Jeff Bezos’ superyacht is in South Florida. It’s so big it has to anchor at a seaport
Madeleine Marr – November 29, 2023
Motorsport Images/Michael Potts/Motorsport Images//Sipa USA
South Florida, meet The Koru.
That’s the name of Jeff Bezos’ colossal yacht that just dropped anchor in Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale. The word means “new beginnings” in Maori, the language spoken by indigenous Polynesians of mainland New Zealand, where the Amazon founder’s private jet was spotted in 2020.
How ginormous is this triple-masted behemoth? Roughly 400 feet long and 250 feet tall, it’s the size of a cruise ship. That ginormous.
The luxury schooner is so big it can’t even hang with other leisure ships; she reportedly is parked near two oil tankers. It has two pools, a hot tub, multiple lounges, dining areas and bars, and perhaps the pièce de résistance, a wooden figurehead on the prow rumored to be modeled after Bezos’ fiancée, Lauren Sanchez.
The 59-year-old billionaire shelled out about $500M for his snazzy new toy, which was built just for him in the Netherlands by Oceanco, the company that also constructed Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones’ superyacht, the Bravo Eugenia.
Get used to seeing The Koru around, especially if you set sail on a vacation. Bezos, a Palmetto High alum, lives back here full time now, after spending three decades in Seattle, busy reinventing the way the world shops.
Russia’s Putin, shown alongside Orthodox icon image, warns West against meddling
Guy Faulconbridge – November 28, 2023
Russian President Putin attends a plenary session of the World Russian People’s Council, via video link in Sochi
MOSCOW (Reuters) – President Vladimir Putin, whose picture was shown between two giant images of an ancient Orthodox icon on Tuesday, warned the West ahead of elections in March 2024 that any foreign meddling in Russia would be considered an act of aggression.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has led to the most serious confrontation between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, prompting Putin to pivot towards China.
Since the invasion, Putin has changed the narrative of the war, casting it as an existential battle between sacred Russian civilisation and an arrogant West which he says is in cultural, political and economic decline.
Speaking to the World Russian People’s Council, led by the head of Russia’s Orthodox church, Patriarch Kirill, Putin’s picture was shown on a giant screen beside two copies of an ancient Orthodox icon. Such icons are stylised, often gilded, religious paintings considered sacred in Orthodox churches.
The Russian Orthodox Church is an ardent institutional supporter of Russia’s war in Ukraine, and Putin has espoused its conservatism as part of his vision for Russia’s national identity.
The Kremlin chief said that the West was gripped by racist Russophobia which casts Russians as a people of backward “slaves” and warned that the United States allegedly wanted to dismember and plunder Russia’s vast resources.
Putin, 71, cautioned that Russians themselves should remember the lessons of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the civil war and the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, which he said had allowed the division of the Russian people.
“I want to underscore: We consider any interference from outside, provocations aimed at causing inter-ethnic or inter-religious conflicts as aggressive acts against our country,” Putin said.
“I want to emphasise again that any attempt to sow inter-ethnic and inter-religious discord, to split our society is a betrayal, a crime against the whole of Russia. We will not allow anyone to divide Russia.”
The West casts Putin as a dictator who has led Russia into an imperial-style land grab that has weakened Russia and forged Ukrainian statehood, while uniting the West and handing NATO a post-Cold War mission.
Putin says that the West is now failing in Ukraine and that its attempt to defeat Russia has also failed.
The Kremlin chief claims Western attempts to isolate Russia with the toughest-ever sanctions imposed on a major economy were evidence for what he believed is historic Western racism against Russians.
The West, which denies it wants to rip Russia apart, has said it wants to help Ukraine defeat Russian forces on the battlefields of Ukraine, eject Russian soldiers and punish Putin for the war.
Putin thanked Russian businessmen for evading the West’s sanctions.
“It was by combining the efforts of the state and business that we thwarted the unprecedented economic aggression of the West: its sanctions blitzkrieg failed,” Putin said.
The presidential election campaign is due to start next month and Putin is expected to run, a step that would ensure at least another six years at the helm for the former KGB spy, who has been in power since 2012, and before that, from 2000 to 2008.
Patriarch Kirill said he would pray for Putin to continue his work for the “benefit” of Russia and its people.
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Bernadette Baum)
Putin accuses the West of trying to ‘dismember and plunder’ Russia in a ranting speech
Associated Press – November 28, 2023
Russian President Vladimir Putin listens to VTB Bank Chairman Andrei Kostin during their meeting in Moscow, Russia, Monday, Nov. 27, 2023. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
MOSCOW (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday, in a ranting speech before a presidential election campaign, cast Moscow’s military action in Ukraine as an existential battle against purported attempts by the West to destroy Russia.
Putin, who has been in power for more than two decades and is the longest-serving Russian leader since Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, is expected to soon declare his intention to seek another six-year term in a presidential election next March.
