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President Biden’s overall approval rating dropped to 37 percent in a poll released Wednesday — a near record-low for the president as he heads into an election year.

The latest CNBC All-America Economic Survey, conducted Oct. 11-15, showed Biden’s overall approval rating at its second-lowest point in his presidency, 1 point higher than the record-low 36 percent approval in July 2022.

Biden’s disapproval rating rose to a record-high of 58 percent, 1 point above the disapproval rating in July 2022.

Biden, 80, is set to run for reelection next year and is not facing strong challengers in a Democratic primary.

Former President Trump, 77, is the runaway favorite for the GOP presidential nomination.

Respondents were split on which presidential candidate they supported in 2020, with 45 percent saying they would vote for or support Biden and 43 percent backing Trump. Also, 85 percent of respondents said they voted. 

Asked about their ideological alignments, 26 percent said they were very or somewhat liberal, 40 percent said they were very or somewhat conservative, and 28 percent described themselves as moderate. 

The latest approval rating dropped 2 points from the most recent polls, conducted in July and in April, when his approval held steady at 39 percent. In November 2022, Biden’s overall approval rating was at 41 percent. 

Biden’s disapproval rating rose by 2 points from the most recent polls, in July and April, when his disapproval rating was at 55 percent. 

The same survey gave Biden his second-lowest approval on the economy so far in his presidency, dropping 5 points from the July poll to a 32 percent approval rating in the latest October survey. The only survey showing Biden with a lower approval on the economy was in July 2022, when 30 percent approved of his job on the economy.

Biden also received dismal ratings on foreign policy, even though it showed the vast majority of the public support military aid for Israel and Ukraine and support foreign humanitarian aid — positions the Biden administration has supported .

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President Biden cautioned Israel Wednesday not to make the same mistakes the United States made after the 9/11 terrorist attacks as Israeli forces are expected to prepare a ground offensive in response to terrorist attacks launched by Hamas.

Biden delivered remarks in Tel Aviv at the end of a trip to Israel meant to underscore his unwavering support for the Jewish state in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks, which killed more than 1,000 Israelis and has set off concerns about a wider conflict in the region.

“Since this terrorist attack took place, we’ve seen it described as Israel’s 9/11. But for a nation the size of Israel, it was like 15 9/11s,” Biden said. “The scale may be different, but I’m sure those horrors have tapped into some kind of primal feeling in Israel just like it did in the United States. Shock, pain, rage. An all-consuming rage.”

“You can’t look at what has happened here … and not scream out for justice,” Biden continued. “Justice must be done. But I caution this: While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11 we were enraged in the United States. While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”

Biden said the choices in a time of war are never clear and must be weighed against potential costs before noting that the Palestinian people are suffering, and that the vast majority of them are not represented by Hamas.

Following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the U.S. embarked on wars in Afghanistan to hunt down those responsible and then months later, began a war in Iraq. The dual conflicts cost the United States thousands of U.S. troops and spanned 20 years. Biden served as vice president while both wars were being waged and his administration later oversaw the chaotic exit of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in 2021.

The president’s comments came as scores of Palestinians have been killed in retaliatory Israeli strikes on Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas. Israel is preparing an offensive against Hamas, including a potential ground invasion.

World leaders have also sounded the alarm about a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, where civilians have struggled to access food, water and medicine.

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Anti-war whistleblowers leak list appearing to show plans to draft hundreds of Serbs to bolster Moscow’s armies

At the beginning of September, Branko boarded a direct flight from Belgrade to Moscow.

After a few days in the Russian capital, Branko, with three other Serbian nationals, was driven to a military recruitment centre in Krasnogorsk, a city on the outskirts of Moscow, where the group signed a contract with the Russian military.

“It all went very fast; in one day I became a soldier for Russia … Now I am waiting to be sent to Ukraine,” Branko said in a text exchange on Telegram, requesting anonymity so he could speak freely.

Branko, not his real name, was part of Moscow’s latest drive to recruit Serbs to fight for the Russian army in Ukraine, as the Kremlin seeks to replenish its forces, depleted by 18 months of fighting.

Based on accounts provided by two Serbian fighters who travelled to Russia, as well as a leaked list of recruited Serbs, the Guardian found that Russian officials appear to have made plans to recruit hundreds of Serbian nationals to bolster the army.

