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U.S. Support for Israel's War Has Become Indefensible
Phil Klay
"This is our 9/11," an Israeli Defense Forces spokesperson said a few days after the rape, torture, kidnapping, and mass murder of Israelis on October 7. Or it was worse than 9/11. "Twenty 9/11s," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said a few weeks later, once the scale of the devastation was evident. As for the current military campaign in Gaza? Earlier this month, Netanyahu told new IDF cadets, "We are preventing the next 9/11."I'm a New Yorker. For me, 9/11 was the unbearable loss of th...
Benjamin Netanyahu Is Israel's Worst Prime Minister Ever
Anshel Pfeffer
If Benjamin Netanyahu had accepted defeat in June 2021, finally yielding the stage to a coalition of his opponents, he could have retired at the age of 71 with a decent claim to having been one of Israel's more successful prime ministers.He had already surpassed the time in office of Israel's founder, David Ben-Gurion, becoming the country's longest-serving prime minister in 2019. His second stretch in office, from 2009 to 2021, coincided with perhaps the best 12 years Israel had known since its ...
Winners of the 2024 World Nature Photography Awards
Alan Taylor
Lukas Walter / World Nature Photography Awards
The winning images and photographers of this year's World Nature Photography Awards have just been announced. Contest organizers have once more shared some of the winning images, shown below, from their 14 categories. Captions were provided by the photographers and have been...
Holi 2024: The Festival of Colors
Alan Taylor
Raj K Raj / Hindustan Times / Getty
This week, Hindus around the world are celebrating Holi, the "festival of colors"--a springtime celebration where revelers throw brightly colored powders at friends and strangers alike. Participants gather to welcome the arrival of spring, commemorate Krishna's pranks, and allow one ano...
Beijing Is Ruining TikTok
Michael Schuman
By all rights, TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, should be one of the world's most respected companies. The technology start-up has created an innovative social-media platform with global appeal--an achievement that puts ByteDance in the elite ranks of Facebook and X.There's a single reason the company doesn't get that respect: It's Chinese.On March 13, the House of Representatives passed a bill with unusually wide bipartisan support that will ban TikTok from the United States unless ByteDance d...
Conspiracy Theories About the Moscow Attack Are Unnecessary
Graeme Wood
Updated at 2:05 p.m. ET on March 23, 2024A decade ago, when foreign fighters were flowing into Syria, the Islamic State's capital, Raqqa, became a sort of Epcot of global jihad: New arrivals from different nations clustered together in their national groups. If you were a recent arrival from France or just wanted to know where to get a croissant, you could visit a cafe full of French people and ask. Tens of thousands of foreign fighters came from places as distant as Chile and Japan. Russia alone...
The Angst Behind China's 'Lying Flat' Youth
Christina Knight
On Halloween in 2022, outside a party the police had just disbanded in Beijing's warehouse district, I saw a 20-something woman in a sparkly spandex suit and bunny ears run into the road. "Freedom, not testing!" she shouted. "Reform, not revolution! Votes, not dictators! Citizens, not slaves!"Those were familiar words at Tsinghua University, where I was studying for a master's degree. From a bridge near campus, someone had hung a banner emblazoned with the slogans. The banner's maker, who became ...
Photos of the Week: Green River, Fire Ritual, Space Needle
Alan Taylor
Idrees Mohammed / AFP / Getty
A massive ballet class in Mexico City, the Night of Ghosts festival in Greece, severe tornado damage in Indiana, a garbage-strewn beach in Bali, airdrops of humanitarian aid over the Gaza Strip, a St. Patrick's Day parade in Tokyo, a robot among tulips in the Netherlands, colorful Holi celeb...
Germany's Zombie Government Is Fueling the Far Right
Joseph de Weck
At a time when far-right movements are surging across Europe, Germany seems to occupy a zone of its own.On one hand, the country's far-right Alternative for Germany--the party that wants to make abortion an "absolute exception," shut down the Ramstein U.S. military base, and turn Europe into a "fortress" against migration--has been gathering strength, its poll numbers rocketing in the past two years from 10 percent to 19 percent.On the other hand, the country's civil society and politicians seem to...
Is the Destruction of Gaza Making Israel Any Safer?
Andrew Exum
Israeli forces are killing thousands of innocent civilians and badly damaging their country's standing with its most important partners, including the United States. Israel has also no doubt severely degraded Hamas's military capabilities, but the question needs to be asked: Is the country's furious response to the Hamas invasion of October 7 making Israel any safer? At best, it's still too soon to say--but on balance, what I see worries me.It sometimes takes years to fully appreciate the strategi...
A Suspicious Pattern Alarming the Ukrainian Military
Graeme Wood
Earlier this month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky got unusually testy over the failure of the United States to deliver anti-missile and anti-drone systems. On March 2, a strike in Odesa had killed 12 people, five of them children. "The world has enough missile-defense systems," he said. Debates over funding have kept those systems from being delivered. "Delaying the supply of weapons to Ukraine, missile-defense systems to protect our people, leads, unfortunately, to such losses."Others i...