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Israel’s Genocide Day 412: Israel kills 87 Palestinians in Gaza as the ICC issues arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant
On the heels of the ICC issuing arrest warrants for Israeli officials, Israel killed at least 87 Palestinians on Thursday in strikes across the Gaza Strip, as well as nine Palestinians in Jenin in the northern occupied West Bank.
Casualties
· 44,056 + killed* and at least 104,268 wounded in the Gaza Strip, 59% of whom are women, children and elderly, as of October 21, 2024.*
· 793+ Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. This includes at least 146 children.**
· 3,558 Lebanese killed and more than 15,123 wounded by Israeli forces since October 8, 2023***
· Israel revised its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,189.
· Israel recognizes the death of 890 Israeli soldiers, policemen and intelligence officers and the injury of at least 5,065 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 November 21, 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 November 21, 2024.
*** This figure was released by the Lebanese Health Ministry, updated on November 21, 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
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It’s Movement Time
It’s movement time.
As the Trump presidency take shape, there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. Disbelief meshes with despair, and some are quite frankly desolate.
Dry your tears, blow your noses, and join movements of resistance to this madness. Blacks in America have never known a time when resistance wasn’t necessary, including life under a Black president.
For centuries for generations, people have had to struggle for freedom, for respect, for justice. Why should this time be any different?
The ancestors, like the revered Frederick Douglass, lambasted Abraham Lincoln as a fool or coward who wouldn’t fight the civil war with thousands of willing Black troops. Said Douglass, “if there is no struggle, there is no progress.” Said Douglass, “Power concedes nothing without demand.”
So let us struggle. Let us build movements that lift our hearts. Let us remake our history with the brick and mortar of struggle.
—Prison Radio, November 21, 2016
https://www.prisonradio.org/commentary/it-is-movement-time/
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
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We need a united, independent, democratically organized mass movement for peace, justice and equality in solidarity with similar movements worldwide if we are to survive the death agony of capitalism and its inevitable descent into fascism and barbarism before it destroys the world altogether!
—Bonnie Weinstein
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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:
Write to:
Leonard Peltier 89637-132
USP Coleman 1
P.O. Box 1033
Coleman, FL 33521
Note: Letters, address and return address must be in writing—no stickers—and on plain white paper.
Sign our petition urging President Biden to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier:
https://www.freeleonardpeltier.com/petition
Email: contact@whoisleonardpeltier.info
Address: 116 W. Osborne Ave. Tampa, Florida 33603
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Beneath The Mountain: An Anti-Prison Reader (City Lights, 2024) is a collection of revolutionary essays, written by those who have been detained inside prison walls. Composed by the most structurally dispossessed people on earth, the prisoner class, these words illuminate the steps towards freedom.
Beneath the Mountain documents the struggle — beginning with slavery, genocide, and colonization up to our present day — and imagines a collective, anti-carceral future. These essays were handwritten first on scraps of paper, magazine covers, envelopes, toilet paper, or pages of bibles, scratched down with contraband pencils or the stubby cartridge of a ball-point pen; kites, careworn, copied and shared across tiers and now preserved in this collection for this and future generations. If they were dropped in the prison-controlled mail they were cloaked in prayers, navigating censorship and dustbins. They were very often smuggled out. These words mark resistance, fierce clarity, and speak to the hope of building the world we all deserve to live in.
"Beneath the Mountain reminds us that ancestors and rebels have resisted conquest and enslavement, building marronage against colonialism and genocide."
—Joy James, author of New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency
Who stands beneath the mountain but prisoners of war? Mumia Abu-Jamal and Jennifer Black have assembled a book of fire, each voice a flame in captivity...Whether writing from a place of fugivity, the prison camp, the city jail, the modern gulag or death row, these are our revolutionary thinkers, our critics and dreamers, our people. The people who move mountains. —Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
Filled with insight and energy, this extraordinary book gifts us the opportunity to encounter people’s understanding of the fight for freedom from the inside out. —Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag and Abolition Geography
These are the words each writer dreamed as they sought freedom and they need to be studied by people inside and read in every control unit/hole in every prison in America. We can send this book for you to anyone who you know who is currently living, struggling, and fighting
Who better to tell these stories than those who have lived them? Don’t be surprised with what you find within these pages: hope, solidarity, full faith towards the future, and most importantly, love.
Excerpt from the book:
"Revolutionary love speaks to the ways we protect, respect, and empower each other while standing up to state terror. Its presence is affirmed through these texts as a necessary component to help chase away fear and to encourage the solidarity and unity essential for organizing in dangerous times and places. Its absence portends tragedy. Revolutionary love does not stop the state from wanting to kill us, nor is it effective without strategy and tactics, but it is the might that fuels us to stand shoulder to shoulder with others regardless. Perhaps it can move mountains." —Jennifer Black & Mumia Abu-Jamal from the introduction to Beneath The Mountain: An Anti Prison Reader
Get the book at:
https://www.prisonradiostore.com/shop-2/beneath-the-mountain-an-anti-prison-reader-edited-by-mumia-abu-jamal-jennifer-black-city-lights-2024
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Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky
In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries.
Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin:
“To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?”
Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine.
A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism.
To sign the online petition at freeboris.info
—Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024
https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine.
Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky
We, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison.
Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles.
The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested.
On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release.
The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison.
The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences.
There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering.
Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course.
We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally.
We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.
Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky
https://freeboris.info
The petition is also available on Change.org
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*Major Announcement*
Claudia De la Cruz wins
Peace and Freedom Party primary in California!
We have an exciting announcement. The votes are still being counted in California, but the Claudia-Karina “Vote Socialist” campaign has achieved a clear and irreversible lead in the Peace and Freedom Party primary. Based on the current count, Claudia has 46% of the vote compared to 40% for Cornel West. A significant majority of PFP’s newly elected Central Committee, which will formally choose the nominee at its August convention, have also pledged their support to the Claudia-Karina campaign.
We are excited to campaign in California now and expect Claudia De la Cruz to be the candidate on the ballot of the Peace and Freedom Party in November.
We achieved another big accomplishment this week - we’re officially on the ballot in Hawai’i! This comes after also petitioning to successfully gain ballot access in Utah. We are already petitioning in many other states. Each of these achievements is powered by the tremendous effort of our volunteers and grassroots organizers across the country. When we’re organized, people power can move mountains!
We need your help to keep the momentum going. Building a campaign like this takes time, energy, and money. We know that our class enemies — the billionaires, bankers, and CEO’s — put huge sums toward loyal politicians and other henchmen who defend their interests. They will use all the money and power at their disposal to stop movements like ours. As an independent, socialist party, our campaign is relying on contributions from the working class and people like you.
We call on each and every one of our supporters to set up a monthly or one-time donation to support this campaign to help it keep growing and reaching more people. A new socialist movement, independent of the Democrats and Republicans, is being built but it will only happen when we all pitch in.
The Claudia-Karina campaign calls to end all U.S. aid to Israel. End this government’s endless wars. We want jobs for all, with union representation and wages that let us live with dignity. Housing, healthcare, and education for all - without the lifelong debt. End the ruthless attacks on women, Black people, immigrants, and LGBTQ people. These are just some of the demands that are resonating across the country. Help us take the next step:
Volunteer: https://votesocialist2024.com/volunteer
Donate: https://votesocialist2024.com/donate
See you in the streets,
Claudia & Karina
Don't Forget! Join our telegram channel for regular updates: https://t.me/+KtYBAKgX51JhNjMx
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) Dozens of Hong Kong Pro-Democracy Leaders Jailed Up to 10 Years in Mass Trial
The 45 defendants, including Joshua Wong, were at the forefront of the opposition movement crushed by Beijing. Many had already been in jail for years.
By Tiffany May, Reporting from Hong Kong, Published Nov. 18, 2024, Updated Nov. 19, 2024
People leaving the court following the sentencing. Credit...Chan Long Hei/Associated Press
Anywhere else, it wouldn’t have been controversial: a public vote by pro-democracy activists trying to strengthen their hand in legislative elections, to decide who should run. More than 600,000 people took part in the peaceful, unofficial poll.
But this was Hong Kong, just after the imposition of a national security law by Beijing, and officials had warned that even a straw poll would be taken as defiance.
On Tuesday, the price of defying Beijing was made clear. Forty-five former politicians and activists who had organized or taken part in the 2020 primary by the opposition camp were sentenced by a Hong Kong court to prison, including for as long as 10 years.
The sentences were the final step in a crackdown that cut the heart out of the city’s democracy movement, turning its leaders into a generation of political prisoners. Among them were veteran politicians, former journalists and younger activists who had called for self-determination for Hong Kong.
In a courtroom that had to be created just to accommodate them, the 45 defendants sat shoulder to shoulder on Tuesday on long benches, behind a glass partition and flanked by police officers. A judge read their sentences aloud, referring to them not by their names but by their numbers on a list. The hearing was over in half an hour.
It was the most forceful demonstration of the power of a national security law Beijing imposed on Hong Kong in response to months of large protests against Chinese rule in 2019.
The court sentenced Benny Tai, 60, a legal scholar and opposition strategist, to 10 years in prison. Twenty opposition politicians and activists were given terms ranging from five to nearly eight years. Joshua Wong, 28, a prominent pro-democracy activist, was among 24 others whose sentences ranged from just over four to just under five years.
Gwyneth Ho, 32, a former journalist who was known for covering a mob attack on antigovernment demonstrators trapped in a subway station, was sentenced to seven years for running as a candidate. She had refused to plead guilty.
“Our true crime for Beijing is that we were not content with playing along in manipulated elections,” said a statement posted on Ms. Ho’s Facebook account, apparently by her supporters, on Tuesday after the sentencing. “We dared to confront the regime with the question: will democracy ever be possible within such a structure? The answer was a complete crackdown on all fronts of society.”
The trial made clear that any form of dissent or criticism, however moderate, carried significant risk, analysts said. “If you are being critical of the authorities both in Hong Kong and in China, then it’s open season,” said Steve Tsang, a Hong Kong-born political scientist and director of the SOAS China Institute in London.
The ruling Communist Party in China says the law is needed to purge threats to Beijing’s sovereignty, but human rights activists, scholars and Western governments have said that it has eroded Hong Kong’s once-vaunted judicial independence.
Even before their sentences were handed down, many of the defendants, who were arrested in early 2021, had already been in jail for nearly four years, as they awaited and then stood trial. That was because the law has made it harder for defendants to be released on bail, which in most nonviolent cases is routinely granted.
Instead of a jury, the case was heard by three judges handpicked by the city’s Beijing-backed leader, as allowed by the law.
“The authorities wanted to show the public that they have the power to bring a big group of people to trial all at once,” said Patrick Poon, a visiting researcher at the University of Tokyo who studies freedom of expression in Hong Kong and China. “They want to show residents that anyone who tries to protest like this group of people will receive their same fate.”