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Russia has introduced a series of laws to lure foreign citizens to join its ranks. Vladimir Putin, at a security meeting shortly after his troops invaded Ukraine, said the Kremlin should help people from overseas who planned to fight on Russia’s side.

Since then, the Russian leader has signed an order lowering the minimum length of contract military service for foreigners from five years to one, and offered a fast-track recruitment drive to non-Russian combatants.

Serbia, an EU accession candidate since 2012, has struggled to balance historically close ties with Russia against aspirations for integration with Europe, and tensions have been exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, with many Serbs sympathetic to Russia.

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Germany’s chancellor expresses outrage after two molotov cocktails hurled at building

Germany’s chancellor has vowed to step up the fight against antisemitism after assailants hurled two molotov cocktails at a Jewish synagogue in central Berlin.

Speaking in Egypt on Wednesday, Olaf Scholz said he was “outraged” by what police called a suspected “serious attempted arson” that took place in the early hours of Wednesday in the Mitte district of the city.

“Two unidentified people came on foot and threw two burning bottles filled with liquid in the direction of the synagogue on Brunnenstrasse,” police said in a statement. “The bottles landed on the pavement and broke, extinguishing the fire.”

There were no reported injuries and the building, which belongs to the Kahal Adass Jisroel community, was not harmed. As the masked assailants fled the scene, security forces outside the building – which also serves as a daycare and a school – noticed “a small fire” on the sidewalk and were able to put it out, police added.

Scholz described the tensions that have gripped his country in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war as “inhumane, abhorrent and intolerable”.

Forcefully condemning the attack on the synagogue, he said further protection would be provided for Jewish institutions. “I want to expressly say that I am outraged,” Scholz told reporters during a trip to Egypt. “It outrages me personally what some are shouting and doing.”

He later took to social media to stress that “antisemitism has no place in Germany” as well as thank security forces for their work. “Attacks against Jewish institutions, violent riots on our streets – this is inhumane, abhorrent and intolerable,” he added.

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Small shards of broken glass glinted in between paving stones in central Ramallah, one of the few physical signs of a clash the previous night between protesters and the security forces of the ruling Palestinian Authority.

Mohammed Tarifi sat with a friend on the corner of a deserted street that would normally throng with crowds stopping at its popular cafes, ice-cream vendors and juice shops. The two stared up at an enormous billboard for Sprite, a giant can of the soft drink rotating slowly in a sign of how Ramallah has grown in recent years and managed some limited prosperity as the economic and political centre of the West Bank.

“I wasn’t at the demonstration but I saw it on TikTok – Ramallah was a war zone,” Tarifi said. As protesters chanted to demand the fall of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, throwing rocks at police cars near Ramallah’s central Manara square, security forces replied with smoke bombs in an attempt to repel the crowds.

“I blame the Palestinian Authority. They should have just allowed the demonstration to happen rather than stopping it. We should support our people in Gaza, and I’m just so angry at what’s happened,” said the 20-year-old.

Protests have erupted across the West Bank in recent days. A 12-year-old girl was shot by authority security forces during protests in Jenin and a university student was injured by live fire in the town of Tubas.

“The roads are closed, and they’re all blocked anyway. Even if I want to leave Ramallah, there’s a good chance I’ll be shot,” said Tarifi, alluding to a widespread security crackdown by Israeli forces across the West Bank.

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While the agreement to allow aid through the Rafah border between Egypt and Gaza was a breakthrough, the flow of relief will still fall short of the perceived need, Reuters reports.

UN aid chief Martin Griffiths told the Security Council on Wednesday that the organisation sought to bring aid deliveries to Gaza back to 100 trucks a day, the level before the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Here is what we know about the desperately-needed aid being allowed into Gaza.

• Israel said Wednesday that it will allow Egypt to deliver limited humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip.

• The announcement to allow water, food and other supplies happened as fury over the blast at Gaza City’s al-Ahli Hospital spread across the Middle East, and as US President Joe Biden visited Israel in hopes of preventing a wider conflict in the region.

• Biden said Egypt’s president agreed to open the crossing and to let in an initial group of 20 trucks with humanitarian aid. If Hamas confiscates aid, “it will end,” he said.

• The aid will start moving Friday at the earliest, White House officials said.

• Egypt must still repair the road across the border that was cratered by Israeli airstrikes. More than 200 trucks and some 3,000 tons of aid are positioned at or near the Rafah crossing, Gaza’s only connection to Egypt, said the head of the Red Crescent for North Sinai, Khalid Zayed.

