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Israeli gut check, Disney-DeSantis detente and a wrinkle in time

 
Today's INTERNATIONAL story

Israel concedes it may not be able to destroy Hamas

What happened
Israel has significantly degraded Hamas and reduced its remaining fighters to guerrilla warfare, but the Israel Defense Forces may not be able to destroy the militant group despite five months of brutal war in Gaza, Israeli intelligence officials told Britain's Telegraph on Wednesday.

Who said what
A month ago, "I would have definitely said" Israel can eliminate Hamas, but not now that the U.S. has "turned its back on Israel," an Israeli intelligence source told The Telegraph. Israel's twin aims of destroying Hamas and saving Israeli hostages seized Oct. 7 "are clashing with each other, and both can't happen," Israeli political analyst Mitchell Barak told The Wall Street Journal.

The commentary
IDF said it has "dismantled" 20 of Hamas' 24 original battalions, but "dismantled does not mean destroyed," and the remaining fighters are "still capable of waging a lethal insurgency," The Washington Post said. "The IDF tactical advantage is clear" in Gaza, said Haaretz military analyst Amos Harel. "But that is hard to turn into a decisive victory."

What next?
The White House, which warns that Israel's heavy-handed destruction and high civilian death toll in Gaza will leave it isolated and fuel an enduring insurgency, said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "agreed to reschedule" a meeting on U.S. alternatives to a full-scale Rafah invasion. Netanyahu canceled the meeting after the U.S. allowed the U.N. Security Council to demand an immediate Gaza cease-fire.

 
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Today's BUSINESS story

Disney and DeSantis reach detente

What happened
The board of the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, handpicked by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) to take over governance of the area including Disney World, approved a settlement Wednesday with The Walt Disney Co. The agreement ends a yearslong battle between Disney and DeSantis stemming from Disney's opposition to Florida's GOP-backed "Don't Say Gay" bill.

Who said what
The settlement "opens a new chapter of constructive engagement" with the CFTOD board and enables "significant continued investment" in the state, said Walt Disney World President Jeff Vahle. A DeSantis spokesperson said the administration stands ready to "work with Disney and the district to help promote economic growth, family-friendly tourism and accountable government."

The commentary
Wednesday's settlement "lifts a significant barrier" to Disney World's "continued development" and suggests Disney may seek a "potential resolution of a related federal case," CNBC said.

What next?
Disney's relationship with the CFTOD will now be governed by an earlier "2020 comprehensive plan" in which the district agreed to "consult with Disney" over any reviews and amendments, The Orlando Sentinel said.

 
 
Today's SCIENCE Story

Melting polar ice is messing with global timekeeping

What happened
So much polar ice is melting and flowing toward the equator that it's influencing how fast the Earth spins, complicating global timekeeping, Nature reported Wednesday.

Who said what
Human-caused "global warming is managing to actually measurably affect the rotation of the entire Earth," and that's "kind of amazing," said study author Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

The commentary
The Earth's rotation slowed for a long period, prompting authorities measuring time by the Earth's rotation — astronomical time — to add occasional "leap seconds" to sync up with coordinated universal time (UTC), the atomic-clock-based standard since the 1960s, CNN said. But now the planet is spinning faster, necessitating subtracting a second. Agnew said this unprecedented "negative leap second" can wait until 2029, not 2026, due to the slowing effect of rising ocean levels.

What next?
The rotational changes won't make the Earth "jerk to a halt, nor speed up so rapidly that everyone gets flung into space," The Washington Post said. But the "negative leap second" will be "a 'yikes' moment" for computer-based technology, University of Colorado Boulder glaciologist Ted Scambos told CNN.

 
 

It's not all bad

Brooklyn Nets star Mikal Bridges is living his dream as a basketball player, but he recently fulfilled another fantasy: teaching at an elementary school. Bridges told CBS News that growing up, he wanted to be an educator. He got the chance earlier this month when he spent the day at P.S. 134 in Brooklyn teaching gym to fourth-graders and music to first-graders. Basketball "doesn't go on forever," Bridges said, "so I think teacher is going to come up next."

 
 
Under the radar

Climate change drives Indian women to sterilization

Hundreds of women from the district of Beed in India's western state of Maharashtra have been "forced to make an unthinkable choice," The Independent said, removing their wombs to keep earning money in "grueling work as a migrant sugarcane worker." A recent study of the sterilization trend found a direct link between climate change and the region in which the women work. 

Jayashree Owhal, a 45-year-old cane cutter from Beed, told The Independent she decided to have a hysterectomy after a gynecologist suggested she stop lifting heavy bundles of sugarcane, her only source of income. Owhal said she started bleeding "very heavily while carrying the bundles in 2017." Since then, the bleeding has increased, and she chose to have the procedure to "get rid of this every month 'pain and stain.'"

Beed has long had a reputation for an abnormally high number of hysterectomies. A 2018 government survey of 200 women in Beed by the Maharashtra State Commission for Women revealed that 36% of the women had undergone the procedure.

Ritu Bhardwaj, a principal researcher for IIED, said to The Independent that the women working in the sugarcane fields should be compensated for their ordeal from the loss and damage fund created at COP27, the United Nations global climate summit for people suffering irreversible losses caused by climate impacts. These women are also victims of climate change, which has "decimated their livelihoods," she said, and "some of what they have lost — their dignity, good health, in some cases their lives — is difficult to quantify."

 
 
On this day

March 28, 1930

The most populous city in Turkey officially changed its name from Constantinople to Istanbul, its second major name switch. The city was known as Constantinople, named after Roman Emperor Constantine, for centuries during its period as the capital of the Byzantine Empire. Before that, it had gone by the Ancient Greek name Byzantium.

 
 
TODAY’S newspaperS

Thursday's newspapers have front-page follow-up reports on Wednesday's collapse of Baltimore's Key Bridge, and several note the death of former Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.). The New York Times leads with a look at Elon Musk's "unusually symbiotic relationship with Beijing," forged when he made a high-stakes "bet that saved Tesla" but has now turned into a "reliance on China" that is "drawing rising scrutiny."

► See the newspaper front pages

 
 
Tall tale

Smell of teen spirit

Scientists have proved your nose is not lying: Teenagers do sometimes smell like a pungent mix of urine and cheese. A team in Germany studied body odor samples from infants and teenagers and found that sweat from the teens' armpits contained steroids that smell of urine and musk, plus higher levels of carboxylic acids that smell like wax, cheese and goat. These compounds were not found in the samples from babies, who have higher levels of a ketone with a flowery scent.

 
 

Morning Report was written and edited by Theara Coleman, Nadia Croes, Catherine Garcia, Scott Hocker, Anya Jaremko-Greenwold, Justin Klawans, Harold Maass, Arion McNicoll, Devika Rao, Rafi Schwartz and Peter Weber, with illustrations by Stephen Kelly and Julia Wytrazek.

Image credits, from top: Olivier Laban-Mattei / AFP via Getty Images; Joe Burbank / Orlando Sentinel / Tribune News Service via Getty Images; Jeff J Mitchell / Getty Images; Illustration by Julia Wytrazek / Getty Images