7: Israel

22: Israel

22: Israel

14: Robotaxi

Adobe Launches AI Video Generator
Nobel economics prize goes to 3 economists who found that freer societies are more likely to prosper
How have social media algorithms changed the way we interact? “the features of social media platforms don’t allow for free and fair competition of ideas to begin with… the ‘value’ of an idea on social media isn’t a reflection of how good it is, but is rather the product of the platform’s algorithm.” .......... “algorithms on social media platforms have fundamentally reshaped the nature of free speech, not necessarily by restricting what can be said, but by determining who gets to see what content” ......... “Rather than ideas competing freely on their merits, algorithms amplify or suppress the reach of messages… introducing an unprecedented form of interference in the free exchange of ideas that is often overlooked.” ......... Facebook is one of the pioneers of recommendation algorithms on social media, and with an estimated three billion users, its Feed is arguably one of the biggest. ......... Determined by the interactions on each post, this came to prioritise posts about controversial topics, as those garnered the most engagement. .......... Because contentious posts are more likely to be rewarded by algorithms, there is the possibility that the fringes of political opinion can be overrepresented on social media. Rather than free and open public forums, critics argue that social media instead offers a distorted and sensationalised mirror of public sentiment that exaggerates discord and muffles the views of the majority. .......... is “free speech” purely about the right to speak, or also about the right to be heard? ......... Our era has been labelled “the algorithmic society” – one in which, it could be argued, social media platforms and search engines govern speech in the same way nation states once did. .......... While Professor Candeub is a “free speech absolutist”, he’s also wary of the power concentrated in the platforms that can be gatekeepers of speech via computer code. “I think that we would do well to have these algorithms made public because otherwise we're just being manipulated.” ............ There is a right to freedom of speech online but not a right for everyone to be heard equally: it would take more than a lifetime to watch every TikTok video or read every tweet.” ......... “Chronological feeds are not … neutral: They are also subject to rich-get-richer effects, demographic biases, and the unpredictability of virality. There is, unfortunately, no neutral way to design social media.” ............ Platforms do offer some alternatives to algorithms, with people on X able to choose a feed from only those they follow. And by filtering huge amounts of content, “recommendation engines provide greater diversity and discovery than just following people we already know”, argues Bertram. “That feels like the opposite of a restriction of freedom of speech – it’s a mechanism for discovery.” ............. “Regular TikTok users are often very deliberate about the algorithm – giving it signals to encourage or discourage the recommendation engine along avenues of new discovery” ........... just 28% of Americans say they like documenting their life in public online, down from 40% in 2020. People are instead becoming more comfortable in closed-off group chats with trusted friends and relatives; spaces with more accountability and fewer rewards for shocks and provocations. .......... Meta says the number of photos sent in direct messages now outnumbers those shared for all to see.

Israel faces a fierce and evasive foe in Hezbollah’s drones The unmanned aerial vehicle, laden with explosives, evaded Israel’s multilayered air-defense system and slammed into a mess hall at a military training camp deep inside Israel, killing four soldiers and wounding dozens. .......... Hezbollah, which said the attack was in response to Israeli strikes in Lebanon, said the drone was “able to penetrate the Israeli air defense radars without being detected” and reach its target. It claimed it had outsmarted Israel’s air defenses by simultaneously launching dozens of missiles and “squadrons” of drones simultaneously.......

