Good morning. It is October 10. It is a sunny and chilly, possibly even crisp, morning in New York City, in answer to a listener inquiry, that if you hear screaming birds in the background, they're blue jays, the window is closed, they're just full of seasonal high spirits, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host. Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

The Nobel Peace Prize, as expected, did not go to Donald Trump. It went to the Venezuelan opposition leader MARIA CORREA Machado, who is currently in hiding from the regime of President Nicolas Maduro, and whose ability to show up for the ceremony is in doubt. The Trump administration is very angry that the President did not receive immediate gratification for his announcement of a deal between Israel and Hamas. But Machado's award is not exactly a rebuke to Donald Trump, although the BBC describes her as "an opposition leader and pro democracy activist, Machado is very much more the former than the latter. She showed up at the presidential palace during the 2002 coup attempt that sought to overturn the election of Hugo Chavez. And it doesn't seem clear that she's evolved a preference for democracy in the intervening years, so much as the ruling party that she opposes has gone anti democratic. And it appears that if a clean democratic election were held, her side would win, but in the absence of a peaceful transfer of power, she seems perfectly happy to support the Trump administration's efforts to overthrow the current regime, up to and including its massacres of boatloads of civilians. 

On its Nobel live blog, the BBC writes, "speaking to the NewsHour program on the BBC World Service last week, Maria Carina Machado said, 'I totally support the international deployment and coalition that's working in the Caribbean to stop the flow of illegal drug income to the regime.' When asked if she was calling for a US led overthrow of the Maduro government in the name of tackling drug smuggling, she told the BBC James Menendez, 'regime change was already mandated by the people in presidential elections under terrible, extreme conditions. We need Maduro to understand that his only option right now is to accept the terms of a peaceful transition, that he has to go. He won't go unless he realizes that there is a credible threat that things are going to get worse every day that goes by for them.' There's not much point in quibbling about a prize that already went to Henry Kissinger, but US-backed regime change and peace don't usually end up on the same side of the ledger.

On the front of this morning's New York Times, two big stories are jockeying for position on the left in the usual secondary slot, there is a four column headline in what looks like the largest type on the page, "Joy, Relief and Worry as Gaza Truce Nears / Hostages Should Be Free Within Days, Trump Says." there are stacked three column photos of people embracing in celebration in Tel Aviv and exultant children in the streets of Khan Younis, flashing victory signs, waving flags and pouring into streets and plazas. The Times writes "Israelis and Palestinians celebrated on Thursday as Israel and Hamas moved toward a cease fire and a hostage prisoner exchange that could pave the way for an end to two years of devastating war in Gaza. Early Friday, the Israeli government put its stamp of approval on the deal reached by negotiators for Hamas and Israel in Egypt. Earlier in the week, President Trump said he expected that the Israelis being held hostage in Gaza would be released on Monday or Tuesday in exchange for Palestinians imprisoned in Israel. Mr. Trump also said he was planning to travel to Egypt for a ceremonial signing of the agreement, which his administration helped broker, and to Israel to address its Parliament at the invitation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu." The caveats, or the negative spaces around the caveats, show up just before the jump, "although the text of the agreement had not been made public" the Times writes, "it promises at least a cease fire, if not a more lasting end to a war that has set off a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, battered Hamas militarily and left Israel exhausted and isolated internationally." 

Below that is a NEWS ANALYSIS piece "On Brink of Diplomatic Feat, a Dealmaker Chases His Legacy. R"ather than going through it in the paper. Let's just go to the online version and do a quick control-F on the word "if," let's see. 

But IF Mr. Trump can hold this deal together, IF Hamas gives up its last 20 living hostages, IF Mr. Trump can get Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to withdraw troops from Gaza City, IF he can stop the carnage, and then there's a quote "'this ceasefire and hostage release, IF it happens only came to fruition because of Trump's willingness to pressure Prime Minister Netanyahu,' said Aaron David Miller of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who has often been critical of Mr. Trump's stops and starts in the Mideast." Let's see, more "ifs," in recent weeks, Israel's military campaign in Gaza drove many of its closest allies to call for the creation of a Palestinian state, even IF they had no concrete plan about where it would be located or who would run it." 

"IF the peace plan moves forward, Mr. Trump may have as legitimate a claim to that Nobel as the four American presidents who have won the peace prize in the past, though with less bombast and lobbying, there are Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow, Wilson, Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter, who was awarded one decades after he left the White House." And one last, "if," "no one seems able to explain what role if any the Palestinian Authority will play."

Ooh, now let's try "clear."

"Wednesday evening, he made CLEAR he was eager to fly to the Middle East." Okay, great. Good for Trump. "It is far from CLEAR that the conflict is truly ending." Okay, and one more, "it is unCLEAR how the United States and its allies will assemble an (sic) technocratic interim leadership." I guess they pasted in the "technocratic" quote afterward or make sure the country's leadership is purged of Hamas sympathies. Israel seems unlikely to leave as long as remnants of Hamas remain, and maybe even after they are gone." And that is why they usually wait a year before they give anybody the Peace Prize, although they might do better if they waited even a while longer than that.

