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Plane descends through air strike smoke to land at airport in Beirut, Lebanon in this screengrab obtained on October 1, 2024.
The world still awaits Israel’s retaliation against Iran for Tehran’s brazen missile attack last Tuesday. But in the meantime, Israeli forcesconducted further airstrikes in Syria, hitting a weapons depot south of Homs and a rocket depot in the eastern countryside on Sunday. The strikes – which apparently aimed to stem the flow of weapons from Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon –caused “material losses,” according to Syrian state media. They came two days after Israel launched rocket attacks near a Russian airbase in Syria, where Russian forces were reportedly “confronting” the missiles for over 40 minutes, raising concerns that Russia — an Iranian ally – could become embroiled in the escalating regional war.
Meanwhile, on Sunday night, Israel resumed bombardment of targets in Beirut while Hezbollah rockets struck the Israeli port city of Haifa. This followed a weekend of intense Israeli bombardment of Hezbollah targets in suburban Beirut, which took the lives of 23 people, according to the Lebanese health ministry.
Key leaders targeted. The Israeli foreign ministry claims that its air force killed Hezbollah commander Hader Ali Taweel on Sunday. Iran’s Quds Force commander Esmail Qaaniis also missing after Israeli strikes on Beirut last week, though it is unclear whether he is dead or wounded. The Quds Force oversees dealings with militias allied with Tehran across the Middle East, including Hezbollah, and confusion about Qaani’s fate is reportedly causing panic among the troops. The strike was in fact targeting senior Hezbollah figure Hashem Safieddine, who is also unaccounted for, and who was seen as a possible successor to Hezbollah’s former leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
But is Hezbollah the real target? Israel’s increased military operations have led observers to speculate that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expanding operations to target Iran – and drag the US into the conflict. Bibi is also suspected of seeking to torpedo a cease-fire in Gaza to harm the Democrats’ chances in the upcoming US election while boosting his own favorability at home. His poll numbers have climbed since the war with Hezbollah heated up but not far enough to allow him to form a majority government if an election were held today.
When asked on Friday whether Netanyahu was attempting to influence the US election, a frustrated US President Joe Biden said “I don’t know” before adding, “No administration has helped Israel more than I have … And I think [Netanyahu] should remember that.”Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk reacts next to Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. president Donald Trump during a campaign rally, at the site of the July assassination attempt against Trump, in Butler, Pennsylvania, U.S., October 5, 2024.
Billionaire Elon Musk joined Donald Trump on stage in Butler, PA, on Saturday — where the former president was shot in July — to deliver a grim vision of America’s choice in the coming election, which he claimed “will be the last” if Trump loses.
Musk falsely claimed Democrats would “take away your freedom of speech … your right to bear arms … your right to vote,” and nodded at his extreme and conspiratorial tone. “As you can see I am not just MAGA — I am Dark MAGA,” he said.
Vice President Kamala Harris, on the other hand, used the weekend to make a micro media blitz, appearing on the extremely popular “Call Her Daddy” podcast and CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday. She’s hitting both younger and older demos with those platforms, and is scheduled to talk to Stephen Colbert, Howard Stern, and “The View” this week.
With polls showing a race too close to call, every vote in the key swing states matters. It looks like it will come down to three crucial states: Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. If Trump wins any one of the three, he’s likely to win the election, while Harris will probably need to hold all three to secure victory. She’s leading but well within the margin of error according to 538’s poll aggregator: 2.2 percentage points in Wisconsin, 1.2 in Pennsylvania — and just 0.1 in Michigan. We’ll see if Musk’s performance makes a difference.People are passing by an AT&T Inc store in Manhattan, New York City in the US with the company's logo and inscription visible. AT&T Inc. the American Telephone and Telegraph Company is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, USA. As of March 2024 there was a data breach with leaks of personal data of 73 million customers in the dark web according to the media. NYC, United States of America on May 2023
A group of hackers with backing from the Chinese government broke past the security of multiple US telecom firms, including AT&T and Verizon, and potentially accessed data used by law enforcement officials. Specifically, the hackers appear to have targeted information about court-authorized wiretaps, which could be related to multiple ongoing cases in the US concerning Chinese government agents intimidating and harassing people in the US.
The hack was carried out by a group known as Salt Typhoon, one of many such units used by the Chinese government to infiltrate overseas networks. Investigators from Microsoft and a Google subsidiary have been helping investigate the breach alongside the FBI, whose cybersecurity agents are reportedly outnumbered by their Chinese opponents 50:1.
