10/27/2024

Bay Area United Against War Newsletter, October 28, 2024

      

Bodies of Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks on Jabalia refugee camp are brought to Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, October 23, 2024.  (Photo: Hadi Daoud/APA Images)

Israel’s Genocide Day 384: Israel continues to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza

 

The ongoing extermination campaign in northern Gaza is displacing Palestinians from shelters as dozens of residents have been abducted by the Israeli army. Meanwhile, Israeli airstrikes hit Beirut’s southern Dahiya district.

 

By Qassam Muaddi, October 24, 2024


Casualties

 

·      42,847 + killed* and at least 100,544 wounded in the Gaza Strip, including 59% women, children and elderly, as of October 21, 2024.*

 

·      760+ Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. This includes at least 146 children.**

 

·      2,574 Lebanese killed and more than 12,001 wounded by Israeli forces since October 8, 2023***

 

·      Israel revised its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,189.

 

·      The Israeli army recognizes the death of 748 Israeli soldiers and the injury of at least 4,969 others 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 October 24, 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 October 22, 2024.

 

*** This figure was released by the Lebanese Health Ministry, updated on October 24, 2024. The counting is based on the Lebanese official date for the beginning of “the Israeli aggression on Lebanon,” when Israel began airstrikes on Lebanese territory after the beginning of Hezbollah’s “support front” for Gaza.

 

**** These figures are released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.” Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot 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 that the number of wounded Israeli soldiers exceeds 20,000, including at least 8,000 who have been 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 and as of June 18.

Source: mondoweiss.net

 
FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA PALESTINE WILL BE FREE!
END ALL U.S. AID TO ISRAEL!
FOR A DEMOCRATIC, SECULAR PALESTINE!

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On this Wrongful Conviction Day, Leonard Peltier, the longest-serving Indigenous political prisoner, is incarcerated in lockdown-modified operations conditions at USP Coleman I, operated by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP).

 

Yet, in this moment of silence, Leonard speaks.

 

To honor his birthday and all those who are unjustly convicted and incarcerated, the Leonard Peltier Official Ad Hoc Committee has released a video of Leonard Peltier that is going viral. Narrated by renowned scholar Ward Churchill and set to a video created by award-winning filmmaker Suzie Baer, the film most importantly centers Leonard’s personal reflection on his 80th year.

 

Jenipher Jones, Mr. Peltier's lead counsel, commented, "This powerfully moving film captures the essence of who I know Leonard to be. I am grateful to Professor Churchill and Suzie Baer for their work and longstanding advocacy of Leonard. As the recent execution of Marcellus Williams-Imam Khaliifah Williams shows us, we as a society bear a responsibility to uplift the cases of all those who are wrongfully convicted and also hold the government accountable to do that for which it professes to exist. We must challenge our impulses of blind blood-thirst for guilt and the use of our legal systems to carry out this malignant pathology. There is absolutely no lawful justification for Leonard's incarceration."

 

“Leonard Peltier is Native elder whose wrongful incarceration is shameful. His continued imprisonment exemplifies the historical cruelty of the US Government toward Native people. The US BOP's treatment of Leonard Peltier is unlawful, and he deserves his freedom.” —Suzie Baer

 

Leonard's Statement: Peltier 80th Statement.pdf:

https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=%21ABHSRNdyB8SKn0I&id=DFF2DD874157D44A%21118178&cid=DFF2DD874157D44A&parId=root&parQt=sharedby&o=OneUp

 

To view the film, please visit:

https://tinyurl.com/Peltier80thPresentation

 

We hope to have additional updates on Leonard soon. In the meantime, please engage our calls to action or donate to his defense efforts.

Miigwech.

 

Donate/ActNow:

https://www.freeleonardpeltiernow.org/donate?link_id=2&can_id=1b2409958245a3dd77323d7f06d7f2df&email_referrer=email_2476307&email_subject=leonard-peltiers-80th-birthday-statement-2024


Leave a message at the Whitehouse:
www.whitehouse.gov/contact

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.

Video at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWdJdODKO6M&feature=youtu.be


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 

By Monica Hill

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

Prison Radio is a project of the Redwood Justice Fund (RJF), which is a California 501c3 (Tax ID no. 680334309) not-for-profit foundation dedicated to the defense of the environment and of civil and human rights secured by law.  Prison Radio/Redwood Justice Fund PO Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94141


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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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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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Articles

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1) France backs expansion of Lebanon’s army, and will give €100 million to aid displaced Lebanese, Macron says.

By Matthew Mpoke Bigg, October 24, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/10/24/world/israel-lebanon-hezbollah-iran
Lebanese soldiers ride atop camouflaged armored vehicles, driving in a line down a road, beneath billboards showing a candle and the words “Pray for Lebanon.”Lebanese military soldiers in Beirut last month. Credit...Wael Hamzeh/EPA, via Shutterstock

France will support the recruitment of thousands of extra troops for Lebanon’s military and donate around $100 million to support people who have fled their homes because of a war between Israel and the militia group Hezbollah, President Emmanuel Macron of France said Thursday at a conference on Lebanon.

 

Mr. Macron called for a cease-fire and said that Hezbollah, which has fired thousands of drones and missiles at Israel in the past year, should stop its attacks. He also said that Israel’s continuing invasion of Lebanon, launched this month to end Hezbollah’s aggression, was “regrettable” and he appeared to criticize the rationale for Israel’s push.

 

“There has been a lot of talk in recent days of a war of civilizations, or of civilizations that must be defended. I’m not sure you can defend a civilization by sowing barbarism yourself,” he said at the opening of the conference in Paris held to help raise funds for Lebanon.

 

Mr. Macron did not specify exactly how France would support the recruitment of additional troops for Lebanon, whose bitter sectarian divisions and weak central government have helped Hezbollah, a Shiite movement backed by Iran, to gain power.

 

Thursday’s meeting is the latest example of Mr. Macron’s bid to wield influence in Lebanon, a former French mandate. The historical ties, as well as the fact that French is spoken alongside English and Arabic, the official language, have long given Paris a sense of responsibility toward the country. France, for example, is one of the largest contributors of troops to the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Lebanon.

 

At the same time, the United States, Israel’s leading backer, remains the region’s most powerful diplomatic force. President Biden’s envoy on the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, Amos Hochstein, visited Beirut this week, and met with Lebanese officials. The State Department said it would send its deputy secretary for management, Richard Verma, to the Paris conference.

 

Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, also called for a cease-fire at the conference and said that Israeli attacks had put 13 Lebanese hospitals out of service. More than 1.2 million people have fled their homes because of the conflict, the United Nations said more than two weeks ago.

 

Mr. Mikati said that his government could deploy additional troops to the south as part of any cease-fire deal. The military, which receives support from the United States, is not a party to the conflict and Israel has said repeatedly that it is at war with Hezbollah, not Lebanon. Still, Lebanon refers to Israel as the enemy and does not have diplomatic ties with the country.

 

Lebanon’s government is largely powerless to rein in Hezbollah or deploy additional troops to the southern border without Hezbollah’s consent. Lebanese officials, including, Mr. Mikati, say that Hezbollah is on board with a nearly 20-year-old U.N. resolution that would allow them to do so, but Hezbollah has not yet publicly said this.

 

The C.I.A.’s website said Lebanon’s military had around 73,000 active troops, but experts say it has been severely weakened by the country’s economic crisis. Israeli forces killed three Lebanese soldiers this week in southern Lebanon. Israel apologized. On Thursday, Lebanon’s military said that another Israeli attack had killed three more of its soldiers in the south.

 

Mr. Macron appealed to the conference to support a plan to recruit at least 6,000 additional soldiers and enable the deployment of at least 8,000 additional soldiers in the south.

 

This is not the first donor conference that Mr. Macron has organized for Lebanon. After a port blast devastated parts of Beirut in 2020, he toured the city before Lebanese politicians did, and held a conference that raised hundreds of millions of dollars.

