A year ago, after the October 7 attacks and the start of Israel’s offensive in Gaza, Joe Biden became the first US president to visit Israel at a time of war. I watched him fix his gaze at the TV cameras after meeting Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the war cabinet in Tel Aviv, and tell the country: “You are not alone”. But he also urged its leadership not to repeat the mistakes an “enraged” America made after 9/11.
In September this year at the United Nations in New York, President Biden led a global roll call of leaders urging restraint between Israel and Hezbollah. Netanyahu gave his response. The long arm of Israel, he said, could reach anywhere in the region.
Ninety minutes later, Israeli pilots fired American-supplied “bunker buster” bombs at buildings in southern Beirut. The strike killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. It marked one of the most significant turning points in the year since Hamas unleashed its attack on Israel on 7 October.
Biden’s diplomacy was being buried in the ruins of an Israeli airstrike using American-supplied bombs.
I’ve spent the best part of a year watching US diplomacy close up, travelling in the press pool with US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken on trips back to the Middle East, where I worked for seven years up until last December.
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The single greatest goal for diplomacy as stated by the Biden administration has been to get a ceasefire for hostage release deal in Gaza. The stakes could barely be higher. A year on from Hamas smashing its way through the militarised perimeter fence into southern Israel where they killed more than 1,200 people and kidnapped 250, scores of hostages – including seven US citizens – remain in captivity, with a significant number believed to be dead. In Gaza, Israel’s massive retaliatory offensive has killed nearly 42,000 Palestinians, according to figures from the Hamas-run health ministry, while the territory has been reduced to a moonscape of destruction, displacement and hunger.
Thousands more Palestinians are missing. The UN says record numbers of aid workers have been killed in Israeli strikes, while humanitarian groups have repeatedly accused Israel of blocking shipments – something its government has consistently denied. Meanwhile, the war has spread to the occupied West Bank and to Lebanon. Iran last week fired 180 missiles at Israel in retaliation for the killing of Nasrallah, leader of the Iran-backed Hezbollah group. The conflict threatens to deepen and envelop the region.
Wins and losses
Covering the US State Department, I have watched the Biden administration attempt to simultaneously support and restrain Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. But its goal of defusing the conflict and brokering a ceasefire has eluded the administration at every turn.
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Biden officials claim US pressure changed the “shape of their military operations“, a likely reference to a belief within the administration that Israel’s invasion of Rafah in Gaza’s south was more limited than it otherwise would have been, even with much of the city now lying in ruins.
Before the Rafah invasion, Biden suspended a single consignment of 2,000lb and 500lb bombs as he tried to dissuade the Israelis from an all-out assault. But the president immediately faced a backlash from Republicans in Washington and from Netanyahu himself who appeared to compare it to an “arms embargo”. Biden has since partially lifted the suspension and never repeated it.
The State Department asserts that its pressure did get more aid flowing, despite the UN reporting famine-like conditions in Gaza earlier this year. “It’s through the intervention and the involvement and the hard work of the United States that we’ve been able to get humanitarian assistance into those in Gaza, which is not to say that this is… mission accomplished. It is very much not. It is an ongoing process,” says department spokesman Matthew Miller.
In the region, much of Biden’s work has been undertaken by his chief diplomat, Anthony Blinken. He has made ten trips to the Middle East since October in breakneck rounds of diplomacy, the visible side of an effort alongside the secretive work of the CIA at trying to close a Gaza ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas.
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But I have watched multiple attempts to close the deal being spiked. On Blinken’s ninth visit, in August, as we flew in a C-17 US military transporter on a trip across the region, the Americans became increasingly exasperated. A visit that started with optimism that a deal could be within reach, ended with us arriving in Doha where Blinken was told that the Emir of Qatar – whose delegation is critical in communicating with Hamas – was ill and couldn’t see him.
