality of Israel’s conduct of war

Politico reports: While American officials say they are not making judgments in real-time about whether Israel is abiding by the laws of war, the U.S. has gathered intelligence that might allow it to make such assessments. The U.S. has collected intelligence and formulated detailed assessments related to both Israel and Hamas military movements and tactics in Gaza since the war began in October, according to two people familiar with the intelligence. That has included data on targeting by both sides,…

Read More Read More