“We are defending the security and well-being of our people, the highest, historical right to be Russia — a strong, independent power, a country-civilization,” Putin said, accusing the U.S. and its allies of trying to “dismember and plunder” Russia.
Ukraine and its Western allies have condemned the Russian action against Ukraine as an unprovoked act of aggression.
“We are now fighting for the freedom of not only Russia, but the whole world,” Putin said in a speech to participants of a meeting organized by the Russian Orthodox Church.
He denounced what he described as Western “Russophobia,” claiming that “our diversity and unity of cultures, traditions, languages, and ethnic groups simply don’t fit into the logic of Western racists and colonialists, into their cruel scheme of total depersonalization, disunity, suppression and exploitation.”
“If they can’t do it by force, they will try to sow strife,” he said, vowing to block “any outside interference, provocations with the aim of causing interethnic or interreligious conflicts as aggressive actions against our country, as an attempt to once again foment terrorism and extremism in Russia as a tool to fight us.”
Russian authorities have intensified their crackdown on dissent amid the fighting in Ukraine, arresting and imprisoning protesters and activists and silencing independent news outlets.
Putin said that the U.S.-dominated global order has become increasingly decrepit, declaring that “it is our country that is now at the forefront of creating a more equitable world order.”
“And I want to emphasize: without a sovereign, strong Russia, no lasting, stable world order is possible,” he said.
Russian authorities are restricting abortion access amid population and military recruiting concerns
Katie Balevic – November 25, 2023
Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks to Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill at Red Square in Moscow in November 2023.Gavriil Grigorov/AP
Top Russian authorities are restricting abortion access to combat population stagnation.
The head of the Russian Church said it would boost the population like “waving a magic wand.”
Russian women’s groups say the policies are forcing women to birth unwanted children, per the BBC.
Top Russian authorities are restricting abortion access, calling the procedure a “disaster.”
It comes amid the state’s concerns over population growth, particularly where it impacts military recruiting, according to the BBC. Some one in three women claim to have gotten the procedure, and more than 500,000 pregnancies were terminated in 2022, the outlet reported.
Patriarch Kirill, the head of the highly influential Russian Orthodox Church, is leading the charge.
“As a member of the clergy, I testify that an abortion is a disaster and a tragedy for the woman [and] those close to her,” Kirill said in January, per the BBC.
The church has close ties to the Kremlin, and Kirill has been a key supporter of President Vladimir Putin.
While Russia’s population leans male for births up to 14 years old, females outpace males ages 15 and up. Over 65% of the population is aged 15 to 64, and there are 3 million more women than men in that age bracket, according to the 2023 data from the Central Intelligence Agency.
The total population of 144 million stands at 2 million less than it did in 2001 when Putin came to power, the BBC reported. In 2022, over 500,000 Russian pregnancies were terminated compared to 1.3 million live births, the outlet reported.
Putin sees it as “an acute problem,” per the BBC. Kirill says anti-abortion policies are the solution.
“The population can be increased as if by waving a magic wand: if we solve this problem and learn how to dissuade women from having abortions, statistics will go up immediately,” Kirill said, per the BBC.
The patriarch’s policies of dissuasion include doctors telling pregnant teenagers to keep their child “because they are practically from the same generation,” the BBC reported. If a woman is single, doctors are to tell the pregnant patient that “having a child is no obstacle to finding a life partner.”
Authorities are also restricting the sale of medication used in medical abortions – over the protests of women’s groups who say such moves will cause the number of illegal and botched abortions to surge.
“Officials, ultra-right politicians and the church are actively forcing women and girls to give birth to unwanted children,” the Urals Feminist Movement group said, according to the BBC.
Oil firms face ‘moment of truth’ in climate crisis: IEA
AFP – November 23, 2023
The IEA says the oil and gas industry’s engagement in clean energy has been ‘minimal’ (Pedro PARDO)
Oil and gas firms will face a crucial choice at UN climate talks next week between contributing to the climate crisis or embracing the clean energy transition, the International Energy Agency said Thursday.
The future of fossil fuels that play a massive role in climate change will be at the heart of COP28 negotiations in Dubai, as the world struggles to meet the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
“The oil and gas industry is facing a moment of truth at COP28 in Dubai,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said ahead of the November 30-December 12 conference.
“With the world suffering the impacts of a worsening climate crisis, continuing with business as usual is neither socially nor environmentally responsible,” he said.
In a report, the Paris-based energy watchdog said the industry’s engagement has been “minimal” so far, accounting for less than one percent of global clean energy investment.
It invested $20 billion in clean energy last year, or just 2.7 percent of its total capital spending.
To meet the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C target, the oil and gas sector must devote 50 percent of its investments on clean energy projects by 2030.
By comparison, $800 billion is invested in the oil and gas sector each year.
While investment in oil and gas supply is still needed, the figure is twice as high as what should be spent to respect the Paris goals, the agency said.
“Producers must choose between contributing to a deepening climate crisis or becoming part of the solution by embracing the shift to clean energy,” the IEA said.
