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Palestinians inspect the area after an Israeli attack hit the Al-Zahraa school in the east of Gaza City, on August 8, 2024. (Photo: Hadi Daoud/APA Images)
‘Operation al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 307:
At least 56 Palestinians killed across Gaza as Israel bombs two more schools in latest massacres
A reported 15 Palestinians were killed in Israeli strikes on the Abdel Fatah Hamoud and the al-Zahraa schools in Gaza City. With these latest massacres, the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli attacks on Thursday alone rose to at least 56.
By Qassam Muaddi, August 8, 2024
Casualties
· 39,699 + killed* and at least 91,722 wounded in the Gaza Strip. The identities of 32,280 of the killed have been identified, including 10,627 children and 5,956 women, representing 60% of the killed, and 2,770 elderly, as of August 6, 2024. Some 10,000 more are estimated to be under the rubble*
· 620+ Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. This include 140 children.**
· Israel revised its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,140.
· 690 Israeli soldiers and officers have been recognized as killed, and 4096 as wounded by the Israeli army, since October 7.***
* Gaza’s branch of the Palestinian Ministry of Health confirmed this figure in its daily report, published through its WhatsApp channel on August 8, 2024. Rights groups and public health experts estimate the death toll to be much higher.
** The death toll in the West Bank and Jerusalem is not updated regularly. This is the latest figure according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health as of August 8.
*** These figures are released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.” Israeli daily Yediot Ahranot reported on August 4, 2024, that some 10,000 Israeli soldiers and officers have been either killed or wounded since October 7. The head of the Israeli army’s wounded association told Israel’s Channel 12 the number of wounded Israeli soldiers exceeds 20,000 including at least 8,000 permanently handicapped as of June 1. Israel’s Channel 7 reported that according to the Israeli war ministry’s rehabilitation service numbers, 8,663 new wounded joined the army’s handicap rehabilitation system since October 7, as of June 18.
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) Two Al Jazeera journalists were killed in an Israeli airstrike on Gaza.
By Ephrat Livni, August 1, 2024
Mourners and colleagues surrounding the body of the Al Jazeera journalist Ismail al-Ghoul, who was killed with a cameraman, Rami al-Refee, on Wednesday. Credit...Omar Al-Qattaa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Al Jazeera, the influential Arab news network, said that two of its journalists were killed on Wednesday in an Israeli airstrike on their car in Gaza City.
The Qatar-based network said the reporter Ismail al-Ghoul and his cameraman, Rami al-Rifee, were killed in Shati camp in northern Gaza after reporting from or near the house of the deceased Hamas political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassinated in Tehran on Wednesday. The network accused the Israeli military of targeting the journalists with a “direct hit,” and reported that “their car was clearly marked as a press vehicle.”
“The assassination of Ismail and Rami, while they were documenting the crimes of Israeli forces, underscores the urgent need for immediate legal action against the occupation forces to ensure that there is no impunity,” Al Jazeera Media Network said in a statement.
Mohammed Moawad, Al Jazeera’s managing editor, praised Mr. al-Ghoul’s courage in a post on social media.
“Ismail was renowned for his professionalism and dedication, bringing the world’s attention to the suffering and atrocities committed in Gaza,” he said.
The Committee to Protect Journalists has said the war in Gaza has led to the deadliest period for correspondents since it began gathering data in 1992, with at least 111 journalists and media workers among the more than 39,000 people killed in Gaza.
Mr. Moawad posted a message that he said had been written by Mr. al-Ghoul, in which the journalist reflected on being haunted by the incessant civilian suffering and death he’d seen while reporting on the conflict in Gaza.
“Let me tell you, my friend, that I no longer know the taste of sleep,” Mr. al-Ghoul wrote. “The bodies of children and the screams of the injured and their blood-soaked images never leave my sight. The cries of mothers and the wailing of men who are missing their loved ones never fade from my hearing.”
He added: “I am tired, my friend.”
An Al Jazeera video from outside a hospital showed two corpses on stretchers wearing vests meant to protect journalists, marked with the word “press.” The journalists were on their way to a hospital after being asked to leave the area by Israeli forces, according to Al Jazeera.
Jodie Ginsberg, the chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said in a statement on social media that the organization was “dismayed” by the journalists’ deaths.
“Journalists are civilians and should never be targeted,” she said. “Israel must explain why two more Al Jazeera journalists have been killed in what appears to be a direct strike.”
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
Israel has a fraught relationship with Al Jazeera. In May, the Israeli government shut down the organization’s local operations in a step that critics denounced as anti-democratic and part of a broader crackdown on dissent over the war against Hamas.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accused Al Jazeera, a major source of news in the Arab world that has often highlighted civilian suffering in Gaza, of harming Israel’s security and inciting violence against its soldiers, though Israeli officials offered no examples. The initial order to shut down, set for 45 days, has since been extended.
The New York Times and other major international outlets have evacuated Palestinian journalists who had been working for them in Gaza. Israel and Egypt have restricted entry by international journalists into Gaza — with the exception of coordinated visits to specific sites with the Israeli military — so the stories that emerge from the war have often been left to local Palestinian reporters to document alone, working in extremely dangerous conditions.
“It is clear that journalists need to be protected,” Stéphane Dujarric, a United Nations spokesman, told reporters in a briefing on Wednesday. “These and other similar incidents must be fully and transparently investigated, and there must be accountability.”
Anushka Patil contributed reporting.
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2) Fears of Wider Mideast Conflict Deepen, With U.S. Seen as ‘Not in Control’
American officials said they had no advance warning of the attack on the Hamas leader in Iran, raising worries of a power vacuum that could lead to a broader geopolitical crisis.
By Mark Landler, Reporting from London, Aug. 1, 2024
People in Tehran on Wednesday held Iranian and Palestinian flags and images of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader who was killed in the city that morning. Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
For months, diplomats and analysts in foreign capitals have worried that prolonged political upheaval in the United States could invite aggression abroad, whether in Russia’s waging of war in Ukraine, North Korea’s rogue nuclear ambitions or China’s expansionist designs in the South China Sea.
Now, less than 100 days before Americans elect a new president, that broader geopolitical crisis has erupted in the familiar theater of the Middle East. The targeted killings of Hezbollah and Hamas leaders in Beirut and Tehran have deepened fears of a regionwide conflict — one that the United States, caught up in its own political drama at home, may have little capacity to avert or even contain.
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said the United States had not been involved in, or even informed of, the operation in Tehran, which the Iranian government swiftly blamed on Israel. To some, Mr. Blinken’s statement confirmed a dangerous power vacuum in the region.
“We thought it would be Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping or Kim Jong-un who would take advantage of this period in the U.S.,” said Vali R. Nasr, a professor of international affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “Nobody counted on an American ally doing it.”
“This is going to make the region extremely nervous,” said Mr. Nasr, who served in the State Department during the Obama administration. “It’s never good for the United States to be seen as not in control.”
For President Biden, who expended time and prestige trying to broker a deal between Israel and Hamas to release hostages in Gaza, the back-to-back assassinations of the Hezbollah commander, Fuad Shukr, and the Hamas political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, could signal the futility of his diplomatic efforts, at least for now.
Moreover, the United States could find itself drawn into a direct conflict with Iran, something both countries have taken pains to avoid through months of tensions over the war in Gaza. In April, American officials worked behind the scenes to persuade Iran to limit its military reprisal against Israel after Israeli jets carried out a deadly strike on a meeting of Iranian generals in Damascus, Syria.
This time, however, the killing of Mr. Haniyeh, while he was in Tehran to attend the swearing-in of Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, suggests that American sensitivities counted for little, analysts said. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, quickly blamed Israel and vowed “harsh punishment.”
“That is an attempt to humiliate the Iranians by showing they can’t protect their own guests at that ceremony,” said Daniel Levy, who runs the U.S./Middle East Project, a research organization based in London and New York. “It signifies another crossing of multiple lines by Israel.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel brought his case against Iran directly to Washington. Addressing a joint session of Congress last week, he said: “Iran’s axis of terror confronts America, Israel and our Arab friends. This is not a clash of civilizations. It’s a clash between barbarism and civilization.”
Dozens of Democrats boycotted Mr. Netanyahu’s speech to protest Israel’s handling of the war in Gaza. But he appeared undeterred, and the visit gave him a firsthand look at a country in unusual political flux. He met with Mr. Biden only four days after he withdrew from the presidential race, as well as with Vice President Kamala Harris, who has swiftly become the presumptive Democratic nominee.
While Ms. Harris echoed Mr. Biden’s support of Israel’s right to defend itself from terrorism, she also made clear that she would speak out on behalf of the civilians killed and maimed in the Gaza conflict.
“We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies,” she said, in language notably stronger than that normally used by Mr. Biden. “We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering, and I will not be silent.”
Mr. Netanyahu later traveled to Palm Beach, Fla., to meet with former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee. When Mr. Netanyahu handed him a photograph of a child who he said had been taken captive by Hamas during its deadly Oct. 7 attacks, Mr. Trump told him, “We’ll get it taken care of.”
Some analysts have suggested that Mr. Netanyahu, an astute observer of American politics, saw an opportunity in the political tumult in the United States to act against Hamas and its sponsor, Iran.
“Maybe he decided there is a definite vacuum in Washington, so this is the time to act,” Mr. Nasr said.
The loss of American influence in the Middle East would normally worry allies in Europe. But they have their own problems. In France and Germany, leaders are preoccupied by surging right-wing populist parties. In London, a new Labour prime minister, Keir Starmer, has edged away from the United States in its handling of Israel, after months in which London had been in lock step with Washington.
