Warehouse worker sparks outrage with alarming photo of employer’s shipping practice: ‘We get two to five shipments a week like this’
Laurelle Stelle – October 28, 2023
A frustrated warehouse employee showed the world the wasteful and polluting practice of a company they said they do business with regularly in the r/Anticonsumption subreddit.
Plastic shipping packages are a significant fraction of the world’s plastic problem. Some companies, like Amazon, have said they’ll try to switch to more affordable and eco-friendly alternatives. Other businesses seem utterly unaware of the money they’re losing and the impact they’re having on the environment.
Photo Credit: u/MDGR28 / Reddit
“This clothing company always ships their freight in two inches thick of plastic wrap,” said this fed-up Redditor.
The attached photo showed a shipping pallet in a warehouse in the process of being unwrapped. A pile of wadded plastic beside the pallet was clearly enough to cover it dozens of times over — and there was still more around the merchandise. None of the other pallets in the background had nearly as much packing material wrapped around them.
“It’s so much!” the Redditor complained. “We get two to five shipments a week like this.”
Wrapping pallets this way just doesn’t make financial sense. It takes longer to both wrap and unwrap, wasting employee time that both companies have to pay for — not to mention the cost of the material itself.
Also, as Greenpeace recently pointed out, plastic recycling is difficult, and most plastic never gets recycled. Instead, plastic trash either ends up in landfills or as litter in the environment, including in the ocean, where it is dangerous to wildlife. The best way to prevent that outcome is to minimize the use of disposable plastic to start with.
“There are alternatives that exist. You can have safety without plastic,” said one commenter, sharing a link to a how-to page listing eco-friendly options. “Also, it took me like two seconds to find these alternatives.”
Even a small improvement would be better than nothing, as another user pointed out. “My dad made an arrangement with his local post office for their plastic wrap,” they said. “This stuff is excellent for packing material. Sure beats having to buy packing materials. Does it get tossed by the buyer? Sure, but it’s being reused once, at least, and not immediately discarded by the post office.”
The city landed that title through multiple metrics including its inflation rate and the cost of gas. The report also considered living costs from annual housing costs, median gross rent and high fees associated with homeownership.
The report said home prices exceed the national median sale price and added that many in San Diego’s downtown area must pay homeowners association fees to maintain living in housing complexes.
“Living in San Diego is not particularly affordable,” the report reads. “San Diegans are willing to pay these elevated prices, though, often referring to the cost-of-living differences as the ‘sunshine tax,’ or the price of enjoying a year-round temperate climate.”
Los Angeles was ranked the second most expensive city, followed by Honolulu and Miami. California actually made up seven of the top ten spots in the report and around half of the top 25. New York City, the most populated U.S. town, earned the 11th spot.
According to the report, the cities at the top of the list require the most amount of wealth in order to live comfortably.
What are the most expensive cities in the US?
These are the 25 most expensive American cities according to the U.S. News & World Report. For information on each city’s various qualities like value and quality of life, click here.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema voted to limit background check reporting hours before Maine shootings
Laura Gersony, Arizona Republic – October 28, 2023
An Army reservist, who has reportedly shown symptoms of mental health issues in recent months, allegedly shot and killed 18 people Wednesday in Lewiston, Maine.
Earlier that day, the U.S. Senate voted to approve a Republican-led amendment that would limit the Department of Veterans Affairs’ ability to relay information about some veterans, including those with certain mental health issues, to an FBI database used for gun background checks.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., was one of only five non-Republican senators to vote in favor of the measure.
According to the bill’s sponsor, the VA is required to report people to the FBI’s criminal background check system whenever a fiduciary is appointed to help the person manage their VA benefits.
The Senate-approved amendment would prohibit the VA from relaying that information to the database, unless a judge rules that the person poses a danger to themselves or others.
A spokesperson for Sinema defended her vote, noting that the amendment would not change federal requirements for background checks, and is geared toward limiting the VA’s role in determining whether a person is mentally fit to own a gun.
“Kyrsten voted to ensure a judge — not a bureaucrat at the VA — was responsible to determine whether a veteran was a danger to themselves or others, just as judges make that determination for civilians,” the spokesperson wrote.
Research suggests that most mass murders are not committed by severely mentally ill people, and that people with mental illness are more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators of it.