 

Euan Ward and Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting


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2) Gaza’s main emergency service says it has ‘completely ceased’ rescue operations in the north.

By Raja Abdulrahim, Reporting from Jerusalem, October 24, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/10/24/world/israel-lebanon-hezbollah-iran

People walk past rubble and destroyed buildings.Displaced Palestinians in northern Gaza on Tuesday. Credit...Dawoud Abu Alkas/Reuters


The main emergency service in Gaza has said it has ceased all rescue operations in the northern part of the territory amid a renewed Israeli offensive in the area.

 

Scores of Palestinians have been killed since Israel stepped up military operations in northern Gaza this month, saying it was trying to eliminate a regrouped Hamas presence there. Roughly 400,000 people remain in northern Gaza, according to the United Nations, and many have been trapped in their ruined neighborhoods by Israeli airstrikes.

 

Palestinian Civil Defense, the emergency service, has been responding to the scenes of attacks to treat the wounded and try to pull people from rubble. But on Wednesday night, it said its work in northern Gaza had “completely ceased.”

 

“The situation has become catastrophic,” it said in a statement on Telegram. “The residents there are left without humanitarian services.”

 

The statement said three of its rescue workers had been injured by an Israeli drone strike and that five others had been detained by Israeli forces. It added that Israeli tanks had shelled the only fire truck operating in northern Gaza.

 

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

 

United Nations officials have expressed alarm about the humanitarian situation in northern Gaza, and said the Israeli authorities have denied aid workers’ requests to help find survivors in the aftermath of Israeli strikes.

 

Gloria Lazic, an aid worker with the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said on social media this week that requests by the agency to help people trapped under rubble in the northern town of Jabaliya had been “repeatedly denied by the Israeli authorities.”

 

Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the main U.N. agency for Palestinians, said much the same in a social media post the same day, writing that “in northern Gaza, people are just waiting to die.”

 

Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.


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3) Boeing Workers Resoundingly Reject New Contract and Extend Strike

The vote, hours after Boeing reported a $6.1 billion loss, will extend a nearly six-week-long strike at factories where the company makes its best-selling commercial plane.

By Niraj Chokshi, Reporting from Seattle, Published Oct. 23, 2024, Updated Oct. 24, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/business/boeing-union-vote-strike.html

Gina Forbush, of Gig Harbor, Wash., reacting to news that striking Boeing machinists had rejected a tentative labor contract on Wednesday. Credit...M. Scott Brauer for The New York Times


Boeing’s largest union rejected a tentative labor contract on Wednesday by a wide margin, extending a damaging strike and adding to the mounting financial problems facing the company, which hours earlier had reported a $6.1 billion loss.

 

The contract, the second that workers have voted down, was opposed by 64 percent of those voting, according to the union, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. The union represents about 33,000 workers, but it did not disclose how many voted on Wednesday.

 

“There’s much more work to do. We will push to get back to the table, we will push for the members’ demands as quickly as we can,” said Jon Holden, president of District 751 of the union, which represents the vast majority of the workers and has led in the talks. He delivered that message at the union’s Seattle headquarters to a room of members chanting, “Fight, fight.”

 

Boeing declined to comment on the vote, which was a setback for the company’s new chief executive, Kelly Ortberg, who is trying to restore its reputation and business with a strategy he described in detail earlier on Wednesday. In remarks to workers and investors, Mr. Ortberg said Boeing needed to undergo “fundamental culture change” to stabilize the business and to improve execution.

 

“Our leaders, from me on down, need to be closely integrated with our business and the people who are doing the design and production of our products,” he said. “We need to be on the factory floors, in the back shops and in our engineering labs. We need to know what’s going on, not only with our products, but with our people.”

 

Mr. Ortberg delivered that message alongside the company’s quarterly financial results, which included the loss of more than $6.1 billion. This month, Boeing also announced plans to cut its work force by about 10 percent, which amounts to 17,000 jobs. The company also recently disclosed plans to raise as much as $25 billion by selling debt or stock over the next three years as it tries to avoid a damaging downgrade to its credit rating. The strike is costing the company tens of millions of dollars each day, according to various estimates.

 

The negotiations have been contentious. The strike began on Sept. 13 after 95 percent of workers voting rejected an earlier contract offer that had been backed by union leaders and Boeing. Later that month, the company made what it described as its “best and final” offer. The company gave workers just days to approve or reject it, but leaders of the union never put it to a vote. Boeing eventually rescinded the offer, with talks breaking down this month.

 

The two sides arrived at the now-rejected deal only after the Biden administration got involved. Senior administration officials had been working closely with Boeing and the union in recent months, at President Biden’s direction. Last week, Julie Su, the acting labor secretary, flew to Seattle to meet with company executives and union officials. On Wednesday, Mr. Holden said he planned to ask the White House to continue to try to help the parties find a resolution.

 

Boeing is important to the United States as an economic engine and as a symbol of manufacturing prowess. It employs almost 150,000 people across the country — nearly half in Washington State — and is one of the nation’s largest exporters. The company also makes military jets, rockets, spacecraft and Air Force One.

 

Under the contract, workers would have received cumulative raises of nearly 40 percent over four years, a significant increase over the rejected offer and approaching what the union initially sought. The offer included a $7,000 one-time bonus and additional contributions to retirement plans. It also would have preserved an incentive bonus program that the initial rejected offer would have replaced.

 

Boeing machinists make about $75,000 in average annual pay. Over the last decade, the workers have seen raises under the union contract of 8 percent and more than $4 an hour in additional cost-of-living adjustments, according to the company. Consumer prices in the Seattle area have risen more than 40 percent over the past decade, according to federal data.

 

But the contract did not revive a defined-benefit pension plan that was frozen a decade ago — an important priority for many union members. Many workers have been furious over that loss for years, and some have said that they felt Boeing had bullied them into agreeing to the freezing of the pension. Workers have also been angry with the leadership of the union’s parent organization, which they say scheduled the vote in a way that supported approval of the offer, prompting a rule change that limited the authority to schedule votes to local union chapters.

 

“There’s some deep wounds,” Mr. Holden told reporters after announcing the vote results. Mr. Holden also said that the union may explore what he called hybrid defined-benefit programs in negotiations.

 

On Wednesday afternoon, union members streamed in and out of the Angel of the Winds Arena in Everett, Wash., one of the voting locations and a short drive from a large Boeing factory. A handful held signs and handed out fliers urging others to reject the offer.

 

In interviews, several said they voted against the offer because they believed the union could hold out for better terms on wages, retirement, health coverage and other benefits. Many said they were frustrated over the lost pension, even if the odds of getting it restored remain in doubt.

 

“How do they expect to have anybody stay at the company if they don’t have some kind of a pension plan or better investments?” said Darryl Shore, who has worked at Boeing in different roles since 1989.

 

Mr. Shore said he grew up in the area and both his parents worked at Boeing, but that jobs at the company today don’t hold the same economic promise they did back then.

 

The rejection of the new contract comes as Boeing is trying to recover from a crisis that began when a panel fell off a 737 Max jet during an Alaska Airlines flight in January, reigniting concerns about the quality and safety of Boeing’s planes. Five years earlier, two fatal Max crashes led regulators worldwide to ground the plane for nearly two years.

 

After the January episode, the Federal Aviation Administration limited production of the Max, Boeing’s best-selling plane. The company has since increased inspections, added training for new hires, started to simplify procedures and limited tasks performed out of sequence.

 

The contract’s defeat is also bad news for the manufacturer’s many suppliers. Spirit AeroSystems, which makes the body of the 737 Max and has agreed to sell itself to Boeing, recently announced plans to furlough about 700 employees, starting next week, because of the strike.

 

The contract being negotiated would replace one that was agreed to in 2008 and extended multiple times. That offer came together only after a two-month strike that led to a decline of more than $6 billion in revenue and a delay in delivering more than 100 airplanes that year, Boeing said at the time.


