Israeli Strike on Central Beirut Reportedly Kills Hezbollah’s Spokesman

A rare Israeli airstrike on central Beirut killed Hezbollah’s chief spokesman on Sunday, an official with the militant group said. Earlier, Israeli strikes killed at least 12 people in the Gaza Strip, officials said, where Israel has been at war with the Palestinian Hamas for over a year.

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The latest in a series of targeted killings of senior Hezbollah officials came as Lebanese officials were considering a United States-led cease-fire proposal. Israel also bombed several buildings in Beirut’s southern suburbs, where Hezbollah has long been headquartered, after warning people to evacuate.

Mohammed Afif, the head of media relations for Hezbollah, was killed in a strike on the Arab socialist Baath party’s office in central Beirut, according to a Hezbollah official who was not authorized to brief reporters and so spoke on condition of anonymity.

Afif had remained especially visible after the eruption of all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah in September and the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was also targeted by an Israeli airstrike. Last month, Afif had hastily wrapped up a press conference in Beirut ahead of Israeli strikes.

A rare strike on central Beirut

An Associated Press photographer at the scene of Sunday’s strike saw four lifeless bodies and four wounded people, but there was no official word on the toll. People could be seen fleeing the neighborhood. There was no comment from the Israeli military.

“I was asleep and awoke from the sound of the strike, and people screaming, and cars and gunfire,” said Suheil Halabi, who witnessed the strike. “I was startled, honestly. This is the first time I experience it so close.”

The last Israeli strike in central Beirut was on Oct. 10, when 22 people were killed in strikes on two locations.

Hezbollah began firing rockets, missiles and drones into Israel the day after Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack ignited the war in Gaza. Israel launched retaliatory airstrikes in Lebanon and the conflict steadily escalated, erupting into all-out war in September. Israeli forces invaded Lebanon on Oct. 1.

Hezbollah has continued to fire dozens of projectiles into Israel each day and has expanded their range to the central part of the country. A rocket barrage on the northern city of Haifa on Saturday damaged a synagogue and wounded two civilians.

More than 3,400 people have been killed in Lebanon, according to the country’s Health Ministry, and over 1.2 million driven from their homes. It is not known how many of the dead are Hezbollah fighters.

On the Israeli side, Hezbollah’s aerial attacks have killed at least 76 people, including 31 soldiers, and caused some 60,000 people to flee from communities in the north.

Overnight strikes in central Gaza kill 12

Israeli strikes killed six people in Nuseirat and another four in Bureij, two built-up refugee camps in central Gaza dating back to the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation.

Another two people were killed in a strike on Gaza’s main north-south highway, according to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the central city of Deir al-Balah, which received all 12 bodies.

The war between Israel and Hamas began after Palestinian militants stormed into Israel on Oct. 7. last year, killing about 1,200 people — mostly civilians — and abducting around 250 others. Around 100 hostages are still inside Gaza, about a third of them believed to be dead.

The Health Ministry in Gaza says around 43,800 Palestinians have been killed in the war. The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but has said women and children make up more than half the fatalities.

Around 90% of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million Palestinians have been displaced, and large areas of the territory have been flattened by Israeli bombardment and ground operations.

Israeli police arrest 3 after flares fired at Netanyahu’s home

Israeli police meanwhile arrested three suspects after flares were fired at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s private residence in the coastal city of Caesarea.

Netanyahu and his family were not at the residence when two flares were fired at it overnight, and there were no injuries, authorities said. A drone launched by Hezbollah struck the residence last month, also when Netanyahu and his family were away.

The police did not provide details about the suspects behind the flares, but officials pointed to domestic political critics of Netanyahu. Israel’s largely ceremonial president, Isaac Herzog, condemned the incident and warned against “an escalation of the violence in the public sphere.”

Netanyahu has faced months of mass protests. Critics blaming him for the security and intelligence failures that allowed the Oct. 7 attack to happen and for not reaching a deal with Hamas to release scores of hostages still held inside Gaza. Israelis rallied again in the city of Tel Aviv on Saturday night to demand a cease-fire deal to return them.