Will the hack undermine US-China relations? Both sides have been trying to keep tensions under control — largely successfully — all year, but this incident may be too awkward to smooth over. China’s Embassy in Washington, DC, denied the hack and accused the US of “politicizing cybersecurity issues to smear China,” and the FBI and DOJ have not commented. We’re watching how the fallout might affect a notional Biden-Xi phone call the White House has reportedly been attempting to arrange.
Smoke rises from an explosion in Gaza, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, near the Israel-Gaza border, as seen from Israel, September 9, 2024.
1,200: Hamas launched terror attacks inside Israel and killed 1,200 people on Oct. 7, 2023 – making it the deadliest day in Israel’s 76-year history. The kibbutz of Be’eri, near the Supernova music festival, suffered the highest death toll with 332 lives lost. The militants targeted the festival, 19 kibbutzim, and five cooperatives, among other targets.
251: Hamas militants took 251 people, including civilians and Israeli security personnel, hostage on Oct. 7, taking them into Gaza. As of Sept. 1, 2024, 101 hostages remained in Gaza, according to Israeli sources cited by the UN. Sixty-four are believed to be alive, while 33 are confirmed dead (four of the hostages were taken before Oct. 7).
41,870: The number of Gazans killed in the war between Israel and Hamas now stands at 41,870, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. The number has been disputed by groups that peg it as either higher, due to an inability to locate people under the rubble, or lower, due to the inflation of numbers. The GHM also does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. According to Israeli authorities, as of Sept. 1, the number of dead includes 17,000 Hamas terrorists.
1,664: Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war, 1,664 Israelis have been killed, including 706 soldiers, according to a report by the Institute for National Security Studies.
1,900: At least 1,900 Lebanese, including civilians, medics, and Hezbollah terrorists, have been killed since Oct. 8, 2023, according to Lebanese officials, and several thousand have been wounded.
1.9 million: UNRWA says 1.9 million people have been displaced in Gaza due to the war instigated by Hamas. 143,000 people have been displaced in Israel due to Hezbollah rocket bombardment, according to an INSS report, including 60,000 evacuated from the border with Lebanon.
1.2 million: Just over 20% of Lebanon’s 5.4-million-strong population – a whopping 1.2 million people – have been driven from their homes by the recent Israeli offensive, according to Lebanese officials.
38: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s popularity has risen since Israel launched its offensive against Hezbollah. According to Israel’s Channel 12, Netanyahu is the preferred candidate for prime minister over the centrist opposition leader, Yair Lapid, at 38% to 27% support. The latest poll gives his Likud Party a possible 25 seats, but that would not be enough to form a government with its current coalition partners.
An Israeli infantry soldier inside a Jewish home in Kibbutz Be’eri that was destroyed by Hamas in their October 7, 2023 infiltration of southern Israeli communities. This community was attacked by Hamas infiltrators who killed some 100 people out of 1000 who lived in this community on October 7, 2023.
A year ago today, Hamas militants shot and paraglided their way out of the Gaza Strip and went on a rampage through southern Israel, murdering more than 1,200 people and taking more than 240 hostages.
The attack set off a geopolitical earthquake in a region that a top US official had described, just a week earlier, as “quieter today than it has been in two decades.”
The noise ever since has been deafening.
Israel responded by unleashing a ferocious air and ground campaign in Gaza that sought to destroy Hamas and liberate the hostages. About half of them have been freed, the majority of those in a prisoner swap deal. Ninety-seven hostages are still in Gaza.
Israeli forces have weakened Hamas as a fighting force in a campaign that has killed more than 40,000 people in Gaza, according to local, Hamas-run health authorities. The dead include thousands of children. Close to two million Gazans, or nearly 90% of the pre-war population, have been displaced from their homes, and Israel has faced accusations of war crimes, including genocide, in international courts.
Meanwhile, months of cross-border clashes with Iran-backed Hezbollah in southern Lebanon have recently escalated – Israel last week assassinated the group’s leader and launched an invasion of Lebanon.
Tensions between Israel and Iran are reaching a crescendo as well. Iran recently fired hundreds of ballistic missiles at Israel, which has vowed to respond, potentially by striking Iranian oil facilities, in a move that could rock oil markets and the global economy.
We take a brief look at how the past year has shaped prospects for seven key players in this story:
1. The Palestinians. Their plight is most certainly back on the global agenda after years of being overlooked as Israel moved toward normalizing its relations with more Arab powers – especially Saudi Arabia – in deals that paid only lip service to eventual Palestinian statehood. Global sympathy for the Palestinian cause has risen, particularly among young people in the West. But Gaza has suffered immense destruction, and the occupation of the West Bank has only deepened over the past year. Support for a Palestinian state among Israelis, already waning in recent years, has plummeted, while the forces most hostile to that outcome in Israel are on a roll these days.