• Supplies will go in under supervision of the UN, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry told Al-Arabiya TV. Asked if foreigners and dual nationals seeking to leave would be let through, he said: “As long as the crossing is operating normally and the (crossing) facility has been repaired.”

• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said the decision was approved after a request from Biden. It said Israel “will not thwart” deliveries of food, water or medicine from Egypt, as long as they are limited to civilians in the south of the Gaza Strip and don’t go to Hamas militants.

• Israel’s statement made no mention of fuel, which is badly needed for hospital generators.

Source:

People tend to pay less attention to tasks when working alongside a robot, according to research that found evidence of “social loafing” – where team members work less hard if they think others will cover for them.

Researchers at the Technical University of Berlin said people come to see robots as part of their team. Where they think a colleague – or the technology – performs particularly well, or where they think their own contribution would not be appreciated, people tend to take a more laid-back approach, the scientists suggested.

“Teamwork is a mixed blessing,” said Dietlind Helene Cymek, the first author of the study, which appears in the journal Frontiers in Robotics and AI

“Working together can motivate people to perform well but it can also lead to a loss of motivation because the individual contribution is not as visible. We were interested in whether we could also find such motivational effects when the team partner is a robot.”

The team tested their hypothesis by asking a cohort of workers to check the quality of a series of tasks; half of whom were told the tasks had been performed by a robot. While they did not work directly with the robot, named Panda, those people had seen it and were able to hear it operating.

The workers were all asked to carry out checks for errors on circuit boards. Their activity was monitored by the researchers, who blurred out the images of the boards the workers received, only showing them an image they could check once they actively opened it.

Initially, they said they found no statistical difference in the time the two groups – those who were told they were working with a robot and those who were not – spent inspecting the circuit boards, or in the area they searched for errors.

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An undersea telecommunications cable between Sweden and Estonia has been damaged, the Swedish government has said, the second such incident to be reported in the region in a week.

Sweden’s civil defence minister, Carl-Oskar Bohlin, said the damage to the cable appeared to have happened at around the same time as an undersea gas pipeline and telecoms cable between Finland and Estonia were damaged on 8 October.

“We are currently unable to assess what has caused this damage. It is not a total cable break but it is a partial damage to the cable,” Bohlin said at a press conference in Gothenburg on Tuesday.

He added: “We can establish that this damage has occurred in time and space, close to the reported damage to the gas line.”

The government had received information from “partners and our authorities” about the damage in recent days, Bohlin said.

Last Friday the Swedish prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, warned of the vulnerability of “a spaghetti of cables, wires, infrastructure on the seabed” in a meeting of leaders of the UK-led joint expeditionary force in Gotland.

“It is absolutely fundamental for data traffic, so the vulnerabilities today are much, much greater,” he said.

Damage to a gas pipeline in the Gulf of Finland was discovered last week, which then led to the discovery of damage to a data cable. A preliminary investigation into sabotage is under way.

Helsinki has said it cannot exclude the possibility that a “state actor” was behind last week’s discovery amid what its national security intelligence service called “significantly deteriorated” relations with Russia.

Vladimir Putin has dismissed any suggestion that Russia was behind the damage as “rubbish”.

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Summary

1. Hundreds of Palestinians are feared dead after a huge blast at a hospital in Gaza City, blamed by the Hamas group on an Israeli air strike
2. Israel says the blast was caused by rockets misfired by another group, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and both sides deny blame
3. US President Joe Biden will visit Israel on Wednesday but a planned summit in Jordan with Arab leaders has been cancelled
4. At least 600,000 Palestinians have fled the northern Gaza Strip for the south since Israeli military warnings
5. Israel has blocked essential supplies to Gaza in retaliation for a Hamas attack on 7 October that left 1,300 Israelis dead

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Russia has intensified its offensive in northeastern Ukraine to break through its heavily fortified defence and recapture the Kupiansk-Lyman area.

The Russian Army is preparing for “serious offensive actions” and sending more staff in Kupiansk-Lyman, commander of the Ukrainian ground forces Oleksandr Syrskyi said.

The fighting had "significantly escalated", he said, adding, "The main goal is to break through our troops’ defences and recapture our territory".

But Ukraine’s eastern forces said president Volodymyr Zelensky’s forces were putting up a tough fight from well-entrenched troops, forcing Russian soldiers to retreat.

