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• Hear the stories of what happened at Dublin from formerly incarcerated survivors.
• Learn about the ongoing lawsuit and the Dublin Prison Solidarity Coalition.
• Find out how you can become involved in supporting this groundbreaking struggle.
Visit our website or contact us at:
dublinprisonsolidarity@gmail.com
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‘Operation al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 328:
Israeli Foreign Minister calls West Bank invasion ‘a war in every sense’
The Israeli army’s large-scale assault on the northern West Bank has entered its second day. During a battle in Nur Shams refugee camp, the Israeli army killed wanted resistance fighter Muhammad Jaber “Abu Shuja’,” leader of the Tulkarem Brigade.
By Mondoweiss Palestine Bureau, August 29, 2024
Casualties
· 40,602+ killed* and at least 93,855 wounded in the Gaza Strip, according to the Gaza-based Ministry of Health as of August 29, 2024. Some 10,000 more are estimated to be under the rubble.
· 664+ Palestinians killed in the occupied West Bank, 5,600 wounded since October 7, according to Palestinian Ministry of Health as of August 29, 2024.
Key Developments
· Israeli forces kill at least 18 Palestinians, injure dozens as part of large-scale northern West Bank invasion since start of operation. Martyrs include 6 people in Tulkarem, 4 in Tubas, and 8 in Jenin, according to Wafa News Agency.
· Israeli army kills 68 Palestinians, wounds 77 in past 24 hours in Gaza, according to Gaza-based Ministry of Health.
· Israeli army announces large-scale military operation in northern West Bank, including Jenin, Tulkarem, and Tubas; claims operation largest in West Bank since Operation Defensive Shield in 2002.
· Israeli army announces assassination of wanted resistance fighter and leader of Tulkarem Brigade, Muhammad “Abu Shuja’” Jaber, alongside four other resistance fighters.
· Israeli army announces on Wednesday death of two soldiers in fighting in Gaza over past 24 hours.
· EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell says Israeli West Bank assault must not be “premises” of “war extension” from Gaza, including “full-scale destruction.”
· Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister Israel Katz says operation must deal with northern West Bank similarly to Gaza, including “temporary evacuation of Palestinian residents,” adding that assault is “a war in every sense.”
· UN’s World Food Programme pauses staff operations in Gaza after being shot at by Israeli soldiers at checkpoint, “despite being clearly marked and receiving multiple clearances by Israeli authorities to approach.”
Source: mondoweiss.net
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Write to:
Leonard Peltier 89637-132
USP Coleman 1
P.O. Box 1033
Coleman, FL 33521
Note: Letters, address and return address must be in writing—no stickers—and on plain white paper.
U.S. Parole Commission Denies Leonard Peltier’s Request for Freedom; President Biden Should Grant Clemency
In response to the U.S. Parole Commission denying Leonard Peltier’s request for parole after a hearing on June 10, Paul O’Brien, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, made the following statement:
“Continuing to keep Leonard Peltier locked behind bars is a human rights travesty. President Biden should grant him clemency and release him immediately. Not only are there ongoing, unresolved concerns about the fairness of his trial, he has spent nearly 50 years in prison, is approaching 80 years old, and suffers from several chronic health problems.
“Leonard Peltier has been incarcerated for far too long. The parole commission should have granted him the freedom to spend his remaining years in his community and surrounded by loved ones.
“No one should be imprisoned after a trial riddled with uncertainty about its fairness. We are now calling on President Biden, once again, to grant Leonard Peltier clemency on humanitarian grounds and as a matter of mercy and justice.”
Background
· Leonard Peltier, Native American activist and member of the American Indian Movement (AIM), was convicted of the murders of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1975. He has always maintained his innocence. Amnesty International joins Tribal Nations, Tribal Leaders, Members of Congress, former FBI agents, Nobel Peace Prize winners and former U.S. Attorney James Reynolds, whose office handled Peltier’s prosecution and appeal, in urging his release.
· Parole was also rejected at Peltier’s last hearing in 2009. Due to his age, this was likely the last opportunity for parole.
· A clemency request is pending before President Joe Biden. President Biden has committed opens in a new tab to grant clemency/commutation of sentences on a rolling basis rather than at the end of his term, following a review of requests by the White House Counsel’s Office and the Department of Justice.
Amnesty International has examined Peltier’s case extensively for many years, sent observers to his trial in 1977, and long campaigned on his behalf. Most recently, Amnesty International USA sent a letter to the U.S. Parole Commission urging the commission to grant him parole.
https://www.amnestyusa.org/press-releases/u-s-parole-commission-denies-leonard-peltiers-request-for-freedom-president-biden-should-grant-clemency/
Write to:
Leonard Peltier 89637-132
USP Coleman 1
P.O. Box 1033
Coleman, FL 33521
Note: Letters, address and return address must be in writing—no stickers—and on plain white paper.
Sign our petition urging President Biden to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier:
https://www.freeleonardpeltier.com/petition
Email: contact@whoisleonardpeltier.info
Address: 116 W. Osborne Ave. Tampa, Florida 33603
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Beneath The Mountain: An Anti-Prison Reader (City Lights, 2024) is a collection of revolutionary essays, written by those who have been detained inside prison walls. Composed by the most structurally dispossessed people on earth, the prisoner class, these words illuminate the steps towards freedom.
Beneath the Mountain documents the struggle — beginning with slavery, genocide, and colonization up to our present day — and imagines a collective, anti-carceral future. These essays were handwritten first on scraps of paper, magazine covers, envelopes, toilet paper, or pages of bibles, scratched down with contraband pencils or the stubby cartridge of a ball-point pen; kites, careworn, copied and shared across tiers and now preserved in this collection for this and future generations. If they were dropped in the prison-controlled mail they were cloaked in prayers, navigating censorship and dustbins. They were very often smuggled out. These words mark resistance, fierce clarity, and speak to the hope of building the world we all deserve to live in.
"Beneath the Mountain reminds us that ancestors and rebels have resisted conquest and enslavement, building marronage against colonialism and genocide."
—Joy James, author of New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency
Who stands beneath the mountain but prisoners of war? Mumia Abu-Jamal and Jennifer Black have assembled a book of fire, each voice a flame in captivity...Whether writing from a place of fugivity, the prison camp, the city jail, the modern gulag or death row, these are our revolutionary thinkers, our critics and dreamers, our people. The people who move mountains. —Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
Filled with insight and energy, this extraordinary book gifts us the opportunity to encounter people’s understanding of the fight for freedom from the inside out. —Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag and Abolition Geography
These are the words each writer dreamed as they sought freedom and they need to be studied by people inside and read in every control unit/hole in every prison in America. We can send this book for you to anyone who you know who is currently living, struggling, and fighting
Who better to tell these stories than those who have lived them? Don’t be surprised with what you find within these pages: hope, solidarity, full faith towards the future, and most importantly, love.
Excerpt from the book:
"Revolutionary love speaks to the ways we protect, respect, and empower each other while standing up to state terror. Its presence is affirmed through these texts as a necessary component to help chase away fear and to encourage the solidarity and unity essential for organizing in dangerous times and places. Its absence portends tragedy. Revolutionary love does not stop the state from wanting to kill us, nor is it effective without strategy and tactics, but it is the might that fuels us to stand shoulder to shoulder with others regardless. Perhaps it can move mountains." —Jennifer Black & Mumia Abu-Jamal from the introduction to Beneath The Mountain: An Anti Prison Reader
Get the book at:
https://www.prisonradiostore.com/shop-2/beneath-the-mountain-an-anti-prison-reader-edited-by-mumia-abu-jamal-jennifer-black-city-lights-2024
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Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky
In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries.
Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin:
“To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?”
Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine.
A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism.
To sign the online petition at freeboris.info
—Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024
https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine.
Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky
We, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison.
Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles.
The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested.
On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release.
The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison.
The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences.
There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering.
Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course.
We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally.
We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.
Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky
https://freeboris.info
The petition is also available on Change.org
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*Major Announcement*
Claudia De la Cruz wins
Peace and Freedom Party primary in California!
We have an exciting announcement. The votes are still being counted in California, but the Claudia-Karina “Vote Socialist” campaign has achieved a clear and irreversible lead in the Peace and Freedom Party primary. Based on the current count, Claudia has 46% of the vote compared to 40% for Cornel West. A significant majority of PFP’s newly elected Central Committee, which will formally choose the nominee at its August convention, have also pledged their support to the Claudia-Karina campaign.
We are excited to campaign in California now and expect Claudia De la Cruz to be the candidate on the ballot of the Peace and Freedom Party in November.
We achieved another big accomplishment this week - we’re officially on the ballot in Hawai’i! This comes after also petitioning to successfully gain ballot access in Utah. We are already petitioning in many other states. Each of these achievements is powered by the tremendous effort of our volunteers and grassroots organizers across the country. When we’re organized, people power can move mountains!
We need your help to keep the momentum going. Building a campaign like this takes time, energy, and money. We know that our class enemies — the billionaires, bankers, and CEO’s — put huge sums toward loyal politicians and other henchmen who defend their interests. They will use all the money and power at their disposal to stop movements like ours. As an independent, socialist party, our campaign is relying on contributions from the working class and people like you.
We call on each and every one of our supporters to set up a monthly or one-time donation to support this campaign to help it keep growing and reaching more people. A new socialist movement, independent of the Democrats and Republicans, is being built but it will only happen when we all pitch in.
The Claudia-Karina campaign calls to end all U.S. aid to Israel. End this government’s endless wars. We want jobs for all, with union representation and wages that let us live with dignity. Housing, healthcare, and education for all - without the lifelong debt. End the ruthless attacks on women, Black people, immigrants, and LGBTQ people. These are just some of the demands that are resonating across the country. Help us take the next step:
Volunteer: https://votesocialist2024.com/volunteer
Donate: https://votesocialist2024.com/donate
See you in the streets,
Claudia & Karina
Don't Forget! Join our telegram channel for regular updates: https://t.me/+KtYBAKgX51JhNjMx
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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The writers' organization PEN America is circulating this petition on behalf of Jason Renard Walker, a Texas prisoner whose life is being threatened because of his exposés of the Texas prison system.