The suspect in the mass shooting, Robert Card, was committed to a mental health facility for two weeks over the summer because he was “hearing voices” and threatening to shoot up a military base in Saco, Maine, severalnews outlets have reported.
It is not immediately clear whether the amendment would have applied directly to Card. Jaclyn Schildkraut, a gun policy expert with the Rockefeller Institute of Government, noted that only certain specific criteria in federal law limit people’s right to have a gun, such as a person being deemed, as the law puts it, a “mental defective” or being committed to a mental institution, rather than going to one voluntarily.
A VA spokesperson said they could not say for sure whether Card fell into those categories and said that Card used VA education benefits in 2004, but he has not used or applied for any VA benefits since.
“Effectively it is too early to determine whether this bill would have any relevance to the Maine shooting as there are just a lot of unknowns,” wrote Schildkraut, the gun policy expert, in an email to the Arizona Republic.
Asked on Friday about Sinema’s vote, Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., who is running for the Senate seat she currently holds, said that he would have voted against the measure.
“Our criminal background system is very important. It’s one of the few things that does work to stop people that shouldn’t be owning weapons (from) buying weapons. And anything that diminishes that, I think, is not going to keep Americans safe,” Gallego said Friday at a news conference on another topic.
‘We were living our best lives’: This 32-year-old says he had more financial freedom working at Chili’s in 2012 than he does now with a much higher income — here’s why
Sabina Wex – October 28, 2023
‘We were living our best lives’: This 32-year-old says he had more financial freedom working at Chili’s in 2012 than he does now with a much higher income — here’s why
While it’s not hard to get a millennial to indulge in some nostalgia for the 2010s — the decade many of their cohort entered adulthood and the workforce — what’s got them reminiscing about their younger years lately may come as a surprise.
Although many were fresh out of college, still figuring things out and living on minimum wage, they’d likely hesitate to characterize their past selves as “young, dumb and broke.” But not necessarily because they remember themselves as wise and mature.
As Mordecai Nuccio explains in a recent TikTok, he feels like he had more disposable income back in 2012 compared to now — an assertion that’s been making the rounds on TikTok.
“We were making minimum wage, but we were living our best lives,” Nuccio, a 32-year-old photographer, says about his time living on minimum wage working as a food runner at Chili’s.
He adds that a big part of his current financial stress is thanks to his increased credit card and student loan debts. Even though he makes more money and lives in a double-income household with his fiancé, he feels more squeezed.
Here’s how do you get back to living your best life now that you should have more cash flow.
Tackle debt
Back in 2012, Nuccio says he had “minimal” credit card debt. But that’s changed as his expenses have increased — and he’s got his student loans to think of too.
While expenses tend to increase as you age and take on more responsibilities, making more often translates into spending more. Millennials love splurging on experiences, but that can quickly wander into risky spending habit territory.
Living on borrowed money can get expensive once you start to factor in interest but it can be overwhelming to get out of that vicious cycle. If you’ve racked up a couple of balances, one way to start picking away at your debt in a manageable way is to use the “debt avalanche method,”. Here’s how it works: you pay off your highest interest loan debt first, and only make minimum payments on all your other debts.
Once you’ve paid off the highest interest loan, you move on to the next highest interest debt, and so on — until, voila, all your debt has disappeared.
Up until fairly recently, student loan payments were suspended. But their return means that borrowers like Nuccio need to figure out how to fit these payments back into their monthly expenses.
Unfortunately, 28% of student loan borrowers say they’ll need to take on additional debt to maintain their household payments and repay their student debt, according to a recent Achieve survey.
When you’re robbing Paul to pay Peter, things can get messy. But consolidating your debts can make this a little easier. If you have private student loans and credit card debt, you might consider refinancing your loan.
Even though it means taking on another loan, if you’re able to find an offer at a lower rate than your current accounts, you’ll save yourself plenty in interest over the life of the loan. Plus, by pooling your debts, you’ll only have to worry about making a single monthly payment, which will hopefully make your life a little easier.
Lower your cost of living
Nuccio mentions that he lived in Tampa, Florida in 2012 when he worked at Chili’s, but has since moved to New York City to pursue photography. Though this may have been a good move for his career, it’s bad news for his debt.
Though Nuccio doesn’t explicitly say which borough he lives in, New York’s Manhattan is the most expensive city in the U.S., according to the Council for Community and Economic Research’s (CCER) most recent data. Though several Florida media outlets report Tampa is the Sunshine State’s most expensive city, it still doesn’t rank on the CCER’s list of priciest cities across the country.
