Good morning.
Henry Kissinger, the secretary of state under Richard Nixon who became one of the most prominent and controversial figures of US foreign policy in the 20th century, has died aged 100.
The celebrity diplomat advised 12 presidents, including Joe Biden. He famously reopened a relationship with what was then called Red China, negotiating Nixon’s visit, and won a shared Nobel prize for negotiating the end to the Vietnam war. But his legacy was also defined by his contempt for human rights and efforts to protect US corporate interests at all costs, with opponents across the world casting him as a war criminal.
To some, he was a brilliant statesman, a master diplomat, and an exponent of power politics deployed to the benefit of America, the country to which his family fled from Germany in 1938. To others, hostility burns over his record: Kissinger supported Indonesia’s military dictator in the invasion of East Timor, backed the invasion of Angola by the apartheid regime in South Africa, and perhaps most notoriously worked with the CIA to overthrow the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, in a coup that installed the brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet. He also authorized wiretaps on journalists, and on his own staff.
How are people responding? Tributes poured in from prominent US officials after the news of his death. George W Bush said the US had “lost one of the most dependable and distinctive voices on foreign affairs”, while Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, said Kissinger was “endlessly generous with the wisdom gained over the course of an extraordinary life”. Some on social media were more damning, referencing the victims of his bombing campaigns such as in Cambodia during the Vietnam war.
Read our obituary of Kissinger
Israel-Hamas ceasefire extended for a day amid last-minute mediation efforts
Israel’s military confirmed on Thursday that a truce with Hamas would continue, allowing further hostage and prisoner releases and the possibility of a more durable pause in hostilities.
There were frantic diplomatic efforts through the night to prolong the six-day halt to fighting in Gaza that was set to end at 7am local time (0500 GMT) on Thursday. The extension appears to be only for 24 hours, though this has yet to be explicitly confirmed by all parties.
The Israeli military’s confirmation came minutes before the ceasefire was due to expire.
Just over an hour later, a statement from the office of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said the war cabinet had come close to ending the truce after unanimously deciding “that if an acceptable list of further prisoners to be released was not delivered by 0700 this morning [Thursday], fighting would resume at once”.
What has the White House national security council spokesperson said? John Kirby told reporters: “Now you have an added population of hundreds of thousands more in the south that you didn’t have before [the Israelis] moved into Gaza City. And so it’s even all that more of an added burden on Israel to make sure … that they have properly accounted for … the extra innocent life that is now in south Gaza.”
Cop28: Guterres calls for complete ‘phase-out’ of fossil fuels
It is day one of the UN’s now-annual climate conference, and the sprawling Expo venue in Dubai is beginning to fill up with delegates, diplomats and activists from more than 180 countries. António Guterres, the UN secretary general, has said this year’s Cop climate talks should aim for a complete “phase-out” of fossil fuels, saying of the 1.5C climate goal: “It is not dead, it’s alive.” Speaking to Agence France-Presse before embarking on his flight to attend the conference in Dubai, Guterres said:
Obviously I am strongly in favour of language that includes (a) phase-out, even with a reasonable time framework.
We have the potential, the technologies and the capacity and the money – because the money is available, it’s a question of making sure it goes into the right direction – to do what is necessary, not only to keep the 1.5 degrees alive, but alive and well.
The only thing that is still lacking is political will.
What was that about political will? A secret Saudi Arabian plan to get poorer countries “hooked on its harmful products” has emerged. Listen to Today in Focus for the full story.
Who else may be undermining the talks? The host of Cop28, the United Arab Emirates, planned to use climate meetings with other countries to promote deals for its national oil and gas companies, according to leaked documents.
So is everyone pessimistic? No, people must balance outrage and optimism after a “hellish summer” of extreme weather, the UN’s former climate chief told the Guardian. “We have to keep the outrage really high because we are so darn late,” said Christiana Figueres, an experienced negotiator hailed as the architect of the Paris climate agreement.
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In other news …
Elon Musk has issued a defiant and profanity-laced message for the advertisers who pulled money from X in recent weeks amid a backlash over his endorsement of an antisemitic tweet and reports of increased hate speech on the platform. “Don’t advertise,” Musk said Wednesday during an on-stage interview at an event in New York. “If someone’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself.”