Prosecutors accused the defendants of “conspiracy to commit subversion,” a national security offense, arguing that the objective of the election primary was to “undermine, destroy or overthrow the existing political system and structure of Hong Kong.”
The outcome of the primary made clear that the residents who voted favored candidates who were prominent supporters of the 2019 antigovernment demonstrations. The pro-democracy camp argued that the primary vote was little different from others held in democracies around the world. The hope was to maximize the camp’s chances of gaining more seats in a legislative chamber that already heavily favors the Beijing-backed establishment.
But they never had a chance to test the plan: The election was postponed, and most of the candidates were arrested.
Mr. Tai, the legal scholar who was sentenced to 10 years, had designed the electoral strategy, and prosecutors deemed him a mastermind. Mr. Tai had long been involved in efforts to persuade China to live up to a promise that has been central to Hong Kong since its 1997 return to Chinese control: that its residents would someday get to choose their own leaders. In 2014, he was one of the leaders of the Occupy Central movement that brought the city’s central business district to a halt in a peaceful call for freer elections.
Other defendants included Leung Kwok-hung, a 68-year-old activist known as Long Hair for his unkempt mane, who was sentenced to six years and nine months; Claudia Mo, 67, a veteran former lawmaker, sentenced to four years and two months; and Lam Cheuk-ting, 47, a former anti-corruption investigator, sentenced to six years and nine months.
Mr. Tai and 30 other defendants had pleaded guilty. The court convicted 14 of them in May and acquitted two others.
Outside, hundreds of people waited in line to enter the gallery, braving a downpour and a heavy security presence around the courthouse, including an armored vehicle, police cars and barricades. Several dozen police officers were stationed on every street corner along the whole block.
As she left the courthouse, Elsa Wu, the mother of Hendrick Lui, one of the defendants, unfurled a poster in protest of the sentencing. Several police officers led her away into a police van and tried to slide the door shut.
“Tell me, why does he have to go to prison?” she called out, beating her fist. Mr. Lui was sentenced to more than four years in prison. “He is a political prisoner. He shouldn’t be in prison. He is a good person. Why does he have to be in prison?” she said.
Thomas Kellogg, the executive director of the Georgetown Center for Asian Law, said he thought the case would be seen by many in the international community as the “final nail in the coffin for the rule of law in Hong Kong.”
Despite the prospect of more prison time, some defendants were simply anxious for the trial that had left their lives in limbo to come to a conclusion, according to friends who had visited them.
Emilia Wong, a gender rights activist, said in an interview ahead of the sentencing that her boyfriend, Ventus Lau, an organizer of the 2019 antigovernment protests, had been studying toward a degree in translation. She said she had been regularly visiting him in detention for the past three years, but it was clear the isolation was taking a toll on him.
“The scary thing about prison is not being locked up in one place. It is the loss of connection with people and society that is scary. To him, it was painful,” she said.
David Pierson and Berry Wang contributed reporting.
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2) Robots Struggle to Match Warehouse Workers on ‘Really Hard’ Jobs
The machines can load and unload trucks, move goods and do other repetitive tasks but are stymied by some, like picking items from a pile.
By Peter Eavis, Reporting from Nashville and Columbus, Ohio, Nov. 19, 2024
Loading packages at the warehouse near Nashville. Amazon’s overall human work force outnumbers its robots by two to one. Credit...Stacy Kranitz for The New York Times
In the outbound dock of an Amazon warehouse near Nashville, a robotic arm named Cardinal on a recent day stacked packages, Tetris-style, into six-and-a-half-foot-high carts. Then Proteus, an autonomous platform, moved the carts to the loading bay, flashing electronic eyes designed to make the robot more appealing to human colleagues.
As robots become more capable, they are performing an increasing number of tasks in warehouses and delivery centers with varying degrees of aptitude and speed. Machines can load and unload trucks. They can place goods on pallets and take them off. Robots can shift items around in inventory, pick up packages and move goods on warehouse floors. And they can do all this without a human minder guiding their every move.
Yet, even though robots are starting to take over some repetitive and cumbersome jobs, there are still many tasks they are not good at, making it difficult to know when or if robots will be able to fully automate this industry.
Despite the rise in automation, warehouses remain big employers of humans. Federal data show that nearly 1.8 million people work in this corner of the supply chain. While that number is down 9 percent from its peak in 2022, when logistics companies went on a hiring spree to handle the pandemic e-commerce boom, it is still up more than 30 percent since early 2020.
There are many crucial, simple tasks that humans are far better at. They can reach into a container of many items and move some out the way to extract the piece they want, a task industry officials refer to as picking. Robotics engineers struggle to say when their creations will be able to do that fast enough to be viable replacements for human workers.
Artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI have served up impressive services that can quickly produce writing, images and videos that can seem to be the work of skilled professionals. But in warehouses brimming with the wares of the modern economy, advances in automation have been slower. There, robots often struggle to master skills most humans can do without much trouble.
Sparrow, one of Amazon’s most advanced robotic arms, performs “top-picking,” taking the item at or near the top of a container. Amazon says that Sparrow can manipulate over 200 million items of different sizes and weights, but that it is not adept at “targeted picking” — rummaging around many items to get one that might be buried or obscured.
“That’s a really hard job,” said Tye Brady, chief technologist at Amazon Robotics. “I’m not saying it’s impossible. That’s kind of the next frontier.”
There are “more that we have not adopted than ones that we have,” said Sally Miller, the global chief information officer at DHL Supply Chain, referring to robots. The DHL division she works for operates warehouses for other companies and has deployed 7,000 robots globally.
Among the rejected: an autonomous forklift capable of stacking boxes at heights that DHL, which is based in Bonn, Germany, decided was too slow.
Ms. Miller said she was frustrated to see venture capital recently rushing into robots that resemble people, a category of machines known as humanoids. Such machines have long been the robotic holy grail in science fiction and in the visions of some technology executives. But to Ms. Miller, they aren’t ready for warehouse work, and she would prefer that engineers develop devices that can handle specific tasks well, quickly and affordably.
One big motivation to automate is the high turnover of warehouse employees. The work is often physically demanding and pays modest wages. Less-skilled warehouse workers earn around $16 to $17 an hour. Among the lower-paid jobs are truck unloaders, who grab boxes and move them onto conveyor systems.
That job can now be done with a robotic arm called Stretch, developed by Boston Dynamics, an automation company.
A Stretch working at an inbound dock of a DHL-run facility in Columbus, Ohio, recently reached deep into the back of a tightly packed truck and steadily removed boxes filled with apparel. A warehouse employee who oversees Stretch referred to it as “he” and spoke fondly of his ability to pick up dropped packages.
Ms. Miller said Stretch can unload roughly twice as many boxes per hour as humans.
She declined to say how much Stretch cost, but said: “It doesn’t call in sick, and it can work for several hours. It’s a great solution.”
Stretch can do the work of four to six workers over two shifts, DHL said, and the company has moved workers whose tasks are now being done by the robot to other jobs in different parts of the warehouse.
Some executives said their aim was to have robots do all the monotonous tasks.
“Menial, mundane, repetitive tasks will be replaced by automation,” Mr. Brady of Amazon said. “That may freak people out, but it’s going to allow people to focus more on what matters.”
Amazon has over 750,000 robots in its operations. While it does not disclose a specific number for warehouse employees, the company had 1.55 million employees at the end of September, up from 800,000 in 2019. Many work in fulfillment centers.
In the outbound dock in Nashville where Cardinal and Proteus operate, there were still scores of employees at work. But Amazon did not say how many people worked in the bay before the introduction of the two robots and how many work there today.
Amazon says deploying robots creates new jobs that involve overseeing and maintaining the machines. But the number of such workers does not appear to be large. On a recent tour of the company’s Nashville facility, a manager said there were around 100 such jobs, out of 2,500 people at the center. An Amazon spokesman said such facilities typically had 200 robot maintenance employees.
Amazon’s robots do seem to be helping it process more parcels with fewer employees.
Mr. Brady said a new Amazon warehouse in Shreveport, La., using its latest technology, including an automated inventory management system called Sequoia, appeared capable of processing packages 25 percent faster and 25 percent more cheaply than the one in Nashville. Like Nashville, Shreveport will have 2,500 employees.
The structured, predictable environment of a warehouse makes it easier for robots to operate. Devising a robot that can find its own way around a warehouse at relatively slow speeds is easier than building autonomous cars that have to navigate ever-changing city streets.
At DHL’s delivery center in Columbus, bin-carrying robots called Locus had no trouble sidling up to human pickers, who handed pieces of apparel to the machines, which transported them to the packaging station. Ms. Miller said Locus and similar devices were designed to reduce the amount of walking pickers do.
Robotics engineers say A.I. technologies have helped them make progress.
Marc Segura, president of the robotics division at the Swiss company ABB, said a client wanted to enable a goods-sorting robot to identify and avoid bulky items. Using A.I., the machine taught itself what such items looked like and now avoids them, he said.
Sometimes the advances don’t rely on cutting-edge technologies.
Fox Robotics makes autonomous forklifts that can unload pallets from trucks and place them on the loading dock floor.
Customers wanted the forklifts to be able to place pallets on rolling conveyors so they could be moved more quickly to their destination. But the pallet created a blind spot that prevented the forklift from seeing whether a conveyor had enough open space. On its latest machines, the company overcame that problem by adding more sensors, effectively expanding the forklift’s vision.
“Once we had those sensors, doing the actual placing on conveyor was trivial,” said Peter Anderson-Sprecher, chief technology officer and a co-founder of Fox Robotics.
Karen Weise contributed reporting from Nashville.
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3) Where Glaciers Melt, the Rivers Run Red
As the glaciers of South America retreat, the supply of freshwater is dwindling and its quality is getting worse.
By Mitra Taj, Photographs and Video by Marco Garro, Nov. 19, 2024
Reported from the Cordillera Blanca in Peru, with support from the Pulitzer Center.
Alicia Leyva draws water from the Rio Negro, another contaminated river in the Andes, in Canrey Chico.
Dionisia Moreno, a 70-year-old Indigenous farmer, still remembers when Shallap River, nearly 13,000 feet up in the Cordillera Blanca, brought crystal clear water brimming with trout to her village, Jancu. “People and animals alike could drink the water without suffering,” she said. “Now the water is red. No one can drink it.”
At a glance the river looks like a casualty of mining pollution; Peru is a major producer of copper, silver and gold, and the waters near abandoned mines often run a shade of rust. But the culprit is climate change. The Cordillera Blanca mountain range harbors the world’s largest concentration of tropical glaciers, which are particularly sensitive to rising temperatures and are a major source of freshwater in Peru.