– Oil sector stalling –
Oil and gas use would fall by 75 percent by 2050 if governments successfully pursued the 1.5C target and emissions from the energy sector reached net zero by then, the report said.
Instead of cutting fossil fuels outright, oil giants have touted several once-marginal technologies as promising solutions to cut emissions.
They include carbon capture and storage (CCS), direct air capture and carbon credit trading.
CCS prevents CO2 from entering the atmosphere by siphoning exhaust from power plants, while direct air capture pulls CO2 from thin air.
Both technologies have been demonstrated to work, but remain far from maturity and commercial scalability.
“The industry needs to commit to genuinely helping the world meet its energy needs and climate goals –- which means letting go of the illusion that implausibly large amounts of carbon capture are the solution,” Birol said.
The think tank Carbon Tracker said in September that oil and gas sector emission reduction pledges have stalled and in some cases gone backwards.
Oil major BP watered down a previous 2030 production cut target and Shell said its “liquids” output would remain stable — both angering climate campaigners.
– Tripling renewables capacity –
Campaigners have raised concerns over the influence of fossil fuel interests at the UN climate conference, noting that COP28 president Sultan Al Jaber is both UAE climate envoy and head of state-owned oil firm ADNOC.
Jaber has proposed tripling global renewable energy capacity and doubling the annual rate of energy efficiency improvements by 2030.
“The fossil fuel sector must make tough decisions now, and their choices will have consequences for decades to come,” Birol said.
“Clean energy progress will continue with or without oil and gas producers. However, the journey to net zero emissions will be more costly, and harder to navigate, if the sector is not on board.”
Trump has big plans for a second term. Critics say they pose a threat to democracy.
Ben Adler, Senior Editor – November 20, 2023
Donald Trump in 2020. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Former President Donald Trump’s campaign is developing plans to use the federal government to punish his political opponents if he wins a second term next year, and critics — including some prominent Republicans, even some staffers from his first term — say these plans would imperil American democracy.
On the campaign trail, Trump has made numerous public references to exacting revenge upon detractors and rivals, including promising to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden for unspecified crimes. Earlier this month, in a speech and in a post on Truth Social, he referred to left-wing Americans as “vermin.”
Historians said such dehumanizing of one’s political opponents is frequently used by fascist dictators. Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung responded by saying, “Those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”
According to the Washington Post, Trump has privately said he would direct the Department of Justice to investigate officials from his first term who have since criticized his tenure, including:
Former White House chief of staff and retired U.S. Marine Corps Gen. John F. Kelly
Former Attorney General William P. Barr
Former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark A. Milley
Former Trump White House special counsel Ty Cobb
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley in 2022. (Ting Shen/Xinhua via Getty Images) (Xinhua News Agency via Getty Images)
According to his advisers, Trump intends to fire up to tens of thousands of career government professionals and replace them with his allies, and will refuse to spend congressional appropriations on programs he opposes.
The New York Times has reported that Trump’s plans to crack down on illegal immigration will include:
Using military funds to erect detention camps
Using a public-health emergency law to shut down asylum requests at the border
Ending birthright citizenship for babies born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants
Trump also reportedly plans to send the military into Mexico to combat drug cartels, with or without the Mexican government’s permission.
A number of high-profile Republican elected officials, conservative legal scholars and veterans of Trump’s first term in office have said Trump’s intentions would weaken the justice system and threaten the rule of law. Here are some of the most notable criticisms:
Former Rep. Liz Cheney. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) (Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images)
“He cannot be the next president, because if he is, all of the things that he attempted to do, but was stopped from doing by responsible people around him at the Department of Justice, at the White House Counsel’s Office, all of those things, he will do. There will be no guardrails.”
“His policies are not centered around improving the lives of his supporters or Americans in general, it’s centered around consolidating power for Trump, and that way he can wield it to enact that revenge on anyone he deems as an enemy. And that is what is scary.”
“Making prosecutorial decisions in a nonpartisan manner is essential to democracy. The White House should not be meddling in individual cases for political reasons.”
National security adviser John Bolton in 2018. (Evan Vucci/AP) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
“He doesn’t think in policy directions when he makes decisions, certainly in the national security space. It’s all connected with how things benefit Donald Trump. … In a second Trump term, we’d almost certainly withdraw from NATO.”
“Donald Trump represents a failure of character, which is changing, I think, in many respects, the psyche of our nation and the heart of our nation. And that’s something which takes a long time — if ever — to repair.”
People warned me before I came to Tel Aviv a few days ago that the Israel of Oct. 7 is an Israel that I’ve never been to before. They were right. It is a place in which Israelis have never lived before, a nation that Israeli generals have never had to protect before, an ally that America has never had to defend before — certainly not with the urgency and resolve that would lead a U.S. president to fly over and buck up the whole nation.
