PRESS REVIEW – Thursday, October 22: The New York Times's sources report plans for fresh strikes on Iran after the US midterm elections. In other news, the French Senate publishes a 30-step proposal for how to "take back control", just days after protests gave way to riots. Also, how software engineers found and patched up bugs in the language that makes up 70 percent of the internet. Finally, the story of a man for whom what happened in Vegas did not stay there.
The New York Times immediately caveats its exclusive findings with a reminder that Donald Trump has "repeatedly cancelled plans to return to major combat", but it cites administration officials who believe one more major attack could be what pushes the Iranian economy to collapse and force diplomatic concessions. Officials also told New York Times journalists that joint training exercises between the US and Israel had been stepped up, and that a meeting had been held this week between Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Drawing on this reporting, Haaretz quotes Trump's cryptic comments on Wednesday evening that the US is "not negotiating" with Iran, that "something one way or the other will happen fairly soon", and that "most people seem to think it's after the election".
Here in France, the right-leaning upper house of parliament has released a report, which was in the works since January, on "the future of maintaining order: 30 proposals to take back control". Le Figaro cites some of the senators' proposals: the confiscation of perpetrators' state benefits to pay for damage caused, more CCTV cameras and algorithmic surveillance. L'Opinion notes the report's recommendations of more police on horseback and the creation of a criminal offence of "illegal protesting".
Meanwhile, the left-wing daily Libération reports on a collective of lawyers, teachers and elected officials assembled outside the courthouse of Bobigny, a town in the Paris suburbs, to denounce the conditions in which teenagers are being detained following the weekend's unrest. They point to 10 mattresses for 86 people on Tuesday night, bottles of urine left lying around when the young people arrived, and teenagers squeezed into extremely confined spaces. "They want to traumatise them so they don't protest again," said the collective.
Elsewhere, when government websites around the world went offline on Wednesday, it was the first clue for most laypeople that something was afoot. This after a security firm used AI to discover bugs in the source code of PHP language, which is used in 70 percent of websites. The Wall Street Journal takes us behind the scenes into how the problem was discovered in August, and how a group of software engineers and security researchers have worked secretly in the months since to develop 10,000 lines of code to "patch" the bug. Supposed to be implemented on Thursday, a leak on Tuesday moved up the timeline so that the vulnerability would not be left exposed.