Britain last week dropped its objections to arrest warrants sought by the International Criminal Court for Mr. Netanyahu and the Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant. It is weighing whether to suspend weapons shipments to Israel, though it has put off a decision pending further legal review.
The strikes also came at a moment of rising Israeli anxiety about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, which have expanded since the Biden administration’s efforts to revive parts of a 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran collapsed in 2022.
Pointing out the lack of leverage the United States has over Iran on its nuclear program, some analysts suggested that Israel might have acted partly out of frustration that the West had not prevented Iran from edging closer to producing a bomb. Provoking a conflict, they said, could give Israel the pretext to strike its nuclear facilities.
“Israel has been quite concerned about the creeping development of the Iranian nuclear program,” said Jonathan Paris, a former Middle East fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The U.S. is noticeably not doing much about it. If I were an Israeli interested in deterrence, this might be one way to do it.”
The assassination could deprive the United States of a fresh diplomatic partner in the form of Iran’s new president, Mr. Pezeshkian. A heart surgeon who beat a hard-line conservative in July, he has portrayed himself as a reformer. But analysts said it would be difficult for him to pursue any diplomatic engagement with the West after such an embarrassing attack.
Still, other experts warned against exaggerating the importance of Mr. Pezeshkian, given the paramount role of Mr. Khamenei. The president’s “relative impotence was exposed on day one,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an expert on Iran at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
Mr. Sadjadpour also cautioned against assuming that Iran would risk an all-out war over the killing of Mr. Haniyeh. It did not do so after the United States assassinated Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the powerful leader of its Quds Force, in 2020. Iran’s previous reprisals against Israel have never proved all that effective.
“Israel has routinely humiliated the Islamic Republic by assassinating high-level targets inside Iran, but Iran’s retaliations have never deterred future Israeli operations,” Mr. Sadjadpour said. “The parameters of an Iranian retaliation need to be face-saving but not life-threatening for the regime.”
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3) Sonya Massey’s Killing Is Black America’s Sorrow
By Charles M. Blow, Opinion Columnist, reporting from Chicago, July 31, 2024
Sonya Massey’s daughter and son, Jeanette and Malachi, put their arms around Sonya’s mother, Donna. Credit...Rashod Taylor for The New York Times
In the days before she was killed, Sonya Massey was having death premonitions. She kept telling her family that she was going to die, that someone was going to kill her. On July 6, a local sheriff’s deputy became the incarnation of her fears: He shot her in the face in her own kitchen.
Massey, a 36-year-old Illinois woman, had called 911 because she thought there was an intruder in her house. Two Sangamon County deputies arrived and entered her home, and one of them, Sean Grayson, began cursing at her and threatening her over a pot of boiling water that she was holding. Grayson shot her at close range as she ducked behind a counter saying she was sorry.
The Associated Press reported that according to her family, Massey had been struggling with mental illness and “had admitted herself to a 30-day inpatient program in St. Louis sometime during the week before her death, but returned two days later without explanation.”
At a news conference on Tuesday at New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church on Chicago’s West Side, Ben Crump, an attorney for Massey’s family, said “many people said she had a premonition” because when the officers arrived she repeatedly said, “Please, God,” she asked one of the officers to grab her Bible and one of the last things she said before she was shot was, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.”
Among the first things Massey said when she opened the door for the officers was: “Please don’t hurt me.”
It seems very clear that Massey was in distress, that what she needed was help. What she got was a bullet that hit her face just below her left eye and exited her head behind her ear.
In the wake of so many of these incidents, we see the wreckage of family members struggling to make sense of the senseless, facing the gantlet of news coverage while their emotional wounds are fresh and tender, expected to convert the screams stuck in their throats into coherent calls for justice.
On Tuesday I spoke with Donna Massey, Sonya’s mother, in a meeting room in the back of the church. Donna is a slight woman whose face was gloomy and drawn, like a cloud, still gray, but emptied of rain.
She told me that she has been hearing voices since her daughter was killed and that she now has a nightmare of being killed the same way. When I asked her about the terrible pain of having to bury her child, she burst into tears: “Oh, God. Nobody should have to do it, nobody.”
Sonya Massey’s 17-year-old son, Malachi, described to me the devastation of returning to the house where his mother was killed, how empty it felt, and how empty he felt: “I still feel lost without my mom right now.”
He is just a boy, a motherless child, whose world is now forever shattered.
This kind of devastation has happened so often, to so many families, that it has become a motif of Black existence in this country, an enduring injury, a simmering sadness, an ambient terror.
And America has refused to enact meaningful federal legislation to address the problem.
Had it become law, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which was shelved in the Senate in 2021, may well have saved Sonya Massey’s life. One of its provisions, as described on the website of the House Judiciary Committee’s Democrats, was the creation of “a nationwide police misconduct registry to prevent problematic officers who are fired or leave one agency from moving to another jurisdiction without any accountability.”
Grayson had worked at six law enforcement agencies in the last four years and was charged with two D.U.I. misdemeanors, one in 2015 and the other in 2016.
He has been fired from the Sangamon County sheriff’s office and charged with three counts of aggravated murder, one count of aggravated battery with a firearm and one count of official misconduct.
This is an encouraging first step, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem. After over a decade of interviewing the families of Black people slain by the police, I have come to the conclusion that what we see in far too many of these situations is the manifestation of a societal sickness that fundamentally devalues Black life.
The Washington Post has been tracking fatal police shootings since 2015. As The Post reports, these shootings have risen in recent years and in 2023 “police killed the highest number of people on record.” A disproportionate number of those killings were of Black people. According to The Post, Black Americans “are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white Americans.”
As long as this trend continues, telling us that as a society we still acquiesce to the assignment of value — and threat — on the basis of race, it will continue to short-circuit people’s natural empathetic impulses and pose an outsize danger to Black lives from the police.
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4) Many of Gaza’s Medical Workers Have Been Detained or Killed
Out of a prewar total of about 20,000 health workers, 500 have been killed in the war, according to the W.H.O., and more than 300 are in Israeli detention, Gaza’s health ministry says.
By Anjana Sankar, Aug. 2, 2024
A doctor inspecting damage at Nasser Hospital, in Khan Younis. Credit...Haitham Imad/EPA, via Shutterstock
Dr. Khaled El Serr last spoke to his family in mid-March, a week before Israeli troops raided the hospital in southern Gaza where he worked as a surgeon.
“No one has seen or heard of him ever again,” said his cousin, Osaid AlSerr, a surgical resident in the United States. “We do not even know whether he is dead or alive.”
Dr. El Serr was arrested by the Israeli military, according to Amnesty International, citing the accounts of co-workers and Palestinian detainees who have been released. But the military has refused to say whether it is holding him.
His story is not unique. More than 300 of Gaza’s health workers are in Israeli detention, the enclave’s health ministry says, while others have been detained for a time and then released. And according to the World Health Organization, 500 have been killed in the war, out of a prewar total of about 20,000.
Based on estimates of the war’s toll, that means medical workers have been killed and detained at higher rates than Gazans generally, a severe blow to a health care system whose facilities have been devastated by war, and a population weakened by hunger, lack of clean water and the rampant spread of diseases.
“That equates to an average of two health care workers killed every day, with one in every 40 health care workers, or 2.5 percent of Gaza’s health care work force, now dead,” Medical Aid for Palestinians, a British charity, said in a statement.
Asked about the detentions, the Israeli military said in a written response that “it does not deliberately detain doctors” but that “suspects of terrorist activities are detained” and taken for detention and questioning in Israel. Those found not to have been involved in “terrorist activity” are released back to the Gaza Strip, the military said.
Some of the doctors who have been released have said they were tortured in Israeli jails, which the Israeli military has denied. Others have died in custody, according to rights groups.
The director of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Dr. Mohammad Abu Salmiya, was taken into custody seven months ago, after Israeli forces first raided the hospital — the largest in Gaza — saying that Hamas fighters were using it for military purposes and had tunnels underneath it. No charges were brought against him.
Released on July 1, Dr. Abu Salmiya said at a news conference that he and others had been subjected to “extreme torture” His finger had been broken, he said, and he had been beaten over the head repeatedly. His release set off a round of finger-pointing among Israeli authorities over who had authorized his detention, but there was no additional clarity on the cause or conditions of his time being held.
One of the doctors who died in Israeli custody was Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, 50, the head of orthopedics at Al-Shifa Hospital. He died in April at Ofer Prison in the West Bank, prompting a wave of criticism from the United Nations and rights groups.
“Dr. Adnan’s case raises serious concerns that he died following torture at the hands of Israeli authorities — his death demands an independent international investigation,” Tlaleng Mofokeng, a U.N. special rapporteur on health care rights said in a U.N. news release. The statement said that the doctor had “reportedly been beaten in prison, with his body showing signs of torture,” but gave no other details.
Israel’s prison service confirmed his death but declined to say anything about how he died.
Dr. Iyad Rantisi, a 53-year-old gynecologist who worked at Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, also died in custody, in Shikma Prison on Nov. 11, six days after he was arrested, the Israeli news outlet Haaretz reported in June.
Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet, which Haaretz reported ran the interrogation facility at Shikma, said Dr. Rantisi had been arrested on suspicion of being involved in holding Israeli hostages. “The circumstances leading to his death are being checked by the relevant authorities,” the security agency said in a statement on June 19.
Since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, many hospitals in Gaza have come under attack from the Israeli military, which has accused Hamas fighters of using them as bases. Hamas and Palestinian doctors have repeatedly denied that claim.
The U.N. Human Rights Office said it had gathered “credible information” that Israeli military raids on hospitals had often led “to mass detention and enforced disappearances, including of medical staff.” The “systematic attacks on hospitals” and the killing, detention and enforced disappearance of health workers had a devastating impact on the people,” the U.N. body said in a statement on June 25.