“Our fortifications there are quite reliable. We have a powerful, dug-in position,” Ilia Yevlash, spokesperson for Ukraine’s forces in the east, told Ukrainian television. “So the enemy got it right in the teeth and retreated in order to regroup.”

Russia captured the northeastern towns near Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv when the invasion began but Ukrainian forces recaptured the areas last year, evicting invading forces from some parts of the country’s Donbas industrial heartland.

Its recapturing marked a significant step in the Ukrainian offensive to defend its territories.

The Russian defence ministry acknowledged that it launched an “intense military activity” in the area and repelled 10 Ukrainian attacks in the Kupiansk area and two more in adjacent Lyman.

In June, Ukraine initiated a counteroffensive with the primary objective of reclaiming territory in the eastern region, notably in the vicinity of Bakhmut, which had fallen under Russian control in May. Their strategy also involved advancing southward toward the Sea of Azov.

The Ukrainian military primarily achieved gradual progress, disregarding criticism from certain Western observers who contended that the offensive was proceeding too slowly.

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US President Joe Biden is expected to visit Israel on Wednesday to show solidarity with the nation while calling on its military leaders to avoid killing civilians ahead of an expected offensive into Gaza.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said over the weekend that the tens of thousands of heavily-armed soldiers surrounding the border with Gaza were “ready” for war.

But for the past four days, since the first evacuation order was handed down to Palestinians to head southward towards Egypt, a major offensive has not materalised.

Following another late night meeting in Tel Aviv, the US secretary of state said that Mr Biden would visit on Wednesday to “hear from Israel what it needs to defend its people as we continue to work with Congress to meet those needs”.

Biden will also travel to Jordan to meet with Arab leaders amid fears that the fighting could expand into a broader regional conflict.

It comes as devastating airstrikes continue to kill civilians in Gaza despite calls from western leaders for Israel to exercise “restraint”.

At least 49 Palestinians were killed in an overnight strike that hit homes in Khan Younis and Rafah, Gaza’s interior ministry said on Tuesday.

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PFAS – also known as forever chemicals – accumulate in nature and in our bodies where they can damage the endocrine, immune and reproductive systems. 

Exclusive: Plan to outlaw all but the most vital of harmful chemicals is not included in leaked policy proposals

The EU has abandoned a promise to ban all but the most vital of toxic chemicals used in everyday consumer products, leaked documents show.

Other legislation to be dropped includes a ban on the export of outlawed chemicals from Europe to the rest of the world, a ban on caged farming and a sustainable food systems framework that the European Commission once described as “a flagship” of its farm to fork strategy.

These proposals are all absent from a copy of the commission’s 2024 work programme seen by the Guardian and due to be announced on Tuesday.

The blueprint maps out which proposals the commission will bring forward in the last months before European parliament elections in June, which will be followed by the formation of a new commission team.

A wind power package will still be launched next year, as will a process to establish a 2040 climate target, and a climate adaptation package. But there was no hiding the disappointment of environmentalists.

Tatiana Santos, the head of chemicals policy at the European Environmental Bureau (EEB), a network of environmental citizens’ organisations, said that by shelving the promised review of the EU’s Reach regulation that governs chemicals, “the European Commission has betrayed European citizens, turning a blind eye to chemical pollution and favoured toxic industry’s short-term interests over those of its citizens. It is now clear that the profits of the chemical industry are more important to this commission than the health of Europeans. The European Green Deal will be remembered as the European Toxic Deal.

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Defence minister says Chinese jet came within five meters of Canadian surveillance plane on UN operation over international waters

Canada’s defence minister has accused China fighter jets of carrying out a “dangerous and reckless” interception of a Canadian military plane over international waters.

Bill Blair spoke after Canada’s Global News said a Chinese jet had come within five meters (16ft) of a Canadian surveillance plane taking part in a UN operation to enforce sanctions against North Korea.

The incident took place in international waters off the coast of China, said Global, which had a crew on the plane. Blair said that while the Chinese air force regularly interacted with planes on UN missions, the incident on Monday had put the Canadian aircraft at significant risk.

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Vendors in the Chinese border city of Heihe complain of a shortage of business

President Vladimir Putin is making a key trip to Russia's most important ally, China, that will seek to shore up an alliance against the West and celebrate China-Russia ties.