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4) The Other War for These Gazans Is Against Cancer

Photographs by Laura Boushnak, Text by Laura Boushnak and Cassandra Vinograd, October 25, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/25/world/middleeast/gaza-war-cancer-jordan.html

Mohammed, 13 and hairless, raising a game controller in triumph in front of a TV screen. Two other children sit nearby.

Mohammed playing on his PlayStation with his brother.


Laura Boushnak spent time with three cancer patients receiving treatment in Amman, Jordan, after their evacuation from Gaza.

 

Oct. 25, 2024

The skies were quiet and Mohammed Ashour was finally safe, but for days after leaving Gaza the 13-year-old was unable to sleep.

 

He had made it to a cancer-treatment center in Jordan, and the hope it offered, and yet he could not stop thinking about what he had left behind.

 

The two-bedroom apartment, for example, where his family had sought shelter. They had crammed into it with about 70 relatives after fleeing the fighting in Gaza, but when they left for Jordan, the stocks of flour were empty.

 

“What would the family who stayed behind have for dinner?” Mohammed recalls wondering during his sleepless nights.

 

Israeli officials said this month that more than 4,000 patients had gotten out of Gaza for medical treatment since the war began. But as of late June, more than 10,000 people in the enclave required urgent medical care that was available only elsewhere, according to the World Health Organization.

 

For the small number of Gazan cancer patients who like Mohammed are receiving care in Jordan’s capital, Amman, that knowledge brings burdens. As well as their illness, they battle deep feelings of guilt, fear and homesickness.

 

When the Israeli military started bombing Gaza in response to the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, what Mohammed hated most, he said, was the sound of airstrikes. The smells after an explosion were also a problem, and would make his breathing difficult.

 

Mohammed, a top student, was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma before the war began, in January 2023. When the fighting began, his mother, Maha, was determined to get him abroad for treatment.

 

Even before the war, many Gazans were forced to travel for lifesaving medical care: The enclave’s health sector had struggled for years under a crippling blockade by Israel and Egypt that intensified after Hamas took over. Getting out of Gaza, though, required permits — a process that grew vastly more complicated and costly after the war began.

 

Ms. Ashour insisted that the whole family leave together, saying that she could not imagine abandoning her husband and other children. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital stepped in and helped the whole family make it to the King Hussein Cancer Center in Amman.

 

Before the war, the center had about two dozen cancer patients from Gaza. Last month, the total was five adults and 49 children, receiving treatment, food and accommodation.

 

Most of the patients are housed a seven-minute car ride from the hospital, on the fourth floor of an Amman hotel. That’s where Mohammed has been staying, and where his mother has been preparing meals for him.

 

Mohammed’s doctors advised him not to socialize too much after he got a bone-marrow transplant that compromised his immune system. But the smell of his mother’s cooking wafts through the hallway of the fourth floor, drawing other children to her door seeking tastes.

 

They also come to take turns on Mohammed’s PlayStation. He hid it in a bag when his family fled central Gaza, knowing his father would not have allowed him to pack it.

 

Ms. Ashour helps care for some of the other children, since not all were able to leave Gaza with their mothers. The fourth floor, she said, has developed a sense of community, a comfort amid so much uncertainty.

 

“Our destiny is ambiguous,” she said. “Where can we go once Mohammed’s treatment is over here in Amman? Even if we are allowed to go back to Gaza, everything is destroyed.”

 

The same uncertainty eats away at another of the center’s patients, Hussam Shehadeh, a 52-year-old man who is fighting Stage 4 cancer.

 

“I left the physical war behind, but I entered the psychological one,” he said. “My whole family is in Gaza.”

 

Information about what is happening to his family back home is often scarce. “Sometimes I can’t reach them for four to five days,” Mr. Shehadeh said. Hovering over him is a big fear: “What if I die without seeing them?”

 

Mr. Shehadeh left Gaza 20 days before the war started. Doctors there had discovered a brain tumor but could not treat it.

 

It pained him to leave his wife and four children behind, he said. But Amman was his only hope of survival.

 

“I just want to live a normal life,” he said. “It’s not my fault that I live in Gaza, where there is no health care for cancer patients.”

 

In Amman, he underwent surgery to remove the tumor. That has affected movement on his right side. But the hardest thing about his illness, Mr. Shehadeh said, has been having to endure it alone.

 

His wife was recently able to join him in Amman, but he tries to call home as often as he can. He said he was troubled by how his 15-year-old son sounds, as if he had aged 10 years in a few months.

 

Transfixed by the news, Mr. Shehadeh, who was once the director of a cultural center in Gaza, keeps the TV on all day in his small, tidy room. That’s how he learned about the deaths of three friends, he said. “We reached a point where we envy the dead ones,” he said.

 

Mohammed Abdel Hadi, too, left his family in Gaza to get treatment in Amman, but the separation has been much harder for him: He is only 13.

 

A few weeks after arriving at the King Hussein Cancer Center, the boy known for his smile locked himself in his room and refused to come out — or to receive treatment — unless his parents came and joined him. (He had traveled with an uncle as his caretaker.)

 

The hospital workers were unable to coax Mohammed out. Only a call from his mother, phoning from the family’s partially destroyed home in central Gaza, succeeded.

 

Mohammed was diagnosed with acute leukemia during his summer vacation in July 2023. It took around two months to get the paperwork for him to seek treatment in Jerusalem — the first time he had left Gaza. He spent 35 days there before returning home to continue his regimen.

 

The war began a few days later, and Mohammed’s family fled their home to seek shelter with thousands of others in school buildings. Despite the bombardment, Mohammed managed to attend a treatment session at a local hospital. “I was terrified,” he said, recalling the sound of explosions and how he hid in another patient’s room when a blast went off near the hospital.

 

As the fighting intensified, Mohammed’s parents feared cancer care would become inaccessible, so they too decided to try getting their son, who dreams of becoming a professional soccer player, out of Gaza.

 

When the permits came through, Mohammed left Gaza through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, with his uncle, Saadi Abdel Hadi. His parents and three younger siblings stayed behind.

 

After about a month of waiting in Cairo for the proper paperwork, Mohammed and his uncle made it to Amman on Dec. 23. There, he began treatment and enrolled in school.

 

While it was challenging at first — classes are taught in English — Mohammed said that he had made many new friends and that they cared for him. But Amman was not home.

 

“Once the war ends, I want to go back to Gaza,” he said. “I miss the sea.”


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5) Israeli attacks kill dozens in southern Gaza, health officials say.

By Raja Abdulrahim, Liam Stack and Abu Bakr Bashir Reporting from Cairo and Tel Aviv, October 25, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/10/25/world/israel-lebanon-gaza-iran

A car is covered in debris in a heavily damaged area.People inspected damage at the site of an Israeli strike in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on Friday. Credit...Bashar Taleb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


Israeli airstrikes in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis killed dozens of Palestinians overnight into Friday, according to the Gazan health ministry.

 

The ministry said at least 38 people had been killed and dozens more injured in the strikes, which hit residential areas. The circumstances of the strikes were unclear, and the Israeli military did not immediately respond to questions. It has said in the past that it is targeting Hamas fighters and infrastructure in Khan Younis.

 

The casualties reported by the health ministry could not immediately be verified. Official accounts of death tolls often fluctuate in the hours after an attack.

 

The ministry also said on Friday that Israeli forces had conducted a raid at Kamal Adwan Hospital, one of the few functioning hospitals left in northern Gaza, where an Israeli military offensive has worsened a dire humanitarian crisis.

 

“The situation inside the hospital is catastrophic in every sense of the word,” the health ministry said in a statement. Calls to the hospital’s director, Dr. Husam Abu Safiyeh, were not answered on Friday morning.

 

The Israeli military said on Friday that it was “operating in the area” of the hospital based on intelligence information that suggested “terrorists and terrorist infrastructure in the area.”

