The Big Story
On a visit that was supposed to be about bolstering the U.S-Israeli alliance, President Biden concluded his trip to Israel Friday by comparing the country’s treatment of Palestinians to Britain’s colonial subjugation of the Irish. The U.S. president offered the analogy during his visit to a Palestinian hospital in East Jerusalem. The hospital visit was already a sore point for Israel after the White House earlier declined a request to have Israeli officials accompany Biden on the stop. It became even more contentious when the Secret Service vehicle driving Biden to the event, which had previously displayed both U.S. and Israeli flags, removed the flag of Israel when it entered East Jerusalem, a move that many observers interpreted as calling into question Israel’s sovereignty over its capital.
In his remarks at the hospital Friday morning, Biden sought to draw a connection to his own roots. “The background of my family is Irish American. And we have a long history not fundamentally unlike the Palestinian people, with Great Britain and their attitude toward Irish Catholics over the years for 400 years,” the president said, in a comparison that managed to simultaneously indict two of the United States’ staunchest allies, Israel and the United Kingdom. Leaving the hospital, Biden traveled to Bethlehem, where he spoke with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in a meeting that reconfirmed his commitment to an eventual two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians but yielded no substantive political progress.
Read More: https://www.jpost.com/israeli-news/article-712204
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→ Following his trip to Israel, Biden on Friday landed in Saudi Arabia, where he had his work cut out for him trying to secure meaningful concessions from the estranged ally. But the White House started the trip off with a PR win by announcing Friday morning, before Biden landed in Jeddah, that the Saudis had agreed to open their air space to all commercial aircraft from Israel—a sign that the Saudis are moving toward normalizing relations with Israel in line with the vision of the Abraham Accords. After the Saudis announced the move—weeks after word of it first broke in the Israeli press—Biden called it a historic decision and praised his own administration for working to secure the deal.
→ Kaja Kallas, the prime minister of Estonia, announced her resignation on Thursday, becoming the latest in a string of world leaders to leave their posts recently, including Boris Johnson in Britain, Mario Draghi in Italy, and Gotabaya Rajapaksa in Sri Lanka. These resignations, on top of Russia’s war in Ukraine, surging inflation, and a global food crisis, all contribute to a growing sense of geopolitical unease—further deepened this week when Shinzo Abe, the longest serving prime minister in Japan’s history, was assassinated. Kallas will now work quickly to form a new government in Estonia amid the country’s mounting concerns about inflation, energy prices, and the Russian war being waged on its doorstep.
→ Cindy Adams, the legendary New York gossip columnist, remembers her friend Ivana Trump, the Czech American model, businesswoman, and ex-wife to Donald Trump, who died in New York City on Thursday at the age of 73. Adams had a front-row seat for the drama that brought Ivana to national attention. “I was with Donald when he was courting her. What was not to fall for her? What was not for him to like? She was a skier. Gorgeous. Blonde. International. Stood out brighter than a LED bulb. Larger than life. She talked, she joked, she dressed.” Adams was also there for the sordid second act, as Donald’s unfaithfulness to Ivana and affair with Marla Maples became fodder for every tabloid in the United States. Ivana, however, had the third act all to herself: “Years and headlines later,” Adams writes, “she lived well. She shopped well. She dated well.” Ivana is survived by her three children, Ivanka, Eric, and Donald Jr., and her 10 grandchildren.
Quote of the Day from Adams’ tribute to the late Ivana Trump: “Ivana. Larger than life. Blonde hair. With extra pieces stuffed in. Long eyelashes. With extra fakes glued in. An East 64th Street townhouse. French furniture. Sometimes fresh gold paint touched up the legs.”
Read More: https://nypost.com/2022/07/14/cindy-adams-remembers-ivana-trump/
→ Remember when we called in the military to airlift baby formula? “I’ve directed my team to do everything possible to ensure there is enough safe baby formula and that it is quickly reaching families that need it the most,” President Biden boasted at the time. Well, call off the parade, because it didn’t work. For the first week of July, supplies of powdered formula products hit their lowest level this year, and while the second week of July saw a slight improvement, the shortages remained dire in several states. “It has not improved at all,” Keith Milligan, the controller of Georgia and Alabama’s Piggly Wiggly stores, told The Wall Street Journal. The shortage was initially caused by an Abbott Laboratories factory closure, which came after several deadly bacterial infections were traced to the company’s large plant in Sturgis, Michigan. On May 18, weeks into the shortage, the Biden administration announced Operation Fly Formula, which would use military planes to fly in formula from Europe, Australia, and Mexico; in the two months since then, the U.S. government says it has transported the equivalent of more than 55 million eight-ounce bottles to the United States—10 million bottles less than what U.S. consumers typically use in a single week.
