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First Thing: the US morning briefing

First Thing: Violence spreads in the Middle East

Israeli airstrikes killed at least 16 in Syria while a Jordanian truck driver killed three Israeli workers at a border crossing between the West Bank and Jordan. Plus: The massive US toxic fire shrouded in secrecy
A large red bus arrives at the crossing
Buses arrive to carry people stranded at the King Hussein (Allenby) Bridge crossing between Jordan and the West Bank after a truck driver's attack killed three Israelis. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

Vivian Ho

Good morning.

Overnight Israeli airstrikes killed at least 16 people in the central Syrian province of Hama, Syria’s state news agency is reporting. A military source told the Sana news agency that the strikes had been targeting a number of military sites, and a military research center for chemical arms production near Masyaf was hit.

Although there was no immediate comment from Israel, which typically does not comment on specific reports of strikes in Syria, Israel has been escalating its strikes on Iranian-backed militia targets in Syria since the 7 October.

In a fresh sign of the spreading violence, a Jordanian truck driver opened fire on three Israeli workers at a border crossing between Jordan and the West Bank, killing them. Benjamin Netanyahu called the gunman, who was killed at the scene, “an abhorrent terrorist”. The Jordanian foreign ministry said initial investigations suggested that the shooting was an individual act.

  • Where else has there been a surge in violence? The West Bank, where there have been army raids on Palestinian towns and frequent attacks by Israeli settlers, as well as a sharp rise in attacks on Israeli settlers and security forces. One Israeli security coordinator blacklisted by the US last month for forcefully expelling Palestinians from their lands has essentially fashioned himself into a warlord of the whole Jabal Salman valley.

Calls for gun control following Georgia school shooting
Flowers and blue and yellow balloons adorn the bottom of a flag pole in front of the school
A memorial at Apalachee high school after the shooting. Photograph: Mike Stewart/AP

Days after two students and two teachers at a Georgia high school were shot dead, allegedly by a teenager wielding a military-style rifle, US senator Raphael Warnock has called for Congress to pass more substantial gun control laws.

“We are at an impasse because there are people in … politics … who are doing the bidding of the corporatist gun lobby even as they line their pockets with the blood of our children,” Warnock said.

  • What else have we learned about the shooting? The mother of the teenage boy who has been charged with murder in connection with the shooting had called the school before the killings, warning staff of an “extreme emergency” involving her son.

Harris and Trump to face off in their first presidential debate
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump
Harris and Trump will go head to head in Philadelphia. Photograph: AP

Tuesday night’s debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is widely being viewed as a crux in the rebooted 2024 presidential campaign. While Harris has turned the race on its head, the vice-president’s upward trajectory appears to have crested and Trump’s advisers are looking at the debate as their best chance to retake the momentum.

  • What do the polls say? A national poll conducted by the New York Times and Siena College found that Trump was up one percentage point, 48%-47%, over Harris – a difference that is within the survey’s three-percentage point margin of error, meaning a win for either candidate in the election on 5 November is well within reach.

  • What are some of the concerns of the Trump campaign? They are most concerned with the former president’s mood going into the debate, according to sources, and are afraid that the mercurial Trump could engage in the kind of self-sabotage that turned off voters in the 2020 presidential election.

  • What about Harris? As a former prosecutor, Harris made a name for herself in the Senate as a tough questioner and Tuesday’s debate could allow her to deliver on her oft-repeated promise that she will prosecute the case against Trump, and allow her to display some of her trademark humor.

In other news …
Cloaked in orange haze, two people lean on a white pickup truck parked under power lines, watching a smoke column from the Line Fire burning in the distance.
People lean on their truck and watch the smoke column of the Line Fire as it burns near Mentone, California. Photograph: David Swanson/AFP/Getty Images

Stat of the day: 70% would support holding the plastics industry responsible for recycling claims
Compacted plastic bottles are packed into a large square at a plastic waste recycling facility.
Just 5% of plastic waste generated by US households in 2021 was recycled, one study found. Photograph: Lauren DeCicca/The Guardian

With research published earlier this year revealing that plastic producers have known for decades that recycling is too cumbersome to be a feasible waste management solution – yet still promoting it to the public – new polling data shows that 70% of American voters (including more than half of Republicans) would support legal action against the companies.

Don’t miss this: How state abortion bans are forcing doctors to provide substandard care
Two seated women, their faces cut off at the edge of the frame
Two women from Texas talk to each other about their travel to Oklahoma as they wait in the recovery room after their abortions at the Trust Women clinic in Oklahoma City. Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Research group Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health has collected dozens of narratives from women describing the substandard medical care they’ve received because of state abortion bans that were made possible after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade. One woman, whose water broke too early on her pregnancy, ended up in the ICU with severe sepsis because she could not get an abortion to end her doomed pregnancy. Another woman’s liver transplant was canceled because doctors discovered that she was pregnant – even though the pregnancy was unwanted.

Climate check: The massive US toxic fire shrouded in secrecy
A composite of two photos: on the right side is a forensic still of a black-and-white wide shot of a Louisiana refinery with a yellow-green, bile-colored cloud rising from it and a blue heat map spreading from the origin of the cloud. On the right side, Andrew Sterling is pictured staring to the left, posing against a backdrop of a blue sky and a Louisiana refinery.
In 2023, a huge fire broke out at a Louisiana refinery – right next to the cemetery where Andrew Sterling’s ancestors are buried. Composite: Forensic Architecture, Kathleen Flynn

Last year, a storage tank containing at least 26,000 barrels of the flammable hydrocarbon naphtha caught fire at the sprawling Marathon Petroleum refinery in south-eastern Louisiana. The fire blazed for over three days, producing one of the largest accidental releases of flammable chemicals in almost three decades. Marathon and local government officials have maintained that “no offsite impacts” were detected from this multi-day episode.

But interviews and a review of an array of records by the Guardian in collaboration with the multidisciplinary research group Forensic Architecture have revealed how the petroleum giant may have minimized the episode in its reporting to both federal and state governments.

Last Thing: The protege effect
Against a blue backdrop, a white conversation bubble acts as the balloon in a hot air balloon that is carrying its basket an individual reading from a book to two people who are seated.
Psychological research has found that humans learn more effectively when they teach someone else about the topic they’ve just explored. Illustration: Elia Barbieri

According to psychological research, the “protege effect” appears to be one of the most effective ways of accelerating knowledge and understanding. The protege effect is essentially learning by teaching – when humans learn more effectively by teaching someone else about a recently explored topic. David Robson has begun practicing this method by engaging with an AI chatbot named Mia. “I felt a little self-conscious talking to my computer, but after just a few weeks I am already more confident in my real-life interactions – all thanks to my little AI protege,” Robson writes.

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