Oct. 10, 2023 ❧ Catastrophic violence in Israel & Palestine, Lithium Mining in Nevada, and a Rent Strike...
Plus, Newsom vetoes legal mushrooms, strife in Bolivia's MAS Party, unusual Japanese novelty keyboards, and a world of glowing creatures!
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BIG STORY
HAMAS LAUNCHES UNPRECEDENTED ATTACK ON ISRAEL, ISRAEL RESPONDS WITH VERY PRECEDENTED ATTACK ON GAZA
Israel’s government formally declared war on the Gaza Strip this weekend after Hamas launched a surprise incursion into Israeli territory. Beginning Saturday morning, members of the Islamic militant group that controls Gaza bombarded Israel with anywhere from 2,500 to 5,000 rockets and sent fighters across the separation wall and into Israeli territory by land, air, and sea to launch attacks on an estimated 22 military installations and Israeli towns. Hamas posted videos online of their fighters butchering soldiers and civilians alike. In one of the deadliest attacks, Hamas militants arrived at a music festival in rural Southern Israel, just three miles from the wall separating Israel and Gaza, and began to indiscriminately shoot young concertgoers at point-blank range, leaving at least 260 dead.
At the time of writing, estimates from the Israeli government place the number of dead over 900 and the number of wounded over 2,500, making it the most deadly attack on Israel since the 1973 Yom Kippur War almost exactly fifty years ago (In an eerie echo, Hamas’ attack this weekend took place during the Jewish Thanksgiving holiday of Simchat Torah). Meanwhile, Hamas claims to have taken more than 100 hostages—both military and civilian—whom it hopes to trade for some of the more than 4,500 Palestinians held in Israeli jails.
The response from Israel has been to launch a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip, in the words of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who added, “We are fighting against human animals and we are acting accordingly.” Israel has cut off electricity and food from the blockaded 141 sq mi. Gaza Strip which contains more than 2 million people—around half of whom are younger than 19. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a televised “warning,” telling Gazans,
“All the places in which Hamas is based, in this city of evil, all the places Hamas is hiding in, acting from—we'll turn them into rubble. I'm telling the people of Gaza: get out of there now because we’re about to act everywhere with all our force.”
This is, of course, a sick joke—Gaza has been under an Israeli blockade since 2006 and its people are not allowed to leave. And given that Gaza is one of the most densely-packed places in the world, this was a promise to obliterate the entire territory and its captive population.
Israel then launched a torrent of airstrikes that have pounded Gaza with more than 2,000 munitions. No territory, civilian or otherwise, was off-limits. According to Middle East Eye, the military has “shelled 20 high-rise residential buildings, mosques, hospitals, banks and other civilian infrastructure.” One of the buildings, which Israel has claimed credit for bombing, was an 11-story apartment, which had at least 150 people living in it. As of writing, more than 800 Gazans have been killed and 4,100 injured according to its Health Ministry. Netanyahu says that Israel is “just getting started.” And one member of his Likud Party, Revital ‘Tally’ Gotliv has urged the military to use “doomsday weapons.” She continued:
“Only an explosion that shakes the Middle East will restore this country’s dignity, strength and security! It’s time to kiss doomsday. Shooting powerful missiles without limit. Not flattening a neighbourhood. Crushing and flattening Gaza. … without mercy! without mercy!”
President Biden has issued a statement of full-throated support for Israel, while his National Security Council issued a condemnation of the “unprovoked attacks by Hamas terrorists against Israeli civilians.” We share in mourning every innocent life snuffed out in this violence, Israeli or Palestinian. But to act as if it came from nowhere is simply absurd.
This violence cannot be described accurately without first understanding the conditions Israel has inflicted upon Gaza. More than 60 percent of the people living in the Gaza Strip are refugees following their families’ expulsion during the 1948 war establishing Israel during an event known as the “Nakba,” meaning “catastrophe” in Arabic. Along with the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza was occupied by the Israeli military in 1967. After four decades of direct illegal occupation, Israeli settlers were forced out of the territory in 2007. For the next sixteen years, up until the present, Israel has imposed a blockade upon the territory that has crippled all aspects of life for its people and turned it into what numerous observers—including everyone from the United Nations to Noam Chomsky to Israeli Human Rights organization B’Tselem to Conservative former-UK Prime Minister David Cameron have called an “open-air prison.”