→ Japan is moving to boost its production of nuclear energy—a fraught policy change for a country with a traumatic history of nuclear power, including the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Accident, when an earthquake knocked out several reactors and led to the evacuation of 100,000 people. Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party, however, has sought to ramp up nuclear energy production, and it won seats in parliament campaigning on the issue, pledging to increase nuclear power from its current level of 5% of Japan’s energy portfolio to between 20% and 22%. The move to increase Japan’s nuclear energy production was especially resonant with voters in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which drove up global energy prices, as well as Russia’s more recent seizure of the Sakhalin-2 gas and oil project in late June. Japan had imported 10% of its liquefied natural gas from Russia, most of it through that Sakhalin-2 project, in which the country also had a sizable ownership stake.
→ The West’s efforts to stymie Russia’s war machine with sanctions are being undermined by Chinese firms, which have increased their exports of microchips, aluminum oxide, and other items with key military uses to Russia. Washington, D.C., has been trying to call out those companies supporting Russia’s military, adding five Chinese companies to the State Department’s trade blacklist in June, but many of the items traded between Russia and China could be used in a military vehicle just as easily as a luxury sedan, making it difficult to say that these companies are knowingly aiding Russia’s military. On the whole, however, China is exporting considerably fewer goods to Russia since the start of the war, with Chinese companies worried about getting blacklisted by the West.
→ The Secret Service deleted text messages exchanged on Jan. 5 and 6 after receiving a records request from oversight officials, according to a letter sent by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. In recent weeks, the Secret Service has emerged as a key part of the Jan. 6 investigations, and the service’s communications from that day could be used to corroborate two significant stories: one, that Vice-President Mike Pence refused to get into his motorcade—“I’m not getting in the car,” he reportedly said—as doing so and fleeing the Capitol would make it impossible for him to certify the election. The other, from testimony given by Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Trump’s chief of staff, is the allegation that Trump had attacked a member of his Secret Service detail. While the erasure of these messages has raised alarms and suspicions among the Jan. 6 committee members, it has been vociferously denied by Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi. “The insinuation that the Secret Service maliciously deleted text messages following a request is false,” he said.
→ MAP OF THE DAY:
Today’s map offers a comparative view of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. Each of the red dots on the maps indicates the location of a large fire caused by Russian bombs and missiles, with the map on the left showing fires on July 8 and the map on the right showing fires on July 12. Between the 8th and 12th, Ukraine received American-supplied M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems—precision missiles that were used to attack Russian munitions facilities. The war in Ukraine is now nearing its fifth month, with more than 5,000 civilian casualties in the country, and with the United States supplying more than $54 billion in military and emergency aid to date.
→ Is Florida Gov. Rick DeSantis’ legislation to fix higher education doomed to fail? That’s the contention made here by Jacob Shell, a professor at Temple University who argues in this intriguing thread that the core of the problem with academia is actually the grant system and that DeSantis’ proposal is likely to make things even worse.
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
Your Weekend Reads
Scroll editor Sean Cooper comes correct with your Weekends Reads. Enjoy, and see you back here on Monday.
→ One of the more memorable bits from Curb Your Enthusiasm’s latter seasons involves Larry David opening up a coffee shop, Latte Larry’s, besides another coffee shop, Mocha Joe’s, because he’d gotten into a fight with the owner of Mocha Joe’s. The spite store, David explains to Mocha Joe himself, will be “exactly the same as yours, only charging much lower prices. All for the express purpose of taking you down.” Larry’s shop inspires other celebrities to open their spiteful endeavors (Mila Kunis, jewelry; Sean Penn, exotic birds), a gag that works well, Joel Stein notes in this piece for Air Mail, because rarely does anyone go to such great lengths to express their resentment. ”Spite, after all, festers silently inside us. We know that acting on it is dangerous, difficult, and antisocial.”
