Hawaii has had more than its fair share of storms this season. First, there was Hurricane Fausto in July. Then there were Hurricane Lala and Tropical Storm Moke in August and most recently, Hurricane Lowell, which grazed the western part of the archipelago this week.
Meanwhile, in the Atlantic, the season has been strangely uneventful. In fact, the Atlantic hasn’t seen any hurricanes all season. If the trend holds past September 12, it will be historic: Any hurricanes that form after that date will be the latest first hurricane since 1966, when we started keeping track. Whether a hurricane will form at all is still up in the air.
So what gives? Why is the Pacific teeming with hurricanes while the Atlantic remains so chill?
Hurricane activity very close to Hawaii is typically rare, thanks to strong trade winds and cooler waters protecting the archipelago. In fact, in the past 75-plus years, only six hurricanes had ever come within 50 miles of the main Hawaiian Islands before this hurricane season, says meteorologist and hurricane specialist Michael Lowry. And during this time, Hurricanes Dot and Iniki, in 1959 and 1992, respectively, were the only hurricanes to make a direct hit on the islands, he adds.
There are a few reasons why this season has been so starkly different. For one, this year is shaping up to produce an especially powerful El Niño, a cyclic climate pattern that affects weather patterns around the globe.
“El Niño events typically help limit how many hurricanes can develop in the Atlantic and help provide ideal conditions for hurricanes in the eastern and central Pacific,” says Nicholas Grondin, an assistant professor in environmental studies at the University of Tampa.
The reason why has to do with ocean temperatures and something called “vertical wind shear,” a metric used to describe the change in wind speed and direction with altitude.
Specifically, El Niño is characterized by warmer-than-usual water in part of the Pacific between five degrees South and five degrees North, or “narrowly along the equator,” explains Matthew Rosencrans, lead hurricane season forecaster at the National Weather Service. Warmer oceans fuel hurricanes.
Right now, sea surface temperatures in the East Pacific are “well above normal” all the way up to 20 degrees North—about the latitude of Hawaii, he says.
On top of that, there has been notably low vertical wind shear in the Pacific, explains Phil Klotzbach, a senior research scientist at Colorado State University. High wind shear can destabilize hurricanes and other cyclones, while low wind shear makes them more likely.
In the part of the Pacific near Hawaii, vertical wind shear has been “well below normal,” Klotzbach says—and this means ideal hurricane conditions.
In parts of the Atlantic, however, vertical wind shear has been high, creating “hostile” conditions for hurricanes, Grondin says. If a cyclone manages to form at all, the storms often “stay weak and decay quickly,” he says, just like Tropical Storm Dolly did last month.
A quiet year does not mean no hurricanes, however, Grondin says. September may be the usual peak of Atlantic hurricane season, but it’s far from the end. “Just because nothing is developing right now does not mean nothing will develop between now and the end of the season,” he adds.
In August, in fact, federal meteorologists predicted a “below normal” Atlantic hurricane season, with between two and six hurricanes expected to form in the Atlantic.
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Satellite imagery of Tropical Storm Karina, Tropical Storm Lowell, and then newly formed Tropical Storm Marie on August 22. NASA Goddard
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You squeeze the wrong muscles.
You only do them sitting down.
You do them while you pee.
You do way too many.
You skip the relaxation step.
You consider Kegels a cure-all.
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Whether you’re dealing with pelvic floor issues now or wanting to avoid them in the future, the Kegel really has a lot to offer. This classic exercise involves repeatedly contracting and relaxing your pelvic floor muscles, which sit like a basket at the bottom of your pelvis and support your bladder, uterus, ovaries, and rectum.
Pregnancy, childbirth, certain lifestyle habits, and aging can all weaken these muscles. And that raises your risk of issues including pee leakage, fecal incontinence, and pelvic organ prolapse, says Sara Reardon, D.P.T., a board-certified pelvic floor physical therapist and author of Floored: A Women’s Guide to Pelvic Floor Health at Every Age and Stage. Doing Kegels regularly can help combat these problems by strengthening your pelvic floor muscles.