For thousands of years, the glaciers were replenished with ice in the winter. But they have shrunk by more than 40 percent since 1968, uncovering rocks that, when exposed to the elements, can trigger chemical reactions that leach toxic metals into the water and turn it acidic.
The process, known as acid rock drainage, “creates a cascade reaction that pollutes water sources,” said Raúl Loayza, a biologist at Peru’s Cayetano Heredia University who researches water quality in the Andes. “It’s a big problem and is getting worse and worse.”
Deglaciation above Lake Shallap, the headwaters of Shallap River, has exposed more than 380 acres of the Chicama Formation, which is rich in pyrite, an iron sulfide. As meltwater trickles across the rocks, the pyrite transforms into iron hydroxide and sulfuric acid, a corrosive chemical that releases heavy metals from the rock into the meltwater, Dr. Loayza said.
Pure water has a neutral pH of 7; Lake Shallap now has a pH of less than 4, nearly as acidic as vinegar. It also contains lead, manganese, iron and zinc at levels that surpass environmental quality standards, according to Peru’s National Institute of Glacier and Mountain Ecosystem Research, or Inaigem.
Health authorities have declared Shallap River and several other acidified streams off-limits for human consumption. But most villages continue to use it for crops, even though it does not meet water quality standards for agriculture. Farmers say it can cause some plants to wither.
Acid rock drainage can degrade ecosystems and corrode infrastructure. Juan Celestino, 75, the husband of Ms. Moreno, said that when the trout first disappeared from Shallap River, villagers thought that someone had dumped pollution into it. “We didn’t think that it was the river itself,” he said. That the problem stemmed from shrinking glaciers was not reassuring. “What can we do?” he added. “Who can help us?”
To identify hot spots, Dr. Loayza and other scientists used satellite images to analyze the spectrum of sunlight reflected by glacial lakes. Their model has identified 60 lakes in the Cordillera Blanca that are highly acidic. Inaigem has confirmed acid rock drainage in five of the eight glacial gorges it has tested so far. “There are areas we’re aware of that are very affected and others where the process is just beginning,” said Yeidy Montano, a scientist with the institute.
Meltwaters are most acidified, and most laden with heavy metals, in the high Andes, where the glaciers are actively melting. Indigenous villages at these elevations are the most vulnerable, and, being small, tend to lack influence with authorities who might help secure access to cleaner alternatives.
“These places in the Cordillera Blanca are a time bomb for highland people, for their way of life, for ecosystems,” Dr. Loayza said.
With help from a local nonprofit, the village of Canrey Chico, which sits on the Rio Negro, another rust-red river, built a system of ponds and canals planted with native reeds to raise pH levels and reduce heavy metals in water drawn from the river. But provincial government officials abandoned an effort to expand it.
Vicente Salvador, the farmer who had promoted the effort, died of gastric cancer in 2021. “His main source of drinking water came from the river,” his son, Joel Salvador, 45, said. “On our land, we don’t have access to spring water.”
Springs have long been seen as cleaner sources of water than rivers in the Andes, but some are drying up, and others now contain heavy metals. “We suspect that groundwater will also be affected in the long term by acid rock drainage,” said Francisco Medina, a research director with Inaigem.
Sixto León, 59, a farmer from the village Cacapaqui, said that in the past year the spring water that his family consumed started to taste sour. “A lot of us have been having stomachaches,” he said.
At first, the melting of the glaciers brought an abundance of water. But research has shown that watersheds in the Cordillera Blanca have since passed “peak water,” meaning that less water is now trickling down in the dry season.
The quality of the water that remains is increasingly threatened by acid rock drainage. In recent years, leaching has been detected on the rocks above Lake Palcacocha, the headwaters of the watershed that supplies drinking water for Huaraz, the regional capital. The lake has maintained an alkaline pH of around 7.5, but scientists say it will probably turn acidic as the glaciers above it continue to retreat.
The two other watersheds that flow into the city were already turning acidic. EPS Chavin, the utility company that provides water for Huaraz, stopped drawing on one of them in 2006 after manganese, a metal that can be toxic to the nervous system, was detected. But with water in shorter supply, the company plans to build a $10 million treatment plant to process acidified waters with heavy metals.
“It’s more complicated to treat, and more expensive,” said María Marchena, a manager at the company. “But the situation is very critical and will become more so every year.”
By 2030, Inaigem anticipates that glaciers in the Cordillera Blanca below 16,000 feet will have disappeared. “That is going to leave a large surface of minerals exposed,” Ms. Montano said.
One peak, Pastoruri, has already shed so much of its ice that it no longer qualifies as a glacier. Tourists once flocked to the mountain to ski, camp and climb its slopes. Today, meltwater gathers there in reddish pools that resemble open wounds.
Ms. Moreno said she longed for the abundance of her youth, when trout could be plucked from the river, thick snow and ice covered the peaks, springs gushed from the mountainside and grasses for grazing livestock grew waist-high.
Sometimes, she said, she thinks that the evangelical Christians who have spoken to her about the end of the world may be right. “They say the glaciers will disappear, and the rivers will run red,” she said. “That’s coming true.”
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4) Biden Agrees to Supply Ukraine With Anti-Personnel Mines
The decision is the latest in a series of moves by the U.S. and Russia that have escalated tensions between the two.
By Andrew E. Kramer and Helene Cooper, Nov. 20, 2024
A Ukrainian soldier outside Toretsk, in October. The Biden administration has approved supplying Ukraine with anti-personnel mines to bolster defenses against Russia’s increasing reliance on foot soldiers to lead their assaults. Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
The Biden administration has approved supplying Ukraine with American anti-personnel mines to bolster defenses against Russian attacks as Ukrainian front lines in the country’s east have buckled, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Wednesday.
The decision is the latest in a series of moves by Russia and the United States related to the war in Ukraine that have escalated tensions between the two.
The White House recently granted permission to Ukraine to fire longer-range American missiles at targets in Russia, which the Ukrainians did for the first time on Tuesday. Moscow in response formalized a new doctrine lowering the threshold for when it would use nuclear weapons.
Mr. Austin said the U.S. decision was prompted by Russia’s increasing reliance on foot soldiers to lead their assaults, instead of armored vehicles. Mr. Austin, speaking to reporters while traveling in Laos, said the shift in policy follows changing tactics by the Russians. Because of that, Ukraine has “a need for things that can help slow down that effort on the part of the Russians,” Mr. Austin said.
“They’ve asked for these, and so I think it’s a good idea,” Mr. Austin said.
The move is also noteworthy because it is part of a series of late actions taken in the waning weeks of the Biden presidency to bolster Ukraine. President Biden in the past has sought to calibrate American help for Ukraine against his own concern about crossing Russian “red lines” that could lead to direct conflict between Washington and Moscow.
But since the Nov. 5 election that will bring former President Donald J. Trump back to the White House, Biden administration officials have said the potential benefits of the actions outweigh the escalation risks.
The announcement came on a day of increased anxiety in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, and across the country. The United States closed its embassy in Kyiv, warning of a “significant air attack,” as Ukraine and the West brace for more intensive assaults by the Russians.
Mines in general have been devastatingly effective in the war in Ukraine, and Russia has made extensive use of them. The mines are planted by hand but can also be scattered remotely with rockets or drones behind opponents’ lines, to catch soldiers as they move to and from positions, a tactic that can assist an offensive.
Land mines, however, have been most effective in defense. A broad belt of dense minefields in southern Ukraine stymied a Ukrainian counteroffensive in the summer of 2023 and gravely wounded a large but undisclosed number of Ukrainian soldiers.
Most anti-personnel mines are small explosives about the size of a hockey puck that are triggered by the pressure of a footstep.
The Biden administration’s decision came despite widespread condemnation of mines by rights groups that cite their toll on civilians, which can stretch for years or decades after conflicts end as the locations of minefields are left unmarked or forgotten. Ukraine is already the most heavily mined country in the world, according to the United Nations.
Most countries, but not the United States and Russia, are signatories of a convention banning the use or stockpiling of land mines, the 1997 Ottawa Treaty. Ukraine is a signatory to the agreement.
In a report released in October, the United Nations said that since 2022, 407 Ukrainian civilians have died and 944 were wounded by mines and unexploded ordnance.
An investigation by the rights group Human Rights Watch in 2023 pointed to the use of rocket-dispersed land mines by Ukrainian troops near the eastern town of Izium in 2022. Ukraine’s foreign ministry said it would investigate the allegation. As the United States is not a signatory, it is not obliged to refrain from supplying land mines to other countries.
A spokeswoman for the Ukrainian ministry of defense did not respond to a query on the decision to transfer American land mines to Ukraine.
Russia has seeded mines throughout vast swaths of Ukraine since 2014 as front lines have swayed over forests, farm fields and villages. It has also set many so-called victim-activated booby traps, such as explosives rigged to detonate when a car door is opened, a category of weapon also prohibited in the mine ban treaty.
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5) U.S. Vetoes Gaza Cease-Fire Resolution at U.N. Security Council
The United States, which has blocked four other resolutions, said it vetoed the most recent version because it did not make the release of hostages a precondition for a truce.
By Farnaz Fassihi, Nov. 20, 2024
Robert A. Wood, the American ambassador to the U.N., raising his hand to veto a draft resolution calling for a cease fire in Gaza, on Wednesday at UN headquarters in New York City. Credit...Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The United States on Wednesday vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for an immediate and unconditional cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, where fighting has entered a 14th month and a humanitarian crisis is intensifying.
Fourteen Security Council members voted for the resolution, while only the United States voted against it.
The United States said it vetoed the resolution, the fifth the Council has taken up, because it did not make the cease-fire contingent on the release of the hostages held in Gaza. The resolution does call for the release of all hostages, but the wording suggests that their release would come only after a cease-fire were implemented.
The veto was the fourth time the United States blocked an effort by the Council to demand a cease-fire since the war began over a year ago, when Hamas led an attack on Israel and took more than 200 people hostage. More than 40,000 people have been killed in Gaza over the course of the war, according to the local health authorities, and a U.N.-backed panel warned that the territory faces the risk of famine.
The veto comes as Washington has been working for months to help negotiate a cease-fire between the parties and a deal to release the hostages. About 100 hostages remain in Gaza, and the Israeli authorities believe that around a third are dead.
“We could not support an unconditional cease-fire that failed to release the hostages,” said Robert A. Wood, an American ambassador to the United Nations. “These two urgent goals are inextricably linked. This resolution abandoned that necessity."
The resolution called for an immediate and unconditional cease-fire, the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, increased and unhindered delivery of humanitarian aid and for all parties to enable the battered Palestinian aid agency UNRWA to carry out its work in the territory.