After traveling around Israel and the West Bank, I now understand why so much has changed. It is crystal clear to me that Israel is in real danger — more danger than at any other time since its War of Independence in 1948. And it’s for three key reasons:
First, Israel is facing threats from a set of enemies who combine medieval theocratic worldviews with 21st-century weaponry — and are no longer organized as small bands of militiamen but as modern armies with brigades, battalions, cybercapabilities, long-range rockets, drones and technical support. I am speaking about Iranian-backed Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic militias in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen — and now even the openly Hamas-embracing Vladimir Putin. These foes have long been there, but all of them seemed to surface together like dragons during this conflict, threatening Israel with a 360-degree war all at once.
How does a modern democracy live with such a threat? This is exactly the question these demonic forces wanted to instill in the mind of every Israeli. They are not seeking a territorial compromise with the Jewish state. Their goal is to collapse the confidence of Israelis that their defense and intelligence services can protect them from surprise attacks across their borders — so Israelis will, first, move away from the border regions and then they will move out of the country altogether.
I am stunned by how many Israelis now feel this danger personally, no matter where they live — starting with a friend who lives in Jerusalem telling me that she and her husband just got gun licenses to have pistols at home. No one is going to snatch their children and take them into a tunnel. Hamas, alas, has tunneled fear into many, many Israeli heads far from the Gaza border.
The second danger I see is that the only conceivable way that Israel can generate the legitimacy, resources, time and allies to fight such a difficult war with so many enemies is if it has unwavering partners abroad, led by the United States. President Biden, quite heroically, has been trying to help Israel with its immediate and legitimate goal of dismantling Hamas’s messianic terrorist regime in Gaza — which is as much a threat to the future of Israel as it is to Palestinians longing for a decent state of their own in Gaza or the West Bank.
But Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza entails urban, house-to-house fighting that creates thousands of civilian casualties —innocent men, women and children — among whom Hamas deliberately embedded itself to force Israel to have to kill those innocents in order to kill the Hamas leadership and uproot its miles of attack tunnels.
But Biden can sustainably generate the support Israel needs only if Israel is ready to engage in some kind of a wartime diplomatic initiative directed at the Palestinians in the West Bank — and hopefully in a post-Hamas Gaza — that indicates Israel will discuss some kind of two-state solutions if Palestinian officials can get their political house unified and in order.
This leads directly to my third, deep concern.
Israel has the worst leader in its history — maybe in all of Jewish history — who has no will or ability to produce such an initiative.
Worse, I am stunned by the degree to which that leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, continues to put the interests of holding on to the support of his far-right base — and pre-emptively blaming Israel’s security and intelligence services for the war — ahead of maintaining national solidarity or doing some of the basic things that Biden needs in order to get Israel the resources, allies, time and legitimacy it needs to defeat Hamas.
Biden cannot help Israel build a coalition of U.S., European and moderate Arab partners to defeat Hamas if Netanyahu’s message to the world remains, in effect: “Help us defeat Hamas in Gaza while we work to expand settlements, annex the West Bank and build a Jewish supremacist state there.”
Let’s drill down on these dangers.
Last Saturday night, a retired Israeli Army commander stopped by my hotel in Tel Aviv to share his perspective on the war. I took him to the 18th-floor executive lounge for our chat, and when we got into the elevator to go up, we joined a family of four — two parents, a toddler and a baby in a stroller. The Israeli general asked them where they were from. “Kiryat Shmona,” the father answered.
As we stepped out, I joked with the general that he could dispense with his briefing. It took just 18 floors and those two words — “Kiryat Shmona” — to describe Israel’s wickedly complex new strategic dilemma created by the surprise Hamas attack of Oct. 7.
Kiryat Shmona is one of the most important Israeli towns on the border with Lebanon. That father said hisfamily had fled the northern fence line with thousands of other Israeli families after the pro-Iranian Hezbollah militia and Palestinian militias in southern Lebanon began lobbing rockets and artillery and making incursions in solidarity with Hamas.
When might they go back? They had no idea. Like more than 200,000 other Israelis, they have taken refuge with friends or in hotels all across this small country of nine million people. And it has takenonly a few weeks for Israelis to begin driving up real estate prices in seemingly safer central Israeli towns. For Hezbollah, that alone is mission accomplished, without even invading like Hamas. Together, Hezbollah and Hamas are managing to shrink Israel.
On Sunday I drove down to a hotel on the Dead Sea to meet some of the hundreds of surviving members of Kibbutz Be’eri, which had some 1,200 residents, including 360 children. It was one of the communities hardest hit by the Hamas onslaught — suffering more than 130 murders in addition to scores of injured and multiple kidnappings of children and elderly. The Israeli government has moved most survivors of the kibbutz across the country to the Dead Sea, where they are now starting their own schools in a hotel ballroom.
I asked Liat Admati, 35, a survivor of the Hamas attack who ran a clinic for facial cosmetics for 11 years in Be’eri, what would make it possible for her to go back to her Gaza border home, where she was raised.
“The main thing for me to go back is to feel safe,” she said. “Before this situation, I felt I have trust in the army. Now I feel the trust is broken. I don’t want to feel that we are covering ourselves in walls and shelters all the time while behind this fence there are people who can one day do this again. I really don’t know at this point what the solution is.”