Israeli minister looks to revive polarizing judiciary overhaul

Israeli Justice Minister Yariv Levin seized on the flare attack on Netanyahu’s home to call for a revival of his plans to overhaul the Israeli judiciary, which had sparked months of mass protests before the war.

“The time has come to provide full support for the restoration of the justice system and the law enforcement systems, and to put an end to anarchy, rampage, refusal, and attempts to harm the prime minister,” he said in a statement.

Supporters said the judiciary changes aim to strengthen democracy by circumscribing the authority of unelected judges and turning over more powers to elected officials. Opponents see the overhaul as a power grab by Netanyahu, who is on trial on corruption charges and for an assault on a key watchdog.

Many Israelis believe the fierce internal divisions caused by the attempted overhaul had weakened the country and its military ahead of the Hamas assault.

Opposition Leader Yair Lapid said in a post on X that he “strongly condemns” the firing of flares at Netanyahu’s home while blasting Levin’s proposal.

“Levin should go home with rest of this irresponsible government,” Lapid wrote. “We will not let him turn Israel into an undemocratic state.”

source https://time.com/7177084/israel-strike-beirut/

Why India and China Are Finally Starting to Patch Things Up

In June 2020, a bloody border clash broke out between India and China in the Ladakh region—the deadliest since a 1962 war. Relations between the nuclear-armed neighbors plunged to their lowest level in decades. But, after four years of icy ties, the relationship is finally beginning to thaw.

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India and China struck a border deal last month that calls for resuming patrols in Ladakh, and for disengaging troops that restore positions to pre-crisis locations. The accord likely paved the way for an Oct. 23 meeting between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping—a first since the 2020 Ladakh clash—on the sidelines of a BRICS summit in Russia. They pledged to strengthen communication and cooperation.

These developments provide a chance to inch ties forward. New Delhi has long insisted the relationship can’t improve until border tensions are eased; that precondition has now been met. The two sides can also leverage the thaw to tap more fully into existing areas of cooperation. Trade ties have remained robust despite deep tensions, and goodwill triggered by the border deal could unlock more Chinese investment in India. New Delhi and Beijing work together in many global forums, from BRICS to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. They share many common interests, from countering terrorism and promoting multilateralism to embracing non-Western economic models—and rejecting what they view as U.S. moral crusading around the world.

A lasting détente between the two Asian giants would have far-reaching consequences, including for Washington’s strategic partnership with New Delhi—which is fueled by the shared goal of countering Chinese power. But it could also serve as a hedge against the unpredictability of President-elect Donald Trump, should he decide to jettison his hardline approach to Beijing and seek his own rapprochement with Xi—a leader Trump has often praised, including as recently as last month.

Yet the significance of the thaw shouldn’t be overstated. That’s because India-China relations are still deeply fraught, and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future.

The Ladakh deal, for instance, does little to resolve a broader India-China border dispute. The countries share a 2,100-mi. frontier, of which 50,000 square miles are disputed—an area equal to the size of Greece. Additionally, mistrust between border troops remains high; traumatic memories of the Ladakh clash—which entailed Indian soldiers getting beaten to death with iron rods, and getting flung to their deaths into icy rivers—still strikes a nerve.

Tensions are high elsewhere, too. The mammoth Chinese Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure project, which New Delhi categorically rejects because it winds through Indian-claimed territory, remains a flashpoint. India also worries about Beijing’s naval power projection in the Indian Ocean, stretching eastward over a massive expanse from a Chinese naval base in Djibouti to what New Delhi believes are Chinese spy ships operating near the Andaman Sea, where India has island territories. Closer to home, New Delhi is concerned about the surveillance risks posed by Chinese technologies in India.