The resolution was put forth by 10 nonpermanent members of the Security Council: Algeria, Ecuador, Guyana, Japan, Malta, Mozambique, Republic of Korea, Sierra Leone, Slovenia and Switzerland.
“It is a sad day for the Security Council, for the United Nations and for the international community,” said Algeria’s ambassador, Amar Bendjama. He said the 14 members who supported the resolution had spoken for the wider international community.
The draft resolution was negotiated for weeks, Guyana’s ambassador, Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, said ahead of the vote. She said the Council needed to respond to concerns “over the catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza,” and particularly the dire situation in northern Gaza.
The Security Council, whose permanent members are divided over the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, has struggled to speak in one voice and play an effective role in mediating or ending these conflicts. The United States’ staunch support for Israel, and the resulting deadlock over Gaza in the Council, has generated criticism and frustration from the wider U.N. membership, including from some of America’s closest allies, the permanent council members Britain and France.
The Council has tried to bring the war in Gaza to the table for action in the past year with multiple resolutions. The United States blocked three previous resolutions calling for a cease-fire and release of hostages saying at the time that Israel had the right to defend itself and it was not yet time for the war to end.
Russia and China vetoed an American resolution in March that called for “an immediate and sustained cease-fire,” in a vote in which Algeria joined them and Guyana abstained. That month, the United States abstained from voting on a resolution that called for a temporary halt to the fighting for the month of Ramadan.
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6) Giraffes, in Steep Decline, Now Need Protection, U.S. Officials Say
A new proposal would restrict the import of hunting trophies, pelts, bone carvings and other items.
By Catrin Einhorn, Nov. 20, 2024
About 117,000 wild giraffes are left worldwide, according to the Giraffe Conservation Foundation, down almost 30 percent from the 1980s. Credit...Steve Allen/Shutterstock
The tallest land animals in the world are declining so precipitously that they should be protected under the United States Endangered Species Act, federal wildlife officials said Wednesday.
While giraffes are found in Africa, the proposal would restrict the import of their parts into the United States and would increase conservation funding to help the animals survive.
In 2022, the last year for which international data was available, thousands of giraffe parts entered the United States: trophies, skins, feet, bones, bone carvings and leather pieces. Although trade is not the main reason for giraffes’ population losses, officials say it could add pressure on their numbers. The proposal would prohibit such imports without special permits.
“This action supports giraffe conservation while ensuring the United States does not contribute further to their decline,” Martha Williams, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said in a statement.
About 117,000 wild giraffes are left worldwide, according to the Giraffe Conservation Foundation, down almost 30 percent from the 1980s.
Northern giraffes have declined an estimated 77 percent since 1985, the wildlife service noted, to 5,919 animals from 25,653. The animals have vanished completely from numerous countries in West Africa.
It’s unclear what the election of Donald J. Trump would mean for the proposal, which will be open for public comment for 90 days and is supposed to be finalized within a year. It was during the last Trump administration that federal officials decided to consider listing giraffes as threatened or endangered, in response to a petition by advocacy groups.
The wildlife service attributed plummeting giraffe populations to habitat loss, as people take over land for urbanization and agriculture, poaching and the impacts of drought fueled by climate change. Without addressing these main drivers, conservationists say, little progress can be made.
Scientists do not entirely agree on the number of species and subspecies of giraffes. In its proposal, the agency recognized three subspecies of Northern giraffes, all of which it said should be listed as endangered. Two other varieties, reticulated and Masai giraffes, would be considered threatened, a less acute category. Two more subspecies, the Angolan and South African giraffe, were not found to be threatened but would be treated as such because they are so similar to the imperiled species that it would be all but impossible for law enforcement to tell them apart.
Advocacy groups petitioned for federal protections in 2017, after the scientific authority on the status of species, the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List, determined that giraffes were threatened with extinction. (It considered giraffes as a single species.)
“We actually realized that there are fewer giraffes in Africa than elephants,” said Tanya Sanerib, international legal director with the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups that petitioned the federal government. “The species had been undergoing a silent extinction.”
There is a split among conservationists over whether trophy hunting helps or hurts threatened species. Supporters say the practice creates important economic incentives to sustain them. Opponents call it cruel and say it can exert problematic pressure on populations because hunters tend to target the largest and most impressive looking animals. Each side accuses the other of perpetuating a colonialist mind-set.
The planet’s biodiversity is experiencing declines that are unparalleled in human history, an intergovernmental panel of scientists found in 2019. The main driver on land: humans taking up so much of the planet for agriculture and other development. At sea, it’s overfishing. Climate change is an increasing threat.
Countries around the world have agreed to a set of ambitious targets to halt and reverse biodiversity loss, but recent talks ended without an agreement on how to mobilize and distribute funds necessary for the effort.
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7) Palestinians welcome the I.C.C. warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant.
By Raja Abdulrahim and Bilal Shbair, November 21, 2024
The International Criminal Court arrest warrants accusing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza brought some rare hope to Palestinians on Thursday.
“We felt some peace in our hearts upon hearing the news,” said Husam Skeek, a community and tribal leader from Gaza City. He said, “We welcome it greatly and we urge countries to implement this decision and hope that America does not use its influence to prevent the implementation of this decision.”
The court also issued an arrest warrant for Hamas’s military chief, Muhammad Deif, accusing him, too, of crimes against humanity. Israel has said that it killed Mr. Deif in an airstrike, but the court said it could not confirm whether he was dead.
If Mr. Deif is found to have violated international law, then he should be prosecuted as well, Mr. Skeek said — “though I don’t think he did,” he added.
Layan Shoashaa, a 20-year-old student of multimedia graphics from Gaza City, embraced the news of the warrants for the two Israeli leaders, but with reservations.
“This war has made it clear that the balance of power heavily favors Israel and its allies, not us,” she said at a cafe in the city of Deir al-Balah, where her displaced family has been staying. “I cannot see this as a historic step, for justice delayed is justice denied.”
Still, she said, any step taken against the two Israeli leaders brought “a glimmer of hope.”
Some hoped the news might spell the end of the war in Gaza, which began after the Hamas-led attack on Israel a little more than a year ago. Rami Moleg, a 44-year-old father of four, described himself “very pleased.”
“I hope this means the war is coming to an end,” he said. “Netanyahu has been under internal pressure already, and I hope this adds huge international pressure that would lead him to quit or be toppled.”
As long as Mr. Netanyahu is in charge, the war will continue, Mr. Moleg believes. But he said he thought Mr. Deif was probably dead.
“I don’t care much about his future or the future of Hamas,” he said. “I care about my own future and the future of my children.”
Ahmed Jarbou, 23, who was hanging out with a group of friends in Deir al-Balah, said he doubted that much good would results from the warrants.
“Palestinians have seen countless resolutions in our favor from the Security Council, yet nothing tangible ever comes of them,” he said. “I fear this might just be another empty gesture. But I still hold a small hope that it leads to action soon, perhaps even a temporary cease-fire to ease the dire situation in Gaza.”
Abu Bakr Bashir contributed reporting.
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8) What ‘Mass Deportation’ Actually Means
By Dara Lind, Nov. 21, 2024
Ms. Lind is a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.
Yael Martinez/Magnum Photos
If you didn’t think they were serious before, you certainly ought to know better now.
Donald Trump’s team has construed his victory as a mandate for carrying out what it has described as mass deportations. Even before Mr. Trump announced a nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security, he named Stephen Miller, an immigration hard-liner, as deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser, and Tom Homan (who was the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during part of Mr. Trump’s first term) as a White House-based czar to oversee “all deportation of illegal aliens back to their country of origin.”
It is tempting to assume that after his first term and four more years of planning, Mr. Trump and his administration will find no obstacles to impose their will swiftly and completely.
But that’s not true. No executive order can override the laws of physics and create, in the blink of an eye, staff and facilities where none existed. The constraints on a mass deportation operation are logistical more than legal. Deporting one million people a year would cost an annual average of $88 billion, and a one-time effort to deport the full unauthorized population of 11 million would cost many times that — and it’s difficult to imagine how long it would take.
So the question is not whether mass deportation will happen. It’s how big Mr. Trump and his administration will go, and how quickly. How many resources — exactly how much, for example, in the way of emergency military funding — are they willing and able to marshal toward the effort? How far are they willing to bend or break the rules to make their numbers?
The details matter not only because every deportation represents a life disrupted (and usually more than one, since no immigrant is an island). They matter precisely because the Trump administration will not round up millions of immigrants on Jan. 20. Millions of people will wake up on Jan. 21 not knowing exactly what comes next for them — and the more accurate the press and the public can be about the scope and scale of deportation efforts, the better able immigrants and their communities will be to prepare for what might be coming and try to find ways to throw sand in the gears.
Understand, first of all, that no change is needed to U.S. law to start the deportation process for every unauthorized immigrant in the United States. Being in the country without proper immigration status is a civil violation, and deportation is considered the civil penalty for it. Just as he did during his first term, Mr. Trump will almost certainly issue guidance to Immigration and Customs Enforcement that every unauthorized immigrant is fair game for arrest, and that deportable immigrants who happen to get caught up by ICE, even if agents aren’t specifically looking for that person, could also be detained.
ICE agents already have authority to conduct enforcement in residential and commercial areas; the reason they usually haven’t (even under Mr. Trump) is because those raids take a lot of planning for the frequently low numbers of people they actually nab. It requires far less effort to simply pick up immigrants from local jails, which is why ICE tends to prefer working with local law enforcement. Since some local police are more willing to cooperate than others, this makes deportation risk a matter of geography.
But the arrest of immigrants isn’t the same as their removal.
For most immigrants — those who haven’t been apprehended shortly after their arrival — deportation isn’t a quick process. It generally entails the right to a hearing before an immigration judge, to prove that the immigrants lack legal status and that they can’t apply for relief (such as asylum). In the meantime, they’re either released on supervision or held in immigration detention.
In fiscal year 2024, Congress gave ICE the money for 41,500 detention beds. This is insufficient for anything that would constitute mass deportation. Extra holding facilities can be spun up as needed, but not immediately — and at higher cost (because of, say, noncompetitive contractor bids) than building a detention facility the usual way.
Immigration courts are famously backlogged, not least because that’s where asylum-seekers end up to present their cases. (An initial screening at the border can weed out some asylum claims, but frequently — especially under the Biden administration — bottlenecks at the screening stage can get fixed by skipping people straight to the no-less-bottlenecked immigration court stage.) As of the end of September, 3.7 million people were waiting for their claims to be resolved. This includes an overwhelming majority of the recent border crossers whose arrival under President Biden so incensed Mr. Trump and his allies. They can try to rush their court cases through faster (though they’ll need people, meaning money, to do it), but there’s not much juice to squeeze in rounding up people who are already, legally speaking, in deportation proceedings.