Before Oct. 7, she and her neighbors thought the threat was rockets, she said, so they built safe rooms, but now that Hamas gunmen came over and burned parents and kids in their safe rooms, who knows what is safe? “The safe room was designed to keep you safe from rockets, not from another human who would come and kill you for who you are,” she said. What is most dispiriting, she concluded, is that it appears that some Gazans who worked on the kibbutz gave Hamas maps of the layout.
There are a lot of Israelis who listened to the recording, published by The Times of Israel, of a Hamas gunman who took part in the Oct. 7 onslaught, identified by his father as Mahmoud, calling his parents from the phone of a Jewish woman he’d just murdered and imploring them to check his WhatsApp messages to see the pictures he took of some of the 10 Jews he alone killed in Mefalsim, a kibbutz near the Gaza border.
“Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews,” he says, according to an English translation. “Mom, your son is a hero,” he adds. His parents can be heard seemingly rejoicing.
This kind of chilling exuberance — Israel was built so that such a thing could never happen — explains the homemade sign I saw on a sidewalk while driving through the French Hill Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem the other day: “It’s either us or them.’’
The euphoric rampage of Oct. 7 that killed some 1,400 soldiers and civilians has not only hardened Israeli hearts toward the suffering of Gaza civilians. It has also inflicted a deep sense of humiliation and guilt on the Israeli Army and defense establishment, for having failed in their most basic mission of protecting the country’s borders.
As a result, there is a conviction in the army that it must demonstrate to the entire neighborhood — to Hezbollah in Lebanon, to the Houthis in Yemen, to the Islamic militias in Iraq, to the Hamas and other fighters in the West Bank — that it will stop at nothing to re-establish the security of the borders. While the army insists that it is hewing to the laws of war, it wants to show that no one can outcrazy Israel to drive its people from this region — even if the Israeli military has to defy the U.S. and even if it does not have any solid plan for governing Gaza the morning after the war.
As Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, told reporters on Wednesday: “Israel cannot accept such an active threat on its borders. The whole idea of people living side by side in the Middle East was jeopardized by Hamas.”
This conflict is now back to its most biblical and primordial roots. This seems to be a time of eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth. The morning-after policy thinking will have to wait for the mourning after.
Which is why I so worry about the leadership here today. I was traveling around the West Bank on Tuesday when I heard that Netanyahu had just told ABC News that Israel plans to retain “overall security responsibility” in Gaza “for an indefinite period” after its war with Hamas.
Really? Consider this context: “According to Israel’s official Central Bureau of Statistics, at the end of 2021, 9.449 million people live in Israel (including Israelis in West Bank settlements), the Times of Israel reported last year. “Of those, 6.982 million (74 percent) are Jewish, 1.99 million (21 percent) are Arab, and 472,000 (5 percent) are neither. The Palestinian Bureau of Statistics puts the West Bank Palestinian population at a little over three million and the Gaza population at just over two million.”
So Netanyahu is saying that seven million Jews are going to indefinitely control the lives of five million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza — while offering them no political horizon, nothing, by way of statehood one day on any demilitarized conditions.
Early on the morning of Oct. 29, as the Israeli Army was just moving into Gaza, Netanyahu posted and then deleted a message on social media in which he blamed Israel’s defense and intelligence establishment for failing to anticipate Hamas’s surprise attack. (Netanyahu somehow forgot how often the Israeli military and intelligence leaders had warned him that his totally unnecessary coup against the country’s judicial system was fracturing the army and Israel’s enemies were all noticing its vulnerability.)
After being slammed by the public for digitally stabbing his army and intelligence chiefs in the back in the middle of a war, Netanyahu published a new post. “I was wrong,” he wrote, adding that “the things I said following the press conference should not have been said, and I apologize for that. I fully support the heads of [Israel’s] security services.”
But the damage was done. How much do you suppose those military leaders trust what Netanyahu will say if the Gaza campaign stalls? What real leader would behave that way at the start of a war of survival?
Let me not mince words, because the hour is dark and Israel, as I said, is in real danger. Netanyahu and his far-right zealots have taken Israel on multiple flights of fancy in the last year: dividing the country and the army over the fraudulent judicial reform, bankrupting its future with massive investments in religious schools that teach no math and in West Bank Jewish settlements that teach no pluralism — while building up Hamas, which would never be a partner for peace, and tearing down the Palestinian Authority, the only possible partner for peace.
The sooner Israel replaces Netanyahu and his far-right allies with a true center-left-center-right national unity government, the better chance it has to hold together during what is going to be a hellish war and aftermath. And the better chance that Biden — who may be down in the polls in America but could get elected here in a landslide for the empathy and steel he showed at Israel’s hour of need — will not have hitched his credibility and ours to a Netanyahu Israel that will never be able to fully help us to help it.