2. Benjamin Netanyahu. Before Oct. 7, 2023, the Israeli prime minister was on the ropes, facing corruption trials and mass protests over his judicial reforms. Then, the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust occurred on his watch, cratering his support further. For months, he seemed to be on borrowed time, an unloved leader kept in power only by Israelis’ reluctance to change horses in mid-war. He faced criticism at home over failure to secure the release of more hostages, but also from far-right ministers who wanted to see even harsher reprisals in Gaza. Shifting the focus to defeating longtime foe Hezbollah, a policy 90% of Israelis support, has paid dividends: He is rising in the polls again. Just how far an emboldened Netanyahu is willing to go now is a big question in a region on fire.
3. Hamas. The terror group has lost thousands of its fighters and two of its most senior officials over the past year. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar may still be alive, likely confined to a tunnel beneath the rubble of Gaza. Still, he miscalculated if he thought that global pressure would force Israel to negotiate a cease-fire, or that Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel from the North would cause Netanyahu to ease up on Gaza in the South. Still, it’s hard to imagine that the idea of Hamas, as an ideology of armed resistance against Israel, has been defeated, especially after the destruction that the IDF has visited upon the Palestinians over the past year. Over the next year, it will be crucial to see if the remainder of Hamas can shape any aspect of a post-war Gaza and whether it reconstitutes itself in any way.
4. Iran. Did Iran miscalculate too? Surely in the days after Oct. 7, Tehran didn’t expect that a year later Israel would be going on an offensive like this, smashing Iran’s No. 1 proxy in the region (Hezbollah) and mulling a major strike on Iran itself. That puts Iran in a tricky spot. As the leader of the “axis of resistance” against Israel, it has to keep resisting via its proxies. But with those proxies getting rolled up by Israel now, “Iran is exposed,” says Cliff Kupchan, head of research at Eurasia Group. “Iran misjudged power dynamics and sentiment in Israel. The IDF killed Nasrallah and severely degraded Hezbollah. Iran’s forward deterrence is gone.” That, he says, means Iran is likely to lean more heavily into its nuclear program now. That program, of course, is something Netanyahu is famously eager to try to destroy.
5. United States. The Biden administration has been largely unwavering in its rhetorical, military, and financial support for Israel, although it has also occasionally angered Israel and Israel supporters by pushing – ineffectively – for a cease-fire, or by raising concerns about the civilian death toll in Gaza. Partisan splits over Israel’s action in Gaza won’t be central to the upcoming presidential election – it will be decided by concerns about the economy, abortion access, and immigration. But the issue could affect the vote at the very margins, with some progressives and Arab-American voters in key swing states pledging not to vote at all in protest of the Biden administration’s support for Israel. The outcome of the election itself will matter on the ground: Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are both strong supporters of Israel, but Trump would give Netanyahu a much freer hand in dealings with the Palestinians, with Hezbollah, and with Iran.
6. Russia. It certainly hasn’t hurt Vladimir Putin to see so much of the world’s attention drawn away from his invasion of Ukraine. And to the extent that the US gets wound into an intractable conflict in the Middle East, so much the better from his perch, especially if regional jitters push up oil prices. But the Kremlin has to be careful. If Israel severely weakens Hezbollah, it could shake things loose in Syria, where the group’s fighters are a major ground force for Russia’s protégé, Bashar Assad. And if a wider Israel-Iran war erupts, Moscow could get drawn more deeply into a messy situation than it likes – after all, Putin’s already fighting a war of his own closer to home.
7. The Arab world. Popular opinion is strongly critical of Israel and the US. That has been a particular challenge for regimes in Egypt and Jordan, which have peace treaties with Israel and are close partners of the US. In Jordan, for example, even in a recent tightly controlled election, Islamist opposition parties that support Hamas surged in the polls. Saudi Arabia, arguably the preeminent Arab power now, is warily watching as Israel-Iran tensions escalate. Saudi Arabia and Iran are longtime rivals, but ties have been improving recently, and Riyadh has no interest in a wider war as it tries to move ahead with an ambitious domestic economic and social modernization drive. But Israel may yet have other ideas.Members of the International Longshoremen's Association strike for higher wages and protection from automation outside Red Hook Terminal in Brooklyn, New York, on Oct. 2, 2024.
