Middle East Still in Turmoil
As the United Nations meets this week in New York, the conflict in the Middle East remains unsolved, all peace talks having failed.
Hezbollah in Lebanon launched about 30 rockets into the Jezreel Valley Saturday night and some 85 rockets into the Haifa area in northern Israel on Sunday morning. Haifa is the third largest city in Israel.
On Monday, Israel launched airstrikes against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent a short video statement addressed to the Lebanese people: "Israel's war is not with you; it’s with Hezbollah. For too long Hezbollah has been using you as human shields.” Israel warned the Lebanese people to evacuate.
After the strikes, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said they had successfully destroyed tens of thousands of Hezbollah rockets. “Today is a significant peak. On this day we have taken out of order tens of thousands of rockets and precise munition. What Hezbollah has built over a period of 20 years since the second Lebanon War, is in fact being destroyed by the IDF.”
The death toll from Israeli strikes on Monday in Lebanon reached at least 492, Lebanon's health ministry said, marking it the deadliest day of conflict since the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war.
The Pentagon announced Monday that it would deploy a small number of troops to join the approximately 40,000 American troops already stationed in the region.
On Friday afternoon, the IDF conducted an airstrike on Hezbollah's central headquarters in Beirut.
Other News
- Helene Wrecks Southeast: As of Friday morning, Category 4 hurricane Helene had left 3.2 million people without power across Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee. According to the AP, almost 45% of homes and businesses in South Carolina were without power Friday morning. Helene hit Florida's Big Bend region with 140 mph winds late Thursday evening and left a chaotic landscape of overturned boats in harbors, felled trees, submerged cars, and flooded streets.
- NYC Mayor Eric Adams Indicted on Charges of Corruption: Eric Adams, New York City’s mayor, who was elected on a platform of going tough on crime, has been indicted by a grand jury on five federal criminal charges, including bribery, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and solicitation of a contribution by a foreign national. The 64-year-old former New York City police captain pled not guilty to all charges. The indictment alleges an international pay-to-play scheme beginning in 2014 that helped to underwrite his successful mayoral campaign seven years later. As part of the plot, he allegedly defrauded taxpayers for $10 million over the past decade and frequently took free or steeply discounted vacations bankrolled by his foreign benefactors. “This was a multi-year scheme to buy favor with a single New York City politician on the rise,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said Thursday. Adams has denied all charges, saying that the charges are “entirely false, based on lies,” and suggesting that his criticism of the Biden administration's disastrous border policies have made him a target for retaliation. “The federal government did nothing as its broken immigration policies overloaded our shelter system with no relief. I put the people of New York before party and politics.”
- Telegram Will Now Divulge Info to Authorities: Pavel Durov, arrested by French authorities in August, has now reportedly agreed to hand over IP addresses and phone numbers of those who use his encrypted messaging app to government authorities that make valid legal requests.
- “The Intelligence Age” — A Hazy AI Utopia: In a futuristic manifesto penned Monday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicted that we might “have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!)” and promised a future world marked by prosperity, better education, a fixed climate, and a space colony, all thanks to artificial intelligence. “I believe the future is going to be so bright that no one can do it justice by trying to write about it now.” He acknowledged that AI might do harm to labor markets, but brushed off fears. “Many of the jobs we do today would have looked like trifling wastes of time to people a few hundred years ago, but nobody is looking back at the past, wishing they were a lamplighter. If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the prosperity all around him was unimaginable. And if we could fast-forward a hundred years from today, the prosperity all around us would feel just as unimaginable.” A new app, SocialAI, has been created for users to create their own network of entirely virtual followers. Upon signing up, users select the kind of followers they want. “Fans? Trolls? Skeptics? Oddballs? Doomers? Visionaries? Nerds? Drama Queens? Liberals? Conservatives?” As WIRED put it, “As a human on SocialAI, you will never interact with another human. That’s the whole point. It’s your own little world with your own army of AI characters ready to bolster you or tear you down.”