This society is so much better than its leader. It is too bad it took a war to drive that home. Ron Scherf is a retired member of Israel’s most elite special forces unit and a founder of Brothers in Arms, the Israeli activist coalition that mobilized veterans and reservists to oppose Netanyahu’s judicial coup. Immediately after the Hamas invasion,
Scientists sound the alarm over a concerning phenomenon observed in the ocean: ‘This is worrying news’
Stephen Proctor – November 4, 2023
Scientists are worried that the recent extreme ocean warming is a sign we haven’t kept up with how quickly the planet is changing. Countries have reported some of the warmest temperatures in recorded history, and the same can be said for the waters from the North Atlantic to Antarctica.
What’s Happening?
The oceanic heat wave is hitting both sides of North America. Waters off the coast of Florida and the western coasts of the U.S. and Canada are alarmingly warm. The Western Mediterranean, off the coasts of Southern Spain and North Africa, is also warmer than average. The same can be said for the Baltic Sea and the water around New Zealand and Australia.
A recent report showed that the number of these heat waves in ocean waters doubled between 1982 and 2016, noted the BBC, and the heat waves have also worsened considerably.
“This is worrying news for the planet,” said Christopher Hewitt, director of climate services for the World Meteorological Organization, in a news report from the WMO.
Why is the marine heat wave concerning?
Marine heat waves can negatively affect ocean life, the fishing industry, and weather patterns.
These heat waves can cause fish to die on a large scale and coral reefs to undergo “coral bleaching.” The warmer water also changes the behavior patterns of marine life, making it harder for fishermen to locate and catch enough to sustain their livelihood. Alaska was forced to cancel the snow crab harvest in 2022 because the billions of crabs that historically called the Bering Sea home had all but disappeared.
An even more concerning effect of these marine heat waves is the threat they pose to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current, which is basically a giant global conveyor belt of ocean water.
Water in the AMOC travels from the tropics to the North Atlantic, where it cools and becomes saltier, then sinks deep into the ocean before traveling back south and repeating the process. The AMOC is crucial in regulating global weather patterns, including the jet stream.
If the water in the North Atlantic becomes too warm, the AMOC could slow down or even stop, resulting in extreme changes to the weather around the world. Scientists say this could happen sometime between 2025 and 2095, reported CNN.
What’s being done about marine heat waves?
A group of scientists from around the world is working to better understand marine heat waves, what causes them, their effect on the climate, and their effect on the environment around them. While there’s still a long way to go, a team in Australia was able to predict a marine heat wave several months out.
In a Worldwide War of Words, Russia, China and Iran Back Hamas
Steven Lee Myers and Sheera Frenkel – November 3, 2023
Motorists drive past a giant billboard depicting Muslim peoples walking with their national flags towards the Dome of the Rock shrine in Jerusalem, erected in Valiasr Square in the centre of Tehran on October 25, 2023. (Photo by ATTA KENARE / AFP) (Photo by ATTA KENARE/AFP via Getty Images) (ATTA KENARE via Getty Images)
The conflict between Israel and Hamas is fast becoming a world war online.
Iran, Russia and, to a lesser degree, China have used state media and the world’s major social networking platforms to support Hamas and undercut Israel, while denigrating Israel’s principal ally, the United States.
Iran’s proxies in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq have also joined the fight online, along with extremist groups, like al-Qaida and the Islamic State, that were previously at odds with Hamas.
The deluge of online propaganda and disinformation is larger than anything seen before, according to government officials and independent researchers — a reflection of the world’s geopolitical division.
“It is being seen by millions, hundreds of millions of people around the world,” said Rafi Mendelsohn, vice president at Cyabra, a social media intelligence company in Tel Aviv, Israel, “and it’s impacting the war in a way that is probably just as effective as any other tactic on the ground.” Cyabra has documented at least 40,000 bots or inauthentic accounts online since Hamas attacked Israel from the Gaza Strip on Oct. 7.
The content — visceral, emotionally charged, politically slanted and often false — has stoked anger and even violence far beyond Gaza, raising fears that it could inflame a wider conflict. Iran, though it has denied any involvement in the attack by Hamas, has threatened as much, with its foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, warning of retaliation on “multiple fronts” if Israeli forces persisted in Gaza.
“It’s just like everyone is involved,” said Moustafa Ayad, executive director for Africa, the Middle East and Asia at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. The institute, a nonprofit research organization in London, last week detailed influence campaigns by Iran, Russia and China.
The campaigns do not appear to be coordinated, American and other government officials and experts said, though they did not rule out cooperation.
While Iran, Russia and China each have different motivations in backing Hamas over Israel, they have pushed the same themes since the war began. They are not simply providing moral support, the officials and experts said, but also mounting overt and covert information campaigns to amplify one another and expand the global reach of their views across multiple platforms in multiple languages.
The Spanish arm of RT, the global Russian television network, for example, recently reposted a statement by the Iranian president calling the explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza on Oct. 17 an Israeli war crime, even though Western intelligence agencies and independent analysts have since said a missile misfired from Gaza was a more likely cause of the blast.
