Flagship

Israel strikes Beirut on eve of Oct. 7

Israel bombarded Beirut in what appeared to be its heaviest assault yet on the Lebanese capital, on the eve of the one-year anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. The airstrikes, aimed at dismantling Iran-backed Hezbollah, displaced yet more civilians in Lebanon, where an estimated 1.2 million peple have left their homes. Israel also intensified attacks in Gaza, a year after Hamas’ attack turned the region “upside down,” upending its power equation and security, The Washington Post’s David Ignatius wrote: Israel now seems on the brink of war with Iran while locked in a bitter conflict in Gaza. “Few Israelis or Palestinians believe it will end anytime soon,” a Haaretz correspondent wrote. “This one appears to be a war with no endgame.”

Trump returns to shooting site

Donald Trump returned to the site of his first attempted assassination alongside Elon Musk, exactly one month before the US presidential election on Nov. 5. The Saturday rally in Butler, Pennsylvania was aimed at recapturing Trump’s momentum immediately following the July shooting, when he sat comfortably ahead of President Joe Biden in the polls, analysts said. Now, Trump is in a deadlocked race against Vice President Kamala Harris, who embarks this week on a flurry of media appearances and interviews, ranging from The Howard Stern Show to Call Her Daddy, a podcast especially popular among Gen Z women. Severe storms, escalations in the Middle East, and perhaps even an unforeseen “October surprise” still threaten to upend the election.

China and North Korea celebrate ties

China and North Korea pledged a “new chapter” in their relationship on the 75th anniversary of establishing diplomatic ties. The renewed alignment comes as the West becomes increasingly vocal about China’s military links to North Korea, Russia, and Iran — an allegiance many have dubbed the “axis of evil,” echoing former US President George W. Bush. While some analysts have cautioned against overestimating that cohesion, a China expert at foreign policy think tank Stimson Center noted that Beijing’s motivation in opposing the US “matters much less than the substance, and the relationships come across as an axis. When it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck.”

Europe’s far right unites in Italy

Europe’s far-right pantheon rallied in Italy Sunday in support of the country’s embattled deputy prime minister. Matteo Salvini faces the possibility of a six-year prison sentence stemming from his 2019 decision to bar a boat carrying more than 100 migrants from docking in Italy. Far-right firebrands including Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders came to Salvini’s defense, railing against Brussels and illegal immigration. The rally was the latest demonstration of Europe’s growing fragmentation and polarization, a reflection of the fact that, increasingly, Europe’s “governments have struggled to find common ground on even basic issues, much less some of their most acute problems,” The Wall Street Journal wrote.

TikTok, AI threaten Google ad dominance

TikTok and artificial intelligence are threatening Google’s long-standing dominance in search advertising. Brands on TikTok can now put their ads in specific searches, while AI startup Perplexity plans to include ads under its search chatbot’s answers. The tech giant has found itself in a “vulnerable” moment, an ad executive told The Wall Street Journal: A US judge recently ruled Google holds an illegal monopoly on online search, and the company is in the middle of another antitrust trial over its ad business. Marketers in the $300 billion search ad industry are far from abandoning Google, Digiday noted: TikTok’s numbers “look promising… But at the end of the day, they’re just that: promising.”

Indian opposition set for state wins

India’s opposition parties seem set to win two state elections this week, exit polls suggest, in what could prove a blow to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The Indian leader notched a weaker-than-expected victory in national elections earlier this year, and poor regional showings could further embolden his rivals. In Haryana, a Hindi-speaking state where Modi’s party has been influential, farmers have hit back at the government’s crop price policies, while a loss in the territory of Jammu and Kashmir signals that voters remain frustrated by New Delhi’s decision in 2019 to bring the region under federal control after years of semi-autonomy, India Today wrote. Yet despite the increased political competition, the prime minister’s party “retains a position of national strength,” a Carnegie Endowment report noted.

Vietnam economy soars on trade boom

Vietnam’s economy grew at its fastest rate in two years in the third quarter of 2024. The better-than-expected 7.4% rise in GDP, fueled by booming trade with the US, comes despite the country being hit by September’s Typhoon Yagi, which devastated key manufacturing hubs and killed more than 250 people. The rosy times may not last, analysts warned, as a slower US economy could curb demand for Vietnam-made products, including high-end laptops and smartphones. Often hailed as the “greatest winner” of the US-China trade war so far, Vietnam “needs to keep reforming,” The Economist argued earlier this year, to prevent geopolitical turmoil and an aging domestic population from hampering the country’s future growth — or potentially threatening its regime.

India’s rich boost luxury watch sales

Swiss watch exports to India rose 20% year-on-year in the first seven months of 2024. The value of exports has grown by a record 41% compared to the same period in 2022, driven by India’s rapidly increasing number of multimillionaires. The country is the world’s fastest-growing major economy, and its sheer size and burgeoning wealth mean its luxury market is also “exponentially growing,” an analyst told the Financial Times. Branding deals with cricket players and Bollywood stars have helped, too. It’s rare good news for the high-end watch industry: Global sales have slumped in the last year, mainly due to a precipitous drop in Chinese demand, its second-largest market.

Earth’s planet defense test advances

Earth is getting closer to being able to defend against extraterrestrial threats. A spacecraft called Hera, set to launch Oct. 7, will travel to a binary asteroid system — in this case, one big rock, Didymos, orbited by another smaller rock, Dimorphos. In 2022, NASA sent another spacecraft, DART, to punch Dimorphos — the theory being that if an asteroid were to endanger Earth like the one that killed most dinosaurs 66 million years ago, we could defend Earth by knocking the rock off course. DART was a “triumph,” The New York Times noted, and the European Space Agency’s Hera will finish the experiment, taking deeper observations of the asteroid system. Together, DART and Hera will help create the first planetary defense protocol, just in case.

Dinosaurs’ even-more-fiery end revealed

A huge underwater crater off West Africa was confirmed to be 66 million years old, suggesting that most dinosaurs went extinct after two asteroids hit Earth in quick succession. Scientists already knew that a massive rock impacted near Chicxulub in Mexico 66 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous Period, throwing up enough dust to block out the sun. Then, in 2022, researchers discovered a bowl-like undersea feature near Guinea’s coast — likely caused by a five-mile-wide asteroid 66 million years ago, perhaps even part of the same asteroid that impacted Chicxulub, a new study suggests. The West African impact would have caused a half-mile-high tsunami “in what was just extra rotten luck for the dinosaurs,” Gizmodo wrote.

Oct. 7:

• The winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology is announced.
• The World Meteorological Organization releases its global state of water report.
• South Korea’s president Yoon Suk Yeol embarks on a tour of the Philippines, Singapore, and Laos.

New York City’s second biggest art museum celebrates 200 years this month with two new exhibitions. Since opening as a library in 1824, the Brooklyn Museum, The New Yorker noted, “is one of the few institutions to have survived Brooklyn’s journey from village to metropolis,” becoming a “lovely Frankenstein’s monster of different eras and aesthetics.” One exhibit, “The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition,” celebrates artists who, aside from being good enough to feature in one of the city’s leading museums, have maintained a studio in the borough at a point in the last five years, while another exhibition, “Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art,” features a lot of the museum’s permanent collection, but recurates it into eight themes stemming from America’s history of colonialism and marginalization.

• DJs are debating whether AI can replace them.
• ADNOC’s still on the hunt after $13 billion acquisition.
• A London lawsuit could amp up environmental pressure on big businesses.