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?
Also notable is Sedlec Ossuary, a chapel adorned with human skeletons. On the site of a former Cistercian monastery is the Gothic and baroque Cathedral of the Assumption. The Czech Museum of Silver recalls the city’s silver-mining history with a replica medieval mine.
Recorded on: 21 September 2023
October 22, 2023 – From Zürich, Monocle’s editorial director Tyler Brûlé, Fabienne Kinzelmann, Juliet Linley and Florian Egli discuss the weekend’s hottest topics. Plus: check-ins with our friends and correspondents in Palma, Helsinki and Paris.
But the 20-truck shipment of food, water and medical supplies is only a fraction of what is needed to head off a catastrophe, officials say.
U.S. officials learned that the Israeli defense minister and other military officials supported a pre-emptive strike on Hezbollah. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been cautious.
Hamas released two American hostages on Friday, but concern is rising about the hundreds still held in Gaza, especially the injured and ill.
A shift that allows booster groups to employ student-athletes has upended the economics of college football and other sports while giving many donors a tax break.
0:15 AI can predict your risk of Parkinson’s – RETFound was trained using 1.6 million retinal images which gave it a picture of a healthy retina. Then its creators added images of eyes from people with certain conditions. Our eyes are a window to our health. They’re the only place where doctors can directly observe capillaries, our smallest blood vessels, enabling detection of cardiovascular illnesses such as hypertension. Eyes are also linked to the central nervous system, giving an insight into neural tissue, too. The RETFound tool was best at picking up eye diseases such as diabetic retinopathy. On Parkinson’s, stroke and heart disease, it performed not quite as well but still beat other AI models.
2:08 These are the most detailed heat maps of our planet – They use imagery from a satellite called HotSat-1 which can detect heat and cold at a resolution of 3.5 metres. The satellite can precisely map the fronts of forest fires, detect and monitor heat islands in cities and measure the thermal efficiency of buildings. This information can drive more effective decision-making.
3:51 AI designed this robot in 26 seconds – Researchers from Northwestern University gave an AI a simple prompt. ‘Design a robot that can walk across a flat surface’. By the 9th iteration, the AI had successfully met its brief. The robot could walk half its own body length per second. The entire iteration process took just 26 seconds and it ran on a laptop.
6:26 Norway completed it’s largest rewilding project – It’s centred around Sveagruva, a 100-year-old mining town on the Arctic island of Svalbard. Norway decided to close the town and its mining operations in 2017 and return the area to its natural state, restoring biodiversity and the local ecosystem.
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