…well…the part where chevron & exxon are clear on the part where they think the appetite for fossil fuels will remain…robust…for decades to come…doesn’t exactly fill me with much of anything you want as you try to kick off your day just on its own…but…in the context?

Accelerated ice melt in west Antarctica is inevitable for the rest of the century no matter how much carbon emissions are cut, research indicates. The implications for sea level rise are “dire”, scientists say, and mean some coastal cities may have to be abandoned.

The ice sheet of west Antarctica would push up the oceans by 5 metres if lost completely. Previous studies have suggested it is doomed to collapse over the course of centuries, but the new study shows that even drastic emissions cuts in the coming decades will not slow the melting.

The analysis shows the rate of melting of the floating ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea will be three times faster this century compared with the previous century, even if the world meets the most ambitious Paris agreement target of keeping global heating below 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

Losing the floating ice shelves means the glacial ice sheets on land are freed to slide more rapidly into the ocean. Many millions of people live in coastal cities that are vulnerable to sea level rise, from New York to Mumbai to Shanghai, and more than a third of the global population lives within 62 miles (100km) of the coast.
[…]
“Our study is not great news – we may have lost control of west Antarctic ice shelf melting over the 21st century,” said Dr Kaitlin Naughten, at the British Antarctic Survey, who led the work. “It is one impact of climate change that we are probably just going to have to adapt to, and very likely this means some coastal communities will either have to build [defences] or be abandoned.”

Naughten said her research showed the situation was more perilous than previously thought. “But we shouldn’t give up [on climate action] because even if this particular impact is unavoidable, it is only one impact of climate change,” she added. “Our actions likely will make a difference [to Antarctic ice melting] in the 22nd century and beyond, but that’s a timescale that probably none of us today will be around to see.”

Dr Taimoor Sohail, at the University of New South Wales, in Australia, and not part of the study, said: “The collapse of the west Antarctic ice sheet is a worrying climate tipping point. This assessment suggests that accelerated melting of ice shelves is locked in. The implications for sea-level rise are dire.”
[…]
The research, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, used a high-resolution computer model of the Amundsen Sea to provide the most comprehensive assessment of warming in the region to date. The results indicated that increased rates of melting in the 21st century were inevitable in all plausible scenarios for the pace of cuts in fossil fuel burning.

…I mean…it’s not like we all need to be emulating noah this side of tomorrow…but…”coastal communities” doesn’t necessarily make everyone think of places like…I dunno…new york?

Naughten said: “We already have a refugee crisis in the world, and [sea level rise] will only make it worse. How are we going to deal with the displacement of millions of people, or possibly over a billion people, depending on the amount of sea level rise?”

Prof Alberto Naveira Garabato, at the University of Southampton, UK, said: “This is a sobering piece of research. However, it should also serve as a wake-up call. We can still save the [east] Antarctic ice sheet, containing about 10 times as many metres of sea level rise, if we learn from our past inaction and start reducing greenhouse gas emissions now.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/23/rapid-ice-melt-in-west-antarctica-now-inevitable-research-shows

…however you cut it…& by all accounts it quite literally cuts a whole lot of ice…it seems like it isn’t a thing you’d choose…but then you’d probably think that pursuing a course that flies in the face of humanitarian law wouldn’t be israel’s bet on how to retain the world’s sympathy after the awful affront they suffered…& it turns out that isn’t how people work…so the signs seem to be that at some point there’s still going to be a ground operation that stands a good chance of being all kinds of brutal for all concerned

“I have been in the tunnels, and once you go down you very quickly lose all sense of direction and all sense of time,” said Daphné Richemond-Barak, an assistant professor at Israel’s Reichman University who founded the International Working Group on Subterranean Warfare and is considered to have written the most comprehensive book on the subject. “The consensus is that you only really send your soldiers in the tunnel as a measure of last resort, maybe to get hostages.”
[…]
On the southern border, where Israel and Hamas are at war, tunnels from Gaza into Egypt have long been used to smuggle goods. Tunnels into Israel have been used for attacks on Israeli villages.