A snub? We never knew for sure (officials say they later spoke by phone), but the trip felt like it was falling apart after Netanyahu claimed he had “convinced” Blinken of the need to keep Israeli troops along Gaza’s border with Egypt as part of the agreement. This was a deal breaker for Hamas and the Egyptians. A US official accused Netanyahu of effectively trying to sabotage the agreement. Blinken flew out of Doha without having got any further than the airport. The deal was going nowhere. We were going back to Washington.
On his tenth trip to the region last month, Blinken did not visit Israel.
Superficial diplomacy?
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For critics, including some former officials, the US call for an end to the war while supplying Israel with at least $3.8bn (£2.9bn) of arms per year, plus granting supplemental requests since 7 October, has amounted either to a failure to apply leverage or an outright contradiction. They argue the current expansion of the war in fact marks a demonstration, rather than a failure, of US diplomatic policy.
“To say [the administration] conducted diplomacy is true in the most superficial sense in that they conducted a lot of meetings. But they never made any reasonable effort to change behaviour of one of the main actors – Israel,” says former intelligence officer Harrison J. Mann, a career US Army Major who worked in the Middle East and Africa section of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the time of the October 7th attacks. Mr Mann resigned earlier this year in protest at US support for Israel’s assault in Gaza and the number of civilians being killed using American weapons.
Allies of Biden flat-out reject the criticism. They point, for example, to the fact that diplomacy with Egypt and Qatar mediating with Hamas resulted in last November’s truce which saw more than 100 hostages released in Gaza in exchange for around 300 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. US officials also say the administration dissuaded the Israeli leadership from invading Lebanon much earlier in the Gaza conflict, despite cross border rocket fire between Hezbollah and Israel.
Senator Chris Coons, a Biden loyalist who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and who travelled to Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia late last year, says it’s critical to weigh Biden’s diplomacy against the context of the last year.
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“I think there’s responsibility on both sides for a refusal to close the distance, but we cannot ignore or forget that Hamas launched these attacks,” he says.
“He has been successful in preventing an escalation – despite repeated and aggressive provocation by the Houthis, by Hezbollah, by the Shia militias in Iraq – and has brought in a number of our regional partners,” he says.
Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert says Biden’s diplomacy has amounted to an unprecedented level of support, pointing to the huge US military deployment, including aircraft carrier strike groups and a nuclear power submarine, he ordered in the wake of October 7.
But he believes Biden has been unable to overcome the resistance of Netanyahu.
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“Every time he came close to it, Netanyahu somehow found a reason not to comply, so the main reason for the failure of this diplomacy was the consistent opposition of Netanyahu,” says Olmert.
Olmert says a stumbling block for a ceasefire deal has been Netanyahu’s reliance on the “messianic” ultranationalists in his cabinet who prop up his government. They are agitating for an even stronger military response in Gaza and Lebanon. Two far-right ministers this summer threatened to withdraw support for Netanyahu’s government if he signed a ceasefire deal.
“Ending the war as part of an agreement for the release of hostages means a major threat to Netanyahu and he’s not prepared to accept it, so he’s violating it, he’s screwing it all the time,” he says.
The Israeli prime minister has repeatedly rejected claims he blocked the deal, insisting he was in favour of the American-backed plans and sought only “clarifications”, while Hamas continually changed its demands.
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A question of leverage
But whatever the shuttle diplomacy, much has turned on the relationship between the US president and Netanyahu. The men have known each other for decades, the dynamics have been often bitter, dysfunctional even, but Biden’s positions predate even his relationship with the Israeli prime minister.
Passionately pro-Israel, he often speaks of visiting the country as a young Senator in the early 1970s. Supporters and critics alike point to Biden’s unerring support for the Jewish state – some citing it as a liability, others as an asset.
Ultimately, for President Biden’s critics, his biggest failure to use leverage over Israel has been over the scale of bloodshed in Gaza. In the final year of his only term, thousands of protesters, many of them Democrats, have taken to American streets and university campuses denouncing his policies, holding “Genocide Joe” banners.
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Biden’s mindset, which underpins the administration’s position, was shaped at a time when the nascent Israeli state was seen as being in immediate existential peril, says Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University in New York.