Newly minted billionaires have collected more of their wealth from the deaths of relatives than through their own work and entrepreneurship, according to a Swiss bank favoured by the super-rich. Of the 137 people who became billionaires in the 12 months to this April, 53 inherited a combined $150.8bn (£119bn) from their family, the report by UBS found. This exceeds the combined $140.7bn created by “84 new self-made” billionaires over the same period.
Canada and Google have reached a deal to keep links to news stories in search results and for the tech company to pay C$100m (US$73.6m) to news publishers in Canada. The deal resolves Alphabet-owned Google’s concerns over Canada’s Online News Act, which seeks to make large internet companies share advertising revenue with news publishers in the country.
The Republican speaker of the US House, Mike Johnson, said the chamber would vote on whether to expel George Santos on Thursday, leaving it up to lawmakers to decide whether the New Yorker should be removed from office for embellishing his résumé and allegedly breaking federal law. “What we’ve said as the leadership team is we’re going to allow people to vote their conscience,” Johnson told reporters on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.
Two kiwi chicks have been born in the wild around Wellington for the first time in more than 100 years, one year after the national bird was reintroduced to New Zealand’s capital. The fluffy and flightless kiwi is one of the most vulnerable birds in New Zealand and conservationists believe it has been absent from the capital for generations.
Stat of the day: Air pollution from fossil fuels ‘kills 5 million people a year’
Air pollution from fossil fuel use is killing 5 million people worldwide every year, a death toll much higher than previously estimated, according to the largest study of its kind. The stark figures, published on the eve of the Cop28 climate summit in Dubai, will increase pressure on world leaders to take action. Among the decisions they must make at the UN conference will be whether to agree, for the first time, to gradually “phase out” fossil fuels. Research has shown that switching from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy sources would save many lives from air pollution and help combat global heating. However, until now, mortality estimates have varied widely.
Don’t miss this: Is Gwyneth Paltrow’s life a work of performance art?
Ripping to shreds Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop gift list has been a media preoccupation for years, writes Zoe Williams, to the point that the website even titles it “The ridiculous but awesome gift guide”. Still, even those not driven by well-documented animus towards Paltrow have objected to the $15,000 vibrator sheathed in 24-carat gold. Others have objected to the idiosyncrasies: a gong fascination that includes not just a $2,000 gong, but also gong workshops with a personal gong trainer. A nearly $400 parmesan looks like a standard out-of-touch slap in the face to pauperised normies everywhere. The most expensive gift, nearly $40,000 for a single night at a Fijian eco resort, hit all the buttons of Great Gatsby profligacy.
But one comment on Reddit struck Williams: “If [Gwyneth] someday comes out and says that this entire persona was an intricate piece of performance art, I would support her getting an Oscar just for that.” Defined in its broadest sense by the theorist Jonah Westerman in 2016, performance art is “not (and never was) a medium, not something that an artwork can be, but rather a set of questions and concerns about how art relates to people and the wider social world”. Read more here.
Last Thing: Ban on ‘cyanide bombs’ on US public lands celebrated as a win for wildlife
A campaign to end the use of “cyanide bombs”, also known as M-44s, within the US has received a boost after the country’s largest public land management agency banned the poison devices on hundreds of millions of acres across the nation. The US Department of Agriculture uses these devices to kill predators and other wildlife.
A key figure in this effort is Canyon Mansfield, of Pocatello, Idaho, who was 14 years old in March 2017 when, while walking with his yellow lab Kasey in the hills behind his family home, he accidentally triggered a cyanide bomb that a Wildlife Services employee had placed on federally owned land. The device sprayed Canyon and Kasey in the face with sodium cyanide. The dog started convulsing and died, while Canyon was rushed to the emergency room. This launched the Mansfield family’s years-long effort to put an end to the use of cyanide bombs.
“The United States government put a cyanide bomb 350ft from my house, and killed my dog and poisoned my child,” Theresa Mansfield, Canyon’s mother, told the Guardian in 2020. “I’m after justice.”
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