Flagship

Netanyahu rules out ceasefire

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ruled out a ceasefire in Gaza unless hostages were released, and said his country would oversee security in the enclave for “an indefinite period.” He also voiced openness to “tactical little pauses” in an interview with ABC News. His comments came as Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry said more than 10,000 people had died as a result of Israel’s response to the Hamas attacks a month ago which left 1,400 dead. Israeli soldiers, meanwhile, made their deepest advances into Gaza in more than a decade: An Economist correspondent traveling with Israeli troops noted even veteran commanders were “unfamiliar with some of the areas they reached,” having to consult handheld maps to navigate neighborhoods while guarding against ambushes.

Israel’s unrelenting push spotlighted the limits to international leverage on the country: Netanyahu has repeatedly rebuffed U.S. calls for greater care towards civilians and a humanitarian pause in the fighting, indicating the White House’s influence “seems far more constrained than expected,” according to The New York Times. Abroad, the conflict contributes to “a darkening global political mood” in which grim prospects for the war in Ukraine, fears of Chinese aggression towards Taiwan, and worries over a return of Donald Trump “feed on each other,” the Financial Times’s chief foreign-affairs columnist wrote. “It is simple realism to understand that the strongest trends in world affairs are malign and gathering momentum.”

Trump hearing descends into chaos

Donald Trump’s appearance as a witness in his civil fraud trial in New York was marked by chaos. The ex-U.S. president was “belligerent and brash, unrepentant and verbose,” as The New York Times put it, denying the charges against him while attacking the attorney general who brought the case and the judge overseeing it. The hearing came as polls showed Trump — already the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination — leading U.S. President Joe Biden in battleground states, despite facing criminal, civil, and constitutional legal challenges. In one case in Minnesota, over whether he could be kept off the ballot, the judge warned of “chaos” if Trump was removed. “Should we do it? Even if we could do it?”

OpenAI unveils ChatGPT ‘agents’

OpenAI unveiled a new platform to create artificial-intelligence “agents” — customized versions of ChatGPT with specific focuses. The Microsoft-backed company said these new tools could be built without any prior knowledge of software code and can utilize both public information on the internet as well as more proprietary data. The latest announcement raises “very important questions about how much agency our AI systems should have,” the tech journalist Casey Newton wrote, envisioning worrying scenarios of agents being built for stock-market manipulation, phishing attacks, or privacy violation: “Superpowers are great when you put them into the hands of heroes,” Newton noted. “But the more that AI developers work to enable all-purpose agents, the more certain it is that they’ll be placing superpowers into the hands of super villains.”

China crackdown worries investors

Chinese authorities cracked down on two business leaders as the country recorded its first quarterly deficit in foreign investment. The probe into a former senior ICBC bank executive and detention of the founder of a popular video game-streaming site combined with a raft of reports to spotlight global unease over China’s direction: Along with the FDI deficit, global fund managers unloaded huge amounts of Chinese equities and investors such as Pimco cut their China credit purchases. “Right now foreign investors are exiting China in a trickle,” the former editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post wrote, “but it will soon become a river” unless Beijing takes immediate steps to reassure them.

Delhi pollution sharply worsens

Extremely unhealthy levels of pollution in New Delhi forced school closures and disrupted the men’s Cricket World Cup. India’s capital suffers sharp declines in air quality every autumn as reduced winds and low temperatures trap pollutants, a crisis that is then worsened by the setting off of firecrackers — even though they are banned — for the Hindu festival of Diwali. Officials announced restrictions on car usage in the coming weeks, and videos showed firefighters somewhat incongruously spraying water onto trees in a bid to reduce pollution. “Every year when November rolls around, there is a sense of dread as the air turns foul,” one New Delhi resident told CNN.

Cancer success hints at new progress

A new drug combination halves the death rate among people with advanced bladder cancer. Bladder cancer survival had remained almost unchanged since the 1980s, Nature reported, but the new method of treatment — combining “antibody-drug conjugates,” themselves an exciting new breakthrough, with a drug that helps the immune system target cancer — is startlingly effective, according to data presented at a scientific conference. Similar combinations are also being trialed in other cancers: Results show that two different ones extend life in advanced breast cancer. More trials in yet more cancers are likely to begin. “It’s going to launch a thousand ships,” one researcher told Nature.

