The Full Belmonte, 10/15/2023
Israel-Gaza War
Israeli soldiers in Be’eri. Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
“Israel’s military plans to begin a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip soon, officials said, with a goal of eliminating Hamas’s leadership. The battle could lock the two sides in months of bloody urban combat.” [New York Times]
“Americans in Gaza say they are unable to leave via the border with Egypt, despite an international agreement to grant them passage.” [New York Times]
“Gaza’s health ministry said it would not heed Israel’s order to evacuate hospitals. ‘Our moral position obliges us to continue working,’ said a spokesman.” [New York Times]
“‘I don’t think those are fireworks’: Survivors of Hamas’s assault on a music festival described the attack.” [New York Times]
“In the Israel-Gaza conflict, social media has done more to confound rather than illuminate, writes Steven Lee Myers.” [New York Times]
Politics
“Jeff Landry, a hard-line conservative, won the Louisiana governor’s race, giving Republicans full control of the state.” [New York Times]
“Allies of Representative Jim Jordan are putting public pressure on the Republicans they believe are blocking his path to becoming House speaker.” [New York Times]
“Donald Trump’s political team has been working behind the scenes to twist his party’s primary and delegate rules in his favor.” [New York Times]
“‘Have we passed “peak Ukraine?’ Officials in Kyiv worry that the U.S. and Europe are growing weary of the war effort.” [New York Times]
New Zealand Elects Its Most Conservative Government in Decades
The rightward shift came as voters punished the party once led by Jacinda Ardern for failing to deliver the transformational change that it had promised.
“After an election campaign of fits and starts, in which neither major party appeared to offer much solace to a weary nation, voters in New Zealand on Saturday ousted the party once led by Jacinda Ardern and elected the country’s most right-wing government in a generation, handing victory to a coalition of two conservative parties.
New Zealand’s next prime minister will be Christopher Luxon, a former chief executive of Air New Zealand, whose center-right National Party will lead a coalition with Act, a smaller libertarian party.
Addressing a euphoric crowd at his party’s victory event on Auckland’s waterfront, Mr. Luxon thanked supporters and promised a better and more stable future for the country.
‘Our government will deliver for every New Zealander,’ he said, to whoops and cheers. ‘We will rebuild the economy and deliver tax relief.’
The rightward drift ended six years of the Labour government that was dominated by Ms. Ardern, who stepped down early this year.
‘She’s probably the most consequential prime minister we’ve had since David Lange,’ the Labour leader who came to power in 1984, ‘and, from an international point of view, most charismatic,’ said Bernard Hickey, an economic and political commentator in Auckland, New Zealand. ‘But this election is the landmark of her failure.’
For many voters, Ms. Ardern and her successor, Chris Hipkins, failed to deliver on the Labour Party’s promise of transformational change. In the weeks leading up to the election, New Zealanders, buffeted by the currents of global inflation and its larger Asia Pacific neighbors’ economic woes, overwhelmingly cited cost of living as the primary concern driving their vote.
The coalition is a return to form for New Zealand, which since moving to a system of proportional representation in 1993 has had only one single-party government — the Labour government elected in 2020 under Ms. Ardern. But it is the first time National, which last governed alone in the early 1980s, has been in coalition with a more conservative partner.
With most of the vote counted, support for the Labour Party, which won 50 percent of the vote in 2020, buoyed by the country’s strong response to the coronavirus pandemic, has collapsed to 27 percent….” Read more at New York Times
“The conversation around AI is often rife with fears of misuse and privacy violations. But this week, researchers discussed its potential benefits. They met at the National Academies in Washington, D.C., to discuss how AI could speed up scientific advancement.
Ian C Haydon/ UW Institute for Protein Design
Yolanda Gil, director of AI and data science initiatives at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, believes AI scientists can be more comprehensive and make fewer mistakes than humans. At the University of Washington, scientists are already using AI to design proteins used in new therapies.
Where will AI fit in our future? Read more of NPR's coverage on its dangers and benefits:
In LA, a first-of-its-kind program predicts who is most at risk of falling into homelessness so they can get help before they do.