Drones are harder to detect and track than rockets or missiles

.......... Israel has a formidable arsenal of drones, capable of carrying out spy missions and attacks. It has developed a drone capable of reaching archenemy Iran, some 1500 kilometers (1,000 miles) away. .......... In July, a drone launched from Yemen travelled some 270 kilometers (160 miles) from Israel’s southern tip, all the way to Tel Aviv, slamming into a downtown building and killing one person without it having been intercepted. .......... The Israeli security official said drones are harder to detect for a number of reasons: They fly slowly and often include plastic components, having a weaker thermal footprint with radar systems than powerful rockets and missiles. The trajectory is also harder to track. Drones can have roundabout flight paths, can come from any direction, fly lower to the ground and — because they are much smaller than rockets — can be mistaken for birds. ........... Israel spent years focusing on strengthening its air defense systems to improve protection against rockets and missiles. But drones were not seen as a top priority. ........ The militant group has launched roughly 1,500 surveillance and attack drones since it began striking Israel in October 2023 ...... Hezbollah has also used drones to erode Israel’s air-defense capabilities by slamming them into the very batteries and infrastructure meant to take them down. Earlier this year, Hezbollah said it used an Ababil explosive drone to down Israel’s Sky Dew observation balloon, a component of its aerial defense. ........... there were ways to combat the drones that could be considered. Detection capabilities could be expanded to include acoustic radars to pick up on the sound of the drone’s engine or electro-optics, which could allow Israeli surveillance to better identify them. He said rockets, fighter jets and helicopters could be deployed for interception, and that electronic warfare could be used to overtake the drones and divert them . ......

'Petty, partisan, un-American': Social media on Harris-Biden Not Congratulating Elon Musk On SpaceX Feat Elon Musk had a clash with California as it rejected Elon Musk' request for more frequent SpaceX launches from the state's central coast and it cited Elon Musk's politics as the reason for the rejection

It is a disgrace that Biden/Harris have not issued a formal congratulations for this unprecedented accomplishment. Failure to do so is petty, grossly partisan, and un-American. https://t.co/cA7kA7DrFR

— Peter Boghossian (@peterboghossian) October 13, 2024

Insane https://t.co/9aWwMstb9r

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 14, 2024

We live in a 1776-like moment in America & there’s little doubt that @elonmusk is the Benjamin Franklin of our time.

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) October 13, 2024

US to send anti-missile system and troops to Israel, Pentagon says The United States has been privately urging Israel to calibrate its response to avoid triggering a broader war in the Middle East, officials say, with Biden publicly voicing his opposition to an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear sites and his concerns about a strike on Iran's energy infrastructure........ The Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD, is a critical part of the U.S. military's layered air defense systems and adds to Israel's already formidable anti-missile defenses. ....... "While we have made tremendous efforts in recent days to contain an all-out war in our region, I say it clearly that we have no red lines in defending our people and interests," Araqchi posted on X.

The trouble with Elon Musk’s robotaxi dream Scaling up self-driving taxis will be hard, and competition will be fierce .......... Elon Musk’s choice of Warner Bros Studios for the long-anticipated launch of his robotaxi on October 10th is entirely appropriate. Hollywood’s film studios are as much a dream factory as Tesla, his electric-car company. The vision he served up, accompanied by whoops of delight from the superfans in the audience, is an autonomous Cybercab so cheap that it will serve as “individualised mass transit”. But Mr Musk’s promises were, like many Hollywood movies, long on bombast and short on reality. The road to self-driving taxis will be long, and Tesla will have tough competition along the way............ The Cybercab, a two-seater without steering wheel or pedals, will be on sale “before 2027”, according to Mr Musk, though his timelines often slip—he once promised a fleet of 1m robotaxis by 2020. He also showed off a Robovan, which will carry 20 passengers, and pledged that his humanoid robot will be the “biggest product ever of any kind”. Yet the event, which was light on details, disappointed investors; Tesla’s share price slumped 9% the following day. ........... Waymo, a division of Alphabet, has raced ahead in America. After 15 years and perhaps $30bn of investment it now has a fleet of 700 self-driving cabs running in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Phoenix, and will soon launch in Atlanta and Austin. ........... China has also become a hotspot for autonomy. Apollo Go, the robotaxi unit of Baidu, a Chinese tech giant, launched its service in Wuhan in 2022 and has since expanded to ten other Chinese cities. It aims to double its Wuhan fleet to 1,000 robotaxis by the end of the year. Other Chinese firms including Pony.ai, WeRide, and Didi, the country’s biggest ride-hailing firm, are also trying out robotaxis in several big cities. ............ Waymo and its competitors so far mostly operate in places where the weather is fine and the roads are straight and wide. ............. The cost of the self-driving cars themselves—around $150,000 a piece for Waymo—also remains a problem. Around two-thirds of that is estimated to come from hardware. To run their vehicles autonomously, Waymo and others are relying on a battery of expensive sensors including cameras, radars and lidars, which use lasers to create a 3D image of the vehicle’s surroundings, as well as lots of in-car computing power to make sense of it all. .......... Human drivers account for well over half the fare of ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft, which suggests a big opportunity for self-driving cabs. ............. Bernstein, a broker, calculates that once all costs are considered, self-driving taxi fares will remain higher than human ones for some time. What is more, replacing the fleet of Uber and Lyft cars in America with robotaxis would require up to 400,000 vehicles, Bernstein reckons. At the current cost of a Waymo vehicle, that would mean an investment of around $60bn. ............ Tesla is betting it can make a cheaper option work. Its “Full-Self Driving” system, which will be the underlying tech for its robotaxis, relies only on cameras to collect information. Data from these will go into an “end-to-end neural network”—an algorithmic black box trained on 9bn miles of driving data from the 6m Teslas already on the road—to produce driving commands. As a result, Tesla says its robotaxis will cost under $30,000 and will be easier to transfer from one city to another. .................. JPMorgan Chase, a bank, does not expect “material revenue generation...for years to come” from Tesla’s robotaxi efforts.