The labyrinth under Gaza itself is believed to be the most extensive, complex and sophisticated, with long passages zigzagging at different depths underground beneath population centers. Some have estimated their combined length at 150 to 300 miles, but Richemond-Barak and others say that is speculation.
[…]
The IDF estimates each tunnel under Gaza costs $3 million to dig, and Hecht told the U.N. that in the past diggers were taken to sites in closed vehicles so they couldn’t see where they were and were kept underground for a few days while they dug. The Gaza tunnels aren’t used for civilians; they are reserved for Hamas, multiple military experts said.

New tunnels can be dug fairly quickly, with some estimates that a meter per day can be dug with tools as simple as a DeWalt hand drill, said retired U.S. Army Maj. John Spencer, the chairman of the Urban Warfare Project at West Point.

In 2021 the IDF said it destroyed more than 62 miles of the Hamas tunnel network. Hamas kept digging.
[…]
Hamas succeeded in surprising Israel with its attack this month. Experts in underground warfare say they believe that in the Oct. 7 attack, fighters emerged from multiple tunnel exits just shy of the security fence around Gaza before they poured into southern Israel.

Those “approach tunnels” let Hamas pre-position weapons to be picked up quickly as fighters breached the fence. In past attacks, Hamas has been known to wait until right before an attack to finish a final stretch of tunnel so the entrance wouldn’t be exposed.

Richemond-Barak and others have said they suspect Hamas somehow must have breached or turned off the billion-dollar sensory barrier that Israel built to stop it from digging tunnels into Israel. She pointed to reports that fighters kept emerging after the military said the area near Gaza was secure.

She also said locating the entrance of a new tunnel is like finding a needle in a haystack. She said it took the IDF six weeks to find five Hezbollah tunnels during an IDF operation in 2018 along the Lebanese border.

“Most of our successes in finding and destroying tunnels over the past 10 years has been by stealing maps or capturing personnel involved in digging them,” Hecht said.

Richemond-Barak doesn’t expect any new maps out of the current operation because of the pressure to act. “Obviously mapping tunnels in Gaza right now is not going to happen.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/israeli-soldiers-will-face-labyrinth-hamas-tunnels

…& one way or another…the people pushing this hard in directions we don’t want to see it go are…a long way from being in those tunnels

The Middle East could be on the verge of a regional conflagration. That’s in stark contrast to the atmosphere of just a few weeks ago, when the Biden administration was working on sealing a historic deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel that it hoped would stabilize a region long convulsed by war and sectarianism.
[…]
At the center of these mounting tensions is Iran, which has been engaged in a shadow war with its chief regional rival, Israel, for years. On Oct. 10, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, applauded the deadly terrorist attack by Hamas, which is part of a loose network of nonstate armed groups that Iran uses to bolster its influence in the region. Tehran has denied any involvement in the attack, and Israeli and American officials acknowledge that there is no “direct evidence” proving otherwise. But as Iran rages over the ever-mounting casualties in Gaza and what it perceives as America’s interference, fears are growing that this on-again-off-again proxy war, waged through Hamas in the south and Hezbollah in the north, will break out into a sustained conflict, potentially even dragging in the United States.

[…back to that in a bit]

…that’s the thing about trying to achieve stuff at several removes…it’s intended to be easy to follow while also making it as hard as possible to close the distance between the instigator(s) & the actions of the ones they instigate

The Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin, who taught constitutional law for more than 25 years, sees Trump’s tactics as consistent with his past disdain for legal and democratic norms.

“Trump’s relationship to the law and the justice system is straight out of the autocrat’s playbook,” said Raskin. “He’s incapable of seeing judges acting in anything other than completely personal and political ways.

“The law and justice system are just a favor bank in Trump world. He’s like a mob boss. For him, a judge is either a lackey in his pocket or his sworn enemy. Trump’s legal and political agendas are fused at this point. His whole strategy is to avoid a reckoning with justice before the election.”

