Tag: Live

Bitcoin Rebounds After a Massive Tumble: Reside Updates

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Post date May 24, 2021

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Universal Pictures

LOS ANGELES — In February 2020, Universal Pictures used the Super Bowl to light a marketing match under “F9,” the latest installment in the “Fast and Furious” franchise. With any luck, the studio hoped, the movie would roar into theaters a few months later and take in more than $1 billion worldwide, just as a predecessor, “The Fate of the Furious,” did in 2017.

But the pandemic had other plans. Some rival studios hemmed and hawed over their release schedule, but Universal shocked Hollywood in early March 2020 by delaying “F9” for an entire year. “It was a very unpopular decision,” Donna Langley, chairwoman of the Universal Filmed Entertainment Group, said recently in a phone interview. “A lot of people really did not agree with me.”

It was a $350 million-plus decision, between production and marketing costs, and Ms. Langley, like everyone at that stage of the pandemic, was operating in the dark. “It really was a gut call,” she said.

More and more, it looks like the right one: Over the weekend, “F9” arrived in theaters in eight international markets, including China and South Korea, and sold an estimated $162 million in tickets — a blockbuster result that signaled a summer rebound for Hollywood, which was largely reduced to a supplier to streaming services during the pandemic. “F9” collected $135 million in China alone, 33 percent higher than the initial total for “Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw” in 2019. The most-recent film to take in more than $100 million over its first three days in China was Disney-Marvel’s “Avengers: Endgame” in 2019.

Credit…Giles Keyte/Universal Pictures

“F9,” directed by Justin Lin, will arrive in North American cinemas on June 25, the longest delay ever between an overseas Hollywood debut and a domestic one. The reason: Releasing “F9” in China over the weekend allowed Universal to get ahead of the country’s usual summertime blackout on imported movies, which will begin around July 1, the 100th anniversary of the founding of China’s Communist Party. Movie theaters in China are being ordered to screen patriotic films with titles like “The Sacrifice” and “The Red Sun” at that time.

As Hollywood has contemplated how best to rev up moviegoing now that theaters are beginning to operate with some normalcy again, there has been a lot of talk about “the right movie at the right time.” It was not Christopher Nolan’s cerebral “Tenant,” which was released in September by Warner Bros. An old-fashioned monster mash-up, “Godzilla vs. Kong,” drew big crowds last month, but results were depressed because it was simultaneously available on HBO Max.

Could “F9” be the one? It will receive an exclusive run in theaters and features action sequences designed specifically for big screens. One of the film’s cars has an actual rocket engine attached to its roof.

“It feels like a big, beginning-of-summer, school’s-out celebration,” Ms. Langley said of the sequel. It finds Vin Diesel’s marble-mouthed Dom Toretto facing his younger brother Jakob (John Cena), an assassin working with the villainous Cipher (Charlize Theron). Michelle Rodriguez returns as the brooding Letty. Tyrese Gibson, Helen Mirren and Ludacris also star.

Credit…Michele Tantussi/Reuters

Over the weekend, the price of Bitcoin briefly fell to around $31,000, more than 50 percent down from its high last month. It has recovered somewhat and is currently trading at around $37,000.

“About $20 billion of long positions were liquidated last week,” Sam Bankman-Fried, the chief executive of the crypto derivatives exchange FTX, told the DealBook newsletter. “In terms of price movements: the biggest part of it is liquidations,” he said, suggesting the worst is over.

But he also noted news from China late Friday of a crackdown on Bitcoin mining and trading. This added to other news of official scrutiny that has spooked crypto investors in recent days, from Hong Kong, Canada and the United States.

Companies with Bitcoin on their balance sheets may be getting nervous. For accounting purposes, cryptocurrency is valued at its purchase price in company accounts. If it goes up in value, this isn’t reflected in a company’s accounts but if it falls, the value is impaired and puts a dent in quarterly profits. Three big corporate investors in Bitcoin are Tesla, MicroStrategy and Square. Here’s where they stand:

Tesla: The electric vehicle company bought $1.5 billion in Bitcoin last quarter, at an average price of about $34,700 per coin, not far from its current price. Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, has signaled that the company isn’t selling, but it probably isn’t buying, either.

MicroStrategy: The business intelligence software company has spent about $2.2 billion on Bitcoin, at an average price of $24,450. The company bought more last week and is still sitting on big gains.
Square: The payments company, led by the Twitter chief Jack Dorsey, bought two batches of Bitcoin for its treasury — $50 million in October at a price of about $10,600 per coin and $170 million in February at a price of around $51,000. It took a $20 million impairment on its holdings last quarter. It doesn’t plan to buy any more, its finance chief said this month.

Credit…Andrew Boyers/Reuters

Some airlines in Eastern Europe began diverting their planes to avoid Belarus airspace on Monday, a day after that country’s leader sent a fighter jet to force down a Ryanair flight, allowing the authorities to seize an opposition journalist on board.

The shocking move has unleashed a storm of criticism against Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, the Belarus president who has clung to power despite huge protests last year. The European Union is considering penalties against the country.

At least two airlines said that they were diverting flights away from Belarus airspace as a precaution, but most carriers seem to be waiting to be told what to do by the European authorities.

Later in the day, Lithuania’s transport commissioner announced that all flights to and from Lithuanian airports must avoid the airspace of neighboring Belarus, Reuters reported. The minister, Marius Skuodis, said the ban would begin Tuesday at 3 a.m. local time.

Ryanair’s chief executive, Michael O’Leary, on Monday condemned the actions of the Belarus authorities, who ordered the plane, flying from Athens to Vilnius, Lithuania, to land in the Belarus capital of Minsk and then arrested Roman Protasevich, a dissident journalist on board, and his companion.

“This was a case of state-sponsored hijacking, state-sponsored piracy,” Mr. O’Leary told interviewers on Newstalk, an Irish radio broadcaster.

Mr. O’Leary, however, said he was waiting for instructions from European Union authorities in Brussels about whether to steer other flights away from Belarus.

He added that it would be an easy matter for his flights to avoid Belarus. “We don’t fly over Belarus much,” he said. “It would be a very minor adjustment to fly over” Poland instead, he added. Ryanair, a discount airline based in Ireland, describes itself as Europe’s largest airline group.

Some analysts say that the European Union may be reluctant to ban flights over Belarus because such a move would create difficulties for European airlines. Airlines are already avoiding Ukraine, the country’s southern neighbor, because of conflict with Russia, and so putting Belarus air space off limits as well would present serious routing difficulties on flights between Europe to Asia.

“Flying to Asia from Europe without crossing Belarus is likely too costly and challenging,” wrote analysts from Eurasia Group, a research firm, in a note on Monday.

Other airlines, flying shorter routes, are already making changes.

AirBaltic, the Latvian national airline, said that its flights would avoid entering Belarus airspace “until the situation becomes clearer or a decision is issued by the authorities.” The rerouted flights include ones from Riga, the airline’s home base, to Odessa in Ukraine and Tbilisi in Georgia.

Another airline that flies in the area, Wizz Air, said that it would alter the path of a flight from Kyiv in Ukraine to Tallinn in Estonia so as to skirt Belarus.

“We are continuously monitoring and evaluating the situation,” a spokesman for Wizz Air, which is based in Hungary, said.

Credit…Pool photo by Oliver Contreras/EPA, via Shutterstock

The transportation secretary said Monday that the safety of flights operated by U.S. airlines over Belarus should be reviewed after the Eastern European country forced a commercial flight to land in order to seize a dissident on board.

“That’s exactly what needs to be assessed right now,” the secretary, Pete Buttigieg, told CNN. “We, in terms of the international bodies we’re part of and as an administration with the F.A.A., are looking at that because the main reason my department exists is safety.”

The comments came after the authoritarian leader of Belarus dispatched a fighter jet on Sunday to intercept a Ryanair plane carrying the journalist Roman Protasevich. The plane was forced to land in Minsk, the Belarusian capital, where Mr. Protasevich was arrested.

The secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, condemned the forced diversion, saying it was a “shocking act” that “endangered the lives of more than 120 passengers, including U.S. citizens.” And Michael O’Leary, the chief executive of Ryanair, an Irish-based low-cost carrier, called the operation a “state -sponsored hijacking.”

The International Air Transport Association, a global industry group, said Saturday on Twitter, “We strongly condemn any interference or requirement for landing of civil aviation operations that is inconsistent with the rules of international law.” The group called for “a full investigation by competent international authorities.”

Officials in the region also criticized the action. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, called the re-routing to Minsk “utterly unacceptable,” adding that “any violation of international air transport rules must bear consequences.”