“American diplomacy has basically been, ‘whatever Israel’s war demands and requires we will give them to fight it’,” says Prof Khalidi.
“That means, given that this [Israeli] government wants an apparently unending war, because they’ve set war aims that are unattainable – [including] destroying Hamas – the United States is a cart attached to an Israeli horse,” he says.
He argues Biden’s approach to the current conflict was shaped by an outdated conception of the balance of state forces in the region and neglects the experience of stateless Palestinians.
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“I think that Biden is stuck in a much longer-term time warp. He just cannot see things such as… 57 years of occupation, the slaughter in Gaza, except through an Israeli lens,” he says.
Today, says Prof Khalidi, a generation of young Americans has witnessed scenes from Gaza on social media and many have a radically different outlook. “They know what the people putting stuff on Instagram and TikTok in Gaza have shown them,” he says.
Kamala Harris, 59, Biden’s successor as Democratic candidate in next month’s presidential election against Donald Trump, 78, doesn’t come with the same generational baggage.
However, neither Harris nor Trump has set out any specific plans beyond what is already in process for how they would reach a deal. The election may yet prove the next turning point in this sharply escalating crisis, but quite how is not yet apparent.
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Lead image credit: Getty
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Big oil companies and their investors are suing governments to thwart climate change policies, Rishika Pardikar reported for The Lever in June 2022. These fossil fuel stakeholders claim that laws designed to address climate change are undermining their profits—and, therefore, that they must be compensated for any resulting financial losses. According to Pardikar, “such moves could have a chilling effect on countries’ ability to take climate action” because of the fear and uncertainty they cause.
One case featuring Vermilion, a Canadian oil and gas company, demonstrates how investor threats are making it difficult for countries to act against climate change. As described in Pardikar’s article, in 2017, France’s environmental minister at the time, Nicolas Hulot, drafted a law to end fossil fuel extraction by 2040. In response, the Canadian oil company threatened to use an “investor-state dispute settlement” (ISDS) to sue the French government, thus taking advantage of a provision that allows investors to sue governments for treaty violations. Due to the ISDS, Hulot’s climate change bill was diluted, enabling oil and gas companies to continue extraction after the originally approved 2040 deadline.
Other reports citing ISDS actions indicated that these efforts consistently benefit fossil fuel companies and their investors. Lea Di Salvatore’s 2021 inquiry into climate-related ISDS reports for the International Institute for Sustainable Development found that fossil fuel investors won their settlements 72 percent of the time. This resulted in fossil fuel investors being awarded more than $600 million in compensation.
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The situation has only gotten worse since fifty countries, most of them in Europe, enacted the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT). Pardikar cited specific articles from the ECT that call for “fair and equitable treatment” of investors and “payment of prompt, adequate and effective compensation.”Additionally, in instances where governments obtain investor assets, investors can invoke clauses in the ECT to threaten legal action against lawmakers for future climate proposals.
The European Union (EU) recently attempted to push back by “revising” the ECT to account for climate goals. However, as The Lever reported, European Parliament Chairman Pascal Canfin announced that mediation efforts failed, and the ECT will likely “continue to be used by investors to sue states taking climate action.” Consequently, the chairman called on all EU countries to exit the Energy Charter Treaty.
Many climate activists and lawmakers are concerned that the ISDS system will prompt future actions against climate progress. Laura Létourneau-Tremblay, an international investment law researcher at the University of Oslo, explained that ISDS provisions requiring states to compensate fossil fuel companies could “prevent governments from taking ambitious climate actions.” Létourneau-Tremblay told The Lever, there are “real concerns as to whether the ECT is compatible with the net-zero energy transition.”
Shortly after President Biden revoked the Keystone Pipeline permits in January 2021, the Canadian company TC Energy took legal action against the US government. The company filed a lawsuit, citing a “responsibility to our shareholders to seek recovery of the losses incurred due to the permit revocation.” TC Energy won and was awarded $15 billion in damages.