With few exceptions, everyone in the strip is trapped there and the Israeli government controls everything that comes in and goes out. This gives them the ability to inflict torment upon the captive population at will. As Rashid Khalidi, author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, said in an interview with Democracy Now! “the blockade of Gaza is “a pressure cooker. It had to explode.”
Here are some statistics from the Norwegian Refugee Council about the daily conditions faced by Gaza’s nearly 2 million residents as a result of Israel’s blockade:
Gaza has the world’s largest unemployment rate of 42 percent.
41 percent of Gazans have too little food.
7 percent of children suffer from stunted growth
98 percent of groundwater is undrinkable.
The Gazan population only has access to 2-4 hours of electricity per day.
45 percent are refused medical treatment outside of Gaza.
Israel inflicts these conditions intentionally. According to cables between the Israeli government and the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv obtained by Wikileaks, the goal of the blockade is “to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge.”
The Israeli government makes no secret about the fact that its ultimate goal is to annex all of Palestine. It has already begun the annexation of the West Bank which has been colonized by more than 700,000 Israeli settlers, who often push Palestinian families from their homes to build Jewish-only communities. Prime Minister Netanyahu made the goal of total annexation abundantly clear last month when he displayed a map of “Greater Israel” before the UN General Assembly, which contained the whole of Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights.
When Gaza has tried to fight the occupation, usually by firing rockets into Israeli territory that are easily repelled by Israel’s U.S.-funded Iron Dome defense system, all the people living in the strip are met with collective punishment, through devastating airstrikes. 2,789 civilians in Gaza have been killed between January 2008 and September 2023, according to the U.N. (almost three times the number of actual militants killed). Prior to this weekend’s invasion by Hamas, the number of civilian casualties in Israel since 2008 was 78.
And though he calls them “evil,” Netanyahu’s own explicit policy has been to fund Hamas in order to drive a wedge between Gaza and the West Bank’s more moderate Palestinian Authority. “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” Netanyahu told a meeting of his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”
To describe this weekend’s violence as the direct result of Israel’s conduct is not some fringe Hamas-apologist position, as many pro-Israel commentators and politicians in America would suggest. As Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan Robinson pointed out on Twitter, one of Israel’s most widely-read newspapers, Ha’aretz, has been willing, in multiple columns, to state the reality of the occupation much more plainly than most American outlets. In an article titled “Israel Can’t Imprison Two Million Gazans Without Paying a Cruel Price,” Israeli columnist Gideon Levy put it perhaps most frankly:
Behind all this lies Israeli arrogance; the idea that we can do whatever we like, that we’ll never pay the price and be punished for it. We’ll carry on undisturbed. We’ll arrest, kill, harass, dispossess and protect the settlers busy with their pogroms…We’ll fire at innocent people, take out people’s eyes and smash their faces, expel, confiscate, rob, grab people from their beds, carry out ethnic cleansing and of course continue with the unbelievable siege of the Gaza Strip, and everything will be all right… We’ll tell them that only by force will their prisoners see freedom. We thought we would arrogantly keep rejecting any attempt at a diplomatic solution, only because we don’t want to deal with all that, and everything would continue that way forever…
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bears very great responsibility for what happened, and he must pay the price, but it didn’t start with him and it won’t end after he goes. We now have to cry bitterly for the Israeli victims, but we should also cry for Gaza. Gaza, most of whose residents are refugees created by Israel. Gaza, which has never known a single day of freedom.
But instead of recognizing this cycle of violent reprisals, the Biden administration has responded by pledging to give Israel “rock solid” support, which likely means more military aid (assuming Congress begins to function again at some point) that will make the onslaught against Gaza even more brutal.
Virtually every American politician this weekend has expressed unqualified horror at the attacks on Israeli civilians. And they are right to. The stories of concertgoers kidnapped and massacred, families shot in their homes, and parents fearing for the lives of their captive children are completely harrowing to read, and the senseless slaughter of innocents is an unforgivable atrocity. Of course, we all naturally understand that ordinary Israelis are victims of circumstance and bear no responsibility for what their government has done.