 

The humanitarian crisis in northern Gaza has drawn criticism from aid groups, the United Nations and the United States, which said last week that it could cut military aid to Israel if it did not allow more humanitarian assistance into the territory.

 

Israel says it is battling Hamas fighters in Jabaliya, a large northern town, and the surrounding area. The United Nations has said 400,000 people have been trapped there for weeks by Israeli bombardment.

 

Food, medicine and medical supplies have been in short supply for many months at Kamal Adwan Hospital and throughout the north. This week, the main emergency service in Gaza said the Israeli offensive had forced it to cease all rescue operations in the northern part of the territory.


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6) ‘The vibe is not normal’: The Israeli attack puts Iranians on edge.

By Claire Moses and Leily Nikounazar, October 26, 2024


“We people of Iran are victims of all these political games,” she said. “We have experienced so much that we all have become somehow numb.”


https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/10/26/world/israel-iran-lebanon-gaza

People walk on a city street near a mural.In Tehran on Saturday after the Israeli strikes on Iran. Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times


Iranians voiced a sense of anxiety and uncertainty on Saturday after a round of retaliatory strikes by Israel on their country, but some said they felt a dim hope about what may lie ahead.

 

“Today at work, everyone was speaking of the attacks,” said Soheil, a 37-year-old engineer who lives in the central city of Isfahan. His colleagues saw some reason for hope that a wider war could be averted, given that Israel attacked only military targets on Saturday, he added.

 

“It seems that people are hopeful that soon the situation will be back to normal,” he told The New York Times when reached by telephone.

 

“The vibe is not normal, though, at the moment,” he said. “People are experiencing different emotions: Some are worried, some indifferent and some are even happy, because they believe that Israel attacks will humble the regime a bit.”

 

Soheil, like other Iranians reached by The Times on Saturday, asked not to be identified by his full name for fear of retribution.

 

Iranian officials and the state news media played down the Israeli attack, calling the damage “limited” and claiming that Iran’s air defense had intercepted the strikes.

 

Israel did not strike sensitive sites related to Iran’s nuclear program or oil production facilities in retaliation for the large barrage of ballistic missiles that Iran fired at Israel this month. And while the attack marked a new escalation between the two archrivals, it appeared to be calibrated to stop short of all-out war.

 

After the attack was completed, Iran did not immediately threaten to retaliate, but it did say that it had the right to do so.

 

On state television on Saturday, reporters around Tehran, the nation’s capital, cheerfully proclaimed that all was well. Live shots showed a vegetable market and morning rush-hour traffic.

 

But for some residents, it was a night of little sleep and high anxiety as the sounds of explosions kept them up.

 

Maryam Naraghi, an Iranian journalist, said she had heard “the sound of bombs and explosions” from her home in Tehran, the capital.

 

Houri, a 42-year-old mother of two in Tehran, said in a telephone interview that after a night of loud explosions and consoling her children, she was anxious about what lay ahead for Iranians, many of them having grown weary of conflict and years of economic hardship.

 

She said her husband had stayed glued to satellite television and social media all night for updates on the attacks because Iran’s state news media offered little information.

 

Yashar Soltani, a journalist, said he had woken up in Tehran to the sounds of an attack that seemed to be nearby.

 

“I saw very big lights in the sky,” he said.

 

The attack on military bases and other targets in Ilam, Khuzestan and Tehran Provinces lasted only a few hours and was over by about 5 a.m., Israeli officials said.

 

As the sun rose on Saturday, people in Iran tried to go on with their day as usual, hoping that a wider war could be avoided.

 

Shadi, a 41-year-old living in Tehran, said she had not heard any of the explosions overnight.

 

“We people of Iran are victims of all these political games,” she said. “We have experienced so much that we all have become somehow numb.”

 

Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting.


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7) Israeli forces arrest dozens of health care workers in Gaza.

By Liam Stack and Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Tel Aviv, October 26, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/10/26/world/israel-iran-lebanon-gaza

A person lies on a stretcher as health workers and other people stand in a crowded hospital corridor.Injured Palestinians arriving at Kamal Adwan Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip on Wednesday. Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


Israeli forces have arrested dozens of medical workers at one of the last functioning hospitals in northern Gaza amid an Israeli offensive that has taken a dire humanitarian toll and drawn a rare threat from the United States that it could cut off military aid.

 

The director of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, announced the arrests of 44 health care workers late Friday. He said Israeli forces had raided the facility, Kamal Adwan Hospital in Jabaliya, shortly after W.H.O. workers delivered medical supplies to the hospital. The Israeli military said it had assisted in that delivery.

 

“We urge for hospitals, health workers and patients to be protected,” Dr. Ghebreyesus said in a statement.

 

The Gaza health ministry described scenes of chaos at the hospital on Friday night. It said Israeli troops had searched the facility and fired shots inside the building, causing panic among hundreds of people sheltering inside. It also said two children in the intensive care unit had died after generators stopped operating.

 

The ministry said on Saturday the arrested health care workers included all of the hospital’s male medical workers.

 

The Israeli military did not respond to questions on Saturday about the arrests, and on Friday it said only that it was “operating in the area” of the hospital. Israel has said the offensive is targeting what it has described as a Hamas resurgence in northern Gaza.

 

Israel launched a new offensive in northern Gaza three weeks ago, in areas close to Israel’s southern border, saying that its aim was to quash what it described as a Hamas resurgence in the area. But the United Nations says the operation has trapped roughly 400,000 people in a ruined landscape devoid of adequate food and other essential goods.

 

The situation has drawn criticism from world leaders, including Biden administration officials, who warned Israel in a letter that a failure to ease suffering in the north could prompt a cutoff in military aid.

 

Dr. Ghebreyesus said on Friday that Israeli forces had arrested the health care workers and damaged four ambulances in what he described as a “siege and attacks on health care workers.”

 

He said that three health workers and another hospital employee had been injured and that roughly 600 people were sheltering in the hospital on Friday night.

 

Khalil al-Muqayed, 79, was among those who had sought shelter at the hospital after Israel’s northern offensive began, according to his grandson, Wasim Alkhaldi, 29.

 

On Friday, Mr. al-Muqayed told his grandson over the phone that Israeli forces had detained him at the hospital, according to Mr. Alkhaldi, who works for the Fatah party, the main rival faction to Hamas.

 

Mr. Alkhaldi has not been able to reach his grandfather since then, he said.

 

“He’s old and suffers from chronic heart problems,” said Mr. Alkhaldi, who lives in the West Bank. “We don’t have any contact with him or know his fate.”

 

A spokesman for Palestinian civil defense, an emergency response organization, said that two members of its staff were also arrested at the hospital on Friday.

 

Israeli forces have besieged and raided Kamal Adwan Hospital before and detained its director. This month, the Gaza health ministry said the hospital was one of three that the Israeli military had ordered to evacuate at the start of its northern offensive.


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8) As Israel presses on with fighting in Lebanon and Gaza, blasts set off earthquake warnings.

By Liam Stack Reporting from Tel Aviv, October 26, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/10/26/world/israel-iran-lebanon-gaza

Gray smoke rises over an urban area.Smoke rising on Saturday over Beit Lahia, beside Jabaliya in the northern Gaza Strip, as Israel continued its military campaign in the area. Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


The Israeli military set off such strong explosives in southern Lebanon on Saturday morning that the blasts triggered earthquake warnings in northern Israel, the Geological Survey of Israel said.

 

The explosions were so powerful, it said, that they were detected by sensors more than 350 miles away in Eilat, the furthest point in Israel from the Lebanon border. It was the first time that Israel three-year-old seismic monitoring system sent a warning to the public, the survey said.

 

Israel’s air force and ground troops also pressed on with the fight against militants across the Gaza Strip, with that military offensive entering its third week on Saturday, even as Israel turned some of its firepower toward Iran, too.