But times are changing, Stein says, and spite stores are all the rage these days, from gun-rights activist David Hogg’s pillow startup to spite the maximal-MAGA Mike Lindell’s MyPillow, to a rival shaving-razor arms race, to several spite-fueled coffee outfits.
Coffee, perhaps due to its bitterness and its ability to make people agitated, is the most common outlet for spite. Black Rifle Coffee was a 50-employee company in 2017. But when Starbucks said they would hire 10,000 refugees in response to Trump’s Muslim ban, Black Rifle Coffee spited it up, claiming it was somehow going to hire 10,000 veterans in the next six years. It circulated a meme that went viral, with Photoshopped Starbucks cups near ISIS fighters. Now Black Rifle Coffee is traded on the New York Stock Exchange and was valued at $1.7 billion at its launch in March.
Read More: https://airmail.news/issues/2022-7-2/spite-the-power
→ In an article for The Wall Street Journal, Tawnell D. Hobbs and Sara Randazzo examine the decision facing parents who have discovered journals, weapons, and materials that suggest their troubled teenagers are planning to carry out a mass school shooting. One mother, Nichole Schubert, ultimately decided to alert police after she discovered a detailed plan in her 17-year-old son’s journal to carry out an attack on the anniversary of the mass shooting at Columbine, with an itinerary to murder her and her mother’s boyfriend at 5:00 a.m. before arriving to the local school at 12:20 p.m. “As hard as it was to turn him in, I don’t have any regrets,” Nichole Schubert said. “I would never be able to forgive myself if I didn’t make that call and something happened.” A Justice Department analysis of 171 school shootings that were averted before they happened found that roughly half of the attacks were thwarted because other children alerted authorities after learning of the plan, while only 4% of the shootings were prevented by parents of the suspects. For the few parents who become aware of their teenager’s schemes, the difficult question, explored here, is “whether police can steer their children to the help they need.”
Read More: https://www.wsj.com/articles/school-shootings-should-parents-call-police-11657465830
→ Exploring the effects of pandemic-era remote instruction within the larger context of the ongoing upheaval across education, William Davies writes in the London Review of Books how the degraded online class experience is just the latest radical oversimplification of ideas and concepts in education. A reflection of an ongoing obsession with performance over knowledge, it’s evidence of “a much broader ideology of literacy at work here, which derives not just from the fetishisation of technology, but the idolatry of markets.” Although focused on education in the United Kingdom, the lesson applies just as well to U.S. schools, where the changes Davies explores are more significant and longer-lasting than the current culture war obsession of gender, identity, and wokism inside the classroom.
If people today worry about using the ‘wrong’ words, it is not because there has been a sudden revival of 1970s pedagogy or radical local government, or, given the political and economic trends of the past dozen years, because the humanities are flexing their muscles. Visit any actual school or university today (as opposed to the imaginary ones described in the Daily Mail or the speeches of Conservative ministers) and you will find highly disciplined, hierarchical institutions, focused on metrics, performance evaluations, ‘behaviour’ and quantifiable ‘learning outcomes.’ Andreas Schleicher is winning, not Michel Foucault.
If young people today worry about using the ‘wrong’ words, it isn’t because of the persistence of the leftist cultural power of 40 years ago, but—on the contrary—because of the barrage of initiatives and technologies dedicated to reversing that power. The ideology of measurable literacy, combined with a digital net that has captured social and educational life, leaves young people ill at ease with the language they use and fearful of what might happen should they trip up.
There’s no question that literacy and pedagogy must evolve alongside technology. It’s possible to recognise this while also defending an educational humanism—with a small h—that values the time and space given to a young person to mess around, try things out, make mistakes, have a say, and not immediately find out what score they’ve got as a result. It has become clear, as we witness the advance of Panopto, Class Dojo, and the rest of the EdTech industry, that one of the great things about an old-fashioned classroom is the facilitation of unrecorded, unaudited speech, and of uninterrupted reading and writing.
Read More: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n04/william-davies/how-many-words-does-it-take-to-make-a-mistake
All women at times wish they were male when they become aware of the perks and privileges delivered to male humans. It’s quite normal. Internet merely is another source of that information.