Comment on Secretary of State readies November ballots

“There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen,” Vladimir Lenin is famously quoted as saying. Over the past week, Israel has detonated thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies carried by Hezbollah members in a highly sophisticated attack that killed at least 39 people and wounded 3,000.

NEW YORK — President Joe Biden declared the U. S. must not retreat from the world, as he delivered his final address to the U. N. General Assembly on Tuesday as Israel and Hezbollah militants in Lebanon edged toward all-out war and Israel’s bloody operation against Hamas in Gaza neared the one-year mark. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Biden used his wide-ranging address to speak to a need to end the Middle East conflict and the 17-month-old civil war in Sudan and to highlight U.

Thousands of people continued to flee South Lebanon after Israeli airstrikes hit 1,300 positions on Monday, killing at least 492 people. It was the deadliest day in Lebanon since the country’s 1975-1990 civil war. Israel and Hezbollah traded strikes again Tuesday. Israeli military officials said they carried out dozens of airstrikes against Hezbollah, while the militant group said it launched missiles overnight at eight sites in Israel, including an explosive factory 37 miles from the border. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The death toll has risen to 558 people in Lebanon since Monday, with an additional 1,835 wounded, according to Lebanon’s Health Minister Firass Abiad.

A Hanoi court sentenced the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology’s former chief accountant to death after Nguyen Hoang was convicted of embezzling more than 152 billion dong ($6.2 million), according to a posting on the Vietnam government’s website. Hoang was found guilty of committing theft between March 2009 and February 2023, the statement said.

Singapore’s former transport minister pleaded guilty bribery and obstruction of justice after the city-state’s prosecution amended the indictment against him, a surprising twist to the biggest political scandal in nearly four decades. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] S. Iswaran, 62, was convicted on Tuesday after the amended charges were read out to him. It was unexpected as the former politician had vowed to defend himself against a raft of charges including corruption.

Asif Merchant was arrested on July 12. He had just loaded his luggage into his ride to the airport, commencing a journey either to his wife and children in Iran or to a different wife and children in his native Pakistan. In weeks of secretly recorded conversations with a federal informant, Merchant had confided that he had families in both countries.