See his book, Reports from within the Belly of the Beast; available on Amazon at:
https://www.amazon.com/Reports-Within-Belly-Beast-Department-ebook/dp/B084656JDZ/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8
Petition: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/protect-whistleblowers-in-carceral-settings
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Daniel Hale UPDATE:
In February Drone Whistleblower Daniel Hale was transferred from the oppressive maximum-security prison in Marion, Illinois to house confinement. We celebrate his release from Marion. He is laying low right now, recovering from nearly 3 years in prison. Thank goodness he is now being held under much more humane conditions and expected to complete his sentence in July of this year. www.StandWithDaniel Hale.org
More Info about Daniel:
“Drone Whistleblower Subjected To Harsh Confinement Finally Released From Prison”
https://thedissenter.org/drone-whistleblower-cmu-finally-released-from-prison/
“I was punished under the Espionage Act. Why wasn’t Joe Biden?” by Daniel Hale
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) A Trial Asks: If Grocery Rivals Merge, Do Workers Suffer?
As Kroger seeks to acquire Albertsons, federal regulators argue that the biggest supermarket combination in history will hurt not only consumers, but workers as well.
By Danielle Kaye, Aug. 26, 2024
The supermarket in West Hills, Calif., where Leonard De Monte works is slated to be sold as part of merger. The last time his store was part of a merger, he found himself out of work. Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York Times
Back in 2015, Leonard De Monte was feeling settled. At 31, he had health insurance and was making a union wage at the Vons grocery store in Woodland Hills, Calif., where he had worked for more than a decade. A familiar face in the bakery section, he knew dozens of frequent shoppers’ orders by heart.
Then came a corporate merger: Albertsons acquired its rival Safeway, Vons’s parent company. Mr. De Monte’s store was sold to a third chain as part of the deal, and within months of the change, the store’s new owner declared bankruptcy. Mr. De Monte found himself out of work.
Former customers vouched for him, and he found a new job at a local Pavilions, part of another grocery chain owned by Albertsons. But he had lost his seniority and was demoted to minimum wage.
“All my hard work was flushed down the toilet,” Mr. De Monte said.
Now, nearly 10 years older and having finally worked his way up to a wage of nearly $27 per hour, he’s experiencing déjà vu: Albertsons is trying to merge with Kroger in a $24.6 billion deal that will be the biggest grocery combination in history if it goes through. The two chains have agreed to sell 579 stores — out of about 5,000 — to a third company in an effort to satisfy antitrust regulators. The Pavilions where Mr. De Monte works is on that list.
Mergers often create anxiety for workers who stand to lose jobs or benefits when companies combine. The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, or U.F.C.W., which represents most in-store workers at Kroger and Albertsons, has spoken out against the proposed deal, though it doesn’t have much ability to stop it.
But the union does have a powerful ally: the Federal Trade Commission. The agency sued to block the combination, and a trial that will decide whether the two chains can join forces is scheduled to start in federal court in Oregon on Monday.
The F.T.C. is making arguments typical of antitrust enforcers in recent decades: The merger will decrease competition, leading to higher prices for consumers.
But within its legal complaint is another claim, one that has surprised some antitrust experts because of its novelty. The combination of the nation’s two biggest supermarket chains, the F.T.C. argues, would erode the bargaining power of unions and harm not just consumers, but workers as well.
Starting in the late 1970s, after a period of robust antitrust enforcement, regulators eased up on challenging corporate mergers. Regulators under the Biden administration, however, have made cracking down on corporate concentration a priority. And for the first time, merger guidelines updated last year by the F.T.C. and the Justice Department explicitly outline the agencies’ emphasis on how corporate mergers could reduce competition for workers and result in lower wages or worse benefits.
“Recognizing that there’s a web of intersecting harm that can happen is an extension, in my mind, of the underlying principles of antitrust enforcement,” said Christine Bartholomew, a professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law who teaches antitrust. “The pendulum is swinging back to recognize the broader types of harm from anticompetitive conduct.”
The attorneys general of Colorado and Washington State, who have separately sued to block the supermarket deal, also centered workers in their complaints.
The grocery industry has seen waves of consolidation since the 1990s. Now just four companies — Walmart, Kroger, Costco and Albertsons — account for about half of all grocery sales.
Kroger and Albertsons collectively employ about 700,000 people. The new corporation would operate under the Kroger name, and a Kroger spokeswoman said all frontline workers would keep their jobs and existing union contracts. But Mr. De Monte is not convinced that his job and benefits would be guaranteed, or that the chain buying his store would keep it open.
His wounds from the last merger are still fresh.
A Regulatory Shift
The F.T.C.’s position today looks very different from the one it took in 2015. Back then, the regulator approved the merger of Albertsons and Safeway, satisfied that the 146 stores eventually sold to a third party — Haggen — would prevent dominance by a single supermarket chain in certain markets.
The U.F.C.W. did not strongly object to that merger or to the sale of stores, either, something the union came to regret once Haggen filed for bankruptcy and thousands of workers lost their jobs.
This time around, Kroger and Albertsons have proposed a similar solution to gain antitrust approval: selling 579 stores — along the West Coast and in Colorado, Arizona, Illinois and a handful of other states — to a company called C&S Wholesale Grocers. But the F.T.C. is not convinced that separating out about a tenth of the stores would effectively maintain competition or mitigate the harm to workers and consumers.
Although only about 13 percent of grocery store workers are unionized, most of the workers at Kroger and Albertsons are represented by the U.F.C.W.
“I have great health benefits because I’ve been with the company so long,” Mr. De Monte said, adding that he needs regular checkups because of a past cancer diagnosis. “If I lose my health benefits, I would have to pay out of pocket.”
The U.F.C.W. is concerned that the combined strength of Kroger and Albertsons would intensify a power imbalance with the union. John Marshall, a financial analyst for U.F.C.W. chapters in California and Washington State, said that, individually, both chains had been aggressive at the bargaining table. In 2003, they each demanded concessions from the U.F.C.W., including the introduction of a two-tiered pay structure. Despite setbacks, unionized workers at the companies have retained health and retirement benefits that their counterparts at nonunion rivals like Walmart lack.
Kroger has said it needs to merge with Albertsons to compete against Walmart and Amazon. Walmart employs two million people and has been accused of illegal union busting, allegations the company has denied. A Kroger spokeswoman said nonunion rivals would become “even more powerful and unaccountable” if the merger was blocked.
The F.T.C., however, argues that a combined Kroger and Albertsons would erode unions’ ability to negotiate better pay and benefits in bargaining talks.
“The unions that represent grocery workers leverage the fact that Kroger and Albertsons are separate companies competing for customers and workers to negotiate better terms of employment for union grocery workers,” the F.T.C. complaint reads. The deal would “eliminate that competition” and lead to lower wages, worse benefits and weaker worker protections. An agency representative declined to provide additional comment beyond the legal complaint.
Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School who focuses on antitrust, noted that a more dominant Kroger would chip away at unions’ ability to use strikes as a bargaining tool.
“If the worker can find an equally good job elsewhere, then the workers can stay on strike longer, and that means the employer will have to give and make concessions,” Mr. Posner said.
He said he was not aware of any other antitrust cases that limited the scope of harm to unionized workers. And regulators have raised labor-related concerns in only one other case that has gone to court, Mr. Posner added. In that 2022 suit, the Justice Department successfully blocked a merger of book publishers, focusing on authors as workers who stood to be harmed by the deal.
Closings and Layoffs Feared
On top of weakened bargaining power, workers — especially those who experienced the fallout from Albertsons’s takeover of Safeway a decade ago — are concerned about potential store closings and layoffs.
Michael Lawing, a meat manager at an Albertsons in the Seattle area, has been an employee of the company on and off since 1987. He said he and all his colleagues lost their jobs when their store switched over to Haggen ownership in 2015.
“I lost all my seniority as far as vacation time, as far as health benefits,” Mr. Lawing said. “I had to restart from the beginning.”
Kroger has portrayed C&S, which has signed up to buy the 579 stores that would be shed under the merger, as a pro-union operator. Lauren La Bruno, a C&S spokeswoman, said the company would recognize the union work force and honor all collective bargaining agreements.
But Mr. Marshall of the U.F.C.W. said that at two meetings in January, C&S representatives had refused to promise to negotiate new collective bargaining agreements with the union once the current contracts expired. Contracts covering more than 100,000 Kroger and Albertsons workers, mostly on the West Coast, are set to run out next year, he said. Ms. La Bruno did not respond to a request for comment on those meetings.
C&S is primarily in the wholesale grocery supply business and currently operates just 23 supermarkets nationwide, according to the F.T.C. While Ms. La Bruno said the company had enough financial strength and experience in food retailing to operate hundreds more stores, antitrust experts and regulators say another Haggen-style collapse is likely if the deal goes through. They argue that C&S doesn’t appear to be equipped to efficiently operate hundreds of supermarkets.
“This company might just shut down the stores after buying them,” Mr. Posner said.
Yasmin Ashur, who has been an Albertsons employee for nearly 25 years, works as a cashier at one of the company’s stores in Port Orchard, Wash., which is set to be sold to C&S. Her pension and health insurance are top of mind as she thinks about what will happen after the current U.F.C.W. contract expires.
Ms. Ashur earns $26 an hour, about $10 above the minimum wage in her state. She said there were other places she could look for work, if need be — maybe at a nursing home or a discount retailer like Big Lots.
“But then again, you’re starting from scratch,” Ms. Ashur said. “Nobody will hire you for whatever I was making, and I’m going to have to start from the bottom.”
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2) Israeli evacuations orders prompt the U.N. to pause humanitarian operations in Gaza.
By Ephrat Livni, Aug. 26, 2024
United Nations humanitarian operations in the Gaza Strip have ground to a halt, at least temporarily, after the Israeli military ordered the organization to evacuate Deir al-Balah, its main hub in the territory, a senior U.N. official told reporters at a briefing on Monday.
U.N. security personnel were working with the Israeli authorities to resume humanitarian work in Gaza as soon as possible, said the U.N. official, who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity. The Israeli authorities were also working with the U.N. to facilitate the movement of aid, the U.N. official said.
Humanitarian work in Gaza is coordinated with the Israeli authorities, who can slow or stop such efforts depending on security concerns in the area. The Israeli authorities were able to facilitate fewer than half of the planned humanitarian missions and movements in the Gaza Strip in the first few weeks of August, the U.N. office of humanitarian affairs said in a report on Friday, with more than half of all missions and movements blocked, delayed, impeded or canceled.
“The high number of aid missions that the Israeli authorities do not facilitate means that people who barely have the means to survive — access to clean drinking water, adequate food and shelter, to name a few — are often left with nothing at all,” Georgios Petropoulos, the leader of the U.N. office’s Gaza mission, said in a statement to The New York Times.
The Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration, an Israeli agency that coordinates humanitarian activities, did not respond to a request for comment. The Israeli military directed comments to COGAT, the Israeli body that oversees policy in the Palestinian territories and that oversees the coordination and liaison administration.