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One of the most concerning aspects of the ISDS is that it offers foreign companies a loophole allowing them to avoid local courts––which frequently operate under stricter regulations. Instead, suits brought by companies against countries in which they have investments are decided by international arbitration tribunals, which are notoriously lacking in transparency. Moreover, under ISDS rules nations cannot file suits against foreign companies, they can only react to claims filed against them.
Grist published an article on the topic in January 2023, more than a year after Di Salvatore’s report for the International Institute for Sustainable Development. The Independentalso reported on fossil fuel companies suing governments, mentioning the ISDS and specific countries that have faced lawsuits (such as Italy and Slovenia). However, it only briefly touched on the concern that these lawsuits could prevent climate action. Beyond this handful of reports, the topic has received little coverage from major news outlets.
Rishika Pardikar, “Big Oil Is Suing Countries to Block Climate Action,”The Lever, June 8, 2022.
Lois Parshley, “The Secretive Legal Weapon That Fossil Fuel Interests Use Against Climate-Conscious Countries,”Grist, January 17, 2023.
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Kyla Tienhaara et al., “Investor-State Disputes Threaten the Global Green Energy Transition,”Science 376, no. 6594 (May 5, 2022): 701-03.
The US government says it is considering whether to ask a judge to break up search engine giant Google, in a move that could reshape how technology giants do business.
The Department of Justice (DoJ) says the measures may include “structural requirements” to prevent Google from maintaining its internet search “monopoly”.
In response, Google warned that the proposed changes could have unintended consequences for US businesses and consumers.
The DoJ’s announcement comes after a landmark court ruling in August that found Google had maintained its dominance of online search through illegal practices.
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The DoJ said in a court filing that it is considering “remedies that would prevent Google from using products such as Chrome, Play, and Android to advantage Google search and Google search-related products”.
In a blog post, Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs, Lee-Anne Mulholland, said the recommendations constitute “government overreach”.
The DoJ is expected to submit a more detailed set of proposals by 20 November.
Google will be able to submit its own proposed remedies by 20 December.
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The court decision in August was a major blow to Alphabet, Google’s parent company.
It came after a 10-week trial, in which prosecutors accused Google of paying billions of dollars a year to firms, including Apple and Samsung, to ensure it was their default search engine.
Google’s lawyers argued that users are attracted to the search engine because they find it useful, and that Google is investing to make it better for consumers.
Other pending lawsuits against big US technology firms – including Facebook-owner Meta, Amazon and Apple – accusing them of anti-competitive practices.
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The lawsuits are part of attempts by US authorities to strengthen competition in the industry.
WASHINGTON — The FBI has arrested an Afghan man who officials say was inspired by the Islamic State militant organization and was plotting an Election Day attack targeting large crowds in the U.S., the Justice Department said Tuesday.
Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, 27, of Oklahoma City told investigators after his arrest Monday that he had planned his attack to coincide with Election Day next month and that he and a co-conspirator expected to die as martyrs, according to charging documents.
Tawhedi, who arrived in the U.S. in 2021, had taken steps in recent weeks to advance his attack plans, including by ordering AK-47 rifles, liquidating his family’s assets and buying one-way tickets for his wife and child to travel home to Afghanistan.
The arrest comes as the FBI confronts heightened concerns over the possibility of extremist violence on U.S. soil, with Director Christopher Wray telling The Associated Press in August that he was “hard pressed to think of a time in my career where so many different kinds of threats are all elevated at once.”
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“Terrorism is still the FBI’s number one priority, and we will use every resource to protect the American people,” Wray said in a statement Tuesday.
An FBI affidavit does not reveal precisely how Tawhedi came onto investigators’ radar, but cites what it says is evidence from recent months showing his determination in planning an attack. A photograph from July included in the affidavit depicts a man investigators identified as Tawhedi reading to two young children, including his daughter, “a text that describes the rewards a martyr receives in the afterlife.”
Officials say Tawhedi also consumed Islamic State propaganda, contributed to a charity that functions as a front for the militant group and communicated with a person who the FBI determined from a prior investigation was involved in recruitment and indoctrination. He also viewed webcams for the White House and the Washington Monument in July.