Only a dozen of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are functioning at all, according to Gaza’s health officials, with the others crippled in raids or rendered dysfunctional because of shortages of fuel and medical supplies. The detention of health care workers has further weakened Gaza’s fragile health care system as it tries to treat thousands wounded in Israeli airstrikes.
Dr. Ahmed Al Moghrabi, who worked as a plastic surgeon at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis before fleeing to Egypt, said the fate of many of his colleagues, including Dr. Khaled Al Serr, remains unknown.
He recounted the “utter chaos” he witnessed when Israeli forces laid siege to Nasser Hospital in February. He said that he saw snipers atop buildings surrounding the hospital, and that one of his nurses was shot in the chest. He said he left the building through a checkpoint that Israeli troops had set up yards away from the hospital.
“I was lucky that they did not detain me,” he said.
Dr. El Serr had returned to Nasser Hospital after the February raid because he was the only general surgeon at the facility, Dr. Moghrabi said. “He was a young and committed doctor who often took to social media to post about what was going on in Gaza,” Dr. Moghrabi said.
With no news about Dr. El Serr since March, Amnesty International began a campaign in June urging Israeli authorities to release him. The rights group has demanded that Israel disclose the whereabouts and legal status of all Palestinian health care workers who have been taken into custody and release then unless they have been charged with a crime and given due process.
Dr. El Serr’s parents, who are in Rafah, are desperate to have information about their son, Osaid Al Serr said. “We are trying everything possible,” he said. “He was a doctor who went above and beyond to do his duty and did not deserve this fate.”
Osaid Al Serr said his cousin’s resilience was apparent during their regular communication on a WhatsApp group Dr. El Serr had set up early during the war to seek help from doctors abroad. “He would post about complicated cases and discuss medical approaches he could take,” he said. “These are doctors Gaza needs badly. They should not be in jails.”
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5) U.S. Poised to Send More Combat Aircraft to Middle East, Officials Say
How many planes to send is still being worked out, as are final approvals from senior officials including Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III.
One of the F15 fighter jets the U.S. sent to Israel since October 7.
The United States is preparing to send additional combat aircraft to the Middle East in response to threats from Iran and its proxies in Gaza, Lebanon and Yemen to attack Israel in the coming days to avenge the death of Ismail Haniyeh this week, American officials said on Friday.
One U.S. military official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters, said that American forces in the Middle East were taking “necessary measures” to increase combat readiness and to protect U.S. troops and allies against any threats from Iran or Iran-backed militia groups.
How many planes to send is still being worked out, as are final approvals from senior officials including Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III. Officials said they were seeking to calibrate the American response to send enough of the right types of aircraft as quickly as possible to help defend Israel without appearing to escalate the conflict.
Any additional air power could be crucial. Iran fired more than 300 drones and missiles against Israel in a major attack in April, but only a handful got through, causing only slight damage. U.S. Air Force jets based in Jordan and in Saudi Arabia coordinated with French, Jordanian and British Air Force fighters to shoot down more than 80 drones.
Iran telegraphed that strike in advance, giving the Pentagon sufficient time to move additional combat aircraft and Navy ships into place while U.S. commanders negotiated access to airspace for fighter jets to operate in and coordinated air defense batteries on the ground to help defend Israel.
It’s unclear whether Israel and its allies will have that much time to prepare for any new round of major Iranian attacks, officials said.
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6) San Francisco Takes Harder Line Against Homeless Camps, Defying Its Reputation
Mayor London Breed has told city officials to issue citations and encourage homeless people to leave town by offering free bus tickets.
By Heather Knight, Reporting from San Francisco, Aug. 3, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/03/us/san-francisco-homeless-london-breed.html
Employees from San Francisco Public Works removed a tent that had been left behind by a homeless camper on Monday. Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times
The homeless men who huddled in tents on a wide sidewalk near Golden Gate Park in San Francisco knew that city crews were coming to clear them out. But they did not budge.
They dozed. They bantered. One strummed a guitar. Fifteen times this year, the city has cleared the sidewalks near the local Department of Motor Vehicles office — and 15 times, the homeless campers have quickly returned.
But attempt No. 16 would be different, Mayor London Breed vowed. No longer would San Francisco allow homeless people to stay on the sidewalks if there was another place to sleep. The individuals camping around the D.M.V. branch had collectively turned down 89 offers of shelter this year, according to the mayor’s office, and Ms. Breed had had enough.
“We need some tough love on the streets of our city,” Ms. Breed said at a re-election campaign rally held four days before the Monday clear-out.
San Francisco has long had a reputation as a liberal bastion, a city that had hoped to solve its problems more through compassion than crackdowns. But with voters frustrated by homeless encampments, open drug use and a downtown that has lost some of its verve, Ms. Breed has taken a tougher approach as she fights for her political life in a hotly contested mayoral race.
Empowered by a recent Supreme Court decision and encouraged by Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, Ms. Breed, a Democrat, has vowed to aggressively clear encampments this month and has told police officers that they can cite homeless campers for illegal lodging if they refuse shelter, with jail time on the table.
The Police Department, whose chief reports to Ms. Breed, told officers in a memo on Wednesday that they can now cite people for violations that included sitting, lying or camping on sidewalks; obstructing people’s ability to walk in public spaces; and creating a public nuisance through conduct that is “offensive to the senses.”
On Thursday, Ms. Breed directed city officials to offer bus tickets to homeless people before providing them a shelter bed or other services. It was the starkest sign yet that San Francisco had changed its tack — and stood in contrast to Los Angeles, where leaders criticized Mr. Newsom for issuing an executive order last week encouraging them to sweep homeless encampments.
“San Francisco will always lead with compassion, but we cannot allow our compassion to be taken advantage of,” Ms. Breed said in her busing order. “We will not be a city with a reputation for being able to solve the housing and behavioral health needs of people across our country.”
On Monday afternoon, the mayor made a personal visit to the sidewalk alongside the D.M.V., a few days after homeless campers had been warned their tents would be cleared through notices that were stapled to nearby trees.
Ms. Breed was joined by about 30 city workers, including her aides and security detail, public health officials and eight police officers. Their numbers dwarfed the four homeless people who were staying put on the sidewalk.
Joel Beiswanger, 49, sat amid a pile of his belongings as the police officers stood nearby and watched him. Wearing a bright orange sweatshirt and pajama pants emblazoned with Santa Claus, he said he found shelters too stressful and had nowhere else to go. He said he has been homeless on and off since he was 14.
Mr. Beiswanger took issue with Ms. Breed’s statement last week that she wanted to make it “uncomfortable” for people to live on the street.
“Where are the bathrooms at? Showers? Where is there comfort?” he asked. “Every week, someone comes through and takes everything you own, no questions asked. I guess it’s how you get your votes.”
Emmanuel Siple, 48, woke up from a nap in a tent nearby. He said a drug and alcohol problem and divorce had led him to live on the streets, and he resented being “micromanaged” by city workers. The threat of jail won’t convince him to stay in a shelter, which already feels like jail, he said.
Ms. Breed did not engage with the homeless men, observing them from across an intersection. She said she did not want to be recorded by a group of activists for homeless rights who had shown up to monitor the clearing and take videos of the workers.
For years, San Francisco has struggled to deal with encampments crowding sidewalks, and the authorities have said that some tents have been used as cover to sell and consume drugs — particularly fentanyl, which has contributed to a spike in deadly overdoses. The city lacks enough affordable housing, drug treatment programs and hospital beds to address the misery, and voters are steamed.
The mayor told reporters last week that she was “excited” about the Supreme Court, dominated by Republican appointees, upholding the ban in Grants Pass, Ore., on homeless people sleeping outside. For several years, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which oversees nine Western states including California, had blocked laws that made it illegal to camp when no shelter was available.
Governor Newsom’s recent order directed state officials to begin dismantling thousands of homeless encampments and urged local leaders to follow suit. Ms. Breed praised the enforcement approach, noting that her teams repeatedly offer shelter beds, but are turned down two-thirds of the time.
But advocates for homeless people called it cruel, saying it would do little to solve the underlying factors that lead to homelessness. City and county leaders in Los Angeles have criticized both the Supreme Court and Governor Newsom and vowed to solve homelessness in their own way, primarily by finding motel space and services for people before clearing them from the streets.
In San Francisco, however, a police officer this week told one homeless person that tents were being swept in the city because Ms. Breed and Mr. Newsom had declared “no more on the streets, no more encampments,” The San Francisco Standard reported.
Some of Ms. Breed’s challengers have criticized her approach. Aaron Peskin, president of the Board of Supervisors and the most liberal candidate in the mayoral race, said that he would add 2,000 shelter beds, fight evictions and boost the number of rent-controlled apartments.
“What is happening now is a quick and performative election-year gimmick,” he said.
At the D.M.V., activists had their own way of countering the sweep overseen by Ms. Breed. They parked a U-Haul van nearby and offered to store the men’s belongings in it until the city crews left. Ms. Breed, standing across the street, said they were only enabling homelessness and doing nothing to actually help.
Jeff Klein, 31, bought turkey and Swiss sandwiches for the men. Another activist gave them Oreo cookies. Mr. Klein said the city should have been spending its money on food and housing instead of paying for the workers involved in the clearing, most of whom did not engage with the homeless men or clean the camp.
“We have our values completely backward,” Mr. Klein said.
Lt. Wayman Young of the San Francisco Police has worked on the camp-clearing team for five years. He said that people living in tents in neighborhoods away from downtown are often disabled people, older citizens or teenage runaways — all of whom desperately need help.
