Antony Blinken has said Israel and Hamas representatives had already agreed to '90 per cent' of a proposed deal, and the Pentagon assured on Thursday: 'I can tell you that we do not believe that deal is falling apart.' With the election looming in November, the ongoing war in the southern Levant has proven a divisive issue and put strain on the incumbent Biden administration.

The United States and mediators Qatar and Egypt have for months attempted to secure a ceasefire but have failed to bring Israel and Hamas to a final agreement.

Wars and rumors of war abound. It’s hot and ugly on the war front today. Israel just ingeniously (evil genius?) found a way to maim a few-thousands people by blowing up their pagers... Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon was among the wounded.

Ugly business for Russia and Ukraine, too, where over a million people have died because of the invasion and Ukraine’s choice to defend its own turf. The war in Ukraine is very ugly business that could easily end by Putin just stopping his invasion, but he’s not going to do that either.

Clearly NATO inspires huge distrust because of the many wars its had a part in that had nothing to do with protecting the US or any of its allies, such as in Iraq. I get that NATO does plenty of evil expansion of its own for unjust reasons.

We’re in a situation more dangerous in nuclear terms than the Cold War ever was. The answers to evil dictators like Kim Jung Un and Putin - who has reverted to former Soviet ways of boundary expansion, consolidating power around himself with constitutional revisions that are solely to his benefit, and imprisoning those who pretend they have freedom of speech but use words he’s outlawed while assassinating his detractors - are not easy answers to come by when the imperialists have nuclear weapons and threaten all the time to actually use them.

Peak stress: No wonder, with all of that in a day’s news, that 41% of Americans say they’re at ‘peak stress’ right now, listing, of course, many reasons besides politics, such as economic duress and global issues like war. If you feel anxious, you have a lot of company. 38% believe this year of chaos has been more stressful than last year. The primary sources of anxiety this year include finances (35%), the economy (28%), physical health (25%), the 2024 presidential election (20%), and other world issues (19%).

I wish I could do more in these pages to provide hope alongside the stressful topics I cover, as it is not my wish to add to people’s stress; Hard to do it, anyway, OUTSIDE OF RELIGIOUS-BASED HOPE for each individual’s life, and I try to tread easily on that because this is a news-based and economic based website. It’s a stressful year with no easy answers because few parties are willing to apply good and fair answers that resolve the problems.

Benjamin Franklin’s words are as true today as when first sounded: “I’ve lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing Proofs I see of this Truth — That God governs in the affairs of Men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an Empire can rise without his Aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the Sacred Writings, that except the Lord build the House they labor in vain who build it. I firmly believe this, — and I also believe that without his concurring aid, we shall succeed in this political building no better than the builders of Babel: We shall be divided by our little partial local interests; our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall become a reproach and bye word down to future Ages.”

Security sources confirmed that hand-held radios were purchased by Hezbollah five months ago, at around the same time as compromised pagers. Lebanese media has also reported that home solar energy systems have blown up in several areas of Beirut.

The ensuing panic has caused terrified residents to tear the batteries from their walkie-talkies and throw devices into the street in fear of more explosions. But how do you live if you don't know where the next blasts might come from?

It’s astonishing to think that, until four years ago, the UK government was intending to allow our 5G mobile broadband network to be based around Chinese-made kit. We are not at war with China, of course, and hopefully we never will be. But as a militant dictatorship it is clearly a potentially hostile nation. Would we really want to grant it the ability to intercept and interfere with our communications network?

If you manufacture an electronic device from scratch, you really can programme it to do whatever you want it to do – and no user could tell what you had done simply by taking it apart. Indeed, we could end up with a situation in which most of the country’s mobile phones suddenly ceased to work, or were programmed to send us propaganda or fake news. We like to think of our cars as being autonomous, yet increasingly they are being connected to the internet, especially electric ones. They could all be brought to a grinding halt at the flick of a switch.

Above all, this week’s events provide a strong argument for bringing much more manufacturing back home. Over the past few decades we have become far too dependent on electronics and other devices manufactured in South Asia. While Britain hasn’t itself been targeted this week, the events in Lebanon should wake us all up to the grave new era of cyber warfare.

