First Thing: Biden urges pause in Gaza fighting to rescue hostages

His comments came as Hamas says the death toll at the Jabalia refugee camp nears 200. Plus, Pentagon’s UFO online reporting tool launches

Good morning.

Joe Biden has said there should be a “pause” in the fighting in Gaza to enable the release of hostages, as Hamas said nearly 200 people had been killed in two days of Israeli airstrikes on the territory’s Jabalia refugee camp.

The US president was speaking at a campaign fundraiser in Minneapolis on Wednesday when a woman shouted: “Mr President, if you care about Jewish people, as a rabbi, I need you to call for a ceasefire.”

Biden responded: “I think we need a pause. A pause means give time to get the prisoners out.” White House officials later clarified he was referring to hostages being held by Hamas.

At least 195 Palestinians were killed in two rounds of Israeli airstrikes on Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp on Tuesday and Wednesday, a Hamas-run government media office said. About 120 were still missing under the rubble, and at least 777 more were wounded, the office said in a statement.

Why has Egypt not fully opened its Gaza border for fleeing Palestinians? Egypt’s president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, said at the Cairo peace summit on 21 October that the world must never condone the use of human suffering to force people into displacement.

What did Sisi say? “Egypt has affirmed, and is reiterating, its vehement rejection of the forced displacement of the Palestinians and their transfer to Egyptian lands in Sinai, as this will mark the last gasp in the liquidation of the Palestinian cause, shatter the dream of an independent Palestinian state, and squander the struggle of the Palestinian people and that of the Arab and Islamic peoples over the course of the Palestinian cause that has endured for 75 years,” he said.

Global heating is accelerating, warns scientist who sounded climate alarm in the 80s

Global heating is accelerating faster than is currently understood and will result in a key temperature threshold being breached as soon as this decade, according to research led by James Hansen, the US scientist who first alerted the world to the greenhouse effect.

The Earth’s climate is more sensitive to human-caused changes than scientists have realized until now, meaning that a “dangerous” burst of heating will be unleashed that will push the world to be 1.5C hotter than it was, on average, in pre-industrial times within the 2020s and 2C hotter by 2050, the paper published on Thursday predicts.

This alarming speed-up of global heating, which would mean the world breaches the internationally agreed 1.5C threshold set out in the Paris climate agreement far sooner than expected, risks a world “less tolerable to humanity, with greater climate extremes”, according to the study led by Hansen, the former Nasa scientist who issued a foundational warning about climate change to the US Congress in the 1980s.

What does Hansen say? “We would be damned fools and bad scientists if we didn’t expect an acceleration of global warming,” Hansen said. “We are beginning to suffer the effect of our Faustian bargain. That is why the rate of global warming is accelerating.”

Texas Rangers win first World Series title in club’s 63-year history

Nathan Eovaldi pitched six gutsy innings, Mitch Garver broke a scoreless tie with an RBI single in the seventh and the Texas Rangers are World Series champions for the first time in their 63-year franchise history after beating the Arizona Diamondbacks 5-0 in Game 5 on Wednesday night.

Marcus Semien homered late and the Rangers, held hitless for six innings by Zac Gallen, finished a record 11-0 on the road this postseason by capping the Fall Classic with three straight wins in the desert.

One night after Texas took a 10-run lead by the third in a Game 4 snoozer, it finished the Series by outlasting the Diamondbacks in a white-knuckle pitchers’ duel through eight innings, piling on four runs in the ninth for good measure.

Gallen took a no-hitter into the seventh before giving up an opposite-field single to Corey Seager, whose weak grounder found a hole. Rangers rookie Evan Carter – all of 21 years old – followed with a double into the right-center gap. Garver then delivered the first run, pumping his fist as a hard-hit grounder got through the middle of the infield to score Seager and make it 1-0.

Which other teams are yet to win the World Series? Now that the Rangers have finally won their World Series title, there are only five franchises remaining without a championship: The Colorado Rockies, Milwaukee Brewers, San Diego Padres, Seattle Mariners and Tampa Bay Rays.

In other news …

A vote to expel Republican lawmaker George Santos from the US House of Representatives failed yesterday when fewer than two-thirds of the chamber supported the resolution, preserving Republicans’ narrow 221-212 majority. Santos on Friday pleaded not guilty to a 23-count federal indictment.

George Harrison originally disliked it; fans had long assumed it would never be released. But the “final” song by the Beatles, Now and Then, is being released today, an unexpected last flourish for arguably the UK’s greatest band. The song features musical contributions from all four members of the group.

China and the United States will reportedly discuss nuclear arms control next week, the first such talks since the Obama administration. The talks would be led on Monday by Mallory Stewart, a senior state department official, and Sun Xiaobo, the head of the arms control department at China’s foreign ministry.

A mother in Iran, whose son was reportedly killed after being shot repeatedly at close range by security forces, has been sentenced to 13 years in prison by an Iranian court after she demanded justice for her child on social media. Mahsa Yazdani’s 20-year-old son Mohammad Javad Zahedi was killed at an anti-regime protest in September 2022.

Don’t miss this: What raising an orphaned owl taught me about our broken bond with nature

Was this a dirty rag? No, a nestling, writes Carl Safina. In very bad shape. A screech owl. Found dragged and dropped on someone’s lawn. Perhaps because she had nearly died of hunger and dehydration, most of the long flight feathers on her wings did not appear. When she should have been able to fly, she could only hop around.

First, I’d cared about her physical disability. Later I saw her emotional capability. But why did this surprise me? Why are we usually blind to the living world that made us possible? Watching Alfie was blurring the usual boundaries that western philosophy had erected between humans and nature. In many belief systems the most holy and important things are of this world; in the western dualist perspective the world is often regarded as the least holy, least important thing.

Climate check: Republicans welcome local benefits of climate law despite voting against it

At least a dozen Republican members of Congress have welcomed clean energy investment flowing to their electorates following Joe Biden’s landmark climate bill, even as they launch fresh attempts to dismantle the legislation. The group of conservative lawmakers, including the House of Representatives members Nancy Mace, Clay Higgins and Marjorie Taylor Greene, have all recently praised the arrival of new renewable energy, battery or electric vehicle jobs in their districts even after voting against last year’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which was loaded with incentives for clean energy projects.

Last Thing: ‘We’ve uncovered some things’: Pentagon’s UFO online reporting tool launches

The Pentagon has launched an online reporting tool for certain encounters with unidentified anomalous phenomena, formerly known as UFOs, in an expansion of its effort to be more transparent about its exploration of the unknown. Only current or former federal employees, or those “with direct knowledge of US government programs or activities related to UAP dating back to 1945” are so far eligible to use the secure form. An option for the public to submit reports is coming soon, officials say.

The move signifies that the government is slowly moving closer to fulfilling its promise of complete openness about what it knows, or doesn’t, about everything from strange flashes in the sky to the possibility of alien life and sightings of unusual flying craft.

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