Eyeless On Gaza

MGBA. “Make Gaza Beautiful Again,” posted US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on X after President Donald Trump stunned the world with his proposal for a US takeover of Gaza to remove the munitions, rebuild the Strip, and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East”. It was meant to be a comeback for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, Trump 2.0’s first visiting foreign leader who is running out of support from his far-right coalition partners back home over the ceasefire deal.

Trump upended matters by giving shape to his musings 10 days earlier, reiterating that Palestinians—all two million of them—would be moved out of Gaza to countries like Egypt and Jordan to howls of protest from Arab states. Trump has signalled the end of decades-old US policy of drawing the roadmap to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But he hasn’t paid heed to the fact that forcible removal of a population flies in the face of international law and is tantamount to ethnic cleansing. Hamas immediately said the plan could “ignite” the Middle East. No wonder, the White House issued a clarification later, with Rubio saying the relocation would be temporary. What about the riviera then?

Faking It in Germany

In the run-up to the February 23 election, Germany has been flooded with fake news. And it’s coming not just from Russia with its troll factories but also from the Land of the Free. Der Spiegel reported fake news items about Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the Green Party’s Franziska Brantner owning California villas, with Scholz’s in the Hollywood Hills burning down in the LA fires. From impending terror attacks to elite greed, fake news is bolstering the prospects of far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in an outdated economy clueless about structural reinvention—although AfD doesn’t have any solutions for that. Once founded by economists and now largely in the grip of neo-Nazi associates, AfD has already got the biggest leg-up in its 12-year existence with Elon Musk’s endorsement.

AfD is likely to emerge as the second-largest party in the Bundestag after the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Friedrich Merz, frontrunner for chancellor, had vowed he would never deal with AfD but last week’s defeated vote on strict new immigration laws saw the Union and AfD cooperate—seen as a precursor to the fall of the Brandmauer, or firewall, against the far-right. The surfeit of fake news has played into that crisis.

Herculaneum Effort

Herculaneum was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79CE along with Pompeii. Its ruins gave up hundreds of carbonised papyrus scrolls so badly burnt and brittle that they started crumbling as soon as touched. Many were stored at the Bodleian in Oxford. An international competition to decipher the scrolls called the Vesuvius Challenge is now close to unlocking some of the secrets with X-Ray imaging enhanced by AI which will open the scrolls virtually. A device called the synchrotron will accelerate electrons to the speed of light and ‘unfold’ the scroll without destroying it.

Benjamin NetanyahuDonald TrumpGazageopoliticsGermanyHerculaneumIsrael-Palestine conflictMiddle EastMount Vesuvius