So part of your plan to pay back your debt may need to include your locale. If you live in an expensive city like New York, it’ll likely take you longer to pay off your debt than a cheaper city like Tampa.
The ‘great wealth transfer’ isn’t $72 trillion but $129 trillion, BofA says—and the government gave most of it to baby boomers
Hillary Hoffower, ChloeBerger – October 28, 2023
Ippei Naoi/Getty Images
You’ve probably heard about the “great wealth transfer.” It’s the $72 trillion stack of assets that baby boomers are sitting on and going to pass onto millennials someday, thereby solving many of the economically beleaguered younger generation’s problems. But there was another, even more “massive” wealth transfer from the government to the baby boomers over the last 40 years, according to Bank of America Research.
The investment bank isn’t alone in coming to this conclusion. No less a figure than Ray Dalio, the billionaire and former leader of what was for many years the world’s biggest hedge fund, wrote on his LinkedIn page in August about a “coordinated government maneuver” that left household balance sheets rich and the state effectively broke. Dalio did not mention the boomers, or any generation, by name, but BofA has now done him one better.
Boomers have quite simply been the biggest beneficiary of a “massive wealth transfer,” wrote the BofA team led by Ohsung Kwon, echoing Dalio’s observation that trillions of wealth flowed from the public to the private sector thanks to government policy since the 1980s, when boomers were in their prime working years. BofA pointed to the ballooning government debt—from 31% of GDP to 120% during that period—and the 10-year Treasury yield shrinking from 12% to 4.6% today (it’s actually 4.9% as of press time).
So how many trillions? Over this period, BofA calculates, U.S. household net worth has skyrocketed from $17 trillion to $150 trillion. Boomers, alongside “traditionalists,” hold two-thirds ($146 trillion) of that total net worth. This means that government policy has resulted in a $129 trillion wealth transfer into the pockets of those boomers and older Americans, BofA said (it didn’t clarify the exact apportionment of wealth between these two groups).
At the top of the ladder
Just over a quarter of this wealth is held in financial assets such as real estate. No surprise there, considering that nearly all boomers locked in a low 3% mortgage rate, unlike those poor millennials—the only group that took on meaningful mortgage debt since 2021, now in the 8% range. Fortune has reported extensively on how millennials have not enjoyed a boomer level of success as they struggled to afford to buy a home for years before facing off with an overpriced, ultra-competitive pandemic housing market.
BofA’s findings are more evidence that boomers have had it pretty good, economically speaking. In addition to low interest rates and inflated housing prices boosting asset value, a 2020 Deutsche Bank report found that boomers shelled out less for education than millennials did and won’t have to pay for the environmental damage caused by the carbon emission-releasing companies they invested in.
While boomers have still had their fair share of economic challenges, like the Great Inflation of the 1970s, BofA found they ultimately benefited in the long run from an economy that’s set them up pretty nicely for wealth accumulation. In a 2021 memo to clients, billionaire (and boomer) Howard Marks wrote that the generation is so big that they’re still wielding enough political and financial power to advocate for a system that works for them, “Boomers have been and still are consuming more than their fair share of the pie. This will leave future generations saddled with substantial debt stemming from expenditures they didn’t benefit from proportionally,” he wrote.
Of course, four of the last five presidents are part of the baby boomer generation, and Congress is largely made up of boomers, if not traditionalists like the recently deceased Dianne Feinstein, with millennial figures such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jon Ossoff the major exception. President Joe Biden, of course, is what BofA would call a traditionalist, But George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and even Barack Obama were all technically boomers.
As Jill Filipovic, author of “OK Boomer, Let’s Talk,” told Salon in an interview, boomers climbed the ladder and then “pulled it up behind them.” Standing at the lowest rung, three-fourths of millennials (and 82% of Gen Zers) feel they’re navigating economic struggles shaped by their parents, per a survey by OnePoll on behalf of National Debt Relief.
At the bottom of the ladder
Dealing with a hefty price tag for a college education and ensuing student debt, many young adults graduated into a post-recession thorny job market, bouncing around to find a well-paying role. Forced to tack on other gigs to make ends meet, many still aren’t seeing the fruits of their labor; a separate BofA report finds that the extra income isn’t giving them much more spending power.