The U.N. humanitarian affairs office on Friday warned that “ongoing intense fighting, damaged roads, a breakdown of law and order and access challenges along the main humanitarian route” have led to critical food shortages in Gaza. The number of children diagnosed with acute malnutrition through arm screenings increased substantially across Gaza between May and July, it reported, noting that since January, 14,750 children ages 6 months to nearly 5 years, out of 239,580 screened, had been diagnosed with acute malnutrition.
Anushka Patil contributed reporting.
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3) The U.S. will keep the aircraft carrier Roosevelt in the Middle East.
By Eric Schmitt, Reporting from Washington, Aug. 26, 2024
The aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt was to depart the Middle East this week, but will extend its stay, the Pentagon said. Credit...Adam Ferguson for The New York Times
Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III has extended the tour of the Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier in the Middle East, the Pentagon said on Monday, reflecting the tensions in the region and persistent concern that Iran will retaliate for the assassination of a senior Hamas leader in Tehran.
Mr. Austin decided over the weekend to prolong the Roosevelt’s time in the region, Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, told reporters on Monday, meaning that the United States will have two carriers and their accompanying warships there in the coming days.
The Pentagon’s decision comes after Israel and Hezbollah fired rockets, missiles and drones at each other over the weekend. Hezbollah had responded to the bombardment of southern Lebanon on Sunday by Israeli military aircraft to stop what Israel said were preparations for a major attack by the Lebanese-based militant group.
John Kirby, the White House’s national security spokesman, said, “We’re maintaining a pretty robust force posture there to be able to defend ourselves and defend Israel should it have come to that.”
He called Hezbollah’s attack on Israel over the weekend significant enough to prompt the movement of additional American forces into the region.
“What Hezbollah launched into the early morning hours Sunday was certainly a sizable attack,” Mr. Kirby said, “different in scope than what we tend to see on a daily basis between Israel and Hezbollah. Hopefully, it won’t.”
The carrier Abraham Lincoln arrived recently in the Gulf of Oman, where the Roosevelt has been operating. The Roosevelt had been scheduled to depart this week, but General Ryder declined to say how much longer the ship would remain in the region. Another Pentagon official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters, said it would be about two weeks.
The Pentagon’s move comes even as Israel and Hezbollah appeared to de-escalate after firing rockets, missiles and drones at each other over the weekend, averting a wider Middle East war, at least for now. But General Ryder said the United States must take seriously vows by Iran to avenge the killing of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader, last month.
Israel’s military has not commented on the assassination. But Hamas and Iran have blamed Israel for the killing, and U.S. intelligence has assessed that Israel was behind it.
“We continue to assess that there is a threat of attack, and we remain well postured to be able to support Israel’s defense, as well as to protect our forces,” General Ryder said.
As part of a coordination between the U.S. and Israeli militaries, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, chief of the general staff of the Israeli military, met with the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., during his visit to Israel this week, the Israeli military said in a statement.
The commanders discussed security, strategic issues and strengthening regional partnerships as part of the response to threats in the Middle East, the statement said.
Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting from Tel Aviv, and Michael D. Shear from Washington.
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4) At Least 10 Killed as Israel Begins Major Military Operation in West Bank
Hundreds of troops entered cities in the occupied territory, targeting Palestinian militants. It was a significant escalation after months of raids that have unfolded alongside the war in Gaza.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, August 28, 2024
![[object Object]](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/08/28/multimedia/28mideast-crisis-briefing-carousel-zz-01-fqtv/28mideast-crisis-briefing-carousel-zz-01-fqtv-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp)
Al-Far'a, West Bank
Hundreds of Israeli troops mounted major overnight raids in the occupied West Bank, Israeli officials said Wednesday, targeting Palestinian militants after what they called months of rising attacks. At least 10 people were killed, and an Israeli military official said the operation was continuing.
The operation was concentrated in Jenin and Tulkarm, two cities that have become militant strongholds, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesman, told reporters. A Palestinian armed group based in Jenin said that it had fired on Israeli forces in two villages on the city’s outskirts, and Palestinian residents in both cities described hearing intermittent gunfire.
The operation followed months of escalating Israeli raids in the occupied territory, where nearly three million Palestinians live under Israeli military rule. Israel has arrested thousands of Palestinians suspected of involvement in armed groups since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks, an increasingly deadly campaign that has unfolded alongside its war against Hamas in Gaza.
Despite the toll in the West Bank — more than 580 Palestinians have been killed since Oct. 7, according to the United Nations, in violence involving both the Israeli military and extremist Jewish settlers — the raids have failed to tamp down the armed groups. They have also further immiserated Palestinian civilians in the territory, who saw Israeli bulldozers tear up roads early Wednesday and feared being caught in the crossfire.
The raids on Wednesday appeared to be the largest since July 2023, when about 1,000 Israeli soldiers carried out a 48-hour incursion in Jenin that killed 12 Palestinians, at least nine of whom militant groups claimed as members.
Palestinian officials said the Israeli operation included drone strikes. Troops also operated farther east in the Far’a neighborhood, conducting an aerial strike that killed four militants, the Israeli authorities said.
Here is what else to know:
· Gunfire and explosions: Kamal Abu al-Rub, the Palestinian governor of Jenin, said the Israeli incursion was unusually fierce, with the sounds of gunfire and blasts intermittently resounding through the city. Israeli officials had informed their Palestinian counterparts that they were imposing a formal curfew on parts of the city and that soldiers had surrounded Jenin’s hospitals, entrances and exits, he said, adding: “People are living in a state of terror and anxiety.”
· Iranian smuggling: The raid comes as U.S., Israeli and Iranian officials have said that Tehran is trying to flood the West Bank with weapons. The covert operation, employing intelligence operatives, militants and criminal gangs, has heightened concerns that Iran is seeking to turn the territory into another flashpoint in its longstanding conflict with Israel, The New York Times reported in April.
· Settler violence: While the Israeli military cited rising Palestinian violence, extremist Israelis have also stepped up attacks against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank. Many escape legal accountability for the mob attacks, some of which turn deadly. This month, a 23-year-old Palestinian was killed when dozens of Israeli settlers attacked the town of Jit in the northern West Bank.
· Jenin a symbol: The city is synonymous with Palestinian rebellion, the source of dozens of suicide bombers who were sent into Israel during the second intifada, or uprising, against the Israeli occupation in the early 2000s. More recently, the impoverished city has been a hotbed for recruiting by Hamas and the militant group Islamic Jihad, as well as newer militias that have emerged among a disaffected younger generation. Israeli officials say that more than 50 shooting attacks on Israelis have emanated from the Jenin area this year.
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5) The Israeli operation follows months of often deadly raids in the West Bank.
By Amelia Nierenberg, Reporting from London, August 28, 2024
Surveying damage after an Israeli military raid in the West Bank city of Jenin in November. Credit...Zain Jaafar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Since Hamas’s surprise Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which killed about 1,200 people, more than 580 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, according to the United Nations, as Israel has ramped up military raids there and violence by extremist Jewish settlers has increased.
Many Palestinians have died in Jenin or its refugee camp, long strongholds of the armed groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad; in Tulkarm, a West Bank city near the Israeli border; and in the nearby Nur Shams neighborhood. On Wednesday, the Israeli military said it had begun a raid focusing on Jenin and Tulkarm, and that nine people it described as militants had been killed.
Here are some of the notable recent Israeli military operations in the territory:
July 3-5, 2023: Israel launched its largest military operation in years against armed groups in the West Bank, a raid meant to curb attacks by armed Palestinians on Israelis. Israel carried out deadly airstrikes, which had not happened there in about two decades.
Twelve Palestinians were killed during the operation, which involved about 1,000 Israeli soldiers. Militant groups claimed at least nine of them as members. One Israeli soldier was also killed, possibly mistakenly by a fellow soldier. Thousands of people fled their homes and Israel detained and interrogated many others. Here are pictures of the raid.
Oct. 19, 2023: At least 13 Palestinians and one Israeli officer were killed in clashes, less than two weeks after the Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel. At least five of the 13 Palestinians were children.
The worst clashes were in Nur Shams. Israel’s military said that it was “thwarting terrorist infrastructure and confiscating weapons” in the operation — and that Palestinians had fought back, shooting and throwing improvised bombs.
Dec. 12-14, 2023: An Israeli raid killed at least 12 people during a two-and-a-half-day incursion in Jenin. A 13-year-old was pronounced dead at a hospital after his father carried him there, according to the medical charity Doctors Without Borders, which said Israeli armored cars had blocked ambulances.
At least 34 other people were injured. The Palestinian Prisoners Club, a rights group, said that at least 100 Palestinians had been arrested.
Israel disciplined three soldiers for a video showing some of them singing a Jewish prayer in a mosque in Jenin during the raid. The footage had circulated widely online.
Jan. 7, 2024: At least nine Palestinians and an Israeli officer were killed during a day of violence. A drone strike killed seven men in pre-dawn clashes during an incursion into Jenin. Four were brothers, aged 22 to 29, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, Wafa, said.
Israeli soldiers killed an eighth man in the central West Bank, Palestinian health officials said. And a 3-year-old girl was killed, apparently by errant fire, when Israeli forces said they shot at a car that rammed a checkpoint near Jerusalem.
The Israeli border police officer was killed when a bomb blew up her military vehicle.
Jan. 30, 2024: Israeli soldiers raided a hospital and fatally shot a Hamas commander in a patient’s room. During the brief incursion, some of the soldiers were wearing medical garb, surveillance footage showed, as they brandished their guns in the hospital. Two other men were also killed in the shooting.
Experts said the raid raised questions because hospitals have special protection under international laws of war.
April 20, 2024: Israeli soldiers killed at least 10 people at the Nur Shams camp, the military said, in what it described as a “counterterrorism operation.” Palestinian officials said that at least 14 people had died, including a 15-year-old boy.
The next day, Palestinians in the West Bank went on a general strike in protest: Shops, schools, universities, banks and public transit were closed or stopped.
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6) Jenin, a focus of the raids, is a symbol of rebellion for Palestinians.
By Erika Solomon, August 28, 2024
A woman raised a Palestinian flag in the ruins of Jenin in 2002, after much of the area was destroyed in a two-week Israeli military offensive. Credit...Scott Nelson/Getty Images
Jenin, a focal point of Israel’s wide-ranging raid into the West Bank on Wednesday, is a potent symbol of rebellion and militancy for Palestinians after decades of fighting against occupying powers.
That history dates back to British rule of Palestine during what was known as the Arab Revolt of the 1930s, and through the 1948 Arab-Israeli war surrounding the creation of the modern Israel and triggered the flight or expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
But Jenin’s resonance today, both for Palestinians and Israelis, largely stems from the second intifada, or uprising, against the Israeli occupation in the early 2000s.
