Good morning. It is October 18th. It's another sunny fall morning in New York City. The cat has found something to chase around the room very loudly. And this is your Indignity Morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

The Texas Supreme Court last night stayed the execution of Robert Roberson, who was sentenced to death in 2002 for supposedly shaking his two-year-old daughter to death based on evidence of so-called shaken baby syndrome that is now widely dismissed as junk science. This has been one more case where someone who is by all appearances innocent is nevertheless being fed into the machinery of the death penalty, even over the objections of those who originally investigated or prosecuted them. Chris Geidner, covering the case on the Law Dork blog, notes that the roots that Texas and federal government systems allegedly assigned to protect against such acts as killing an innocent person failed Roberson repeatedly and spectacularly. The Supreme Court had rejected his request for a stay, with Sonia Sotomayor regretfully noting that the case didn't involve a federal claim strong enough to transcend the Supreme Court's own limitations on its interventions, apparently leaving the question to Texas Governor Greg Abbott, an enthusiastic proponent of executing innocent people. But as a sadistic executive branch and an impotent judicial branch sat on their hands, the state legislature intervened, subpoenaing Roberson to come testify about the state's junk science law on a date next week that would have been after his execution and then the state Supreme Court ruled not that the legislature necessarily has the power to block an execution by subpoenaing the target of the execution, but that while that question was being decided the execution had to be paused to keep the case from being moot. These are the kind of contortions that are necessary under our legal system to even temporarily prevent someone who appears to be innocent from being executed. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the full-width headline is “Hamas leader who planned October 7th is dead.” Subhead. “Sinwar, Israel's top target, is killed in unexpected encounter in Gaza.” The news, apparently for certain, is that Yahya Sinwar, the top official in Hamas, is dead. The Israeli authorities, the Times reports, said they had confirmed his death on Thursday using dental records and fingerprints. His DNA was also tested for confirmation, according to one Israeli official and the White House. Hamas, for its part, does not seem to be disputing that Sinwar is dead. As for the story of how he died, who knows? The Israeli account, which the Times is taking as fact, is that a band of trainee squad commanders on a routine patrol in Gaza, stumbled across a small band of militants, got into a firefight, and when the dust settled, looked at the dead bodies and realized that one of them looked just like the person military intelligence had been hunting with all its resources for a year. Random things do happen in war zones, and this version of events does not obviously redound to the credit of the Israeli military or political leadership, but the rule of thumb that whatever the Israeli military says happened is not what actually happened, has been a reliable guide to almost everything that's taken place in Gaza. And so it's probably worth waiting to see how the story of the lucky recruits holds up over the next few weeks. An accompanying news analysis story by Jerusalem bureau chief Patrick Kingsley is under the headline, “Militants' death could unlock stalled Gaza truce negotiations,” writing that Sinwar was considered the driving force behind Hamas's refusal to surrender, even as Israel's airstrikes and ground invasion devastated the territory and displaced most of its population, and his survival made it impossible for Israel to declare victory, living proof that Hamas, though decimated, remained undefeated. Now, Kingsley continues, “after Mr. Sinwar’s killing, a route towards some kind of truce in Gaza seems slightly more navigable, since it gives both Israel and Hamas a pretext to soften their stance, according to Israeli and Palestinian analysts.” The analysis would inspire a little more confidence if the story anywhere contained the name Ismail Haniyeh, who was the political leader of Hamas and the central figure in truce negotiations, until Israel assassinated him in July in Tehran. It may be that the removal of an arch militant from the top position in Hamas improves the prospects for negotiating an end to the slaughter in Gaza, but that particular bottleneck was the direct result of Israeli policy in the first place. Along with the killing of Mohammed Deif, the killings of Sinwar and Haniyeh have now eliminated all three people on the Hamas side of the International Criminal Court's request for war crimes warrants. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Golan, their counterparts in the prosecution brief, remain in office. 

Elsewhere on page one of the Times, there's a campaign memo from Jonathan Weisman. “Democrats lose fear of calling Trump a fascist,” which slightly overstates the case. Kamala Harris told Charlemagne Tha God in a radio interview when he asked if what Trump was doing was fascism. “Yes, we can say that.” And she has taken to quoting Bob Woodward's reporting that Trump's chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, said Trump is “fascist to the core,” but that does still keep it all in quotation marks. So it's less Democrats calling Trump a fascist and more Democrats pointing to other people calling Trump a fascist, a distinction that exists because people like Jonathan Weisman write sentences like, “but an element of political risk remains, even as Mr. Trump freely uses the word himself against Ms. Harris.” Then comes a grab bag of people dickering about the word “fascism” and whether it covers what Weisman describes as “Mr. Trump's calls for mass deportations and internment camps, his promise to use force against a pernicious enemy from within, his leveraging of a cult of personality, his refusal to distance himself from groups like the Proud Boys and 3 %ers, and his persistent evocation and even glorification of violence.” Amid that usual back and forth, there is one remarkably bizarre assertion from Laura Thornton of the McCain Institute, at least as paraphrased by Weisman. “He certainly has a cult of personality, Ms. Norton said, but that developed largely on its own, she argued, reflecting the demand for a strong man within elements of the population, more than any effort by Mr. Trump to inculcate it.” We're talking about the guy who put his name in giant brass letters on every building that he was remotely connected to. The guy who declared he alone could solve the country's problems. The cult of personality just happened to him. Got it. 

In other news on page A6, “Steep jump found in global carbon emissions from forest fires.” The Times reports “global carbon emissions from forest fires have increased 60 % since 2001 according to a study published Thursday.” That sounds entirely believable in principle. The Times then writes “the study published in Science used machine learning to group the world's forest ecosystems into 12 categories. Each kind of forest reacted differently to a combination of drivers that can influence how fires start and how severe they become.” I guess finding categories of classification is something that machine learning is actually capable of doing. But I do wonder what the admissions footprint of doing the study that way was.

On page A17 is the news that a local judge in Georgia delivered a sweeping ruling that rejected multiple new rules governing elections in Georgia, describing them as illegal, unconstitutional, and void. “Most of the rules knocked down,” the Times continues, “closely aligned with the priorities of right-wing activists and were approved by the Georgia State Election Board in recent months. They included mandates to count election ballots by hand, expand the monitoring of ballot drop boxes, require new identification for delivering absentee ballots, and provide expanded access for poll watchers, along with new requirements and procedures that could disrupt the election certification process.” That's heartening news, as the Trump campaign seems less and less focused on trying to get more votes, and more and more focused on trying to make the election results an unknowable mess. 

And on page A19, the Times reports that New York Mayor Eric Adams' legal defense fund is out of money. “The mayor has received only one donation since his indictment on September 26th on federal charges of bribery, fraud, and soliciting illegal foreign campaign contributions,” the Times reports, “the donation for $1,000 was from Deborah Robbins, who lives in Miami Beach and who did not respond to a request for comment.”

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. Please subscribe to Indignity to keep us going. And if all goes well, we'll talk again on Monday.