But there’s a catch: The Kegel isn’t as simple as it sounds.
In fact, people botch the exercise all the time, which prevents them from reaping its benefits…and in some cases, even causes harm. Read on to learn six common Kegel mistakes, why they’re problematic, and how to correct them.
You squeeze the wrong muscles.
Doing the contraction improperly is the most common error Reardon sees people make with Kegels. A lot of people incorrectly squeeze the big, external muscles—like the glutes, back, or thighs—which “basically overpowers the pelvic floor,” says Alex Hill, D.P.T., a board-certified pelvic health and oncology physical therapist and spokesperson for the American Physical Therapy Association. That means they don’t actually engage the pelvic floor muscles, which negates the benefits of the exercise.
Another mistake people make is pushing out while doing the Kegel, like they’re pooping or giving birth, Reardon says. This is essentially the opposite of what a proper Kegel is: The correct form, she explains, involves lifting and squeezing the pelvic floor muscles upward. The true Kegel movement, Hill adds, is “a lot more gentle” than many people realize. “I like to tell my patients that no one should be able to tell that you’re doing them.”
To master the Kegel, Reardon cues patients to think about sucking up a thick smoothie or picking up a blueberry with their vagina while simultaneously holding in gas. Those small cues can encourage you to gently engage your pelvic floor muscles instead of inadvertently tightening all the big muscles, she says.
Still not feeling quite right? Consider seeing a pelvic floor physical therapist for in-person training, Hill says. She points to a small, impactful study back in the 1990s, which found that when women were just given verbal or written instructions on how to do the Kegel, many of them performed it incorrectly—some to the extent that it could promote incontinence. Looping in a pro can help you nail good form. Find one near you by searching for pelvic floor specialists on ChoosePT.com.
You only do them sitting down.
The no-equipment nature of Kegels can make them a tempting exercise to do when you’re sitting on the couch, parked in your desk chair, or in the car waiting at a red light. But only performing them from a seated position is a no-go, Reardon says.
That’s because it doesn’t train your body to use and strengthen your pelvic floor muscles during the activities where you actually need them to work, like jumping, running, lifting heavy weights, or walking to the bathroom with a full bladder. Basically, seated Kegels don’t help you develop the real-world pelvic floor strength you need to properly support your pelvic organs.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t a time and place for them, though. When you’re first learning how to do a Kegel, Reardon typically recommends seated ones as part of a progression. Start lying down so that you can “really learn to connect with the muscles” without the added stress of gravity, she says. When that feels easy, graduate to seated Kegels. And once those are no biggie, move on to standing Kegels and pair them with movements that mimic the specific ways you want to train the muscles to work. For example, if your goal is to pick up your grandkids without leaking pee, do Kegels along with weighted squats.
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President Trump has a long record of threatening rather than protecting the integrity of American elections. At his worst, he sought to overturn the 2020 results. Now he is menacing the midterms, with an executive order that would throw voting by mail into chaos if it went into effect.
It is up to the Supreme Court to prevent that. Nearly one in three voters now vote by mail. Mr. Trump’s order has already sowed doubt about whether Americans can continue to trust the Postal Service to deliver their ballots and prompted bipartisan alarm from states and local election officials. The sooner the court puts Mr. Trump’s ill-advised directive to rest, the better.
Mr. Trump’s order is illegal. He does not have the authority to set the rules for election administration. The Constitution gives that role to the states, with Congress providing oversight. “The times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations,” Article I states.
As a bipartisan task force said in 2021 in response to a relatively minor executive order from President Joe Biden, “Presidents don’t have much of a role in how elections are run — and that’s a good thing.” Nevertheless, Mr. Trump ordered the Postal Service in March to decide which voters would receive mail-in ballots, a decision that states have always made for themselves.