But when Palestinian civilians have been killed in much greater numbers at the hands of Israel during the last decade, only a few courageous people who hold positions of power in America have even dared to condemn it. Most either remain silent or accuse Israel’s critics—including those who are Jewish—of harboring “anti-Semitism” or questioning Israel’s “right to exist” (which apparently translates to “Israel’s right to do whatever it wants”).
But the status quo of permanent occupation is clearly not something that can ever result in peace, and the violence that began this weekend has proven it. We need to start asking, for real, can this end? As Nathan J. Robinson wrote today in Current Affairs:
…What we have is an occupying power brutalizing an occupied/besieged population, and then a militant wing of that population reacting with terror of its own. That, in turn, is causing the occupying power to unleash hell. The cycle of violence looks like it will never end.
Can it end? Perhaps, but only with a just peace. Israel’s current campaign of violent reprisal will create more victims. Those victims will have families. Those family members will want vengeance of their own. They will seek it. More victims. More rage. More people who see only their own suffering and not the suffering they inflict on others.
The responsibility of the international community is clear: we have to push for a final negotiated end to the conflict, through the end of Israel’s apartheid and the granting of full rights of self-determination to Palestine. Ultimately, as Chomsky and Cassif point out, the subjugation of Palestine is not in the interests of ordinary Israelis, who thesmeselves deserve to live in peace. It guarantees Israel’s perpetual insecurity. So long as there are Palestinians, there will be resistance, some of which will be violent, and it will become more violent when other avenues for expressing dissent are closed off. To predict what will happen is in no way to justify it, and while we can and should condemn Hamas’ counterproductive and hideous atrocities, we need to understand why they occurred and how to prevent more from happening in the future. One way, favored by some, is to simply “destroy everything”—there is peace, by definition, if everyone is dead. But if we care about trying to avert the worst disaster, then we have to think rationally and carefully about what is actually likely to end the conflict. Eliminating the source of Palestinian grievances by granting them their basic rights under international law is the best way to minimize the likelihood of future violence. The job of the U.S. is not to “support Israel” by aiding Israel’s vengeance, but by facilitating a just settlement. That involves pressuring Israel to end the occupation that serves as Hamas’ greatest recruitment tool.
There is so much more that could be said about this. Current Affairs has numerous articles and interviews covering the Israel-Palestine conflict in more detail. You can read some of them below:
“The History of Arab-Jews Can Change Our Understanding of the World,” Interview with Historian Avi Shlaim (Sept. 28, 2023)
“The War on Palestine,” Interview with Historian Rashid Khalidi
“If You Support Ukrainian Resistance to Occupation, You Must Also Support Palestinian Resistance to Occupation” & “Why Free Speech on Israel-Palestine Matters So Much” by Nathan J. Robinson (July 5, 2023)
“Dreams and Despair in Gaza” (July 2, 2021) & “An Open Letter to Joseph Biden, From a Woman in Gaza” (May 21, 2021) by Haneen Shat
“Israel is Weaponizing Time Against Palestinians” by Omar Aziz (May 1, 2021)
For now, we will leave you with the words of Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council (which is not affiliated with either the Palestinian Authority or Hamas) who appeared on a number of networks over the weekend to provide a perspective rarely heard on TV news:
[CORRECTION: In our haste to ensure that our facts on the many fluid and delicate aspects of this conflict were correct, we made an incredibly embarrassing error. We referred to the great Israeli journalist Gideon Levy as “Gordon Levy.” Our sincerest and humblest apologies! Please check out all of Mr. Levy’s terrific work in Ha’aretz.]
STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
A NEVADA LITHIUM MINE RAISES SERIOUS CONCERNS
Thacker Pass, Nevada contains enormous deposits of lithium—the alkali metal that’s essential to modern electronics manufacturing, and especially to the rechargeable batteries used in electric cars. Nobody is sure how enormous, exactly, but the Biden administration wants to find out, and has offered a $700 million loan to develop and mine the area. Currently, there’s just one lithium mine in the entire United States, also in Nevada, and as Biden himself has noted, “close to 100 percent” of the lithium used by U.S. companies is imported from places from Chile, Australia, or—cue the scary music—China. Changing that status quo, and establishing a domestic supply chain for the metal, has become a priority for the administration.
