happybadger

Russia has recaptured half of the territory it lost to Ukraine in Kursk, a region central to Volodymyr Zelensky’s plan to defeat Vladimir Putin.

A senior Russian commander from Chechnya said that an estimated 50,000 troops were pushing back Ukrainian forces, who either had to flee or “end up in the cauldron”.

“Approximately half of the territory that was occupied by the enemy has already been liberated,” said Major General Apty Alaudinov.

Well-connected Russian and Ukrainian military bloggers have been reporting since Saturday that Moscow’s troops have punched through sectors of Ukraine’s front lines in Kursk.

Mr Zelensky has insisted that the situation has stabilised but the US-based Institute for the Study of War, which holds staunchly pro-Ukraine views, said that it has seen “visual evidence” that Russia has recaptured 46 per cent of its territory in Kursk.

According to some commentators, seasonal rain has turned the ground to mud in the Kursk region, handing Russia an advantage because its forces use more tracked vehicles than Ukrainian troops do.

Boris Rozhin, a pro-Kremlin blogger, posted a video of Ukrainian soldiers pulling an armoured car out of a rain-soaked patch of forest next to a water-logged, mud-coated track.

“Ukrainian forces are doing a lot of whining about how they have a lot of wheeled vehicles, while Russian forces are betting on tracked vehicles,” he said.

The muddy season in Russia and Ukraine is called “rasputitsa” and is renowned for bogging down vehicles on tracks and fields, making travel slow-going.

Emil Kastehelmi, an open-source research analyst at the Finland-based Black Bird Group, also said that the terrain that Ukrainian forces were trying to defend in Kursk favoured the attacker.

“The area is mostly dominated by large open fields with a limited natural cover,” he said, describing Ukraine’s western flank. “Especially without proper fortifications, defending it can be difficult.”

By Mr Kastehelmi’s reckoning, Ukraine has lost at least a third of the territory that it had once held in the Kursk region.

Ukraine launched its daring incursion into Russia in August. Catching Russian soldiers by surprise, Ukrainian forces quickly captured a region around the town of Sudzha measuring roughly 450sq miles, half the size of Dorset.

The invasion boosted morale among Ukrainian civilians but some analysts warned that instead of drawing Russian forces away from the front line, it had weakened Ukraine’s defences.

Last month, George Beebe, the director of grand strategy at the US-based Quincy Institute, said the Kursk operation was already looking like a “blunder”.

He said: “There seems to be a great deal of scepticism about what this incursion is going to accomplish.”

Regardless, Mr Zelensky has made holding on to Ukraine’s Kursk salient central to his ‘Victory Plan’, which he presented to Sir Keir Starmer last week.

But Russian forces have accelerated their attacks along the front line in Donbas since Ukraine invaded Kursk, and on Tuesday pro-Russia officials in occupied Donetsk said that they had now captured two-thirds of Toretsk, a key front-line town with a pre-war population of 34,000 people.

In the northern section of the front line in east Ukraine, Ukrainian officials have also ordered the evacuation of civilians from the city of Kupyansk on the banks of the Oskil river because of Russian advances.

Oleg Sinegubov, the head of the Kharkiv region , said: “The military situation is deteriorating and we cannot ensure the heating season, the provision of electricity, and humanitarian assistance. The enemy is shelling critical infrastructure.”

Since Hamas’s attack on October 7th, which killed approximately twelve hundred Israelis, Jacobson has been increasingly outspoken about antisemitism, and critical of those who question Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, which has killed more than forty-two thousand people. Earlier this month, in a controversial piece published in the Observer, Jacobson wrote that the sustained media coverage of children being killed in Gaza was functioning as a new “blood libel” against the Jewish people. “Such bias as I have described—conscious or not—has contributed not just to the anxiety level of Jews but to the atmosphere of hostility and fear in which they now live,” Jacobson wrote. “The litany of dead children corroborates all those stories of their insatiable lust for blood.”

I recently spoke by phone with Jacobson. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed his views about Israeli military tactics, his concerns about how Jews are being treated in the U.K., and whether the coverage of dead children in Gaza is the result of antisemitism.

What is it that you have wanted to get across to readers since October 7th?