Kenya drugmaker wins WHO approval

A Kenyan company became the first antimalarial drug manufacturer in Africa to receive the World Health Organization’s quality guarantee, a significant step in easing the continent’s dependence on imports. According to the WHO, more than 70% of drugs used throughout Africa are shipped in, with lack of investment and technical expertise holding back the continent’s pharmaceutical industry. Low-cost, local production will speed up efforts to eradicate malaria, research group Medicines for Malaria Venture said. “Cost-effective drugs… are nothing short of a lifeline in the battle against malaria,” an expert at MMV said. This year, Nairobi rolled out a vaccine program against malaria, which kills more than 12,000 people in the country each year, most of them children.

Colombia to recover epic shipwreck

Colombian authorities ramped up efforts to recover as much as $20 billion from the “Holy Grail of shipwrecks.” President Gustavo Petro is keen on recovering the remains of the San José, a Spanish galleon that sank in 1708 off the coast of Cartagena which is believed to be laden with gold, silver, and jewels taken from South American mines. The find could be worth as much as 6% of the country’s GDP. “The president has told us to pick up the pace,” Bogotá’s culture minister said. Lifting the wreck may be the easier task, however: The treasure is also claimed by Spain, Indigenous groups, and a salvage company.

Saving kelp forests with seafood

Sushi could be used to combat a growing environmental problem. Longspined sea urchins are native to warm waters off eastern Australia. But as the sea warms, their range spreads into the cold kelp forests further south. The urchins eat the forests and leave barren seabed behind. A report for the Australian Senate recommends a new strategy: harvesting the urchins’ eggs, known as roe, which is a Japanese delicacy: Known as “uni,” it is “renowned for its sweet, buttery, umami flavors and bright golden color,” The Conversation reported. A trial run off Tasmania found that harvesting the urchins’ roe for seafood was commercially viable, and has slowed the spread of urchins, allowing the recovery of kelp forests.

Football Manager back to ruin lives

The 20th edition of Football Manager was released. The Sports Interactive game, which simulates in astonishing depth the career of a soccer-team coach, has hundreds of thousands of real-life soccer players in its databases, and is frequently used by actual scouts: The Chile national team discovered that one English player, Ben Brereton Díaz, had Chilean ancestry, and he now plays for Chile. Similarly, the Guinea-Bissau team uses it to find eligible players. The game is text-heavy — most of the gameplay involves reading statistics on little-known Bosnian defenders or organizing training schedules — yet enormously popular, with FM2023 selling more than 5 million copies. In 2008, Sports Interactive’s managing director said the game was cited in 35 British divorce courts in a single year.

• King Charles III delivers his first King’s Speech, which outlines the U.K. government’s legislative program in an event heavy on pomp and ceremony.
• Two Indian states hold elections for their legislatures, a key test of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popularity ahead of nationwide polls next year.
• Britain’s Prince William attends Singapore’s annual Earthshot Prize ceremony, recognizing people who’ve found solutions to environmental problems.

Tim McLaughlin is the co-author of Among the Braves, which is out today. The book chronicles the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong and China’s subsequent crackdown. Kirkus described it as offering “compelling and poignant insider tales of China’s devastatingly complete anti-democracy actions.”

The trailer for Shogun was released. It’s the TV adaptation of James Clavell’s much-loved 1975 novel of the same name, and follows a European sailor, John Blackthorne, who is shipwrecked in 1600 in feudal Japan as a civil war brews. Blackthorne’s story is loosely based on a real character, William Adams. The program is the second attempt to bring Shogun to the small screen — there was a 1980 miniseries. But while the original was told from Blackthorne’s point of view, the new one “also tells the story from the Japanese perspective,” following the warlord Blackthorne ends up serving and his Christianized translator, and features a largely Japanese cast. The series is due to be released in February 2024.

• Key providers of satellite photographs to news organizations have begun to restrict imagery of Gaza after a New York Times report on Israeli tank positions.
• A Florida summit devolved into a battle between Trump and DeSantis over who owns the Sunshine State.
• Democrats, still struggling to understand the Gen Z voters in their coalition, worry TikTok is driving a wedge between them.