Unfortunately, there are serious environmental harms associated with lithium mining. As BBC reporter Michael Winrow wrote in 2021, “conventional ore mining” involves large amounts of fossil fuels (and therefore carbon emissions), while other methods require evaporating lithium-laden salts in enormous pools of water, threatening the local drinking supply. It’s not clear which method would be used in Thacker Pass, but John Hadder, director of the Great Basin Resource Watch environmental group, has warned that “we’ve got to be very careful about how we permit these things.”
Beyond the environment, the mine has also raised concerns about “green colonialism” and Native American rights. To the Shoshone-Bannock and Paiute tribes, Thacker Pass is a site of historical tragedy and remembrance:
“The US Cavalry chased the people into this area right here where the mine is being dug up at the moment. And they were massacred by the US Cavalry,” says Ka'ila Farrell-Smith, a member of The People of the Red Mountain. “It's a tragedy, it should be a historical site… unfortunately, the corporations didn't hear that,” she says.
The tribes maintain that, although the land in question is legally owned by the Bureau of Land Management, it was stolen from their ancestors in 1865, and they should be the ones to decide how it’s used. Currently, they hold an annual memorial at Sentinel Rock, which may be disrupted by future mining operations. There are obvious parallels to the Dakota Access Pipeline, which was rammed through Sioux land over the objections of the people who actually live there. In the transition from fossil fuels to green energy, it seems, the abuse of Native Americans—and their determined resistance—is the one constant.
FIGHTING BACK
GM BATTERY PLANT WORKERS WILL BE COVERED BY UAW CONTRACTS
In an important concession to the United Auto Workers, General Motors has agreed—in writing, no less—that workers at its “joint venture” battery manufacturing plants will be covered by any future national agreement with the union. These plants are an important part of the United States’ transition to electric vehicles, but they’ve also been a key flashpoint in the auto industry’s recent labor disputes, making this a major victory.
As the name suggests, “joint venture” plants are created through corporate partnerships between the Big Three automakers and international tech companies like Samsung or Korean firm SK On, which have expertise in battery production that the automakers lack. In GM’s case, the Ultium plant in Lordstown, Ohio was created in 2022 through a partnership with LG. Initially, workers there were non-union, and made just $16.50 an hour (with a maximum wage of $20, attainable after seven years)—significantly less than their peers in traditional car manufacturing, organized by the UAW. As Diane Feely notes in Jacobin, they had to mount their own campaign to unionize, and negotiate their own pay increases separately from other UAW workers—just another example of the divide-and-conquer tactics employers have brought to bear against the union.
Now, the situation is entirely different. Whatever contract the UAW eventually wins, it will also apply to the 720 workers at Ultium. Shawn Fain, the union’s president, sees the win as a sign that his strategy of striking only selected locations at a given time is paying off:
We were about to shut down GM’s largest money maker, in Arlington Texas. The company knew those members were ready to walk immediately. Just that threat provided a transformative win… We know their pain points. We know their money makers. We know the plants they really don’t want to see struck. And they know we’ve got more cards left to play.
AROUND THE STATES
❧ California Governor Gavin Newsom has vetoed a bill that would have decriminalized magic mushrooms, DMT, and mescaline for users over 21. He says he intends to pass the bill in the future, but that he would not do it now because the state does not yet have adequate regulations in place to ensure that dosing is done safely, though the law would not have actually gone into effect until 2025. Psychedelics have been made legal in Oregon and Colorado, and have been found to improve the mental health of veterans, who have been at the forefront of legalization efforts. Despite fears that legal psychedelics would increase crime, this has not been the case in Colorado or Oregon, and some studies have found that mushroom use correlates with a reduction in the likelihood of criminal behavior. Given that we’ve seen its successes elsewhere, for Newsom to veto this bill seems like a needless delay that will leave people without potentially life-saving treatment and force others to needlessly languish behind bars.