 

Israel’s military said on Saturday morning that its air force had struck more than 70 sites across southern Lebanon and in Dahiya, a densely populated area near Beirut, over the past day. Its troops also battled Hezbollah fighters in multiple locations, the military added.

 

It did not provide the locations of any of those airstrikes, but said that some had hit Hezbollah sites “under and inside civilian buildings in the heart of populated areas,” and accused the Iran-backed armed group of endangering Lebanese civilians.

 

Hezbollah said on Saturday that it had engaged Israeli forces in almost a dozen towns across the south, including in the area of Nabatieh, one of the largest cities in the region.

 

A day earlier, Israeli forces in Lebanon suffered their single deadliest day of the current conflict there, with five soldiers killed in a Hezbollah rocket attack, according to Kan, Israel’s public broadcaster. It said that 24 soldiers had been wounded in the attack.

 

In Gaza, an Israeli airstrike on Saturday killed three people in Jabaliya, the town at the center of Israel’s northern Gaza offensive, according to the official Palestinian news media.

 

Palestinian civil defense, an emergency response organization, said it had been unable to respond to “numerous calls and pleas” from buildings damaged in the strike because of Israeli bombardment.

 

Israel’s military said on Saturday that its forces were conducting “targeted raids” against Hamas fighters in central and southern Gaza, but it did not refer to its offensive in the north, which has drawn criticism from both Israel’s allies and detractors.


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9) Inmate Labor Tests the Limits on ‘Involuntary Servitude’

A work-release program for Alabama prisoners provides labor for corporations and income for the state. Lawsuits are challenging its constitutionality.

By Talmon Joseph Smith, Photographs by Audra Melton, Reporting from Montgomery and Birmingham, Ala., Oct. 26, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/26/business/economy/prison-labor-alabama-hyundai.html

Six people sitting and standing near a cement staircase in a parking lot outside a building as another person climbs the stairs between them.Taking a break outside the Ju-Young plant.


In the back of a nondescript industrial park on the outskirts of Montgomery, Ala., past the corner of Eastern Boulevard and Plantation Way, there is a manufacturing plant run by Ju-Young, a car-part supplier for Hyundai. On a Tuesday in May, about half of the workers there — roughly 20 — were prisoners.

 

They were contracted to the company by the Alabama Department of Corrections as part of a “work-release” day labor program for inmates who, according to the state, have shown enough trustworthiness to work outside prison walls, alongside free citizens.

 

The inmates bused there by the state make up just one crop of the thousands of imprisoned people sent to work for private businesses — who risk disciplinary action if they refuse.

 

Sitting against a chain-link fence under the shade of a tree in the company parking lot, commiserating over small talk and cigarettes with fellow assembly workers, one of the imprisoned men, Carlos Anderson, argued that his predicament was simple. He could work a 40-hour week, at $12 an hour — and keep a small fraction of that after the state charges transportation and laundry fees, and takes a 40 percent cut of pretax wages — or he could face working for nothing at the prison.

 

Under Alabama prison rules, there are thin lines between work incentives, forced labor and “involuntary servitude” — which reforms to the Alabama Constitution in 2022 banned. From the viewpoint of Mr. Anderson and more than a dozen other Alabama inmates interviewed by The New York Times, the ultimate message, in practice, is straightforward: Do this, or else.

 

“You have no choice,” said Mr. Anderson, 43, who has served 15 years of a 20-year felony sentence for a marijuana trafficking conviction in 2009, and has been contracted out to Ju-Young for about a year.

 

“If you don’t,” he added, “they’re going to send you on back to the camp and you get rolled up with a disciplinary charge” — like denial of parole, having “good time” revoked, which prolongs incarceration, or being made to work without pay at prison facilities.

 

The men hanging out with Mr. Anderson in the parking lot — who live with him up the road at a low-security corrections facility for work-release-eligible inmates — nodded in agreement. Most declined to speak on the record out of fear of retaliation.

 

An employee at the Ju-Young plant, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Mr. Anderson’s description of the work environment for inmates, including the implicit threat of punishment, was correct. Representatives of Ju-Young did not respond to requests for comment.

 

Work-release inmates housed at the lower-security camps generally live in fear of being sent back to the state’s more dangerous medium- and high-security prisons. The U.S. Justice Department sued the Alabama Department of Corrections in 2020, accusing it of unsafe conditions of confinement, failing to protect prisoners from violence, excessive force by guards, overcrowding and understaffing. A trial is expected to begin in May.

 

Qualifying for the lower-security prison facilities is a ticket out. And the nominal hourly wage is comparable to what the plant pays outside workers. Yet life on work-release has its own trade-offs. And the incentive system for all parties involved is clear.

 

Businesses get laborers who cannot organize for better pay or conditions and cannot quit without risking a greater loss of their freedom.

 

The Department of Corrections’ 40 percent cut of work-release workers’ pretax gross earnings — which it says is meant “to assist in defraying the cost” of incarceration — gives an estimated $450 million annual boost to state coffers, on top of the taxpayer dollars allocated to the prison system. This helps shore up the fiscal budget of the low-tax state.

 

Kelly Betts, a representative of the Department of Corrections, said, “The work-release programs are instrumental to the success of inmates preparing for release back into the community.”

 

But critics say the system perpetuates the racist legacy of “convict leasing,” which lasted in Alabama from 1875 until 1928. It forced state prisoners to do uncompensated work for private companies, which then kicked back lease payment fees to the state.

 

‘It’s an Illusion of Choice’

 

For centuries, a penal exception clause in the U.S. Constitution has played a substantial role in labor markets and prison networks. The 13th Amendment, ratified in 1865, abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” That language became the legal foundation for “convict leasing” systems across Alabama and the nation, which have been technically eliminated since the end of the Jim Crow era in the 1960s.

 

Prison labor, however, remains common, from California to Texas to New York, with various rules and regulation regarding pay. Across the country, state and federal prisoners earn 13 to 52 cents per hour on average, producing about $11 billion worth of goods and services each year, according to an estimate from the University of Chicago Law School and the American Civil Liberties Union.

 

Unpaid labor for inmates is still allowed in Alabama and a few other states. In Alabama, unpaid internal prison work can be assigned to those who have not qualified for or been assigned to work-release: yard work, janitorial services, cooking and laundry duty. Some inmates work for state and local entities, at tasks like road maintenance, for about $2 a day — the rate Alabama set for prison laborers in 1927.

 

“I don’t think we have gotten rid of convict leasing,” said Darrick Hamilton, an economist and the director of the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy at the New School. “The very nature of people profiting from prisoners is related to convict leasing. It’s an illusion of choice — there’s no real consent that they can offer.”

 

During the 2022 election cycle, Alabama was one of four states that tightened their bans on involuntary servitude to remove exceptions for convicts. It is now banned without qualification.

 

But that has not ended the legal and philosophical battle over inmate labor.

 

A lawsuit filed in May by the Center for Constitutional Rights, representing people incarcerated in Alabama prisons, argued that inmates were “forced by the State of Alabama to labor against their will” and that the new state ban on involuntary servitude has rendered the current prison labor system unconstitutional.

 

The plaintiffs requested the nullification of an executive order and a bill signed into law by Gov. Kay Ivey in 2023, saying it was “in defiance of the newly ratified constitution.” The two measures collectively tightened definitions of “good time” violations, clarified the Department of Corrections’ authority to directly revoke good-time credits for “refusal to work,” paid or unpaid, and roughly doubled the time it takes for a prisoner to build such credits.

 

The executive order followed an informal labor strike inside the state prison system that ended shortly after nonprofits working with the prisoners reported that strikers were facing retaliation. (The prison laborers had various demands, including the establishment of parole criteria that would mandate release from prison if met.)

 

In a motion in June to dismiss the lawsuit, an assistant attorney general for Alabama said unpaid labor at prison facilities constituted “mandatory chores,” reasserting that “slavery and involuntary servitude do not exist” in the state’s prison system.