The only people who can be both easily rounded up and deported without a court hearing are those who have already been ordered removed from the United States but are allowed to stay if they come in for regular check-ins. Indeed, those were some of the first people targeted in 2017. The problem there — and a problem for any mass deportation operation — is that many of these people were not immediately deported because their countries had not agreed to accept deportation flights from the United States, or had limited the number of deportees they would accept. Mr. Trump has no problem using any diplomatic cudgel available to get other countries to cooperate on immigration enforcement. But it’s going to be tricky to argue simultaneously that, say, the United States is in some sort of conflict with Venezuela that would somehow allow for the deportation of its nationals through the activation of the Alien Enemies Act (which requires a declared war or an “invasion” or “predatory incursion” by a foreign government), and also that Venezuela must bend the knee and allow large numbers of deportation flights onto its soil.
Who gets targeted first — who is most at risk in the days after a second Trump inauguration — will depend in part on which of these problems the administration tackles first. If Trump officials get a diplomatic breakthrough with a country previously deemed recalcitrant, expect large numbers of people to get arrested at their ICE check-ins and deported under existing removal orders. If they don’t, expect deportations to be limited to countries that are generally already willing to take U.S. removal flights (like Mexico, Guatemala, Peru). People with prior contact with the criminal justice system are politically appealing targets, but if they haven’t already been deported, it may be because their cases are complicated and will need to be worked out in court. People who have a form of legal status that has lapsed, or legal protections that the Trump administration might try to strip, such as Temporary Protected Status, may be easy to find but won’t be quick to remove.
Many Trump critics are liable to wave off such considerations, because they assume that a second Trump administration will have no problem breaking the law en masse to deport large numbers of people. Even if true, that doesn’t exempt them from the logistical realities: beds in detention, seats on planes.
That this mass deportation will happen with no legal restraints, accountability or oversight is by no means a premise to be granted without contest. Because resigning oneself in advance to a maximalist vision of mass deportation helps accomplish the same goal: making immigrants feel they have no choice but to leave the United States.
There are two previous occasions in which the U.S. federal government can be said to have engaged in mass deportation — around the 1930s and the 1950s. Both entailed horrific conditions for those caught and deported, and the tearing apart of families with claims to both the United States and other countries. But in both cases, the federal government ultimately took credit for “deporting” some people it never actually laid hands on — those who had been pressured or terrorized into leaving.
In the 1930s, high-profile raids in Los Angeles didn’t net that many immigrants to deport — the real impact was in sending the message that raids might happen, leading some immigrants to pick up and leave and many more to stay home and out of the public eye. In 1954 and 1955, the so-called Operation Wetback probably arrested and removed fewer immigrants than had been removed the year before — historians think of it as a retroactive P.R. campaign for the previous year’s efforts, but one that had effects of its own. In the first month of Operation Wetback, one historian estimates, 60,000 immigrants left Texas voluntarily — about as many as the government apprehended throughout the country per month.
For those who believe the United States will be better off if every unauthorized immigrant leaves the country — no matter how many native-born U.S. citizen children they have to take with them to keep families together or how many American communities are surveilled and disrupted for years — making people afraid enough to deport themselves is a convenient and low-cost way to do it.
Conversely, those who do not wish to see millions of people leave the United States under coercion during a second Trump administration should do what they can to prevent that reality. That starts with a committed and cleareyed understanding of what is actually happening, and a willingness to treat abuses of power as a rupture and an aberration — something that can, and should, be fought.
They can document and communicate when the government is breaking the law; pressure state and local officials to refuse to collaborate with federal removal efforts by refusing to share information, and especially by objecting to deployment of the military or National Guard in their states’ territory; and support efforts to provide legal representation to immigrants.
This work will require, particularly for those who are not themselves immigrants, a promise not to let pessimism do the Trump administration’s job for it. The government will do things that hurt people. It will do things that look scary.
But how many people will be caught up in a deportation machine, and how quickly, is by no means a settled question — and it’s one that a public sympathetic to immigrants should continue to care about the answer to.
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9) Police in New Jersey’s Capital Violate Residents’ Rights, U.S. Finds
Officers in Trenton have caused the deaths of innocent people, a Justice Department report found, citing a fatality that occurred after officers pushed a man’s face into the ground.
By Christopher Maag, Published Nov. 21, 2024, Updated Nov. 22, 2024
A report by the Justice Department found that the police in Trenton, N.J., systematically violated residents’ rights. Credit...Matt Rourke/Associated Press
Police officers in Trenton, N.J., systematically violate the constitutional rights of the city’s residents, conduct illegal searches and needlessly escalate peaceful interactions into violence, the U.S. Department of Justice found in a report published Thursday.
Even as former prosecutors and experts in civil rights law question whether President-elect Donald J. Trump will suspend federal efforts to reform police departments around the country, a yearlong investigation by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and Philip R. Sellinger, the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, documented several cases in which the police in Trenton had caused the deaths of innocent people.
In one event described in the 45-page report, police officers encountered an unarmed man as he ran shirtless around a hospital parking lot. The officers pepper-sprayed him, tackled and handcuffed him and then took turns pressing their knees into his back as they pushed his face into a patch of mulch.
The man cried, “I can’t breathe,” and, “I’m going to die.” After more than four minutes, he grew still, the report said. Doctors later pronounced him dead. The man was not identified, but the details match the case of Stephen Dolceamore, 29, of Springfield, Pa., which was reported by NJ Advance Media. He died on April 3, 2020, seven weeks before George Floyd was murdered by police officers in Minneapolis.
“As I read through the report, it broke my heart,” said the Rev. Charles Boyer, a pastor with the Greater Mount Zion A.M.E. Church in Trenton. “It also made me angry. But it was no surprise.”
Police officers in Trenton regularly commit illegal stops, searches and arrests of pedestrians and drivers, the report found, and use physical force and pepper spray indiscriminately. Those practices are exacerbated by the department’s leadership, which actively discourages residents from filing complaints about police abuses and “ignores officer misconduct in plain sight,” the report found.
“Trenton police escalate encounters and use force when there is no threat of harm to officers or others,” Kristen Clarke, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, said at a news conference on Thursday. “This behavior not only violates the Constitution and inflicts serious injuries, but it also sows distrust and undermines law enforcement’s mission to keep the community safe.”
Trenton is New Jersey’s capital, a city of 90,000 people where 84 percent of the population is Black or Latino, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The Police Department employs 350 people, including about 260 officers. The city’s leaders cooperated with the inquiry and allowed federal investigators to accompany Trenton police officers on the street.
“We know of the complaints they were investigating,” Reed Gusciora, the mayor of Trenton, said in an interview on Thursday. “We take people’s constitutional rights seriously, and we look forward to addressing the U.S. attorney’s concerns.”
It is customary for incoming presidents to replace sitting U.S. attorneys, especially when the new president is from a different political party. On Thursday, Mr. Sellinger declined to comment on his career plans for after Jan. 21, the day after Mr. Trump’s inauguration. But he expressed confidence that his office would continue to negotiate a consent decree on police reform in Trenton even after he left office.
“Our expectation is that the work on this investigation and promoting a remedy will continue under the next administration,” Mr. Sellinger said.
Others believe the era of police reform is already over. Mr. Trump’s opposition to the practice was well established during his first term, when the Department of Justice initiated only one investigation into a local police force, fewer than under any president since the process for such investigations was created by the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in 1994.
Under Mr. Biden, the Justice Department opened 12 investigations into law enforcement practices. Mr. Trump and his appointees at the Department of Justice will inherit these, as well as 16 settlements reached between local law enforcement agencies and previous administrations.
During his latest campaign for president, Mr. Trump vowed to reverse course.
“We will give our police back their power, protection, respect that they deserve,” Mr. Trump said at a rally in October in Charlotte, N.C., during which he accused Democrats of going to war against law enforcement. Karoline Leavitt, a campaign spokeswoman for Mr. Trump who has been named the next White House press secretary, did not respond to messages seeking comment on Thursday.
“What we saw when Trump was president is clearly a good indicator for what may happen in the next four years,” said Alex del Carmen, a criminology professor at Tarleton State University in Fort Worth, Texas, who has worked to oversee implementation of consent decrees with two police departments.
With only eight weeks to go before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, the Justice Department has most likely run out of time to forge a consent decree with Trenton that would win the necessary support of the city’s elected officials, community members and the police union, said Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor who is now a law professor at Georgetown University who studies race and policing.
“It’s game over for consent decrees for the next four years,” Mr. Butler said.
The end of federal oversight for local police departments may not be the end of reform efforts nationwide. Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union may be able to poach experienced federal prosecutors who quit or are fired by the Trump administration, Mr. del Carmen said, as could some state attorneys general.
Such efforts might achieve results more quickly than federal investigations, which tend to drag on for years, Mr. del Carmen said. Of the 12 efforts that began under Mr. Biden, only five have published reports of their findings. None has produced a final consent decree signed by a federal judge.
“I think it’s preferable to have enforcement like this done by the attorney general because they’re local, and they understand the culture and the people far better than the Department of Justice can,” said James E. Tierney, a former attorney general of Maine and a lecturer at Harvard Law School.
On the other hand, Mr. Butler said, a patchwork of efforts by attorneys general will leave citizens in some states with no protection from abusive police practices.
“If the Department of Justice shuts down its civil rights division, it’s also a tremendous loss,” Mr. Tierney said. “It sends a green light to malfeasance everywhere, all over the country.”
In New Jersey, the Trenton case could be taken up by Matthew Platkin, the state’s attorney general, who took direct control of the Police Department in the city of Paterson last year. Michael Symons, a spokesman for Mr. Platkin, declined to comment on whether the office was planning to pursue a consent decree with Trenton if the Trump administration did not do so.
“I would love Platkin to get involved,” Mr. Boyer, the pastor, said. “I consider him a friend.”
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10) Israeli Strike in the Heart of Beirut Kills 11
Israel was targeting a senior Hezbollah commander, but failed to kill him, one Israeli official said. Hezbollah officials said none of the group’s leaders were at the attack site.
By Ronen Bergman, Liam Stack and Christina Goldbaum, Nov. 23, 2024
The site of an Israeli strike in Beirut’s Basta neighborhood on Saturday. Credit...Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times
An Israeli airstrike on a residential building in central Beirut killed at least 11 people on Saturday, the Lebanese Health Ministry said, part of an intensifying Israeli military campaign that appears aimed at pressuring Hezbollah into a cease-fire deal.
The strike was an attempt to assassinate a top Hezbollah military commander, Mohammad Haidar, according to three Israeli defense officials who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive military operations. Hezbollah officials on Saturday afternoon said that none of the group’s leaders were at the site of the airstrike, and later in the day, one of the Israeli officials said Mr. Haidar was not killed.