His order is also a recipe for bureaucratic chaos. It would force states to send lists of eligible voters to the Postal Service, with each voter’s information attached to a unique bar code. Even minor discrepancies between the information on the list and the information on a ballot envelope could lead to somebody not being able to vote.
Tracking ballots via bar codes can have benefits when election officials have sufficient time and funds to set up a system. It allows voters to see how their ballots are moving through the mail. But Mr. Trump’s rushed order is pretending to solve a problem that does not exist. He claims it will prevent voter fraud, which is vanishingly rare in the United States.
Rather than making elections more secure, the order would inject turmoil. Many jurisdictions would need far more time than they have to comply with the new rules for a November vote. And while the Postal Service has had a stellar record of delivering ballots quickly, it has no experience or expertise in making decisions about the appropriateness of sending ballots to millions of people. It has already been struggling this year with timely ballot delivery.
A Postal Service employee’s whistle-blower report became public this month, warning that the new system could reject an entire batch of ballots, numbering in the thousands, if even one bar code did not scan properly. Anybody who has used a self-service counter at a supermarket understands how common bar code problems are. The whistle-blower raised “grave concerns” that the change could cause major disruptions.
The order could lead some voters who request mail-in ballots not to receive them, while also slowing the election process. “There is a low but nonzero chance that in a state with a nail-biter congressional election, someone will discover 50,000 ballots at the post office on the Wednesday after the election,” said Charles Stewart III, director of the M.I.T. Election Data and Science Lab. The risks are biggest in states where most voters now vote by mail, including California, Colorado and much of the rest of the West. The numbers are also significant in Maine, Michigan and Ohio, where Senate races are tight, as well as Pennsylvania and other states with close House races.
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Photo illustration by Tam Stockton for The New York Times
Most of us walk around carrying invisible scorecards, secretly keeping tabs on how people, plans, and the universe ought to treat us. It’s exhausting.The quickest way to ditch that background frustration? Kill the script.When you zero out your daily entitlement, the whole dynamic flips. You stop treating a sunny afternoon, a great espresso, or a…
Sleeping while listening to bursts of pink noise – background sounds akin to gentle radio static – seems to boost the flow of fluid through the brain, and so might enhance the clearance of waste products that are linked to conditions like Alzheimer’s disease. The pink noise seems to bolster the slow brainwaves that enhance the pumping of blood vessels, which drives the brain’s waste-disposal system.
We already knew that listening to bursts of pink noise during sleep can strengthen slow brainwaves, a kind of electrical activity that occurs during certain phases of non-REM sleep, known as N3 (deep sleep) and N2 (the lighter stage before it). This effect occurs when the bursts coincide with the peaks of slow brainwaves.
“They really don’t sound like much; they’re just little staticky beeps,” says Joshua Levitt at Boston University in Massachusetts.
Prior research has also shown that boosting slow brainwaves – using drugs, for instance – can enhance the flow of the brain’s cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), which bathes the brain and carries away waste products.
But it was unknown whether listening to pink noise has the same effect. That’s because measuring the brain’s CSF flow involves imaging it with MRI scans, but MRI interferes with EEG, the technique used to measure waves of electrical activity in the brain. One consequence of this interference is that slow waves recorded via EEG during MRI scans can’t be detected fast enough to align bursts of pink noise with their peaks.
“You have to do a lot of extensive processing of the EEG signals to detect slow brainwaves, so it’s hard to do that fast enough in real-time,” says Laura Lewis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
To overcome this problem, Levitt, Lewis and their colleagues used EEG data collected during MRI scans from prior studies to train an AI model to rapidly predict when the brain’s slow waves will peak. “[The AI] says, ‘In about 70 milliseconds, a slow wave peak is coming,’ so now we should schedule our sound stimulation to arrive in accordance with that,” says Levitt.
“This, methodologically, really moves the field forward,” says Sephira Ryman at the University of New Mexico.