Earlier in October in a motion that legal experts say could lead to lengthy appeals, Trump’s lawyers tried to scuttle his indictment in the election interference case by contending that he should have absolute immunity from any criminal charges linked to his official duties as president.

The absolute immunity motion could result in some delays, but Trump and his lawyers will lose in the end, experts and justice department predict.

“Trump’s not interested in winning in court,” the ex-federal prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig said. “His arguments don’t have any legal legs. They’re designed to be catnip for his supporters and to attempt to delay his trials for as long as possible.”
[…]
“I think that Trump’s comments about the judges are designed for one thing, to create a story that overshadows the allegations,” said Michael Moore, a former Georgia US attorney. “Trump is trying to delegitimize any adverse outcome. It’s remarkably similar to his efforts to delegitimize the election before the votes were even counted.”

In Raskin’s eyes, “Recapturing the presidency in 2024 is Donald Trump’s ultimate safe haven from the legal consequences of his prior crimes. He believes it will give him all the immunity he needs for the rest of his life. He’s convinced he can pardon himself for all federal crimes he’s charged with and avoid all state and civil cases because of his pressing state business.

“And if you think he ever plans to leave office and let the justice system come near him again, you’re too innocent to be let out of the house by yourself.”

‘He’s like a mob boss’: legal experts alarmed by Trump’s attacks on judges [Guardian]

…I know it’s apples to orange-faced fuckwits & all…but…well

However, from everything I have gleaned from senior U.S. officials, Biden failed to get Israel to hold back and think through all the implications of an invasion of Gaza for Israel and the United States. So let me put this in as stark and clear language as I can, because the hour is late:

I believe that if Israel rushes headlong into Gaza now to destroy Hamas — and does so without expressing a clear commitment to seek a two-state solution with the Palestinian Authority and end Jewish settlements deep in the West Bank — it will be making a grave mistake that will be devastating for Israeli interests and American interests.

It could trigger a global conflagration and explode the entire pro-American alliance structure that the United States has built in the region since Henry Kissinger engineered the end of the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

I am talking about the Camp David peace treaty, the Oslo peace accords, the Abraham Accords and the possible normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. The whole thing could go up in flames.

This is not about whether Israel has the right to retaliate against Hamas for the savage barbarism it inflicted on Israeli men, women, babies and grandparents. It surely does. This is about doing it the right way — the way that does not play into the hands of Hamas, Iran and Russia.
[…]
There will be no one to extract Israel and no one to help Israel pay the cost of caring for more than two million Gazans — not if Israel is run by a government that thinks, and acts, as if it can justifiably exact its revenge on Hamas while unjustifiably building an apartheidlike society run by Jewish supremacists in the West Bank. That is a completely incoherent policy.

Alas, though, a senior U.S. official told me that the Biden team left Jerusalem feeling that while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel understands that overreach in Gaza could set the whole neighborhood ablaze, his right-wing coalition partners are eager to fan the flames in the West Bank. Settlers there have killed at least seven Palestinian civilians in acts of revenge in just the past week.

Meanwhile, U.S. officials told me, the representatives of those settlers in the cabinet are withholding tax money owed the Palestinian Authority, making it harder for it to keep the West Bank as under control as it has been since the start of the Hamas war.

Netanyahu should not allow this, but he has trapped himself. He needs those right-wing extremists in his coalition to keep himself out of jail on corruption charges.

…sound familiar?

In the first week of this conflict, the supreme leader of Iran and Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, appeared to be keeping very tight control of their militiamen on the border with Israel and in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. But as the second week has gone on, U.S. officials have picked up increasing signs that both leaders are letting their forces more aggressively attack Israeli targets and that they might attack American targets if the United States intervenes. They smell the logic of how much an Israeli invasion of Gaza could help their goal of driving America out of the whole region.
[…]
As the Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea pointed out to me, Palestinian Islamic Jihad achieved more this week with an apparently misfired rocket “than it achieved in all of its successful missile launches.”