The housing market is no rosier of a scene; while some millennials have made up some ground and started to househunt, many were pushed back to the last rung of the ladder when they were outbid by boomer cash offers. It’s led many young adults to depend on their more financially stable parents to afford a house. No wonder most millennials (and Gen Z) feel the economy is hurting their ability to be financially independent and like they’re falling behind.
“Millennials, and now Gen Z, have grown up amidst global and financial turmoil,” Suzanne Schmitt, Head of Financial Wellness at New York Life, told Fortune. “These two cohorts have witnessed economic changes in their formative years and may be more risk-averse when it comes to financial habits than their predecessors.”
There’s a silver lining, though, in the other great wealth transfer that is still pending. This could make millennials five times wealthier in 2030 than they were at the start of this decade, according to a Coldwell Banker estimate. Others are less optimistic. A survey from Alliant Credit Union finds that half of millennials think they’re inheriting at least $350,000 from their parents, while half of boomers report say they’ll give away less than $250,000. As Americans live longer and struggle to afford retirement during inflationary times, it’s likely the nest egg chips away a bit more. Even if there’s a large lump sum, many millennials don’t feel equipped to handle it.
Perhaps, then, that wealth transfer won’t be as “great” as the ones boomers already received, the one Bank of America called downright “massive.” It may not be repeated anytime soon.
Here are the places that could become too hot for humans due to climate change
Daniel Vecellio – October 27, 2023
A sign displays the temperature at dusk at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport in July 2023. The area is experiencing record heat-related deaths this year. (Matt York / Associated Press)
Heat waves have always been part of summer, but the familiar short periods of oppressive conditions have grown into weeks to months of sweltering heat. Research has shown that heat waves have become longer, hotter and more frequent over the last half a century because of human-induced climate change.
The 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome, the Central Plains’ summer from hell the following year and this year’s Southwest sizzler are the most familiar recent examples in this country. But extreme heat has touched every continent over the last few years: Temperatures have regularly exceeded 122 degrees (50 Celsius) across the Asian subcontinent, and London’s thermometers reached 104 (40 C) for the first time last year, much earlier than climate models predicted.
But will such extended periods of heat and humidity come to regularly test the limits of human tolerance in places where much of the world’s population lives? It could happen sooner than we think.
We can study this question using the wet-bulb temperature, which combines the influence of heat and humidity on the human body. It denotes the temperature to which a parcel of air would cool by evaporating water into the environment, analogous to the cooling effect of sweat evaporating from skin. Scientists previously theorized that a wet-bulb temperature of 95 degrees — equivalent to an air temperature of 95 at 100% relative humidity — was the highest at which humans could cool themselves without the aid of fans or air conditioning. But lab testing of young, healthy, non-heat-acclimated people at Pennsylvania State University indicated that the wet-bulb limit was closer to 88.
Unfortunately, the hot spots for exceeding this wet-bulb temperature threshold include some of the most populous parts of the world: the Indus River Valley in India and Pakistan, eastern Asia, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. These regions comprise many low- to middle-income countries with vulnerable populations that will bear the brunt of climate change even though they contributed relatively little to its causes.
If global warming, currently at 1.2 degrees C (2.2 F) above the preindustrial baseline, is kept to 1.5 C (2.7 F), the extent and duration of temperatures exceeding the threshold can be limited. At 3 C (5.4 F) of warming, however, the duration of exposure in the world’s hot spots begins to increase exponentially, and physiologically intolerable conditions also begin to appear in the Americas.
Breaking the wet-bulb temperature threshold once, it’s worth noting, does not inherently make a place “too hot for humans.” Chicago, for example, would experience an average of one hour a year above the threshold at 2 degrees of warming, but one has to be exposed to these conditions for six continuous hours without taking precautions to reach dangerous core temperatures.
On the other hand, at the same 2 degrees of warming, the city of Hudaydah, Yemen, with a population of about 700,000, will experience an average of 340 hours a year of physiologically intolerable heat and humidity, putting the entire population at increased risk of dying. Divided into six-hour increments, that’s equivalent to 56 days a year of these extreme conditions.
Other populous global hot spots at 2 degrees of warming would include Aden, Yemen, with about 34 days a year of such conditions; Dammam and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, with 37 and eight days, respectively; Bandar Abbas and Ahvaz, Iran, with 29 and three; Lahore, Pakistan, with 24; Dubai, with 20; and Delhi and Kolkata, India, with six and five.
