First Thing: ‘They have total impunity’ – West Bank settler violence rises after Gaza ceasefire

Good morning.
Violence has increased across the occupied West Bank as Palestinian farmers try to harvest their olive trees before the end of the season, in the face of a campaign of harassment by groups of armed and aggressive Israeli settlers.
Dozens of incidents have occurred in recent days. Early on Sunday, settlers vandalised cars on the outskirts of the town of Sinjil and “raided” farmland near the village of Mughayyir, according to local reports.
“It’s really bad at the moment. The settlers are operating with total impunity,” said Aviv Tatarsky, an Israeli activist who has worked in the West Bank for decades.

How many attacks were there last month? The UN logged more than 260 attacks resulting in Palestinian casualties or damage to property in the West Bank in October alone – the highest monthly count since they began monitoring in 2006.
What’s the latest on the Gaza peace plan? Yesterday, the UN security council endorsed proposals put forward by Donald Trump for a lasting peace in Gaza, including the deployment of an international stabilization force and a possible path to a sovereign Palestinian state. China and Russia abstained.

Protests ramp up in Charlotte as aggressive immigration arrests continue

Aggressive arrests by federal immigration agents continued in Charlotte on Monday after a weekend sweep in which authorities said they detained a total of at least 130 people in North Carolina’s largest city, as protests picked up against the actions.
The Trump administration on Saturday sent border patrol agents to Charlotte. The White House has argued that its latest focus on the Democratic-run city is an effort to combat crime but the enforcement has met with fierce objections from local leaders – amid declining crime rates in the city.

What have the state’s lawmakers said? North Carolina’s Democratic representative Deborah Ross said: “The Trump administration is sowing fear in our communities. They are targeting people based on the color of their skin and the languages they speak. This is not public safety.”

Top Democrat accuses Trump of ‘panicking’ after U-turn on Epstein files vote

A top Democrat has accused Donald Trump of “panicking” after the president told his fellow Republicans in Congress to vote for the release of files related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, in a sudden reversal of Trump’s earlier position.
Robert Garcia, the ranking member on the House oversight committee, which released a tranche of new Epstein documents last week, said that Trump “has tried everything to kill our Jeffrey Epstein investigation”.

What happens next? Today, the House is expected to vote overwhelmingly in favor of the legislation regarding the release of more Epstein files. Its future in the Senate is less certain.
What other fallout has there been since the latest document dump? Economist Larry Summers said he would step back from public life after the documents showed his connections to Epstein, while Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was accused of “hiding” from the committee.

In other news …

Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, described a railway explosion on a line to Ukraine as an “unprecedented act of sabotage”. The deputy prime minister added this morning that “all traces lead … to Russia.”
Nestlé has been accused of “putting the health of African babies at risk for profit”, after an investigation by campaigners found the company is still adding sugar to baby cereals.
A judge on Monday found evidence of “government misconduct” in how a prosecutor secured criminal charges against James Comey, the former FBI director, whom Donald Trump has pushed to prosecute.
Bangladesh’s deposed prime minister has been sentenced to death in absentia, with Sheikh Hasina convicted of crimes against humanity over a deadly crackdown on a student-led uprising.

Stat of the day: More than 300 big agriculture lobbyists take part in Cop30
More than 300 industrial agriculture lobbyists have participated at this year’s UN climate talks taking place in the Brazilian Amazon, where the industry is the leading cause of deforestation, an investigation by DeSmog and the Guardian found – a 14% rise in these lobbyists from last year’s summit. Agriculture is responsible for a quarter to a third of global emissions.
Don’t miss this: What AI doesn’t know – we could be creating a global ‘knowledge collapse’
GenAI is trained on massive datasets of text from sources – hence the name “large language model” (LLM). But this “training data” is far from the sum total of human knowledge, with oral cultures and even languages underrepresented or absent. As GenAI becomes the primary way to find information, local and traditional wisdom is being lost, writes Deepak Varuvel Dennison.
Climate check: This Nepal village has survived for 1,000 years. Now recurring floods threaten its future
Til, the remotest of three villages in the Limi valley on the Tibetan border in Nepal, was already wrestling with a dwindling population. But a series of natural disasters has led many to consider where their future should be. Thawing permafrost from a frozen lake above was thought to be the source of a catastrophic flood. “We have nothing left”, a survivor said.
Last Thing: These rare whales had never been seen alive. Then a team in Mexico sighted two
Last June, off the coast of Mexico, a team of scientists spotted a whale that had never been spotted in the wild before: the ginkgo-toothed beaked whale. One researcher managed to attain a tiny fragment of skin that later confirmed it. Ginkgo-toothed beaked whales are Earth’s deepest-diving mammals. They’re notoriously shy and easily frightened. “I can’t even describe the feeling”, one researcher said.
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