Israelis remember Jenin, which sits in the rolling hillsides of the northern West Bank, as a source of dozens of suicide bombers sent into Israel at that time.
Palestinians remember a 10-day battle, known as the Battle of Jenin, in 2002 between Palestinian militants and Israeli forces. Israel killed 52 people, of which up to half may have been civilians, according to the United Nations in a report on the event. The fighting killed 23 Israeli soldiers.
Yasir Arafat, the late Palestinian leader, dubbed the camp “Jeningrad,” a reference to the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II.
Palestinian officials called the Israeli assault a massacre — a claim that was rejected by the United Nations in its report, though it criticized both sides as putting Palestinian civilians at risk. Nonetheless, the attack is widely remembered as such to Palestinians.
During the period of British administration, Jenin was a stronghold of rebellion against colonial rule and the wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine. British forces blew up a quarter of the town in 1938 after one of their officers there was killed.
In the wake of the 1948 war, Jenin became known as a town that never surrendered, after Palestinian fighters, backed by Iraqi soldiers, repelled an Israeli attempt to take Jenin.
It also was home to one of the original refugee camps set up for Palestinians displaced by that war. Although all of these sites are still called “camps” to recognize the displacement of the residents’ ancestors, the areas are actually ramshackle neighborhoods of apartment blocks and roads, usually of poor quality.
In more recent years, the Jenin refugee camp has frequently been a target for raids by Israeli forces. In addition to widespread violence in Jenin, the camp is considered by the United Nations to have the highest rates of unemployment and poverty in the West Bank.
Both Hamas, which controls Gaza, and the militant group Islamic Jihad have recruited in Jenin. But in recent years, the ranks of the militants have been joined by newer, loosely affiliated militias that emerged among a younger generation that is frustrated with a Palestinian leadership they see as corrupt and enabling of the Israeli occupation.
Israeli officials say that more than 50 shooting attacks on Israelis have emanated from the Jenin area this year. Violence has surged in the West Bank amid Israel’s war in Gaza. Israeli forces say they are fighting off efforts to move arms into the West Bank, but Jewish settlers have also escalated attacks and expanded settlements.
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7) ‘We are in the first stages of this operation,’ an Israeli military spokesman says.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, August 28, 2024
“'If people wish to leave, they can leave,' Colonel Shoshani told reporters. 'But I am not aware of a plan of evacuation or something like that.'”
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/08/28/world/israel-hamas-gaza-war
An Israeli military bulldozer in the Nur Shams area near the city of Tulkarm, in the occupied West Bank, on Wednesday. Credit...Jaafar Ashtiyeh/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Israeli military said on Wednesday that an unusually wide-scale operation in the northern part of the occupied West Bank had only just begun as Israeli troops raided two major Palestinian cities there in an effort to crush militant groups.
“We are in the first stages of this operation,” Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesman, told a news briefing.
Israeli forces launched the unusually large military raids, focusing on the cities, Jenin and Tulkarm, after months during which Palestinian militants resisted Israeli efforts to subdue them in the territory.
Both cities have seen deadly battles between Israeli troops and Palestinian militants. Colonel Shoshani said that more than 150 “shooting and explosive attacks” against Israelis had originated in the two cities over the past year, including an attempted bombing in mid-August in the coastal metropolis of Tel Aviv.
Since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks prompted full-blown war in Gaza, Israeli forces have stepped up raids in the West Bank, targeting what it says are Hamas and allied groups. More than 500 Palestinians have been killed, including both militants and civilians; at least 4,500 have been arrested, according to the Israeli military.
In the operation announced on Wednesday, nine militants were killed, the Israeli military said; Colonel Shoshani said that at least seven had been killed in aerial attacks. The West Bank once rarely saw bombardments by Israeli drones, but they, too, have become commonplace since Oct. 7.
Another Israeli security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that roughly hundreds of soldiers were participating in the operation. In Jenin, Israeli forces deployed near a major hospital, stoking fears that they might raid it. Colonel Shoshani argued that the military was trying to prevent the hospital from becoming a haven for militants.
Israeli officials have long said that militants have planted improvised explosive devices in an attempt to blow up Israeli soldiers as they drive along roads in Palestinian towns. Colonel Shoshani said that Israeli troops had worked overnight to disarm the explosives, deploying combat engineers specialized in dismantling them.
During another major raid in Jenin last year, scores of Palestinians fled their homes temporarily as Israeli troops pursued people suspected of being militants. Colonel Shoshani said there were currently no plans to order the evacuation of residents. Earlier, Israel’s foreign minister had raised the prospect of temporarily ordering residents to evacuate as the military operation goes on.
“If people wish to leave, they can leave,” Colonel Shoshani told reporters. “But I am not aware of a plan of evacuation or something like that.”
Patrick Kingsley contributed reporting.
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8) Africa’s Debt Crisis Has ‘Catastrophic Implications’ for the World
Crushing obligations to foreign creditors that have few precedents have sapped numerous African nations of growth and stoked social instability.
By Patricia Cohen, Aug. 28, 2024
Proposed tax increases resulted in deadly protests in Kenya this summer. Credit...Brian Otieno for The New York Times
After a new tax increase incited weeks of deadly riots in Kenya early this summer, President William Ruto announced that he was reversing course. He abandoned the finance law he had proposed, and then he shook up his cabinet.
Last week, the government reversed itself again. The newly appointed finance minister announced that some of those discarded tax increases would be reintroduced.
The Ruto administration is desperately trying to raise revenue to pay off billions of dollars in public debt and avoid defaulting on its loans, even as critical public assistance and services are being cut.
Governments throughout Africa are facing the same dilemma.
The continent’s foreign debt reached more than $1.1 trillion at the end of last year. More than two dozen countries have excessive debt or are at high risk of it, according to the African Development Bank Group. And roughly 900 million people live in countries that spend more on interest payments than on health care or education.
Outsize debt has been a familiar problem in the developing world, but the current crisis is considered the worst yet because of the amounts owed as well as the huge increase in the number and type of foreign creditors.
And in Africa, a continent pulsating with potential and peril, debt overshadows nearly everything that happens.
It leaves less money for investments that could create jobs for what is the youngest, fastest-growing population on the planet; less money to manage potential pandemics like Covid or mpox; less money to feed, house and educate people; less money to combat the devastating effects of climate change, which threaten to make swaths of land uninhabitable and force people to migrate.
If nothing is done to help countries manage the financial crunch, “a wave of destabilizing debt defaults will end up severely undermining progress on the green transition, with catastrophic implications for the entire world,” warned a new report from the Finance for Development Lab at the Paris School for Economics and Columbia University’s Initiative for Policy Dialogue.
At the same time, economic stagnation in combination with government corruption and mismanagement has left many African countries more vulnerable to brutal wars, military coups and antigovernment riots.
In Nigeria, where foreign debt amounts to $40 billion, rising inflation and widespread hunger spurred a string of violent antigovernment protests this month. Forty percent of the country’s 220 million people live in extreme poverty. Yet more than a third of the revenue collected by the government is used to pay the interest on its public debt.
In Uganda, where foreign creditors are owed $12 billion, demonstrations in July targeted corruption. And in Kenya, which has $35 billion worth of external debt, some protesters have said they are ready to march again after the latest news of impending tax increases.
In many African countries, there has been zero per capita income growth in the past decade. The debt crisis has caused the value of many currencies to depreciate, further sapping purchasing power.
The string of economic shocks produced by the coronavirus pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine helped to supercharge the debt crisis. Food and energy prices soared as government coffers dwindled. The moves by central banks in wealthy countries to fight inflation with higher interest rates caused borrowing costs to rapidly climb.
The issue, though, is not just how much money countries like Kenya and Nigeria have borrowed, but whom they have borrowed from.
In recent decades, the pool of potential lenders has exploded to include thousands of private bondholders and a major new geopolitical player: China.
Seeking to spread its own clout and counter American and European influence, China has transformed itself into the world’s biggest national lender, financing roads, ports, bridges, airports, power plants, telecommunications networks and railways in developing countries.
Many nations, bristling at loan conditions dictated by Western lenders or the International Monetary Fund, were eager to find an alternative source of financing. Agreements with China often came without environmental, financial or human rights restrictions, though they were more opaque so difficult for outsiders to assess.
China now accounts for 73 percent of bilateral borrowing in Kenya, 83 percent in Nigeria and 72 percent in Uganda, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.
Over the past two decades, one in five infrastructure projects in Africa was financed by China, a report from the National Bureau of Asian Research found, and Chinese firms built one in three projects.
Some of them — like Kenya’s railway between Nairobi and Mombasa — have turned into showcases of corruption and blunders. Many of these large-scale infrastructure projects will never produce enough revenue to justify the costs.
Economic conditions and loan repayment prospects have soured, but China has been reluctant to offer debt relief. It has instead been holding out for repayment, extending credit swaps and rollovers that end up putting off the day of reckoning.
It took Zambia nearly four years to reach a loan restructuring agreement after it defaulted in 2020, for example, primarily because of opposition from China, the country’s single largest creditor.
The monumental increase in the number of private bondholders and creditors has further complicated efforts to resolve debt crises.
The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank encouraged poor and middle-income countries to embrace Wall Street and seek private loans overseas in the 2010s, said Jayati Ghosh, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Interest rates were extremely low, investors were on the hunt for higher returns and development officials hoped countries could tap a big new source of capital.
As a result, governments looking to rally political support or finance development borrowed too much and creditors seeking gains lent too much.
When interest rates suddenly rose, countries were forced to take out new loans, at high costs, to repay the money they had previously borrowed.
Investors were also able to impose costly loan terms like higher rates on struggling nations that were sometimes on the edge of default — what’s known as a risk premium. Kenya’s government paid more than 10 percent on international bonds to pay off a $2 billion debt that was due in June.
Countries that borrow more than they can afford end up experiencing intense economic and social pain as output crashes, employment dries up, and inflation and poverty rise. The systemic problem, said Indermit Gill, chief economist at the World Bank, is that lenders who also made bad decisions by extending too much credit often don’t pay a financial penalty.
“You got paid a risk premium for a reason,” Mr. Gill said of the lenders, adding that if they don’t absorb losses, they will make more reckless loans. “That’s a major weakness in the way the system works.”
The debt overhang leaves countries unable to make the kind of investments that could put their economies on stable footing, which would enable them to repay their loans.
And money that was intended for economic development ends up being siphoned off: Emergency loans from international institutions like the I.M.F. and the World Bank have been used to pay off private foreign creditors or China.
In Kenya, the central bank announced in June that private creditors would get $500 million of a World Bank loan.
As the Finance for Development Lab report concluded, “The global community is currently funding loans to developing countries, which end up ‘leaking out’ to pay off other creditors.”