Even in our current climate, extreme heat is already associated with dire health consequences. A Midwestern heat wave killed 700 people in Chicago in 1995. More than 70,000 died in Europe in the summer of 2003, and in 2010, 55,000 perished due to heat in Russia. More recently, an estimated 1,400 died across Oregon, Washington and British Columbia during the 2021 heat dome, and about 60,000 lost their lives due to extreme heat across Western Europe last year.
Thousands more have probably lost their lives in the heat waves that have afflicted the Global South, where the lack of public health capacity and reporting obscures the toll. Vulnerable populations die not only of heatstroke but also of complications related to cardiovascular, respiratory and renal illnesses.
The results of our study suggest that we need to prepare for, adapt to and mitigate extreme heat right now.
How do we put the brakes on the worst consequences of extreme heat? During these ever-worsening summer heat waves, we can prevent heat-related illnesses by opening cooling centers, monitoring vulnerable communities and shifting high-exertion activities to cooler parts of the day. To better prepare for future heat waves, we should also invest in adaptation and mitigation measures to deal with the warming that past emissions have already baked into our future climate.
Ultimately, a global effort to reduce the use of fossil fuels and bring net carbon emissions to zero as quickly as possible is the only way to avoid intolerable conditions for billions.
Daniel Vecellio is a postdoctoral research scholar at George Mason University’s Virginia Climate Center. He completed the work behind the extreme heat study while he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Healthy Aging at Penn State.
U.S. consumers are ‘walking towards a cliff’ and the jobs market is beginning to ‘fray at the edges,’ warns market strategist
Eleanor Pringle – October 27, 2023
Justin Sullivan—Getty Images
Forget about the blistering pace of economic growth in the United States this past quarter: Americans are hurting, and one market strategist believes life might be about to get a whole lot worse.
Speaking to CNBC’s Squawk Box Europe, Longview Economics founder Chris Watling argues U.S. households are “walking towards a cliff, basically” and warned the excitement around strong retail sales is not justified. That poses a problem for U.S. growth as spending by consumers accounts for over two-thirds of the economy.
“They’re running out of cash. If you look at excess savings they’ve been run down quite hard,” said Watling, who serves as Longview’s CEO and chief market strategist. “If you look across the income quartiles, the bottom…quartiles are under pressure, [and] probably [have] spent all that excess savings.”
Indeed, backward-looking data suggests U.S. households appear to be in robust condition. According to predictions from the U.S. Census Bureau, retail and food services sales for September 2023 will hit $704.9 billion, up 0.7% from the preceding month and 3.8% higher than a year ago.
Wall Street also enjoyed a slew of positive third-quarter updates from major retailers. Just this week Amazon enjoyed a 13% bump in revenue, while Unilever reported underlying sales growth was up 5.2%.
Watling is unconvinced by such sales success, saying it has been buoyed by a household savings ratio that is now dwindling.
“So it’s not quite all good news,” Watling continued. “Quite the reverse, I think there are some real challenges coming for the U.S. consumer.”
Labor market ‘fraying at the edges’
While the nation’s economy expanded at a 4.9% annual rate from July through September, its fastest in nearly two years, Watling added that some economic indicators are hinting at troubles beneath the surface.
Among them are car repayment delinquency rates for risky borrowers, which have pushed to the highest figure in three decades. Also worrying is a slowdown in the Kansas City Fed’s Labor Market Conditions Indicators (LMCI), which saw momentum drop into negative numbers earlier this year.
“The labor market’s under a lot of pressure,” said Watling. “We had a good payrolls month, but if you look at a lot of the indicators of where the labor market’s likely to go, a lot of them are fraying at the edges—they’re quite soft.”
Continued pressure on both consumers and the labor market could be what “kick-starts” a recession in the U.S. economy, Watling added.
“Bond King” Bill Gross is similarly unconvinced by the seemingly positive picture some datasets are painting.
Earlier this week Gross, former chief investment officer of Pacific Investment Management Co., or Pimco, tweeted that he was predicting a recession in the fourth quarter and urged his followers to return to the bond market.
Watling added that a further headache for the U.S. economy will be its stock market in the coming months, which he believes is massively overpriced.