How so? After that rocket failed and fell on the Palestinian hospital in Gaza, killing scores of people, Hamas and Islamic Jihad rushed out and claimed — with no evidence — that Israel had deliberately bombed the hospital, setting streets ablaze across the Arab world. When Israel and the United States offered compelling evidence a few hours later that Islamic Jihad accidentally hit the Gaza hospital with its own rocket, it was already too late. The Arab street was on fire, and a meeting of Arab leaders with Biden was canceled.

If people cannot talk openly and honestly about a misfired rocket, imagine what will happen when the first major Israeli invasion of Gaza begins in our wired world, linked by social networks and polluted with misinformation amplified by artificial intelligence.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/19/opinion/biden-speech-israel-gaza.html

…&…like the folks who seem to want to double down on thinning the literal ice with little concern for the 1/3 of the population that looks to be trying to drown…that’s all music to some with their ears to the ground

Each year, Iran doles out hundreds of millions of dollars to improve the combat effectiveness of Hezbollah, Hamas and other militant groups in the region, including the Houthis in Yemen and an assortment of Iraqi Shia militias. With that funding, the groups, which Tehran has supported for decades as part of its “axis of resistance,” have developed an extensive assortment of capabilities, ranging from unmanned aerial systems to high-end ballistic missile arsenals that would be the envy of most national militaries.

Training and equipping terrorists, insurgents and militias is a core element of Iran’s foreign and security policy in the Middle East. At the vanguard of this effort is the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps-Quds Force, an elite unit responsible for conducting covert activities, including the sponsorship of groups like Hamas. IRGC-QF trainers and advisers provide hands-on instruction to militants on how to plan ambushes, improve operational security and gain proficiency with emerging technologies and cutting-edge weapons systems. The success of this training was evident in the way Hamas used drones to knock out the Israel Defense Force’s cellular communications and surveillance towers along the border with Gaza in its recent attack.

Iran uses proxy forces to advance its national security objectives: pushing adversaries like the United States, which has more than 30,000 troops stationed across various facilities in the Middle East, out of the region and expanding its own sphere of influence without generating a direct military response from rivals. Proxy forces allow Tehran to meddle in ongoing conflicts in the background, maintaining a thin veneer of deniability and avoiding being pulled into a direct military confrontation with militarily superior foes — namely, Israel and the United States. It also gives Tehran leverage as its proxy groups develop political wings, helping Iran play kingmaker in local and national politics in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen and elsewhere.
[…]
But Tehran has gone much further than disrupting talks. The IRGC-QF commander, Gen. Ismail Qaani, appears to be coordinating Iran’s various proxy forces more closely, even reportedly organizing regular meetings since August between the heads of Hezbollah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another militant group that is active in Gaza. Accordingly, the fighting since Oct. 7 has not been limited to Gaza. Israel has launched strikes into Lebanon in response to Hezbollah missiles that have been fired into its territory. The exchange so far has followed a long-running pattern of tit-for-tat reprisals. Still, Israel, concerned that Hezbollah fighters may be preparing to ramp up attacks and launch a sustained offensive in response to an Israeli ground invasion of Gaza, has announced the evacuation of more than two dozen communities along its border with Lebanon, including one small city of some 20,000 residents.

Why the World Is Watching Iran [NYT]

…meanwhile…for the folks that call the disputed ground home turf…some things that might be referred to as temporary feel disturbingly permanent potentially

Palestinians in Gaza, as well as members of the Palestinian diaspora, told NBC News that they fear Israel will use Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack to permanently expel Palestinians from the Gaza strip.
[…]
But Palestinians don’t see it as a fair fight. Layal Luay, 22, a Palestinian who lives in London, said that as she watched the death toll of Israelis climb after Hamas’ attack, which killed more than 1,000 Israeli civilians, she feared Palestinian civilians would suffer the consequences. Hamas tactics, which she doesn’t support, would be used to justify a crushing offensive.

“I think of all the innocent civilians on both sides, of course, that are affected by this,” she said. “When I saw all the casualties, I was like, ‘They’re going to retaliate; they’re going to come for us.’”