Though not a major European hub, Minsk is served by multiple international airlines, including Lufthansa, KLM, Turkish Airlines and Air France. Delta Air Lines and United Airlines offer flights to Minsk through their partnerships with those European airlines as well as through Belavia, the Belarusian national carrier.

Belarus sits between Poland and Russia and also has borders with Ukraine, Lithuania and Latvia, putting it in the path of some flights to and from major European airports.

Credit…Al Drago for The New York Times

Top Federal Reserve officials have made clear in recent days that the central bank will spend this year taking a closer look at the possibility of a digital dollar — a push partly motivated by concerns that private-sector digital coins could come to dominate the payment system.

Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, announced last week that the Fed will issue a discussion paper this summer outlining the benefits and risks of a United States central bank digital currency, which would basically be a digital version of cash. He made clear that the Fed had not decided to issue a digital currency, and that the paper “represents the beginning of what will be a thoughtful and deliberative process.”

Mr. Powell specifically cited stablecoins, digital coins that tie their value to the dollar or another underlying asset, as something that could pose risks to users and to the “broader financial system” because those private currencies “may not come with the same protections as traditional means of payment.” That means the Fed needs to understand how to oversee them.

Lael Brainard, a Fed governor who has paid significant attention to payments issues, fleshed out that message during a speech on digital currencies on Monday. She outlined growing concerns about the possible widespread adoption of stablecoins as something that could fragment the payment system.

“A predominance of private monies may introduce consumer protection and financial stability risks because of their potential volatility and the risk of run-like behavior,” Ms. Brainard said. “Indeed, the period in the 19th century when there was active competition among issuers of private paper banknotes in the United States is now notorious for inefficiency, fraud, and instability in the payments system.”

The Fed has other motivations for exploring the possibility of a digital dollar. Other nations including China are further along in developing central bank digital currencies, and the United States wants to make sure it has a prominent seat at the table as the rules of future cross-border payments are drawn. Digital currencies may have financial inclusion benefits, and even if central banks don’t choose to create their own, they need to understand the technology to regulate and supervise it.

But stablecoins — in particular, Facebook’s Libra project, which has since been renamed Diem — has played a critical role in focusing both the central bank and Congress’s attention on understanding the new technologies, their possibilities and their risks.

Mr. Powell said in testimony last year that Libra was “a bit of a wake-up call that this is coming fast and could come in a way that is quite widespread and systemically important fairly quickly,” highlighting the “importance of making quick progress.”

Credit…Etienne Laurent/EPA, via Shutterstock

After its $100 billion deal to buy Time Warner, and spending millions more to fight a Justice Department lawsuit that delayed the deal, AT&T wants a do-over. This reversal culminated in the announcement last week that it would spin off WarnerMedia, as the former Time Warner is now known, to merge with the reality-TV giant Discovery.

In the three short years since AT&T closed the deal to buy Time Warner, AT&T radically upended the business by cutting staff, angering the talent and firing executives and becoming something of a Hollywood villain. Some of WarnerMedia’s most successful executives, including Richard Plepler of HBO, left or were pushed out. The company cut more than 2,000 jobs.

It could have been different if a phone call in 2016 had come just a few weeks earlier, according to the DealBook newsletter. In October that year, shortly before Time Warner and AT&T first announced their deal, Robert A. Iger, the chief executive of the Walt Disney Company at the time, placed a call to Jeffrey Bewkes, the head of Time Warner, according to two people familiar with those details.

The Disney leader asked Mr. Bewkes if he’d be interested in a possible merger. It was too late, Mr. Bewkes said: There was already something in the works. Mr. Iger wished him well and hung up the phone. Later, Mr. Iger called another media chief in the hopes of forging a deal. It was Rupert Murdoch.

U.S. stocks rose on Monday, with the S&P 500 climbing about 1 percent. Stocks in Europe were little changed.
Belarus government bonds, denominated in dollars, dropped on Monday after the Belarusian government sent a fighter jet to intercept a Ryanair plane traveling through the country’s airspace on Sunday and seized a prominent opposition journalist on board. European officials are considering further penalties against Belarus.

Commodity prices

Metal prices, including iron ore and steel rebar, fell as Chinese officials continued to intervene in what the government sees as excessively high commodity prices.
The National Development and Reform Commission said in a statement on Monday that there would be “zero tolerance” for illegal activities such monopolistic behavior or hoarding after major metal producers were called to a meeting with several Chinese government departments.
Oil prices rose. Futures of West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. crude benchmark, rose 3 percent to $65.47 a barrel.

Company news

Cineworld shares rose in London after the movie theater chain said it had a “strong opening weekend” in Britain thanks to the success of “Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway.” In the United States, 97 percent of the company’s movie theaters are now open, Cineworld said, which operates Regal Cinemas, the second-largest chain in the country after AMC.
Shares in Virgin Galactic soared after Richard Branson’s space plane completed a test flight on Saturday to the edge of space. The company also has more than 600 customers who paid up to $250,000 each for seats on its earliest flights.
Beyond Meat shares jumped after the largest supermarket chain in Britain, Tesco, said on Monday it was introducing a range of frozen meals with Beyond Meat.

Credit…Ben Sklar for The New York Times

While Black business ownership rates nationwide dropped by 41 percent from February 2020 to April 2020 — the largest decline for any racial group — Dexter George watched as 1,200 patrons donated $69,211 to support his 30-year-old enterprise, Source of Knowledge, a bookstore on Broad Street in Newark.

Personal checks and civic grants further steadied the store’s finances.

Unable to secure loans, he used some of the money to reinvest in his 2,700 square feet of retail space.

“At the end of the day, you only fit in a box,” Mr. George, who was born in Tobago, said of putting the money back into the store. “Can’t take it with you.”

Mr. George, 56, has kept his business operating partly by practicing caution during the pandemic, Kevin Armstrong reports for The New York Times.

“There’s a lot of people we aren’t seeing again,” he said. “This virus is going around in a circle until it gets everybody.”

Mr. George counted 30 customers killed by the coronavirus. Almost 1,000 people have died in Newark, New Jersey’s largest city, because of Covid-19 and the vaccination rate remains below 30 percent. Throughout the pandemic, Mr. George considered not only safety concerns, but also the costs of closures and curfews. He weighed reduced foot traffic against his mortgage of $6,500 per month for the two-story building that houses his bookstore. On his commute, he noted roller gates that remained down and “For Lease” signs going up.

But Mr. George was not done building. Early in the epidemic, he created a GoFundMe page to alert customers to his status: “Covid almost killed us!”

It was the contributions that revived him.

Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator and Republican presidential candidate, has been dropped from his role as a CNN political commentator amid controversy over recent remarks in which he seemed to erase the role of Native Americans in U.S. history. Mr. Santorum’s departure from CNN came after comments he made about Native Americans at a Young America’s Foundation event last month. “We birthed a nation from nothing — I mean, there was nothing here,” Mr. Santorum said.
Daimler, the world’s largest maker of heavy trucks, whose Freightliners are a familiar sight on American interstates, said last week that it would convert to zero-emission vehicles within 15 years at the latest, providing another example of how the shift to electric power is reshaping vehicle manufacturing with significant implications for the climate, economic growth and jobs.

Tags Big, bitcoin, Live, rebounds, tumble, Updates

World News

Stay Updates: Ryanair Criticizes Belarus After Arrest of Roman Protasevich

Post author By
Post date May 24, 2021

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Onliner.by, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

International outrage mounted on Monday as new details emerged about a brazen operation by the strongman leader of Belarus to divert a Ryanair passenger jet and arrest a dissident Belarusian journalist traveling on board.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken condemned the forced diversion, saying it was a “shocking act” that “endangered the lives of more than 120 passengers, including U.S. citizens.”

He demanded the “immediate release” of the journalist, Roman Protasevich.

“Initial reports suggesting the involvement of the Belarusian security services and the use of Belarusian military aircraft to escort the plane are deeply concerning and require full investigation,” Mr. Blinken said.

Britain ordered that “airlines avoid Belarusian airspace in order to keep passengers safe,” the transportation secretary, Grant Shapps, wrote on Twitter.

Mr. Shapps said that the operating permit for Belavia Belarusian Airlines was being suspended.

Michael O’Leary, the chief executive of Ryanair, an Irish-based low-cost carrier, called the operation, which was directed by President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus, a “state-sponsored hijacking.”

Leaders from the European Union were expected to meet Monday night to discuss possible penalties.

Sofia Sapega, the girlfriend of the arrested journalist, was also detained when the plane landed in Minsk on Sunday after a bogus bomb threat during its flight from Athens to Vilnius, Lithuania, her university in the Lithuanian capital said.