Downtown is another story, he said, fueled mostly by the open-air drug trade. The team has found guns, knives, machetes and axes in the tents, as well as giant containers of urine and feces, rats, mold and drugs. Lt. Young said the police search the records of anyone who gets aggressive with them, and he estimated that roughly one in four have come back with warrants for crimes that ranged from car break-ins to sexual assault.
He said the new policy allowing citations will make it easier to keep sidewalks clear.
“We want them to go to shelter, and if they don’t, we have to enforce the law,” Lt. Young said. He added that those cited will be released on site and that it would be up to the district attorney to decide whether to charge them. Those with warrants will be taken to jail immediately.
In the first few days of the latest effort, city employees had 235 conversations with homeless people and removed 81 tents. Twenty-four people accepted a shelter bed, while the rest declined or did not respond. The police reported that they have made nine arrests, eight for outstanding warrants and one for illegal lodging, who was cited and released on site.
Among the arrested was Mr. Beiswanger, outside of the D.M.V., who had outstanding warrants for falsely identifying himself to the police and possessing methamphetamines. They took him to jail, and he has been released. He could not be reached for comment after leaving the camp.
The other homeless men by the D.M.V. loaded their belongings into the U-Haul van and wandered away. That, for the time being, was enough to avoid citations.
About an hour after the city crews left, the men retrieved their belongings, and carried them through Golden Gate Park to a different corner.
There, they erected a new encampment.
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7) An effort to vaccinate Gazans against polio faces hurdles, including the heat.
By Vivian Yee reporting from Cairo, August 5, 2024
A street covered in stagnant wastewater last month in Deir al Balah in the Gaza Strip, near tents used as shelters by displaced Palestinians. Credit...Bashar Taleb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
With polio probably already circulating in Gaza’s population, United Nations officials say, aid agencies are preparing to mount a vaccination campaign with more than one million doses to prevent an outbreak there. About 18,000 doses are already on their way, Jonathan Crickx, a spokesman for the U.N. children’s agency, said on Sunday.
But the effort faces steep odds: Getting humanitarian supplies into Gaza is already a slow and challenging process, and the decimation of the strip’s health care system over 10 months of war will make distribution harder. Polio vaccines must be refrigerated, further complicating matters; already, truckloads of food have gone bad in the summer heat as they have waited to be sent into Gaza and picked up for distribution.
The World Health Organization said last week that traces of poliovirus had been found in six wastewater samples from Gaza, raising fears of an outbreak not only in the territory, but also across the border in Israel, given the frequent raids by Israeli soldiers. A spokesman for the agency, Christian Lindmeier, said last week that the Palestinian Health Ministry in the West Bank was hoping to retest the samples to confirm the results.
If they are validated, some people in Gaza most likely already have the virus. About three-quarters of infected people do not show symptoms, so polio can spread even if no cases have been confirmed, Mr. Lindmeier said.
But getting anything into Gaza is difficult nowadays. Aid groups say that since the war began, Israeli security restrictions on imports, attacks on aid convoys, damaged roads and the fighting and looting inside Gaza have kept them from distributing enough food, water, fuel, medical supplies, shelter equipment and materials for repairing sanitation and electricity systems. Even less aid has made it to where it needs to go since one of the main border crossings closed amid an Israeli offensive on the southern Gaza city of Rafah in early May.
“It’s not enough just to get it across the border,” Mr. Lindmeier said last week.
Without a halt to the fighting — or, at a minimum, roads cleared of rubble and conditions that would allow workers to administer the vaccines widely — the vaccine doses will sit at the crossing, stuck there just as other types of aid have been, he added.
From July 1 to July 29, according to U.N. data, an average of 77 truckloads of aid entered Gaza each day. From January to April, before the crossing closed, the daily average was 132 — which was not enough to keep thousands of Gazan children from descending into malnourishment, hospitals stocked with medicine and equipment, families in sturdy shelters or water and sewage systems up and running.
As the threat of famine and epidemics has hovered over Gaza for months, aid officials and health experts have said it is not enough to simply distribute canned food. They say people need a health care system capable of treating malnourishment and related diseases; clean water and functioning sewage systems to prevent infectious diseases from spreading; and a diverse diet.
Hepatitis A, acute respiratory infections, diarrhea, lice and scabies are already surging through the population, health officials say.
Israel says it is doing its part to facilitate the entry of aid. It says the United Nations’ numbers do not reflect airdrops, other aid routes the organization does not monitor or trucks carrying commercial goods for sale, which have kept Gazan markets supplied with limited amounts of fresh fruit, vegetables and other foods. But many people cannot afford to buy food, or they have trouble finding cash to pay for goods.
The U.N. data also includes only trucks that it is able to pick up at the border and move into Gaza, rather than the total number of trucks that pass Israeli inspection. Aid officials say organized crime and looting in Gaza often makes it too unsafe for them to move the trucks from border crossings to their destinations, leaving many supplies stranded.
Under Israeli requirements, the trucks Israel screens are half-full, but the inspected supplies are then reloaded onto new trucks on the Gaza side until they are full, meaning the number of trucks collected by the United Nations is far lower than the number that Israel says it has signed off on.
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8) Britain’s Weekend of Violence: What We Know
The country begins a new week on edge after anti-immigrant riots, fanned by disinformation from the far right, broke out in cities across Britain.
By The New York Times, Aug. 5, 2024
After a weekend of violent uprisings across Britain, set off by a deadly stabbing rampage and a disinformation campaign aimed primarily at immigrant Muslims that followed it, tensions are high from the streets to government leaders’ offices.
Here is what we know as the country enters a new week of uncertainty.
Where has the unrest taken place?
Protesters over the weekend took to the streets of a dozen cities across the United Kingdom, most of them in England. Trouble broke out from Aldershot in the south to Sunderland in the north and Liverpool in the west. Belfast, in Northern Ireland, was also drawn into the fray.
In some cases, the protesters were merely unruly, but in others the violence was far more pronounced.
On Sunday, rioters set upon a hotel that has housed asylum seekers in the town of Rotherham, in northern England, breaking windows before surging inside as the police struggled to control them. It remained unclear whether asylum seekers were still staying at the hotel and no guests were injured in the melee, police said.
In Middlesbrough, a group of rioters, some masked, hurled bottles and rocks at officers. Cars were set on fire, and at least nine people were arrested. On Saturday, a library and a food bank were set alight in Liverpool as groups damaged and looted businesses, and in Hull, fires were set and storefronts smashed in the city center.
Nearly 150 people were arrested over the weekend, national police representatives said, and dozens of police suffered injuries, including some that required trips to the hospital.
What set off the protests?
The unrest began after a 17-year-old wielding a knife attacked a children’s dance class on Monday in the seaside town of Southport, which is near Liverpool. Three children were killed, and eight were wounded.
The suspect was born and raised in Britain, but online rumors soon circulated that he was an undocumented immigrant. To counter those false claims, the authorities took the unusual step of publicly identifying him. But with migration a flashpoint issue in Britain, especially on the far right, the rumors were all it took.
Extremist groups urged their followers to take to the streets, and the day after the stabbings, they began to do so, starting in Southport.
How have the authorities responded?
The riots prompted a heavy police response. Nearly 4,000 additional officers were deployed, a law enforcement association said.
“Be in no doubt: Those who have participated in this violence will face the full force of the law,” Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in a statement on Sunday.
“I guarantee you will regret taking part in this disorder,” Mr. Starmer said, “whether directly or those whipping up this action online and then running away themselves. This is not protest. It is organized, violent thuggery.”
BJ Harrington, the head of public order for Britain’s National Police Chiefs’ Council, said online disinformation had been “a huge driver of this appalling violence.”
Intelligence teams, detectives and neighborhood officers, Mr. Harrington said, are working to identify the people fomenting the violence.
“They won’t win,” he said.
Even as the authorities vow to crack down on the violence, they have long struggled to tamp down disinformation on social media, one of the accelerants behind the riots. Britain and other democracies have found that policing the internet is legally murky terrain, where individual rights and free speech protections are balanced against a desire to block harmful material.
What are the political implications?
The riots are the first political crisis for Mr. Starmer, who took office only a month ago after his Labour Party defeated the Conservatives, who had been in power in Britain for 14 years.
While in power, the Conservatives tried to capitalize on public unhappiness over immigration, vowing to reduce it (though they failed to do so). But in recent days, they joined Labour in condemning the violent protests.
Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who is now the opposition leader, said the unrest had “nothing to do with the tragedy in Southport.” The police, he said, have “our full support to deal with these criminals swiftly.”
Mr. Starmer held an emergency meeting on Monday, part of an established protocol that brings together relevant government ministers, civil servants, and representatives from the police and intelligence services.
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9) Elon Musk Clashes With Keir Starmer Over Riots in Britain
Over the past few days, the billionaire has posted incendiary comments about violent protests on the social media platform he controls, drawing the ire of the prime minister.
By Eshe Nelson, Reporting from London, Aug. 7, 2024
A police car was set on fire in Sunderland, England, on Friday. Violent protests have continued to break out across the country. Credit...Ian Forsyth/Getty Images
As he tries to quell violent outbreaks across Britain, Prime Minister Keir Starmer is also embroiled in a war of words with Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and owner of the social media platform X.
Over the past few days, Mr. Musk has posted incendiary comments and shared memes and videos about the riots in Britain to his more than 193 million followers on X. Violence has flared in towns across the country over the past week amid widespread misinformation after a deadly stabbing attack in Southport, England, last week, in which three girls died at a dance class.
“Civil war is inevitable,” Mr. Musk posted on X on Sunday in response to a video that showed small fires in the streets, fireworks being set off and rioters confronting the police.
