The Globalist Podcast (October 24, 2023) – The latest from the Middle East and why Israel is arming its civilians, the so-called ‘Venezuelan Margaret Thatcher’ Maria Corina Machado storming the opposition primaries and the fallout of Australia’s Indigenous Voice referendum.
Plus: Why a French auction of the former Senegalese president’s possessions has been suspended and an arts-news round-up.
As two more hostages are released, American officials have urged Israel to delay a ground invasion, to allow time for negotiations and for more humanitarian aid to enter Gaza.
Resentments are complicating calls by the Biden administration to rally the world against efforts to “annihilate” democracies.
Long derided as naïve, even traitors, the bridge builders between Israelis and Palestinians sense opportunity in the aftermath of the Hamas attack.
The dynamics of Europe’s deadliest war in generations remain exceedingly violent and increasingly complicated by factors far from the battlefield.
‘Editor’s Picks’ Podcast (October 23, 2023) – A selection of three essential articles read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist. This week, why only America can save Israel and Gaza from a greater catastrophe. Also, the recent election in Poland offers a lesson in how to push back on populism (10:30) and the resurgence of bedbugs, beyond the hype (16:00).
The Israeli government is taking a leaf out of Ariel Sharon’s playbook to try to undo what it regards as Sharon’s biggest mistake. This essay is on the ‘regime change’ planned for Gaza, and the carnage it entails.
Wondering if the leopard could possibly survive falling from such a height, Attenborough says “suddenly you realise you haven’t written anything because, you know, you’re just completely held. And that may tell you that perhaps your words aren’t all that necessary”.
Party officials are vanishing, young workers are “lying flat,” and entrepreneurs are fleeing the country. What does China’s inner turmoil mean for the world?
By Evan Osnos
Twenty-five years ago, China’s writer of the moment was a man named Wang Xiaobo. Wang had endured the Cultural Revolution, but unlike most of his peers, who turned the experience into earnest tales of trauma, he was an ironist, in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut, with a piercing eye for the intrusion of politics into private life. In his novella “Golden Age,” two young lovers confess to the bourgeois crime of extramarital sex—“We committed epic friendship in the mountain, breathing wet steamy breath.” They are summoned to account for their failure of revolutionary propriety, but the local apparatchiks prove to be less interested in Marx than in the prurient details of their “epic friendship.”
Our accelerating rates of extraction come with immense ecological and social consequences.
The town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina, doesn’t have a lot to say for itself. Its Web site, which features a photo of a flowering tree next to a rusty bridge, notes that the town is “conveniently located between Asheville and Boone.” According to the latest census data, it has 2,332 residents and a population density of 498.1 per square mile. A recent story in the local newspaper concerned the closing of the Hardee’s on Highway 19E; this followed an incident, back in May, when a fourteen-year-old boy who’d eaten a biscuit at the restaurant began to hallucinate and had to be taken to the hospital. Without Spruce Pine, though, the global economy might well unravel.
Violence on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, and strikes in Syria and the West Bank, sent shock waves through the Middle East.
A senior Hamas official says “nothing is left” of the munition that hit the Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza City last week, killing hundreds. Israel says the explosion was caused by a misfired Palestinian rocket.
Anthony Pratt, one of Australia’s wealthiest men, made his way into Donald Trump’s inner circle with money and flattery. What he heard there has become of interest to federal prosecutors.
Quantum technology could compromise our encryption systems. Can America replace them before it’s too late?
Boomers Daily 