Over the past week, Israeli ground troops made a concerted push deeper into southern Lebanon while Israel intensified its bombardment of the Dahiya, a cluster of neighborhoods on the southern outskirts of Beirut that are effectively governed by Hezbollah.
The death toll in the latest strike was expected to rise, and at least 63 people were injured, according to the Health Ministry. The strike came just after 4 a.m., jolting Beirut residents awake with thundering explosions that left much of the city enveloped in acrid smoke. It was the third strike this week in central Beirut, an area that had largely been spared since the war between Hezbollah and Israel escalated.
Lebanon’s health minister, Firass Abiad, said the airstrike hit a multistory building that was believed to house at least 35 people in the Basta neighborhood of Beirut, an area that is home to both Sunni and Shiite Muslims and close to several Western embassies. Hezbollah is a Shiite militant group and Shiite communities in southern and eastern Lebanon have borne the brunt of Israeli attacks over the past few months.
The war in Lebanon has killed more than 3,500 people and forced almost a quarter of the population to flee their homes. Some Shiites who fled the Dahiya have taken refuge in Basta, according to residents of the area.
“There was no prior warning,” Mr. Abiad said of the Basta strike in a phone interview. “It appears there are still bodies under the rubble.”
A crowd of onlookers and rescue workers gathered outside the blast site. Among them were Iman Ismael, a refugee from Syria, and her 10-year-old son, who were waiting for news about four relatives who had lived in the destroyed building.
“They are still missing,” she said. “God, please let them survive.”
The building was just three doors down from another building that Israel bombed last month in an attempt to kill another senior Hezbollah official. Zainab Rummu, 54, said the strike in October had felt like “the end of the world” and forced residents to repair their damaged homes and neighborhood. Now they would have to do it again.
“We thought it was over. No more danger,” she said. “Now where can I go?”
Later on Saturday morning, Israel issued new evacuation warnings for the Dahiya.
The new wave of attacks on Lebanon came as Israel and Hezbollah appeared to be inching toward a cease-fire deal.
An Israeli official said Friday that there was “cautious optimism” about prospects for a truce in negotiations mediated by the United States, though Lebanese officials were less sanguine about a deal. Both Israel and Hezbollah have said they will keep fighting as negotiations go on.
Heavy fighting was reported overnight in the southern Lebanese town of Khiam which the Israeli military has been attempting to encircle in recent days, according to Lebanon’s state-run news agency. Hezbollah said on Friday that it had repeatedly attacked Israeli forces in and around the large town, which lies around three miles from the Israeli border.
Israel began an intensified military campaign against Hezbollah in September in response to almost a year of near-daily rocket attacks on northern Israel. Hezbollah said the attacks were in solidarity with its ally, Hamas, in Gaza. Both armed groups are back by Iran.
Israel said it was going to war in Lebanon to stop the rockets and to allow tens of thousands of displaced Israelis to return to their homes in northern towns that were evacuated last year. But the rocket attacks have not ceased, and those residents have been unable to return home.
The war has become the bloodiest conflict inside Lebanon since the country’s 15-year civil war, which ended in 1990.
Euan Ward, Ben Hubbard and Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.
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11) In West Bank Raids, Palestinians See Echoes of Israel’s Gaza War
West Bank residents say Israeli forces are adopting tactics similar to the ones they are deploying in Gaza, including airstrikes and the use of Palestinians as human shields.
By Raja Abdulrahim and Azmat Khan, Photographs by Sergey Ponomarev, Nov. 24, 2024
Raja Abdulrahim reported from Jenin; Azmat Khan from Tubas, Faraa, Tulkarm, Jenin and Ramallah; and Sergey Ponomarev from Jenin and Tulkarm, all in the occupied West Bank.
Nasir Damaj at his house in Jenin, West Bank, in September. He recalled being used as a human shield by Israeli soldiers.
The Israeli soldiers grabbed his arms on each side, Nasir Damaj recalled, marching him through the streets to the blown-out shell of a mosque.
A shaft led to an old underground cave. As they ordered him to climb down, Mr. Damaj said he realized why: He was being used as a human shield.
“They wanted me to scout what was downstairs, to protect them,” Mr. Damaj said.
He said he protested, but the three soldiers and their commander, assault rifles in hand, forced him to investigate what the Israelis later called “an underground combat facility.”
“Be careful,” Mr. Damaj recalled the commander telling him as the soldiers handed him a drone so they could survey the cave. “Don’t break it. It’s expensive.”
The episode, which was corroborated by witnesses, did not take place in Gaza, where Israeli forces have illegally forced Palestinians to carry out dangerous missions to avoid risking the lives of Israeli soldiers in the war there.
It happened in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where, residents say, Israeli forces are adopting tactics similar to the ones they are deploying in Gaza, including airstrikes and the use of Palestinians as human shields.
The 10-day Israeli raid in Mr. Damaj’s densely packed hometown, Jenin, was part of a broader military offensive into Palestinian areas that began in late August and signaled an intensification of Israeli offensives in the West Bank.
Before Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Israeli airstrikes on the West Bank were relatively rare, experts said, with only a few confirmed cases.
But during the raids in Jenin and other Palestinian areas beginning in August, the Israeli military reported carrying out about 50 airstrikes on the West Bank.
More than 180 people have been killed in airstrikes on the territory in the past year, including dozens of children, according to the United Nations and the Palestinian human rights group Al Haq. The Israeli military declined to provide a death toll, but contended that “98 percent” of the people killed in airstrikes were “involved in terrorist activities.”
The strikes have caused extensive damage to roads, electricity networks and water and sewage lines. Local, international and United Nations humanitarian workers say Israel has disrupted their relief efforts, while videos verified by The New York Times appear to show Israeli bulldozers blocking emergency vehicles from passing. (The Israeli military said it operated in accordance with international law.)
Instead of calling them raids, residents, aid workers and some experts have likened what is happening in the West Bank to a war.
“We call Jenin a small Gaza,” said Saleem Al-Sade, a member of a local neighborhood council.
As he walked through a neighborhood known as Jenin camp, which started as a refugee camp for Palestinians displaced from their homes in what is now Israel, he pointed out the constant sound overhead of Israeli drones that carry out surveillance and airstrikes.
“It’s a Gazafication of the northern part of the West Bank,” said Nadav Weiman, the director of Breaking the Silence, an advocacy group made up of former Israeli soldiers who say they are collecting testimonies from soldiers who took part in the raids in Jenin and another city, Tulkarm.
Raids into Palestinian areas of the West Bank have become common since the Oct. 7 attacks last year. Beyond the armed drones, bulldozers have ripped up the roads, which the Israeli military says is to unearth explosives buried beneath the pavement.
But the strikes in the past few months were some of the most extensive and deadly in the West Bank in two decades.
The Israeli military described the raids as a “counterterrorism operation” to crack down on Palestinian armed groups and to combat rising attacks against Israelis, including shootings and attempts to set off car bombs. The violence has accompanied a surge in attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank by Israeli settlers who often operate with impunity.
In its operations in the West Bank, the Israeli military said it had killed or detained dozens of fighters, confiscated explosives and destroyed command and control centers. It added that it carried out airstrikes “in situations where arrests cannot be made due to real risk to the forces.”
The military’s actions in the West Bank were long shrouded in secrecy, but experts said Israel had largely refrained from conducting airstrikes on the territory since the end of the second intifada, nearly 20 years ago. At times, Israel used attack helicopters in select operations, but experts said that happened in only a few cases that they knew of over the two decades.
The Israeli military’s deployment of armed drones appeared to have been exceedingly rare. Palestinian reports of it emerged in 2022, but only a few cases were confirmed before Oct. 7, 2023.
Since then, Israeli forces have carried out dozens of strikes in northern areas of the West Bank, largely concentrated in the cities and towns of Jenin, Tulkarm, Nablus and Tubas.
In visits to Jenin, Tubas and Tulkarm, The Times encountered multiple accounts of Palestinians being forced to perform potentially dangerous missions for Israeli soldiers. The destruction from blasts was widespread, leaving families grappling with the losses of their loved ones in rapid succession.
Israeli forces conducted an airstrike on Aug. 26 in the Nur Shams refugee camp in Tulkarm on what it described as an “operations room,” killing five people, including a 15-year-old, Adnan Jaber, whom Israel accused of manufacturing explosives.
“Immediately, the Israeli news announced they had killed a terrorist,” said Aysar Jaber, Adnan’s father. “But he was a young kid, not a terrorist.”
His son had been taking classes to become a barber, Mr. Jaber said. “He had about two weeks left, and he was killed.”
On Aug. 28, an Israeli aircraft struck what the military said were militants in an alleyway in the Faraa refugee camp. Residents recounted how a home was hit, as well, killing two brothers, Muhammad Masoud Muhammad Naja, 17, and Murad Masoud Muhammad Naja, 13, and critically injuring a third brother and the boys’ father.
In September, the Israeli military said its aircraft had struck “terrorists who hurled explosives and shot at the security forces” and had “eliminated” a person “armed with an explosive device.”
Residents said that Israeli soldiers had shot Majed Fida Abu Zeina, 17, and had fired upon ambulances that tried to rescue him, ultimately using a bulldozer to dump his body outside the camp.
“The soldiers are doing whatever they want,” said his mother, Amal Abu Zeina.
The raids in Jenin and other cities over 10 days killed 51 people, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians. Seven children were among those killed, according to the United Nations.
On the morning of Aug. 28, when Israeli forces launched their raids into Jenin, Tulkarm and Tubas, Israel’s foreign minister at the time, Israel Katz, posted on social media, “We must deal with the threat just as we deal with the terrorist infrastructure in Gaza.”
Human rights groups and aid workers are warning about what they call the dangerous parallels.
“We all have this sense that the pattern of Gaza, the modus operandi, is being applied in the West Bank, and it’s very worrisome,” said Allegra Pacheco, who leads a consortium of Western-backed aid groups in the West Bank.
“The current Israeli government’s objectives in the West Bank aim to force Palestinians out of targeted areas using the same Gaza type of massive force, weaponry and destruction,” she added.
U.N. officials, warning of “lethal warlike tactics” in the West Bank, tried to get into Jenin to carry out an assessment but were denied access by the Israeli authorities, the U.N. spokesman Stéphane Dujarric said in September.
During the raids, Mr. Damaj’s mother, Amal Damaj, 48, said, “I was so afraid.”
She added, “These are the most intense raids I’ve ever seen, I’ve ever experienced.”
Once in the cave, Mr. Damaj recounted how the only light came from the drone in his hands.
From above, the commander watched the live feed on an iPad and yelled out instructions on where to go and what to approach, Mr. Damaj said.
Seemingly satisfied that it was safe, the three soldiers and the commander joined Mr. Damaj in the cave and interrogated him, demanding to know the location of members of armed Palestinian groups.
