July 19 2024
Global IT outage; Biden expected to exit race; Trump delivers speech at RNC; WSJ reporter sentenced to 16 years; Israel-Lebanon war?
1 World faces biggest IT outage in history
2 Biden excepted to withdraw from race this weekend: multiple reports
3 “I’m not supposed to be here”: Trump reflects on assassination attempt in RNC speech, extends lead
4 American WSJ reporter found guilty, sentenced to 16 years in Russian penal colony
5 A new battlefront looms between Israel and Lebanon
7/19/1799 Rosetta Stone found
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1 World faces biggest IT outage in history
One of the biggest-ever IT outages has hit companies across the world, from airlines to financial services and media groups, causing significant disruption. Thousands of workers in cities from Tokyo to London were unable to log on to their computers on Friday, affecting businesses and public services such as transportation and emergency services. The outage has been blamed on a security update from US group CrowdStrike, which caused a problem with Microsoft’s Windows. PCs and servers are affected, suggesting that millions of computers may need to be fixed for the issue to be resolved. “I don’t think it’s too early to call it: this will be the largest IT outage in history,” said Troy Hunt, a prominent security consultant, in a social media post. “This is basically what we were all worried about with Y2K, except it’s actually happened this time.”
Article Source: FT
2 Biden excepted to withdraw from presidential race this weekend: multiple reports
Top Democrats are convinced President Biden is likely to step aside as early as this weekend to make way for another Democratic presidential nominee. If he does, Democrats will be forced to make a swift decision that would determine the fate — and the future — of the party for 2024 and beyond. There's a movement underway among some Democratic officials and operatives to bypass Vice President Harris as Biden's successor — or at least make the nomination a contest rather than a coronation. They're floating names like Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, or California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
The Biden campaign's war chest — $91 million as of the last filing in June — could easily be transferred to Harris but not to any other candidate. The roughly $150 million held by other Biden-aligned entities could hypothetically move to another Democrat, and there may be other ways to repurpose that $91 million. But it's all much simpler if Harris is nominated.
Axios
President Joe Biden’s reelection bid appeared to be nearing the point of collapse on Thursday, amid a cascade of warnings from the Democratic Party’s top leaders that they have lost confidence in his candidacy. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi each told Biden in separate meetings over the last week that he should reconsider his reelection run or risk losing and dragging the rest of the party down with him. Schumer was “pretty harsh” in his conversation with Biden, said one senior Hill Democrat briefed on the discussion. Sen. Jon Tester, the vulnerable incumbent from Montana, became the 22nd congressional Democrat — and only second senator — to publicly call for Biden to step aside. “While I appreciate his commitment to public service and our country, I believe President Biden should not seek re-election to another term,” he said. And House Democrats, party operatives and former administration officials who want Biden to step aside expressed growing optimism that the intensifying pressure campaign would finally crack the shell of defensiveness, denial and unwavering determination constructed around Biden — and that he and his most loyal aides may be starting to listen, said three people familiar with private conversations who were granted anonymity to describe them. Others viewed the leaks of the days-old conversations as a sign the petitioners have grown impatient. “This is an absolute debacle,” said one senior Democratic official who is close to congressional leadership. “Only amateurs see a path. The red is mushrooming all across the map.”
Politico
Article Source: Axios, Politico
3 “I’m not supposed to be here”: Trump reflects on assassination attempt in RNC speech, extends lead
Donald Trump, five days after narrowly escaping an assassin’s bullet and with his Democratic rival’s candidacy in crisis, accepted the GOP’s nomination Thursday in a speech that described in detail the attempt on his life, while painting the nation as deeply troubled and offering himself as the solution. “I stand before you this evening with a message of confidence, strength, and hope,” Trump said as he accepted his party’s nomination for a third consecutive time. “I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America.” Trump spoke in gripping, emotional terms about the shooting, and spent the early portion of his speech asking for a divided nation to find common cause.
WSJ
This wasn’t a divided party, it was a party united. It wasn’t only Mr. Trump’s party, it was an explicitly Trumpian party. We saw something epochal: the finalization and ratification of a change in the essential nature of one of the two major political parties of the world’s most powerful nation. It is now a populist, working-class, nationalist party. That is where its sympathies, identification and affiliation lie. There will be shifts, stops and accommodations in the future, no party ever has a clear line, history intervenes, but it is changed, and there will be no going back.
