Florida & Beyond, and All Opinions

Donald Trump is using the language of intelligence, or intellectual impairment, as a weapon against Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Trump’s language is what is called “ableist,” meaning that it assumes people with disabilities are somehow less valuable than those without. The language becomes even more horrific when race is brought in.

Israel is now set to repeat its Gaza operations in Lebanon, with a view to reordering the Middle East in its own interests. But has it bitten off more than it can chew? Israel has been here before. It invaded Lebanon as far as the capital Beirut in 1982, in an attempt to eliminate the Palestine Liberation Organisation. 1982 was also the year Hezbollah was formed with the help of the recently established Islamic government in Iran.

A new filing by special counsel Jack Smith in the case he has brought against Donald Trump for his alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election provides greater detail and support for Smith’s argument that Trump, while president, committed illegal acts to reverse his 2020 election loss. Those acts, argues Smith, were taken by Trump as a candidate for reelection and therefore are not covered by a 2024 Supreme Court opinion related to the case that says presidents’ official actions are immune from prosecution when they exercise their core constitutional powers.

We need to once and for all dispose of the West and the East as a clash of civilizations. Militaries and militias should not have to race to eliminate either side. They should instead realize that their fate is as intertwined as their past, and that only dialogue can solve conflict. Wars have always required these types of false dichotomies: Christian and Muslim, civilization and barbarism, West and East.

The debate between vice presidential nominees Democrat Tim Walz and Republican JD Vance showcased two candidates with competing views of women’s and men’s autonomy. Throughout the debate, Vance subtly suggested that authority and autonomy are the purview of men, reinforcing how patriarchy is shaping the Republican strategy.

Some 90% of all internationally traded products are carried by ships at some point. The availability of labor is essential in each link of the supply chain. That includes the workers who make sure that your tinned fish and handy tools smoothly journey from their point of origin to where they’ll wind up, whether it’s a supermarket, hardware store or your front door.

Hezbollah, which means “party of God” in Arabic, was born during the Lebanese Civil War after Israel’s invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982. Hezbollah is primarily an Iranian-backed militia. It exists to serve the Iranian regime and expand its ideology in the region, as set out in the group’s 1985 manifesto.

Democrats have been losing rural voters across the U.S. since the 1960s. But the party has hemorrhaged these voters since 2000. The Democratic Party’s collapse in rural America has fueled support for Donald Trump and his “Make America Great Again” movement.

Should Americans be bracing for bloodshed if Donald Trump loses the 2024 presidential election? A political scientist who studies American politics can easily imagine a repeat of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection – or worse – following this November’s presidential election.

Lebanese families have been fleeing the country’s south in the thousands amid escalating tensions and an Israeli bombardment that has so far killed hundreds. Their fear, echoed by many onlookers, is that Israel will accompany the airstrikes with something that has the potential to have far worse consequences: a ground invasion of south Lebanon.

If world agricultural authorities don’t get their act together soon enough, your morning orange juice may disappear from the supermarket shelves – for good. This is how critical the situation has become in the citrus growing world. In Brazil, production has fallen by more than 20%, 60% in Guadeloupe and and plummeted by more than 90% in Florida.

Human prenatal genome editing has not happened yet – as far as we know. Prenatal genome editing isn’t the same as editing ex vivo embryos, like the Chinese scientist did, because prenatal editing involves editing the DNA of a fetus visible inside a pregnant person’s womb – without the intent to affect future descendants. But the societal implications of this technology are still vast. And researchers can already start exploring the ethics by engaging communities well ahead of time.

Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was one of the most famous figures of his time, not only in his native Prussia but throughout the world. In addition to being a leading geographer, climatologist, ecologist and oceanographer, he attached great importance to the dissemination of knowledge to society as a whole.

All parties surely know the likely destructive consequences of such an eventuality for themselves: Israel has the military power to devastate Beirut and other parts of Lebanon as it did in Gaza, while even a weakened Hezbollah could fire thousands of missiles at Israeli strategic sites, from the airport to central Tel Aviv, water supply lines and electricity hubs, and offshore gas rigs.

Summer 2024 was officially the Northern Hemisphere’s hottest on record. In the United States, fierce heat waves seemed to hit somewhere almost every day. Here’s how heat domes, the jet stream and climate change influence summer heat waves and the record-hot summer of 2024.

The Mediterranean’s drying out 5.5 million years ago, known as the Messinian salinity crisis, is the biggest extinction event suffered by the Earth since the meteorite that wiped out the flightless dinosaurs and ended the Mesozoic era 65 million years ago. No one knows yet how long it will take for marine life to recover from the kind of global-scale change that is currently underway.