The International Longshoremen’s Association announced late Thursday it would suspend the two-day-old strike across America’s East and Gulf Coast ports after reaching a tentative deal with their employers.
The deal reportedly includes a 62% rise in wages over the course of six-year contracts, which works out to about a $4 an hour wage increase per year. Workers won’t see the benefit for a few months though, as their current contract, which expires Tuesday, has been extended to Jan. 15, 2025.
President Joe Biden, who had pressed both sides to come to a deal — in no small part because of the political ramifications of a crucial labor strike five weeks before an election — praised the quick resolution. “I congratulate the dockworkers from the ILA, who deserve a strong contract after sacrificing so much to keep our ports open during the pandemic. And I applaud the port operators and carriers who are members of the US Maritime Alliance for working hard and putting a strong offer on the table,” he wrote in a statement.
With the threat of major economic disruptions from the strike now off the table, the week just got a little bit easier for Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign — and with polls showing essentially a dead-heat race, she’ll take any little advantage she can get.
With the baseball playoffs in full swing and the US presidential election looming, I’ve been thinking a lot about one of the most polarizing figures in America: a serial liar, an unrepentant womanizer, a convicted criminal, and a charismatic hero to millions.
I don’t know who comes to mind for you, but I am thinking of Pete Rose.
For those unfamiliar with Rose, who died this week at age 83, he was one of the greatest baseball players ever to take the field. A hard-nosed, scrappy, winning-is-everything athlete nicknamed “Charlie Hustle,” Rose led his hometown Cincinnati Reds to two world titles in the 1970s and amassed more base hits than anyone else in history. Even today, decades later, he holds the hits record by such a large margin that it will probably never be broken.
But a Major League Baseball investigation in the late 1980s found that Rose had broken the rules by betting on baseball games that he played in and managed. He lied about it and, as a result, was banned from MLB for life. The Baseball Hall of Fame voted to exclude him permanently from candidacy.
Despite calls from many players, fans, and sportswriters to reinstate him – and a clumsy late-life rapprochement campaign by Rose himself – MLB and the Hall of Fame have never budged.
Which is to say that, unlike the other person my introduction might have brought to mind (and a great many other powerful people in America), Rose ran into something that's too rare in public life today: real consequences for doing really bad things.
It didn’t matter that Rose was one of the greats. Or that he was immensely popular, had a quick bat, a flinty charisma, or an inspiring life story. He still paid the price for his actions.
Imagine if our politics always worked like that. What if undermining the legitimacy of, say, an election – the World Series of any democracy, really – or endlessly telling obvious lies to huge numbers of people carried a real cost? In other words, imagine if messing with the integrity of the game got you thrown out of it.
Instead, we live in a world where we often excuse the offenses of players on our own political teams because the other side is so much worse. It’s always the bottom of the ninth with the future of civilization on the line.
The contrast between the world of Pete and the world of Politics couldn’t be clearer. As Sports Illustrated baseball editor Ted Keith, who supports the ban on Rose, puts it in a superb new documentary about the player, “integrity has to be the basis of professional sports, even if it’s not the basis of public life.”
And yet there is, as with so many things in modern baseball, an asterisk to this story.
*If we want a society where people respect rules and laws, then those laws have to be enforced in a fair and reasonably consistent way.
And that's where the Rose story is an example of what not to do if you want to bolster the credibility of rules and the systems that enforce them. Why, many ask, was Rose banned from baseball for gambling on games when a team that won the World Series after a season of cheating faced no serious sanctions?
Why did the Barry Bondses and the Mark McGwires, who broke all-time records while pumped to the eyeballs with illegal steroids in the 1990s, never get banned?
When baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani was implicated in a gambling scandal earlier this year, why did everyone simply accept the explanation that his Japanese interpreter was the one placing the bets? “Boy I wish I’d had an interpreter,” Rose said of the matter.
And all of this is Cracker Jack stuff compared to what goes on outside of baseball.
People see the way that some countries get support when they kill civilians while others get sanctioned. Or the way that some leaders get booked for sexual misconduct, while others get book deals, or how some rioters get sentenced while others get sympathy. They understand that this is a world where some people get bailouts while others go broke, and some countries kill journalists or dissidents with impunity while others get stern lectures from "the free world." They know that some speech is deemed “violent” while other similar speech is declared “free.” They see all of this and think: The fix is in.
In baseball, and even more importantly in the world outside baseball, either we have a reasonably consistent “rules-based order” or we don’t.
And if not, is it any wonder that our hustlers become heroes?