A Biden Confidant Emerges as a Crucial Mideast Diplomat

Amos Hochstein, an energy policy official who was born in Israel, is playing diplomatic firefighter along the Israel-Lebanon border.

Mr. Hochstein has made at least five trips to Israel and Lebanon since the war in Gaza prompted Hezbollah to launch rocket attacks on northern Israel in solidarity with Hamas. He speaks constantly with Lebanese officials as well as top Israeli officials, sometimes including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“He’s a very close adviser of the president,” said Edward M. Gabriel, the president of the American Task Force on Lebanon, a nonprofit organization in Washington that seeks better relations between the United States and Lebanon. “As a consequence, I think he can speak with a lot of authority when he’s in the field.”

Mr. Hochstein’s background — he is not a trained foreign service officer — has raised some eyebrows among diplomats who note that he is carrying out the sort of sensitive work typically handled by State Department regional experts.

Arab officials and media outlets also remark frequently on Mr. Hochstein’s Jewish heritage and service in the Israeli Defense Forces.

In 2021 Lebanon’s foreign minister, whose country prohibits visits by Israelis, said that he would deal with Mr. Hochstein as a U.S. envoy “and not in his Israeli capacity.” (Mr. Hochstein, born in Israel to American parents, no longer holds Israeli citizenship. He has lived in the United States since the 1990s.)

 

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https://nationalfile.com/trump-donors-entire-family-killed-in-plane-crash-after-being-chased-by-f-16s/

And Anglos are dumb.

https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=568,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/139/617/823/original/07967909e98a3552.png

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An old arrest can follow you forever online. Some newspapers want to fix that.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/old-arrest-boston-globe-fresh-start/2021/01/22/122cbd0c-5cd1-11eb-b8bd-ee36b1cd18bf_story.html

The newspaper on Friday launched its Fresh Start initiative, which allows people to petition to have information about them removed from or added to old stories, to have their names anonymized, or to have the stories delisted from Google searches. The Globe will prioritize stories involving minor crimes and those from long ago, but will also consider ones about “embarrassing” noncriminal behavior.

... In Cleveland, the Plain Dealer launched its Right to Be Forgotten process two years ago as a way for people to have old stories and mug shots removed or amended. ...

... The Plain Dealer is now trying to remove problematic content even before someone petitions them to do so. Google awarded the paper a $200,000 grant in December to develop digital tools to help them identify those stories and photos.
 

 

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The epic disaster of the Chosin was only redeemed by the First Marine Division’s performance. Essentially, the army failed, in leadership by MacArthur, who categorically refused to believe that Chinese forces were massing and already across the Yalu (just as MacArthur’s hubris contributed to the disastrous Philippine Campaign that ended with the largest surrender of US troops in history), as well as in badly trained soldiers unprepared for war. But filming a movie about a white male Marine Corps with men like Chesty Puller, who legendarily said “ There are not enough chinamen in the world to stop a fully armed Marine regiment from going where ever they want to go” wouldn’t play too well...

As for 1917, the Camel wasn’t introduced into front line service until June, and finding one battalion in a moonscape without any navigation equipment except a compass and no radio was a practical impossibility. My burning question as a former artilleryman is this- do the artillery shells explode like they’re full of napalm instead of high explosive?

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Stories of castaways are inherently interesting, as Daniel DeFoe showed to his vast profit
 

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I was born in 1981, which places me on the far end of what marketers call “old millennials” [...] I graduated from college in 2003 and spent the next decade moving all over the place: Over my graduate career and following attempts to secure a job, I moved to Seattle, Oregon, Texas, Vermont, and back to eastern Washington state before ending up in New York.
 

After graduating from Lewiston High School in 1999, [Petersen] studied film and media at Whitman College, went to University of Oregon for a master’s degree and got her doctorate at University of Texas in Austin.
 

Lewiston High School
[Lewiston, Montana] (2000 Census: 95% White, 0.3% Black)
Graduated 1999

Whitman College, 1999-2003
[Washington State]
B.A., Rhetoric and Film Studies, Summa cum laude; Phi Beta Kappa

University of Oregon
[Eugene, Oregon] (2000 Census: 91% White, <1% Black)
M.A., English and Film Studies
2005 – 2007

The University of Texas at Austin
Ph.D., Media Studies
2007 – 2011
Dissertation: "The Gossip Industry: Producing and Distributing Star Images, Celebrity Gossip, and Entertainment News, 1910 - 2010."
 

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