Ms. Sapega, a Russian citizen, was detained at the Minsk airport along with Mr. Protasevich under “groundless and made-up conditions,” the European Humanities University in Vilnius said in a statement demanding her release.

There was no word Monday morning from the Belarusian authorities on their whereabouts.

Lawyers seeking to help Mr. Protasevich said he was believed to be in a jail in Minsk operated by the Belarussian intelligence service. The Russian Embassy in Minsk said that Belarus had notified it of Ms. Sapega’s detention.

Credit…Reuters

Five people who boarded in Athens were not on the plane when it finally arrived in Vilnius, the Lithuanian police said on Monday.

Mr. O’Leary said some of the passengers may have been agents of the Belarusian intelligence service, which is still known by its Soviet-era initials.

“We believe there were some K.G.B. agents offloaded at the airport as well,” Mr. O’Leary told Irish radio on Monday.

Mr. O’Leary said Ryanair was in the process of debriefing its crew and that the European Union and NATO were “dealing with” the situation.

The Lithuanian government called for Belarusian airspace to be closed to international flights in response to what it called a hijacking “by military force.”

The Lithuanian police said they had opened a criminal investigation, on suspicion of hijacking and kidnapping. Of 126 passengers who took off from Athens, 121 arrived in Vilnius, the police said. (Officials had earlier said there were about 170 passengers on the plane, and that six had stayed behind in Minsk.)

The Lithuanian police spoke to the pilots after they landed in Vilnius on Sunday evening, Renatas Pozela, the Lithuanian police commissioner general, said in a telephone interview.

Police investigators would be interviewing the passengers this week, he said.

“The pilots were the priority,” Mr. Pozela said. “We wanted to hear their stories. How did they see the situation? What did they do? Were there other planes?”

Mr. Pozela said he was not yet authorized to disclose any findings of the investigation.

Credit…Tut.By, via Reuters

The chorus of condemnation and outrage from across the European Union swelled on Monday as leaders began discussing possible penalties they could direct at Belarus for its forcing down of a civilian passenger jet.

However, they are somewhat limited in the actions at their disposal, because there are already E.U. sanctions against Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, the brutal and erratic leader of Belarus who has clung to power despite huge protests against his government last year, and dozens of his immediate associates.

In a summit scheduled to take place Monday evening, European leaders are expected to discuss adding aviation-related sanctions.

The options may include designating Belarusian airspace unsafe for E.U. carriers; blocking flights from Belarus from landing in E.U. airports, and sanctions against the national flag carrier, Belavia.

E.U. leaders also called for an investigation into the circumstances of the incident by the International Commercial Aviation Organization.

While the European Union considered its options, Lithuania — the original destination of the Ryanair flight and one of the countries that shares a border with Belarus — has said it is banning flights over Belarus and strongly advising its citizens not to travel there.

Gabrielius Landsbergis, Lithuania’s minister for foreign affairs, said in a tweet that the government was responding to “unprecedented threats” from Belarus and would push for the European Union to impose further measures.

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis of Greece, where the flight originated, said it was critical the European Union take specific action, especially in the context of the bloc’s frequent paralysis over foreign-affairs issues including a recent failure to agree on a statement regarding the Middle East conflict.

“Our inability to reach a consensus on recent events in Israel and Gaza — where as a union we failed to present a unified stance — must not be repeated,” Mr. Mitsotakis told the Financial Times. “The forcible grounding of a commercial passenger aircraft in order to illegally detain a political opponent and journalist is utterly reprehensible and an unacceptable act of aggression that cannot be allowed to stand.”

Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, also promised action at the leaders’ summit.

“The outrageous and illegal behavior of the regime in Belarus will have consequences,” she said in a tweet Sunday evening, adding that there must be sanctions for those “responsible for the #Ryanair hijacking.”

Credit…Pool photo by Sergei Sheleg

Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, the strongman ruler of Belarus and the most enduring leader in the former Soviet Union, appeared undeterred by the international outcry that has erupted after his country forced a civilian passenger jet to land and then arrested a dissident journalist who was onboard.

Rather than try to blunt diplomatic fallout on Monday, he signed new laws cracking down further on dissent.

The country placed bans on publishing unauthorized public opinion polls, on the livestreaming of unauthorized protests, and even on posting links to “banned” information.

The Belarusian Foreign Ministry’s spokesman, Anatoly Glaz, insisted that what happened to the jet was in strict accordance with aviation rules and said the country was prepared to host international experts “in order to rule out any insinuations.”

Russia, Mr. Lukashenko’s main ally, stood by him.

Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman, compared Sunday’s incident to the forced diversion of a plane carrying Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, which made an unscheduled landing in Austria when he was flying home from Moscow in 2013 after other European countries refused it permission to refuel or to use their airspace.

“I’m shocked that the West is calling the incident in Belarusian airspace ‘shocking,’” Ms. Zakharova wrote on Facebook.

Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, also refused to join the chorus of condemnation in the West.

“The international aviation authorities need to evaluate whether or not this followed or did not follow international norms,” he told reporters. “I cannot comment on anything in this situation.”

Credit…Petras Malukas/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The tray tables were being raised and the seat backs returned to the upright position as passengers on Ryanair Flight 4978 prepared for the scheduled landing in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius. Then, suddenly, the plane made an abrupt U-turn.

There was no explanation given.

It would be roughly 15 minutes before the pilot came over the intercom and announced that the plane would be diverting to Minsk, the capital of Belarus, according to those on board.

For many passengers, it seemed, at first, it was most likely just one of those unexpected delays that can be part of airline travel — perhaps a technical problem, some speculated.

For one passenger, however, the situation was clear. And frightening.

Roman Protasevich, a prominent Belarusian opposition journalist who had been living in exile since 2019, started to panic.

“He panicked because we were about to land in Minsk,” Marius Rutkauskas, who was sitting one row ahead of Mr. Protasevich, told the Lithuanian broadcaster LRT upon arrival in Vilnius. “He said: ‘I know that death penalty awaits me in Belarus.’”

Once in Belarus, Mr. Protasevich’s worries appeared more real than ever. The plane was surrounded by Soviet-looking officials in green uniforms, along with dogs, fire crews and technical workers from the airport.

Saulius Danauskas, a passenger who spoke to Delfi, a news website, after arriving safely in Vilnius, said it quickly became apparent to him that the notion of a bomb threat was all a ruse.

“When we landed people were standing around the plane doing nothing, looking pleased with themselves,” Mr. Danauskas said. “They didn’t let us out for half an hour,” he added. “If there was a bomb on the plane, why would they not let us out?”

Passengers were eventually told to descend in groups of five with their luggage, which was thoroughly checked by security officials.

Mr. Protasevich’s luggage was checked twice, passengers recalled. Then a security officer escorted him to the terminal, where he was arrested.

Most of the rest of the passengers were kept standing in a dark corridor for three hours. Some had to stand with their children. Guarded by security officials, they had no access to food, water or a toilet.

In retrospect, passengers noted how weird it all was.

Mantas, a passenger on the plane, told a Lithuanian news website that the pilot was “visibly nervous” during the landing in Minsk.

Alyona Alymova, one of the passengers, wrote about the experience in a Facebook post, noting that for much of the time there was only “light anxiety.”

“There was no clear understanding of what was going on,” she wrote.

Some passengers learned about the bomb threat only hours later, when they could connect to the internet.

In an Instagram post, one passenger said that they were “treated as prisoners in Minsk.” Hours later, they were allowed in an airport lounge area with a small cafeteria.

“I want to see who will be responsible for this chaos,” she said.

Credit…EPA, via Shutterstock

A day after the dissident journalist Roman Protasevich was detained in a plot that most Hollywood producers would have dismissed as improbably dramatic, there has been no word about where he is, how long he could be held, or what will happen to him.

Mr. Protasevich, an exiled opposition figure, was taken into custody on Sunday after the flight he was on was intercepted while traveling from Athens to Vilnius, Lithuania, by a MIG-29 fighter jet under orders from the strongman president of Belarus, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, and diverted to Minsk.

Mr. Protasevich is a co-founder and a former editor of the NEXTA channel on the social media platform Telegram, which has become a popular conduit for Mr. Lukashenko’s foes to share information and organize demonstrations.

Mr. Protasevich became a dissident as a teenager, drawing scrutiny from law enforcement. He was expelled from a prestigious school for participating in a protest rally in 2011.

He fled the country in 2019, fearing arrest. But he has continued to roil Mr. Lukashenko’s regime while living in exile in Lithuania, to the extent that he was charged in November last year with inciting public disorder and social hatred.

Also in November, the government’s main security agency in Belarus, called the K.G.B., placed Mr. Protasevich’s name on a list of terrorists. If he is convicted of terrorism, he could face the death penalty.