The UNGA resolution demands that Israel withdraw all of its settlements from the West Bank within a year– including from towns that were Jewish before the Jordanian military expelled local residents in Israel’s independence war in 1948. It demands that Israel cease military activity in Judea and Samaria, and even demands that Israel get rid of passive measures, such as the “wall” (a fence, for most of its length) that keeps suicide bombers out of Israel.

Notably, the resolution never mentions the word “terror” once, nor does it acknowledge that Israeli military activity in the area is a reaction to attacks on Israeli communities and Israeli civilians by Palestinian terrorist organizations. The resolution passed with 124 votes in favor, 14 votes against, and 43 abstentions. Several European Union nations voted in favor of the resolution. The resolution has no binding effect at all, but is merely considered advisory.

However, when looking at states as a whole, New York did not come out on top, according to Yelp. California, it turns out, led the nation in searches for rodent-related pest-control searches, followed by Wyoming, Washington, DC, New Mexico and Wisconsin. And it seems a pest problem is plaguing the entire nation.

Some 12 people appeared to have been killed by current reckoning, and possibly as many as 3,000 wounded in some way, some losing hands and fingers and others their eyesight. Deep abdominal wounds have also been reported in those who had their pagers on their belts.

It transpires that Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, was injured in the wave of explosions. I was left wondering why he was in possession of one of the pagers, presumably Hezbollah-supplied, after reading he was wounded by his own device exploding. Is there some connection here?

It now transpires that there has been a second wave of attacks on Hezbollah communications devices, this time involving walkie-talkies and other similar devices. Apparently “thousands” of hand-held communications devices exploded in Lebanon on Wednesday afternoon, with explosions being heard in the southern suburbs of Beirut, as well as the cities of Nabatieh, Tyre, and Saida in southern Lebanon. There are reports that nine people have been killed and another 300 injured in this second wave of attacks. The Israelis clearly aren’t finished yet.

What will happen next? Nobody knows, but with perhaps thousands of Hezbollah fighters wounded and disabled it will take the terrorists some time to recover and regroup. Those veterans who have lost fingers and hands, or perhaps their eyesight, will now find it difficult to dress and feed themselves let alone fire their rifles and missiles at the IDF. If you live by the sword you can expect to die by the sword. I have little sympathy for them.

It seems they have been taught a severe lesson. Israel, philosophically, intellectually, and practically is away ahead of them, and there’s no sign of the gap closing. Their best option, in my opinion, is to seek peace. Peace always involves compromises and swallowing of pride, but that’s a price worth paying. By both sides.

If people start fighting over whose religion is more important “or saying, ‘Mine is the true religion; yours isn’t true,’ where does that lead? Where?” the pope asked. “All religions are a path to reach God,” he stated. “They are, to use a comparison, like different languages, different dialects to get there. Some Sikh, some Muslim, some Hindu, some Christian, but they are different paths. Understood?” he said.

In response, Chaput wrote that such loose comments “can only confuse.” “Christians hold that Jesus alone is the path to God,” he said. “To suggest, imply, or allow others to infer otherwise is a failure to love. We are called Christians because we believe Jesus Christ is God, the second person of the Trinity,” he stated. “From the beginning of our faith, followers of Christ were unique among world religions because they accepted as true Christ’s extraordinary claim that he is God.”

So what does a company’s social credit score depend on? Apparently, a variety of measures are used to determine a company’s credit score — things like “climate change,” “biodiversity,” “land and water use,” “social justice,” “LGBTQ” causes, and diversity in general.

“How diverse is your board of directors? How diverse is your management team? Things like these are the kinds of things that are in these ESG scores,” says Haskins. Even though the United States doesn’t have a social credit scoring law (most ESG initiatives exist in the private sector), Europe’s CSDDD will nonetheless hugely impact American businesses.

The law “applies to large companies that are based in the European Union” as well as “non-EU companies that do above a certain amount of revenue in the European Union, so for example Apple or McDonald's,” Haskins explains. Further, these high-earning non-EU companies that fall under the jurisdiction of the CSDDD will be forced to adhere to its policies outside of the EU as well.

“It's not enough for them to change their policies in the EU; they have to change it in America. They have to change it everywhere they do business; that's what the law says, and if they don't, then they can be fined 5% of their total worldwide revenue, so for a company like Apple, if you do the math, that's $19 billion for one violation,” says Haskins, who predicts that “no one's going to violate this law because they can't afford to.”