Luay and Diab were referring to the “Nakba,” or “catastrophe,” a reference to the forced removal of an estimated 750,000 Palestinians from their homes when Israel was founded in 1948. They see it as a core element of their identity. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, some Jewish militias massacred Palestinian civilians, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported, and hundreds of thousands of them were forced to flee their homes, according to the United Nations.
[…]
The Israeli government has said it doesn’t intend to occupy the Gaza Strip or permanently expel Palestinians. On Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the Israelis have “absolutely no intent, no desire, to be running Gaza themselves.”

But some far-right members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party support the idea of expelling Palestinians. Hours after the Oct. 7 terrorist attack, Knesset member Ariel Kallner posted a call on social media for another Nakba. “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48,” he wrote. “Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to anyone who dares to join!”

As the conflict enters its third week, nearly a million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced since Israel began conducting retaliatory airstrikes, the U.N. said Saturday. According to the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza, 4,651 Palestinians, including 1,873 children, have been killed in Gaza.

Palestinians have passed down stories of the Nakba from generation to generation.

“This is a sort of a collective traumatic event in the minds of most Palestinians,” said historian Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. “Back in 1948, the majority of the Arab population of Palestine was actually driven from their homes, and these are things that people remember hearing from their grandparents and their parents.”

Some Israelis have acknowledged that the Nakba occurred, said Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli attorney who supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “For years, Israelis were in denial about the existence of the Nakba. It’s our original sin,” Seidemann said. The Israeli right flatly rejects that view.
[…]
In the West Bank, which is occupied by Israel and administered in part by the Palestinian Authority, fear of being displaced has been handed down through generations. Diana Buttu, a Palestinian writer and lawyer and Stanford graduate who was a spokesperson for the Palestine Liberation Organization in the 2000s, remembers hearing stories from her father, who was 9 years old during the Nakba.

“And here I am today, a mother, and my son is 9 — same age as my father was,” said Buttu, who lives in Ramallah, one of the largest cities in the West Bank. “And I feel what my grandmother was talking about and the decision that she had to make in 1948.”

Motivated by reports of violence near their village, al-Mujaydal, Buttu’s grandparents fled to the city of Nazareth. What they believed would be a short stay turned into permanent exile.

“And this is what it feels like for people in Gaza now,” Buttu said. “Some of them are saying, ‘Well, it’s only going to be for a couple of weeks.’ Some of them are saying, ‘Well, we have to go somewhere.’”
[…]
An estimated 5.9 million Palestinians are refugees today as a result of the 1948 conflict, including their descendants, according to the U.N. Multiple human rights groups and the U.N. have called for the return of Palestinian refugees to their homes, but 75 years later, many haven’t been able to do so.

The fear of not being able to return has made Gazans extremely hesitant to leave their homes. They also say travel south presents its own risks and peril as Israel intensifies strikes. As of Sunday, Israel has hit dozens of targets in the south since Oct. 13, The New York Times reported.

Why Palestinians fear that if they leave northern Gaza they may never be able to return [NBC]

…vested interests combined with stunningly dumbassed behavior is

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/24/canada-tells-of-china-linked-propaganda-blitz-across-mps-social-media

…well…depending on where you look, I guess…kinda all over the place

A handful of influential but unreliable accounts, some of which have been promoted by Elon Musk, are dominating the flow of news on X around the Israel-Hamas war and easily outpacing established mainstream news outlets, according to research published Friday by the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.

Researchers analyzed viral posts about the conflict during a three-day period starting from the beginning of the attack against Israel on Oct. 7. They concluded that the most popular posts about the crisis revealed how news on the platform is “faster, more disorienting, and potentially more shaped by Musk himself.”

The new work adds data to a swell of recent anecdotal accounts from researchers, academics and journalists who have noted a change for the worse in the way news and information moves and is incentivized on Twitter over the last year, especially since the start of the Israel-Hamas crisis. A separate analysis published Thursday by NewsGuard, a nonpartisan company that tracks false narratives online, found verified accounts were responsible for nearly three-fourths of the most viral misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war on Twitter.