A spokesperson for Mr. Starmer said there was “no justification” for Mr. Musk’s comments. Since then, Mr. Musk has continued to post comments directed at the prime minister.
“Why aren’t all communities protected in Britain? @Keir_Starmer,” Mr. Musk posted on Tuesday. He added “#TwoTierKeir,” a reference to the far-right claim that there is a policy of two-tier policing in which far-right groups are policed more heavily than others. (A government minister on Wednesday rejected those accusations.)
On Tuesday, Mr. Musk replied to a post on X that said “Britain is turning into the Soviet Union,” adding, “Seriously.”
The comments fit a wider effort by Mr. Musk to influence politics in several countries, including the United States, Italy and Venezuela, and at times sow discontent. Mr. Musk has become a loud critic of immigration policies in particular. He has become popular among far-right figures and has helped expand some of their platforms by reinstating the accounts of people previously banned on Twitter, as X was known before Mr. Musk bought it, including Tommy Robinson, an anti-Islam agitator who founded the English Defense League.
On Monday, Mr. Starmer posted on X, “We will not tolerate attacks on mosques or on Muslim communities,” after holding an emergency response meeting to the violent disorder over the weekend. Mr. Musk, replied to the video, “Shouldn’t you be concerned about attacks on *all* communities?”
Some British lawmakers have said they would consider calling Mr. Musk in front of a parliamentary committee to answer questions about X’s role in the violence. After the stabbing, misinformation quickly spread online claiming the attacker was an asylum seeker from Syria and arrived in Britain illegally by boat. Despite police and government officials pushing back against false claims and the decision to release the name of the 17-year-old suspect in the attack, who was born in Wales, violence has still taken place, fueled by online comments.
Britain passed a sweeping online safety law last year, but like other countries, it has struggled to effectively hold social media companies to account for misinformation and other inflammatory content on their platforms. European Union laws require platforms to have robust content moderation, but tech companies’ internal policies and enforcement are patchy.
In the past week, rioters started fires at hotels that were housing asylum seekers, looted stores and targeted immigrant-owned businesses. More than 400 arrests have been made. On Wednesday, the police were preparing for possible riots amid reports that more than 30 gatherings had been planned.
Mr. Starmer has previously called out social media platforms for their role in fomenting violence and warned the executives of the companies, without naming any, that crimes committed online will also be subject to legal action.
“Let me also say to large social media companies and those who run them: Violent disorder, clearly whipped up online, that is also a crime, it’s happening on your premises, and the law must be upheld everywhere,” Mr. Starmer said in a televised speech last week.
Adam Satariano contributed reporting.
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10) Heat Raises Fears of ‘Demise’ for Great Barrier Reef Within a Generation
A new study found that temperatures in the Coral Sea have reached their highest levels in at least four centuries.
By Catrin Einhorn, Aug. 7, 2024
A marine biologist inspected bleached coral near Lizard Island on the Great Barrier Reef this year. Credit...David Gray/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
This generation will probably see the demise of the Great Barrier Reef unless humanity acts with far more urgency to rein in climate change, according to scientists in Australia who released new research on heat in the surrounding ocean.
The Great Barrier Reef is the largest coral reef system in the world and is often called the largest living structure on Earth. The study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, found that recent extreme temperatures in the Coral Sea are at their highest in at least 400 years, as far back as their analysis could reach.
It included modeling that showed what has been driving those extremes: Greenhouse gas emissions caused by humans burning fossil fuels and destroying natural places that store carbon, like forests.
“The heat extremes are occurring too often for those corals to effectively adapt and evolve,” said Ben Henley, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Melbourne and an author of the new study. “If we don’t divert from our current course, our generation will likely witness the demise of one of Earth’s great natural wonders, the Great Barrier Reef.”
The study’s scientific prose put it this way: “The existential threat to the Great Barrier Reef ecosystem from anthropogenic climate change is now realized.”
Tanya Plibersek, Australia’s environment minister, said in a statement that the government understood its responsibility to act on climate change and safeguard the reef. She pointed to a recent law that calls for a 43 percent reduction of emissions by 2030 and to $1.2 billion in measures to protect the reef.
All coral reefs are in danger from global warming, scientists say. Too much heat causes coral to bleach, meaning they lose the symbiotic algae they need to survive. If conditions don’t improve quickly enough, the coral die.
The new research comes as the world’s reefs are in the grips of the most widespread bleaching event on record. From January 2023 to this August, 74 percent of the ocean’s reef area has experienced bleaching-level heat stress, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Reef Watch. The previous record, which occurred between 2014 and 2017, was 65.7 percent.
Coral reefs support an estimated quarter of marine species, protect coasts from storms and underpin activities like fishing and tourism. Their economic value has been estimated at $2.7 trillion a year.
Dr. Henley recalled snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef as a boy with his father. “You can’t even take in the diversity,” he said. “It’s a kaleidoscope of color, it’s absolutely spectacular.”
When the Great Barrier Reef experienced back-to-back bleaching in 2016 and 2017, Dr. Henley and colleagues wondered what kind of temperatures it had weathered before records were kept.
To look back as far as possible, they used data from samples of the oldest living corals measured, about 400 years old.
“It’s like finding centenarians in humans, there’s not that many of them,” said Helen McGregor, a professor of paleoclimatology at the University of Wollongong and one of the study’s authors.
Using the chemical signatures in those limestone cores, combined with historical records from ships, contemporary data sets and modeling, the team recreated four centuries of sea surface temperatures in the Coral Sea.
As they worked, mass bleaching kept hitting the Great Barrier Reef: In 2020, 2022, and then this year, when global ocean heat shattered records. The researchers kept adding in the data.
“It’s a stunningly important summary of the history of the world’s largest reef system,” said Stephen Palumbi, a professor of marine biology at Stanford University who led a committee on coral resilience for the National Academy of Sciences and was not involved with the study. “The paper lays out the danger that corals all around the world face from this heat.”
But Dr. Palumbi also wondered if some hope was to be found in a temperature spike the authors identified during the 1700s, when the water appears to have been almost as warm as it is now. Could that mean certain corals in the Great Barrier Reef have survived similar circumstances in the past?
“Maybe these elders of the reef are better adapted to warmer water than the younglings born in 1920 or so,” Dr. Palumbi said. If so, they would be the ones to target in helping to breed more heat-resistant corals.
There is a split among coral experts over how useful selective breeding and other assistance from humans can be in the face of climate change.
Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, an author of the study and a coral scientist who has been sounding alarms about the effects of climate change on reefs for decades, said he didn’t think such attempts could work at scale, in part because of the astronomical expense.
Instead, he said, efforts should be focused on cutting greenhouse gas emissions to zero as quickly as possible, and to protecting the reefs that are faring better as the oceans heat.
“They become the spawning reefs, the ones that will recover things in the future,” Dr. Hoegh-Guldberg said. “And that seems to be helpful in terms of the psychology of the situation. We can do something, but it’s also practical.”
Reefs will crash to very low levels but will come back in hundreds or thousands of years, Dr. Hoegh-Guldberg predicted.
As Dr. Henley, who snorkeled on the Great Barrier Reef with his father, reflected on the future, he thought of his two-year-old daughter.
“In her childhood years the reef is likely to see immense destruction,” he said. But if global action can hold warming to the low end of global targets, “there’s a reasonable chance that my daughter and her generation can still marvel at the reef in their lifetimes.”
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11) The Toll of 10 Months of Simmering Conflict on the Israel-Lebanon Border
By Lauren Leatherby, Leanne Abraham and Euan Ward Aug. 8, 2024
“In the cross-border fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, the most widespread structural destruction has been in Lebanon, where thousands of buildings have been damaged or destroyed. The thousands of Israeli attacks since October have far outnumbered Hezbollah attacks into Israel, according to data collected by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, a nonprofit that studies world conflicts.”
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/08/08/world/middleeast/israel-lebanon-destruction.htmlEven before a deadly rocket strike and a round of assassinations renewed fears of a wider war across the Mideast, the steady, simmering conflict between Israel and Hezbollah militants in Lebanon proved devastating.
For almost a year, both sides have been carefully calibrating their tit-for-tat attacks to avoid a larger conflict. But the near-daily exchanges of fire have added up.
Satellite imagery makes clear just how profound the toll has been on both sides of the border. This is what one Lebanese town, Aita al-Shaab, looked like before and after it came under attack.
Israeli forces and Hezbollah militants, who are backed by Iran, have been fighting off and on for years. But the conflict intensified last October after another Iranian ally, Hamas, led an attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip, setting off the war there.
In the cross-border fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, the most widespread structural destruction has been in Lebanon, where thousands of buildings have been damaged or destroyed. The thousands of Israeli attacks since October have far outnumbered Hezbollah attacks into Israel, according to data collected by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, a nonprofit that studies world conflicts.
Around a quarter of the structures are damaged in some villages, according to an analysis of satellite data by Corey Scher of the CUNY graduate center.
Israeli airstrikes and shelling in Lebanon have killed nearly 500 people, at least 100 of them civilians, according to the U.N. and Lebanon’s health ministry.
Hezbollah has launched 7,500 rockets, missiles and drones since the start of the war in Gaza, according to the Israeli prime minister’s office, killing 43 people in Israel, more than half of them civilians, and setting swaths of farmland ablaze. Northern Israel has seen more than 700 wildfires, according to the prime minister’s office, which Israel has blamed on the Hezbollah barrages.
This satellite imagery shows what happened to large areas of dry brush surrounding the Malkiya kibbutz after it was ignited.
It is not only Israel that is burning.
The fighting has caused significant fires on both sides of the border, and many fear they may cause long-lasting damage to land that plays an important role in food production.