When asked about the impact of this shaky consumer on Wall Street, he replied: “From our point of view, though, I can see a bounce for a month or two. It’s been quite beaten up; markets have been coming down since July, but I think net-net, you want to be underweight equities if you are looking beyond the next few months.
“Particularly, the U.S. equity market is too expensive; it’s overvalued…The U.S. in aggregate is overvalued—tech’s overvalued.”
He finished: “I think the U.S. is in for tough times.”
Editorial: Donald Trump’s attorneys abandon their client for the truth and the law
New York Daily News Editorial Board – October 26, 2023
John Bazemore/Pool/AFP/GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/TNS
Roy Cohn, the evil, crooked, disbarred New York lawyer, who mentored a young Donald Trump and taught him many of the nasty ways to bully, cheat and lie, was loyal to his client, but he still would absolutely sell out Trump to save himself from prison.
The moral, for an immoral man, is that a lawyer who engages in a crime with a client has no protection from prosecution.
And so many of Trump’s other attorneys have been lining up to rat out the rat in chief, as we saw vividly Tuesday, first with a morning guilty plea by lawyer Jenna Ellis before an Atlanta judge in the Georgia election interference criminal case. The afternoon saw disbarred New York lawyer Michael Cohen, Trump’s one-time fixer, spilling the beans before a Manhattan judge in state Attorney General Tish James’ civil case over Trump’s fake valuation of his holdings.
Ellis’ plea, in the wide-ranging conspiracy indictment against Trump et al brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, was the third by a Trump lawyer in that case. Last week, Sidney Powell switched sides and then so did Ken Chesebro.
Powell and Chesebro are also two of the six unnamed co-conspirators in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s federal indictment of Trump brought in Washington. Ellis was evidently too small a fish for Smith.
A very big fish is Mark Meadows. He is no lawyer, but as Trump’s White House chief of staff was the top of the food chain during those nightmare years. Meadows has cut his own deal with Smith to testify, ABC News reported Tuesday. Tellingly, Meadows is not one of the half dozen co-conspirators and can provide a road map to Smith.
Trump trusted his lawyers, going back 50 years when Cohn was first retained after the Nixon Department of Justice accused the Trump family real estate business of illegally discriminating against minority renters of their apartments. The charges were true, but Cohn concocted a phony suit against DOJ. Misusing the legal system was Cohn’s specialty and Trump learned well.
Trump trusted Cohen to do his dirty work, like arranging the $130,000 hush money payment to Stormy Daniels, which landed Cohen in trouble. After he was convicted of federal felonies and disbarred in 2019 — by the same Manhattan appellate court that disbarred Cohn two months before he died in 1986 — Cohen told Congress about Trump’s false bookkeeping before Cohen reported to prison.
Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance was listening to Cohen’s testimony and started a criminal probe. In 2022, new DA Alvin Bragg wrongly dropped the prosecution, but Tish James picked it up on the civil side.
Trump has already been found guilty. The ongoing trial downtown will establish the size of his financial penalty. The four pending criminal cases (by Willis, Smith and the document case by Smith and the hush-money payments by Bragg) could put Trump in prison.
There’s another New York lawyer, whose law license has been suspended by that same appellate court, Rudy Giuliani. He is Smith’s co-conspirator No. 1 and also a target of Willis. It was U.S. Attorney Giuliani who helped bring down Cohn in 1986 by forcing him to pay $7 million in taxes, interest and penalties for nearly three decades of stiffing the IRS.
Trump, Wallace said on Wednesday, “couldn’t take the heat ― lost any ability to control his impulses.”
Then, she compared the former president to her dogs.
“I have vizslas, so all of the training of that breed is about impulse control: teaching them not to run after the squirrel and not to roll in horse poop,” she said. “Trump has less impulse control than a hunting dog. Couldn’t keep himself out of trouble.”
Trump loves to compare his opponents to dogs, saying, for example, that Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) “choked like a dog” during his 2012 presidential run and that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) was “sweating like a dog” during a 2016 debate.
Now, he’s being dogged in return by the MSNBC host:
What is Hamas, and what’s happening in Israel and Gaza?
BBC – October 26, 2023
Hamas gunmen launched an unprecedented attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip on 7 October, killing more than 1,400 people and taking more than 220 hostages.
Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry says more than 7,000 people have been killed in the territory since Israel launched retaliatory air strikes, and a ground offensive is expected.