The charges of inciting public disorder and social hatred carry a punishment of more than 12 years in prison.

Sofia Sapega, a 23-year-old Russian citizen and the girlfriend of Mr. Protasevich, was traveling with him on the flight, and she was also detained, according to a statement from the European Humanities University in Lithuania, where she is a student. The university said she was detained on “groundless” conditions and pleaded for help in securing her release.

Credit…Andrius Sytas/Reuters

Shortly after Ryanair Flight 4978 crossed in the airspace of Belarus, an alarming message came crackling over the radio.

The pilots were told of “a potential security threat on board.” A possible bomb.

The plane, headed from Athens in Greece to Vilnius in Lithuania, would have to be diverted to Minsk, the capital of Belarus.

And if there was any doubt about the seriousness of the situation, the pilots only needed to look out of their window, where a MIG-29 fighter had suddenly appeared to escort them.

Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, the ruler of Belarus who is often referred to as “Europe’s last dictator,” personally ordered the fighter jet to intercept the passenger plane — a fact his office proudly noted in a news release.

According to the statement, Mr. Lukashenko gave an “unequivocal order” to “make the plane do a U-turn and land.”

After the plane was forced to land, Roman Protasevich, a dissident journalist, was arrested. His girlfriend, Sofia Sapega, was also on the flight, and she, too, did not board the plane again.

The country’s interior ministry announced Mr. Protasevich’s arrest in a statement that was later deleted from its official Telegram channel.

After about seven hours on the ground in Minsk, the passenger jet, a Boeing 737-800, took off for Vilnius, landing there safely 35 minutes later.

No bomb was found on board, according to law enforcement authorities in Belarus. The Investigative Committee, Belarus’s top investigative agency, said it had opened a criminal case into a false bomb threat.

“Nothing untoward was found,” Ryanair said in statement.

Credit…Andrew Boyers/Reuters

At least two airlines said that they were diverting flights away from Belarus airspace as a precaution, but most carriers seem to be waiting to be told what to do by the European authorities.

“This was a case of state-sponsored hijacking, state-sponsored piracy,” Mr. O’Leary told interviewers on Newstalk, an Irish radio broadcaster.

Mr. O’Leary, however, said he was waiting for instructions from European Union authorities in Brussels about whether to steer other flights away from Belarus.

“Flying to Asia from Europe without crossing Belarus is likely too costly and challenging,” wrote analysts from Eurasia Group, a research firm, in a note on Monday.

Other airlines, flying shorter routes, are already making changes.

Another airline that flies in the area, Wizz Air, said that it would alter the path of a flight from Kyiv in Ukraine to Tallinn in Estonia so as to skirt Belarus.

“We are continuously monitoring and evaluating the situation,” a spokesman for Wizz Air, which is based in Hungary, said.

Tags Arrest, Belarus, criticizes, Live, Protasevich, Roman, Ryanair, Updates

Health

The Return of Dwell Theater

Post author By
Post date May 23, 2021

As vaccinations and an announcement from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have seen many use less masks, live performances are slowly returning. While Broadway won’t officially return until September, Radio City Music Hall will reopen on June 19 to host the final night of the Tribeca Film Festival (guests must be vaccinated). Across New York, venues like Park Avenue Armory and St. Ann’s Warehouse are already experimenting with socially distant open-air performances in an attempt to cautiously revive live theater.

Last year the summer stick theater festivals were canceled across the board, but this season they’re coming back, albeit with some adjustments. The Massachusetts Williamstown Theater Festival will have all of its shows outdoors, while the Utah Shakespeare Festival requires masks and offers concessions only outdoors. While the summer art season won’t look quite like 2019, theater lovers are on the verge of a welcome awakening.

“Ring of Fire” at the Rocky Mountain Repertory Theater

This Grand Lake, Colorado theater is hosting its 2021 indoor season and opens with Johnny Cash’s jukebox musical “Ring of Fire,” which debuted on Broadway in 2006. The musical with cash classics like “I. Walk the Line and Folsom Prison Blues begin a season that lasts until September and includes Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Little Shop of Horrors. Starts June 4, $ 45; rockymountainrep.com.

“Out on the Main: Nine Solo Pieces by Black Dramatists” at the Williamstown Theater Festival
This prestigious Berkshires festival has shaped many future stars and premiered Broadway shows such as Bradley Cooper’s headlined production of The Elephant Man. When it returns for a personal season, the debut show will be the world premiere of “Outside on Main,” directed by Wardell Julius Clark, Awoye Timpo and Candis C. Jones and curated by playwright Robert O ‘. Hara. Each performance consists of three 30-minute pieces, all written by black writers for color performers. The season starts on July 6th. The festival tickets are priced at $ 100 each and will go on sale on June 22nd. wtfestival.org/shows-events/.

“Pericles” at the Utah Shakespeare Festival

This Shakespeare festival, which is part of Southern Utah University in Cedar City, will open its 60th anniversary season “Pericles.” This season, which runs from June to October, also features Shakespeare classics such as Richard III and The Comedy of Mistakes, as well as some off-topic themes such as Pirates of Penzance and Ragtime. The season kicks off June 21, with tickets starting at $ 9. bard.org.

“The Magic Flute” at the Glimmerglass Festival

This Cooperstown, NY opera institution is moving shows from their traditional theater to a redesigned outdoor area. The season kicks off with a new version of “The Magic Flute,” but what seems to be the jewel of the festival is “The Passion of Mary Cardwell Dawson,” a world premiere starring Denyce Graves about the life of the founder of the National Negro Opera Company in Dawson Year 1941. The season kicks off July 15, with tickets starting at $ 80 for a socially detached seat that can seat up to four people. glimmerglass.org.

“A Thousand Ways (Part Two): An Encounter” in the public theater

In December, the New York Public Theater made its debut with the socially distant piece “A Thousand Ways (Part 1): An Encounter”, which connected the audience to one another via a telephone line. “Part One” was created by Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone of the Brooklyn Theater Company 600 Highwaymen and was the first in a trilogy. Now personal participants can experience “A Thousand Ways (Part Two)”. In this experimental work the participants are brought together and follow the instructions to create a private work. June 8th-Aug. 15, $ 15; publictheater.org.

“Send what up when it goes down” from BAM

The monumental work by playwright Aleshea Harris, which debuted on Broadway in 2018, testifies to the epidemic of the black death from racial violence. With a permeable boundary between audience and actors, the play enables an emotional experience of discussion and healing. The production is presented by BAM and Playwrights Horizons in association with the Movement Theater Company. Check the website for the June opening date; bam.org.

Tags Live, return, Theater

World News

Covid-19 Information: Stay Updates on Circumstances and Vaccines

Post author By
Post date May 21, 2021

Digging graves for coronavirus victims at a cemetery in São Paulo, Brazil, on Wednesday.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Mario Tama/Getty Images

GENEVA — Deaths from Covid-19 and Covid-related causes are likely to be two to three times the number that countries have recorded in their official data, the World Health Organization said on Friday.

Some six to eight million people may have now died from Covid-19 or its effects since the start of the pandemic, compared with 3.4 million deaths recorded in countries’ official reporting, Dr. Samira Asma, assistant director of the W.H.O.’s data division, told reporters.

The W.H.O. also estimates that at least three million people may have died from Covid-19 in 2020, compared with 1.8 million recorded in official data, the W.H.O. reported in annual statistics released on Friday.

The W.H.O. based its assessment on a statistical model that estimates the excess deaths attributable to Covid-19. The technique involves taking the total number of officially recorded deaths and then subtracting the number of deaths that would have been expected on the basis of previous mortality trends if the pandemic had not occurred.

On that basis, the W.H.O. said it estimated that 1.1 million to 1.3 million people in 53 European countries died from Covid-19 in 2020, roughly double the number recorded in official data. The organization also calculates that, over the same period, 1.3 million to 1.5 million people died in 35 countries in the Americas, compared with the 900,000 deaths officially recorded.

The huge discrepancy between the W.H.O.’s estimates and official data underscores the limited capacity of many countries to test their populations for the coronavirus and other weaknesses in official health data. For example, some Covid victims had died before being tested and their deaths did not appear in official reporting, William Msemburi, a W.H.O. data analyst said.

The W.H.O. will present its statistics to the annual meeting of its policymaking assembly in Geneva next week. The numbers will help make the case for countries to invest urgently in bolstering data systems and their capacity to monitor and report health developments.

“We can only be better prepared with better data,” Dr. Asma said.

