Israel’s High-Stakes Election, and How Illegal Gold Is Getting Into the Global Market

From The New York Times, it's The Headlines. I'm Will Jarvis, in for Tracy Mumford. Today's Monday, October 19th. Here's what we're covering. Yesterday, President Trump threw his weight behind Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, officially endorsing the country's leader ahead of key elections there next week. Relations between the two have become increasingly tense in recent months over their country's joint war in Iran. But in his endorsement message, Trump had only praise for Netanyahu, calling him strong, brave, and brilliant. In response, Netanyahu, who's locked in a razor-tight race with opposition parties, thanked Trump, and in a video released last night, told Israelis to listen carefully to the U.S. president. For many, many Israelis, this really is one of, if not the most consequential elections in the country's eight-decade history. Isabel Kirshner covers Israel for The Times. She says the upcoming elections are the first there since the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023. And one of the key issues is whether there should be an independent investigation into security failures leading up to that day. The opposition has been pushing for that, saying Netanyahu's government has failed to take responsibility for what happened. Netanyahu has blocked efforts to get an investigation underway. But beyond that, this is also a major referendum on Netanyahu himself. He's Israel's longest-serving prime minister. And in the last four years, he's headed the most far-right and religiously conservative government the country has known. Netanyahu, after the October 7 attack, took Israel to war against Hamas in Gaza. And then that spread to Hezbollah. In Lebanon and two campaigns in Iran. And none of these have really been completed. And Netanyahu says, you know, he needs to be there to finish the job. Many people here now feel that this is an election essentially over the future character of Israel. Is it going to continue along a very hawkish hardline path where we've seen this government trying to institute judicial overhaul laws that would curb the independence of the Supreme Court and continue settling the occupied West Bank and sealing Israel's control there? Or is the opposition going to prevail? And although they're very diverse, and the opposition includes right-wing parties, some of whom support settlement in the West Bank, for example, they're offering a more liberal outlook where they say they would start to try to heal the country and, you know, they're not going to be able to do that. And also preserve Israel's democratic values. Now to France. So what we saw this weekend was really two things. It was like a split screen. On one side were these peaceful, really large protests. In Paris, they unfurled through the streets. And then on the other side was these scenes of total destruction. Catherine Porter covers France for The Times. She says that this weekend, organizers across the country planned demonstrations that were designed to bring together different groups demanding change. Students who've been protesting for weeks over poor conditions in schools and a broader coalition of people who are upset about the cost of living and other social and economic issues. But even as the peaceful anti-government protesters took to the streets, others stoked chaos, helping set off some of the country's worst riots in decades. They were masked people in black, attacking the police, picking up cobblestones to hurl them, and then smashing not only storefronts, but also particularly state buildings. People broke into the city hall in Marseille, also in Lille, and in one case in the town of Le Mans. The reaction to all this was horror and shock and sadness. France is a country that's renowned for protests, is really used to it, but this kind of pillaging was at a new level that people had not seen. And right away, a blame game started. We saw the Minister of Interior and the Prime Minister blame the far left, saying that they had instigated this. And the Prime Minister blamed the far left, saying that they had instigated this. And the prime minister of the far left movement had been the ones who had been doing the breaking in, at least at first, before delinquents joined in. And then you saw the far left on their side saying it really was the state that lost control and they were looking for someone else to blame. It was ridiculous. And then you had the far right step in in campaign mode and say, look, there's an election in six months. We are the ones who will clearly bring back order to this country. Catherine says that This morning, the country is on edge as the government works to reassert control. And she says that for the moment, it's not clear how much momentum the protest movement has. Students are currently on a two-week fall break, but some groups have already called for another day of mass demonstrations early next month. Over the past two decades, the price of gold has surged, climbing to record highs. And in the multi-trillion dollar gold market, industry leaders have pushed the idea that there's clean gold and there's dirty gold. Clean gold from reputable, legal, responsibly run mines and dirty gold from illegal mines with records of human rights abuses or environmental destruction. But a new investigation from the Times has found that that divide is a fiction. There's no clean gold or dirty gold, just gold. And the closest thing the industry has to a global regulator, a group called the LBGT, has repeatedly allowed gold into the market that has been mined by criminals, cartel members, and children. The industry works like this. Miners and brokers sell raw gold to refiners, which melt it down and sell it into the international marketplace. The role of the LBMA in all this, short for the London Bullion Market Association, is to certify the gold as being legitimately mined, since without that sign-off, the gold is basically unsellable. What the Times learned, though, is that the LBMA, relies on refiners to inspect the mines and self-report anything suspicious. And sometimes those refiners lie with impunity about the actual origins of the gold. My colleagues traveled to mines in Madagascar to see the reality on the ground. There, workers cut down trees in a protected forest to make beams for mine shafts, and children crush rocks, haul buckets of ore, and pan for gold in raw sewage. The gold from those mines is then melted down and shipped to Turkey. Documents show that, at that stage, the refiner basically just claimed the gold was clean, paving the way for the Madagascar gold to be LBMA-certified and enter the global market. In response to questions from the Times, the chief executive of the LBMA said that the group holds refiners to the, quote, highest level of international guidelines, but also downplayed the organization's responsibility, saying that it's up to governments to oversee the industry. At the same time, the question of what gold is making it into the global market is only, of course, the question of whether or not the world is going to be able to make it into the global market. In addition to that, the world's gold prices are becoming more urgent. Skyrocketing gold prices have fueled a mining boom in some of the world's poorest places like Madagascar, as well as Sudan and the depths of the Amazon, as Wall Street, central banks, and investors profit from a supply that includes gold from illegal sources. You can find the full investigation, including photographs from the mines in Madagascar, at NYTimes.com. And finally, roughly a decade ago, a comment popped up below a YouTube video of an astrobiology seminar, and it was a provocative question. Shouldn't there be planets more habitable than Earth? Unlike most YouTube comments, this one wasn't some half-baked thought from a guy way down the rabbit hole. It came from an actual astronomer, and the cosmic-sized question sparked a conversation with another scientist that helped jumpstart a new field of study, the hunt for so-called astronauts. For the most part, scientists searching for life out there have focused on finding what they call Earth twins, basically other rocky, watery, similar-sized planets orbiting sun-like stars. But Earth is really only barely habitable. For example, if it was just 2% closer to the sun, all of our water would have boiled away billions of years ago. So what would a super-habitable planet look like? One key thing is it would be about 30% wider and twice as massive. The actual size of the planet is about 2.5 times the size of the Earth. The Earth would be about 1.5 times the size of the Earth. planets is scheduled to launch. And other major telescope projects are also underway, including a NASA mission planned for the 2040s known as the Habitable Worlds Observatory. Those are the headlines. And if you're not a Time subscriber yet, you can get a full month of free access to everything we publish when you download the Times app now. I'm Will Jarvis. We'll be back tomorrow. you