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Israel, Hamas and US in impasse over cease-fire deal
US-Israel in impasse over cease-fire deal | Ian Bremmer | Quick Take

Israel, Hamas and US in impasse over cease-fire deal

Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi everybody. Ian Bremmer here and a Quick Take to kick off your week. And I want to talk a little bit about the Middle East because the war is very much still going on.

There's been hope, a lot of hope that we would have had a breakthrough deal for an extended cease fire, not a permanent cease fire, the cease fire of some six weeks, and that in return, significant numbers, dozens of the hostages that are still held after many months by Hamas in Gaza would have been released to their families in Israel. That has not happened. And it's not happened in large part because Hamas has refused to continue to negotiate. They basically said we want a permanent cease fire or nothing. And they are essentially daring the Israelis to go ahead with ground strikes in Rafah, where we have about 1.5 million Palestinians that are sheltering. “I have nowhere to go.” And the Americans are very unhappy with the idea that the Israelis would engage in that battle without having a plan for evacuation and protecting those civilians. Hamas is saying “go for it if that's what you want to do.” They're putting, as they have all the way through, their civilians at maximum risk. They're not trying to defend them.

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US inching away from Israel on Gaza war
US inching away from Israel on Gaza war | Ian Bremmer | Quick Take

US inching away from Israel on Gaza war

Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here and a Quick Take to kick off your week. And the war in Gaza continues apace. We don't yet have an agreement between Israel and Hamas for a near-term cease fire and for more hostages to be released. Everyone is saying that it's imminent. The Israelis essentially have accepted the terms that have been put forward now by the United States, by Qatar, by Egypt.

Hamas has not yet. But it looks very close. Meanwhile, the United States continues to publicly inch further away from the war position of Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. This is hurting the US on the global stage with its allies, with the Global South. It's hurting the United States and Biden in particular at home as well with his constituents in an election year.

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As Israel presses conflict, US frustration grows
Biden frustrated by Israel's insistence on conflict | Ian Bremmer | Quick Take

As Israel presses conflict, US frustration grows

Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here and a Quick Take to kick off your week. Of course it is the Middle East that we are first and foremost exercised about. Not the biggest topic in Europe for the Munich Security Conference. That was Navalny and Russia and Ukraine. But back in the United States and for most of the rest of the world, it is still the Middle East.

And that is in part because there is less optimism about an imminent deal on the remaining hostages, which has led the Israeli government to step up the pressure, saying if you don't give all of the hostages back, in short order, that they're going to engage in ground warfare against Rafah, where over a million Palestinians are sheltering, if we can call it that, having already been resettled from other parts in the rest of Gaza, and they have nowhere to go.

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The U.S. Capitol.

Reuters

The US government is heading toward a shutdown. What does that mean?

The US government looks set to shut down this Sunday after House Republicans indicated that they would not support a bipartisan Senate bill that would fund the federal government past this weekend’s deadline.

Absent a last-minute agreement, many federal agencies could soon shut down, while millions of federal workers could be placed on furlough without pay due to a lapse in funding from Congress, which controls the purse strings.

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Politics, trust & the media in the age of misinformation
Politics, trust & the media in the age of misinformation | GZERO World with Ian Bremmer

Politics, trust & the media in the age of misinformation

Ahead of the 2024 US presidential election, GZERO World takes a hard look at the media’s impact on politics and democracy itself.

In 1964, philosopher Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase, “the media is the message.” He meant that the way content is delivered can be more powerful than the content itself.

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Pete Buttigieg's lessons learned about parental leave
Pete Buttigieg's lessons learned about parental leave | GZERO World

Pete Buttigieg's lessons learned about parental leave

In the fall of 2021, US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten, became parents overnight.

After adopting infant twins, Buttegieg became the first out gay parent in the US cabinet. Because of the unique circumstances, Buttigieg was also the first US cabinet secretary ever to take parental leave.

On GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, Buttigieg spoke about the lessons he’s learned since becoming a parent and the advice he has for other senior government officials and private sector executives who are planning to start families.

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Ian Explains: Will US infrastructure finally be fixed?
mono | GZERO World

Ian Explains: Will US infrastructure finally be fixed?

At 6:05pm on a sweltering August evening in 2007, rush hour traffic was crawling across Minneapolis’ I-35 bridge. Then, the bridge began to shake.

Thirteen people died and 140 more were injured when Minnesota’s third-busiest bridge collapsed, plunging vehicles ten stories down into the rushing Mississippi river and leaving one school bus with 63 children teetering against a guardrail. An NTSB investigation later attributed the collapse to 300 tons of construction materials that had been placed on a 40-year-old design flaw in the bridge’s original construction. But while the flaw had gone undetected for decades, inspectors HAD rated the bridge in poor condition for 17 straight years.

The truth is that bridges in America fall down all the time, Ian Bremmer explains on GZERO World.

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The road to repair: Pete Buttigieg & crumbling US infrastructure
The road to repair: Pete Buttigieg & crumbling US infrastructure | GZERO World

The road to repair: Pete Buttigieg & crumbling US infrastructure

There's no sugarcoating it. America needs work. Not just when it comes to the state of democracy, either. A 2022 report found that 43,000 US bridges are “structurally deficient.” The report also found that those same bridges are crossed 168 million times a day. At the current rate, it would take 30 years to fix all of the country’s structurally deficient bridges. Do you feel lucky?

It's not a question Americans particularly want to ask themselves on every morning commute or summer road trip. The richest country in the history of the world should be able to keep its infrastructure updated and its roads intact. Globally, of course, the number of faulty bridges is much higher, but at least here in the United States, things may be starting to change. On November 6, 2021, Congress passed the Biden administration’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, which includes $550 billion for America’s roads, bridges, mass transit, rail, airports, and ports. On GZERO World, Secretary Pete Buttigieg discusses what he has called "the single largest dedicated bridge investment since the construction of the Interstate highway system."

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