United States ›	United StatesOn May 20	14-day change
New cases	29,701	–36%
New deaths	654	–14%

World ›	WorldOn May 20	14-day change
New cases	636,014	–23%
New deaths	12,828	–6%

U.S. vaccinations ›

Credit…Brian Inganga/Associated Press

When the pandemic began, global health officials feared that the vulnerabilities of Africa would lead to devastation. More than a year later, the rates of illness and death from Covid in Africa appear to be lower than in the rest of the world, upending scientists’ expectations.

But if the virus begins to spread more rapidly on the continent, as it has in other regions, new findings suggest that the death toll could worsen.

People in Africa who become critically ill from Covid-19 are more likely to die than patients in other parts of the world, according to a report published on Thursday in the medical journal The Lancet.

The report, based on data from 64 hospitals in 10 countries, is the first broad look at what happens to critically ill Covid patients in Africa, the authors say. The increased risk of death applies only to those who become severely ill.

Among 3,077 critically ill patients admitted to the African hospitals, 48.2 percent died within 30 days, compared with a global average of 31.5 percent, the Lancet study found.

The study was observational, meaning that the researchers followed the patients’ progress, but did not experiment with treatments.

For Africa as a whole, the death rate among severely ill Covid patients may be even higher than it was in the study, the researchers said, because much of their information came from relatively well-equipped hospitals, and 36 percent of those facilities were in South Africa and Egypt, which have better resources than many other African countries. In addition, the patients in the study, with an average age of 56, were younger than many other critically ill Covid patients, indicating that death rates outside the study could be higher.

Reliable data on a country’s deaths and their causes have been hard to come by. As the coronavirus pandemic swept across the world in 2020, it has became increasingly evident that in a majority of countries on the African continent, most deaths are never formally registered.

The other eight countries in the study were Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Libya, Malawi, Mozambique, Niger and Nigeria. Leaders of 16 other African nations had also agreed to participate, but ultimately did not.

Reasons for the higher death rates include a lack of resources such as surge capacity in intensive care units, equipment to measure patients’ oxygen levels, dialysis machines and so-called ECMO devices to pump oxygen into the bloodstream of patients whose lungs become so impaired that even a ventilator is not enough to keep them alive.

But there was also an apparent failure to use resources that were available, the authors of the study suggested. Proning — turning patients onto their stomachs to help them breathe — was underused, performed for only about a sixth of the patients who needed it.

The slow introduction of vaccines across the continent has underscored global problems of vaccine inequality. Just over 24 million vaccines have been administered in Africa, according to the Africa C.D.C., with just 1.42 percent of the population fully vaccinated. In the United States, about 126.6 million people are fully vaccinated and more than 60 percent of adults have received at least one shot.

Facing a resurgent coronavirus and plagued by delays with vaccine supply, South Africa began the second phase of its public vaccination campaign on Monday, opening appointments for people aged 60 or older. The country has a 14.5 percent positivity rate, according to the Africa C.D.C.

Credit…Kyodo News, via Associated Press

Japan on Friday approved the Moderna and AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccines for use in adults, giving the country much-needed new options as it tries to speed up an inoculation campaign that has been one of the slowest in the developed world.

Previously, only the Pfizer vaccine had been authorized for use in Japan, where just 4.1 percent of the population has received a first shot. Vaccinations have been held up by strict rules that allow only doctors and nurses to administer shots, and by a requirement that vaccines be tested on people in Japan before they are approved for use.

Japan is in the midst of a fourth wave of coronavirus infections, just two months before the Summer Olympics in Tokyo are set to begin. Tokyo and eight other prefectures are under a state of emergency that will last at least until the end of this month, and Okinawa is expected to be added to that list. Japan has been reporting about 5,500 cases a day, compared to 1,000 in early March.

A Health Ministry panel recommended on Thursday night that the government approve the Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccines. The health minister, Norihisa Tamura, said that the Moderna shots would be used at mass inoculation sites scheduled to open on Monday in Tokyo and Osaka, which will be staffed mainly by military doctors and nurses.

The government has not said when the AstraZeneca vaccine would be deployed. NHK, the public broadcaster, reported that despite the green light from the government, the use of AstraZeneca might be delayed over concerns that it could be linked to very rare cases of blood clotting.

Credit…Alen Thien/Alamy

Scientists have discovered a new canine coronavirus in a child who was hospitalized with pneumonia in Malaysia in 2018. If the virus is confirmed to be a human pathogen, it would be the eighth coronavirus, and the first canine coronavirus, known to cause disease in humans.

It is not yet clear whether this specific virus poses a serious threat to humans, the researchers stress. The study does not prove that the pneumonia was caused by the virus, which may not be capable of spreading between people. But the finding, which was published on Thursday in Clinical Infectious Diseases, highlights the need to more proactively search for viruses that could jump from animals into humans, the scientists said.

“I think the key message here is that these things are probably happening all over the world, where people come in contact with animals, especially intense contact, and we’re not picking them up,” said Gregory Gray, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Duke University who is one of the study’s authors. “We should be looking for these things. If we can catch them early and find out that these viruses are successful in the human host, then we can mitigate them before they become a pandemic virus.”

Seven coronaviruses are currently known to infect humans. In addition to SARS-CoV-2, which is the causes of Covid-19, there are coronaviruses that cause SARS, MERS and the common cold. Many of these viruses are believed to have originated in bats, but can jump from bats to humans, either directly or after a stopover in another animal host.

Scientists have known for decades that coronaviruses can cause disease in dogs, and recent studies have shown that the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 can infect both cats and dogs. But there has not been any evidence that dogs transmit it, or any other coronavirus, to humans.

global roundup

Credit…Natacha Pisarenko/Associated Press

President Alberto Fernández of Argentina ordered a nine-day lockdown in the worst-affected parts of the country to help curb the spread of the coronavirus as the nation struggled to contain a second wave of the outbreak.

In a speech broadcast nationally on all radio and TV stations, Mr. Fernández ordered a lockdown that starts on Saturday and ends on May 30 in those regions. That will be followed by another nine days of restrictions, the severity of which will be determined by how much the country is able to control the spread of the virus.

“We are living the worst moment since the start of the pandemic,” Mr. Fernández said. “If we follow the guidelines, we will reduce the impact of this second wave. It is imperative that every local jurisdiction strictly apply these guidelines. There is no space for speculation and there is no time for delay.”

Argentina, like many of its neighbors in Latin America, saw an alarming spike in cases in April that has shown little respite as the region struggles to vaccinate people quickly enough to slow the spread. In the last seven days, the country’s daily average of new cases soared to become the fourth-highest in the world, and deaths rose to be the fifth-highest.

On Thursday, Argentina recorded 39,652 new cases and 494 new deaths. So far, 18 percent of the population has received at least one dose of a vaccine and 4.7 percent are fully vaccinated, according to the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford. Neighboring Chile has fully vaccinated 40 percent of its population.

In other developments around the globe:

Thailand has detected its first 15 domestically transmitted cases of the highly infectious coronavirus variant first found in India, Reuters reported. The cases were discovered among construction workers in Bangkok, the Thai coronavirus task force said on Friday.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain announced on Friday that visitors from Britain, Japan, China and a handful of countries would be allowed back into the country from Monday, while Americans and other people who have been vaccinated will be able to visit Spain from June 7. The return of British tourists, who form the largest contingent of holiday makers in many Spanish resorts, was seen as essential to help guarantee the recovery of the Spanish tourism sector. “Spain will be very happy to welcome British tourists,” Mr. Sánchez said, during a tourism conference in Madrid. “They are welcome into our country without restrictions.”
While the government of Britain still advises against international cruises, a ship embarked on a domestic journey on Thursday night, the first time any such vessel had set sail from the country for more than a year. Passengers for the four-night cruise around the British Isles had to test negative for the virus before boarding and social distancing and masks are still required in public areas
Norway plans to ease some virus restrictions beginning May 27, Reuters reported. Larger groups of people will be allowed to meet and alcohol will be allowed to be served until midnight, Prime Minister Erna Solberg said on Friday. In some places, though, local restrictions will remain tougher than the national rules to prevent regional flare-ups of the virus.

Raphael Minder and Anna Schaverien contributed reporting.

ParisAndrea Mantovani for The New York Times
AthensLouisa Gouliamaki/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
BerlinLena Mucha for The New York Times
LondonLeon Neal/Getty Images
MadridEmilio Parra Doiztua for The New York Times
Krakow, PolandOmar Marques/Getty Images
Florence, ItalySusan Wright for The New York Times

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After 14 months of lockdowns — some light, some draconian — many in Europe are again allowed to grab a coffee at a cafe or a pint in a pub, and to stay at a hotel or at a bed-and-breakfast.

Lockdown rules intended to prevent the spread of the coronavirus have been eased in England, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland, among other places — with many of the restrictions falling away this week.