Tawhedi’s alleged co-conspirator was not identified by the Justice Department, which described him only as a juvenile, a fellow Afghan national and the brother of Tawhedi’s wife.
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After the two advertised the sale of personal property on Facebook last month, the FBI enlisted an informant to respond to the offer and strike up a relationship. The informant later invited them to a gun range, where they ordered weapons from an undercover FBI official.
Tawhedi was arrested Monday after taking possession of two AK-47 rifles and ammunition, officials said. The unidentified co-conspirator was also arrested but the Justice Department did not provide details because he is a juvenile.
After he was arrested, the Justice Department said, Tawhedi told investigators he had planned an attack for Election Day that would target large gatherings of people.
Tawhedi was charged with conspiring and attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State, which is designated by the U.S. as a foreign terrorist organization. The charge is punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
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It was not immediately clear if he had a lawyer who could speak on his behalf. A message was left with the federal public defender’s office in Oklahoma City and no telephone numbers were listed for Tawhedi or his relatives in public records.
Tawhedi entered the U.S. on a special immigrant visa, a program that permits eligible Afghans who helped Americans despite great personal risk to themselves and their loved ones to apply for entry into America with their families.
Eligible Afghans include interpreters for the U.S. military as well as individuals integral to the American embassy in Kabul. While the program has existed since 2009, the number of applicants skyrocketed after the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021.
—Associated Press writer Rebecca Santana in Washington contributed to this report.
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Alimentation Couche-Tard has told Japan’s Seven & i Holdings it is willing to pay close to $47bn to take over the convenience store giant, 20 per cent more than its previously rejected bid.
The non-binding offer by the Canadian company was sent to the Tokyo-based owner of the 7-Eleven chain last month and no material negotiations have taken place since, according to people familiar with the matter.
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Seven & i shares initially surged more than 10 per cent on the news, which was first reported by Bloomberg, on Wednesday before paring gains to trade up 4 per cent by mid-morning in Tokyo.
Seven & i and Couche-Tard declined to comment.
The Japanese group received and rejected an almost $39bn opening offer from Couche-Tard in September, saying it “grossly undervalues” the business and does not account for the difficulty of getting a deal past competition regulators in the US.
The combination of Couche-Tard, operator of the Circle K brand, and Seven & i would create one of the largest retail chains in the US.
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One person familiar with Seven & i’s thinking said the group was focused on second-quarter results, due to be announced on Thursday, and proving to shareholders it could deliver sufficient value as a standalone entity.
The group has been exploring selling non-core assets to private equity and other investors, while accelerating plans to focus on its convenience store business.
Alongside other plans, the company is considering accelerating the sale of its stake in its financial services arm, Seven Bank, as well as selling its supermarket business.
If accepted, Couche-Tard’s takeover bid would be the largest in Japan by a foreign company and follows years of stop-start progress on corporate governance reform in the country, which has put boards under greater pressure to prioritise shareholders’ interests.
One investor, whose fund holds a substantial stake in Seven & i, said if the company continued to resist Couche-Tard the pressure would now be on the Japanese company.
“It will need to explain why it is rejecting an offer given that the overall valuation has not risen that much since the summer, and the board’s special committee will need to be clearer on what level of price or what conditions would be required for serious negotiations to begin,” said the person who did not wish to be named.
As the digital landscape continues to evolve at breakneck speed, so do the demands on newsrooms to deliver content faster, smarter, and across multiple platforms. Newsrooms 2.0, a new guide published by WordPress VIP and Big Bite, explores how media organisations around the world are leveraging WordPress to meet these challenges head-on.
Highlighting how newsrooms at The Times, Al Jazeera, and the New York Post have turned to WordPress to drive innovation and scale with ease, the guide offers key insights into why the open-source CMS is now the number one solution for news sites.
WordPress for publishers: From blogging to breaking news
First released as a simple blogging tool in 2003 – the same year that saw the launch of Skype, MySpace, and LinkedIn – WordPress has matured into the go-to platform for brands big and small, and today powers over 43% of the web. Fueled by milestone innovations such as the rollout of its block-based editor in 2018, which made content creation much more accessible for editorial teams, WordPress is now also relied on by a growing number of major news publishers, including Vox Media and News Corp.