Furthermore, India and China have strong security ties with the other’s main rival. Thanks to a series of foundational defense accords, the Indian and U.S. militaries are cooperating on unprecedented levels, and ramping up arms sales and technology transfers. India has now evolved into a net security provider for the U.S., providing Washington with military equipment and helping its allies counter Chinese provocations. The U.S. has even supplied intelligence to New Delhi at critical moments. For its part, Beijing continues to pursue its longstanding security alliance with Islamabad. It provides significant military aid to Pakistan, including equipment for ballistic missiles (which has produced a flurry of recent U.S. sanctions).

Meanwhile, India and China also have profound differences on core issues. Beijing rejects many Indian policies in Kashmir, the disputed region that’s provoked multiple India-Pakistan wars. India is strengthening ties with Taiwan, which Beijing views as a renegade province of China. The Dalai Lama—the exiled leader of Tibet, who Beijing regards as a dangerous separatist—has long been based in India. India and China are also each part of rival global forums: India participates in the Indo-Pacific Quad, while China leads BRI.

Yet bilateral ties should continue to improve. Continued talks on the border—which have happened regularly since the Ladakh crisis—to discuss other flashpoints, and to reassert mutual commitments to longstanding protocols that forbid the discharge of firearms, could help avert future escalations. The next opportunity for high-level dialogue could come this month, if Modi and Xi attend the G20 leaders summit in Brazil.

The best hope for deeper ties lies with their robust economic partnership (China was India’s top trade partner last year). India’s chief economic advisor is making the case for more Chinese FDI that could accelerate Beijing’s long-term plans to invest in top Indian industries. And China, with its recent economic setbacks, stands to benefit from increasing engagement with the world’s fastest-growing major economy.

The incoming return of Trump could also spur more India-China business bonhomie, if their collective fear of U.S. tariffs prompts them to carve out more commercial space for themselves.

Ultimately, relations will sometimes be cooperative, particularly on the economy, but they’ll remain competitive—and possibly at times even confrontational. Still, even a modest India-China thaw is a good thing. The world is on fire, and it can’t afford yet another crisis—much less a conflict.

source https://time.com/7175644/india-china-ladakh-deal-rapprochement/

Jake Paul Beats 58-year-old Mike Tyson as the Hits Don’t Match the Hype

The boos from a crowd wanting more action were growing again when Jake Paul dropped his gloves before the final bell, and bowed toward 58-year-old Mike Tyson.

Paying homage to one of the biggest names in boxing history didn’t do much for the fans that filled the home of the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys on Friday night.

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Paul won an eight-round unanimous decision over Tyson as the hits didn’t match the hype in a fight between the 27-year-old YouTuber-turned-boxer and the former heavyweight champion in his first sanctioned pro bout in almost 20 years.

All the hate from the pre-fight buildup was gone, replaced by boos from bewildered fans hoping for more from a fight that drew plenty of questions about its legitimacy long beforehand.

The fight wasn’t close on the judge’s cards, with one giving Paul an 80-72 edge and the other two calling it 79-73.

“Let’s give it up for Mike,” Paul said in the ring, not getting much response from a crowd that started filing out before the decision was announced. “He’s the greatest to ever do it. I look up to him. I’m inspired by him.”

Tyson came after Paul immediately after the opening bell and landed a couple of quick punches but didn’t try much else the rest of the way.

Even fewer rounds than the normal 10 or 12 and two-minute rounds instead of three, along with heavier gloves designed to lessen the power of punches, couldn’t do much to generate action.

Paul was more aggressive after the quick burst from Tyson in the opening seconds, but the punching wasn’t very efficient. There were quite a few wild swings and misses.

“I was trying to hurt him a little bit,” said Paul, who improved to 11-1. “I was scared he was going to hurt me. I was trying to hurt him. I did my best. I did my best.”

Tyson mostly sat back and waited for Paul to come to him, with a few exceptions. It was quite the contrast to the co-main event, another slugfest between Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano in which Taylor kept her undisputed super lightweight championship with another disputed decision.

Paul said he eased up starting about the third round because he thought Tyson was tired and vulnerable.