Many villages near the border on both sides are ghost towns. Roughly 60,000 people in northern Israel and 100,000 in southern Lebanon have been displaced by the fighting along the border since October, with no clear timeline for returning home.
Now, there is fear that like the wildfires, the conflict itself may spread. In the past three weeks, attacks have escalated, threatening a larger regional war.
In July, a rocket from Lebanon killed 12 civilians in a town in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. It was the deadliest attack on Israeli-controlled territory since the Oct. 7 attacks led by Hamas.
Israel responded with a strike in Beirut’s southern suburbs, killing a Hezbollah leader along with five civilians, according to Lebanese authorities. A senior Hamas figure was assassinated hours later in the capital of Iran. Both Hezbollah and Iran vowed vengeance.
Lebanon's border towns with Israel, made up mainly of Shiite Muslims, are a bastion of support for Hezbollah. But there are also Christian and Sunni Muslim enclaves.
Some of those border towns that have borne much of the destruction in the current attacks were the scene of heavy ground fighting in 2006, when Israel and Lebanon fought their last war.
Now, with hostilities heating up, some Israelis want their country to mount a full-scale invasion again. Others fear that an all-out response from Hezbollah could be devastating. The militants’ arsenal of sophisticated precision-guided missiles is considered capable of striking cities across Israel, along with critical infrastructure like power plants and ports.
Israeli military commanders have their own concerns. They are still prosecuting one major war — against Hamas in Gaza — and do not relish the prospect of a second. And with munitions stockpiles dwindling, it is unclear how intense a battle the military could wage in Lebanon.
Additional work by Agnes Chang.
KEY DEVELOPMENTS
The E.U. and U.K. condemn comments by a far-right Israeli minister, and other news.
· Britain and the European Union have condemned Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right Israeli finance minister, for reportedly saying that it “might be justified” to starve two million civilians in Gaza until hostages held there are returned. Mr. Smotrich has a strong influence over policy as the leader of a party that helps keep Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government in power. “Deliberate starvation of civilians is a war crime: Minister Smotrich advocating for it is beyond ignominious,” the E.U.’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell Fontelles, said in a post on social media on Wednesday in reaction to his comments. The British foreign secretary, David Lammy, called on the Israeli government to “retract and condemn” the remarks.
· Israel plans to effectively close Norway’s diplomatic mission to the Palestinians in retaliation for Norwegian policies. In late May, Norway, along with Spain and Ireland, officially recognized a Palestinian state, prompting Israeli anger. The Israeli foreign ministry said on Thursday that it would revoke the diplomatic status of the Norwegian mission’s employees in one week. Many European countries, including Norway, maintain both an embassy to Israel in Tel Aviv and a separate envoy based in Jerusalem or Ramallah whose job is to liaise with Palestinian officials.
· A Palestinian warehouse worker for World Central Kitchen was killed in central Gaza, the aid organization said on social media on Wednesday, calling him a “humanitarian at his very core.” The organization said it believed that the worker, Nadi Sallout, was off duty at the time, though it said the details of his death were still unclear. In April, seven aid workers with World Central Kitchen were killed in the Gaza Strip when their convoy came under fire. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel acknowledged at the time that it was a “tragic case of our forces unintentionally hitting innocent people.”
· The Israeli military ordered Palestinians on Wednesday to leave several neighborhoods in northern Gaza and move south into Gaza City, warning shortly after midnight on Wednesday morning that it was preparing to take “immediate” and “forceful” action against Hamas and other militants who it said fired rockets toward Israel. The new evacuation orders were issued for areas near Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia, which have been decimated by repeated Israeli bombardment. Later on Wednesday, the Israeli military urged displaced Palestinians to move even further south into central Gaza, including into Deir al Balah.
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12) Trying to Capitalize on Anti-Migrant Riots Could Backfire on U.K.’s Far Right
The public’s reaction to the recent rioting has been resoundingly negative, suggesting that using the unrest to push anti-immigrant policies could backfire, at least in the short term.
By Amanda Taub, Aug. 8, 2024
Holding back demonstrators during disorder in Southport, northwestern England, last week. Credit...Getty Images
The violent unrest that has broken out in multiple towns across England and Northern Ireland this week feels simultaneously shocking and familiar.
Rioters have rampaged across more than 15 towns and cities, looting businesses, injuring police officers, attacking mosques and targeting hotels that house asylum seekers. Britain has had sporadic outbreaks of semi-organized mob violence for decades, including brawls by infamous “firms” of soccer hooligans in the 1980s and ’90s, an outbreak of race rioting in northern England in 2001 and a spate of rioting and looting centered on London in 2011.
But some circumstances are markedly different. While the 2011 unrest was sparked by the police killing of a Black man, these riots have stemmed from far-right disinformation on social media. Online influencers opposed to immigration spread the false claim that an asylum seeker had killed three children last week in Southport, England, and called their supporters to attend “protests” against the supposed threat. Many of the gatherings erupted into violence.
More far-right protests had been expected on Wednesday, but with a heavy police presence on the streets, they did not materialize on any large scale. Instead, thousands of antiracism protesters gathered in cities across the country.
Most Britons and most elected officials have recoiled at the anti-immigrant violence, indicating that for now, it has hurt the nativist cause more than helped it. But in the long run, experts say, the effects are much harder to predict.
A number of politicians and pundits from the anti-immigration right, while condemning the violence itself, have claimed that the unrest is evidence that immigration needs to be restricted, even though it arose out of false online claims about a migrant attack. (In reality, the suspect is British-born and his parents, according to the BBC, are from Rwanda.)
Nigel Farage, a newly elected member of Parliament who is the most prominent face of Reform, a small far-right party, issued a statement denouncing the violence, then went on to say that “mass, uncontrolled immigration” had “fractured communities” and that Parliament should be recalled to “have a more honest debate and give people the confidence that there are political solutions.” Others on the right echoed those remarks, claiming that the violence was caused by a failure to limit immigration and asylum.
In fact, while immigration is a frequent political flashpoint in the country, Britain is a notable success story when it comes to several measures of immigrant integration. Children of immigrants to Britain tend to be better off financially than their parents, which is not true of many immigrant communities in France and Germany, for example, and studies show that immigrants are a net positive for the British economy.
Students from families of Asian and African origin perform better on average in the main national high school exams than white British students do. British cities are also less segregated than those in the United States, studies suggest, and segregation levels are falling.
In addition, the overwhelming majority of foreign nationals seeking to settle in Britain enter the country legally, with visas. While much attention is paid to asylum seekers crossing the English Channel in small boats, they make up a small fraction of the total.
‘A mistake’ for politicians?
The British public’s reaction to the rioting has been resoundingly negative, suggesting that the strategy of using the unrest to push anti-immigrant policies could backfire, at least in the short term.
In a YouGov poll published on Monday, nearly half of respondents said that those taking part in recent riots should receive “harsher” sentences than those that would normally be issued for that type of crime. Those numbers were even higher in the north and in central England, where much of the unrest has occurred, further suggesting that the rioters were not expressing the views of a silent local or national majority.
And in another YouGov poll published Wednesday, the vast majority of respondents, including Reform voters, said that they did not believe the unrest was justified, did not support it, and did not sympathize with the views of those who committed it.
“I’ve spent a lot of time chatting to Reform voters,” said Luke Tryl, director of More in Common, a nonprofit that tracks public opinion and promotes dialogue on polarizing issues. “The vast, vast majority are not in any way sympathetic to what is happening.”
A small focus group he held last Friday, with participants who had pre-existing concerns about immigration, strongly condemned the violence and expressed particular outrage that the rioters had “claimed to speak for us,” Tryl said.
Farage’s statement, which appeared to draw connections between his political agenda and that of the rioters, was a marked departure from his past policy of distancing himself from violent, extreme-right groups. In 2018, he resigned from UKIP, the political party he once led, in protest of the decision by its leader at the time to appoint the English Defence League’s founder, Tommy Robinson, as an adviser.
By taking a different tone this week, “I think he’s made a mistake,” Tryl said of Farage. “He got himself on the wrong side of his own voters.”
Why anti-immigrant violence might bolster the far right in the future
There is some research to suggest that the medium- or long-term consequences of the violence might benefit hard-line anti-immigration politicians like Farage.
A 2022 academic study by Maureen Eger and Susan Olzak found that anti-immigrant violence in Germany did, in fact, lift support for far-right parties among voters who already held anti-immigrant views. A smaller number of voters with neutral views on immigration also shifted their support to the far right in the wake of anti-immigrant violence. But it didn’t have that effect on voters who had been pro-immigration before the attacks, so the net result was a more polarized electorate rather than a general shift to the right.
Eger and Olzak argue that this happened because anti-immigrant attacks made immigration more salient to voters across the political spectrum.
In political science, salient issues are those that are particularly prominent in people’s minds and influential on their decisions. The idea captures an important insight, which is that if an issue becomes more salient, that can have a radical effect on behavior even if people’s opinions about the underlying issues don’t change. (In the United States, for example, voters’ opinions of abortion have been fairly stable for years. But abortion has become far more salient to voters since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, giving it new power to affect elections.)
Researchers have often found that when immigration becomes more salient, it increases support for the far right. That may be one reason mainstream-right parties often fail to win back far-right voters by adopting similar platforms on immigration: Doing so pushes the issue into public consciousness and debate, making it more salient, which then often leads voters to support the far-right parties most associated with anti-immigration policies.
Eger and Olzak’s study concerned Germany, not Britain. And they also looked at a much longer period of anti-immigrant violence than the unrest that has happened in England and Northern Ireland this week: days of rioting, while shocking, may not have the same impact on immigration’s salience to voters.