 

“True, prisoners may have some privileges temporarily suspended for shirking their duties,” the motion said, “but the law is clear that the threat of losing a privilege does not transform normal housekeeping work into involuntary servitude.”

 

On Aug. 1, a judge granted the dismissal, ruling that “the court lacks subject-matter jurisdiction due to sovereign immunity” — a legal doctrine that protects governments from lawsuits without their consent.

 

“Our clients intend to appeal the dismissal order,” said Emily Early, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights. The group filed a notice of appeal in the Alabama Civil Court of Appeals on Sept. 9.

 

Separately, the center joined in sending a complaint to the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on Sept. 30 that requests “immediate attention” to the “coercion” of imprisoned U.S. laborers and that calls on the body to “investigate, and visit, the Alabama Department of Corrections and Louisiana Department of Safety and Corrections.”

 

A ‘Question for Debate’

 

Several legal scholars worry that broad applications of “sovereign immunity” doctrines could make constitutional law subservient to the will of states’ governors. But some lawyers and criminologists believe that “modern slavery” arguments about prison labor remain a stretch.

 

“It seems like a question for debate rather than one where you caught someone doing something illegal,” said Shawn Bushway, an economist and criminologist at the RAND Corporation.

 

Characterizing prison work as forced labor is wrongheaded, he said, because most inmates who qualify for paid work earn that classification based on positive credits for behavior. “In other words, it’s a privilege,” he said, better than some of the other alternatives behind bars.

 

Mr. Bushway’s view is widely held among lawyers and judges throughout the country, which is why the legal path remains unclear for those who hoped that Alabama’s constitutional change would prompt immediate labor reforms.

 

The state court’s reasoning in its August ruling, for instance, may not bode well for a separate federal lawsuit against Alabama filed in December.

 

The plaintiffs in that case — current and former inmates, labor unions and a civil rights group — seek an injunction that would end “forced labor,” release inmates who they say have met parole qualifications, and require the state to end wage garnishments, allowing workers to keep what they earn working in the prison system.

 

The labor union plaintiffs — the Union of Southern Service Workers, the Service Employees International Union and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union — argue that the use of prison labor also undermined the legal right of unions to bargain and organize workers.

 

Specifically, they argue in the lawsuit that union organizing drives at corporations using prison labor were stymied by prison labor “because work-release employees could not enter into binding contracts” like free colleagues who work by their side. And they add that “not being able to represent all workers” at a given plant or other workplace depresses wages and working conditions and harms the interests of union members.

 

The state has moved to dismiss the federal lawsuit. A judge’s decision is pending. The Department of Corrections said it did not comment on ongoing litigation.

 

According to the federal lawsuit, over 100 public agencies and about 575 companies in Alabama have used imprisoned people for labor since 2018.

 

Along with food processors, auto parts companies are among the most prominent users of work-release prison labor in the state.

 

Ju-Young, which makes fenders for Hyundai Motors, is not the automaker’s only supplier reliant on prison labor. Another is SL Alabama, in Elba, which provides Hyundai with “lamp systems” — parts for high beams, brake lights and taillights.

 

According to the Center for Constitutional Rights lawsuit, as many as 83 state inmates have worked for SL Alabama, with at least 53 working for the company in the 2023 fiscal year. As many as 97 Alabama inmates worked for Ju-Young between Jan. 1, 2018, and Sept. 7, 2023, the lawsuit said, with at least 61 working for the company in the 2023 fiscal year.

 

The Department of Corrections declined to provide The Times with its own estimate.

 

An Injury Toll

 

Mark Anthony Miller, 58, has served 20 years of a life sentence triggered by a “three strikes” law — for felony charges including marijuana possession, burglary and receiving stolen property. He is a contract worker for Ju-Young. Assigned to handle heavy machinery and objects, he was injured on the job in the spring, and says he now can’t sleep on his back.

 

“If you get hurt out here, you’re screwed,” Mr. Miller said, speaking on his break near the parking lot of a Ju-Young plant. Usually injured prisoners are told, by either correctional staff members or plant supervisors, to “get back out there and be quiet,” he said. Two other inmates, standing nearby while on their break, agreed.

 

Civil rights groups argue that a lack of proper medical care is common in the Alabama Department of Corrections system.

 

Thirty-seven Alabama inmates (not including Mr. Miller) filed an unsuccessful motion in 2022 to join the Justice Department’s lawsuit against the state prison system regarding unsafe conditions. They asserted that after the 2022 prison labor strike, inmates “became subjected to limited food provision, both in quantity and quality, and change in medication” and “medical equipment policy.”

 

The judge ruled that adding litigation over medical and food issues, which were not central to the 2020 lawsuit, would “unduly delay” the proceedings.

 

Hyundai and its suppliers faced previous scrutiny from the U.S. government over labor practices — though for child labor, not prison labor violations. In 2022, the Department of Labor ruled that three of Hyundai’s direct suppliers, including SL Alabama, had violated child labor provisions.

 

Still, the tension between the Alabama Constitution and Hyundai’s indirect use of prison labor has created an awkward balancing act for the company — which says in its mission statement, “We partner with like-minded suppliers to help us grow.”

 

Regarding the lawsuits questioning the constitutionality of Alabama prison labor, a spokesman for Hyundai told The New York Times that “while Hyundai is not a party to the lawsuits, we are aware of the allegations,” adding: “Hyundai does not condone or tolerate violations of labor law. Consistent with the standards and values to which we hold ourselves as a company, we mandate that our suppliers and business partners strictly adhere to the law, and we take reports of alleged violations very seriously.”

 

The spokesman added that it was against company policy to employ prison labor directly but said that “employment decisions are up to the suppliers as long as they adhere to the law and our supplier code of conduct.”

 

That Hyundai code of conduct dictates that “suppliers should ensure that they do not source raw materials, parts or components for their manufacturing process that are in turn manufactured, at any point in their supply chain, directly or indirectly, with the use of forced labor.”

 

The company spokesman declined to comment on whether Ju-Young or SL Alabama might be in violation of that internal code in the company’s view, or whether the labor of work-release inmates constituted “forced labor.” But he added that Hyundai planned to avoid prison labor in the supply chain for its “metaplant” in Georgia for electric vehicles and E.V. batteries, which was announced in 2022 and began production this month.

 

Like Ju-Young, SL Alabama did not respond to requests for comment.

 

In a statement, the White House declined to comment in detail on pending legal cases, but expressed concern about Alabama’s prison labor networks as they were presented in the state and federal lawsuits.

 

“These reports are alarming and we strongly condemn any use of involuntary labor,” a White House spokeswoman said.

 

Incentives and Alternatives

 

Mr. Bushway, the economist and criminologist at RAND, said a demonstrated history of reliable work in prison can help “lead to better outcomes” including improved employment prospects if they are released.

 

But he added that “there is a potential for corruption and abuse.”

 

He noted that Alabama had a multimillion-dollar economic incentive to keep inmates working and earning the state a 40 percent share of their gross pay, and a possible disincentive to grant parole to those up for release.

 

The upside for private companies is also not lost on the imprisoned.

 

“It’s beneficial for the employer, for sure,” said George Garth, 41, an inmate who works in quality control for Ju-Young. “Whatever they put you on, you’re pretty much stuck on.”

 

Mr. Garth dislikes the system but said that at times he felt fortunate because “guys in the facility” — those without work-release status — “make nothing at all.” He has served 14 years on a robbery conviction and is due for release in 2030.


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10) Iranian officials stress Tehran’s right to respond to Israel’s attack.

By Cassandra Vinograd, October 27, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/10/27/world/israel-iran-lebanon-gaza

Two people look over a city at sunrise.Tehran at sunrise on Saturday after multiple strikes. Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times


Iran’s supreme leader appeared to take a measured tone on Sunday in response to Israel’s strikes on the country, even as Iranian officials stressed that Tehran had a right to retaliate.

