First Thing: Israel planted explosives in thousands of Hezbollah pagers – reports

Good morning.

Israel placed explosives inside thousands of pagers imported by Hezbollah months before Tuesday’s extraordinary attacks, according to sources cited by Reuters and US media.

Twelve people were confirmed killed so far and almost 3,000 injured after pagers exploded across Lebanon and in Syria in an operation that Hezbollah attributed to Israel’s spy agency, the Mossad. Israel’s military did not comment directly but said senior commanders had held a situational assessment “focussing on readiness in both offence and defence in all arenas”.

• How many are seriously injured? More than 200 people had critical injuries, Lebanon’s health minister, Firass Abiad, said, adding that a young girl was among those killed.

JD Vance defends pet-eating remarks: ‘The media has a responsibility to fact check’

JD Vance has said the “media has a responsibility to factcheck” politicians’ comments, after he spread false and racist rumors about Haitian immigrants eating pets.

The Ohio senator made the statement at a rally in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, two days after he defended his right “to create stories” to draw attention to issues constituents care about. The comments, in which he appeared to say that politicians could shamelessly lie without consequence, were immediately censured.

During the rally, he claimed numerous constituents had told him “they’d seen something in Springfield” and laid responsibility with the media.

• What else did he focus on? He spoke about immigration and crime, despite research showing immigrants don’t commit more crimes than those born in the US.

Russia propaganda group was behind fake Kamala Harris hit-and-run story, says Microsoft

A Russian disinformation operation is behind a false claim spreading online that Kamala Harris was involved in a hit-and-run in San Francisco in 2011, research by Microsoft has found.

Researchers described the group behind the operation as a Kremlin-aligned troll farm. They discovered it had created a video using an actor to play the alleged victim, and disseminated the story through a fake website for a nonexistent San Francisco news outlet named KBSF-TV.

The website was launched shortly before publishing its first article about the fake incident, according to online registration records.

• How many times has the video been watched? At time of the research, 2.7m times.

• What has Russia said? A spokesperson for the Russian embassy in Washington did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment.

In other news …

• Kashmiris are voting for their first regional assembly in a decade on Wednesday in their first vote since the prime minister, Narendra Modi, stripped the region of its statehood.

• Kamala Harris has called the bomb threats that followed Donald Trump and JD Vance’s lies about Haitian immigrants in Ohio “a crying shame”, in an interview that also covered the Gaza war, gun violence, and reproductive rights.

• Texas is preparing to execute an innocent man convicted of a crime that never happened, the author John Grisham has warned, joining scores of doctors, scientists, lawyers and others who have sounded the alarm over the case of Robert Roberson.

Stat of the day: Only 13 of Japan’s top 1,600 companies have female CEOs

Female chief executives are at the helm of just 0.8% of the 1,643 firms listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s top-tier prime market, according to a survey by the Kyodo news agency. Japan lags behind all countries except South Korea and China in this regard, with a 2022 OECD survey finding that women held just 15.5% of executive positions in Japan, compared with 40.9% in Britain and 45.2% in France.

Don’t miss this: ‘It’s not about proving’ – inside the mysterious world of psychics

When documentarian Lana Wilson visited a medium the morning after the 2016 election, it was as a “lifelong skeptic” of psychics and religion. But entering the room, she found herself feeling comforted. “It wasn’t about believing her or not believing her … I think because it was a brief, intimate connection with a stranger, and that’s really rare, and very powerful when it happens.” Eight years on, her documentary on the subject offers insight into people’s “innermost insecurities, longing and pain, their nagging questions and uncertainties”, writes Adrian Horton .

Climate check: More than $650bn of subsidies a year are harmful to the climate, says report

Taxpayers around the world are funding more than $650bn a year in subsidies harmful to the climate, data has shown. The report from the charity ActionAid found that renewable energy projects in the developing world get 40 times less funding than the fossil fuel sector. While these subsidies are sometimes used to benefit poorer consumers, for example by insulating people from energy price shocks, subsidies are also given to industries with powerful lobbies.

Last Thing: Friends at 30 – the inside story

In 1994, the executives at NBC were not sure that Friends would be a success, describing the pilot as “not very entertaining, clever or original”. But by the time the writer Adam Chase was working on season 2, he would hear people out and about quoting the show’s jokes. Three decades on, Kate Lloyd hears about how the series was made : all-nighters were common in the writing room, and antics, bets and dares abounded (memorably, a writer once ate a 2.3kg can of beans for $3,000). Incredibly, the extra who played Gunther got the role because he was the only one on set who knew how to operate the coffee machine.

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