“That shift is real,” said Mike Caulfield, a research scientist at the University of Washington and lead author of the new report.

“At its core what we’re looking at here is a different vision of what news is,” Caulfield said. “It’s fast, it’s unvetted, and it’s very often unsourced. And there’s every indication that the shift is not accidental and that it’s part of a vision of what news is going to be on X.”
[…]
The researchers branded seven high-performing accounts on X as “new elites,” because they have exercised “disproportionate power and influence” over Israel and Hamas news. The “new elites” include: Visegrád 24, a news aggregator run by a right-wing Polish social media marketing agency; Mario Nawfal, a Twitter celebrity known for hosting live audio chats focused on cryptocurrency who was the focus of an NBC News investigation; @spectatorindex, an account self-described as “News, media and data from around the globe,” reportedly operated by an Australian-Muslim medical doctor; @CollinRugg, a co-founder of the conservative site Trending Politics; and @CensoredMen, a 10-month-old account that before pivoting to the Israel-Hamas war primarily posted in support of the misogynist internet influencer Andrew Tate.

Tweets about the Israel-Hamas war from these accounts outperformed popular news accounts belonging to CNN, The New York Times, the BBC and Reuters, despite having far fewer followers, according to the research (NBC News was not included). Across the research period, tweets about the Israel-Hamas war from well-followed traditional news sources garnered 112 million views over 298 tweets, while tweets from the seven newly influential accounts drew 1.6 billion views across 1,834 tweets.

The researchers said that changes made by Musk to X had pushed the platform in a new direction.

“This occurs in an environment that has been shorn of many of the ‘credibility signals’ that served to ground users in the past — checkmarks that indicated notability, fact-checks distributed through Twitter Trends, and Twitter/X-based labeling of deceptive content,” the researchers wrote. “Even fundamental affordances of the web — such as simple sourcing through links — have been devalued by the platform, and, perhaps as a result, by the new elites that now direct its users’ attention.”

An emailed request for comment sent to X received an automated response: “Busy now, please check back later.”
[…]
Researchers wrote that the volume of the tweets combined with a dearth of sourcing or context created “the sense of a constant stream of decontextualized anger and violence.”

Another commonality between these new elite accounts is their dramatic increase in followers over the last two years, which may be explained by Musk’s interactions with them. Through following many of these accounts, replying to them, and directly recommending them, researchers wrote, “Musk may be playing a significant role in the increasing prominence of these news-focused sources.”

On several occasions, Musk has interacted or specifically promoted the accounts identified by researchers. In a tweet seen more than 11 million times before he later deleted it, Musk praised two of the anonymous accounts noted by researchers. Both accounts had reputations for false tweets before the Israel-Hamas war.

All of the “new elite” accounts identified by researchers have blue verified badges, a designation that until recently signified an account was notable and authentic, but which now means they pay $8 per month to subscribe to X’s premium service.

7 influential accounts are warping Israel-Hamas news on X, researchers find [NBC]

…I dunno about you…but it sure feels like the conjunction between lowest common denominators & high net worth individuals is doing a hell of a job forcing all of us to live in the conjunction of the shittiest venn diagram they can concoct…like ships failing to pass…never mind in the night

China and the Philippines traded accusations over a collision in disputed waters of the South China Sea as Chinese vessels blocked Philippine boats supplying forces there on Sunday in the latest of a series of maritime confrontations.

The two countries have had numerous run-ins in the South China Sea in recent months, especially near the disputed Second Thomas Shoal, part of the Spratly Islands.

The Philippines has sent supplies to troops stationed on a rusted World War II-era transport ship used as an outpost on the shoal, prompting China’s coast guard to repeatedly deploy vessels to block the resupply missions.

In the incident early on Sunday, China’s coast guard said there had been a “slight collision” between one of its ships and the Philippine boat while the coast guard was “lawfully” blocking the boat from transporting “illegal construction materials” to the warship.

