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Mossad’s pager operation: Inside Israel’s penetration of Hezbollah

Mossad’s pager operation: Inside Israel’s penetration of Hezbollah

The Washington Post reports: Among the half dozen Iranian-backed militia groups with weapons aimed at Israel, Hezbollah is by far the strongest. Israeli officials had watched with increasing anxiety as the Lebanese group added new weapons to an arsenal already capable of striking Israeli cities with tens of thousands of precision-guided missiles. Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service responsible for combating foreign threats to the Jewish state, had worked for years to penetrate the group with electronic monitoring and human informants….

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Hurricane Helene aftermath: Untold stories from the mountains

Hurricane Helene aftermath: Untold stories from the mountains

Since Hurricane Helene hammered Western North Carolina, media coverage of the aftermath has focused on the impact felt in Asheville. Having lived there from 2002 until 2020, I know the area very well. The stories from Asheville, Swannanoa, Black Mountain, and all the small towns dotted around Buncombe and the surrounding counties are heartbreaking. But beyond the towns, there are so many communities that are even smaller — places that might catch some momentary media attention because of an heroic…

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Biden urges Congress to replenish disaster relief funds quickly

Biden urges Congress to replenish disaster relief funds quickly

The New York Times reports: President Biden urged members of Congress on Friday to provide emergency funding for the Small Business Administration, saying the agency is critically low on money needed to help people in communities devastated by Hurricane Helene. In a late-night letter addressed to the leadership of Congress, Mr. Biden wrote that the S.B.A.’s disaster relief program, which supports small-business owners in recovering from the storm, will run out of money in weeks, before Congress is set to…

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Helene hit Trump strongholds in Georgia and North Carolina. It could swing the election

Helene hit Trump strongholds in Georgia and North Carolina. It could swing the election

Politico reports: Hurricane Helene hit especially hard in heavily Republican areas of Georgia and North Carolina — a fact that could work to Donald Trump’s disadvantage in the two swing states. Research has shown that major disasters can influence both voter turnout and voter preference. And Helene has pushed this contest into novel territory: It’s the first catastrophic event in U.S. history to hit two critical swing states within six weeks of a presidential election, based on a POLITICO’s E&E…

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Trump is everywhere. Anxious Democrats wonder why Harris isn’t

Trump is everywhere. Anxious Democrats wonder why Harris isn’t

Politico reports: Democratic operatives, including some of Kamala Harris’ own staffers, are growing increasingly concerned about her relatively light campaign schedule, which has her holding fewer events than Donald Trump and avoiding unscripted interactions with voters and the press almost entirely. In interviews with POLITICO, nearly two dozen Democrats described Harris as running a do-no-harm, risk-averse approach to the race they fear could hamper her as the campaign enters its final 30-day stretch. With early voting by mail and in…

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Truth Social users are losing ridiculous sums of money to scams

Truth Social users are losing ridiculous sums of money to scams

Gizmodo reports: Donald Trump launched Truth Social in 2022 as a social media platform where the MAGA faithful could hang out without any liberals to spoil the fun. The biggest selling point? It was the only place where Trump was personally posting his unhinged screeds after getting banned from Twitter over that whole coup attempt. But new documents obtained by Gizmodo reveal the site has also been flooded with scammers who are swindling users out of enormous sums of money….

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Macron calls to halt weapons deliveries to Israel, but who is listening?

Macron calls to halt weapons deliveries to Israel, but who is listening?