The virus has killed more than 3.4 million people and sickened more than 165 million. But in Europe, with vaccinations rising, normalcy is once again at hand. After a rough start, 33 percent of people in the European Union have gotten at least one vaccine shot, according to Our World in Data, a University of Oxford tracking site. In Britain, 37 million people have received one dose of the vaccine and 21 million are fully vaccinated.

On Wednesday in Paris, where cafe terraces were once again open, Saïd Belkhiati, a 27-year-old account manager was dressed in a suit and having a drink with a friend.

“It really changes everything,” he said. “For a year, I felt like I was imprisoned, in an open-air jail. Now we are free. I’m enjoying this first breath of freedom. I took a day off to enjoy the reopening. Having a drink here, it’s so nice. Terraces are what make the charm of Paris!”

Noëlle Roche, a 75-year-old retiree, ventured out in the rain in Paris to catch up on a beloved pastime, going to the movies.

“I just watched the movie ‘DNA,’” she said. “I’m happy to be able to go to the movies again,”

“I missed it so much,” she added. “I usually go to the movies several times a week.”

In England, where indoor dining was allowed to restart and movie theaters and museums reopened, there was a note of caution because a variant of the virus that is circulating in India has also been found in Britain.

“We must be humble in the face of this virus,” the health secretary, Matt Hancock, told Parliament on Monday, adding that the variant, with a higher transmission rate, “poses a real risk.” While the overall case numbers remain low, they have been multiplying rapidly.

In Berlin, terraces, beer gardens and outdoor seating at restaurants opened on Friday. Despite some clouds and rain, owners and staff had been preparing all week, taking chairs and tables out of storage, and setting up the kind of tent-like structures that will allow customers nearly all the comforts of indoor dining while staying in line with the current coronavirus guidelines.

Those enjoying the outdoor services will have to present either a vaccination documentation, proof of an old Covid infection or a negative antigen test, which can be taken in one of hundreds of free test stations that the government has funded.

Other attractions, like museums, memorials and some outdoor theaters and cinemas, were opening on Friday under a reservation-only system, under the same testing-vaccine rules as the restaurants.

“It’s just grand — we are so happy that we can open up again and that we can have tourists sitting on our terrace,” said Jan Bubinger, 36, one of the managers at the Ständige Vertretung, a pub and restaurant on the Spree River right in the middle of Berlin’s tourist district.

Mr. Bubinger, who has had to shutter his restaurant for seven months, added that he would make antigen tests available to those without documents so that they don’t have to go to a test center before being served.

Volker Pradel, 61, said, “We are very happy of course,” after welcoming his first guest to the Schleusenkrug, a beer garden close to the Berlin Zoo on the west side of the city. Mr. Pradel, the manager of the eatery, noted, however, that it was difficult finding servers because most people in that profession now work at test or vaccination centers.

Credit…Rebecca Conway/Getty Images

India’s federal health ministry raised an alarm on Thursday, asking state governments to immediately report all cases of a potentially deadly fungal infection that appears to be spreading quickly among Covid-19 patients.

The rare condition, mucormycosis, commonly known as black fungus, was present in India before the pandemic, but it is affecting those with Covid or those who have recently recovered.

Many health experts blame the spread on a central coronavirus treatment, steroids. These drugs can limit inflammation of the lungs, but they also dull the response of the immune system, which can allow infections like the black fungus to take hold.

More broadly, Covid patients with weakened immune systems and underlying conditions, particularly diabetes, are especially vulnerable to black fungus, which has a high mortality rate.

Making matters worse, a shortage of antifungal drugs, like amphotericin B, has made it hard to fight the infection once it attacks. Relatives of the sick have been desperately sending messages over social media seeking the drug.

Courts are pressuring local governments to make antifungal drugs available and pushing for stepped up investigations to stop black-market drugs from being distributed.

Before the pandemic, a vial of amphotericin B would cost around $80, but some relatives of sick people say they have paid as much as $500 on the black market.

Video of a woman saying she would jump off the roof of a hospital if it failed to arrange injections of the medication for her husband spread widely on social media early this week.

The woman, in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, said, “If I don’t get the injection today, then I will jump off the roof of the hospital and commit suicide. I have no other option left.” She added that the hospital had none of the medication and said of her husband, “Where should I take him in this condition?”

In the western state of Maharashtra, which includes the commercial hub of Mumbai, the authorities said at least 90 people had died of fungal infections and more than 1,500 patients were being treated in hospitals.

Rajesh Topai, the health minister of Maharashtra, told reporters on Wednesday that the state was desperate for more supplies of the medicine and begged the federal government, “do anything, but give more vials to Maharashtra.”

In Delhi, the capital, badly hit by the pandemic, hospitals have recorded 185 fungal infection cases and the local government is setting up three dedicated centers inside government-run hospitals to treat the condition.

M.V. Padma Srivastava, a professor and head of neurology department at All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, said the number of black fungus cases was increasing every day and the condition was appearing across the country like never before.

She said hospitals received few cases during the first wave of the pandemic but certainly not the numbers they are registering now, amid a virulent second wave.

Of the medication for the disease she said: “It is not one of the common over-the-counter medications. This is a toxic medication by itself. It can’t be given by all and sundry. It is not something which you can take at home. It needs strict monitoring of body parameters because it is a toxic drug.”

The federal government directive requiring state governments to immediately disclose cases follows those of many Indian states that had already required hospitals to report cases of mucormycosis.

Credit…Patrick T. Fallon/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Los Angeles is taking its vaccination efforts on the road.

The city is gradually winding down its mass vaccination sites and will be fully mobile starting Aug. 1, marking what one deputy mayor called “the end of an era.”

“It’s a natural evolution,” said Jeffrey Gorell, the deputy mayor for public safety, who is overseeing vaccine efforts in the city. “Rather than having fixed sites where we ask community members to come to us, the natural progression is for us to move into more of a mobile approach where we can go to the populations where we need to be for areas with the lowest vaccination rates.”

With mobile sites, “we believe we can get to the most challenged areas,” he said.

Mobile vaccine units have been a part of the city’s vaccine program. But as the city’s 10 mass vaccination sites close over the coming weeks, the city will up its mobile units from 10 to 14. The city stopped offering vaccines at Dodgers Stadium on Thursday but other mass sites remain open.

Specially outfitted vans and trailers will give the city “tactical vaccination capabilities” so they can get into communities that may be underserved, hesitant or simply don’t have the time because of work requirements, Mr. Gorell said, adding that mobile teams will be able to extend evening and weekend hours.

“Rather than hunker down at a fixed site waiting for them to come to us, we can be in their neighborhood and available,” Mr. Gorell said. “We’re going to be a truly mobile presence in the city.”

The mobile units will offer all three federally authorized vaccines — the two-dose Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, and the single-shot Johnson & Johnson — and will be able to travel to multiple neighborhoods a day or stay for an entire week. Mr. Gorell said they also plan to target community events, grocery stores, street fairs and other highly trafficked areas. Appointments will not be necessary.

As of Thursday, 54 percent of California residents have received at least one shot and 40 percent are fully vaccinated according to a New York Times database. In Los Angeles County, 40 percent of eligible residents are fully vaccinated.

“With a growing number of residents getting inoculated, we are putting our resources where they will do the most good — delivering doses directly to undervaccinated communities, engaging and educating vulnerable populations, and eliminating barriers to this life-saving vaccine,” Mayor Eric Garcetti said in a statement.

Los Angeles joins a growing fleet of mobile Covid-19 vaccine clinics that are rolling up to neighborhoods in Delaware, Minnesota and Washington State to reach people who have been unable to travel to vaccination centers.

The city is working with community based organizations to help residents understand the science of the vaccine and access the mobile sites.

For Denise Villamil, the director of youth development services at Alma Family Services in East Los Angeles, outreach has been both personal and professional. Ms. Villamil lost her aunt to Covid-19 in December, just a month before vaccines started becoming available in the United States.

“Every person I can get through the line, every person I can get through the registration is one more person who is luckier than those who didn’t in the pandemic,” Ms. Villamil said. “Fear spreads, so does hope. So we’ve seen that in the communities and that’s been the beautiful part of this process. We’ve been able to give hope and see the ripple effect.”

Credit…Patrick Siebert

It’s not every day that an American governor appears alongside a man dressed as a lottery ball.

But that’s exactly what happened on Thursday as Gov. Larry Hogan announced that Maryland would partner with the state’s lottery to provide $2 million in prize money for residents who get vaccinated.

“Our mission is to ensure that no arm is left behind and we’re committed to leaving no stone unturned and using every resource at our disposal to achieve that goal,” Mr. Hogan said.

