The Acceleration
NEED TO KNOW
The Acceleration
LEBANON
Starting on Sept. 17, hundreds of pagers and two-way handheld radios exploded in homes, supermarkets, buses, hospitals, and on the streets of Beirut and elsewhere, killing at least 37 people and injuring more than 3,000. Many Lebanese, recalling the port explosions in the capital four years ago, reacted in mass panic.
“I can’t believe this is happening again. How many more disasters can we endure?” wondered Jocelyn Hallak, a mother of three, during an interview with the Associated Press. “All this pain, when will it end?”
The Israelis haven’t taken responsibility for the attacks even as they are widely credited for it.
Regardless, it was a shocking and audacious act that left even close observers of the Middle East stunned, and worried about a widening conflict. Meanwhile, as the Economist noted, “The attacks signaled a shift, with Israel taking the initiative in ratcheting up the war.”
Israeli military folks agree. “You don’t do something like that, hit thousands of people, and think war is not coming,” retired Brig. Gen. Amir Avivi, who leads the Israel Defense and Security Forum comprising hawkish former military commanders, told the Times of Israel. “Why didn’t we do it for 11 months? Because we were not willing to go to war yet. What’s happening now? Israel is ready for war.”
As a result, two days after the tech attacks, Israel bombed an apartment building in Beirut’s Dahiyeh neighborhood, a Hezbollah stronghold, killing Ibrahim Aqil, a founding member of the group and its operations chief, along with commanders of the elite Radwan Force and more than 40 other people, the Middle East Eye reported.
Since then, it’s been a theater of escalation: Since Monday, Israel has struck more than 1,500 targets in Lebanon, hitting what it said were militant sites linked to Hezbollah in the country’s south and east and in Beirut. The strikes have killed at least 564 people in Lebanon, including 50 children, and wounded almost 2,000, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry. Thousands have fled their homes.
The strikes occurred after Iran-backed Hezbollah shot more than 100 rockets into northern Israel, noted Al Jazeera. Those rockets were fired as retaliation against Israel for an airstrike that killed a top Hezbollah commander near Beirut a few days before.
Hezbollah has been firing rockets intermittently at Israel since Israeli forces began pounding the Gaza Strip in response to Iran-backed terror group Hamas’ attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed more than 1,200 people.
As Tarek Abou Jaoude of Queen’s University Belfast wrote in the Conversation, war has been brewing for months between Israel and Hezbollah, with tensions periodically rising even as neither side has really planned for a war.
“But things now seem quite different,” he said, referring to the tech attacks. Hezbollah’s secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah “has already declared that a ‘reckoning will happen.’ And, while he has promised similar vendettas for the previous attacks, a humiliation on this scale could very well push Hezbollah to up the ante even further.”
Israelis, meanwhile, want the 60,000 Israelis displaced from northern Israel to be able to go home.
“The center of gravity is shifting to the north,” said Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant recently, meaning that the Israeli military is changing gears to focus more on Lebanon even as the Gaza conflict continues, the Associated Press reported.
But even if Hezbollah wants a war, the majority of Lebanese don’t. Lebanon, grappling with a deep economic and political crisis, can’t survive one, many believe.
“There is no doubt it is a scary moment,” Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib told CNN. “And we are afraid of a coming war because we don’t want a war.”
THE WORLD, BRIEFLY
Dirty Hands
SINGAPORE
Singapore’s former Transport Minister S. Iswaran pled guilty on Tuesday to illegally receiving gifts while in office, in a landmark case that has rocked the Southeast Asian financial hub which prides itself on its clean governance and transparency, the Financial Times reported.
The case against Iswaran began earlier this year, when prosecutors charged him with 35 felonies, including receiving gifts with a total value of more than $312,000 from local businessmen during his term in office.
He initially denied the allegations and vowed to clear his name. But prosecutors ultimately proceeded with only five of the charges, all of which he pled guilty to. The remaining 30 charges will be taken into consideration during his sentencing next month.
Iswaran could now face a fine or up to two years in jail for each charge, according to the BBC. His lawyers are demanding no more than eight weeks.
The former official is known for bringing the Formula 1 Grand Prix to the city-state and played a key role in developing Singapore’s tourism landscape since the late 2000s.
The case shocked the public in a country known for being one of the least corrupt in the world and for having some of the highest-paid officials anywhere, with some ministers earning about $758,000 a year.
Singaporean officials say such salaries are aimed at discouraging corruption.
Before this case, the last time a politician faced corruption charges was in 1986, when authorities investigated then-National Development Minister Teh Cheang Wan for accepting bribes. He committed suicide before he could be charged.
Analysts said the case comes at a difficult time for the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP), which has governed Singapore since its independence in 1965 and long touted its strong stance against corruption and amoral behavior.
The country is set to hold elections next year and while the PAP is likely to win again, it has come under scrutiny over a series of scandals, including a corruption probe against two other ministers last year and the resignation of two lawmakers over an extramarital affair.
