A campaign of posturing about Israelis kidnapped by HAMAS and held hostage is viewed by supporters of one side or the other as partisan.

This tendency to close one's eyes to the suffering of people on the other side is the main obstacle to peace. If people on each side assume, "If they aren't crushed, we must be crushed," they tend to reject any plan other than to crush the other side. Often they do this without recognizing they rejected anything.

Often they do this by dehumanizing everyone "on the other side", they crush all but the worst part of themselves.

The Anti-Defamation League lists peace rallies by Jews in its database of "antisemitism", and calls them "anti-Israel". This equates calling on Israel to cease war crimes with seeking to destroy Israel. Meanwhile, a Republican elected official called for genocide of the Palestinians. Perhaps this should not be a surprise, since we know that the Republican Party now includes Nazis.

The same sort of extremist thinking can be seen on the Palestinian side in the young men that "want to be martyred". They have dehumanized themselves, and often others too. HAMAS supporters care nothing about committing war crimes.

*McDonald's and Amazon's ties to alleged labor trafficking: five key takeaways.*

When Australia's "drug sniffer" dogs indicate sniffing drugs, 75% of the time the following search does not find any drugs.

• Maybe drug mules have adopted a clever new way to hide the drugs, so dogs can sniff them but humans can't find them.
• Maybe these dogs do a bad job.
• Maybe all "drug sniffer" dogs do a bad job. How would we know?
• I've read that the cops that control the dogs actually decide whether to report that the dog "sniffed drugs" on any given person. Maybe these cops make that decision based on a whim to harass certain people, and maybe those people mostly don't carry any drugs.

*Oil and gas production in Texas is spewing out double the rate of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, than in the more regulated state of New Mexico, new satellite data shared with the Guardian shows, prompting calls for tougher curbs of “super-emitter” sites that risk tipping the world into climate breakdown.*

*Human-caused heating behind extreme droughts in Syria, Iraq and Iran, study finds. [Such] droughts … used to happen once every 250 years but now expected once a decade.*