Flagship

Gaza crisis builds as invasion nears

A wide-ranging diplomatic effort was underway to avert what the U.N. described as an impending “humanitarian catastrophe” as Israel readied an expected ground invasion of Gaza. U.S. President Joe Biden — who is reportedly considering a trip to Israel — said that it would be a “mistake” for Israel to occupy Gaza even though eradicating Hamas was “necessary,” while officials sought to open corridors for Gazans to flee and for humanitarian supplies to enter the region. The Israeli government wants to eliminate Hamas after the Oct. 7 attacks, and has pummeled the territory with air strikes and blocked the entry of vital supplies including food and fuel. Egypt said some foreign nationals would be allowed to leave Gaza via the Rafah crossing, but Palestinians would not. Israelis, meanwhile, are coming to terms with the horrors of the initial attack, with one emergency response worker telling Sky News that 80% of the bodies he saw — including children — had been tortured.

Israel’s defense minister said the coming assault “will be lengthy. It will be lethal. It will be powerful.” But Israeli leaders need to think about the aftermath of the attack, The Wall Street Journal said. One U.S. official drew comparisons with 9/11 and the rush to a war with no exit strategy: “You destroy al Qaeda and you get ISIS. You destroy Hamas, you get Hamas 2.0.” The Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy similarly warned that a ground invasion would end in “mass slaughter,” both of Israeli soldiers and Gazan civilians: “No one would emerge from these horrors for the better.”

Poland opposition on track to win power

An opposition alliance appeared on track to take power following Poland’s parliamentary election, potentially concluding the eight-year rule of a populist conservative party. Early exit polls suggested the incumbent Law and Justice Party — hampered by a growing list of scandals — would fall short of a majority despite winning the most votes, with a challenger more likely to assemble a coalition government. The vote has significant implications for Europe, and beyond: Poland’s government clamped down on media and judicial freedoms, and shielded others from accusations of democratic backsliding, drawing the ire of the European Union, Politico noted. Reversing those efforts will, one analyst warned, “take time and, possibly [involve] equally controversial legal shenanigans.”

Israel-Hamas conflict fractures globe

The Israel-Hamas conflict is increasingly cementing global powers into two camps: The U.S. and its allies versus China and Russia. In particular, India — long a supporter of Palestinians, and which only established full diplomatic relations with Israel in 1992 — has strongly backed Israel. In part, this is due to domestic political shifts, but also suggests New Delhi is offering a “signal to the United States about its willingness to support a critical U.S. ally,” two experts wrote in Foreign Policy. Beijing and Moscow, meanwhile, have been strong critics of Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, and both countries’ leaders are due to meet this week in China.

Fertilizer costs hit African supplies

A fertilizer shortage is spreading hunger across Africa. The New York Times reported that Russia’s war in Ukraine and climate change had already reduced the availability of grain, but the COVID-19 pandemic, the growing value of the dollar, and oil-price shocks have also doubled the cost of fertilizer for farmers in 13 countries, including Nigeria. The World Bank says food insecurity concerns are “alarmingly high” in West and Central Africa, while 40% of Nigerians — 90 million people — face “insufficient food consumption.” Farmers are shifting from rice and corn to less valuable but less fertilizer-hungry crops like soybeans, thieves are stealing harvests, and parents are pulling children out of school, unable to afford tuition.

Paris and Berlin’s nuclear standoff

France and Germany, the European Union’s two largest powers, are increasingly divided over their attitudes towards nuclear energy. France gets two-thirds of its electricity from nuclear plants, and is building more. Germany, meanwhile, mothballed its nuclear fleet after the 2011 Fukushima incident — it was aiming to rely on renewables, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine forced it to reopen old coal stations. France wants the EU to count nuclear towards its emissions targets, but Germany is wary that that would mean expensive subsidies for Paris. The deadlock is creating tension at the heart of the EU, the Financial Times reported.

UK’s flagship fusion reactor shuts down

A 40-year nuclear fusion experiment near Oxford, England, shut down on Saturday. The Joint European Torus, a U.K.-European collaboration, was set up in 1983, and led much of the world’s research into fusion, the process that powers stars and that is hoped to provide limitless free energy once it can be tamed and understood. JET, which ran the world’s first experiments using a deuterium-tritium mix, now believed to be the most efficient way to fuel a fusion reaction, is being replaced in Europe by the ITER reactor in France, and by a new fusion plant in England — but also by a new generation of private companies, as fusion draws closer to commercial viability.

Four lost Ukrainian children head home

Four children separated from their parents because of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine will return home in a Qatar-brokered deal. Thousands of children were either stranded in Russian-controlled territory or forcibly abducted in the early weeks of the war, and Kyiv accuses Moscow of attempting to eradicate their Ukrainian identity: It was among the war-crimes charges leveled at Russian President Vladimir Putin by the International Criminal Court. Qatar, along with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, hope the deal will lead to many more children returning, the Financial Times reported: “We have a concrete road map,” a Ukrainian official said. “I don’t just hope, I believe.”

Political neophyte wins Ecuador vote

Daniel Noboa, a 35-year-old businessman and political novice, won Ecuador’s violence-marred presidential election. The center-right heir to a banana fortune, he will become Ecuador’s youngest-ever leader, and faces the difficult task of reversing growing unrest in what had been one of South America’s safest countries. Noboa’s victory also represents what El País described as “a slap in the face” for Ecuador’s leftist movement, backed by ex-president Rafael Correa, which had called for a return to oil-fueled public spending. The president-elect has little time to get going: Noboa will only serve until 2025, when the term of his ousted predecessor was due to conclude.