Peggy Noonan, WSJ Opinion
Trump is up five points nationally now, and three across the key battleground states. To put that national lead in context: it's been 20 years since a Republican presidential candidate has won the national popular vote, and over 30 years since a Republican won by more than five.
CBS
New polling conducted July 15-16 by Emerson College Polling and sponsored by Democrats for Next Generation finds former President Trump leading Biden in seven swing states
Emerson
Article Source: WSJ, CBS, Emerson
4 American WSJ reporter found guilty, sentenced to 16 years in Russian penal colony
Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter falsely accused by Russian authorities of spying, was sentenced to 16 years in a high-security penal colony, after being wrongfully convicted in a hurried, secret trial that the U.S. government has condemned as a sham. The court’s Friday verdict—after three days of hearings—was widely viewed as a foregone conclusion, since acquittals in Russian espionage trials are exceedingly rare. Gershkovich was afforded few of the protections normally accorded to defendants in the U.S. and other Western countries.
Article Source: WSJ
5 A new battlefront looms between Israel and Lebanon
Israel faces a conundrum to which there is no easily discernible, sustainable solution: how best to counter the growing strategic threat posed by Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite terrorist group that runs Lebanon. On July 4, Hezbollah fired 200 rockets and more than 20 drones into northern Israel—one of its largest attacks to date—after Israel killed yet another of its high-ranking commanders in a drone strike in the Lebanese coastal city of Tyre. Lebanon’s National News Agency said that Muhammad Nimah Nasser, aka Abu Nimah, was killed along with two other passengers in the drone strike on July 3. Nasser, the head of Hezbollah’s Aziz unit, was reportedly responsible for military operations in southwestern Lebanon and for firing hundreds of rockets into Israel.
Hezbollah’s latest rocket and drone barrage—part of a total of some 7,000 rockets and missiles that it has fired into Israel since Oct. 7—has increased concern about a possible escalation of the Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza into a full-scale conflict between the two heavily armed foes. With some 45,000 fighters and an arsenal of more than 150,000 rockets, drones, and missiles, many of them precision-guided, Hezbollah has always posed a far greater strategic threat to Israel than Hamas, which has been significantly degraded since Israel’s offensive in Gaza.
Hezbollah has said it will stop firing rockets and missiles into Israel when there is a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza—a position that has been endorsed by the Biden administration and that now serves as the basis for its diplomatic initiative to broker a cease-fire on the Lebanese front. Still, American and Arab negotiators say that while progress has been made in this latest round of talks, such a deal between Israel and Hamas may not be imminent. Nor is it immediately clear that Hezbollah would stop its tit-for-tat strikes.
Article Source: Tablet, Youtube
7/19/1799 The Rosetta Stone, a tablet with hieroglyphic translations into Greek, is found in Egypt
During Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign, a French soldier discovers a black basalt slab inscribed with ancient writing near the town of Rosetta, about 35 miles east of Alexandria. The irregularly shaped stone contained fragments of passages written in three different scripts: Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Egyptian demotic. The ancient Greek on the Rosetta Stone told archaeologists that it was inscribed by priests honoring the king of Egypt, Ptolemy V, in the second century B.C. More startlingly, the Greek passage announced that the three scripts were all of identical meaning. The artifact thus held the key to solving the riddle of hieroglyphics, a written language that had been “dead” for nearly 2,000 years.
Sources
1. https://on.ft.com/4cYnw9A
2. https://www.axios.com/2024/07/18/biden-drop-out-election-kamala-harris-democrat; https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/18/biden-in-crisis-00169415
3. https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/trump-rnc-speech-election-campaign-5ab54db3?st=1wc19k7o8018m72&reflink=article_copyURL_share; https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-trumpian-triumph-in-milwaukee-republican-national-convention-2024-election-0230db27?st=d6rw5t2ofq5pgs9&reflink=article_copyURL_share;https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-poll-biden-national-07-18-2024/; https://emersoncollegepolling.com/july-2024-swing-state-polls/
4. https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/evan-gershkovich-russia-trial-dbabd6e3?st=t84tm6z7i5ajd3u&reflink=article_copyURL_share
5. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/lebanon-war-coming-hezbollah-israel
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