“I don’t know; I don’t get involved,” Mr. Damaj said he told them.
“‘You’re a liar; you’re living in the neighborhood of the terrorists,’” he said the commander yelled at him. “‘Speak the truth or I’m going to shoot you in the legs.’”
After more than two hours, he said, they let him go. The next day, the Israeli military returned and blew up the cave.
In response to questions about two cases involving the use of human shields in Jenin, including Mr. Damaj, the Israeli military said, “The incidents mentioned in the inquiry appear to contradict I.D.F. orders.” It added that it did not have enough information to confirm or deny whether the episodes took place.
It did confirm an action involving the cave, however, saying “an underground combat facility located beneath a mosque was destroyed.”
In 2005, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that the military’s use of civilians as human shields violated international law and banned the practice.
“You cannot exploit the civilian population for the army’s military needs, and you cannot force them to collaborate with the army,” Ahron Barak, then chief justice, wrote in the ruling.
But Palestinians in the West Bank say the practice never stopped.
Ahmed Bilalo said Israeli forces had given him a lighter and ordered him to torch the strings holding up the curtained tarps above the narrow alleyways of Jenin camp, which fighters often use to obscure themselves from view.
“If I said, ‘No,’ I knew they would beat me up,” he said.
Mr. Weiman, who leads Breaking the Silence, the advocacy group of former Israeli soldiers, said the overall military approach being used in the West Bank was known as the “Dahiya doctrine,” a reference to Israel’s flattening of the Dahiya, the collection of neighborhoods in southern Beirut that is a Hezbollah stronghold, during its 34-day war in Lebanon in 2006.
The tactic creates disproportionate damage to civilian infrastructure and is aimed at trying to cause so much damage and destruction that civilians turn against armed groups in their areas, he said.
“That kind of pressure wasn’t imposed on villages and towns in the West Bank until very recently,” he said.
The Israeli military rejected his assessment, saying, “The claim that the I.D.F. deliberately causes harm to civilian infrastructure is false.” Instead, it has long accused Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups of embedding themselves in civilian areas.
The day after the Israeli military forced Mr. Damaj into the cave, it returned and ordered Khalid Salih, 59, a school attendant, and his wife to leave their home before it was blown up, the couple said.
The mosque above the cave had already been destroyed by an airstrike, killing four people, according to residents. Israel’s military said at the time that it was targeting an underground “terror compound” beneath the mosque being used by Hamas and Islamic Jihad to organize an imminent attack.
Aseel Mustafa Salih, who is married to Mr. Salih’s nephew and lived in an adjacent apartment, was asleep at home with her husband and two young children when the mosque was struck.
“I woke up and thought our house was the one that was struck,” she said, adding that the airstrike broke some of their windows.
Downstairs, Mr. Salih and his wife were thrown from their beds and across the room from the blast, he said.
Half an hour after the Oct. 22 strike, Ms. Salih said, she received a text message from the Israeli military instructing her to leave the area: “You are in a place that is not safe.”
Hiba Yazbek and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.
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12) Donald Trump’s Theory of Power Is More Power for Donald Trump
By David French, Opinion Columnist, Nov. 24, 2024
These are the times that try a constitutional conservative’s soul.
Donald Trump and his allies have proposed two legal maneuvers that could have profound consequences for the function of the federal government. He has proposed confirming presidential appointments through an abuse of his power to make recess appointments, and his allies have proposed reviving a mostly banned practice called impoundment, under which the president can refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress.
These proposals together would gut core constitutional functions of Congress and could make Trump our nation’s most imperial peacetime president.
You can’t fully comprehend how pernicious these proposals are without knowing Congress’s intended role in our republic. If you read the Constitution carefully, you see that the United States was not intended to have coequal branches of government. Instead, it is clear that the branch of government closest to the people, Congress, was given more power than any other.
While other branches can check Congress’s power — the president can veto bills and the Supreme Court can use the power of judicial review to invalidate statutes passed by Congress, to give the most obvious examples — Congress’s enumerated powers surpass those of both the president and the court.
Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution says, “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives.” This constitutional provision is particularly important, given that in the original Constitution the House was the only part of the federal government chosen directly by the people. The power of the purse is inseparable from democratic rule.
Congress has the sole constitutional power to declare war, even if presidents frequently usurp that authority. It can fire the president, executive officers and judges through impeachment and conviction. It can override presidential vetoes, and the Senate can reject presidential appointees.
But if Trump gets his way, he will have the power to nullify congressional enactments, even if they’re passed with veto-proof majorities. He’ll destroy the Senate’s advice and consent authority. He’ll make the executive the most powerful branch of government by far, creating a version of monarchical government that the founders despised.
In Federalist No. 1, Alexander Hamilton warned that “of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.” A similar pattern is playing out here — claiming a popular mandate, Trump is now threatening to further diminish American democracy.
In one version of a Trump recess plan, Trump could pressure the Republican majority in the Senate to agree with the House to adjourn, granting Trump the ability to make immediate recess appointments. This is the clear message of Trump’s post on the subject on Truth Social. He wants the Republican leader to agree to an adjournment, thus forfeiting the Senate’s constitutional role.
But if the Senate holds firm, Trump theoretically has another option. He could conspire with the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, to request that Congress enter into a recess. If the Senate refuses a recess, then he’ll rely on Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution — which provides that the president can adjourn Congress “to such time as he shall think proper” if the two chambers disagree about the timing of a recess — and then use his constitutional power to make recess appointments without the Senate‘s advice or consent.
The recess appointments wouldn’t be permanent. They’d lapse at the beginning of the next congressional term, but he could have his handpicked team for up to two years, and there is nothing the Senate could do about it, at least according to Trump’s theory.
The founders never intended for Article II, Section 3 to permit the president to shut down Congress and name his cabinet without Senate approval. Recess appointments were created to permit presidents to fill vacancies when Congress was out of session in a large nation, when travel was often slow and difficult.
When legislators were traveling by horseback to Washington, permitting recess appointments made a degree of sense. It could be weeks before Congress could assemble. But now it takes hours, less when they assemble online.
There is no meaningful question about whether Trump’s scheme violates the spirit of the Constitution. Advice and consent exists precisely because the founders believed that a president should not possess unchecked power to name his team.
In Federalist No. 76, Hamilton wrote that the advice and consent power is “an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the president, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from state prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity.”
In fact, a key purpose of the power is to prevent the confirmation of exactly the kind of obsequious yes men with whom Trump surrounds himself. Hamilton warned against the selection of nominees who have “no other merit” than “being in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure.”
Trump’s potential scheme violates the letter of the Constitution as well. In a 2014 case called National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected President Barack Obama’s recess appointment of three members of the National Labor Relations Board. A majority of the court held that even when the Senate was in a mere “pro forma” session — when no formal business was conducted — it was not technically “in recess,” and thus the recess appointment power wasn’t available to the president.
Four members of the court, however, went further. In a persuasive concurrence, Justice Antonin Scalia argued that the recess appointments clause covered only the space between congressional sessions, not breaks within the session. Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas all joined with Scalia.
According to this reasoning, even if Trump engineered a disagreement between the House and the Senate and forced a recess, his recess appointment power wouldn’t attach because the recess occurred after the congressional term started.
Yes, that’s a concurrence — and concurrences aren’t binding law — but the current court’s jurisprudence is far more aligned with Scalia’s than it is with that of Justice Stephen Breyer, the author of the Canning majority. It is highly unlikely that a Roberts-led court would abandon Scalia’s logic and rubber-stamp an obvious end-run around one of the Senate’s core constitutional powers.
Now let’s talk about impoundment. During earlier periods of American history, presidents would sometimes refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress. This process, which came to be called impoundment, could give presidents the ability to nullify acts of Congress, even if the act passed with a veto-proof majority.
Imagine that Congress passed a statute mandating the construction of a new bridge across the Potomac, at a cost of $200 million. If impoundment were a real option, the president could simply choose not to spend the money, block construction of the bridge and frustrate the will of Congress.
American presidents periodically used impoundment to block the use of appropriated funds until 1974, when Congress largely banned the practice through the Impoundment Control Act. The act was passed after Richard Nixon frustrated Congress by impounding funds more than his predecessors, blocking spending for multiple programs across several federal agencies.
The constitutional justification is obvious. It prevents the president from exercising an unconstitutional version of a veto. Nonetheless, in a Wall Street Journal essay last week, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy — the two men Trump named to lead his new Department of Government Efficiency — raised the prospect of reviving impoundment. They suggested it was the Impoundment Control Act itself that was unconstitutional.
Russ Vought, Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget (and the man Trump has chosen to choose to lead the O.M.B. again), is an enthusiastic supporter of impoundment. The Center for Renewing America, which Vought founded in 2021, has published a raft of materials attacking the constitutionality of the Impoundment Control Act.
I very much want to limit the growth of government spending, but not at the expense of our constitutional structure. There is no authority for impoundment in the text of the Constitution. The president’s principal check on Congress is the veto, and the process for vetoes (and for overriding them) is plainly detailed in the text.
One of the reasons American democracy is under duress is that Congress has spent decades abdicating its power to the president. Congressional inaction has created a power vacuum that presidents and courts have been only too eager to fill.
Unilateral executive action elevates the power of the presidency, increases the stakes of each presidential election and sidelines our nation’s most democratic branch of government. According to Trump and his team, however, Congress has not abdicated enough power. They want the president to get the yes men (and women) he wants in government, no matter how corrupt or unqualified. They want the president to block government spending, no matter if Congress has mandated the expenditure.
Trump isn’t in office yet. We don’t know whether he’ll follow through on his threats and try to engineer a recess or impound funds. But his threats are still destructive. He’s trying to cow Congress into becoming an extension of his own will and desires. And if the Republican-led Congress capitulates, the party that long prided itself on constitutional fidelity will become an instrument of its decline.
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13) Immigrants Across U.S. Rush to Prepare for Trump Crackdown
Donald Trump’s promise to carry out mass deportations has driven fearful immigrants to seek protections and advice.
By Miriam Jordan, Nov. 24, 2024
Farmworkers in Riverside County, Calif., who are worried about the immigration crackdown promised by President-elect Trump, met with legal advocates. Credit...Alex Welsh for The New York Times
President-elect Donald J. Trump has vowed to slash immigration — both legal and illegal — and ramp up deportations on Day 1.
Immigrants are racing to get ahead of the crackdown.
Foreign-born residents have been jamming the phone lines of immigration lawyers. They’re packing information meetings organized by nonprofits. And they’re taking whatever steps they can to inoculate themselves from the sweeping measures Mr. Trump has promised to undertake after he is inaugurated on Jan. 20.