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9) Palestinian militants confirm the death of a commander, as the toll in Israel’s raids rises to 17.
By Victoria Kim, Rawan Sheikh Ahmad and Raja Abdulrahim, August 29, 2024
![[object Object]](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/08/29/multimedia/29mideast-carousel-2-jptq/29mideast-carousel-2-jptq-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp)
A damaged mosque following an Israeli military operation in the Fara camp in the occupied West Bank.
The Israeli military battled Palestinian militants in the occupied West Bank for a second straight day on Thursday, killing at least five, including a young militant commander it said was responsible for attacks against Israeli civilians.
The commander, Muhammad Jaber, was killed in a clash in the city of Tulkarm, a focal point of the raids that are Israel’s biggest military operation in the West Bank in more than a year. Mr. Jaber, who was in his mid-20s and known as Abu Shujaa, led the local branch of the militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which dominates the Tulkarm camp. The group confirmed his death.
Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, said 17 people had been killed in all in raids across the territory that began before dawn on Wednesday, without specifying whether militants were among them. The Israel military said that 16 militants have been killed across the West Bank.
Residents of Tulkarm and the surrounding area on Thursday described another difficult day of being stuck inside, with internet and telephone services down, many friends and family members unreachable and the streets watched over by Israeli snipers perched on rooftops. Israeli bulldozers ripped up roads to unearth improvised explosive devices and troops searched people’s homes, residents said. Israeli military officials have said that when they raid people’s homes they are searching for suspects and weapons or want to use them as lookout points.
The Israeli military has sent hundreds of troops, backed by drones, into Tulkarm and the city of Jenin since Wednesday in what officials described as an operation targeting Palestinian militant strongholds. Israeli officials have told the United States that the operation was likely to last at least through Friday, a senior U.S. official said. It was not clear whether the United States received a heads-up about the operation.
Israeli forces had repeatedly staged smaller raids in both cities in recent months as they escalated their campaign in the West Bank, where roughly three million Palestinians live under Israeli occupation.
The exact circumstances of the deaths of the five in Tulkarm on Thursday morning were not completely clear. Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesman, said Mr. Jaber and four other militants were exchanging fire with the Israeli military from within a mosque and near a mosque before they were killed by Israeli forces.
In its statement confirming Mr. Jaber’s death, Islamic Jihad said that he had been killed after a “heroic confrontation” with Israeli forces. Its local branch in Tulkarm said in a separate statement that after Mr. Jaber had been killed, its fighters detonated an explosive device and shot at Israeli forces, causing “direct injuries.” The timing was not clear.
Faisal Salameh, head of the services committee of Tulkarm camp, said that Mr. Jaber and the others had been killed in a strike around 5 a.m. while they were hiding in a home next to a mosque.
The New York Times could not independently verify any of the accounts.
In addition to his role with Islamic Jihad — an ally of Hamas in Gaza that was founded in the 1980s — Mr. Jaber also led a loose collective of militants in Tulkarm camp, including the Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. The Israeli military accused him in a statement of being involved in “numerous terror attacks,” including the murder of an Israeli civilian in June.
Mr. Jaber, whose nom de guerre means Father of the Brave, gained a kind of cult status in the spring when the Israeli military announced that it had killed him during a raid on the Tulkarm camp. Three days later, he emerged alive at the funeral of other Palestinians killed during that same raid, to joyous shouts from residents.
The Israeli forces took Mr. Jabr’s body, along with the bodies of two others killed, and detained a man whose leg had been broken, Mr. Salameh said.
Explosions were also heard on Thursday in Jenin, where Israeli troops were operating in the eastern part of the city, Wafa reported. The Palestinian Red Crescent said that it had lost contact with the emergency medical services in Jenin because communications were down.
Gheith Shawesh, a 17-year-old resident of the Nur Shams neighborhood near Tulkarm, lamented Mr. Jaber’s death, saying that people across the West Bank were “angry and sad” about his killing.
He called the raid the “most aggressive” on the camp in years. He said that Israeli forces were blowing off the doors of homes and searching them, rounding up suspects and holding them in seized shops, and cutting up the tarps that hang over some alleyways and are designed to give militants cover from Israeli drones.
Mohammad Al-Sayed, a member of the Jenin city council, said that most communications to the city were down and that movement on the street was being prevented. “The situation is very dangerous, everyone is afraid,” he said.
Riyad Awad, the head of the city council in Tulkarm, said that parts of the city — and all of Nur Shams — were without water and sewage service.
The activity in the West Bank is an escalation along a third front for Israel, in addition to its war in Gaza and the increased air attacks across its northern border with Lebanon against the militant group Hezbollah.
More than 600 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel, both in military strikes and at the hands of extremist Jewish settlers, according to the United Nations.
Rami Nazzal and Adam Rasgon in Jerusalem and Eric Schmitt in Washington contributed reporting.
KEY DEVELOPMENTS
Hostages’ relatives protest at the Gaza border, and other news.
· Relatives of Israeli hostages rushed toward the Gaza border on Thursday before turning back at the request of Israeli security forces, a group representing the families said in a statement. In their latest high-profile protest demanding a cease-fire deal, hostages’ family members stood near the border and used loudspeakers to call out to their loved ones being held in Gaza, before some in the group “broke through the fence” and ran toward the border “in a desperate attempt to get as close as possible to their relatives,” said the statement from the Hostages Families Forum. The Israeli government says that 107 hostages abducted during the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks are still being held in Gaza after Israeli soldiers rescued one captive this week.
· Negotiators working on a cease-fire deal in Gaza are “bearing down on the details,” said President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, describing tentative progress in the monthslong talks. Speaking to reporters in Beijing at the end of an official visit, Mr. Sullivan said Thursday that the mediators “have advanced the discussions to a point where it’s in the nitty-gritty, and that is a positive sign of progress, but at the end of the day, nothing is done until it is done.” Officials from the United States, Egypt and Qatar have been holding meetings in Cairo to discuss details of a Biden administration proposal to bridge the gaps between Israel and Hamas.
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10) W.F.P. says it is pausing aid deliveries in Gaza after its workers were attacked.
By Lara Jakes, August 29, 2024
A photo made available by the World Food Program on Thursday shows a W.F.P. car that came under fire a few yards from an Israeli checkpoint at the Wadi Gaza bridge. Credit...World Food Program, via Associated Press
The World Food Program said it is suspending deliveries of aid in Gaza after one of its humanitarian teams was hit by gunfire this week as it approached an Israeli military checkpoint.
In a statement, the United Nations agency said none of its employees were injured during the shooting on Tuesday night, which occurred after a convoy of its trucks had delivered assistance to central Gaza. The agency said one of its vehicles had been hit by 10 bullets — five on the driver’s side — a few yards from the Israeli security post at the Wadi Gaza bridge.
The statement did not assign responsibility for the shooting, but it said Tuesday’s attack was not the first time a W.F.P. team had come under attack while nearing an Israeli checkpoint in Gaza — even after receiving permission to approach. As a result, it said it was “pausing the movement of its employees in Gaza until further notice.”
“This is totally unacceptable and the latest in a series of unnecessary security incidents that have endangered the lives of W.F.P.’s team in Gaza,” Cindy McCain, the agency’s executive director, said in the statement, which was released Wednesday.
She demanded that Israeli officials take immediate action to ensure the safety of humanitarian workers delivering aid in Gaza and to improve the system by which aid agencies coordinate their movements with Israeli forces. “The current de-confliction system is failing, and this cannot go on any longer,” Ms. McCain said.
The Israeli military said in a statement on Wednesday that the incident was “under review” and that “Israel is committed to improve coordination and security with humanitarian organizations to ensure the effective delivery of aid within the Gaza Strip.”
Earlier this week, the agency’s main operating hub in Deir al Balah, in the central part of the territory, had to relocate after the Israeli military issued an evacuation order for the area. Last week, amid ongoing Israeli military operations, five W.F.P. community kitchens were evacuated and the agency lost access to the only aid warehouse that it was still operating in central Gaza, the statement said.
The pause in aid deliveries comes at a perilous time for humanitarian efforts and the Palestinians in Gaza who depend on them. As Israel’s military offensive nears its 11th month, nearly half a million people in Gaza face starvation, experts have warned.
In April, an Israeli drone strike killed seven workers with the World Central Kitchen aid group. The organization resumed its work after a brief pause and said in June it had delivered more than 50 million meals in Gaza since the war began.
Israeli military officials have said the attack on the World Central Kitchen convoy was a “grave mistake” and cited a series of failures, including a breakdown in communication and violations of the military’s operating procedures.
Adding to the humanitarian concerns, a 10-month-old child was diagnosed with polio this month, the first confirmed case of the disease in Gaza in a quarter-century. UNICEF, the U.N. children’s agency, is hoping to start a campaign to vaccinate children in Gaza as early as this weekend, and has asked Israel to pause military operations to allow it to take place.
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11) The Mpox Crisis Is Much Bigger Than Mpox
By Nicaise NdembiJean KaseyaNgashi NgongoTajudeen Raji and Morenike O Folayan
The writers are public health experts based in Africa, Aug. 29, 2024
Arlette Bashizi/Reuters
It is not easy to witness people battling an mpox infection. Fear and stigma make it difficult for patients to seek medical attention soon after symptoms arise, which include a painful rash, fever, muscle aches and sore throat. Misinformation is spreading rapidly. Doctors and other health care workers are straining to fight not just the disease as it afflicts individual patients; they are also up against larger issues they have little control over.
The resurgence of mpox has reminded the world of how dangerous this disease is for personal and community health. But less focus has been placed on the profound crises that exacerbate outbreaks like these, particularly in Africa. They are made exponentially worse because of the broader sociopolitical and economic challenges that many African countries face, exposing vulnerabilities that extend far beyond the realm of public health. Mpox is simply the latest crisis, and this cycle will not abate without meaningful action to alleviate the larger plights affecting the continent.
The Democratic Republic of Congo stands as a stark example of how a health crisis can intertwine with ongoing emergencies. The country experienced outbreaks like cholera, Ebola and Covid-19. Now it is at the center of the mpox outbreak in Africa. This year Congo has reported over 17,000 cases and over 500 deaths — the most cases and deaths in the continent — particularly in provinces like Équateur and South Kivu. These regions, already burdened by conflict, displacement and health infrastructural collapse, are grappling with the additional strain of a widespread and deadly mpox outbreak.
The emergence of a new mpox strain has added a layer of complexity to a challenging situation. Although the disease has spread predominantly because of sexual contact between adults, any physical contact can cause transmission of the virus. This means the overcrowded camps housing hundreds of thousands of people displaced by armed conflict are potential breeding grounds for a large-scale outbreak of the disease. These displaced families are grappling with the trauma of conflict, and now they must navigate the additional burden of disease.