Beginning May 25, the Maryland lottery will randomly select and award $40,000 to a vaccinated Marylander every day through July 4, when a final drawing will be held for a grand prize of $400,000. Any Maryland resident who has been vaccinated in the state will be automatically enrolled in drawings.

“The sooner you get your shot, the more lottery drawings you will be eligible for,” he said, adding, “There’s no better time than now and there should be no more excuses.”

The state has administered about 5.7 million vaccines, and 44 percent of the state is fully vaccinated, according to a New York Times database. But like other states across the country, vaccination rates have tapered off. States have turned to an array of incentives — including beer, money, transit cards and joints — to get shots into the arms of more Americans.

“Promotions like this are just one more way that we’re reinforcing the importance of getting every single Marylander we can vaccinated against Covid-19,” Mr. Hogan said. All funding will be provided from Maryland’s lottery marketing fund.

“Get your shot for a shot to win,” he said, adding, “that’s a good line.”

Maryland isn’t alone in trying to lure residents with the chance of big winnings. This month, Ohio’s governor, Mike DeWine, offered a $1 million lottery prize for five people who get vaccinated. That effort would be paid for by federal coronavirus relief funds, Mr. DeWine said during a statewide televised address.

And in New York, the state will hand out free scratch-off tickets for the “Mega Multiplier” lottery to those 18 and older who get their shot at 10 state mass vaccination sites next week, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said on Thursday. The pilot program lasts from next Monday to Friday. The tickets could yield prizes from $20 to the $5 million jackpot, he said.

Credit…Emily Elconin/Reuters

As vaccinated Americans return to many parts of their prepandemic lives this summer, one group will be left out: children under 12, who cannot yet be vaccinated. So what should families with young children do when everyone else starts socializing again?

We asked experts as part of an informal New York Times survey. The group of 828 who responded included epidemiologists, who study public health, and pediatric infectious disease physicians, who research and treat children sick with diseases like Covid-19.

They noted that this phase was temporary. Pfizer has said vaccines for children ages 2 and up could come as soon as September. Of the survey respondents with young children, 92 percent said they would vaccinate their own children as soon as a shot was approved.

In the meantime, families with young children may need to retain more precautions, like masking and distancing, than their childless friends do. But they said some minimally risky activities could help counteract the mental health effects of pandemic living.

“Kids need to be able to be kids,” said Mac McCullough, an associate professor at Arizona State. “Outdoor activity isn’t perfectly safe, but its benefits are likely to outweigh its risks across an entire population.”

Credit…Susan Wright for The New York Times

ROME — As Dr. Mario Sorlini sits patients down in a vaccination center near the badly affected Italian town of Bergamo, he explains a potential complication of the coronavirus vaccine.

The second dose, he tells patients with terror-stricken faces, will fall on a date during the summer holidays.

“‘But I’ll be in Sardinia then,’” he said that some had responded with distress. Others moan about hotel rooms they’ve already booked. Some, he said, get up and leave.

For months, Italians have hungered for the vaccines that would give them safety, freedom from lockdown and a taste of normal life. After initial pitfalls and hurdles, the vaccination campaign is finally speeding up, but it is heading smack into the summer holidays that are sacred for many Italians and prompting fears among officials that a significant number would rather get away than get vaccinated.

“I am certain that many, after such a hard year, will risk delaying the vaccine” until after the summer holidays, said Renata Tosi, the mayor of Riccione, a beach town that is so identified with summer flings that it lent its name to a recent vacation anthem. That could create a significant danger next autumn, Ms. Tosi wrote in an open letter to the region’s president.

“The Second Shot Blocks Vacation,” read a headline in Messaggero Veneto, a newspaper in northeastern Italy, echoing concerns in papers, websites and social media accounts across the country.

An estimated 20 million Italians — mostly 40- and 50-somethings — face the prospect of getting their second shots in the middle of July or worse, in the riptide that is the Italian August, which pulls people out of cities and into swelling seaside towns.

This year, people have sought vacations with such a vengeance that tourism operators have started using the term “revenge travel” to describe the way Italians are trying to get even with the cruel months of lockdown. Surfing the web for holiday homes has become the new doom scrolling.

Tags cases, Covid19, Live, News, Updates, vaccines

Business

Shares Rebound as Wall Road Shakes Off Inflation Worries: Reside Updates

Post author By
Post date May 21, 2021

The buyers returned to central London last month. UK retail sales in April rose twice the rate forecast by economists.

Recognition…Mary Turner for the New York Times

The US stock futures rose along with most European stock indices on Friday as the data showed more signs of the European economy strengthening as it emerges from lockdowns and vaccines are introduced faster.

The S&P 500 is expected to gain 0.3 percent at the start of trading, according to the futures. The US benchmark index is down around 0.4 percent so far this week after concerns about faster-than-expected inflation unsettled markets.

The Stoxx Europe 600 rose 0.4 percent, led by gains in consumer goods companies. One of the biggest winners was Richemont, the Swiss luxury goods company that owns brands like Cartier and Montblanc. Richemont stock rose 5.3 percent after the company reported annual results of strong sales growth in Asia, particularly for its jewelry and watch brands.

Oil prices rose. West Texas Intermediate, the US crude oil benchmark, futures rose 0.7 percent to $ 62.38 a barrel.

Economic data

UK retail sales rose sharply in April as unneeded stores were allowed to reopen. The sales volume rose by 9.2 percent compared to the previous month, announced the office for national statistics on Friday. It was more than double the forecast of the economists polled by Bloomberg. Shopping for clothing stores led to the resurgence.
Across the euro area, activity in the service sector increased in May. The purchasing managers index rose from 50.5 in April to 55.1 points, IHS Markit announced on Friday. A value above 50 indicates expansion. The index for the manufacturing sector has hardly changed compared to the previous month at 62.8.
“Growth would have been even stronger had it not been for supply chain delays and difficulty restarting businesses fast enough to meet demand, especially in terms of recruitment,” wrote Chris Williamson, chief economist at IHS Markit, in the report.
“The outlook for the euro zone is currently quite positive as growth and inflationary pressures mount,” ING’s economist Bert Colijn wrote in a note. He added that the economic recovery, which “started cautiously somewhere in January,” accelerated significantly in the second quarter of this year.

Recognition…Ed Kashi for the New York Times

The government’s $ 788 billion relief effort to small businesses hit by the coronavirus pandemic, Paycheck Protection Program, is ending as it began. The last days of the initiative are full of chaos and confusion.

Millions of applicants seek money from the scarce handful of lenders who still provide government-sponsored loans. Hundreds of thousands of people are stuck in the air waiting to find out if they will get their approved loans – some of which have been stalled for months due to errors or malfunctions. According to the New York Times’ Stacy Cowley, lenders are overwhelmed and borrowers are panicking.

The aid program should continue until May 31st. Two weeks ago, its manager, the Small Business Administration, announced that $ 292 billion in funding for the forgeable loan program was nearly depleted this year and that it would cease processing most new applications immediately.

Then the government tossed another curve ball: the Small Business Administration ruled that the remaining money, roughly $ 9 billion, would only be available through Community Financial Institutions, a small group of specially designated institutions focused on underserved communities.

Recognition…Taylor Glascock for the New York Times

The American steel industry is making a comeback that only a few months ago would have predicted.

Steel prices are at record highs and demand is rising as companies ramp up production amid the easing of pandemic restrictions. Steel makers have consolidated over the past year so they can have more control over supply. Tariffs on foreign steel imposed by the Trump administration have kept cheaper imports out. And steel companies are hiring again, reports Matt Phillips of the New York Times.

It’s not clear how long the boom will last. This week, the Biden government began talks with European Union trade representatives on global steel markets. Some steel workers and executives believe this could lead to an eventual decline in Trump-era tariffs, widely believed to be the catalyst for the turnaround in the steel industry.

Record prices for steel will not reverse decades of job losses. Employment in the steel industry has fallen by more than 75 percent since the early 1960s. More than 400,000 jobs disappeared as foreign competition increased and the industry shifted to manufacturing processes that required fewer workers. The price hike, however, is fueling optimism in steel cities across the country, especially after job losses during the pandemic brought American steel employment to its lowest level in history.