Afghans shock England

Afghanistan defeated reigning champions England in the men’s Cricket World Cup. The unfancied Afghans weathered a toothless bowling attack before tearing through the English batsmen with embarrassing ease. It’s only Afghanistan’s second-ever victory at a World Cup: The country has no particular history of cricket, but Afghan refugees in Pakistan brought it home with them in the 1990s. It was, for a while, the only sport not banned by the Taliban. For a team that still has to play its home games abroad, out of security fears, defeating one of the world’s best teams is an unprecedented scalp — and rare positive news for a country that has suffered, among other calamities, multiple earthquakes in the past week.

Drone taxis approved in China

Chinese authorities licensed an autonomous air taxi firm, the first such approval in the world. EHang, a Guangzhou-based but U.S.-listed firm, will be allowed to manufacture electric drones that carry two human passengers. Regulators in China have been moving towards a decision like this, CNBC reported. In June, Beijing released new rules for unmanned aircraft, to go into force in January. EHang’s share price has doubled over the last year on expectation of the license, and the firm says it has orders for hundreds of units within China and expects to expand overseas. U.S. regulators are moving more slowly, but have released a plan that gives a path towards autonomous flying vehicles in future.

• The four-day International Rice Congress begins in the Philippines.
• Walt Disney commemorates its 100th anniversary.
• Picasso’s Woman with a Watch painting goes on display at Sotheby’s Paris ahead of its auction in New York next month.

States of war

The 1993 Oslo Accords envisaged a “two-state solution” to the Israel-Palestine dispute: That a Palestinian state comprising the West Bank and Gaza would be created, alongside the existing state of Israel. That idea “has been dead for a while,” writes Noah Smith, in a widely shared and controversial piece. Some people envisage a “one-state solution.” But that either means ethnic cleansing —expelling Israelis to form a Palestinian state, or expelling Palestinians to form a Greater Israel — or an unrealistic scenario where Israelis and Jews form a plurinational state in which they consider themselves one people, something neither side wants.

The only way out, says Smith, is to recognize both Gaza and the West Bank as states of their own: A “three-state solution.” Gaza and the West Bank are separated by Israel; “geographically, economically, politically, and militarily, they are already separate entities.” It wouldn’t end the violence or the hatred, but, he argues, it could start the journey towards more normal international relations between states, rather than between occupied and occupier.

Brief encounter

The lyrics to Aretha Franklin’s (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman, “the greatest record ever made about female sexuality,” were written by a man; its gospel-inflected music, by a Jewish woman. Its origin story is businesslike. Franklin was an up-and-coming star, and the head of her record label told two professional songwriters: “I’m looking for a really big hit for Aretha. How about writing a song called ‘Natural Woman’?”

Ian Leslie, a writer and former advertising creative, calls this “one of the best creative briefs anyone has ever given.” A “brief” is how a business team sets its creative colleagues’ objectives: “What we want consumers to think, do, and feel” when they see the product. The label executive set the songwriters two constraints: The artist and the title. “After that, he left it up to them.” By setting constraints, a good brief can inspire creation: “It sets a clear destination, but allows its recipients leeway on how to get there.”

Despairing effort

U.S. citizens don’t live very long, given their wealth — they are much richer than Europeans, on average, but their life expectancy is significantly shorter. Over recent years, one widely believed explanation for that has been the “deaths of despair”: The idea that social and economic decay in poorer communities is driving an epidemic of early deaths from drug abuse, suicide, and alcoholism among working-class white Americans, as well as being responsible for the rise of Donald Trump.

But it’s not true, says the politics writer Matthew Yglesias, and we should be less timid about saying so. The facts, he claims, don’t stack up: Most of the economic and social factors posited are just as relevant in non-white communities and, in fact, in European ones; and when you unpack the “deaths of despair,” the rise is almost all accounted for by a rise in opioid overdoses. The real cause is probably much more straightforward: “The US and Europe have very different laws governing pharmaceutical marketing.” Or, to put it even more bluntly, it’s easier to get hold of fentanyl in the U.S. than in Europe.

A new video game developed in Toronto explores the Tamil diasporic experience through food. Venba centers on an Indian mother who moves to Canada in the 1980s, following her mission to preserve her culinary heritage after her treasured book of family recipes is damaged. Players restore the lost recipes by cooking different foods — from puttu and idli to dosas — that unlock the memories of a home left behind. The developers “meticulously prepared and cooked every dish featured in the game, ensuring that each virtual meal tantalizes players’ senses,” Vaaswat Sarkar reported in Homegrown. The result, he says, is “a wonderful tale that savors the flavors of familial bonds, culture, and food.”

• A high-profile memestock CEO sent sexually explicit images and messages in a weeks-long text exchange with a woman who tried to extort hundreds of thousands of dollars from him using fake identities.
• OpenAI has quietly changed its “core values.” The AI startup now says its singular goal is to build “safe, beneficial” artificial general intelligence, noting that anything else is “out of scope.”
• In the era of the “buff business leader,” some tech workers have turned to a broad class of oral and injectable drugs, treatments, and supplements to improve their health and appearance.