New ChatGPT prompt goes viral with Sam Altman’s approval this particular ChatGPT prompt has found a way of resonating with people, providing an instant peek into their own psychological makeup......... Responses on Reddit ranged from Newmoonlightavenger who said simply “It was the best thing anyone has ever said about me” to Jimmylegs50 who wrote, “Crying. I really needed to hear this right now. Thanks, OP." .......... User PopeAsthetic wrote, 'Wow I did it, and GPT gave me the most profound advice and reflection of myself that I’ve ever received. Even told me I seem to have a desire for control, while at the same time having a desire to let go of control. I’ve never thought about it like that.' ............ It turns out that ChatGPT doesn’t mess around when you ask it to roast you, and the results can be quite brutal! ........ In fact, when I tried the same prompt the results were scarily accurate: “But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, you’re probably the type to say, 'Draw me like one of your French girls,” only to immediately follow it up with, “But make sure my espresso is ready in exactly 1 minute 45 seconds. And don’t forget to set up the camera – I’m planning a tech review after this sketch.”'

U.S. officials say Israel has narrowed down its targets for strike on Iran The strike could happen at any time, U.S. and Israeli officials told NBC News, and could come during this weekend's Yom Kippur holiday. ........ Iranian military and energy infrastructure. ........ There is no indication that Israel will target nuclear facilities or carry out assassinations ........ Iran's attack caused little damage in Israel. ........ U.S. and Israeli officials said a response could come during the Yom Kippur holiday........... U.S. officials have continued to urge the Israeli government to make their response proportional, sticking to military targets and avoiding oil, gas and nuclear facilities.

Pretty cool.

Ask ChatGPT “From all of our interactions what is one thing that you can tell me about myself that I may not know about myself”

— Tom Morgan (@tomowenmorgan) October 12, 2024

This is cool. Thanks for the idea Tom pic.twitter.com/0BT0D9cax6

— Will Mannon (@will_mannon) October 12, 2024

love this: https://t.co/Jh66ElOmfA

— Sam Altman (@sama) October 13, 2024

9: Israel

6: Dhruv Rathee

6: India

4: Israel

4: Iran

2: Israel

Iran-Israel

1: Donald Trump

The Red Heifer Prophecy

"'Regional War Has Essentially Begun"