“The impact of WordPress in the digital newsroom space has been transformative,” says Iain McPherson, chief growth officer of Big Bite – a leading enterprise WordPress agency based in the UK. “With its flexibility and ease of use, it has allowed some of the world’s most prestigious publications to adapt quickly and efficiently in a fast-changing digital environment, which is why we’ve seen a rapid rise in adoption – particularly over the last two years – and high-profile titles moving across to the open source CMS.”
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Tackling industry-wide challenges
While many newsrooms still struggle with outdated, proprietary systems that can’t keep pace with the needs of modern journalism, WordPress has continued to expand and advance, offering solutions to the most pressing challenges.
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In the race for clicks, views and subscriptions in a sector where social media is now a key competitor, one of the most significant advantages delivered by WordPress is speed. Since migrating to the platform, news organisations such as The Times have seen their time-to-publish improve by as much as 34% thanks to streamlined workflows that cut unnecessary steps, enabling titles to break stories faster than ever before.
As a highly extensible, secure, and scalable system, WordPress also gives newsrooms complete control of their CMS and its roadmap, allowing it to be tailored to meet specific user needs and business cases. Importantly, it also easily integrates with external systems, empowering brands to build best-of-breed tech stacks.
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Redefining editorial workflows
More than just a platform for publishing content, WordPress is designed to make the day-to-day work of editorial teams easier through a combination of built-in functionality and custom plugins. Developed in partnership with editorial teams on the ground, such tools and features are helping newsrooms work more efficiently, giving journalists and editors the power to focus on creating quality content.
Luke Sikkema, News Corp’s director of newsroom transformation, CMS and publishing, shares the benefits of this approach: “The WordPress CMS built by Big Bite enables our editorial teams to interact with content in a much more visual way and publish captivating narratives in much quicker timeframes. It also facilitates collaboration better than any platform we’ve previously used.”
Since moving to WordPress in 2023, the UK’s oldest national daily newspaper – The Times – now trains new team members on the system in a matter of minutes rather than days, illustrating the intuitiveness of its custom-built solution.
Opening the door to next-gen tech
As well as streamlining the editorial process, WordPress is driving audience engagement thanks to an increasing number of news organisations using the platform’s flexibility to build cutting-edge features.
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McPherson explains: “WordPress is much more than a CMS – it’s a platform that empowers brands to push the boundaries of digital publishing. We’ve seen this firsthand with features such as the live blogging tool we built on behalf of the New York Post, which enables non-technical journalists to create real-time event coverage and offers readers a dynamic, continuously updated news feed. Similarly, a specifications feature we developed for Gumtree provides site visitors with instant access to detailed product data – such as vehicle specs – enhancing the reader experience.
“AI solutions are also really exciting right now, particularly those that free up writers to focus on creating world class content. We’ve already launched a series of AI-powered tools that automate a wide range of manual tasks, and we’re working with brands to push the boundaries even further in the coming months.”
Securing long-term value
On top of the functional and operational advantages, cost is another key factor in WordPress’s rise in popularity across the news sector. By eliminating lofty licensing fees associated with alternative CMS platforms, organisations are able to allocate more resources toward development and innovation, rapidly evolving their CMS as their needs change. As a result, recent data shows that 74% of enterprise WordPress users reported a strong return on investment, and 91% plan to continue using the platform in the future – clear evidence of its value for long-term success.
“In an industry where speed, flexibility, and innovation are essential to staying competitive, WordPress has become the backbone of modern newsrooms” adds McPherson. “The guide we’ve produced in partnership with WordPress VIP not only showcases this, but also provides real-world insights into how media organisations can leverage WordPress to transform their workflows, engage audiences, and future-proof their digital strategies. Whether you’re managing breaking news or expanding your digital presence, WordPress equips brands with the tools to do it faster and smarter.”
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