The other big story on page one in the usual lead spot, two columns wide, "JAMES IS INDICTED AS TRUMP PURSUES POLITICAL RIVALS / On Heels of Comey, Justice Dept. Targets Attorney General of New York." Yesterday's infographic about Trump using the justice system as his personal weapon, is published inside the paper, updated so that Letitia James, the New York State Attorney General, is now in the "indicted" category with James Comey. The front page piece begins, "a prosecutor hand picked by President Trump, secured an indictment of New York's Attorney General Letitia James on bank fraud and false statement charges in the Eastern District of Virginia on Thursday after the president publicly demanded she be charged. The five page indictment accused Ms James of falsely claiming in loan documents that she would use a home she purchased in Norfolk Virginia as a secondary residence and using it instead as a rental investment property, allowing her to receive favorable terms that would save her close to $19,000 the charges, coming two weeks after the Trump directed indictment of James B Comey, the former FBI director, deepened the President's intervention in the justice system, casting away long standing democratic norms as he seeks retribution on his political enemies." Not a bad summary, totally accurate. No dodging around ugly truths or trying to put them in the mouths of outside critics or experts. The Times goes on to write, "the prosecutions have ushered in a turbulent era at a Justice Department, increasingly under the direct command of a president intent on using federal law enforcement to prosecute his adversaries, shield his supporters, and redefine criminality as it suits his interests. That his appointees have now succeeded in convincing two grand juries," the Times adds "will likely embolden him, even If the prospects of conviction are anything but certain in both the James and Comey cases, the career prosecutors who conducted the investigations reported that there was insufficient evidence to bring charges, and a previous US Attorney ousted by Mr. Trump declined to bring either case before a grand jury. Mr. Trump's newly appointed replacement, Lindsay Halligan, was the only prosecutor listed on either indictment in nearly all similar cases, the career prosecutors responsible for collecting and analyzing evidence signed the court filings."

Down at the bottom of the page, there's a fascinating and frustrating dispatch from Kathmandu written up as a feature story that maybe really wants to have been an investigation. "Initially Peaceful, Nepal’s Gen Z Protests Went Chaotically Awry," is the headline. "It was not supposed to be a revolution," the Times writes, "really it wasn't. The young Nepalese all chafed at the government. Abrupt ban on social media. They all wanted an end to corruption in a country where families of communist Maoist and social democrat leaders alike paraded their wealth while the rest of the population seemed to slide into hopelessness, but a wholesale change in government, security forces shooting dead at least 19 protesters, including students in school uniforms, the coordinated burning and looting that in a few hours, robbed a nation of the physical manifestations of a state, majestic government buildings, police stations and Ward offices, all in smoldering ruins, along with hundreds of homes and businesses connected to the political elite." Then comes the feature story, nutgraph: "in a handful of days in September, Tanuja misan and Mahesh, Sudan, Raksha and Dipendra would find their lives transformed. One would be elevated as a leader of the Gen Z movement, even though he was a millennial, a decade or more older than the others. Another would watch the protest she helped organize devolve into unrecognizable chaos. Several would bicker about what it was they really wanted. All would be hunted. Two would be shot. One would die."

But then, after characterizing the uprising in Nepal as part of a wellspring of youthful dissent that has flowed in recent years from Indonesia and Bangladesh to the Philippines and Sri Lanka, the story then includes what seems like it would have been the nut graph, or part of the nut graph of a very differently set up story. "But" the Times says "interviews with dozens of young Nepalis in the wake of the government ouster make clear that the country's abrupt and violent shift was not what they envisioned. Someone somehow appears to have steered the movement in unexpected ways, leaving its youthful engineers dazed even as they scramble to help the new government run. A mysteriously sourced call for another anti corruption protest on October 9" —Today is October 10, but the story went up online on October 8, and once again, nobody made the necessary copy editing adjustments to a prestige package before slapping it into the print edition. Anyway,— "a mysteriously sourced call for another anti corruption protest on October 9 has been met with both excitement and anger from Gen Z groups that say they desire no more upheaval," and the story goes on from there, the personal stories are affecting and frequently horrifying, but they also keep including observations from the young participants in the protests just left out to hang there, that there was an odd shortage of security forces when they assembled, that the body of young protesters was suddenly supplemented by older men prepared and equipped to attack the buildings, that after the chaos and violence, the young protest organizers were summoned by the army to meet with a general who welcomed them and who seemed to be the source of the idea that the former Chief Justice, Sushila Karki should become the interim prime minister, which she became. There are certainly a lot of implications that could be drawn from those facts if they were put together in a certain way. And as affecting as the portrait of a bunch of traumatized and now confused young people may be, it would be more helpful journalistically to set about clearing up their confusion about what exactly happened.

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The indignity morning podcast is edited by Joe MACLEOD. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. You the listeners keep us going through your paid subscriptions to indignity and your tips. Keep sending those along if you are able, keep an eye out for coastal flooding, as a nor'easter is supposed to come passing through this weekend, and if the waters recede and nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again on Monday.