The researchers then recruited 27 healthy adults, aged 29 on average, to wear EEG electrodes on their scalp while taking an afternoon nap in an MRI scanner. Of these, 14 managed to fall asleep and enter N2 sleep. “It’s a difficult place to fall asleep,” says Lewis.
At the peak of half of each participant’s slow brainwaves, the researchers used the AI model to play 50-millisecond bursts of pink noise. During the remaining slow brainwaves, they played no noise as a control.
By analysing the MRI and EEG recordings, they found that bursts of pink noise strengthened the slow waves they coincided with and briefly boosted the flow of CSF into the brain, compared with no sonic stimulation. This suggests the pink noise also enhanced the flow of CSF through, and out of, the brain. “We know that the flow in is usually balanced with the flow that comes out,” says Lewis.
The increased CSF flow seemed to be driven by enhanced pumping of the brain’s blood vessels, which is known to push fluid through the brain’s waste-disposal system, called the glymphatic system.
Off the back of these results, the team is exploring whether the approach also works in older adults and whether it can boost the clearance of proteins, such as beta-amyloid, that are linked to conditions like Alzheimer’s disease. If the results are positive, the researchers hope to test whether the technique can slow cognitive decline in people during normal ageing, mild cognitive impairment – a condition that often precedes dementia – and the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.
There is reason to think this could work. Exposing people to sounds and flickering lights – while they are awake – has previously shown promise at slowing cognitive decline in people with Alzheimer’s, potentially by boosting the glymphatic system.
But one benefit of the new approach is that it could eventually be delivered via a portable device while people are sleeping, which could be less disruptive, says Ryman.
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Pink noise might have health benefits Veleri/Shutterstock
This morning I woke up to a freshly rebooted desktop. A bit annoying, but that’s just something that happens with Windows 11 — it reboots to install an update after a while, sometimes even when you don’t ask it to. But I got the feature I’ve been waiting for since Windows 11 launched, almost five full years ago: I can put the taskbar on the top of the screen.
I’m in a small minority of users here, I know. Most people use the taskbar on the bottom. If that weren’t the case, Microsoft wouldn’t have unaccountably stripped out a feature Windows has had for decades, for apparently no reason. But when we’re talking about a userbase in the billions, it’s a big deal.
Personally, I use the taskbar on the top because it just feels right on my standing desk, where I’ve got an iPad beneath my monitors, and I try to keep the screens roughly parallel with my eyes for ergonomics. Looking at the taskbar, as I need to do for triple screens and constant multitasking, is a much bigger part of my day than for a lot of people. I’m glad it’s back. Microsoft seems to be seriously trying to improve Windows 11 for users for the first time, not just using it as a serving platter for “AI” and a bunch of other expensive services. (And advertising. Don’t forget, Microsoft is a massive advertising company.) This isn’t the only thing it’s doing. Microsoft, while careful not to walk back its commitment to Copilot in pretty much every way, is pulling out a lot of the actual Copilot buttons it’s jammed into every possible nook and cranny of Windows.
And Microsoft is, allegedly, trying to make Windows functional on 8GB of RAM. Here I’ll point out that Microsoft set 16GB as a standard for itself years ago, and now sells Surface products that start at 8GB. And also, Microsoft is a fairly sizeable part of the corporate issue creating the problem that’s making RAM unaffordable. So yeah, thanks for all of that, Microsoft! Windows feels kind of nice for me again, for the first time in years, despite your best efforts to make both hardware and software terrible.
One of my core measurements for improvement in an operating system is that I need fewer third-party tools. For example, I used to use a program called Ultramon to put taskbars on secondary monitors, back when Windows didn’t do that on its own. Now it does. Improvement. Simple.
Windows 11 required me to add programs to bring core features back. So in honor of Microsoft reversing one of the biggest annoyances of its OS, I’m going to show you a program that can easily tweak a bunch of stuff, which I’ve been using and enjoying. It’s called Windhawk.