Throughout the country, health care workers, the frontline defenders in the battle against mpox, are struggling to provide care with limited resources. Conflicts between armed insurgents and the country’s military have destroyed infrastructure and severely compromised access to essential services. In South Kivu, a region plagued by displacement and human rights violations, the situation is especially dire.
Mpox is especially dangerous to young children, many of whom have lost access to education and the safety that regular schooling offers. In Congo, over 1.1 million children under 5 years of age and approximately 605,000 pregnant or breastfeeding women faced or were expected to face elevated levels of acute malnutrition between July 2023 and June 2024. Though some patients get access to antiviral treatments, many must rely on their immune systems to fight off infection; malnutrition makes this especially challenging.
The resilience of these communities is continuously tested, and without significant intervention, the cycle of vulnerability and disease will only be perpetuated. Mpox will be far from the last public health issue to affect the region unless the social, political and economic problems plaguing these populations are also addressed.
While the World Health Organization and the Africa C.D.C. have declared mpox a public health emergency, the measures taken so far have been insufficient to address the scale of the crisis in the continent. Mpox vaccine distribution has been inequitable. African countries that desperately need it to protect their populations have been afforded limited access. The high cost of vaccines may further hamper disease prevention efforts, particularly in regions like South Kivu where the need is greatest. The W.H.O. has allowed its partners like UNICEF and Gavi, the global vaccine alliance, to procure mpox vaccines before the W.H.O. can formally give an approval — a step in the right direction but still woefully falling short of the kind of aggressive response we need to see from the rest of the world.
More than that, there must be a coordinated international response that goes beyond short-term emergency measures and addresses the root causes that keep certain populations vulnerable to the disease. Foreign aid should focus not only on immediate relief but also on building resilient infrastructure, strengthening health systems and promoting peace and stability in affected regions.
The lessons from the mpox outbreak are clear: Health crises cannot be effectively managed without addressing the broader societal context. The world must recognize that in places like Congo, where conflict and disease intersect, public health interventions must be coupled with efforts to resolve conflict, rebuild communities and restore dignity to those affected. In the absence of such an intersectional response, conflict regions are likely to be hot spots of health crises once again. We want nothing more than for the memories of those suffering from this terrible disease to be just that: memories.
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12) International criticism was mounting over the operation that local officials say has killed 19 Palestinians.
By Aaron Boxerman reporting from Jerusalem, August 30, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/08/30/world/israel-hamas-gaza-war
A firefighter extinguishes the flames of a smoldering car in the small town of Zababdeh, southeast of Jenin in the occupied West Bank on Friday. Credit...Ronaldo Schemidt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The three-day Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank appeared to enter a new phase on Friday, as troops began to pull back from the ravaged city of Tulkarm and the focus of the operation shifted to the flashpoint city of Jenin, with Israeli security forces saying they had killed a local Hamas commander.
International criticism was mounting over the operation, which has killed 19 Palestinians since overnight on Wednesday in Jenin and Tulkarm, according to Palestinian health authorities. Palestinian militant groups said they were fighting back against Israeli troops and claimed at least some of the 19 killed as fighters.
The Israeli military says the raids are necessary to crack down on militant groups in the northern West Bank that are growing in potency, conducting roughly 150 attacks over the past year against Israeli forces and civilians. The attacks have terrified ordinary Palestinians living in the two cities, who have spent much of the last three days trapped in their homes as gunfire resounds outside.
The operation — Israel’s most intensive and prolonged in the West Bank in more than a year — has prompted fears of a more serious conflict in the territory, where nearly three million Palestinians live under Israeli occupation, at the same time as the devastating war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza nears the end of its 11th month.
France condemned the raids, saying they were “worsening a climate of unprecedented instability and violence” in the West Bank. And Britain said that it was “deeply concerned” by the operation, particularly by reports of civilian casualties and the destruction of infrastructure. “We recognize Israel’s need to defend itself against security threats, but we are deeply worried by the methods Israel has employed,” the British foreign office said in a statement.
The Israeli police said that their special forces had killed Wisam Khazem, a local commander in Hamas, in the Jenin area. Two other militants affiliated with Hamas were also killed in a drone strike as they attempted to flee, the Israeli police said in a joint statement with other Israeli security forces.
Hamas acknowledged that Mr. Khazem was a commander in its armed wing, the Qassam Brigades. In a statement on Telegram, the group vowed that the deaths of its militants would “chart the path to freedom and dignity.”
Israeli troops were still surrounding Jenin’s hospitals, as well as the major arteries leading into the city, said Ahmed Izz al-Din al-Qassam, a local Palestinian official.
Just to the south, Israeli troops had mostly left Tulkarm, Mustafa Taqatqa, the Palestinian governor of the area, said on Friday. The troops left behind torn-up roads and infrastructure, and residents were beginning to try to pick up the pieces in the wake of the destructive raids, he said.
An Israeli security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to comply with protocol, confirmed that Israeli forces had withdrawn from Nur Shams, the neighborhood of Tulkarm that had been a focus of the operation.
Palestinians in Jenin reported that running water, internet and electricity were still cut off, even as most stayed in their homes for fear of being swept up in the raid. UNRWA, the U.N. aid agency for Palestinian refugees, said it had suspended services in some communities because of the violence.
Mr. al-Qassam said the Palestinian governorate had received hundreds of phone calls from residents begging them to organize shipments of food and water amid a sweeping Israeli lockdown.
Ismael Bani Gharra, a Jenin resident, said he was exhausted by the constant violent raids, which have taken place on a near-daily basis since the Israel-Hamas war began last October. In that time, more than 600 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank in clashes with Israeli soldiers and civilians, according to the United Nations.
“Sometimes, I think about emigrating,” said Mr. Bani Gharra, 25. “I don’t know whether it’s right to think that way, but they just don’t stop coming for us.”
West Bank militants had grown slightly more sophisticated in recent months, but were still “absolutely no match” for the Israeli military, he added. Many young men in his neighborhood had scattered to other towns and villages as this week’s raids began, fearing arrest by Israel, he said.
KEY DEVELOPMENTS
Harris says she won’t withhold U.S. weapons from Israel, and other news.
· Vice President Kamala Harris said she would continue President Biden’s policies with regard to the war in Gaza. Speaking to CNN on Thursday in her first major interview as the Democratic presidential nominee, Ms. Harris emphasized the need for a cease-fire deal but responded “no” when asked whether she would withhold U.S. weapons shipments to Israel. “I’m unequivocal and unwavering in my commitment to Israel’s defense, and its ability to defend itself, and that’s not going to change,” she said.
· Israel told the United States it blamed “a communications error” between military units for an episode in which Israeli troops fired at a World Food Program vehicle, Robert Wood, a U.S. representative to the United Nations, told a U.N. Security Council meeting on Thursday. “We have urged them to immediately rectify the issues within their system that allowed this to happen,” Mr. Wood said. The World Food Program said this week that it was suspending staff movement in the Gaza Strip because of the shooting on Tuesday, noting that it was a marked car that had obtained the necessary security clearances. No staff members were hurt in the shooting, it said.
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13) A polio vaccination campaign in Gaza faces major hurdles.
By Lara Jakes, August 30, 2024
U.N. aid agencies plan to begin a massive vaccination drive across Gaza on Sunday to try to protect young children from a rare type of polio, having persuaded Israel to pause combat operations for several hours a day in certain locations.
The effort faces enormous logistical challenges in a war zone where much of the infrastructure has been destroyed. The operation depends on the brief cease-fires holding while rule of law has broken down, hundreds of thousands are living in temporary shelters and many buildings are in ruins.
But it comes too late for at least one infant boy who was diagnosed with poliovirus type-2 earlier this month — the first confirmed case of the disease to surface in Gaza after it was eradicated in most of the world during the 1990s.
The World Health Organization and UNICEF, the U.N. children’s fund, have delivered more than 1.2 million doses of polio vaccination from Indonesia to distribute to about 640,000 children in Gaza under 10 years old. Another 400,000 doses are on their way.
At least 90 percent of those children need to be vaccinated to stop the disease from spreading, Dr. Rik Peeperkorn, the top W.H.O. representative in Gaza, told reporters on Thursday.
That will take a force of about 2,100 health and community aid workers in Gaza, at some 700 medical facilities, mobile clinics and shelters. They will administer the polio vaccination during a staggered pause in military operations for nine hours a day for three days in designated areas in each of Gaza’s three main regions — north, south and central.
The agreement for the humanitarian pause was reached Thursday after days of tense negotiations with Israeli officials, who insisted that it was not a first step to a cease-fire and that fighting would not be halted across the Gaza Strip.
The first confirmed polio case is a boy named Abdul Rahman Abu Al-Jidyan, who is almost a year old and living with his family in a tent in Deir al Balah in central Gaza.
He was born just before the war between Israel and Hamas began last October, and was unable to get the routine vaccinations that are given to babies, his mother said, because the family was constantly forced to move from one shelter to another to escape violence. Then, about two months ago, Abdul Rahman stopped walking and crawling.
“I found the boy vomiting, he stopped moving and had a fever,” his mother, Nivine Abu Al-Jidyan, said in an interview this week with Reuters. Exams at a hospital in Gaza and a sample sent to a lab in Jordan confirmed heath officials’ fears: He had tested positive for polio.
Some Western diplomats privately voiced skepticism that a pause would hold, although Hamas officials said they would abide by the agreement.
“I think this is a way forward,” Dr. Peeperkorn said. “I’m not going to say this is the ideal way forward, but this is a workable way forward. Not doing anything would be really bad. We have to stop this transmission in Gaza, and we have to avoid the transmission outside Gaza.”
The vaccinations will begin around 6 a.m. Sunday in central Gaza for at least three days, and longer if needed, Dr. Peeperkorn said. When that is complete, the drive will shift to southern Gaza for three days, and later to northern Gaza for three days.
A second, booster round of immunizations will need to be given four weeks after the first dosages, and Dr. Peeperkorn said that was part of the agreement reached on Thursday. “We expect that all parties will stick to that,” he said.
Some of the doses will be administered in shelters run by UNRWA, the main U.N. agency that provides aid to Palestinians in Gaza. Israel has accused UNRWA of being infiltrated by Hamas, a charge it denies.
Dr. Peeperkorn said the vaccine drive was planned in coordination with both UNRWA and COGAT, the Israeli defense ministry’s agency that oversees policy for the Palestinian territories, and “we haven’t encountered any problems.” He also said Israeli authorities had agreed to not issue evacuation orders in the times and places that the inoculations are being administered.