30: Palestine

What This Israel-Hezbollah-Hamas-Iran Conflict Is Really About To understand why and how Israel’s devastating blow to Hezbollah is such a world-shaking threat to Iran, Russia, North Korea and even China, you have to put it in the context of the wider struggle that has replaced the Cold War as the framework of international relations today. ............. the post-post-Cold War: a struggle between an ad hoc “coalition of inclusion” — decent countries, not all of them democracies, that see their future as best delivered by a U.S.-led alliance nudging the world to greater economic integration, openness and collaboration to meet global challenges, like climate change — versus a “coalition of resistance,” led by Russia, Iran and North Korea: brutal, authoritarian regimes that use their opposition to the U.S.-led world of inclusion to justify militarizing their societies and maintaining an iron grip on power............... China has been straddling the two camps because its economy depends on access to the coalition of inclusion while the government’s leadership shares a lot of the authoritarian instincts and interests of the coalition of resistance. ........... You have to see the wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Lebanon in the context of this global struggle. Ukraine was trying to join the world of inclusion in Europe — seeking freedom from Russia’s orbit and to join the European Union — and Israel and Saudi Arabia were trying to expand the world of inclusion in the Middle East by normalizing relations........... And if Israel were allowed to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia, not only would that vastly expand the coalition of inclusion in that region — a coalition already expanded by the Abraham Accords that created ties between Israel and other Arab nations — it would almost totally isolate Iran and its reckless proxies of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and the pro-Iranian Shiite militias in Iraq, all of which were driving their countries into failed states. .............. Indeed, it is hard to exaggerate how much Hezbollah and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed by an Israeli strike on Friday, were detested in Lebanon and many parts of the Sunni and Christian Arab world for the way they had kidnapped Lebanon and turned it into a base for Iranian imperialism. ............. the flood of social media postings from across Lebanon and the Arab world celebrating Hezbollah’s demise and urging the Lebanese government to declare a unilateral cease-fire so the Lebanese Army could seize control of Southern Lebanon from Hezbollah and bring quiet to the border. The Lebanese don’t want Beirut to be destroyed like Gaza and they are truly afraid of a return of civil war

Why Everything Is Suddenly Spiraling for Israel the unfolding of an Iranian grand strategy to slowly destroy the Jewish state, weaken America’s Arab allies and undermine U.S. influence in the region — while deterring Israel from ever attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities — by using Iranian proxies to bleed Israel to death. ........... The Iranian strategy is exquisite from Tehran’s point of view: Destroy Israel by sacrificing as many Palestinians and Lebanese as necessary but never risk a single Iranian life. The Iranians are ready to die to the last Lebanese, the last Palestinian, the last Syrian and the last Yemeni to eliminate Israel (and distract the world from the Iranian regime’s abuses of its own people and imperialist control over Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Syria). .......... Netanyahu thought he could just tell the world that Israel was defending the frontier of freedom against Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran and everyone would fall in line behind Israel. What would you do? But the only place in the world that that gets you a standing ovation is in the U.S. Congress. ........... Netanyahu’s strategy is a disaster. As a veteran U.S. military commander who has observed close up Israel’s war strategy in Gaza told me privately, anyone with two eyes in his head knows that the only way to defeat Hamas is a strategy of “clear, hold and build”: Destroy the enemy, hold the territory and then build an alternative local, legitimate Palestinian governing authority. Israel’s strategy in Gaza, he said, has been: “Clear, leave, come back, clear again the same place, leave again, come back and clear again.”



Ex-PM Olmert, ex-PA foreign minister propose plan for two-state solution to conflict The two leaders agree to the territorial solution proposed by Olmert during his time in office based on the 1967 borders but with land swaps to account for Israeli settlements and Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem; a Palestinian capital in Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem; and the administration of the Old City by a trusteeship of five states including Israel and Palestine. .......... They agree that an Israeli withdrawal and a Palestinian, technocratic governing council linked to the PA is necessary in the Gaza Strip and that the West Bank and Gaza Strip should be prepared for elections within 24-35 months ............ An Arab peacekeeping force, called the Temporary Arab Security Presence (TASP) will be needed to “stabilize” the Strip, in cooperation with the Israeli military, to prevent terror attacks from Gaza. ......... “Finally, they agreed on the need of a donors conference to rebuild the Gaza Strip with a serious participation of wealthy countries”