Windhawk isn’t a mod in and of itself; it’s more of a platform for delivering Windows modifications. It reminds me a lot of some of the tools I used to use for rooted Android phones, back when that operating system was a lot less mature and needed work. (Take that statement as you will.) Windhawk offers hundreds of small tweaks, provided by the community, and shows users and reviews to give you a glimpse of how well they work. You can search and browse through it with an interface similar to an app store. These are all fairly small tweaks, but a lot of them are serious creature comforts for me. I’ll give you an example. Some time ago, Windows started trying to put notifications on the active monitor you’re using. That’s a good idea. But it doesn’t work. Slack and email notifications seem to appear randomly across my three monitors, and there’s no way to assign them to one monitor specifically. I hear a notification, and I have to rapidly look across three screens to find it before it disappears.
A Windhawk mod called “Customize Windows notification placement,” created by m417z and currently reviewed at 5 stars with over 16,000 users, fixes that. Now when I hear the “ding” of a notification, I know exactly where to look: the bottom-center of my main screen. Thanks, m417z, you’ve genuinely helped me.
Most of the tweaks in Windhawk are possible with other programs — there’s one that puts the taskbar on top, for example, which I was doing with StartAllBack before. (I happily paid five bucks for that one years ago.) But the centralized interface and easy-to-add, easy-to-disable nature makes it super fast to add a bunch of stuff, like the option to put the Start button on the left even when your apps are in the center, or add weather or performance info to your clock without needing a widget that gobbles up RAM and serves you ads.
A word of caution: Windhawk is installing small programs on your PC that aren’t coming from a verified source, and anyone can add stuff or even fork an existing mod. It’s presenting the same kind of security issues that any third-party software does. But the creator of the program, Ramen Software (Michael Maltsev), seems to be aware of this. Contributors can link their Github profiles for extra verification, and you can take a look at the source code and updates for each tool right on its page.
Someone who actually understands that source code, make a mod that brings back the list view for icons on the desktop. Please and thanks.
The Trump administration on Wednesday proposed to no longer count immigrants without green cards in the 2030 census or ask about race and ethnicity, part of an overhaul that would redefine who counts as a U.S. resident in the eyes of the federal government.
The sweeping measures would upend a process that helps determine the allotment of congressional seats, billions of dollars in federal funding, and policies to address systemic disparities.
The proposed regulation, published online on Wednesday, would not count noncitizens without green cards in the 2030 census, a significant departure from the process stipulated by the Constitution to occur every 10 years. Historically, the census has asked Americans about their race and ethnicity and counted all U.S. residents regardless of their immigration status.
The overhaul also would bar the U.S. Census from asking Americans about their sexual orientation.
While the proposal is likely to face legal challenges, the changes would not only remove undocumented immigrants from the official population count used to determine congressional seats, but also immigrants who are in the United States legally and have yet to secure green cards or citizenship. As a result, areas with more immigrants, which tend to vote Democratic, could lose representation and federal funding.
The proposed overhaul, as well as removing questions about race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation from the census, could have major implications for collecting the federal data used to inform anti-discrimination policies and civil rights protections.
“If we don’t have the data in order to see that there’s problems, then we’re sticking our heads in the sand,” said Kimball W. Brace, the president of Election Data Services, an organization working with Democratic and Republican local governments on census and election issues. “We won’t see it. We won’t get a feel for what’s happened.”
An overhaul of the census count would face significant hurdles. The 14th Amendment calls for “counting the whole number of persons in each state,” rather than just citizens. And the rule would affect a census count after the 2028 presidential election, so a new administration could try to reverse the changes. Under the U.S. Constitution, Congress is tasked with carrying out the census; however, it has delegated decisions on the census to the Commerce Department.
But some researchers said Mr. Trump’s decision to try to resurrect his first-term effort to reshape the census could create a chilling effect and reduce participation.
As part of the proposal released on Wednesday, the administration said it was considering including a question in the census about the immigration status of participants, something civil rights groups have warned would deter immigrants with and without legal status from filling out the form out of fear of government retaliation.