“I wanted to give the fans a show, but I didn’t want to hurt somebody that didn’t need to be hurt,” Paul said.

It was the first sanctioned fight since 2005 for Tyson, who fought Roy Jones Jr. in a much more entertaining exhibition in 2020. Paul started fighting a little more than four years ago.

“I didn’t prove nothing to anybody, only to myself,” Tyson said when asked what it meant to complete the fight. “I’m not one of those guys that looks to please the world. I’m just happy with what I can do.”

The fight was originally scheduled for July 20 but had to be postponed when Tyson was treated for a stomach ulcer after falling ill on a flight. His record is now 50-7 with 44 knockouts.

Tyson slapped Paul on the face during the weigh-in a night before the fight, and they traded insults in several of the hype events, before and after the postponement.

The hate was long gone by the end of the anticlimactic fight.

“I have so much respect for him,” Paul said. “That violence, war thing between us, like after he slapped me, I wanted to be aggressive and take him down and knock him out and all that stuff. That kind of went away as the rounds went on.”

The fight set a Texas record for combat sports with a gate of nearly $18 million, according to organizers, and Netflix had problems with the feed in the streaming platform’s first live combat sports event. Netflix has more than 280 million subscribers globally.

“This is the biggest event,” Paul said. “Over 120 million people on Netflix. We crashed the site.”

Among the celebrities were basketball Hall of Famer Shaquille O’Neal and former NFL star Rob Gronkowski, along with Cowboys owner Jerry Jones.

Evander Holyfield and Lennox Lewis, two foes with Tyson’s heyday, greeted him in his locker room before the fight.

Tyson infamously bit Holyfield on the ear in a 1997 bout, and appeared to have one of his gloves in his mouth several times during the Paul bout. He was asked if he had problem with his mouthpiece.

“I have a habit of biting my gloves,” Tyson said. “I have a biting fixation.”

“I’ve heard about that,” the interview responded.

Mario Barrios retained the WBC welterweight title in a draw with Abel Ramos on the undercard. Barrios was in control early before Ramos dominated the middle rounds. Each had a knockdown in the 12-round bout.

It was the first fight for the 29-year-old Barrios since he was appointed the WBC welterweight champ when Terence Crawford started the process of moving up from the 147-pound class.

Barrios, who is 29-2-1, won the interim WBC title with a unanimous decision over Yordenis Ugás last year. The 33-year-old Ramos is 28-6-3.

source https://time.com/7177070/jake-paul-mike-tyson-fight/

What Democrats Can Learn from America’s First Black Voters

Following Kamala Harris’ defeat and the GOP’s congressional successes in the 2024 elections, many Democrats are expressing not only rage and frustration, but fear. Donald Trump’s return to the presidency will provide him the opportunity to ensure the Supreme Court remains firmly in conservative hands for the foreseeable future. Many Democrats fear the radical and tyrannical policies Trump has promised to enact upon his ascendance to office: the revocation of broadcast licenses of critical media outlets, the punishing of politicians and entire states that did not support him, and perhaps most infamously, a claim that he would be “a dictator on day one.”

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While concerning, these threats are far from novel. Indeed, they mirror what conservatives did in the aftermath of the Civil War. Ex-confederates during Reconstruction levied claims of fraud, enacted de-registration campaigns, and even destroyed the physical ballots of their opponents. The most devastating tool conservatives had in 1868, however, was the susceptibility of white Americans to racist rhetoric, a power that remains an animating force in American politics today.

The 1868 election remains the most violent in U.S. history. Black Americans had just received the right to vote thanks to the passage of the Reconstruction Acts and the 14th Amendment, but formal suffrage rights did not guarantee that Black Americans could exercise that right without threat of reprisal. Though federal troops occupied some portions of the South to curb political and racial violence, most regions, like St. Tammany Parish, La., lacked any meaningful federal presence.