Another Russian overseas news outlet, Sputnik India, quoted a “military expert” saying, without evidence, that the United States provided the bomb that destroyed the hospital. Posts like these have garnered ten of thousands of views.
“We’re in an undeclared information war with authoritarian countries,” James Rubin, the head of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, said in a recent interview.
From the first hours of its attack, Hamas has employed a broad, sophisticated media strategy, inspired by groups like the Islamic State. Its operatives spread graphic imagery through bot accounts originating in places like Pakistan, sidestepping bans of Hamas on Facebook and X, formerly known as Twitter, according to Cyabra’s researchers.
A profile on X that bore the characteristics of an inauthentic account — @RebelTaha — posted 616 times in the first two days of the conflict, though it had previously featured content mostly about cricket, they said. One post featured a cartoon claiming a double standard in how Palestinian resistance toward Israel was cast as terrorism while Ukraine’s fight against Russia was self-defense.
Officials and experts who track disinformation and extremism have been struck by how quickly and extensively Hamas’ message has spread online. That feat was almost certainly fueled by the emotional intensity of the Israeli-Palestinian issue and by the graphic images of the violence, captured virtually in real time with cameras carried by Hamas gunmen. It was also boosted by extensive networks of bots and, soon afterward, official accounts belonging to governments and state media in Iran, Russia and China — amplified by social media platforms.
In a single day after the conflict began, roughly 1 in 4 accounts on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X posting about the conflict appeared to be fake, Cyabra found. In the 24 hours after the blast at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, more than 1 in 3 accounts posting about it on X were.
The company’s researchers identified six coordinated campaigns on a scale so large, they said, that it suggested the involvement of nations or large nonstate actors.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s report last week singled out Iranian accounts on Facebook and X that “have been spreading particularly harmful content that includes glorification of war crimes and violence against Israeli civilians and encouraging further attacks against Israel.”
Although the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, denied the country’s involvement in the attack, the accounts have depicted him as the leader of a “Pan-Islamic resistance” to Israel and neocolonial Western powers.
A series of posts on X by a state-affiliated outlet, Tasnim News Agency, said the United States was responsible for “the crimes” and showed a video of wounded Palestinians. On Telegram, accounts have also spread false or unverified content, including one widely debunked account that CNN had faked an attack on a television crew.
Cyabra also identified an online campaign in Arabic on X from Iraq, evidently from Shiite Muslim paramilitary groups supported by Iran, including the movement of Muqtada al-Sadr. A network of accounts posted identical messages and photos, using the hashtag #AmericasponsorIsraelTerrorism. Those posts peaked on Oct. 18 and 19, amassing more than 6,000 engagements, and had the potential to reach 10 million viewers, according to Cyabra.
Israel, which has its own sophisticated information operations, has found itself unexpectedly on the defensive.
“Like its military, Israel’s social media was caught flat-footed and responded days late,” said Ben Decker, the CEO of Memetica, a threat intelligence consulting firm, and a former researcher for The New York Times. “The response, even when it got off the ground, was chaotic.”
Two Israeli government officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, said Israel was tracking the bot activity from Iran and other countries. They noted that it was larger than any previous campaign they had seen.
The war has heightened concerns in Washington and other Western capitals that an alliance of authoritarian governments has succeeded in fomenting illiberal, anti-democratic sentiment, especially in Africa, South America and other parts of the world where accusations of American or Western colonialism or dominance find fertile soil.
Russia and China, which have grown increasingly close in recent years, appear intent to exploit the conflict to undermine the United States as much as Israel. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which combats state propaganda and disinformation, has in recent weeks detailed extensive campaigns by Russia and China to shape the global information environment to their advantage.
A week before Hamas attacked Israel, the State Department warned in a report that China was employing “deceptive and coercive methods” to sway global opinion behind its worldview. Since the war began, China has portrayed itself as a neutral peacemaker, while its officials have depicted the United States as a craven warmonger that suffered a “strategic failure in the Middle East.”
Accounts of Russian officials and state media have shared that sentiment. Numerous pro-Kremlin accounts on Telegram abruptly shifted after Oct. 7 from content about the war in Ukraine to post exclusively on Israel, including an Arabic-language channel linked to the Wagner Group, the Russian paramilitary force that rebelled against President Vladimir Putin in June.
Putin, who met with Hamas leaders after the war began, described the wars in Ukraine and Israel as part of the same broad struggle against American global dominance. He also claimed, without evidence, that “Western intelligence services” were behind a riot Sunday that targeted Jews at the airport in Dagestan, a predominantly Muslim region in southern Russia.
“They’re in a conflict, a geostrategic competition, with the United States,” said Michael Doran, a former White House and Pentagon official who is now director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Hudson Institute. “And they recognize that when Israel, the U.S.’ primary ally in the Middle East, is wrapped up in a war like this, it weakens the United States.”