“The Trump administration is trying to omit pieces of the population that they don’t feel are real Americans,” said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. “And in many ways, pulling back some of the trends and important policies that came into effect since the civil rights movement of the 1960s.”
The White House referred questions to the Commerce Department, which did not respond to requests for comment.
In the proposed rule posted on Wednesday, signed by Mr. Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, the administration said it was reassessing how it collects race and ethnicity data after “substantial doubts about the meaning, significance, and impact of attempting to categorize persons by race and ethnicity” surfaced in the national conversation.
The proposal also cited Mr. Trump’s executive order that purged the federal government of efforts centered on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
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A naturalization ceremony at Ellis Island in 2022. The Trump administration has proposed new census regulations that would no longer ask Americans about race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, and would exclude noncitizens without green cards. Credit…Jeenah Moon for The New York Times
The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope just launched to space Sunday morning. The spacecraft is already more than 600 miles away from our planet—but it has many more miles to go.
NASA’s newest space observatory is winging its way to a special spot in space called the second sun-Earth Lagrange point, or L2. This point is just shy of one million miles from Earth.
From this distance, Roman will get to work: The telescope will be able to capture broad swaths of space in one image, giving astronomers never-before-seen views of stars, galaxies, and other massive structures in the universe. Its survey will produce huge amounts of data and could solve several cosmic mysteries, with potential achievements ranging from understanding dark energy to detecting exoplanets—and finding some things astronomers don’t even know about yet.
It will take Roman about three months to make the journey to L2, but the trek will be well worth it. Lagrange points are crucial for space telescopes because, at these locations, the gravitational forces of Earth and the Sun essentially balance each other out, keeping the spacecraft stable with minimal effort on its part. The pulls of our star and planet equal the centripetal force needed for a smaller object to stay in place.
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Matthew Twombly (graphic); Heidi B. Hammel/Shari Lifson/Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (contentconsultants)
From L2, Roman and its soon-to-be neighbor, the James Webb Space Telescope, can orbit the Sun without disproportionate pull from one direction or the other. In other words, they will stay put. Each of the observatories orbit a point in their halos.
There are five Sun-Earth Lagrange points. They are named after Italian-French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange, who proved their existence in a paper entitled “Essay on the Three-Body Problem,” which was published in 1772.
L2 is particularly ideal for telescopes because it’s close enough to communicate easily with Earth but far enough to get a clear, deep view of space. The first Lagrange point (L1) also hosts spacecraft, including solar and weather observatories; the other three points are uninhabited. Of the five Lagrange points, three are unstable, and two are stable. What that means is that spacecraft at the unstable points—L1, L2, and the third Lagrange point (L3)—need regular course corrections to keep them from drifting off into space.
L2 offers a clear view of deep space and keeps the Sun, the Moon, and Earth out of an observatory’s field of view. That means Roman will have the benefit of solar power and a lack of obstructions—giving it an unfettered look into the cosmos.
A new humanoid robot designed to support crop breeding has been unveiled in Beijing, highlighting the growing use of embodied AI in agriculture.
GEAIR 2.0 was presented at the 33rd China Beijing Seed Industry Conference as a system capable of autonomously performing tasks involved in hybrid pollination.
Developed by a team from the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the robot is designed to operate in complex crop environments without continuous human control.
Its developers say the upgraded system improves the robot’s ability to work among leaves and branches while enhancing its flower-recognition capabilities.
Robot automates pollination
GEAIR 2.0 combines robotics, artificial intelligence and biotechnology to automate hybrid pollination for crop breeding, a labor-intensive step in the process. The humanoid robot can identify flowers, navigate around plants and perform pollination autonomously, allowing it to work for extended periods without continuous human supervision.
The upgraded robot uses two arms instead of the flexible single-arm system used previously. This allows it to maneuver more effectively around leaves and branches and adapt to changing conditions inside crops. Its stigma-recognition accuracy (its ability to identify a flower’s female reproductive organ) has also improved from 85 percent to 92.8 percent.