Read More: Exclusive: Donald Trump Says Political Violence ‘Depends’ on ‘Fairness’ of 2024 Election

In 1868, conservatives backed Horatio Seymour against Ulysses S. Grant, in a campaign built on the promise of disenfranchising Black Americans, and their rhetoric sparked widespread violence. The Ku Klux Klan launched murderous campaigns across the South terrorizing freedpeople to prevent newly enfranchised Black men from voting. In the months leading up to the 1868 election, the Klan had killed at least 2,000 freedpeople across the state of Louisiana with many more intimidated, assaulted, or tortured. Klan members burned Black Americans’ homes, gunned down entire families, assassinated elected officials, destroyed voter registries, and stole freedpeople’s firearms to ensure they could not fight back. The death toll of what some scholars have termed the “Killing Fields of 1868” is impossible to tabulate, but contemporaries estimated it to be in the tens of thousands with the majority of those victims having been Black women, men, and children. Yet, these horrific efforts failed in their attempt to demoralize Black voters. Despite the violence and vitriol they faced at the ballot box in 1868, Black Americans marched to voting booths by the hundreds of thousands in the years that followed.

On June 10, 1869, formerly enslaved blacksmith Mumford McCoy stepped before a congressional investigation in New Orleans to testify about the devastation of his home parish of St. Tammany during the election. Mumford McCoy had witnessed this violence firsthand. In the preceding year, the Klan had killed the local coroner John Kemp (one of the first Black men to ever hold the position in the United States), brutalized a local Black preacher and his family, and burned to the ground the community’s church that McCoy had built. Hearing McCoy describe these horrors, one of the investigators asked him, “Have you not lost courage, spirit, and faith?”

“No sir,” McCoy replied. “I have not lost any at all. It has only given me better encouragement and ambition.”

And he was not alone.

After 1868, Black Americans across the South re-formed their political organizations, with some mustering into militias to protect themselves against Klan violence. This newly re-formed political front proved incredibly effective. In Shreveport, La., for example, a group of white terrorists had summarily executed a group of Black men and boys in the local brickyard just weeks before the 1868 election, and through their violence and intimidation, ensured the parish did not register a single Republican vote. Yet, after Black suffrage was enshrined in the Constitution by the 15th Amendment two years later, over a thousand Black Americans, both men and women, marched into Shreveport, as one witness put it, “like well-drilled soldiers who had received their orders” to vote in the 1870 congressional election, undaunted by the violence they had witnessed just two years prior. As a result of their bravery, Black voters carried Shreveport and Caddo Parish for the Republican Party, still known then as the party of Lincoln and the formerly enslaved.

In the years that followed, Black voters made staggering gains in states that had witnessed some of the nation’s most horrific massacres, including in Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Even McCoy’s home state of Louisiana, a state carried by conservatives through intimidation and violence in 1868, saw every single one of its Congressional districts flip Republican two years later thanks almost exclusively to the unyielding efforts of Black voters.

Read More: The Supreme Court Could Gut the Voting Rights Act Even Further

Similar to their counterparts in the civil rights movement a century later, Black Americans during Reconstruction manifested a stalwart, united front in the face of racist rhetoric and political violence. They used their solidarity to their advantage, strategized on how to resist their disenfranchisement, and most importantly, refused to allow themselves to succumb to defeatism. Rather than allow themselves to be demoralized by the assassination of their leaders, the constant attacks on their communities, and the tepidness of their white allies’ support, America’s first Black voters saw each of these obstacles as yet another reason to stay politically engaged.

Those who had endured enslavement within the United States intimately understood the flaws of American democracy in ways that no person today ever could. Yet, they still voted, protested, and ran for office even in the aftermath of violent attacks on their communities and stunning electoral defeats.  Why? Because allowing ex-Confederates and former enslavers to return to positions of unchecked power would herald the end of freedom in the post-emancipation South.

Over the next years, ex-Confederates continued to wield violence and intimidation against Black Americans to expel them from politics through force, and though Black Americans fought valiantly for their political rights, their white allies in the North and South retreated from Reconstruction and allowed many freedpeople to be reduced again to a state of functional slavery in the Jim Crow South.

