Happy Friday! We’re not saying we’re to thank for China’s announcement that more pandas may be sent to the U.S. as “envoys of friendship,” but we’re not not saying it, either.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said yesterday they had discovered the body of Judith Weiss, who lived in Kibbutz Be’eri and was kidnapped by Hamas, on Wednesday near Al-Shifa hospital. Weiss, 65, was being treated for breast cancer before she was abducted on October 7—though it’s unclear whether she died in captivity or was already dead when taken from the kibbutz. The Israeli military had been closing in on the hospital for days, and IDF officials have released videos purporting to show Hamas weaponry and tunnels discovered within and underneath the complex—U.S. intelligence officials have reportedly echoed the claim that Hamas has a “command node” under the Al-Shifa hospital. “Hamas does use hospitals, along with a lot of other civilian facilities, for command-and-control, for storing weapons, for housing its fighters,” White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said earlier this week. “Without getting into this specific hospital or that specific claim, this is Hamas’ track record, both historically and in this conflict.”
• Rep. George Santos of New York announced Thursday he would not run for reelection after a House Ethics Committee report found he “sought to fraudulently exploit every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit,” including by using campaign funds in ways that broke federal law. Santos, who survived a vote earlier this month to expel him from Congress, may now face another expulsion vote before his term ends in early 2025. He is also facing a 23-count federal indictment accusing him of wire fraud, credit card fraud, and aggravated identity theft. 
• Politico reported Wednesday that Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford, a Democrat, is investigating Republicans who falsely claimed to be genuine electors for former President Donald Trump in 2020; Joe Biden won the state that year by more than 2 percentage points. Similarly “false electors” are already facing charges in Georgia and Michigan, and an investigation is ongoing in Arizona.
• A New York appeals court judge temporarily paused the gag order on Donald Trump on Thursday, pending a longer appeals process, citing concerns about the former president’s free speech rights. Trump had been fined twice under the order imposed by Judge Arthur Engoron last month in the former president’s civil fraud case; it restricted him from making disparaging comments about Engoron and his staff. 
• A California jury on Thursday convicted David DePape of two federal crimes for breaking into former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s house and attacking her husband Paul with a hammer last year. DePape could face decades in prison for one count of assault on the immediate family member of a federal official and one count of attempted kidnapping of a federal official. Nancy Pelosi was in Washington, D.C., at the time of her husband’s attack.
• The Ventura County, California, Sheriff’s Office arrested college professor Loay Abdelfattah Alnaji on Thursday on suspicion of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Paul Kessler, a 69-year-old Jewish man who died earlier this month after suffering a head injury during an altercation at dueling pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel rallies in Thousand Oaks, California. Witnesses gave conflicting accounts of what caused Kessler to fall and hit his head, and authorities continue to search for video footage of the event. Alnaji’s bail has been set at $1 million and he will appear in court Monday. 
• Shohei Ohtani, the Los Angeles Angels two-way baseball superstar, won the American League Most Valuable Player award Thursday, becoming the first player to win the award twice by unanimous vote. Atlanta Braves outfielder Ronald Acuña Jr. won the National League MVP award.

Legally Biden

Over the summer, things were looking up for Hunter Biden. The president’s son seemed set to finally iron out a federal investigation that had dogged him for years—reaching a plea deal with prosecutors that included no jail time and appeared to preclude any future federal charges related to the Justice Department probe. The younger Biden had even begun to take on a more public role alongside his father in the months leading up to the deal. For the White House, this represented a tidy resolution to a saga that Republicans had continually used to criticize the president. Then it all fell apart.

The plea deal exploded in dramatic fashion, and prosecutors have since indicted Biden again on federal gun charges while the Justice Department probe into his conduct remains ongoing. Hunter’s case is heating up again as his legal team goes on the offensive, setting the stage for a high-profile court battle in the middle of his father’s 2024 reelection campaign. 

How did things go south so quickly? As we wrote this summer, Biden’s plea deal collapsed …

As a non-paying reader, you are receiving a truncated version of The Morning Dispatch. Our full 1,700-word story on the Hunter Biden saga is available in the members-only version of TMD.

Worth Your Time

• Following a spate of high-profile derailments, a team of ProPublica reporters—Topher Sanders, Jessica Lussenhop, Dan Schwartz, Danelle Morton, and Gabriel Sandoval—examined the questionable safety record of the railroad transportation industry. “If the public thinks of America’s sprawling freight rail network at all, it typically does so when a train derails, unleashing flaming cars and noxious smoke on a community as it did this year in East Palestine, Ohio,” they wrote. “The rail industry usually responds by vowing fixes and defending its overall record, which includes a steady decrease in major accidents. But a ProPublica investigation has found that those statistics present a knowingly incomplete picture of rail safety. They don’t count the often-harrowing near misses, the trains that break apart, slip off the tracks or roll away from their crews with no one aboard—the accumulation of incidents that portend deeper safety risks. The government trusts the rail companies to fix the underlying problems on their own, to heed the warnings of workers like Bradley Haynes of loose hoses that could impair brakes or rotting tracks that could cause derailments. Unless those mishaps result in major injuries or costly damage, the companies don’t have to report them to anyone. But as railroads strive to move their cargo faster, that honor system, ProPublica found, is being exploited. To squeeze the most money out of every minute, the companies are going to dangerous lengths to avoid disruptions—even those for safety repairs. They use performance-pay systems that effectively penalize supervisors for taking the time to fix hazards and that pressure them to quash dissent, threatening and firing the very workers they hired to keep their operations safe. As a result, trains with known problems are rolling from yard to yard like ticking time bombs, getting passed down the line for the next crew to defuse—or defer.”

Presented Without Comment

NBC News: TikTok Removes Hashtag for Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ After Viral Videos Circulate

Also Presented Without Comment

Axios: IBM Suspends Advertising on Elon Musk’s X After Their Ads Appear Next to Nazi Content

Also Also Presented Without Comment

Business Insider: George Santos Spent Campaign Funds on OnlyFans, Botox, and Hermes, Ethics Report Finds

Toeing the Company Line 

• Alex fact checked Vivek Ramawamy’s many accusations against Ukraine during the most recent GOP debate.  
• In the newsletters: Sarah and Mike explored what would happen if Trump is on trial in Georgia in January 2025 while Nick lamented (🔒) the growing levels of antisemitism on both sides of the political aisle.
• On the podcasts: Sarah was joined by Jonah and Mike on The Dispatch Podcast to discuss Osama bin Laden’s 9/11 manifesto going viral, the Biden-Xi meeting, and the relative benefits of power tools.
• On the site: Kevin weighs in on the feud between Pope Francis and a bishop in Texas, while Frederick Hess and Matthew Levey argue that lackluster K-12 civics education contributed to the Hamasification of campuses.