Israel vs. Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran — and Itself It’s been almost a year since Oct. 7. More than 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza are dead. ........... He’s now, so far as we know, underground and has been since Oct. 7 and communicates with the outside world and his Hamas colleagues by runner and by written message because he doesn’t trust electronic communications. .......... And in Israeli jail, he decided with a great sense of determination — because he wanted to be a leader of Hamas and was committed to armed struggle — he learned Hebrew. And he learned it perfectly. He read Israeli papers. He watched Israeli television. He became incredibly familiar with and fluent in Israeli society, language, politicians. He read memoirs of security chiefs, prime ministers and all the rest. ............ One thing I heard from a lot of Israelis at different levels of Israeli society was that they feel he understands them, and they don’t understand him. He’s talked about using prison as a sort of study hall in the Israeli psyche. .......... It’s not a great literary novel, but if you want to know something about Yahya Sinwar, it’s very much worth reading. And it’s a portrayal of the making of himself — how he became this political leader, military leader, terrorist, strategist, what the roots of his politics and fury are. And they’re rooted in his family’s exile, obviously as Palestinians from where they lived originally in Palestine into the Gaza Strip. They’re rooted in his witnessing close at hand the 1967 war, which everybody around him thought was going to be a great victory. And a week later, it was a humiliation. Same thing in 1973. ............ You might imagine the leader of Hamas is somebody whose experience is waging war against Israelis, killing Israelis. But his experiences, at least before prison, appear to be in killing Palestinians. ............ he says to this dentist at some point that he’s ready to sacrifice 20,000; 30,000; 100,000 Palestinians in order to obtain —— ................. I think in jail, the most important thing that happened to him that helped shape events was the increasing awareness on a tactical level that the taking of hostages was effective. ........... Twenty years ago, you had a situation where members of Hamas came across the border, the fence, and kidnapped, in a raid, a young Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. One. Brought him into Gaza. And for the next five years, while Shalit was in the hands of Hamas, Israeli society was obsessed with this case. ............. And finally, he was released for a thousand Palestinian prisoners. One of them was Yahya Sinwar. ........... So if you’re an Israeli, you are not seeing what’s going on in Gaza every night, not on Channel 12, not on 13 and certainly not on 14, which is the kind of Fox News station. You’re seeing military operations. You’re seeing the military spokesman taking an embed of some correspondents into the Philadelphi Corridor near Rafah. Much more, you’re seeing lots and lots — understandably — about the hostages, about internecine political battles, street demonstrations. .............. And, as you said earlier, if 20,000 or 30,000 or 100,000 Palestinians have to die for the liberation of Palestine — and the liberation of Palestine also in his view repeatedly means the elimination of what we now know as Israel — then so be it. ........... part of what distinguishes this part of the world is that there are political actors on both sides who are fantasists. Fantasists with guns ........... there was a conference sponsored by Hamas, sponsored by Sinwar, about what taking over would look like. And there were all kinds of speeches and very specific plans about what would happen on the day after Israel was eliminated and Palestine was liberated in their terms. What should we do about the Jews? Should we kick everybody out or kill them? Or should we keep the ones that are really valuable, who are doctors or advanced computer programmers? That conference of the hereafter took place — that was on the level of fantasy. ............ when he unleashed his soldiers on Oct. 7 ........ it was basically a suicide mission to spark something even larger, if possible. .............. we will have exploded Israel’s sense of the status quo. I think that was what it was about. ............. Remember, Oct. 7 was Oct. 7. That was an attack from Hamas. Something happened the next day, on Oct. 8, which is that Hezbollah began to attack northern Israel. .............. Hezbollah is a Shiite group, heavily militarized, infinitely more sophisticated than Hamas, infinitely better armed, and it obviously doesn’t have the sense of isolation. And in fact, in a relatively failed state of Lebanon, its power there is immense. .............. Americans old enough to remember even during the Reagan administration that Hezbollah killed hundreds of Marines. ......... what you have right now is a depopulated northern Israel ....... Israel has shrunk. In a strategic, geographic sense, Israel — already a tiny state — has shrunk. ............... I think Gallant also recognizes that the vaunted Israel Defense Forces proved that it was deeply flawed on Oct. 7 and that it is now exhausted. It’s suffered losses. Forget the criticism from abroad — that the idea that they’re now going to wage war in Lebanon is something that Gallant objects to. ..........