Yet, even after being abandoned by their allies, Black Americans persisted. Through the grassroots populist movements of the 1880s and 1890s, through labor organizations like the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and through simple acts of survival, Black Americans continued to fight because, as hard as it may be to imagine, they still had hope for the American project and an unshakeable understanding that they deserved a place within it.

Instead of allowing the Republicans’ sweeping victories to dishearten them, perhaps Democrats could take a page out of Mumford McCoy’s book and keep up their courage, spirit, and faith. The political obstacles facing Democrats are dire, but it is the very existence of these threats that renders political engagement so important in the first place. Those disappointed by this month’s result should strive to emulate America’s first Black voters and allow the immense challenges ahead to instill in them “better encouragement and ambition.”

J. Jacob Calhoun is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Nau Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia. He researches 19th-century American history including the history of Black politics.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.

source https://time.com/7176913/first-black-voters/

Inside Capitol Hill’s Latest UFO Hearings

Americans had a pandemic on their minds back in 2020 when then-President Donald Trump signed a $2.3 trillion COVID-19 relief bill that stimulated the slack economy and averted a government shutdown. Tucked inside the bill, however, was another bit of business entirely—a provision requiring the Pentagon to investigate more than 120 sightings by military pilots of what used to be known as UFOs, and now go by the more decorous-sounding “unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP).” Lawmakers wrote the requirement into the must-pass legislation in the hope that it might help explain cockpit footage of UAP sightings that the Navy had declassified earlier that year and that had been burning down the internet ever since. 

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The Department of Defense released the mandated report in 2021, analyzing both the video evidence and eyewitness accounts of flying objects moving in all manner of ways that defy conventional aeronautics—loop-the-looping and changing directions with a nimbleness no existing technology could manage. None of the objects produced detectable exhaust. Some turned with a suddenness that would have produced g-forces deadly to any human being who might be aboard. Others dove into the ocean and then flew straight back out.

The military’s verdict? A shrug. The objects weren’t U.S. Air Force or Naval aircraft, but whether they belonged to a hostile foreign power—terrestrial or otherwise—was impossible to say.

“These things would be out there all day,” one pilot told the New York Times in 2021. At the speeds at which the objects were moving, he added, “twelve hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”

Inauguration day for Trump’s second term is still more than two months away, but when the once-and-future president returns to Washington, he’ll find the mystery of UAPs again there waiting for him. 

On Nov. 13, two subcommittees of the House Oversight Committee held a joint hearing provocatively titled “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth,” during which they heard from four witnesses who spent just over two hours making the case that American skies are indeed being plied by un-American—and quite possibly unearthly—machines.

“Let me be clear,” testified Luis Elizondo, a former military intelligence official who spent 10 years running a Pentagon program investigating the unexplained sightings, “UAP are real. Advanced technologies not made by our government or any other government are monitoring sensitive military installations around the globe. Furthermore, the U.S. is in possession of UAP technologies, as are some of our adversaries. I believe we are in the midst of a multi-decade, secretive arms race, one funded by misallocated taxpayer dollars, and hidden from our elected representatives and oversight bodies.”

What caused both the lawmakers and the witnesses at the hearing particular concern is not just the fact that the sightings keep occurring, but where they’re occurring—with a disproportionate share of them happening over military or other secure installations. Committee chairman Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) put the question directly to Elizondo.

“I suppose, hypothetically, you could have incursions over just regular airports,” he said, “but is it obvious that these incursions are more likely over military facilities than over a random airport?”

“There is definitely enough data to suggest that there is some sort of relationship between sensitive U.S. military installations, also some of our nuclear equities, and some of our Department of Energy sites,” Elizondo answered. “This is not a new trend; this has been going on for decades and that information has been obfuscated, unfortunately, from folks like you in this committee, and I think that’s problematic.”

Read More: When Should I Go to the Doctor With Cold Symptoms?