In May, the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) disabled its chatbot, Tessa, after it gave troubling diet advice.
Will AI destroy the future of work, or can it take over tedious tasks and give us more time to focus? WHYY's The Pulse explores whether AI will replace us or make us better.
Malevolent AI has been a mainstay in Hollywood films. Here's how it claimed its place in movie villainy, from Space Odyssey to Mission Impossible.
NPR's Planet Money tried to teach an AI to write a script for the show from scratch. Listen to the series and judge for yourself whether it was successful.
Generative AI could play a big role in the 2024 election. Here's how to spot AI-generated text and images.” [NPR]
At a Minnesota Twins-Houston Astros game. Adam Bettcher/Getty Images
A parade of strikeouts
“The final game of the playoff series between the Houston Astros and the Minnesota Twins on Wednesday lasted only two hours and 38 minutes. It was a crisply played game — which the Astros won, 3-2 — that highlighted Major League Baseball’s biggest accomplishment this season. Thanks to a 15-second clock that prevents players from dawdling between pitches, the average game lasted just two hours and 40 minutes this season, down a remarkable 24 minutes from last season.
Major League Baseball has trumpeted this change with television commercials. Journalists have praised it for speeding up a hidebound sport. Fans seem to have noticed, too: Attendance rose 10 percent, to its highest level in six years.
The shorter game times will help more fans enjoy the sport’s semifinals, known as the League Championship Series, which begin tonight with an intra-Texas rivalry between the Astros and the Texas Rangers. Tomorrow night, the other series — between the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Philadelphia Phillies — begins.
There will be plenty of good stories over the next couple weeks. The Astros could become the first repeat champions in more than two decades. The Rangers have never won a World Series. Neither has Bryce Harper, the Phillies’ star. The Diamondbacks’ best player, Corbin Carroll, is a 23-year-old rookie. If you like watching only a few baseball games a year, now is the time to tune in.
But the sport still has a basic problem that the celebration over the pitch clock has obscured: Major League Baseball, which can already seem slow compared with football and basketball, includes less action than at any almost any other point in its history.
Baseball executives tried to address this problem with a package of rule changes before this season, including not only the clock but also larger bases (to encourage steals) and restrictions on where fielders can stand (to allow for more hits). They didn’t solve the problem, though.
This chart tells the story:
Source: Baseball Reference | By The New York Times
For most of baseball’s history, hits were much more common than strikeouts — and hits are exciting. They can score runs, as a home run always does, or can put a runner on base who creates game action. Strikeouts, by contrast, involve a batter walking back to the dugout after failing to hit a pitch.
‘The idea that there would be more strikeouts than hits would have been a crazy idea even 20 years ago,’ Joe Sheehan, a longtime baseball writer, told me. ‘Well, strikeouts surpassed hits in 2018 and there have been more strikeouts than hits in every year since.’
(The small recent decline in strikeouts you can see in the chart is the result of pitchers — who tend to be weak batters — no longer hitting for themselves in any game. That change happened two years ago, and it had a one-time effect.)
Going to 11
Why have strikeouts increased so rapidly in the past two decades? Pitchers have become stronger and can throw harder. Computer analysis has taught them how to spin pitches even more effectively than before. And teams have jammed their rosters with pitchers so that many need to throw only one inning at a time, allowing them to throw as hard as possible to just a few batters each night.
As a result, the late innings of games often resemble a procession of strikeouts. During the Astros-Twins game on Wednesday, six of the Twins’ last seven batters struck out.
There are reasons to think that fans would prefer a livelier game. Attendance, despite the increase this year, is still about 10 percent below its 2007 peak. In polls, baseball has slipped to be the country’s third most popular sport, behind both football, which it has long trailed, and basketball. ‘Baseball, in its design, was a game of baserunning and defense, and there’s less baserunning and defense than ever before in the game’s history,’ Sheehan said.