❧ After Roe v. Wade was overturned, Idaho Republicans quickly raced to ban all abortions. They love babies and mothers, you see. Just ask Governor Brian Little, who said after the ban went into effect, “We absolutely must come together like never before to support women and teens facing unexpected or unwanted pregnancies.” But according to a new report from ProPublica, since the ban went into effect…
The state’s GOP-led Legislature has disbanded a maternal mortality committee, failed to expand postpartum Medicaid coverage and turned down federal grants for child care.
Idaho is now the only state in the U.S. without a body to investigate the causes of maternal deaths. And while some other states that banned abortion at least made some investments in early childhood education, Idaho turned down $36 million in federal grants—literal free money—to support childcare, which led to a giant cut to preschool teachers’ wages. This is not the first time Idaho, which already has the worst-funded schools in the nation, has done this. They also passed on federal education funding in 2021 because, according to GOP state representative Charlie Shepherd:
“I don’t think anybody does a better job than mothers in the home, and any bill that makes it easier or more convenient for mothers to come out of the home and let others raise their child, I don’t think that’s a good direction for us to be going.”
❧ In Nebraska, labor leader Dan Osborn has joined the race for Senator as an independent. An industrial mechanic by trade, Osborn led the 2021 strike at the Omaha Kellogg’s plant, part of a nationwide labor action that won pay and pension raises from the cereal manufacturer. As a candidate for the Senate, he’s emphasizing nuts-and-bolts economic issues, promising to lower taxes on workers’ overtime pay, “restrict the use of foreign tax havens to hide multinational corporate profits,” and guarantee a “right to repair” for cars, electronics, and other machinery. His social agenda is more bare-bones, limited mostly to a statement that “While I respect the deep moral convictions of my fellow Nebraskans, I oppose attempts to use government to enforce those convictions upon others,” including through abortion bans. Osborn has an uphill battle ahead; according to the Nebraska Examiner, he’s raised just $60,000 in campaign funds, compared to $2.1 million in the hands of incumbent Republican Deb Fischer. Still, he seems to welcome the challenge. “My intent is to go up against the large corporations, just like I did on strike at Kellogg’s,” Osborn has said. “I’m not afraid of them. And they need to pay their fair share in corporate taxes.”
❧ Indiana journalists are suing the state over a new law, which requires a 25-foot “buffer” between police officers and members of the public. The plaintiffs include TV news stations WXIN, WTHR, WRTV and WANE, along with the IndyStar newspaper and various professional associations of reporters and broadcasters. They’re arguing that the “buffer” law presents a clear violation of the First Amendment, as 25 feet is too far away for reporters to adequately observe police actions, and “whenever a journalist receives an order to withdraw while documenting law enforcement activity from a distance of less than 25 feet, that journalist is put to a choice between committing a crime or forgoing reporting.” As the suit points out, the murder of George Floyd only came into the public eye because someone was recording it from close range, and the new law could serve to cover up similar crimes. A court date hasn’t been set, but Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita has already promised to “vigorously defend” the law.
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ More than a hundred more tenants just joined in a rent strike in Toronto. Since June, hundreds of renters in the York-South Weston Tenant Union have spent months protesting corporate landlords who have been evading provincial rent controls by hiking costs “above guideline” and neglecting basic maintenance and repairs. One of the landlords, Dream Unlimited, has attempted to illegally evict tenants who went on strike, despite failing to provide the required notice that they planned to raise rates. They also justified rent increases as a means to pay for repairs but instead pocketed the money. Last month, Mayor Olivia Chow attempted to mediate an agreement Dream Unlimited and the union, but Dream refused to attend and instead began filing to evict the tenants on strike. One tenant told Jacobin, “We’ve had floors with a bedbug epidemic, to cockroaches, to ants. What’s frustrating is being told they’re going to take care of it and then they don’t.” Toronto is already Canada’s most expensive city. But amid a housing shortage, a small group of corporate and financial landlords is using the scarcity to rake in record profits.