I was in such a confusion of fear and stress and upset and then rage. The fear and the upset—and the heartbreak—was the massacre itself. And then the speed of the response to the aftermath of the massacre was so hideous, so unexpected, such a kind of topsy-turvy version of what we normally expect a response to a catastrophe to be, that it just threw me into half confusion, half fury. What the hell was going on that people could turn like that on the people who’d been attacked? All those people who said, “No, no, hang on, don’t talk about antisemitism. This is anti-Zionism.” All that went as the people attacking Israel couldn’t remember if they were attacking Jews, Israelis, Zionists. I thought, The world that I live in is not the world I knew. It’s changed and I still feel that. I’m living in a world I don’t recognize and find it very hard to comprehend.

After October 7th, there was a rise in antisemitic incidents in many countries. But there was also strong support for Israel, including diplomatic and military support, from almost every powerful Western country.

It was ambiguous but certainly stronger even than what I’ve just suggested. And here was another extraordinary phenomenon: suddenly you could trust the government but you couldn’t trust the people. Governments were sound; people were flaky. Much of this irrationality was coming from institutions of higher education. That was the bewildering thing. And I suppose because I’m an academic at heart and was a lecturer for many years before I became a full-time writer, I looked to that.

After the war in Gaza started and there were all these civilian casualties, we saw Israel intentionally denying humanitarian aid to people who were starving. What should the response from people have been at that point?

That’s not something I can say because I don’t know what my own response should have been. I trusted no one and I trusted no report. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t see some pictures on television. The BBC has been appalling. It just showed you pictures, unbearable pictures, heartbreaking pictures of dying babies every night, but any war would look appalling if you just showed the suffering of the women and children.

So, I thought, Who am I to believe here? I read a lot of people; I believed some, and I didn’t believe others. It’s turned out very badly and the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu is contemptible. I have no doubt about all that, but that didn’t mean that something didn’t need doing. There was no alternative to it. Israel had to try and get Hamas. I thought Netanyahu’s belief that he could wipe out Hamas was stupid. So I felt that this war had to be prosecuted. If a war is prosecuted, it will be ugly.

I asked you about the specific intentional denial of humanitarian aid, and your answer was something like “Well, I don’t know what to believe anymore when I read the news, so I can’t really comment on that.” Is that right?

Put quite like that it sounds as though what I said was stupid and ignorant. One got accounts and accounts and accounts and it was very hard to know what was the truth.

Well, just for example, the American government, which has been very supportive of Israel and has kept sending them weapons, has tacitly acknowledged that Israel intentionally denied humanitarian aid. Lots of humanitarian groups have said the same thing.

Well, if Israel was doing that, then what can one feel except that it’s monstrous? I’ve said one has to balance these things. This thing has got to be done. Did it have to be done quite so cruelly? No. Did it have to be done so . . . See, I’m very worried about the indiscriminate and the disproportionate. I’ve got snagged up on the disproportionate argument and the indiscriminate argument. The disproportionate one I can’t buy because I don’t know how you’d measure what you have to do after that massacre. We know we can’t measure life for life. I don’t buy the disproportionate. I don’t buy it.

So you’re saying the idea that twelve hundred Israelis were killed and now forty-two thousand Gazans have been killed—that comparing the two in itself is not any sort of argument?

Well, all right, Isaac, what’s the figure you’d choose?

I was just trying to clarify what you meant.

I don’t know how you do the mathematics of this, and I’m not going to say the “mathematics of revenge” because, while of course there was an element of revenge, and you wanted it not to be revenge, you didn’t want it to be a punishment either. I hated that word—“punishment.” I think the justification for what Israel did was to try to make sure that this never happened again. And I think in the attempt to make sure that this never happened again, the numbers were going to inevitably have to be high. If you’re a terrorist, you do hide yourself in schools and hospitals. So if the Israelis are going to get you, they’re going to have to attack those things.

If it’s a war crime to hide in a hospital, it’s also a war crime to indiscriminately bomb a hospital.

Well, you’ve just used rhetoric. Indiscriminately. Well, what’s indiscrimination? If you’re trying to go after people who are hiding there, how do you get them if you have to be discriminant? What do you do?