Baseball has more promising ways to address the problem than it has tried so far. It could limit the number of pitchers on a roster to, say, 11; that was a normal number a few decades ago, but teams now often carry 13. Baseball could also lower the mound, as it did in 1969, or shrink the strike zone.
Some of these changes might sound radical, but most successful sports — and successful businesses of any kind, for that matter — make significant changes over time.” [New York Times]
THE WEEK AHEAD
What to Watch For
“Ecuador’s presidential runoff election is today.” [New York Times]
“Federal prosecutors will argue tomorrow that a judge should impose a limited gag order on Trump related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.” [New York Times]
“The U.S. is hosting a joint summit on Friday with the European Union. The leaders are expected to discuss support for Ukraine and the Israel-Gaza war.” [New York Times]
Palestinians gather at the site of Israeli strikes on houses in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip.
“Conditions in Gaza have deteriorated into a ‘complete catastrophe,’ with serious shortages of clean water and food as tens of thousands of Palestinians attempt to flee crippling airstrikes and an imminent Israeli ground offensive. Israel said the next stage of war will include strikes from land, sea and air. Follow live updates.” [CNN]
“Rep. Jim Jordan is the GOP's new House speaker nominee following Majority Leader Steve Scalise’s exit from the race. But the Ohio Republican lacks the 217 votes needed to win the gavel in a full floor vote, keeping the House in a state of paralysis.” [CNN]
“Kaiser Permanente reached a tentative deal with the unions representing 75,000 employees, following the largest-ever health care strike in US history. The strike last week lasted only three days, but the coalition of unions had threatened a longer walkout next month.” [CNN]
“Republicans will reclaim the Louisiana governor’s office, CNN projects, with state Attorney General Jeff Landry winning a majority of the vote Saturday in the state’s ‘jungle primary’ and avoiding the need for a November runoff.” [CNN]
“New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has conceded his Labour Party lost Saturday’s election, as voters punished the government and took the country rightwards nine months after his predecessor Jacinda Ardern suddenly resigned.” [CNN]
MONDAY
“If you are among the more than 10 million people who filed for an extension on your federal income tax return for 2022, your day of reckoning is about to arrive. October 16 is the deadline to file your Form 1040. If you miss this deadline, the failure-to-file penalty is 5% of the unpaid taxes for each month or part of a month that a tax return is late — capped at 25%. There are some exceptions, however, including taxpayers affected by flooding in Illinois, Alaska and Vermont, and those impacted by the recent Maui fires and Hurricane Idalia.” [CNN]
TUESDAY
“Donald Trump is scheduled to be deposed under oath in a lawsuit that ex-FBI agent Peter Strzok brought against the Justice Department for his wrongful termination after the Russia investigation — the latest legal issue the former president faces. In the lawsuit, Strzok alleges Trump has a political vendetta against him — the former president has criticized him in tweets — that led to his wrongful termination, and that the Justice Department wrongfully released text messages he exchanged with former FBI lawyer Lisa Page. Page is also suing. Trump has denied any wrongdoing.” [CNN]
WEDNESDAY
“The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will hold a confirmation hearing for Jack Lew, President Biden’s nominee to be US ambassador to Israel. Lew, a former Treasury secretary and White House chief of staff during the Obama administration, was nominated by Biden more than a month ago. Lew's confirmation has taken on new urgency following the attack on Israel by Hamas militants.” [CNN]
THURSDAY
“The 60-year-old man arrested last month in the killing of rapper Tupac Shakur is scheduled to be arraigned. Duane Keith Davis, known as “Keffe D,” was expected to be arraigned earlier this month on a murder charge stemming from the fatal shooting in 1996, but when he appeared in court at that time, he said his defense attorney needed two weeks to arrange to be present. The judge granted a continuance.” [CNN]
FRIDAY
“President Biden will welcome President Charles Michel of the European Council and President Ursula von der Leyen of the European Commission to the White House for the second US-EU Summit since he took office. In addition to clean energy, global supply-chain infrastructure and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, the wars in Ukraine and Israel are expected to be on the agenda.” [CNN]