Elizondo was not the only witness to charge that the government is playing cute with what it knows or doesn’t know about the origin of UAPs. Retired rear admiral Tim Gallaudet was deployed off the east coast of the continental U.S. in Jan. 2015 when one of the cockpit videos that was declassified in 2020 was first captured. According to his testimony, he and a handful of other Naval officers received an email with the video attached—an email that vanished from all of their inboxes “without explanation” the next day. The anomalous object, he said, exhibited “flight and structural characteristics unlike anything in our arsenal.” For Gallaudet, the content of the video, not to mention its disappearance, served as “confirmation that UAPs are interacting with humanity.”

Some of the most sensational claims of the two-hour session came from journalist Michael Shellenberger, founder of the news site Public on the Substack platform, who submitted 214 pages of testimony into evidence. Last month, Shellenberger published an article alleging that the government was running what he described in his testimony as “an active and highly secretive” program called Immaculate Constellation, which includes “hundreds, maybe thousands” of images and videos of UAPs. “And it’s not those fuzzy photos and videos we’ve been given,” he testified. “It’s very clear, very high resolution.”

Read More: The Surprising Health Benefits of Pain

Michael Gold, a former NASA associate administrator and a member of the space agency’s UAP independent study team, weighed in too, lamenting what he described as “the pernicious stigma that continues to impede scientific dialogue and open discussions” about UAP. “Science requires data which should be collected without bias or prejudice, yet when the topic of UAP arises, those who wish to explore the phenomena are met by resistance and ridicule.”

That’s not only a disservice to public knowledge, but a risk to public safety—one that Gallaudet, with his military pedigree, was quick to point out. “There is a national security need for more UAP transparency,” he said. “In 2025, the U.S. will spend over $900 billion on national defense, yet we still have an incomplete understanding of what is in our airspace.”

Added Elizondo: “We are talking about technologies that can outperform anything we have in our inventory. And if this was an adversarial technology, this would be an intelligence failure eclipsing that of 9/11 by an order of magnitude.”

Whatever the unexplained technology is, the witnesses stressed, it is the government’s responsibility not just to figure out its origin, but to share what it learns with the taxpaying public. “The intelligence community is treating us like children,” Shellenberger testified. “It’s time for us to know the truth about this. I think that we can handle it.”

source https://time.com/7176658/inside-capitol-hills-latest-ufo-hearings/

Let’s Bring Back Romance

Most of us inhabit pretty unromantic lives, particularly when it comes to getting into and sustaining relationships. From interview-style dates to unaffectionate couples who feel more like roommates, we’ve sucked the joy out of our interpersonal relationships, leaving many to feel that romance is just too evasive or idealistic to obtain.

But romance isn’t just for the starry-eyed. It’s perfectly attainable if we take a moment to consider just how much we get in our own way when it comes to making time for a romantic life. Romance can be everywhere—the stressful daily grind be damned.

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Much of my work as a sex coach is helping people see how bogged down in daily life they become, and how, when there is space to relax, dream, and even luxuriate in having nothing on the to-do list, romance becomes possible again.

Most couples that I work with express the desire for more frequent sex. But when I ask about their general sense of nonsexual intimacy in the relationship (i.e. romance), they share that there really hasn’t been enough time for that. Then I ask about the last time they had together where neither of them was working or had many outside commitments. They usually recall a time in the past when they had vacation sex or a deep conversation that they otherwise wouldn’t have had. They muse over a shared experience that brought them joy—how natural it felt to be in the moment with each other, and how the tone of the time they spent together was, in fact,  romantic.

Romance is not just a feeling of love, though it can feel the most powerful when love is present. It’s the excitement of “good newness” in our lives, usually involving a feeling of remoteness from everyday stress of personal achievement through work, school, or family. Romance also asks us to be connected, whether that’s to nature, to each other, or to ourselves; to pay attention to the beauty around us, which is difficult in our modern culture of escapism through devices.

Some of us have even forgotten how to flirt. I often have to remind my dating clients to look up from their phones while they are out, notice who is noticing them, and to meet friendly gazes and smiles in kind.