Dead bodies litter Mount Everest because it’s so dangerous and expensive to get them down — and 2023 could be the most deadly season yet
Hilary Brueck, Ashley Collman and Maiya Focht – November 2, 2023
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More than 310 people have died climbing Everest since exploration first started in the early 1900s.
It’s dangerous to retrieve the bodies, so many litter the mountain to this day.
Many have blamed overcrowding for deaths in recent years, and 2023 saw a record number of climbers.
Dead bodies are a common sight on top of Mount Everest.
On average, six people die climbing the world’s tallest peak each year. The year 2015 was the mountain’s deadliest in recent history, when an avalanche killed 19.
Including sherpas that accompany climbers, that means about 900 people tried to summit the mountain from the South side during the main 2023 climbing season, which only lasts about eight weeks, each April and May
When people die on Everest, it can be difficult to remove their bodies. Final repatriation costs tens of thousands of dollars (in some cases, around $70,000) and can also come at a fatal price itself: Two Nepalese climbers died trying to recover a body from Everest in 1984.
Lhakpa Sherpa, who is the women’s record-holder for most Everest summits, said she saw seven dead bodies on her way to the top of the mountain in 2018.
“Only near the top,” she told Insider in 2018, remembering one man’s body in particular that “looked alive, because the wind was blowing his hair.”
Her memory is a grim reminder that removing dead bodies from Mount Everest is a pricey and potentially deadly chore.
These days, tourists spend anywhere from $50,000 to well over $130,000 to complete a once-in-a-lifetime Everest summit. It’s difficult to know for sure exactly how many people have died trying to get up and down, and where all those bodies have ended up.
Recent fatality estimates are as high as 322 after an especially deadly 2023 season. A BBC investigation in 2015 concluded “there are certainly more than 200” corpses lying on Everest’s slopes.
Some hikers are blaming the surges in deaths in recent decades, in part, on preventable overcrowding.
As May temperatures warm and winds stall, favorable springtime Everest climbing conditions sometimes only last a few days. These brief climbing windows can create conveyor-belt style lines that snake toward the top of the mountain.
Mountaineers line up as they make their way up a slope on Mount Everest on May 31, 2021.LAKPA SHERPA/AFP via Getty Images
Climbers can be so eager to reach the peak and stake their claim on an Everest summit that they develop what’s called “Summit Fever,” risking their lives just to make it happen.
Other Everest climbers complain about risky human traffic jams in the mountain’s “death zone,” the area of the hike that reaches above 8,000 meters (about 26,250 feet), where air is dangerously thin and most people use oxygen masks.
Even with masks, this zone is not a great place to hang out for too long, and it’s a spot where some deliriously loopy trekkers may start removing desperately-needed clothes, and talking to imaginary companions, despite the freezing conditions.
Getting bodies out of the death zone is a hazardous chore.
“Even picking up a candy wrapper high up on the mountain is a lot of effort, because it’s totally frozen and you have to dig around it,” Ang Tshering Sherpa former president of the Nepal Mountaineering Association, told the BBC in 2015. “A dead body that normally weighs 80kg might weigh 150kg when frozen and dug out with the surrounding ice attached.”
Mountaineer Alan Arnette previously told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that he signed some grim “body disposal” forms before he climbed Everest, ordering that his corpse should rest in place on the mountain in case he died during the trek.
“Typically you have your spouse sign this, so think about that conversation,” he added. “You say ‘leave me on the mountain,’ or ‘get me back to Kathmandu and cremate,’ or ‘try to get me back to my home country.'”
For years, Everest climbers often referenced one particular dead body they called “Green Boots” who some spotted lying in a cave roughly 1,130 feet from the peak. It was the body of Tsewang Paljor, a 28 year-old Indian climber who died on the mountain in 1996, during the same storm that inspired Jon Krakauer’s bestseller, “Into Thin Air.”
Pemba Dorjee Sherpa, who has climbed up Everest 20 times, at camp three on the mountain in Nepal, May 20, 2019.Reuters/Phurba Tenjing Sherpa
But in recent years, Everest’s most infamous corpse has been tougher for hikers to spot, leading to widespread speculation that the body was either moved, or covered by rocks, as climber Noel Hanna told the BBC.
Nepalese Sherpas generally consider it inappropriate and disrespectful to their mountain gods to leave dead bodies littering their holy mountain. In 2019, at least four bodies were taken down from the mountain by Nepalese trash collectors.
“There’s sort of this idea that there’s only one mountain that really matters in the kind of Western, popular imagination,” filmmaker and director Jennifer Peedom told Insider when her documentary, “Mountain” was released in 2017.
Peedom had climbed Everest herself four times as of 2018, but said the thrill of summiting Everest is largely relegated to the history books, and for “true mountaineers,” it’s just an exercise in crowd control these days.
“There seems to be a disaster mystique around Everest that seems to only serve to heighten the allure of the place,” she said. “It is extremely overcrowded now and just getting more and more every year.”
This story was originally published in May 2019. It has been updated.
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