The most recent YouGov poll offers some hints that the unrest in Britain has increased the salience of anti-immigration views. Two-thirds of respondents said that “immigration policy in recent years” was partly to blame for the riots, though that phrasing was open to multiple interpretations.
But their findings may suggest that Farage’s strategy of tying the riots to immigration as an issue might not hurt him in the longer run, helping to ensure that the issue — and Farage himself — remain politically relevant.
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13) Israel Launches Another Offensive in Gaza’s South Amid Push for Cease-Fire
By Victoria KimJohnatan Reiss and Aaron Boxerman, August 9, 2024
Palestinians checking the damage at a school complex in Gaza City after an Israeli airstrike on Thursday. Credit...Omar Al-Qattaa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Palestinians leaving the Khan Younis area of the Gaza Strip on Thursday after evacuation orders from Israeli military. Credit...Abdel Kareem Hana/Associated Press
Israel’s military said early Friday that it had launched another offensive in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, in an attack involving ground troops, fighter jets, helicopter gunships and paratroopers, after ordering thousands of Palestinians to flee the area.
The attack was the latest in which Israeli forces have returned to devastated cities and neighborhoods where they fought Hamas for months, saying that militants had managed to regroup there. Israel is still struggling to achieve one of its main war aims: wiping out Hamas, which planned and led the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel that set off the war in Gaza.
Hours earlier, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said he would send negotiators next week to what President Biden and the leaders of Egypt and Qatar said would be the presentation of a “final” cease-fire proposal.
“The time has come” for an agreement, the leaders said in a joint statement, the latest push for peace talks amid concerns that the conflict will engulf more of the region.
Before the attack, the Israeli military ordered thousands of Palestinians to leave the area, again displacing people who have repeatedly moved across the 140-square-mile territory in search of elusive safety, with no end to the war in sight.
Photos and videos from Gaza on Thursday showed streams of people trudging through piles of rubble, carrying bedding and bags, to leave the evacuation areas in anticipation of the attack.
The Israeli military said its coordinated attack had struck “more than 30 terrorist targets” and that it had killed several militants. Israel said it had ordered the evacuation to protect the safety of civilians living in the areas, from which some rockets had been fired at Israeli territory.
It is at least the third time that Israeli soldiers have launched a major operation around Khan Younis. The Israeli military withdrew in April after fighting there for about four months, destroying large swaths of the city. Some residents went home and began laboriously clearing rubble from the streets — only to flee again in the face of the new operations.
Elsewhere in Gaza, at least 16 people were killed in airstrikes on Thursday on two school complexes in the northern part of the enclave. Schools in Gaza have been closed since the war began 10 months ago, but displaced people have crowded into the buildings, seeking safety.
Israel’s military said that the strikes had been intended to destroy Hamas “command-and-control centers” inside the compounds and that measures had been taken to protect civilians. Israeli officials have blamed Hamas for hiding among displaced people, while rights groups have said Israel must do more to protect civilians.
Earlier in the week, the United Nations Human Rights Office expressed “horror” over what it called an “escalating pattern” of attacks in the past month on schools turned into shelters.
KEY DEVELOPMENTS
Lebanon accuses Israel of attacking ambulances, and other news.
· Lebanon’s Health Ministry accused Israel on Friday of being responsible for repeated attacks on ambulance crews in southern Lebanon. The statement came after an Israeli strike on an ambulance in the Lebanese town of Mays al-Jabal on Friday that injured a health worker, the ministry said. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to the accusation. At least 21 health workers have been killed in Lebanon over the last 10 months in the conflict between Israel and the Lebanese group Hezbollah, according to the U.N.
· Four soldiers were injured in Israeli airstrikes on military sites in central Syria, according to SANA, the Syrian state media outlet. Just before 9 p.m. in Syria on Thursday, Israel launched an “air attack” from northern Lebanon, “targeting a number of military points in Syria,” SANA reported, quoting an unnamed military official. A spokesman for the Israeli military said he would not respond to foreign news reports.
· Israeli and American military officials continued to coordinate ahead of the highly anticipated Iranian retaliation for the assassination of two Hamas and Hezbollah leaders. On Friday, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin and Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defense minister, spoke for at least the sixth time since the latest escalation began last month. The day before, Michael Kurilla, the U.S. general who oversees Central Command — which includes the Middle East — arrived in Israel for his second visit in less than a week.
· Iraqi security forces said they had arrested five people on charges that they were involved in a rocket attack on an air base in Iraq’s western desert on Monday that injured American troops. The arrests were made after investigations and were based on witness accounts, Iraqi security officials said Thursday in a statement on social media about the strike on the Ain al Asad Air Base in Anbar Governorate, which houses international coalition advisers.
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14) Newsom Clears Homeless Camps in L.A. County, Where He Wants More ‘Urgency’
Gov. Gavin Newsom, frustrated by county leaders who spurned his executive order cracking down on encampments, visited their turf to clear homeless sites.
By Shawn Hubler, Reporting from Los Angeles, Published Aug. 8, 2024, Updated Aug. 9, 2024
Gov. Gavin Newsom worked with Caltrans workers to pick up trash at a homeless encampment under a freeway in Los Angeles on Thursday. Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York Times
The stop in Los Angeles came without the usual courtesy notice.
Gov. Gavin Newsom was in Southern California on Thursday morning to celebrate the debut of two giant pandas at the San Diego Zoo. But hours later, he emerged 127 miles up the freeway, driving home his message of the moment: Famously tolerant California isn’t tolerating homeless encampments anymore.
Since July 25, when the governor urged California cities to dismantle the street camps that have come to define the state’s homelessness crisis, leaders in Los Angeles have been particularly resistant to Mr. Newsom, making clear that they plan to deal with the issue in their own way and on their own timetable.
On Thursday, Mr. Newsom, in sunglasses, jeans and a black ball cap, visited two homeless encampments on their turf without directly informing city or county leaders. The only advance notice seemed to be state placards that warned people days ago they were facing citation or arrest if they continued to stay there. His office said state officials also called local homeless providers to ask for help in finding shelter.
“People are done. If we don’t deal with this, we don’t deserve to be in office,” Mr. Newsom said, tearing into a rancid, garbage-strewn campsite on state property under Interstate 10 in Los Angeles, alongside a crew of state workers in orange vests.
His mission, he said, was part public service, part political flex. The governor said that he particularly wanted more “urgency” from the leaders of Los Angeles County, home to nearly 10 million Californians, where unsheltered homelessness decreased last year at about half the rate as it did in the City of Los Angeles, its largest jurisdiction.
“We need partners, not sparring partners,” Mr. Newsom said. “If we can’t move Los Angeles County, we’re not going to move the state.”
The governor cannot demand that local governments crack down on homelessness, so he has encouraged them to remove camps, starting with those that pose the highest health and safety risks. He can, however, deploy his own teams on state property, which is exactly what he did on Thursday.
After Mr. Newsom issued his executive order last month, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors quickly declared that its county jails would not be used to house people removed from encampments. Sheriff Robert Luna has vowed that his agency will arrest homeless campers only if they commit a crime, not simply for sleeping in public spaces.
After Mr. Newsom issued his executive order last month, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors quickly declared that its county jails would not be used to house people removed from encampments. Sheriff Robert Luna has vowed that his agency will arrest homeless campers only if they commit a crime, not simply for sleeping in public spaces.
Lindsey P. Horvath, the current chair of the board of supervisors, said that outreach workers from a county-affiliated homeless authority had already provided services and housing offers to the people who lived at the encampment that Mr. Newsom was clearing. The problem with demanding immediate enforcement, county leaders say, is that people have nowhere to go and will simply move elsewhere in the area.
“What’s the point of a cleanup if you don’t match it with housing and services?” she said.
Mayor Karen Bass, who is in Paris this week for the Olympics as her city prepares to host the next Games in four years, has issued a steady stream of statements touting the positive results of her own approach. It prioritizes shelter and offers of support first, rather than scattering homeless campers with threats of citation, arrest or forced eviction.
This summer, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, the regional planning body that coordinates homelessness programs for the city and county, announced a 10 percent drop in the number of unsheltered homeless people compared with the previous year, the first double-digit decline in nearly a decade.
On Thursday morning, as word spread in Los Angeles that the governor was en route from San Diego, Ms. Bass sent out three more statements. She reported that her program, called Inside Safe, had recently found housing for 30 more homeless people, and that her lobbying with the federal government and the United States Conference of Mayors had yielded a policy change that will make it easier for homeless veterans to obtain housing.
Mr. Newsom did not criticize Ms. Bass’s approach on Thursday, applauding her as “a good partner” and calling the lowering of Los Angeles’s homeless numbers “one of the most significant declines in the state of California.” Instead, he focused on county officials.
In a phone interview from France, Ms. Bass, laughing, said that she had not yet spoken to the governor but had heard that he had gone to San Diego “to welcome some pandas, and he was passing through Los Angeles and was going to help us out.”
“If I were in town, I’d be out there with him,” she added. “I know he’s frustrated with a lot of cities that do not address the problem, but Los Angeles is one of the cities that does address the problem. For the first time in years, homelessness in Los Angeles is down.”
Mr. Newsom’s pit stop came weeks after a Supreme Court ruling in June that gave state and local governments greater authority to crack down on encampments. The change had particular effect in the nine Western states covered by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which had ruled that cities could not arrest homeless people for sleeping outside if they had no other legal place to stay, finding such punishment unconstitutionally cruel and unusual.
Western officials from both parties, including Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, had asked the Supreme Court to review that ruling, arguing that it had hobbled enforcement so much that encampments were overtaking parks, sidewalks and other public spaces.