You have to make a judgment about balancing civilian casualties with war.

I’d like to think that Israel has in the main done that.

Does how they have fought the war in the past year, let alone what members of the Israeli government think of Palestinians, make you think that they’re trying to do that?

I would like to think Israel has done its best. Some people will laugh in my face, but I haven’t been convinced that they have been wildly indiscriminate. One or two people in Netanyahu’s cabinet have said the most appalling things. And if they were just taken out right now, removed from government, I would be perfectly happy. The current Israeli administration has no imagination for what it might be to be a Palestinian, I feel that with a great passion. There has been cruelty in this government.

Your piece brings up the number of children being killed in Ukraine and the number of children being killed in Gaza. And you say that the news coverage of the two has been very disproportionate. Can you talk about that?

Yes. It’s interesting. Of all the pieces that I’ve done, this is the piece that seems to upset people most. I’ve thought about writing it for many months and didn’t, and then I thought, Well, no, I’m going to have to do it and just risk it. And it upsets people because the minute you talk about the death of children, not only every word, but every comma, is scrutinized.

Crazy how that works.

Well, I get it, and now think I should have trusted my own feeling at the beginning: don’t go there. But I wanted to record the experience as a Jew, and it was shared by many of my Jewish friends. Night after night after night after night, the BBC showed pictures of a beautiful Palestinian child alive one minute and dead the next. That is the most monstrous thing. We shed tears, we couldn’t bear to see it. Were some children targeted? If children were deliberately targeted, that is absolutely monstrous and indisputably a war crime. If some were targeted, I don’t know. But when a plane flies overhead, it doesn’t deliberately target the Jew. It cannot—there’s no such plane, and there’s no such pilot. And to turn the war into nothing other than the murder of children made me sick, made me not want to trust the news. I was happy to say, This is like watching Hamas propaganda. Look what the Jews do. Look what the Jews do. Ring the bell, folks. Jews kill children.

You compare this with Ukraine, and asked why there is more coverage of children in Gaza. About two thousand children in Ukraine have been injured or killed in two and a half years of war. This year, in Gaza, more than fifteen thousand children were killed.

How do we explain that?

Some Ukrainian children were able to leave many of the front-line areas. Gazans, including children, are not allowed to leave. And Israel has fought an incredibly intense war that has killed a ton of children because they’re not trying to avoid civilian casualties as well as they should. That’s how I would describe it.

And how careful do you think the Russians are to avoid civilian casualties?

I don’t think they’re being careful. And in fact, a lot of Ukrainian children have been kidnapped and taken to Russia. But you were talking about the media. And way more children have been killed in Gaza. So that could explain some of the discrepancy.

Why should this be a matter of numbers? I’m not saying that the media should underestimate the number of Palestinian children killed. It’s a question of whether you choose to lead every story with children killed. Forty-five children were killed today. Thirty children were killed today. Fifteen children were killed today. It became an obsession. It became, and still is.

What should be the lead story on days when lots of children are killed?

I’m not talking about those days. This was every single night. I’m telling you I saw a dead baby every single night.

You couldn’t look at a child, pictures of a child being killed every single night without thinking this is making my people, my kin, out to be child murderers. I’ve got two options for you. I can believe it’s true. O.K., it’s true. It’s true. That’s what we do. That’s what the Israelis, not us, but the Israelis, do. But we feel a kinship with the Israelis. That’s what they do. And so maybe there we are again. Maybe everything that they said about us in 1200 and 1300 was true. This is what the Jews do—kill children. I’m not going to buy it. I’m not going to buy it.

Howard, I think maybe we’re in a bit of a worrisome place if you see photos of dead children on television and your first thought is, They’re trying to make me, a Jew, hate my people.

You’ve twisted what I’ve said. That’s not my first thought. That’s not my first thought.

Second thought?

And it’s not my second thought. It all depends on how often you see them, and when you see them. You see them and you see them and that’s all you see, and then you feel, Is this what the war means to the media? This is what they want to stress again and again and again?

I am not saying that if all those children were being killed that we should not know about it. But it’s perfectly possible now for people to call Jews in the streets of London child-killers. Child-killers. Exactly as we would’ve heard seven hundred bloody years ago.