Every single Israeli I spoke to believes the real enemy for them is Iran.

............ And they don’t think it because they have a rich imagination. They think it because for years and years, the leadership of Iran has made it absolutely plain in its rhetoric — and in its actions — that its intentions, the reason for being, for the state, to some degree, is the future elimination of the State of Israel. It’s part of the national project. .............. they see themselves as locked in an ongoing multigenerational war against a patient adversary who strikes at them from all directions using all kinds of different clients and may one day — in fact, one day soon — have nuclear weapons. ............. by shattering the Israeli sense of security, by exposing the weaknesses of the Israeli military, or the degree to which it’s overextended — that it’s not some mythological institution that could fight on infinite fronts. By arousing the fury that you see in the West Bank, rather than a kind of terrible resignation, by arousing Hezbollah and, by extension, Iran, or the other way around, into action, by tripping off a set of events in which Iran, for the first time, directly sets missiles off toward Israel, well, in Sinwar’s mind, that’s an enormous victory. ............... Bill Clinton, remember him leaving a meeting with Netanyahu, and he said out loud, wait a minute, who’s the superpower here? ............... Barack Obama, whom Netanyahu loathed, extended himself to such a degree that Netanyahu made his cynical speech at Bar-Ilan University, hinting that he might be for a Palestinian state. It was all a sham. ........... and the MAGA-like rhetoric of Yair Netanyahu, the son, who sounds like somebody who’s just never off of Truth Social, going on and on about how the Israeli people, and particularly the media, are ungrateful ............. Any compromise is thought to be a betrayal of the Jews and Jewish history. And all of it informed by an intense knowledge of and feeling about everything from the inquisition to the Holocaust. ............. And I’m talking now about Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are vile creatures. They’re thugs. They’re not just annexationists and extremists. Their background — they were in trouble with the law. Ben-Gvir couldn’t serve in the military; he was in so much trouble with the law.

