Benjamin Netanyahu seems to have won the Israeli vote, according to the exit polls, but at what cost? He has denounced a two-state solution. He warned Likud voters that they must vote by telling them that Israel’s Arab voters were rushing to the polls in droves. In Israel, some called it a “gevalt” campaign, using a Yiddish word for alarm. “More than a gevalt campaign it was a ‘Let’s blow up the world’ campaign,” said Gadi Wolfsfeld, a professor of political communications at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. “It was a scorched-earth policy to stay in power.” Via the New York Times.
If the vote was a referendum on Netanyahu, then Bibi wins. But the vote, writes Roger Cohen in the New York Times, was also a sign of unease in Israel, in which case the only victory may be in a national unity coalition government. (“Unease in Israel” also being a likely title for an eight-line sardonic Charles Simic poem or top candidate for the prize in Post-World War II Historically Absurd Understatements.)
Media guru Ken Doctor reports that Apollo Global Management is about to win the contest of hedge funds to buy Digital First Media, the parent company of the Denver Post. The price for 75 dailies and 100 non-dailies – including the Post, the Boulder Daily Camera and 12 other Colorado properties — is said to be around $400 million. The big question, Doctor asks, is what Apollo plans to do next. Via Capital New York.
Meanwhile in pathbreaking newspapers news: The Guardian joins the growing global fossil-fuel divestment movement with its “It has to stay in the ground” campaign. “Join us and more than 84,000 others in urging the Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust, the world’s two biggest charitable funds, to move their money out of fossil fuels.” It’s a bold move for a news company and observers are hoping it starts a wave among major media corporations. The announcement couldn’t come at a better time. The international climate talks to be held in Paris are less than a year away, and the 2016 U.S. presidential election has already launched — the free-for-all Republican primary now sure to crank up the do-nothing science-denial machinery to full tilt. Editor in Chief Alan Rusbridger makes the case in an editorial.
A pediatrician faces the question that his children will inevitably face: Which is more dangerous: pot or booze? Via the New York Times.
Vanuatu: a small nation devastated a Category Five storm. Via the Atlantic.
When Breitbart says the Scott Walker honeymoon is over, does that mean Scott Walker’s honeymoon is actually over? Via Breitbart.
Ezra Klein says Al Gore should run for president in 2016. Yes, Klein just might be the only one to think that. Via Vox.
ISIS’s destruction of history, write Jon Lee Anderson in the New Yorker, does something to our very sense of humanity. UNESCO calls it an act of barbarism, but has no power to do anything about it.
Is One America News Network, a now tiny cable news outlet, poised to become the next Fox? National Journal takes a look.
[Banksy’s Jerusalem by Mac42.]