 

Iranian and Israeli officials told The New York Times that strikes early on Saturday had destroyed air-defense systems set up to protect important energy sites in Iran but avoided the facilities themselves. The Israeli attack — retaliation for a recent Iranian missile barrage — raised fears about whether, and how hard, Tehran might strike back.

 

President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran warned late Saturday that his country would “answer any stupidity with wisdom and strategy.”

 

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has the authority as commander in chief to order strikes on Israel. On Sunday, in his first public comments about the attacks, Ayatollah Khamenei said that the effect of the strikes “should neither be magnified nor downplayed,” the Iranian state news agency IRNA, reported. He did not appear to explicitly call for retaliation.

 

In the meantime, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, has asked the U.N. Security Council to convene an “urgent meeting” and condemn the attacks, IRNA reported. It said that Mr. Araghchi sent a letter to the United Nations secretary general stating that Iran “reserves its inherent right to legal and legitimate response to these criminal attacks at the appropriate time.”

 

Farnaz Fassihi and Mike Ives contributed reporting.


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11) Israeli forces withdraw from a major hospital in northern Gaza.

By Hiba YazbekReporting from Jerusalem, October 28, 2024

“An Israeli military official said that Israeli forces had left the facility, Kamal Adwan Hospital, which is one of the last functioning hospitals in the area, after detaining nearly 100 people who they said were suspected of being militants. … The Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Monday that Israeli forces had ‘detained or expelled all the medical staff’ at the hospital, and that only one pediatrician remained there. … The Israeli military official added that Israeli troops had dismantled oxygen tanks at the hospital to ensure that they weren’t booby-trapped.”

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/10/28/world/israel-gaza-iran-lebanon

Crushed vehicles amid debris between two buildings.Damaged ambulances and debris at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip on Saturday. Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


The Israeli military said on Monday that its forces had withdrawn from a hospital in the northern Gaza Strip after a three-day raid during which Palestinian health officials said nearly all of the medical workers at the complex were detained and two children died.

 

An Israeli military official said that Israeli forces had left the facility, Kamal Adwan Hospital, which is one of the last functioning hospitals in the area, after detaining nearly 100 people who they said were suspected of being militants. Israeli forces had stormed the hospital on Friday after firefights in the surrounding area, as the military continued a weekslong offensive in northern Gaza against Hamas fighters.

 

There were no major gun battles inside the hospital complex once troops entered, according to the Israeli military official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the operation.

 

The Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Monday that Israeli forces had “detained or expelled all the medical staff” at the hospital, and that only one pediatrician remained there. The statement also called on international organizations to send medical teams to the hospital and urged people with surgical skills in Gaza to come to the hospital to save those who could be saved among the wounded and sick.

 

The Israeli military official added that Israeli troops had dismantled oxygen tanks at the hospital to ensure that they weren’t booby-trapped. “We haven’t damaged the medical infrastructure, but specific findings that we had there we had to dismantle, and that’s the reason we’ve seen damage,” he said.

 

Last Thursday, a U.N. World Health Organization team that visited the hospital to deliver supplies reported a chaotic scene, with injured people lying on the floors and medical staff overwhelmed. The next morning, the Gaza health ministry said that Israeli forces had stormed the complex and were “detaining hundreds of patients, medical staff and some displaced people,” and the W.H.O.’s director said it had lost contact with staff at the hospital.

 

Later on Friday, the health ministry said that the situation at the hospital was “alarmingly deteriorating” as Israeli troops searched it and fired shots, causing panic among the roughly 600 people inside. Two children in the intensive care unit died after generators stopped working during the Israeli military operation, the ministry said.

 

The Israeli military did not comment on the reports that patients had died. It said in a statement on Monday that the hospital had been provided with medical and other supplies, including fuel and blood, and that 88 patients, caregivers and staff members had been relocated to other hospitals in Gaza in recent weeks.

 

Israeli forces had previously besieged and raided Kamal Adwan Hospital last December and detained its director. This month, the Gaza health ministry said the hospital was one of three that the Israeli military had ordered to evacuate as its forces launched a new offensive targeting what it said was a Hamas resurgence in northern Gaza.

 

Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting from Jerusalem and Gabby Sobelman from Rehovot, Israel.


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12) In Western North Carolina, Helene’s Devastation Is Threatening Health Care Access

Dozens of volunteer doctors, nurses and psychologists traveled to the region to treat people whose routines, including medical appointments, were disrupted by the storm.

By Emily Cochrane, Reporting from Swannanoa, N.C., Oct. 28, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/28/us/politics/north-carolina-helene-health-care.html

Several doctors are standing in a living room, facing a woman who is sitting down.

Doctors speaking with Tina Abbott in her home in Swannanoa, N.C., earlier this month. Credit...Loren Elliott for The New York Times


An aerial view of damage from Hurricane Helene. A car is flipped on its side, and there are piles of debris.Damage from catastrophic flooding after Hurricane Helene ravaged Swannanoa. Credit...Loren Elliott for The New York Times


Tina Abbott had already been struggling to stay on top of her medical issues. There was the pain from a tear in her arm tissue, the cyst on her spine and the chronic breathing problems that required a portable oxygen tank, which she had refinanced her car to afford.

 

Then Hurricane Helene hit western North Carolina, forcing her to cancel an appointment for lab work. When a trio of volunteer doctors arrived at her home days later, Ms. Abbott, 67, was sitting in her dark living room, without reliable cell service or running water.

 

With the region essentially shut down, she was worried about how she would get oxygen refills and blood tests to monitor the impact of her many medications on her organs.

 

“If this goes on forever,” she told the volunteer doctors, “it’s going to be a problem.”

 

Even before the storm sent floodwaters raging through this slice of mountainous Appalachia, the largely rural region had a lot of people in poor health, with medical care often challenging to get. And while North Carolina’s recent expansion of Medicaid has allowed many more residents with limited income to get health coverage, the hurricane’s devastation is hindering that progress, at least for now.

 

The storm is among the deadliest in the nation’s history. After making landfall in Florida’s Gulf Coast in late September, Helene tore through the Southeast, killing more than 200 people and decimating hundreds of homes and businesses. The devastation is particularly acute in western North Carolina, where floodwaters swept away entire communities and destroyed much of its mountainous infrastructure.

 

“The health care infrastructure in western North Carolina is already so fragile,” said Kody H. Kinsley, the North Carolina secretary of health and human services. The hurricane, he added, has shone “a bright light on that already fragile system.”

 

Several hospitals in both North Carolina and Tennessee remain closed, including one in Erwin, Tenn., where dozens of patients and staff members had to be rescued on the day the storm hit.

 

In western North Carolina, some hospitals are still relying on bottled water or mobile water units.

 

Nancy Lindell, a spokeswoman for Mission Health in North Carolina, said that the hospital in Asheville still lacks potable municipal water, and tanks are pumping in more than 200,000 gallons into the hospital each day.

 

In a region where it was already difficult to recruit and retain medical staff, some providers are also worried about the consequences of lost revenue, and about supporting staff members who may have suffered personal losses from the storm.

 

“How do we attract someone to come into the area at this moment?” said Kim Wagenaar, the chief executive of Western North Carolina Community Health Services, which serves 13 counties in the region. She added, “It’s just going to take a long time to really mitigate the effects of this disaster.”

 

The health disparities in the Appalachian region can be traced in part to the 2008 recession, which dealt an economic blow from which many of the area’s rural communities have not fully recovered. Increased levels of poverty heightened health challenges, including depression and addiction.

 

“When something like this happens in vulnerable communities,” said Michael Meit, the director of the Center for Rural Health and Research at East Tennessee State University, “it tends to have worse outcomes, and the recovery is harder.”

 

The aftermath of the storm could create new health problems, such as injuries sustained during cleanup and issues from contaminated water. Health officials have called for storm survivors in flood-damaged homes and people cleaning up debris to take extra precautions. Dust from the mud could exacerbate asthma and breathing issues, for example.