Manila responded by condemning “in the strongest degree” the “dangerous blocking maneuvers” of the Chinese vessel.

China’s “dangerous, irresponsible and illegal actions” were “in violation of Philippine sovereignty, sovereign rights and jurisdiction,” Manila’s Task Force for the West Philippine Sea said in a statement.

…& speaking of statements

Manila’s relations with Beijing have soured under President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., who has strengthened military engagement with Washington since taking office last year. The Pentagon said in May it would protect the Philippines if its coast guard came under attack “anywhere in the South China Sea.”
[…]
China’s coast guard said in a statement that the Philippine vessel had ignored repeated warnings, crossed the bow of the Chinese ship and “deliberately provoked trouble,” causing the collision.

“The Philippines behavior seriously violates the international rules on avoiding collisions at sea and threatens the navigation safety of our vessels,” the coast guard said.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-philippines-trade-accusations-south-china-sea-clash

…one way or another…it feels like we’re all in dangerous waters…& the hands on the tiller leave a lot to be desired

Exclusive: findings show uncontrolled and potentially discriminatory way technology used in Whitehall and some police forces [Guardian]

‘Destitute’ means a living standard so sparse, it should be consigned to history. It now applies to 4 million in the UK [Guardian]

[…for context…a guy named ed balls who used to be a big deal in the labour party has recently pointed out the levels of disparity involved involve a bigger gap than existed between east & west germany before the wall went down…in fact…that one might deserve more than just the sub-heading of the article to do justice to the injustice in a part of the world a lot of places would think of as enviably well-off]

Over the last decade, billionaire-backed press and wealthy ministers have worked to propagate the myth that this deprivation has nothing to do with Conservative policies, blaming structural inequality on the working class’s apparent idleness and overspending. Or, as Andrew Cooper, the Tory candidate in last week’s Tamworth byelection, put it: jobless parents who are struggling to feed their children while paying for a phone should “fuck off”.

In reality, a decade of austerity and squeezed wages and benefits has ripped the social fabric, making large swathes of the population poorer, sicker and more insecure. At the same time, multiple crises – Brexit, the pandemic, soaring inflation – have exposed the gaping holes in the safety net once intended to catch us.

It is telling that nearly three-quarters of destitute households actually receive support from the benefits system, according to the JRF study. Or to put it another way: after a decade of benefits freezes, cuts and sanctions, social security rates are now so meagre that many of those who are “lucky” enough to qualify often still can’t afford to eat, wash or pay the rent. It is not as if this is an accident. Keeping benefits as low as possible has always been deliberate, a so-called legitimate means for ministers to divide the undeserving sick and poor from “hardworking families”. In this context, severe poverty is less a problem to fix than an accepted part of the status quo. It is destitution by design, where governments know which public policy will push the already struggling into dire conditions, and they implement it anyway.
[…]
Established wisdom says now is not the time for any of this, that a struggling economy means we cannot afford to do better. I would suggest we cannot afford not to. When Keir Starmer recently ruled out scrapping the two-child benefit limit (a move that would lift about 270,000 households with children out of poverty) he cited the need for “tough decisions” in order to be fiscally responsible. And yet true responsibility – fiscal as well as moral – comes from tackling the vast cost of social and economic hardship. In many ways, this is a matter of simple maths: child poverty alone is estimated to be now costing the economy £39bn a year due to the extra strain on public services and future unemployment. In the long run, doing the right thing is reassuringly cost-effective.

But it is also surely about a collective lowering of expectations: the nagging fatigue that says that, in one of the richest nations on Earth, millions of people going without the basics for sustaining life is “just the way it is”. Infants sleep on the floor. Mothers eat a piece of fruit for lunch. It starts slowly, yes, but we should all fear where it ends.

[…that’d be at the link above]

…& those hands on the tiller?