So many of us are on guard against the world right now that we miss when sweetness is present. We think someone’s interest in us must have ulterior motives, rather than it being a bid for connection and romance. And oftentimes, we unwittingly miss opportunities we so desperately crave.

Read More: Love Doesn’t Have to Be Unconditional

Romance can add so much to our experience of daily life. It helps us break free from our habits and can expand our sense of who we are and what we are capable of. It allows us to feel that we aren’t just brains moving from one task to another. We have five senses that are begging to be activated.

Of course, to fill this need we can’t be on vacation all of the time (as much as we’d like to be). So how do we fit romance fit in with everything else we have to do? Because while the benefits of rest are irrefutable, it is the first thing to get compromised in our busy lives.

In 2024, the average American works about 34 hours a week. This number includes part-time employees, so we can infer that many full-time workers are putting in more time. Add to this the hours needed for commuting, errands, childcare, domestic tasks, and socializing with friends and family, and there just isn’t much time left in the week for romance. There often isn’t even time for taking time off. According to Forbes, about a third (31%) of the workforce does not receive any paid time off. Of those who do get it, many of them leave about a quarter (27.2%) of time off unused, and over half report working during their time off. Even when we are given the opportunity to recharge and take advantage of hours we could use for dates, wandering, and exploring the unknown (both internal and external), we don’t prioritize it.

Technology also gets blamed for our modern disconnection from our senses, and there’s some truth to this. Screen time for Americans is up to about seven hours per day, with about two of those hours being on social media. Yes, joy and connection can be found online, but overuse of devices cuts us off from our immediate surroundings and possibilities to connect more deeply and romantically with our people in real life.

Because we live within systems that don’t support romantic living, romance is something we have to fight to make time for. Worker rights activists, for instance, have long advocated for more work-life balance, most recently the four-day work week. The free time this would create could increase romance in our lives. In fact, the ethnographer Kristen Ghodsee explains in her book, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, that sexual frequency does increase with more free time, free childcare, and better social support for families.

While the average American is far off from having the kind of work-life balance that could naturally enhance their romantic lives, there are things you can do now. Bringing romance into your life can result from putting hard limits on screen time and proactively scheduling more time in your week for connecting with those around you, from the stranger with kind eyes at the cafe to your partner while you’re at dinner. It can mean allowing yourself time in nature, literally smelling the flowers or bringing some home. It can be a date with your love once a week or once a month—whatever your schedule can allow.

What romance isn’t is something frivolous and elusive. You can access it if you can give yourself permission to take the time to do so.

source https://time.com/7176684/bring-back-romance-essay/

TV Funnyman Conan O’Brien to Host the 2025 Oscars

NEW YORK — A year after turning to comedian Jimmy Kimmel to host their big show, The Academy Awards will pivot to another familiar TV funnyman — Conan O’Brien.

“America demanded it and now it’s happening: Taco Bell’s new Cheesy Chalupa Supreme. In other news, I’m hosting the Oscars,” O’Brien said in a statement Friday.

It will be his first time as Oscar host, but he’s emceed other high-profile awards shows, like the Emmy Awards in 2002 and 2006 and the White House Correspondents’ dinner in 1995 and 2013.

The Oscars will air live on ABC on March 2, 2025.

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O’Brien is best known for hosting the late-night talk shows “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” “The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien” and “Conan.” Before his TV hosting career, O’Brien was a writer for “Saturday Night Live” and “The Simpsons.”

O’Brien joins the list of Oscar hosts that includes Johnny Carson, Billy Crystal, David Letterman, Whoopi Goldberg, Chris Rock, Jon Stewart, Hugh Jackman and Neil Patrick Harris.

“He joins an iconic roster of comedy greats who have served in this role, and we are so lucky to have him center stage for the Oscars,” said Craig Erwich, president, Disney Television Group.

source https://time.com/7176893/conan-obrien-is-tapped-to-host-next-oscars/