In April, you wrote, “Netanyahu is enough to try the patience of the West whose leaders have little appetite for sticking to a mission. There is a flaw in our natures that leads to our growing bored with even the noblest causes, let alone those grown stale in their own complacency.” Did you mean the mission to defeat Hamas?

Yeah. I can’t remember. That’s a long time ago. But certainly my feeling, I think it’s fairly well agreed that often the pressure has been brought on Israel to stop it now.

You yourself said they weren’t going to completely defeat Hamas. But I want to bring this back to what you said about the streets of London. One of the things that has been so disturbing about antisemitism, especially after October 7th, is American Jews or British Jews being blamed for what the Israeli government is doing. I agree this is disgusting, but it seems that this has somehow led a lot of American and British Jews, like yourself, to support whatever the Israeli government is doing.

I take your argument. But it’s a bit of a quagmire when you say, “Well, don’t confuse us with the Israelis. We’ve got nothing to do with that.” Because the next stage of that is: all the terrible things that you say about Israel are allowed to be true.

I castigate myself all the time. I know lots of Jews who castigate. I wake up and I think a hopeless war is over. I want it to stop. And then I castigate myself because I think that’s weak. And then I wake feeling quite different, and I want the war to be pursued. I castigate myself for feeling bloodthirsty. I castigate myself for feeling apologetic and I castigate myself for feeling bloodthirsty. Look, the war isn’t about me and the war isn’t about my nature.

Who the hell knows what’s the right thing to do? Why can’t we admit that? We just don’t know. That’s not a carte blanche for the Israelis. If war crimes have been committed, then let them be tried when it’s all clear. But at the moment, in the fog of war—

The fog of war is a year later. I hear what you’re saying about how tortured you are by all this, and you don’t know what is to be done—

No, no. I’m not tortured. I’m not tortured. I’m not tortured. The people who are tortured are the Jews who were tortured and the poor Palestinians. I’m just a Jew living in a safe space at the moment, watching it all, wishing it wasn’t happening. But trying to distinguish what might be true from what’s not true and listening, from where I live, to the helicopters going overhead and people marching through the streets, shouting gibberish and accusing Jews of being genocidal and apartheid and child-killers and the rest of it, and getting very angry. Feeling unsafe. Feeling sorry for Jews. You get that?

Yeah, of course. I guess my fear is that your anger about antisemitism in Britain is leading you to a place where basically nothing the Israeli government can do will be seen as too far. And you may say you feel torn about it, but fundamentally you are going to support this Israeli government whatever it does.

No, I won’t. No, no, no. There’s no “whatever it does.” I don’t know what they’re going to do tomorrow. And I’m not prepared to say I support it.

But fundamentally you think this war should be supported and that the West should continue giving Israel weapons. Is that accurate?

I think the West should continue to give them weapons because I think they are an island surrounded by enemies. They’ve got a lot of fights on their head. But just to be clear: I do not support anything that they might do. I do not support everything that they have done. But I get why they have to do it. I get why they have to do it.

What are things you don’t support but that you think that they have to do?

Well, I didn’t support the whole notion from the start of going in and wiping Hamas out. That looks a bit pitiless, but how do you show pity? This is the problem. How do you show pity when you have to remove an enemy that wants you dead?

I think you should show pity to civilians.

Well, of course you do. And if there’s any suggestion that they are, if you are telling me that you know for sure that the Israelis are going out there and they’re picking off civilians for the fun of picking off civilians, I agree with you. That’s unforgivable if that’s what they’re doing.

They intentionally denied humanitarian aid to people who didn’t have food. We can start there. If we know for sure that’s what they did, then, A, that’s cruel. And, B, that’s stupid.

I would tell you it’s been all over the news, but I feel like you’re not going to trust me when I say that.

Well, I don’t trust. I know, I know. That sounds as though I’ve just turned myself into somebody that puts his head in the sand. I am unwilling on all sides, actually, to trust anybody at the moment. This is what I support: I support the Israeli government’s attempt to wipe out Hamas, to kill them all, to get rid of them all. I support that.

Despite thinking it’s unrealistic?