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/oct/20/rishi-sunak-considers-tax-cut-for-top-earners-after-byelection-defeats

…FFS…in fact…fuck it…I’ll let john take it to the finish line for today

Call it war fatigue. So soon. Last week it was standing room only on both sides of the house for Rishi Sunak’s statement on Israel and Gaza. For the update on Monday there were plenty of gaps on the green benches. Especially on the Tory side. Already the Middle East has been filed under something too difficult, too unbearable and too far away. Most Conservatives no longer have the bandwidth for the conflict. They are too busy contemplating their own more immediate eternity. Losing the next general election.

Many of Sunak’s opening remarks were more or less a reprise of what he had said last week. Horror at the 7 October attacks on Israel by Hamas. A commitment to stand with Israel and a reaffirmation of its right to defend itself and to retrieve its hostages. An acknowledgment that the Palestinians are also victims of Hamas. Their need for humanitarian aid and for Israel to respond within international law. Hard to argue with any of that.

Where the script diverged slightly was in Rishi’s attempts to put himself centre stage. The tetchy school prefect sending himself out to cosplay the global statesman. You could hardly blame him, I suppose. His trip last week to the Middle East had to mean something more than a self-seeking photo opportunity. For his own self-worth at least. So what we got was Rish! as a Zelig character, squeezing himself into different moments of history.
[…]
In reply, Keir Starmer chose to ignore Rish!’s fantasies about single-handedly winning the Nobel peace prize but otherwise pretty much mirrored the prime minister’s statement. Close your eyes and the two speeches were pretty much interchangeable. The Labour leader is taking the Commons speaking with one voice on this subject very seriously. He might have been marginally more accommodating to those of his MPs who wanted him to voice more support for the Palestinian people, but not much.

Once again, the SNP’s Stephen Flynn called for the government to advocate a ceasefire. To stop the violence – if only temporarily – and to allow essential humanitarian aid into Gaza. Flynn’s was not a lone voice. Many MPs from both sides of the Commons also appealed for a ceasefire.

But Sunak wouldn’t consider it. Not even as a possibility for the future. Israel had a right to defend itself. Hamas had forfeited whatever rights it may have had with its massacre of Israeli civilians. And as long as Hamas continued to keep hostages and launch rocket attacks on Israel, Israel could send down airstrikes on Gaza. Any Palestinian civilian casualties were the fault of Hamas. For embedding terrorists among an innocent population.

It had a logic. And an absence of logic. Any two-state solution – any solution at all come to think of it – has to start with both sides stopping wanting to kill the other. It’s as basic as that. But neither Hamas nor the Israelis are willing to back down and take that step. Decades of mistrust, hatred and violence prevent it. A ceasefire is the minimum requirement. Not just to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe but for any long-term solution. It’s international diplomacy 101. But a ceasefire is further away than ever. And Sunak and Starmer aren’t even pushing for one. Go figure.

Nor is Israel and Gaza an issue that splits along simple party lines. Everyone agrees that what Hamas has done is barbaric and unforgivable, but MPs on both sides were concerned that the government appeared to be giving the Israelis carte blanche to exact a collective punishment on the Palestinians in Gaza. Tory Vicky Ford wondered who was policing the Israeli response to make sure it was within international law.

Sunak just ummed and ahed and waved his hands imperiously. The Israelis had assured him that they were following the letter of the law and that was good enough for him. Who was he to doubt them? Those airstrikes that wiped out entire Palestinian families were just one of those things. His assurances that all lives were equal were not entirely convincing.
[…]
Zarah Sultana claimed there was already evidence that war crimes had been committed. Food, fuel, water and medical supplies had all been denied. Rish! again looked somewhat uncomfortable. Everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. He was sure the Palestinians were getting more than enough. The press cameras were lying. Things weren’t as bad as all that.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/oct/23/rishi-sunak-dodges-ceasefire-questions-as-he-cosplays-global-statesman

…hard to deny they could get a whole lot worse…but…I can’t say as I’m finding the margin for error all that reassuring…so I hope you lot have something more appealing than I’ve found to throw into today’s mix?