What is happening in the Gaza Strip?
Hospitals in Gaza are admitting emergency cases only as fuel runs out, according to the World Health Organization.
The UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, say is has significantly reduced its operations because it has almost exhausted its fuel reserves.
Small quantities of fuel retrieved from existing reserves are being used to maintain the water supply in the south of Gaza. However, they will run out soon.
An Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman said Gaza still had fuel but “Hamas prefers to have all of the fuel for its warfighting capabilities, leaving civilians without it”.
However, these have provided only a fraction of the needs of people in Gaza. Unrwa called it “a drop in the ocean of overwhelming needs”. About 500 lorries were allowed into Gaza every day before the start of the war.
An estimated 1.4 million people in Gaza have been displaced, according to the UN.
Hundreds of thousands moved from the north of the territory to the south, after being told by the Israeli military to leave for their own safety.
The WHO has also warned that it is “almost impossible” for patients in hospitals in northern Gaza to be evacuated.
Map showing route of evacuation in Gaza
The southern city of Khan Younis, normally home to 400,000 people, has seen its population increase to about 1.2 million. Many families are sharing homes, or sleeping in tents.
However, Israel has continued to carry out strikes on what it says are Hamas military targets in southern Gaza.
The UN’s regional humanitarian chief has said: “Nowhere is safe in Gaza.”
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has suggested a temporary ceasefire to allow more aid to enter Gaza, and and EU leaders are also expected to call for one.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday: “We have set two goals for this war: to eliminate Hamas by destroying its military and governing abilities, and to do everything possible to bring our captives home.”
“All Hamas terrorists are dead men walking – above ground, below ground, outside Gaza.”
Mr Netanyahu said Israel would launch a ground incursion, but did not detail when it would start.
On Thursday morning, the IDF said it had carried out a “targeted raid” on defensive positions in northern Gaza with tanks and armoured bulldozers. It said this was “part of preparations for the next stages of combat”.
Israeli forces have carried at least two other raids into Gaza since the conflict started. In one, on 22 October, one soldier was killed and three were injured.
The IDF has massed tens of thousands of soldiers along the territory’s perimeter fence, along with tanks and artillery. It has activated some 300,000 reservists, alongside its standing force of 160,000.
Hamas is thought to have about 25,000 people in its military wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades.
Graphic based on 2021 Israeli military map showing destroyed sections of Hamas’s “Gaza Metro” tunnel system
Hamas has previously claimed the tunnels stretch for 500km (310 miles). Many have entrances hidden within houses, mosques, schools and other public buildings.
Israel’s troops are likely to avoid going into tunnels unless they have to, instead using explosives to destroy them.
A major challenge for the Israeli troops will be close-quarters fighting in densely populated urban areas. It is thought that Hamas will lay booby traps and improvised explosive devices at entry points such as doorways, and along narrow streets.
Hamas is a Palestinian group which has ruled the Gaza Strip since 2007. The group is sworn to Israel’s destruction and wants to replace it with an Islamic state.
Hamas has fought several wars with Israel since it took power. It has fired – or allowed other groups to fire – thousands of rockets into Israel, and has carried out other deadly attacks.
In response, Israel has repeatedly attacked Hamas with air strikes. In 2008 and 2014, it also sent troops into Gaza.
Together with Egypt, Israel has blockaded the Gaza Strip since 2007 for what it describes as security reasons.
Hamas – or in some cases its military wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades – has been designated a terrorist group by Israel, the United States, the European Union and the UK, as well as other powers.
Iran backs the group, providing it with funding, weapons and training.
Hamas killed families in their homes in the kibbutz of Kfar Aza
On 7 October, hundreds of Hamas gunmen crossed from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel by breaking through the heavily-fortified perimeter fence, landing by sea, and using paragliders.
The gunmen killed 1,400 people, most of them civilians, in a series of raids on military posts, kibbutzim and a music festival, and took hostages back into Gaza.
It came at a time of soaring Israeli-Palestinian tensions.
This year has been the deadliest on record for Palestinians who live in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, which could have motivated Hamas to strike Israel.
Hamas might also have been seeking to score a significant propaganda victory to boost its popularity among ordinary Palestinians.
The capture of Israeli hostages is thought to be designed to pressure Israel to free some of the estimated 4,500 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.
The Israeli military believes 224 people are still being held in Gaza.