 

Many residents are also experiencing the psychological stress of grief, loss and trauma, with the death toll at nearly 100 in the state. Even the constant sound of helicopters overhead, many of which are delivering aid, has made people anxious. One doctor described an uptick in anxiety stemming from the financial toll the storm took on many residents, after it snatched away homes, cars and jobs.

 

Shortly after the storm, Richard Ball, 60, was helping his sister-in-law clear away some of the waterlogged debris inside her home. He suffered two heart attacks earlier this year, he said, adding, “If I get tired, I’ll sit down.”

 

His sister-in-law, Brenda Ball, had fallen days earlier, and the bruise and cut were still visible above her right eye. But she could not seek treatment with her car buried under a collapsed part of her house.

 

Dozens of volunteer doctors, nurses and psychologists have driven or flown into the region to treat people still lacking reliable transportation, roads or access to medical care. Their work is meant not only to relieve the strain on local emergency workers and hospitals, volunteers said, but to keep a log of residents’ health problems while regular appointments remain hard to get.

 

“I’ve been chomping at the bit to get out here,” Pat Tucker, 61, an urgent care doctor from Oxford, Miss., told Ms. Abbott, the 67-year-old with several medical issues, when he knocked on her door in Swannanoa, one of the worst-hit towns. Along with two family medicine doctors from the Asheville area, he gently pressed her about her health problems, made sure that neighbors could help her and promised to see if he could get her an oxygen regulator.

 

In Swannanoa, which has about 5,500 residents, an athletic trainer, a school nurse and a number of family medicine specialists worked in the parking lot of a church to set up a temporary clinic and filtered through reports of residents who needed medication refills, oxygen, insulin or simply a wellness check.

 

Pharmacists raced from store to store, calling in prescriptions and determining how best to get them distributed. Some people were going into withdrawal, several providers said, because they could not get the addiction medication they normally took to stave it off, or the substance they were dependent on.

 

About a month after the storm, the makeshift clinic had seen about 500 patients, not counting home visits. “You just jump in and figure out how,” said Shanda Bradley, 47, an athletic trainer from outside Asheville.

 

Mr. Kinsley said the work the volunteers were doing could help build faith in medical providers in a deeply independent community.

 

“True health care access moves at the speed of trust,” he said, adding that “it’s just going to be a long haul.”


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13) Britain Braces for ‘Painful’ Budget Meant to Recharge the Economy

The new Labour Party government said it had inherited a challenging financial position and warned of tax increases and spending cuts when it reveals its budget this week.

By Eshe Nelson, Reporting from London, Oct. 28, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/28/business/uk-budget-taxes.html

Several people on the sidewalk and street in front of a shop with an open door.

The Labour Party has said it would not raise taxes on working people, but its promises leave it little room to maneuver on the budget. Credit...Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times


As Britain’s Labour Party government prepares to deliver its first budget this week, the message to Britons for the past few months has been a dispiriting warning that they may not like what they hear.

 

The budget, which will be announced in Parliament on Wednesday, will be “painful,” Prime Minister Keir Starmer said. The Treasury, the department responsible for laying out the government’s tax and spending plans, has repeated a relentless mantra: “Difficult decisions” are coming.

 

Rachel Reeves, the chancellor of the Exchequer, faces the difficulty of setting out a fiscal plan that adheres to Labour’s campaign promises, even though those promises offer little room to maneuver.

 

Ms. Reeves has vowed “no return to austerity,” which many have interpreted as avoiding cuts to public spending while also promising not to raise taxes on working people. The government has said it will stick to strict rules to push down debt levels and increase investment in an effort to make Britain the fastest-growing economy in the Group of 7 nations.

 

“It’s a very, very challenging situation,” said Isabel Stockton, an economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, adding that there was pressure to spend more on benefits and public services.

 

“She’s kind of boxed in on those parameters,” Dr. Stockton said of Ms. Reeves. “And then she’s additionally boxed herself in with the commitments she’s made on tax.”

 

The British government is not alone in making unpopular choices after deficits across Europe increased because governments spent heavily to support households and businesses through pandemic lockdowns and an energy crisis. High interest rates have also raised the cost of government debt. This month, France announced a round of severe spending cuts and tax increases to head off a financial crunch.

 

The budget announcement on Wednesday has been imbued with a sense of historic importance. It will be the first one by a Labour government in 14 years and the first delivered by a female chancellor of the Exchequer. But it has also been deemed by analysts as a chance for the Labour Party to set its agenda for the rest of the Parliament and as a make-or-break moment after the government’s turbulent early months, which were rocked by criticism over the acceptance of gifts and the resignation of the prime minister’s chief of staff.

 

Despite the dour messaging, recent economic news in Britain has been relatively positive. The economy grew faster than expected in the first half of the year, recovering from a recession. Last Tuesday, the International Monetary Fund upgraded its forecast for Britain’s economic growth this year to 1.1 percent, from 0.7 percent three months ago. Inflation has dropped to 1.7 percent, and investors are betting that the Bank of England will have to ramp up the pace of interest rate cuts, easing the pressure on mortgage holders and businesses.

 

Still, the government has not swayed from its message that it will have to make tough choices to ensure fiscal stability and restore long-term economic growth.

 

After a surge in spending during the pandemic and a spike in inflation, government debt levels are high and interest payments have ballooned. Many public services, including prisons, courts and social care, are stretched. In her first few weeks as chancellor, Ms. Reeves declared that she had inherited a “hole in the public finances” amounting to 22 billion pounds, or $28 billion, because of overspending by the previous government.

 

“It’s welcome that the I.M.F. have upgraded our growth forecast for this year, but I know there is more work to do,” Ms. Reeves said in a statement on Tuesday. “That is why the budget next week will be about fixing the foundations to deliver change.”

 

Ms. Reeves has said she will increase some taxes this week. If she wants to bolster departmental budgets and keep other election manifesto pledges, she’ll need to raise £25 billion in taxes, the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimated, noting that it is common for the first budget of new governments to substantially increase taxes.

 

But the Labour Party has already ruled out increasing income tax; National Insurance, an employment-based tax; and the value-added tax, a type of sales tax, complicating the calculations. The three taxes made up about 60 percent of the government’s revenue last fiscal year. This year, Ms. Reeves is to increase to capital gains tax and inheritance tax instead.

 

There is also speculation that the government could raise the employer contributions of National Insurance, which funds state benefits, including pensions. But that would breach the government’s vow not to raise taxes on working people, some analysts have said, because companies are likely to pass the cost on to employees by scaling back wage increases.

 

Some companies are “scratching their heads a little bit,” said Duncan Edwards, the chief executive of BritishAmerican Business, a trans-Atlantic lobby group. “The language has been about delivering a pro-growth program,” he added, but “the action — or at least the telegraphed action — has been to do things which are likely to discourage growth.”

 

The government needs to show how the budget would increase economic growth and how it fits with other policies, such as the new industrial strategy, to ensure that Britain is more attractive than its European neighbors as a place to invest, Mr. Edwards said.

 

Still, there are likely to be some welcome announcements in the budget. For example, the Treasury has already announced more money toward affordable housing projects. And in a break with her predecessor, Ms. Reeves also plans to change fiscal rules to give the government more room to borrow for investment for big projects, most likely by changing which measure of debt the government uses when it calculates debt levels over five years’ time. Ms. Reeves has not confirmed what the new measure will be, but she wrote in The Financial Times on Thursday that the changes would mean that expected declines in public sector investment would not go ahead.

 

Changing that measure “could make quite a big difference” for investment, said Dr. Stockton, the Institute for Fiscal Studies economist. But the bigger issue with the debt rule is that it can be heavily influenced by small changes to economic forecasts far in the future.

 

“That’s not going to be solved by targeting a different measure; that would be solved by thinking more carefully about the design of the rule itself,” Dr. Stockton said.


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