During its launch in Beijing, GEAIR 2.0 demonstrated tomato pollination by using one hand to hold a pollen tube and the other to operate a pollination brush. The robot completed each pollination in less than 10 seconds, while a single dip of the brush into pollen could support about 50 pollinations, as reported by China Daily.
The system’s name refers to Genome Editing combined with AI-based Robotics. Researchers use gene editing to create male-sterile plants with exposed stigmas, making the reproductive structures easier for the robot to identify and access.
The approach, described as “crop-robot co-design,” was detailed in a 2025 study published in Cell. Researchers found that automated tomato cross-pollination could achieve efficiency comparable to manual methods and later extended the approach to soybean.
The developers say automating pollination could reduce the need for manual labor, lower breeding costs, and improve the efficiency of hybrid breeding. Robots could also perform repetitive tasks for longer periods and operate under varying environmental conditions, potentially making them useful for large-scale crop breeding operations.
AI transforms breeding
In this process, the researchers first modify the plants to expose the stigma, removing the need for workers to manually open petals and giving the robot easier access to the reproductive structure.
The robot must then navigate through dense crops, avoid branches and leaves, and locate the needle-sized stigma with enough precision to complete pollination. This allows it to perform repetitive breeding tasks for longer periods than human workers, including during different times of day and under varying weather conditions, the Global Times reported.
According to experts, hybrid pollination is physically demanding and must often be completed within a narrow time window. Robots could let farmers manage the process while reducing the manual labor required.
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GEAIR demonstrated the pollination of tomato flowers.
Israeli opposition politicians said on Tuesday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “unfit” for office after a newspaper reported he had been warned that Hamas was planning a major operation weeks before the Oct. 7, 2023, attack but did not alert security officials.
The report in the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, which The New York Times could not confirm, said that Mr. Netanyahu had a 45-minute phone call with Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, the president of the United Arab Emirates, in late September 2023, and was told about a plan by Hamas to attack Israel and destabilize the region. Mr. Netanyahu’s office has denied the report.
Mr. Netanyahu was said to have been unfazed by the revelations, responding that Israel was prepared for any scenario, according to the report.
On Wednesday, he vowed to sue Haaretz for libel, calling the report “a wicked fabrication with clear political timing,” in a post on social media. He said security officials had found no record that he had spoken with Sheikh Mohamed between September 2023 and the Oct. 7 attack.
A day earlier, Mr. Netanyahu’s office similarly said that he had not been personally warned by the Emirati president. “No warning was given to the Prime Minister from the United Arab Emirates,” it said. “If there was any relevant information, it was passed through intelligence channels between the two countries.”
The Emirati foreign ministry said in a statement that it did not comment on “media stories or speculation regarding conversations between government leaders.” It added that the Emirati and Israeli governments had “open and direct lines of communication” and that “all relevant intelligence” was transmitted between them.
The report that Mr. Netanyahu may not have been responsive to warnings about the attacks landed at a particularly sensitive time for him and Israel. National elections are planned for late October, and Mr. Netanyahu’s chances of being re-elected are not assured.
The questions about what the Israeli prime minister had been told, by whom and when in the period leading to the Hamas-led assault have become hot-button election issues in a deeply polarized country.
Mr. Netanyahu has sought to present himself as the only politician positioned to ensure Israel’s security. And he has seemed to shift blame onto others for the Oct. 7 assault, the single deadliest day in Israel’s history, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 250 others taken hostage to Gaza.
Recently, Mr. Netanyahu asserted that Israeli security officials had chosen not to wake him up in the early hours of Oct. 7, despite worrying signs from Gaza, because they had feared he would respond aggressively and set off a war with Hamas.
“If they had woken me up, everything would have looked different,” he said in a campaign video clip last month.
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel at a news conference in Jerusalem on Tuesday. Credit…Ammar Awad/Reuters
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Credit: Michael Crider/Foundry
GSFC/SVS
James' World 2 