Despite thinking it’s unrealistic, I want them to do the best they can. I remember Amos Oz saying about a previous war, What do you do if the people you are trying to get to because they are trying to kill you are holding up a child in one hand and shooting at you with another? You go wrong is what you do. You go a little bit too far is what you do. You are forced into cruelties is what you are. Yeah.

I appreciate you taking the time to talk.

I don’t know how this is going to come out, but my fear is somehow or other I’m beginning to sound hysterical or overexcited or extreme. I think that I have been so thrown by the topsy-turvyness of people’s response to the massacre. When people denied that children were killed and women wereremovedd. That was denied. I think the attitude towards that has made me a different kind of person. ♦

A series of falsehoods and threats have swirled in the two weeks since Hurricane Helene tore through six states causing several hundred deaths, followed by Milton crashing into Florida on Wednesday.

The extent of the misinformation, which has been stoked by Donald Trump and his followers, has been such that it has stymied the ability to help hurricane-hit communities, according to the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema).

Katie Nickolaou, a Michigan-based meteorologist, said that she and her colleagues have borne the brunt of much of these conspiracies, having received messages claiming there are category 6 hurricanes (there aren’t), that meteorologists or the government are creating and directing hurricanes (they aren’t) and even that scientists should be killed and radar equipment be demolished.

“I’ve never seen a storm garner so much misinformation, we have just been putting out fires of wrong information everywhere,” Nickolaou said.

“I have had a bunch of people saying I created and steered the hurricane, there are people assuming we control the weather. I have had to point out that a hurricane has the energy of 10,000 nuclear bombs and we can’t hope to control that. But it’s taken a turn to more violent rhetoric, especially with people saying those who created Milton should be killed.”

One post aimed at Nickolaou said: “Stop the breathing of those that made them and their affiliates.” She responded: “Murdering meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes. I can’t believe I just had to type that.”

“People have called me a plethora of curse words, people telling me to shut up and sit down, people who think it’s OK to take out Doppler radar because they think it is controlling the weather,” Nickolaou said. “It is eating up a lot of work and free time to deal with all of this. It’s very tiring.”

A wide range of misinformation has been spread as Helene and then Milton gathered pace in the Gulf of Mexico, such as claims spread by Trump that Fema had run out of cash for hurricane survivors because it has been given to illegal immigrants. Violent threats have also become common, with posts across TikTok, Facebook and X (formerly known as Twitter), alleging that Fema workers should be beaten or “arrested or shot or hung on sight”.

More outlandishly, several of Trump’s closest allies have baselessly asserted that the federal government is somehow controlling hurricanes. “Hurricane Helene was an ATTACK caused by Weather Manipulation,” claimed a video shared by Michael Flynn, a former national security advisor to Trump.

“Yes they can control the weather,” Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right congresswoman, wrote on X last week. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”

This steep rise in falsehoods has drawn a sharp response from Joe Biden, who has blamed Trump for an “onslaught of lies” and told the former president to “get a life.”

“It’s beyond ridiculous,” Biden said of the claims being made around weather control. “It’s so stupid. It’s got to stop.”

Although humans can worsen hurricanes by burning fossil fuels, creating a hotter ocean and atmosphere that gives hurricanes more energy, they cannot create, control or steer individual storms. Also, Fema’s disaster relief fund for hurricane-hit communities is separate from and unaffected by the money spent on giving shelter to migrants.

But for meteorologists, the experiences around Helene and Milton are just an extreme continuation of a trend where the public is increasingly getting its information from extremist figures online rather than experts, according to Chris Gloninger, a former TV meteorologist and climate scientist who faced threats for talking about the climate crisis during his forecasts.

“The modern Republican party has an army of people who are on social media with huge followings who just disseminate this misinformation,” Gloninger said. “I’m seeing my former colleagues getting threats, I’m getting messages that we are steering hurricanes into red states. It’s mindblowing, I’ve never seen anything like this in any disaster.”

Gloninger said that meteorologists are “going to reach a point of burnout. What other profession are people targeted for simply doing their job? All we are trying to do is protect life and property during extreme weather.”

Xiao Chen*, who works in a private equity firm in China’s financial hub, Shanghai, says he is having a rough year.