Delay, Delay
SOUTH SUDAN
A group of South Sudanese lawyers filed a petition at the country’s top court challenging the government’s decision to postpone elections and extend the rule of the transitional government for two years, a move that had already drawn rebuke from the country’s donors, Reuters reported.
Nearly two weeks ago, President Salva Kiir’s administration announced the extension of the transitional period by two years and delayed elections – originally scheduled for December – to 2026.
This was the second time polls were postponed – the first was in 2022.
The government said the decision will allow the implementation of “critical remaining protocols” agreed to under a 2018 peace accord to end a civil war in the young East African nation. These include the drafting of a constitution to replace the current transitional charter and registration of political parties, Bloomberg added.
But on Monday, five lawyers asked South Sudan’s supreme court to declare the move as “null and void,” countering that it was unconstitutional.
“This extension is unconstitutional and is illegal and we are demanding our government to conduct elections within the time frame,” said Deng John Deng, one of the petitioners.
Kiir’s decision to delay the vote drew criticism from South Sudan’s international donors, who said the government is not fully implementing the 2018 peace deal.
The country has been at peace since the 2018 agreement ended a five-year conflict that killed hundreds of thousands of people. Even so, violence between rival communities is not uncommon and United Nations officials warned earlier this year of potential unrest if the election process is mismanaged.
Desperate Measures
ITALY
Italy moved to deploy its army to guard hospital staff in Calabria and elsewhere after escalating violence by patients and their family members across Italy has left dozens of doctors, nurses and other medical staff injured, Euro Weekly News reported.
One well-known incident captured on video saw doctors and nurses forced to barricade themselves in a room at the Policlinico hospital in Foggia, in the southern region of Puglia, in early September after about 50 enraged relatives and friends of a 23-year-old woman who died after an emergency operation turned on medical staff, the Guardian reported.
Some healthcare workers were injured, with bloodstains visible on the emergency room floor.
Two days later, the same hospital reported another attack, with a patient kicking and punching three emergency room nurses, according to Italian newswire ANSA. Then on Tuesday, also in Puglia, a patient assaulted a doctor at the Francesco Ferrari hospital in Casarano.
After the recorded Foggia attack, the hospital threatened to shut the emergency room, the Associated Press noted.
“We have never seen such levels of aggression in the past decade,” Antonio De Palma, president of the Nursing Up union, told the AP. “We are now at a point where considering military protection in hospitals is no longer a far-fetched idea. We cannot wait any longer.”
In Italy, there had been 16,000 reported cases of physical and verbal assaults on medical staff by patients and their relatives in 2023, the latest figures available.
While these attacks have been occurring throughout the entire country, the frequency of the attacks has been higher in southern Italy, leading the doctors’ guild to request the army be sent to protect staff.
The reasons behind the attacks have been attributed to understaffing at hospitals and clinics, and long wait times for procedures that result in frustration for patients and their relatives.
At the same time, Italy’s salary cap legislation has kept wages low and nearly half of clinical posts in emergency medicine have remained unfilled as of 2022. Meanwhile, the Covid-19 pandemic worsened the staffing crisis, with many health professionals emigrating for opportunities abroad. As a result, Italy is short of around 30,000 doctors.
DISCOVERIES
The Great Escape
For some animals, ending up in the belly of their predators is not always the end.
Japanese scientists recently discovered a species of eel that is able to pull off an elaborate escape after being swallowed by predatory fish.
Researcher Yuha Hasegawa first noticed this unusual maneuver when he released a young Japanese eel – known as Anguila japonica – into a tank with a dark sleeper, a predatory river fish. Hasegawa witnessed the sleeper gobbling up the juvenile eel. However, less than a minute later, the eel was swimming around the tank.
“We had no understanding of their escape routes and behavioral patterns during the escape because it occurred inside the predator’s body,” he explained in a statement.
Hasegawa and his colleagues later conducted a study to understand how the eels pulled off their great escape from the belly of the beast.
They injected 32 eels with a contrast agent that would light up under an X-ray and placed them in the tank with a dark sleeper. They then used a special device that recorded X-ray movies and figured out how these escape artists did it.
“We thought the eel escaped from the mouth of the predator, but in the first footage we recorded the eel escaped from the stomach of the predator,” Hasegawa told the New York Times. “It moved back up the digestive tract toward the gill of the fish.”
Still, it wasn’t easy and the success rate was low: Twenty-eight eels attempted the escape and only nine succeeded.
Time was of the essence, too: The eels spent 56 seconds on average in the attempt to escape.
The researchers explained that A. japonica is built for such escapes, adding that its elusive methods are also uncommon compared with other escape artists in the animal kingdom.
For example, the bombardier beetle sprays a noxious fluid when stuck in the stomach of a toad.
Meanwhile, this study marks the first time scientists have captured footage of a prey species escaping from inside a predator’s digestive tract.
The authors hope to learn more about how such maneuvers might have evolved in eels and whether other species have adapted in similar ways.