❧ Bolivian president Luis Arce has been expelled from his own party, the Movimiento al Socialismo (or MAS). He’s not alone, as dozens of other party members loyal to Arce have also been expelled—including David Choquehuanca, the country’s vice president. It’s the culmination of a bitter power struggle between Arce, who took office in 2020 after a short-lived coup by the Bolivian right, and former president Evo Morales, who has made it clear that he intends to run again in 2025. Morales has accused Arce of plotting to disqualify him from the country’s elections before they can even begin; meanwhile, legal challenges have already been filed against Arce’s expulsion, and important Indigenous groups have called for a “parallel congress” of the MAS on October 17, with Arce in attendance. The infighting shows no sign of slowing down, and as Thomas Graham writes for Foreign Policy, there’s a danger that internal dysfunction on the left could be a gift to Bolivia’s conservative opposition, allowing it to regain power.
❧ Everyone has used a keyboard to write an email or play a game on their computer. But surely, while clicking and clacking away, you have also thought, “Why can’t I also wear this keyboard as a stylish hat?” Thankfully, Google Japan has a solution to your deep-seated longing. Their new “head-turning” invention, called Gboard CAPS, is a fully functional computer keyboard that the wearer can control entirely by tilting their head left and right and then pressing the top, which is shaped like a giant computer key.
Google does not currently have plans to mass produce this device—it is, in fact, a marketing stunt to promote the company’s “GBoard” keyboard plugin for Android and iOS (They have also produced prototypes for other fake keyboards—including the “stick” which puts all keys onto one long row, thus allowing you to increase productivity by having two people type at once!).
Even though you can’t purchase one from Google directly, you can create your own fully-functional keyboard cap using open-source software published on Github. There is even a design document that teaches you how to make the physical cap out of cardboard, so there is literally no reason for all of us not to be wearing one right now!
LONG READ
⚜ In In These Times Magazine, Anthony Flaccavento makes the case for a “Rural New Deal” to help bridge the gap between the political left and middle America:
While many on the Left argue about whether it’s culture or economics that has driven the rightward shift among rural voters (which, by the way, long predates the Trump era), those of us who live in these communities know it’s both. We can rebuild this lost trust only by championing rural and working-class communities. This does not mean putting economic issues above cultural ones — it’s how we build the kind of bedrock trust that allows us to actually change minds on things like gay marriage and transgender rights, to defuse these culture-war weapons that the Right has wielded so devastatingly.
What might happen if millions of people, our fellow citizens in the countryside, began to believe that we progressives understood their frustrations, that we had their back? Might the “politics of resentment,” as Kathy Cramer has described it, lose some steam when we stop dismissing the grievances of rural people and instead invest in the health of their communities and the strength of their economies? …
The Rural New Deal rests on 10 pillars, which each contain specific policy recommendations. While rural-focused, many of the recommendations would also benefit people in cities and suburbs. For example, the second pillar, “Reward Work and Ensure Livable Wages,” calls for a federal jobs guarantee with livable wages, expansion of effective training and apprenticeships for displaced workers, eliminating unfair barriers to unionization and supporting small businesses who struggle to pay fair wages. The third pillar, “Dismantle Monopolies, Empower and Support Local Business,” would provide support for independent businesses, including cooperatives, while taking on extreme corporate concentration through aggressive anti-trust action, reducing corporate subsidies and challenging the unbridled power of private equity.
While the Rural New Deal is a non-partisan call to action, it is rooted in a progressive economic vision. PDA Director Alan Minsky puts it this way: “Addressing the problems and concerns of rural America isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s essential for the health of our nation. Too many progressives have ignored rural and small-town America for too long. The Rural New Deal will change that.”
FLUORESCENT ANIMAL FACT OF THE WEEK
A surprising number of animals glow under UV light!
Researchers at the Western Australian Museum recently spent a few days shining ultraviolet lights at all their preserved mammal specimens (what a job!), and found something surprising. Of the 125 species on hand, 107 of them—or 86 percent—had fur that glowed to some extent, including bats, zebras, moles, polar bears, foxes, civets, and even marsupials like the platypus and echidna. There’s currently no consensus about just why the mammals glow, although Dr. Kenny Travouillon, the museum’s curator of mammalogy, has suggested that it could be “potentially a way for them to recognise each other within their own species.”
The full study can be read here (although, as a warning, it does include some unpleasant images of taxidermy animals.)
Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Fact-checking by Justin Ward. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here. Current Affairs is 100% reader-supported and depends on your subscriptions and donations.