| This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a network of hidden ditches filled with Bloomberg Opinion's opinions. Sign up here. Remember these? Back in the day, no Halloween costume was complete without a heavy, coin-filled UNICEF box tied around your neck. Everyone from Selena Gomez to Jennifer Lopez to the Brady Bunch endorsed the organization's efforts to help kids around the world — as exemplified by that box. Nowadays, however, UNICEF's month-long Halloween campaign relies on QR codes instead of cardboard. That's progress, I guess: People are more likely to have Venmo than spare change. Still, by replacing the tangerine-colored box with a digital square of black and white pixels, UNICEF has lost a ubiquitous symbol. For more than 70 years, those boxes were in classrooms, churches and playgrounds. Now, they're only on our phones, amid dozens of other attention-seeking apps. And it's not just UNICEF: The influence of the United Nations itself is dwindling, too. "One way or another, pretty much every one of its 193 member nations is fed up and increasingly convinced that the UN is fast making itself irrelevant," Andreas Kluth writes (free read). And part of it is the international equivocation over the Israel-Hamas war. According to Bloomberg News's Henry Meyer, Israel's current campaign to destroy Hamas involves ground forces moving gradually into the Palestinian territory while backed up by tanks and artillery. The civilian death toll — including from a lethal strike Tuesday on the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza — "has sparked growing international criticism, while leading to a dire humanitarian crisis," Henry writes.  "Where's the United Nations in all this?" Andreas asks. "Oh, right, nowhere." Although the organization is meant to facilitate multilateral cooperation and collective peacekeeping, it's failing to live up to its principles. The watered-down resolution recently passed by the General Assembly may demand "an immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce" but it fails to mention Hamas, the hostages or Israel's right to self-defense:  Making matters worse is the gridlock within the UN Security Council, which consists of five permanent veto-wielding members — the US, UK, France, Russia and China — and a rotating cast of 10 other countries. The council can dispatch troops to keep peace in trouble spots, but there's a catch: Resolutions are only approved when all permanent members agree, and they rarely do. Initially, the US's proposed council resolution got shot down by Russia and China. "Then it was Russia's turn to get rejected. Its resolution called for an immediate ceasefire and condemned all violence against civilians. That's rich coming from a nation that's been bombing, abducting, maiming and killing Ukrainian civilians for more than 600 days," Andreas writes. This inability to come up with a solution is costing both Israel and Palestine dearly. Just today, UNICEF Spokesperson James Elder said: "Gaza has become a graveyard for thousands of children. It's a living hell for everyone else." And the longer the UN fails to act, the fewer children there will be for UNICEF to help. Bonus Israel-Hamas Reading: - Emmanuel Macron's tour of the Middle East highlights Europe's struggle to make diplomatic headway on Israel and Gaza. — Lionel Laurent
- While the US focuses on Gaza and Ukraine, Taiwan should beef up its own military capabilities to deter China. — Karishma Vaswani
Given the millennial obsession over open-concept kitchen plans, you'd think governments would feel the same way. But nope. They LOVE walls! There are 74 in the world, to be exact:  "Tear down this wall" may be one of history's great quotes, but the world that emerged after the Cold War turned out to be full of fortified walls rather than open borders, Adrian Wooldridge says. Some of these walls work better than others, and I'm not just talking about Donald Trump's fail in Mexico: "The most sophisticated wall is probably Saudi Arabia's 560-mile wall on its border with Iraq, along with a similar border fence with Yemen. Another world-class wall is Pakistan's 2,000-mile wall with India, consisting of a dual chain link fence and barbed wire, reinforced by a 400-mile-long ditch, 14 feet wide and 11 feet deep and 1,000 forts and border posts. Unlike the Great Wall of China, the Great Wall of Pakistan is visible from space thanks to permanent floodlights. Compared with these two goliaths, Israel's 'iron wall' with Gaza is both short and unsophisticated," he notes. According to David Betz's new book — The Guarded Age: Fortification in the Twenty-First Century — walls make up only a fraction of the fortifications arising across the planet. Israel has a defense system in the sky made of radar beams and interceptor missiles. The new US Embassy in London is protected by a "pond" and a network of hidden ditches. Barriers are all around us, from barbed-wire fences to concrete barricades. Even Wall Street was named after a nine-foot-high wall that Dutch settlers built in the 17th century to keep out the British and pirates. To this day, fear of disorder continues to inspire humans to erect new fortifications, Adrian explains: "Some 17 million Americans live in gated communities. The emerging world is splitting into a world of slums and a world of walled cities." What does that mean for globalization? Try not to put your guard up before reading the whole thing. There's really no way to tell whether Xi Jinping is giving the Chinese people the ick these days, because the country has no regular presidential-job-approval survey and heavily censors its social media. But there are context clues, courtesy of our data visualization columnist Elaine He. For example: Real-estate developers have literally *run out of money* to build and deliver all of the homes they've pre-sold: "Seeking a fast churn, developers relied on the so-called pre-sales model, where apartments are often bought 18 months to two years before completion to pull in operating cash early," Shuli Ren writes. But now they have no money left to build them. Can you imagine?? I feel like demanding a refund when my Uber Eats order doesn't come with the container of dipping sauce I ordered. I can't fathom how I'd feel if I put a deposit down on an apartment that never got built. An unfortunate knock-on effect of the property blowup is China's faltering economy. "As indebted developers could no longer deliver homes, angry buyers staged protests and threatened mortgage boycotts," Shuli writes. Xi's common prosperity isn't very common these days: Given the slumping property prices, the ever-widening urban income gap and the fact that more than one in five young people are jobless, I'm guessing that not many of China's citizens are feeling chipper right now. Who needs approval ratings when you have facts like that? | 
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