While You Were Sleeping: 5 stories you might have missed, Nov 9
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Israeli forces gave a small group of foreign reporters a rare view of their advance into the Palestinian territory.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Israeli army shows devastation in northern Gaza
Blackened windows, shattered bedrooms, pockmarked walls. Wherever you look in northern Gaza, you see destruction and desolation a month into Israel’s military campaign to oust Hamas from the enclave.
Israeli forces gave a small group of foreign reporters a rare view of their advance into the Palestinian territory on Wednesday, driving them along sandy routes, churned by tank tracks, to the fringes of Gaza City.
Stopping at a cluster of apartment blocks, every building within sight is scarred by battle. Walls have been blown away, bullet holes and shrapnel dot the facades, the palm trees are shredded and broken.
“It’s been a long two weeks of fighting. It is not an operation, it is a war,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Ido, deputy commander of the 401st brigade. He did not give his last name. “It is going to last a long time, until Hamas no longer exists.”
Ivanka Trump says she had no role in dad’s net worth claims
AFP
Ivanka Trump testified she had no role in preparing her father Donald Trump’s financial statements and was not aware that he was claiming a net worth of more than US$4 billion (S$5.4 billion) as she was trying to get a Trump Organization loan for the Doral golf club in Florida.
“I am not involved in his personal financial statements,” the former president’s elder daughter said on the witness stand on Wednesday in the civil fraud trial against Donald Trump and his real estate company, which the state accuses of inflating assets.
The state alleged Donald Trump had just US$1.6 billion in assets in 2011, when he claimed a net worth of US$4.3 billion.
Trump’s rivals tie him to Republican election losses
Donald Trump’s rivals for the Republican presidential nomination tried to tie him to the party’s disappointing showing in a string of local elections as they prepared to face off on Wednesday in the third Republican debate.
Trump’s rivals seized on a series of Republican defeats in state elections on Tuesday night to make the case that the party needed new leadership - with some outright blaming Trump for the poor results - as they assembled in Miami.
Frontrunner Trump is skipping Wednesday’s debate, as he did the first two, and will hold a rival event close by.
Room-temp superconductor study retracted by Nature
NYT
A study published in March claiming the discovery of a superconductor that works at room temperature – a scientific holy grail – has been retracted by the high-profile journal Nature at the request of most of its authors.
It marks Nature’s second retraction of a superconductor study produced by the team led by Professor Ranga Dias, of the University of Rochester in the United States.
It also comes after a different room-temperature superconductor discovery claim went viral on social media earlier this year which also fell short of the long sought-after breakthrough.
Washington’s pandas return to China amid diplomatic strains
NYT
All three giant pandas in the Washington zoo were set to begin a one-way trip back to China on Wednesday, leaving only a few of the cuddly creatures in the United States amid tense diplomatic relations with Beijing.
Now in their mid-20s, pandas Mei Xiang and Tian Tian arrived at the Smithsonian National Zoo in 2000 and quickly became a main attraction.
The duo and their three-year-old cub Xiao Qi Ji – “Little Miracle” in English – will board a special cargo plane to begin the 19-hour journey to Chengdu, China, later on Wednesday, the zoo said.