Gazan health officials have reported multiple children with symptoms consistent with polio, likely the result of what UNICEF and W.H.O. officials said was severely unsanitary conditions combined with deteriorating health services across the region. The polio virus has been detected in wastewater samples in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, and Deir al Balah, both of which have large populations of displaced Palestinians who have fled Israeli airstrikes.
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14) Why Relief Agencies Are Rushing Polio Vaccines to Gaza
A wider outbreak in the conflict zone would be difficult to contain and could spread far, experts fear.
By Emily Baumgaertner, Aug. 30, 2024
Unloading a shipment of polio vaccines at a depot belonging to Gaza’s health ministry on Sunday. Credit...Eyad Baba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In July, health officials made an unsettling discovery in Gaza: Poliovirus, a global scourge, was found in samples of wastewater. This month, the news got worse. A 10-month-old baby contracted polio and is now paralyzed in one leg.
It’s the first confirmed case of polio in Gaza in 25 years. Now international agencies are sending more than 1.6 million doses of oral poliovirus vaccine to the conflict zone in an ambitious effort to immunize 640,000 children under age 10.
Israel has agreed to three pauses in military operations, starting Sunday, to facilitate the campaign.
Health officials had been warning for months that the conflict in Gaza could eventually give way to major regressions in infectious diseases. Transmission of poliovirus — which attacks the nervous system and can lead to spinal and respiratory paralysis, and in some cases death — may already be widespread, some experts fear.
Here’s what you should know.
How could there be polio in Gaza?
Of the three naturally occurring “wild-type” viruses, only Type 1 remains; Type 2 and Type 3 have been eradicated.
But there is another form to worry about: so-called vaccine-derived poliovirus. This form now accounts for most outbreaks worldwide.
Since 2000, the United States and most wealthy countries have used an injected vaccine that does not contain live virus. But many low-income countries still rely on oral vaccines that contain live, weakened poliovirus, designed to induce an immune response without causing serious illness.
But a child receiving an oral vaccine may shed the weakened virus in stool or bodily secretions. That virus may not be as harmful as wild-type poliovirus — at first.
When vaccination rates in a population are inadequate, a vaccine-derived poliovirus may spread widely without interruption, undergoing genetic changes and eventually reverting to a type able to cause paralysis and outbreaks.
The pathogen circulating in Gaza is believed to be vaccine-derived Type 2 poliovirus, according to the W.H.O. Type 2 was removed from the widely used oral vaccines a few years ago, and so many children in Gaza may be susceptible.
How has the conflict contributed?
Polio vaccine coverage rates in Gaza were at about 99 percent in 2022 but have dropped dramatically. The baby who was infected was unvaccinated.
At the same time, the majority of Gaza’s 2.2 million people have fled their homes for makeshift shelters, where a lack of clean water and sanitation infrastructure, plus overcrowding, make the territory ripe for the spread of disease.
In many communities, untreated sewage is flowing openly near temporary dwellings. Illnesses passed through contaminated food or water, or close person-to-person contact, are a major threat.
Airstrikes and ground combat have decimated many of the territory’s hospitals and clinics, and fewer than half of its facilities remain even partly operational. As a result, existing health infrastructure is dedicated largely to people suffering from war injuries, not to public hygiene and disease prevention.
In the midst of the crisis, disease is surging. There have been at least 500,000 cases of diarrhea and nearly one million acute respiratory infections. The W.H.O. has reported 100,000 cases of lice and scabies, and about the same number of cases of acute jaundice syndrome, or suspected hepatitis A.
What’s the plan in Gaza?
In an effort to curb a potential outbreak, global health officials have started an urgent campaign to deliver vaccines to hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children. The effort is expected to begin on Sunday.
The oral vaccines on the way to Gaza target Type 2 poliovirus, according to the W.H.O., and the campaign will involve 708 teams and 2,700 health workers.
Poor sanitation in Gaza means that at least 95 percent of children will need to receive two vaccine doses to reduce the chances that polio will re-emerge in the region, according to UNICEF.
Israel’s defense ministry said the vaccine drive would occur during three humanitarian pauses.
What does this mean for the global effort to eradicate polio?
The short answer: No one knows.
The poliovirus found in Gaza did not emerge there — it was imported somehow, perhaps from Egypt. Spread beyond Gaza remains possible for however long the virus continues circulating; it is impossible to say whether cases can be contained in Gaza.
More than 30 years ago, the World Health Assembly passed a resolution to eradicate polio, which led to mass vaccination campaigns that brought cases down by more than 99 percent worldwide. Wild-type poliovirus is now known to exist only in two strongholds — Pakistan and Afghanistan.
But Oliver Rosenbauer, a spokesman for the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, said that truly eliminating the disease would require a “one-two punch”: eradicating wild-type polio from those places, and phasing out the live-virus component in oral vaccines.
For now, the best protection against polio in any community is still vaccine-induced “herd immunity.” In places where almost all children have been vaccinated, the likelihood of spread is minimal. But a child anywhere who is unvaccinated remains at risk, as evidenced by a 2022 outbreak that reached New York.
“As long as polio is anywhere,” Mr. Rosenbauer said, “all countries are at risk.”
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15) Boar’s Head Plant Tied to 9 Deaths Had Mold, Leaky Pipes and Flies
Federal inspectors cited continuing problems at a deli meat plant in Virginia that was linked to an outbreak of listeria, records indicate.
By Teddy Rosenbluth and Christina Jewett, Aug. 30, 2024
Federal meat inspectors documented black mold, water dripping over meat and dead flies at a Virginia Boar’s Head deli meat plant that has now been linked to nine deaths from listeria, according to records.
Over the course of a year, food safety inspectors, who are a constant presence in meat facilities across the United States, noted escalating problems at the plant.
Under U.S. Department of Agriculture rules, the processing facility, in rural Virginia, was expected to swab for listeria, which the agency considers a “zero tolerance” concern that can spur an immediate recall. Yet the inspectors — who also swab and test for listeria, a lethal bacteria — do not appear to have been the first to prompt a recall of more than seven million pounds of ham, salami, hot dogs and other meats by Boar’s Head.
The alarm rang after people like Günter Morgenstein, a hair stylist renowned in coastal Virginia, fell gravely ill. As Mr. Morgenstein, an active 88-year-old known as Garshon, grew frail in the hospital in early July, his family racked their brains to think of everything he had eaten in recent weeks.
As listeria illnesses spread, a disease detective in Maryland began to suspect liverwurst as the common thread, given the older age of the hospitalized patients. Her hunch proved correct: Whole genome sequencing matched the patients’ bacteria to Boar’s Head liverwurst bought at a store, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, setting off the recall of 3,500 tons of meat.
At the same time, U.S.D.A. inspectors documented flies, bits of meat on food-contact surfaces and mold on a wall at the Boar’s Head plant in Jarratt, Va. From June 2023 through this August, inspectors listed 84 problems at the facility. Listeria was not mentioned in more 80 pages of inspection records on the plant that were released by the agency.
“Clearly there’s a breakdown in the process when you have a zero-tolerance policy but you still see listeria and deaths as well,” said Brian Ronholm, who is the director of food policy for Consumer Reports, a watchdog group, and a former food safety official at the U.S.D.A. Under the policy, ready-to-eat food discovered by a company or the U.S.D.A. to be contaminated with listeria is to be destroyed and recalled.
A spokeswoman for the Agriculture Department said that the Virginia facility has been closed until it “is able to demonstrate it can produce safe product.”
The spokeswoman said that Boar’s Head had corrected problems at the plant that were cited by inspectors. The U.S.D.A. said the facility was inspected by the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which did not respond to requests for comment.
Liverwurst from the Jarratt Boar’s Head plant was first recalled on July 25, and then the company expanded the recall on July 29 to include all the meat processed there.
In an email, a spokeswoman said the company leaders “deeply regret” the impact the outbreak has had on the families of those affected and on its customers. The company provided a full list of the more than 50 meats that were recalled, but emphasized that listeria had been found on only liverwurst samples connected to the Jarratt plant.
Boar’s Head said it was working with top food safety experts to determine the cause of the problem, which it said was “limited to a single process” at the plant in Virginia, one of several the company operates.
On Thursday, a company spokeswoman said: “We want to assure consumers that no product will be released from this facility until it meets the highest quality and safety standards that you deserve and expect.”
The C.D.C. said 57 people, ranging in age from 32 to 95, had been hospitalized, but added that many more likely became ill and had recovered without testing for listeria. The nine people who died were all older than 70, according to the agency.
Health experts have expressed concerns that consumers may still have recalled products, some of which do not expire before October, in their refrigerators. And they advised consumers and retailers to clean surfaces where the deli meats had contact, because listeria can linger stubbornly on counters, deli slicers and other places and is not killed by refrigeration.
Some people also may not experience symptoms, which can include vomiting and diarrhea, until weeks after they’ve consumed contaminated products.
Food safety experts who reviewed the inspection reports said that they were troubling, given the repeated nature of problems, including dripping or standing water that can foster an environment where listeria bacteria thrive.
In October 2023, an inspector noted plastic wrapped around an overhead pipe outside a cooler with “orange/brown water” pooled in the lowest hanging point. “The establishment typically does this for temporary fixes,” the inspection report said.
In February, an inspector noted “ample amounts of blood in puddles on the floor" and “a rancid smell in the cooler.” In June, 15 to 20 flies were seen going in and out of vats of pickles.
“Considering there’s continuous inspection, it’s a real mystery why it ever got so bad before it got to this,” said Neal Fortin, the director of the Institute for Food Laws & Regulations at Michigan State University.
Concern about listeria has been so high that the U.S.D.A. has devised rules specifically aimed at limiting spread of the lethal pathogen in ready-to-eat food, such as deli meat.
In a guideline in 2012, the U.S.D.A. said about 1,500 hospitalizations and 250 deaths each year were linked to listeria. The bacteria is particularly deadly to people who are very young, older than 65 or pregnant, according to the C.D.C.
Past outbreaks have been severe and led to some criminal prosecution. Thirty-three people died in a listeria outbreak in 2011 tied to cantaloupe, one of the deadliest outbreaks in recent history. Two cantaloupe farmers were sentenced to five years’ probation for their involvement in the case.
Blue Bell Creameries paid $17.25 million in criminal penalties after a 2015 listeria outbreak linked to its contaminated ice cream killed three people. Blue Bell’s former chief executive pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor charge and paid a $100,000 fine.
Mr. Fortin said the U.S.D.A. listeria rules allow food companies to choose one of three methods to control listeria. Records from the department show that the Virginia Boar’s Head plant relied on a system based on keeping a sanitary plant and routine testing to monitor for the bacteria. Other options include taking measures to kill listeria or prevent it from growing on the meat.
