Attention to the Unseen

Reuters reports: The wife of Ukraine’s military spy chief has been poisoned with heavy metals and is undergoing treatment in a hospital, a spokesperson for the agency said on Tuesday. Marianna Budanova is the wife of Kyrylo Budanov, who heads Ukrainian military intelligence agency GUR, which has been prominently involved in clandestine operations against Russian forces since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. “Yes, I can confirm the information, unfortunately, it is true,” GUR spokesperson Andriy Yusov told Reuters, without…

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  Sky News’ Dominic Waghorn speaks to Palestinian prisoners in East Jerusalem freed from an Israeli jail as part of a deal with Hamas. The Israeli military had refused to let journalists speak to those who have been let out – and Palestinians had also been threatened with fines for celebrating the releases.

The Washington Post reports: Earlier this month, a group of about 20 distressed White House staffers requested a meeting with President Biden’s top advisers, as Israel’s war in Gaza entered its sixth week. The diverse group of staffers had three main issues they wanted to discuss with White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, senior adviser Anita Dunn and deputy national security adviser Jon Finer: They wanted to know the administration’s strategy for curbing the number of civilian deaths, the…

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The Guardian reports: Dogs biting at a human corpse. An exhausted, heavily pregnant woman carrying a toddler on her back. A seemingly lifeless body pushed on a cart. The sights of the Salah al-Din road, the main highway that runs like a spine through Gaza, remain with those who’ve walked it. “What we experienced cannot be seen in horror movies,” said Nahla from Beit Lahia in northern Gaza. Under siege, hungry, thirsty, and encircled by Israeli troops, her family had…

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The New York Times reports: Israel has cast the deaths of civilians in the Gaza Strip as a regrettable but unavoidable part of modern conflict, pointing to the heavy human toll from military campaigns the United States itself once waged in Iraq and Syria. But a review of past conflicts and interviews with casualty and weapons experts suggest that Israel’s assault is different. While wartime death tolls will never be exact, experts say that even a conservative reading of the…

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The Times of Israel reports: Soldiers in the IDF’s prestigious 8200 signal intelligence unit reportedly warned senior officers before the October 7 atrocities that Hamas was preparing a highly organized and meticulously planned mass invasion of Israel but were told their concerns were “fantasies.” A senior and experienced non-commissioned officer as well as a junior officer in 8200 alerted senior IDF officers well in advance that a major operation was being planned by Hamas, but their warnings went unheeded, according…

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  BBC News reports: Lord Cameron has warned Israel that it will never be secure unless there is “long-term safety, security and stability” for the Palestinian people. In his first full interview as foreign secretary, he welcomed Friday’s pause in the fighting to get hostages out of Gaza and humanitarian aid in. But he told the BBC that civilian casualties in Gaza were too high. He also said that Israeli forces must abide by international humanitarian law. Lord Cameron urged…

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The Washington Post reports: University of Michigan senior Bhavani Iyer, 21, stayed in line to vote until 1 a.m. last November to help reelect Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and vote on a ballot measure to codify the right to abortion in the state. The 21-year-old considers herself a Democrat, but sitting here on the Diag — an open area on the center of campus where students gather between classes and club meetings — she said she doesn’t know if she…

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Omar Shakir writes: While global attention is focused on Israel and Gaza, Israeli authorities are tightening their repression in the West Bank and Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians are surging. That repression was already at a peak before the October 7 Hamas-led attack that killed some 1200 people, mostly civilians, in Israel, but it has gotten much worse since. Between January 1 and October 6, Israeli security forces killed more Palestinians in the West Bank – 192, including 40 children…

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Politico reports: The Biden administration has been providing Israel with the location of humanitarian groups in Gaza for weeks to prevent strikes against their facilities. But Israel has continued to hit such sites. The information included GPS coordinates of a number of medical facilities and information on movements of aid groups in Gaza to the Israeli government for at least a month, according to three people familiar with the communications. All were granted anonymity because they feared speaking publicly would…

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Vice News reports: A lobbying group has cut ties with an ex-adviser to former President Barack Obama after videos surfaced that show the man making Islamophobic comments and threats to a food cart employee in New York City. The videos, posted on X (formerly Twitter) by a Columbia University student, shows Stuart Seldowitz asking someone off camera, “Did you rape your daughter like Muhammad did?” and saying that killing 4,000 Palestinian children “wasn’t enough.” Seldowitz was acting director for the…

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