“People that should be scared are coming in, and people that are fine with a green card are rushing in,” said Inna Simakovsky, an immigration lawyer in Columbus, Ohio, who added that her team has been overwhelmed with consultations. “Everyone is scared,” she said.
People with green cards want to become citizens as soon as possible. People who have a tenuous legal status or who entered the country illegally are scrambling to file for asylum, because even if the claim is thin, having a pending case would — under current protocols — protect them from deportation. People in relationships with U.S. citizens are fast-tracking marriage, which makes them eligible to apply for a green card.
In total there are about 13 million who have legal permanent residency. And there were an estimated 11.3 million undocumented people in 2022, the latest figure available.
“The election result put me in a state of panic that propelled me to immediately find a permanent solution,” said Yaneth Campuzano, 30, a software engineer in Houston.
Brought to the United States from Mexico when she was 2 months old, she was eligible for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, the Obama-era program that has allowed hundreds of thousands of immigrants who entered the country as children to remain in the country with work permits.
But DACA was a target of Mr. Trump’s during his first term and is being challenged in a lawsuit that could help him end it. Given the program’s precarious state, Ms. Campuzano and her fiancé, an American neuroscientist, have expedited plans to marry. They will wed next month — before Mr. Trump takes office. “Only after my status is secure will I be able to breathe again,” she said.
Voters of both parties were frustrated by chaos at the border under President Biden. Mr. Trump campaigned on a promise of mass deportations, and last week said that he intended to declare a national emergency and use the U.S. military to accomplish his goal. His top immigration policy adviser, Stephen Miller, has said that “vast holding facilities” would serve as “staging centers” for the operation. This week, the state land commissioner in Texas offered the federal government more than 1,000 acres near the border to erect detention centers.
Deportations are not uncommon. Mr. Trump deported about 1.5 million people during his first term, according to analysis by the Migration Policy Institute. President Biden has removed about as many. President Obama removed 3 million in his first term.
But not since the 1950s has the United States sought to deport people en masse, and it has not previously created a vast detention apparatus to facilitate expulsions.
Sergio Teran of Venezuela has legal permanent residency. After five years as a green-card holder, Mr. Teran, 36, who lives in Lakeland, Fla., became eligible for U.S. citizenship in late July. The uncertainty surrounding the election was one of the factors that pushed him to recently apply. “I wanted to do it quickly,” Mr. Teran said.
“I am an upstanding community member,” he said, “but with a green card you can still be deported. I feel much more secure knowing my citizenship is in process.”
In addition to Mr. Miller, the president-elect has tapped other immigration hawks for key roles, including Thomas Homan, a veteran of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to be “border czar.”
Mr. Homan has said that the administration will prioritize the removal of criminals and people with outstanding deportation orders. But he has also said that workplace raids and other tools will be deployed to round up undocumented immigrants, many of whom have lived in the country for decades.
Even in California, whose leaders restricted cooperation with immigration authorities during Mr. Trump’s first term and have pledged to do so again, immigrants are worried about enforcement going into overdrive.
“This time we are more afraid, because of everything Trump says that he will do when he regains power,” said Silvia Campos, an undocumented Mexican farmworker who lives with her husband and three children, two of them U.S. citizens, in Riverside County.
Everywhere she turns, on Spanish-language radio, TV and social media, she said she is slammed with information about his intentions.
“It’s all everyone talks about,” said Ms. Campos, 42, who crossed the border with her husband 18 years ago. “We have to prepare for the worst.”
That is why she asked her manager for the day off from harvesting vegetables to attend a “know-your-rights” session last Tuesday at a nonprofit.
Among the tips: You have the right to remain silent. Only open the door to immigration agents who produce a search warrant from a judge. Do not sign anything without a lawyer. Make a family plan, in case you are detained and separated from your children.
After the session, Ms. Campos completed an affidavit authorizing her children to receive medical attention, if necessary, and to be cared for by her sister, a U.S. citizen, in her absence. She had three copies notarized, and on her return home, she sat down her children, 11, 14 and 17.
“We don’t want to create more fear, but we want them to be ready for anything,” said Luz Gallegos, executive director of TODEC Legal Center, which began holding the sessions, many of them standing room only, after its hotline was clogged with calls following the election.
The organization has been sending teams to brief workers on farms in Southern California’s agriculture-rich corridor that relies on immigrant labor, much of it undocumented. On Thursday morning, all 30 laborers at a farm in Lakeview took a break from picking and packing leafy greens to go to a presentation, the fourth held that day.
In Dallas, Vinchenzo Marinero, 30, a DACA beneficiary, has been frantically exploring avenues to remain in the country lawfully.
Stripped of DACA, he would lose his job, his driver’s license and, perhaps, his three-bedroom house. He has started a family with a fellow DACA beneficiary, and they have a 7-month-old baby.
“Without DACA, I wouldn’t be able to provide for my family,” said Mr. Marinero, who works for a faith-based broadcaster as a systems engineer.
He hopes the company will sponsor him for a skilled-worker visa, but that could not occur until next year. In the meantime, his lawyer advised him to renew his DACA for another two years, even though it expires in June 2025.
“By the time Trump takes office, I hope mine gets renewed so I have two more years,” Mr. Marinero said. “That gives me more time to plan.”
While few university leaders have spoken out about the Trump administration’s immigration strategy, many campuses have been quietly weighing steps to protect their international and undocumented students.
More than 1,700 university administrators and staff attended a webinar on Nov. 15 about how to support them.
“Our message is that the time to act is now,” said Miriam Feldblum, executive director of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, a nonpartisan group of private and public colleges and universities that hosted the event.
Many institutions are considering sponsoring DACA beneficiaries for work visas, she said, which would give them a temporary solution that could eventually put them on the path to permanent legal status. They are seeking to take advantage of new guidance under the Biden administration that has provided faster processing for those who qualify.
A particular concern is the upcoming winter break when many international students may visit their homelands. On his first day in the White House in 2017, Mr. Trump banned people from predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States, creating chaos at airports. It was challenged in court, but a subsequent version of it survived.
The University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has issued a travel advisory to all international students, faculty and staff, urging them to “strongly consider” returning to the United States before Inauguration Day, and said that students could move into their dorms early.
Wesleyan University, a private university in Middletown, Conn., emailed its international students on Nov. 18 with similar advice. It said that being in the country around Jan. 19 was “the safest way to avoid difficulty re-entering the country.”
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14) I Starred in ‘Cabaret.’ We Need to Heed Its Warning.
By Joel Grey, Mr. Grey played the Emcee in the original Broadway production of “Cabaret” and in the motion picture version, for which he won a Tony Award and an Academy Award, Nov. 24, 2024
Archive Photos/Getty Images
This past week marked 58 years since the opening night for the Broadway premiere of “Cabaret” in 1966. At the time, the country was in deep turmoil. Overseas, the Vietnam War was escalating, and at home, our most regressive forces were counterpunching against the progress demanded by the civil rights movement. The composer John Kander, the lyricist Fred Ebb and the playwright Joe Masteroff wrote “Cabaret” in collaboration with the director Harold Prince as a response to the era. The parallels between the rise of fascism in 1930s Berlin as depicted in the show and the mounting tensions of the 1960s in America were both obvious and ominous.
I played the Emcee — the Kit Kat Club’s master of distraction, keeping Berlin mesmerized while Nazism slipped in through the back door. Night after night, I witnessed audiences grappling with the raw, unsettling reflection that “Cabaret” held up to them. Some material was simply too much for the audience to handle. “If You Could See Her,” which has the Emcee singing of his love for a gorilla — a thinly veiled commentary on antisemitic attitudes — ended with the lyric: “If you could see her through my eyes, she wouldn’t look Jewish at all.”
When we first performed it, in Boston, audiences gasped and recoiled. It was too offensive, too raw, too cruel. Producers fretted and the line was changed to “She isn’t a meeskite at all,” softening the blow, yes, but also the impact. I resented the change and would often, to the chagrin of stage management, “forget” to make the swap throughout that pre-Broadway run.
I’m hearing from friends in the current Broadway production of “Cabaret” that the line is once again getting an audible response, but of a different sort. On more than one occasion in the past two weeks — since the election — a small number of audience members have squealed with laughter at “She wouldn’t look Jewish at all.” In the late 1960s, we softened the line because the truth was too hard to hear. Today, it seems the line is playing exactly as the Nazi-sympathizing Emcee would have intended.
My initial assessment, when word first reached me about this unusual reaction, was that these must be the triumphant laughs of the complicit, suddenly drunk on power and unafraid to let their bigotry be known. Now I find myself considering other hypotheses. Are these the hollow, uneasy laughs of an audience that has retreated into the comfort of irony and detachment? Are these vocalized signals of acceptance? Audible white flags of surrender to the state of things? A collective shrug of indifference?
I honestly don’t know which of these versions I find most ominous, but all of them should serve as a glaring reminder of how dangerously easy it is to accept bigotry when we are emotionally exhausted and politically overwhelmed.
The 1960s were a time of social upheaval, but also a time of hope. There was a sense that as a society, we were striving toward progress — that the fight for civil rights, for peace, for equality was a fight we could win. “Cabaret,” with its portrayal of a decadent society willfully ignorant of its own demise, provided a stark counterpoint to that hope. It was a warning against the seductive power of distraction, the dangers of apathy and the perils of looking away when history demands that we look closer.
Now, in 2024, we find ourselves in a different, far more precarious moment. The recent election of Donald Trump to a second term has left many Americans, particularly those who fought so hard against the forces of authoritarianism and hate, feeling drained and disillusioned. There’s a sense that we have seen this show before, that we know how it ends, and that we’re powerless to stop it. Or worse, a sense that even though we are facing dark times they won’t really affect our own day-to-day lives — echoing the tragically shortsighted assessment of so many European Jews in the 1920s and ’30s.
“Cabaret,” with all its humor, spectacle and tunefulness, has always been both the peanut butter and the pill hidden within. It’s an entertainment that seduces us into distraction. “Leave your troubles outside,” the Emcee implores in his opening number. “In here, life is beautiful.” It’s also a cautionary tale that forces us to confront the perils of falling prey to such distractions.
The current revival cleverly ramps up the seduction, staging the show in a fully immersive, champagne-soaked party environment constructed to beguile its audience. Only when the Nazis finally show up do we see how false our velvet-enrobed sense of security has been. We too have chosen not to see what has been directly in front of us.
The democratic election of an authoritarian figure, the normalization of bigotry, the complicity of the frightened masses — none of these are new themes. We have indeed seen this show before, and I fear we do know how it ends. It’s understandable to want to retreat, to find solace where we can, but we cannot afford to look away.
History is giving us another chance to confront the forces that “Cabaret” warned us about. The question is: Will we listen this time, or will we keep laughing until the music stops?
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