An estimated 180,000 people were homeless last year in California, most of them unsheltered. The state has some of the highest housing costs in the nation, complicating the many other factors that contribute to homelessness.
Newsom administration officials have said that the governor’s sweeping executive order is not intended to “lead with enforcement,” but rather to strike a balance between public safety and compassion, based on procedures already used by the state transportation agency, Caltrans.
That model, the governor said, mandates that the state remove encampments “humanely,” prioritizing those that most threaten health and safety.
The state must notify campers in advance and work with local providers to connect them with services and housing. Property collected at each site must be bagged, tagged and stored for at least 60 days.
But campers who refuse to leave state property can be arrested, a point of contention among advocates for the homeless who fear that “criminalization” will further harm an already vulnerable population. And, they note, most cities still are short on shelter space. California, by the most recent estimates, has only about 71,000 shelter beds.
Though the governor cannot force local governments to sweep encampments, he does control billions of dollars for municipalities to address homelessness. And many California cities have enthusiastically embraced Mr. Newsom’s order, pressured by constituents who have lost patience.
The Fresno City Council recently initiated a ban on camping in public spaces. Mayor London Breed of San Francisco, a Democrat in a tough fight for re-election, has pledged to aggressively clear encampments and told the police that homeless campers who refused shelter could face citation and possible jail time for illegal lodging. Last week, she directed city officials to offer bus tickets to homeless people before providing them shelter beds or other services.
Constance Farrell, a spokesman for Ms. Horvath of Los Angeles County, said that authorities found out that the governor was coming only after Caltrans posted notices of the cleanup and notified local service providers.
By Thursday morning, she said, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority had found shelter for several of the two dozen or so campers at the two sites that Caltrans had indicated the governor would visit. An agency spokesman, Ahmed Chapman, said that six people from the second encampment that the governor visited, near an overpass in the Pacoima neighborhood, had accepted shelter and moved inside.
“We’re doing the outreach and we’re bringing people inside,” Ms. Farrell said. “And we’re not going to pivot from our approach.”
In the working-class neighborhood surrounding the Los Angeles encampment that Mr. Newsom visited first on Thursday, residents expressed relief that someone, anyone, was rousting the settlement under the freeway. Not because of animus toward the people, they said, but because of the safety hazard.
“They build a lot of fires,” said Omar Godinez, 19, an auto mechanic who does smog checks across the street from the encampment. “There’s only a few of them, but this is our environment, you know? It’s all dirty and smelly and it’s not really pleasant, and it’s been that way since Covid.”
“It doesn’t seem like it’s getting better,” said Jorge Juarez, 29, a waiter who lives down the street who said he had personally seen little evidence of progress, statistics notwithstanding.
Last week, he said, the diner where he works on Hollywood Boulevard was robbed by people he believes were living in a nearby encampment.
At home, south of the freeway near the University of Southern California, he said, “it’s dangerous to walk at night time, and there’s not much we can do about it. It’s just homelessness everywhere. And L.A. is such a nice city. It’s too bad.”
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15) Liverpool Sends a Message to Far-Right Rioters: Not Here
The city in northern England has a long history of protest. That tradition continued this week, with counterprotesters delivering a firm rejection of anti-immigrant violence.
By Megan Specia, Photographs by Andrew Testa, Reporting from Liverpool, England, Aug. 9, 2024
Pushing back against recent rioting that unnerved many Britons, people in Liverpool, England, demonstrated Wednesday night against racism.
The residents of the southeast Liverpool neighborhood of Edge Hill had spent Wednesday preparing for trouble.
Parents were called to pick up children early from nursery school. Shop owners pulled their shutters down over glass storefronts. And in the semidetached brick houses on and around Overbury Street, where generations of the same families have lived alongside newer arrivals, locals pulled their curtains as evening approached.
What they feared was another night of the anti-immigrant violence that had rocked the country in the week since a deadly stabbing attack nearby in Southport that was falsely rumored as being carried out by a migrant.
What they got, instead, was a night of near celebration by people opposed to the racism and anti-immigrant sentiments that drove the week of rioting in cities and towns across Britain.
People in Liverpool had been especially unnerved since an online list of what were said to be new far-right targets for protests included a local charity that works with asylum seekers. Neighbors texted neighbors to head to the streets to counter any racist rioters. Local unions and leaders of neighborhood mosques also put out the word, as did a nationwide collective called “Stand Up to Racism.”
So as helicopters circled overhead on Wednesday night, and police officers on horseback patrolled the streets, young women handed out snacks and water bottles in front of the boarded-up windows of the targeted charity. Another group set up a makeshift first aid area across the street in case of emergency, given the unbridled violence of the past riots. And a white-haired man with a long beard propped a megaphone next to a speaker on his metal walker and played peace songs.
People carried signs reading “Not in our city,” and “Will trade racists for refugees.”
“They all had one thing in mind; it was to not let this hate get a foothold,” said Ewan Roberts, who manages Asylum Link Merseyside, the charity that was on the target list.
And then, the far right was a no-show.
In some ways, the gathering of hundreds of antiracism demonstrators was not unexpected in Liverpool, a multicultural city with proud working-class roots.
But similar protests were staged in cities across England on Wednesday night as thousands of people angered by the earlier violence decided to make their voices heard. That violence had included rioters trying to set fire to a hotel in the city of Rotherham while asylum seekers and other guests were inside. Some rioters pummeled police officers so hard they had to go to the hospital. A fire was set in a community library on the northern outskirts of Liverpool over the weekend.
Some of the Liverpool residents who turned out in force Wednesday were especially angry that what set off the spasm of violence was a lie about the deadly knife attack that was promoted again and again online.
The teenager accused of killing three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class was not — as online agitators claimed — a migrant straight off one of the small boats that bring impoverished people across the English Channel to Britain’s shores. The suspect was born in Wales, to parents who the BBC says came from Rwanda, and the police have not disclosed a motive.
“They are using a tragedy to promote this hate,” said Jasmine Galanakis, 27, who put her young daughter to bed in their home up the street and then joined the crowd on Wednesday evening. “So many people in this community come from different backgrounds, and it’s ignorance driving this. It’s just an excuse for hate, and we won’t stand for it.”
Liverpool, in England’s north, has long been a stronghold of the Labour Party and has a proud working-class tradition. The city’s dock workers have a history of organized action, and particularly after World War II, diversity flourished, making the city among the country’s most multicultural.
The threats in this sliver of Liverpool had been made against Asylum Link Merseyside, the charity that Mr. Roberts manages. He and the staff decided to shut its doors temporarily at the start of the week and bring in carpenters to board up the windows and doors to minimize damage if the building was attacked.
As he watched people gather peacefully in the streets, he said he was moved by the diversity of those who came out to express their support for asylum seekers.
It was especially affirming after years of railing by the former Conservative government against the number of asylum seekers — and its attempt to deport them to Rwanda despite a Supreme Court ruling that the policy was illegal.
Nazehar Benamar, 42, and her cousin Wafa Hizam, 22, who grew up in Liverpool, both said they felt it was important to be there. But they also said they were angry about the violence that erupted in the city center a few days earlier.
“Liverpool is a very multicultural city, but as a person of color, you are always aware of racism and prejudice,” said Ms. Benamar, who is Muslim and wears a hijab. She recalled how as the only nonwhite child in her class, she had been subjected to racial slurs. She said she was saddened that racism and Islamophobia were still so potent so many years later.
“People are being terrorized by fear about this violence,” she said. “Today especially, I could feel it.”
Still, on Wednesday night she was reassured to see members of her local mosque standing alongside university students and retirees. The people of Liverpool had come together to show “what we are made of here,” she said.
What united many of them was the feeling that working-class people are in life’s struggles together. As the evening light turned golden and night slowly set in, one young woman raised a sign that read, “The Enemy of the Working Class Travels By Private Jet Not Migrant Dinghy,” to applause from many standing nearby.
Matty Delaney, 33, who lives just outside Liverpool, said he had heard on Instagram about the demonstration against racism and thought it was important to deliver a clear message to those who had rioted, particularly as a young, white, working-class man.
“We’ve got more in common with an Indian nurse, with a Black bricklayer than we do with the Elon Musks, the Nigel Farages, the Tommy Robinsons, of the world — all these people who are stoking violence,” Mr. Delaney said.
Mr. Musk, the billionaire owner of the social media platform X — where disinformation about the initial attack had been allowed to swirl — threw himself into the fray this week by saying, “Civil war is inevitable” and accusing the prime minister, Keir Starmer, of not protecting “all communities” in Britain.
Mr. Farage, the leader of the populist anti-immigration Reform U.K. party, initially stoked conspiracy theories that drove the riots, before coming out against the violence. And Mr. Robinson, an anti-Islam agitator who founded the English Defense League — originally a street movement, which now spreads Islamophobic and xenophobic views mostly online — was among the far-right figures who pushed for their supporters to take to the streets after the stabbing attack.
By Thursday morning, the rhythm of daily life had returned to Overbury Street. At St. Anne’s Church, next door to the charity for asylum seekers, a local family gathered for a funeral. Discarded placards from the night before lay on the ground nearby.
The staff of the charity was also regrouping, and Mr. Roberts said they were trying to figure out when to reopen. While he said he felt an overwhelming sense of relief that the center had not faced violence, it was difficult to know what would come next.
Speaking of the rioters, he said, “They are trying to damage trust between the community and new arrivals, more than the buildings or infrastructure.” But, he added, “What last night told me was we are a greater value in the community, more than we actually understood, and it was wonderful to see that.”
For now, his staff planned to send a letter of thanks to the community. But they also planned to reinforce the wooden boards that protect the center’s windows, just in case.
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