Politico reports: French President Emmanuel Macron called for a halt to the delivery of weapons to be used in the Gaza Strip. Macron made the comments in an interview on the French radio show “Etcetera” on France Inter, which was recorded on Oct. 1 and aired on Saturday. “I think today, the priority is that we return to a political solution, that we stop delivering arms for fighting in Gaza,” Macron said. He said France is not delivering any. The…

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Marwan Bishara: ‘Israel’s recent attacks shows it infiltrated Hezbollah’

Marwan Bishara: ‘Israel’s recent attacks shows it infiltrated Hezbollah’

  Al Jazeera’s political analyst Marwan Bishara says Hezbollah losing contact with its leader Hashem Safieddine shows that Israel is able to “deliver one blow after another” to the group. “It is also significant that it proves there is an intelligence breach when it comes to Hezbollah, allowing Israel to locate and attack one leader after another,” he said. “From the rigging and detonating of communication devices and the assassination of one Hezbollah leader to another, all the way to…

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I wasn’t prepared to be a climate refugee

I wasn’t prepared to be a climate refugee

Melissa Hanson, a climate advocate who recently moved from wildfire-prone California to Asheville, North Carolina, writes: Asheville was supposed to be one of those places where people were safer from climate disasters. It was listed in the top three cities in this country to escape climate impacts. It’s not Florida, where sea level rise threatens to drown coastal communities, or California, with its wildfires, or Arizona, battered with its record-breaking heat waves. But now I know firsthand that no place…

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Trump spreads lies about FEMA disaster funds and migrants

Trump spreads lies about FEMA disaster funds and migrants

NBC reports: False claims that federal emergency disaster money was given to migrants in the U.S. illegally have spread quickly in recent days, boosted by former President Donald Trump and some of his most high-profile supporters. Trump repeated one of the more extreme baseless allegations during a rally Thursday in Saginaw, Michigan, saying that the money had been stolen. “They stole the FEMA money, just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal…

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Deny, attack, reverse – Trump has perfected the art of inverted victimhood

Deny, attack, reverse – Trump has perfected the art of inverted victimhood

Early this year (but just as applicable now as then) Sidney Blumenthal wrote: Time after time, with predictable regularity, never missing a beat, Donald Trump proclaims his innocence. He always denies that he has done anything wrong. The charge does not matter. He is blameless. But this is only the beginning of the pattern. Then, he attacks his accusers, or anyone involved in bringing him to account, usually of committing the identical offense of which he stands accused. But it…

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Will Trump Bibles be placed in in every classroom across Oklahoma?

Will Trump Bibles be placed in in every classroom across Oklahoma?

The Oklahoman reports: Superintendent Ryan Walters isn’t just talking about buying Bibles for schools. Bids opened Monday for a contract to supply the state Department of Education with 55,000 Bibles. According to the bid documents, vendors must meet certain specifications: Bibles must be the King James Version; must contain the Old and New Testaments; must include copies of the Pledge of Allegiance, Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights; and must be bound in leather or leather-like…

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In the authoritarians’ new war on ideas, biology might be next

In the authoritarians’ new war on ideas, biology might be next

By C. Brandon Ogbunu In 2021, U.S. Sen.Ted Cruz compared critical race theory — an academic subfield that examines the role of racism in American institutions, laws, and policies — to the Ku Klux Klan, the most notorious homegrown terrorist organization in U.S. history. In doing so, he opened a playbook that resembles one put into practice by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and others: Attack ideas that are unfriendly to a narrow view of the world, and do so by…

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U.S. discusses strikes on Iran oil sites as Israel presses Lebanon offensive

U.S. discusses strikes on Iran oil sites as Israel presses Lebanon offensive

Be wary of the credulous takes about a new Middle East being forged through war. https://t.co/JDNmuAO9TG — Ben Rhodes (@brhodes) October 3, 2024 Reuters reports: The U.S. is discussing strikes on Iran’s oil facilities as retaliation for Tehran’s missile attack on Israel, President Joe Biden said on Thursday, while Israel’s military pressed ahead with its campaign against Iran-backed armed group Hezbollah in Lebanon. As Israel weighs its options after its arch-foe Iran launched its largest ever assault on Tuesday, Biden…

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Why Netanyahu and Putin both want a Trump victory

Why Netanyahu and Putin both want a Trump victory

James Risen writes: The outcomes of the two biggest wars in the world hang in the balance of the American presidential election, even though U.S. troops are not involved in combat in either one. If Donald Trump wins the election, both wars will get much, much worse. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu both want Trump to win the American presidential election so that they can prolong and intensify their brutal wars without the possibility of…

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