For his first year in the job, he says he was paid almost 750,000 yuan ($106,200; £81,200). He was sure he would soon hit the million-yuan mark.

Three years on, he is earning half of what he made back then. His pay was frozen last year, and an annual bonus, which had been a big part of his income, vanished.

The “glow” of the industry has worn off, he says. It had once made him “feel fancy”. Now, he is just a “finance rat”, as he and his peers are mockingly called online.

China’s once-thriving economy, which encouraged aspiration, is now sluggish. The country’s leader, Xi Jinping, has become wary of personal wealth and the challenges of widening inequality.

Crackdowns on billionaires and businesses, from real estate to technology to finance, have been accompanied by socialist-style messaging on enduring hardship and striving for China’s prosperity. Even celebrities have been told to show off less online.

Loyalty to the Communist Party and country, people are told, now trumps the personal ambition that had transformed Chinese society in the last few decades.

Mr Chen's swanky lifestyle has certainly felt the pinch from this U-turn. He traded a holiday in Europe for a cheaper option: South East Asia. And he says he “wouldn’t even think about” buying again from luxury brands like “Burberry or Louis Vuitton”.

But at least ordinary workers like him are less likely to find themselves in trouble with the law. Dozens of finance officials and banking bosses have been detained, including the former chairman of the Bank of China.

The industry is under pressure. While few companies have publicly admitted it, pay cuts in banking and investment firms are a hot topic on Chinese social media.

Posts about falling salaries have generated millions of views in recent months. And hashtags like “changing career from finance” and “quitting finance” have gained more than two million views on the popular social media platform Xiaohongshu.

Some finance workers have been seeing their income shrink since the start of the pandemic but many see one viral social media post as a turning point.

In July 2022, a Xiaohongshu user sparked outrage after boasting about her 29-year-old husband’s 82,500-yuan monthly pay at top financial services company, China International Capital Corporation.

People were stunned by the huge gap between what a finance worker was getting paid and their own wages. The average monthly salary in the country's richest city, Shanghai, was just over 12,000 yuan.

It reignited a debate about incomes in the industry that had been started by another salary-flaunting online user earlier that year.

Those posts came just months after Xi called for “common prosperity” - a policy to narrow the growing wealth gap.

In August 2022, China’s finance ministry published new rules requiring firms to “optimise the internal income distribution and scientifically design the salary system”.

The following year, the country's top corruption watchdog criticised the ideas of “finance elites” and the “only money matters” approach, making finance a clearer target for the country’s ongoing anti-corruption campaign.

The changes came in a sweeping but discreet way, according to Alex*, a manager at a state-controlled bank in China’s capital, Beijing.

“You would not see the order put into written words - even if there is [an official] document it’s certainly not for people on our level to see. But everyone knows there is a cap on it [salaries] now. We just don’t know how much the cap is.”

Alex says employers are also struggling to deal with the pace of the crackdown: “In many banks, the orders could change unexpectedly fast.”

“They would issue the annual guidance in February, and by June or July, they would realise that the payment of salaries has exceeded the requirement. They then would come up with ways to set up performance goals to deduct people’s pay.”

Mr Chen says his workload has shrunk significantly as the number of companies launching shares on the stock market has fallen. Foreign investment has decreased in China, and domestic businesses have also turned cautious - because of the crackdowns and weak consumption.

In the past his work often involved new projects that would bring money into his firm. Now his days are mostly filled with chores like organising the data from his previous projects.

“The morale of the team has been very low, the discussion behind the bosses backs are mostly negative. People are talking what to do in three to five years.”

It’s hard to estimate if people are leaving the industry in large numbers, although there have been some layoffs. Jobs are also scarce in China now, so even a lower-paying finance job is still worth keeping.

But the frustration is evident. A user on Xiaohongshu compared switching jobs to changing seats - except, he wrote, “if you stand up you might find your seat is gone.”

Mr Chen says that it's not just the authorities that have fallen out of love with finance workers, it's Chinese society in general.

“We are no longer wanted even for a blind date. You would be told not to go once they hear you work in finance.”

*The names of the finance workers have been changed to protect their identities.