The option Boar’s Head used in Virginia “is the least reliable and it’s the hardest to do,” Mr. Fortin said. “I won’t buy lunch meat from anyone who uses” that method.
The Virginia facility was required to do environmental testing, Mr. Fortin said, which could mean swabbing drains, walls, floors or food-cutting surfaces. If listeria is found, companies are expected to sanitize thoroughly and then test the finished product to ensure it is free of bacteria.
Any discovery of listeria in food is a serious matter, Mr. Fortin said, leading to an immediate recall. Generally, though, he said facilities have no day-to-day duty to test products.
Exactly how the Virginia facility carried out its listeria safety plan — or whether it had turned up any positive swabs — remains unclear. The U.S.D.A. did not respond to specific questions about testing for listeria.
Spreadsheets posted on the department’s website that list listeria test results of thousands of samples taken by officials at many facilities showed negative results at the Boar’s Head Virginia plant in January 2016 and in September 2021. The facility is not listed on a summary of test results released in 2024.
Mr. Morgenstein’s family said he was fond of Boar’s Head liverwurst as a comfort food eaten on a plain bagel. It reminded him of his childhood in Germany, which he fled as a child to escape Nazi rule. A receipt from Harris Teeter provided by Ron Simon, his family’s lawyer, shows he made the purchase on June 30.
“Garshon’s three favorite things were honey ham, lox and liverwurst,” his wife, Peggy Morgenstein, said. Even at 88, he was still cutting customers’ hair three days a week.
Over the course of his 10-day hospital stay, Mr. Morgenstein weakened and became feverish. As the bacteria reached his brain, he grew uncharacteristically irritable, his wife said. Hospital staff had to put mittens on him to keep him from pulling at his tubes. Then he fell quiet.
Mr. Morgenstein died on July 18 of listeria-related brain swelling, his death certificate shows. Had there been a warning about the recall, Ms. Morgenstein said her family would have known.
“My husband and I are news freaks,” she said. “We certainly wouldn’t have bought it if we had seen that.”
In the week after Mr. Morgenstein died, epidemiologists in Maryland began noticing that the people who had fallen ill with listeria in their state all skewed older; they were, on average, 76.
Health officials suspected that the meat to blame might be popular among older generations, said Dr. Sinisa Urban, head of the environmental sciences division at the Maryland Department of Health.
On July 18, the local investigators bought a package of Boar’s Head liverwurst from a major grocery chain in Baltimore and, in a turn of luck that Dr. Urban believes probably saved lives, the first package of liverwurst tested positive for the bacteria when definitive results arrived a week later.
“This is a very rare instance where things lined up very, very quickly,” he said. “It’s like finding a needle in a haystack.”
Given the seriousness of the outbreak, more answers are needed, and are expected to emerge in the coming weeks, said James Dickson, a food safety expert at Iowa State University.
“It doesn’t help the people who got sick, it doesn’t help the people who died,” he said. “But hopefully down the road we learn something from this so it doesn’t happen again.”
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16) Gaza Debate Reopens Divisions Between Left-Wing Workers and Union Leaders
Last week’s Democratic National Convention surfaced differences over the war in Gaza that could widen fissures between labor activists and union officials.
By Noam Scheiber, Noam Scheiber reported from Chicago and has covered the labor movement since 2015, Aug. 30, 2024
“‘Everything we do needs to start with mobilizing our members,’ Mr. Cohen said. ‘A common mistake for us as leaders is to stray away from that because we’re too concerned about being able to talk to the president.’”
When members of the Chicago Teachers Union showed up to march at the Democratic National Convention last week, many expressed two distinct frustrations.
The first was over the war in Gaza, which they blamed for chewing up billions of dollars in aid to Israel that they said could be better spent on students, in addition to a staggering loss of life. The second was disappointment with their parent union, the American Federation of Teachers, which they felt should go further in pressuring the Biden administration to rein in Israel’s military campaign.
“I was disappointed in the resolution on Israel and Palestine because it didn’t call for an end to armed shipments,” said Kirstin Roberts, a preschool teacher who attended the protest, alluding to a statement that the parent union endorsed at its convention in July.
Since last fall, many rank-and-file union members have been outspoken in their criticism of Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 attacks, in which Hamas-led militants killed more than 1,000 people and took about 250 hostages. The leaders of many national unions have appeared more cautious, at times emphasizing the precipitating role of Hamas.
“We were very careful about what a moral stance was and also what the implications of every word we wrote was,” the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, said of the resolution her union recently adopted.
In some ways, this divide reflects tensions over Israel and Gaza that exist within many institutions — like academia, the media and government.
But labor’s divide over Gaza also reflects a deeper, more existential debate: Is the future of organized labor with its left-leaning activists, who have become increasingly outspoken on various issues inside and outside the workplace? Or is it with establishment leaders whose politics are more pragmatic?
The leaders, who are generally elected, may reflect the views of most of the 10 percent of U.S. workers who belong to unions. But that percentage has been dwindling for decades. By contrast, the portion of the labor movement that has been growing rapidly in recent years — Starbucks baristas, REI workers, graduate students, medical residents — skews young and to the left, precisely the demographic that cares most about the war in Gaza.
“Insofar as the new energy is about those young people — and it mostly is — part of what comes with that is Gaza being a high priority,” said Ruth Milkman, a sociologist who studies labor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Radical labor activists have been at odds with more moderate leaders for generations, of course, but the current divide first reared its head during the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries.
At the time, many large unions lined up to endorse Hillary Clinton before her opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, had a chance to gain traction with voters. As progressives became enthusiastic about Mr. Sanders, whom they tended to trust more on issues like trade, inequality and the Iraq war, many grew disenchanted with their unions’ early endorsements.
The split flared up again in 2022 when rail workers in several unions rejected a labor contract over issues like understaffing and scheduling. After President Biden worked with Congress to impose the contract nonetheless, averting a strike that he worried would damage the economy, many labor activists criticized Democrats for undermining workers’ leverage, while mainstream union leaders defended the president.
The split over Gaza has resembled these earlier fights in some respects. “There’s a general reluctance to take strong stands on anything that might risk political capital,” Dr. Milkman said, referring to labor leaders, who have generally aligned their unions with Democrats and sought to preserve their access to party leaders. When it comes to Gaza, Dr. Milkman said, many national union leaders have been reluctant to criticize the Biden administration and potentially hurt the party’s electoral chances.
In February, a 50,000-member local of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union in Washington State backed a campaign urging Democrats to vote “uncommitted” in the presidential primary, arguing that it would pressure the Biden administration to alleviate suffering in Gaza. In response, the union’s international leadership “privately made it clear that they were not in that place,” said Joe Mizrahi, the secretary-treasurer of the Washington local, whose membership is relatively young and racially diverse.
“They are more reluctant to put out a strong statement,” Mr. Mizrahi added about the union’s leaders. After the local called for Mr. Biden to leave the presidential race in mid-July, the international union’s president, Marc Perrone, said that “we strongly support” Mr. Biden’s candidacy.
A spokesman for the international union said that it had backed a cease-fire and the return of Israeli hostages through its affiliation with other labor groups, and that it took strong stances on issues “that impact our members the most.”
Members of teachers’ unions have also parted company with their parent union. At the American Federation of Teachers convention this summer, when some members sought to amend the resolution on Gaza so it would call for a suspension of U.S. military aid to Israel, the convention’s chair did not allow the motion to go forward.
“I would have liked to see it come to the floor to get a vote,” said Dennis Kosuth, a school nurse and member of the Chicago Teachers Union, who attended the convention.
Ms. Weingarten, the parent union’s president, noted that the adopted resolution, which called for a cease-fire in Gaza as well as “diplomacy that creates two states for two peoples,” had followed months of outreach and dialogue and was supported by a large majority of her members. She said the member who sought to introduce the amendment was allowed to speak for the idea before a vote on a related motion.
A video of the remarks indicated that the member had received spirited applause at times, though it is difficult to say how widely the views were shared. Several members of the Chicago local who said they had been disappointed with the convention resolution on Gaza said they were still encouraged by the discussion of the issue there.
Outside groups have also played a role in these debates, raising concerns that some teachers may be drawing from biased or inaccurate material, which risks misinforming their students.
“The entire subject of public education, K-12, is very, very concerning,” said Eric Fingerhut, the president of the Jewish Federations of North America, whose local federations have sought to educate labor leaders about Israel.
Mr. Fingerhut spoke with Ms. Weingarten this year and said he felt “very positive” about the relationship with her union, calling her someone who “brings substantial political and communal experience and expertise to the issue.”
But some labor experts argue that by failing to more aggressively challenge U.S. policy toward Israel, union leaders may be missing an opportunity to help rebuild their movement.
Charmaine Chua, a political scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said one way to motivate workers to unionize might be to appeal to their interest in Gaza. “Many people are being freshly brought into union-movement work as a result of their solidarity with Palestine,” said Dr. Chua, who has helped organize workers to speak out on the issue.
At Google and other tech companies, where workers have been organizing on and off for years, the war in Gaza appeared to prompt a large increase in employees interested in joining No Tech for Apartheid, a group that pushes Google and Amazon to abandon a cloud technology contract with the Israeli government and military.
Gabriel Schubiner, a former Google employee and organizer with the group, said that the number of tech workers actively involved had grown from a few dozen to a few hundred after Oct. 7, and that many of these employees had later become interested in a wider range of workplace issues.
“They gained a really experiential understanding of how much power they actually have in the workplace,” Mx. Schubiner said. In April, Google fired more than two dozen workers involved in sit-ins over the cloud contract.
A Google spokeswoman confirmed the firings but said many members of the group were not Google employees.
The United Automobile Workers, whose president, Shawn Fain, came to power thanks largely to a left-leaning insurgent group within the union, has also rallied its members with progressive positions on political issues, like calling for a suspension of military aid to Israel. (A few other major unions also joined this effort.) The union waged a successful strike last fall and unionized its first major foreign auto plant in the South this year.
Larry Cohen, a former president of the Communications Workers of America, said the Gaza issue was a reminder that the goals of union members and the interests of the Democratic Party were not always the same, even if labor leaders sometimes lost sight of the difference.
For example, he said, calls to limit shipments of offensive weapons to Israel until there is a cease-fire might put labor at odds with the Biden administration. But these calls would most likely create enthusiasm within the labor movement, motivating existing members and helping to attract new ones.
“Everything we do needs to start with mobilizing our members,” Mr. Cohen said. “A common mistake for us as leaders is to stray away from that because we’re too concerned about being able to talk to the president.”
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