Israelis Are Not Watching the Same War You Are Netanyahu has become an anti-system candidate. .......... But after Oct. 7, the topic in Israel is no longer judicial reforms; it’s security. ......... According to a new poll, 65 percent of the Israeli public define themselves as 50 shades of right wing and only 12 percent as left or center-left. So for every leftist in Israel, you have five to six right-wingers. ............. Israelis ceased to believe in the two-state solution, which would be achieved through a bilateral negotiation, because they saw what happened last time. In 1993, following the Oslo Accords, Israelis experienced an awful lot of suicide bombers. And following the Camp David summit in 2000, when Ehud Barak offered Yasir Arafat, give or take, everything, including half of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, we got the second intifada. ............... We saw that the unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 and from Gaza in 2005 didn’t lead to a new equilibrium in which everyone can live happily and freely but to more tense times of security. ................ The fact that this horrendous terrorist attack came from Gaza, which Israel ceased to occupy in 2005, and that only gave them time and money to actually create a monstrous terrorist army — it’s the last time unilateral withdrawals will be experienced in Israel. So we don’t have a left here. ................ Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, evacuated each and every settlement, took out dead from the graves and withdrew from the international border. And Israel, at the same time, stayed in Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, in order to preserve its security in a bearable condition. ........... So Israelis say, “Perhaps we should stay there as much as needed, pay the price and prevent the situation in which we are attacked. Perhaps the attempt to buy international legitimacy with the currency of territory doesn’t pay.” ..................... Gantz and Netanyahu voted exactly the same for the consecutive 91 meetings of the war cabinet, which means that there is a consensus in Israel of management rather than ideology. ............. Fatah was thrown from roofs in Gaza in 2007. But it’s not that Fatah wants Israel to exist. When people chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free,” it’s not a Hamas phrase; it’s a Fatah phrase. When 72 percent of the Palestinian population in Judea and Samaria in the West Bank support the massacre of Oct. 7, it’s horrifying. .................... We all have a dream about two Western democracies living side by side in peace and harmony. Unfortunately, this is not the case. ................ And the grave mistake was, when President Clinton, it’s amazing to remember, came to Gaza as the president of the United States to stand alongside a mass murderer, Yasir Arafat, they wanted him to be Nelson Mandela. .......... Hamas is becoming more popular. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, is extremely, extremely unpopular. .............. yes, this is Smotrich’s ideological purpose. He doesn’t want, in the long run, the Palestinian Authority to exist, because it’s against his idea of sovereignty on every single inch of Greater Israel. .............. And the idea is shrinking the conflict — that, look, there’s no two-state solution, there’s no one-state solution, there’s no deal. Let’s just try to make the roads better, make more Palestinian roads that are not going to have checkpoints, push for economic development. It has some resonances with an old idea from Netanyahu, which is economic peace, which is different from actual peace. ............... No one wants to annex three million Palestinians to Israel. ......... prior to Oct. 7, no one thought that Israel would invade Gaza. .......... But it’s not the case with Lebanon. You can never cut the lifeline of Hezbollah, because Lebanon is connected to Syria and then Iran. So you can’t stop Hezbollah from getting more weapons and more soldiers. And you can’t eliminate Hezbollah. Plus, Lebanon is a country. It’s not like Gaza or the West Bank. It has more legitimacy in the world. It’s way more difficult. ................ “No, you Americans completely misunderstand this. Hezbollah is Iran. Iran is connected to China. It’s connected to Russia. Americans don’t understand countries with imperial pasts or even countries with current imperial ambitions. And it is, in a way, implacable because its ambitions here are ideological. It doesn’t care about the Palestinians.” ................. what we learned, the tragic lesson from the last decade is that peaceful periods do not equal a peaceful future. ..............

There is a square in Tehran in which there is a clock counting down to the year 2040, in which Israel would be eliminated.

And the intelligence in Israel says that they no longer see 2040 as the date but way earlier. So not tomorrow but maybe 2030, 2032. .................. Hezbollah is a very important ingredient in this scheme, because they got 200,000 rockets that will land here in Israel. ............... to build an army that is well equipped and well trained to fight the Iranian octopus — Hezbollah, the Houthis, maybe the threat that comes from terrorists who come from Jordan — and to prepare for the next war, which will come. ............... President Biden wants Israelis to stop the war when Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in Gaza, is still on his feet, and most Israelis don’t want it. Biden still believes in the idea of two-state solution. Seventy percent of the Jewish Israeli population is against it. ................. the way to have a peace with the Middle East is not going through Ramallah. You can have peace with the moderate Arab countries based on interests against Iran. ............... Israelis and Saudis and Jordanians want Israel to defeat Hamas. They want Iran to be defeated. They want Hezbollah to be defeated. ................. They don’t want the world to end. They want Hamas to be eliminated. But the funniest thing I heard was from a senior figure in the United Arab Emirates. Remember that in the last government, there was a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood here. And he was furious. And I said, “Why?” I mean, finally, an Arab-Jewish cooperation. He said, “No, the Muslim brotherhood — the only place they are allowed to be in office is in Israel. You’re crazy.”

In North Carolina, Remnants of Helene Become an ‘Unprecedented Tragedy’ Thousands of people struggled to cope without basic necessities as authorities searched for the missing, and the overall death toll from the storm surpassed 100. ........... Magda Randolph, 72, who has lived in Asheville for 24 years, said she had never experienced a flooding event this powerful and wondered about the long-term impact........ “Our water system is greatly compromised. Our landfill got compromised,” she said. “It’s unclear what the quality of life is going to be like here for a while.”

Why the World’s Biggest Powers Can’t Stop a Middle East War The United States’ ability to influence events in the Mideast has waned, and other major nations have essentially been onlookers. ............ “There’s more capability in more hands in a world where centrifugal forces are far stronger than centralizing ones,” said Richard Haass, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. “The Middle East is the primary case study of this dangerous fragmentation.” ........... Mr. Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah over more than three decades and the man who built the Shiite organization into one of the most powerful nonstate armed forces in the world ............ Whether full-scale war will come to Lebanon remains unclear. .............. “Nasrallah represented everything for Hezbollah, and Hezbollah was the advance arm of Iran” ............. China, a major importer of Iranian oil and a major supporter of anything that might weaken the American-led world order that emerged from the ruins in 1945, has little interest in donning the mantle of peacemaker. .......... Iran is cautious because it knows the cost of all-out war could be the end of the Islamic Republic; Egypt fears an enormous influx of Palestinian refugees; and Saudi Arabia seeks a Palestinian state but would not put Saudi lives on the line for that cause. .......... As for Qatar, it funded Hamas with hundreds of millions of dollars a year that went in part to the construction of a labyrinthine web of tunnels, some as deep as 250 feet, where Israeli hostages have been held. It enjoyed the complicity of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who saw Hamas as an effective way to undermine the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and so undercut any chance of peace. ............... So in their annual pilgrimage, world leaders troop to the meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations, where the Security Council is largely paralyzed by Russian vetoes over any Ukraine-related resolutions and American vetoes over Israel-related resolutions. ..................... There is no global consensus on the need for peace or even a cease-fire. In the past, war in the Middle East led to soaring oil prices and tumbling markets, forcing the world’s attention. Now, said Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States, “the attitude is, ‘OK, so be it.’” ................. Mr. Netanyahu has shunned a serious American effort to bring about the normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia, perhaps the most important country in the Arab and Islamic world, because its price would be some serious commitment to the establishment of a Palestinian state, the very thing he has devoted his political life to preventing................ “The institutions that have guided international relations and global problem-solving since the mid-20th century are clearly no longer capable of addressing the problems of the new millennium,” Mr. Heintz wrote in a recent essay. “They are inefficient, ineffective, anachronistic, and, in some cases, simply obsolete.” ...... That, too, has been a lesson of the year since Hamas struck.

Iran Is Losing. That May Matter More Than Israel’s Mistakes. Israel’s inexcusable complacency on Oct. 7, 2023, allowed Hamas, a terrorist force with a small fraction of the military strength of the Israel Defense Forces, to kill more Israeli civilians than the vast armies of Egypt and Syria and their allies did at the height of the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973. ........... Israel’s stunning airstrike on Friday on Hezbollah’s underground headquarters near Beirut, which killed the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, the fortunes of war have shifted against Israel’s enemies since Oct. 7. Hamas is losing. Hezbollah is losing. And most important: By extension, Iran is losing. ............. Even if Israel ultimately wins this war, it will have paid a dreadful price. .......... As of late last month, Israel claimed it has killed as many as 17,000 Hamas fighters and “dismantled” 22 of its 24 battalions, while losing fewer than 1,000 soldiers in action in almost a full year of war. ........... On Sept. 17, Israel reportedly orchestrated an attack in which thousands of pagers detonated in the hands and pockets of Hezbollah operatives. The next day Israel reportedly detonated hand-held radios that Hezbollah also used to communicate, and then executed a devastating airstrike on an in-person meeting of Hezbollah leaders, killing several of its senior officials............ In August, the Biden administration approved a $20 billion arms deal with Israel that will allow it to purchase 50 new F-15IA fighters from the United States (helping ensure its qualitative military edge for a generation). And there is currently a huge American naval buildup in the region. The American Navy is fighting Iran-backed Houthi rebels in the Red Sea and attempting to deter Iran from launching fresh attacks against Israel.......... the West’s jihadist enemies: Defeat demoralizes them. It’s not that their resistance collapses entirely, but jihadism waxes and wanes depending on its battlefield success.