Shareholders in Tribune Publishing, the owner of major city newspapers like The Chicago Tribune and The New York Daily News, will vote on Friday on whether to sell the company to Alden Global Capital, a financial investor with a reputation for cutting costs and increasing costs should lower, approved jobs. Alden already has a 32 percent stake in Tribune, so the deal depends on approval from the shareholders who own the other two-thirds of Tribune shares. Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a multi-billion dollar medical entrepreneur who owns the Los Angeles Times and other California newspapers, has a 24 percent stake in Tribune with his wife, Michele B. Chan. Dr. Soon-Shiong has not publicly commented on how he plans to vote.
CNN said Thursday that its prime-time host, Chris Cuomo, gave inappropriate public relations advice to his brother, New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, after a series of sexual harassment allegations threatened the governor’s political career earlier this year would have. CNN said Chris Cuomo would refrain from further similar talks with the governor’s staff. However, the network said it would not take disciplinary action against the anchor, whose program was CNN’s top-rated show in the first quarter of the year. Chris Cuomo apologized to viewers and colleagues at the start of the show on Thursday for the calls to the governor’s staff, saying, “It won’t happen again. It was a mistake. “But he also defended himself, saying that he” naturally “gave advice to his brother and that he was” family first, job second “.

Tags inflation, Live, Rebound, Shakes, Stocks, Street, Updates, Wall, worries

World News

Israel-Palestinian Battle: Stay Updates and Video

Post author By
Post date May 19, 2021

A building in the southern city of Ashdod, Israel, on Monday after being hit by a rocket fired from Gaza.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Dan Balilty for The New York Times

A senior Hamas official said on Wednesday that he expected a cease-fire agreement within a day or two, while Israeli media has reported that Israeli officials do not expect the bombing to stop until Friday at the earliest.

The comments offered the latest indications that talks on halting — or at least pausing — the conflict are making headway.

In past conflicts, cease-fire agreements have broken down and been followed by resumed violence, and it was not clear whether any deal reached this week would lead to a long-term suspension of hostilities or just a brief hiatus to allow humanitarian relief supplies to reach the battered Gaza Strip.

Speaking to an Arabic television channel, Mousa Abu Marzouq, a senior official of Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, said he expected the cease-fire talks to succeed in the next one or two days. But, he warned, “Our equation is clear — bombing for bombing, and escalation will be met with escalation.”

Similarly, Israeli officials have said that as long as rockets continue to be fired at Israel from Gaza, Israel will continue to bomb the territory. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others have said the campaign will go on as long as it takes to degrade Hamas’s ability to attack Israel, particularly with rockets.

Israeli media reported that Israel’s military commanders expect the bombardment of Gaza to continue for at least another two days.

Credit…Hosam Salem for The New York Times

President Biden told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday that he “expected a significant de-escalation today on the path to a cease-fire” in the conflict between Israel and Hamas, the White House principal deputy press secretary told reporters onboard Air Force One.

“Our focus has not changed,” the press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said. “We are working towards a de-escalation.”

Ms. Jean-Pierre said Mr. Biden wanted the situation to reach a “sustainable calm.”

She said the call, which came before the president departed from Washington to address graduates at the United States Coast Guard Academy on Wednesday morning, did not reflect a shift in administration policy as it pertains to a cease-fire.

“This is what we have been calling for for the past eight days,” she said.

Mr. Netanyahu did not give any assurance during the call that Mr. Biden could expect a cease-fire, according to a senior administration official who received a readout of the call shortly after it happened.

After visiting Israeli military headquarters, Mr. Netanyahu said he was “determined to continue this operation until its aim is met.”

Still, the president’s call to the Israeli leader added to a growing chorus of international parties urging the Israeli military and Hamas militants to lay down their weapons as the conflict stretched into its 10th day.

France is leading efforts to call for a cease-fire at the United Nations Security Council, but it remains unclear when a resolution will be put to a vote.

Israel and Hamas have signaled a willingness to reach a cease-fire, diplomats privy to the discussions say, but that has not reduced the intensity of the deadliest fighting in Gaza since 2014.

At least 227 people in Gaza have been killed, including 64 children, and 1,620 have been wounded as of Wednesday afternoon, according to the Gaza health ministry. Israeli airstrikes and shelling have destroyed or damaged homes, roads and medical facilities across the territory.

Hamas militants continued to fire rockets into Israeli towns on Wednesday, sending people scurrying for shelter. More than 4,000 rockets have been fired from Gaza since the conflict began, according to the Israeli military, killing at least 12 Israeli residents.

VideoIsraeli airstrikes leveled homes in Gaza, and Hamas militants fired rockets into Israeli towns, as fighting continued into Wednesday. At least 227 people have been killed in Gaza and 12 in Israel, officials said.CreditCredit…Khalil Hamra/Associated Press

As Egypt, Qatar and the United Nations mediated talks between Israel and Hamas, the two adversaries indicated publicly that the fighting could go on for days.

A senior Hamas official denied reports that the group had agreed to a cease-fire, but said that talks were ongoing.

Still, with Israeli warplanes firing into the crowded Gaza Strip, in a campaign that Israeli officials say is aimed at Hamas militants and their infrastructure, the humanitarian crisis has deepened for the two million people inside Gaza.

The United Nations said that more than 58,000 Palestinians in Gaza had been displaced from their homes, many huddling in U.N.-run schools that have in effect become bomb shelters. Israeli strikes have damaged schools, power lines, and water, sanitation and sewage systems for hundreds of thousands of people in a territory that has been under blockade by Israel and Egypt for more than a decade. Covid-19 vaccinations have stopped, and on Tuesday an Israeli strike knocked out the only lab in the territory that processes coronavirus tests.

“There is no safe place in Gaza, where two million people have been forcibly isolated from the rest of the world for over 13 years,” the U.N. emergency relief coordinator in the territory, Mark Lowcock, said in a statement.

Credit…Abdel Kareem Hana/Associated Press

GAZA CITY — Riad Ishkontana had promised his children that their building on Al Wahida Street was safe, though for Zein, his 2-year-old son, the thunder of the airstrikes spoke louder than his reassurances.

The Israelis had never bombed the neighborhood before, he told them. Theirs was a comfortable, tranquil area by Gaza City standards, full of professionals and shops, nothing military. The explosions were still far away. To soothe them all, he started calling home “the house of safety.”

Mr. Ishkontana, 42, tried to believe it, too, though around them the death toll was climbing — not by inches, but by leaps, by housefuls, by families.

He was still telling the children about their house of safety all the way up until after midnight early Sunday morning, when he and his wife were watching more plumes of gray smoke rising from Gaza on TV. She went to put the five children to bed. For all his attempts at comforting them, the family felt more secure sleeping all together in the boys’ room in the middle of the third-floor apartment.

Then a flash of bright light, and the building swayed. He said he rushed toward the boys’ room. Boom. The last thing he saw before the floor gave way beneath him and the walls fell on him, then a concrete pillar, then the roof, was his wife pulling at the mattress where she had already tucked in three of their children, trying to drag it out.

“My kids!” she was screaming, but the doorway was too narrow. “My kids!”

Credit…Mohammed Abed/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

As Israel has focused its firepower on Hamas’s warren of underground tunnels and infrastructure in the Gaza Strip, it has simultaneously been engaged in a parallel clandestine strategy: a targeted killing campaign against Hamas’s military leadership.

Israel has tried several times in the current fighting to kill Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing, a spokesman for Israel Defense Forces said Wednesday. Mr. Deif, a shadowy figure who has been atop Israel’s most-wanted list for nearly three decades, has become a symbol of the militant group’s resilience.

“Throughout the operation, we have tried to assassinate Mohammed Deif,” said the spokesman, Brig. Gen. Hidai Zilberman.

Israeli commandos have come close a few times over the years, and Mr. Deif has been wounded, but he has always survived.

A senior Israeli army officer said that Mr. Deif, 55, had played a pivotal role in the latest conflict, including ordering the firing of 130 rockets at Tel Aviv last Wednesday, one of the harshest attacks on Israel’s commercial capital since the fighting began.

Mr. Deif, revered among many Palestinians for his strategic prowess and ability to evade Israeli efforts to kill him, has spent decades underground. He has survived at least eight attempts on his life, including by ambush, bombings of safe houses where he was staying and missiles fired at his car, Israeli intelligence officials said. The officials, like others quoted in this article, spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational details of an active mission.

Credit…Mahmud Hams/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

During those attempts, he has lost an eye and a hand, sustained neurological damage from shrapnel, suffered hearing damage and was left with a limp, according to a current and a former Israeli intelligence official.

A senior Israeli intelligence official said that since the last Israeli incursion into Gaza in 2014, Israel had several opportunities to kill him but had refrained from doing so for fear of setting off a war.

Even before Israel was founded as an independent state in 1948, those fighting for its creation had long engaged in targeted killings. But the program has raised moral quandaries internally and internationally about the ethics of such actions.

In August 2014, Israeli warplanes dropped at least five bombs on a house in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood in Gaza where Israel believed Mr. Deif was staying. The house was reduced to rubble, and one of his wives, Widad, 28, and their infant son, Ali, were killed, along with another resident and her two teenage sons.

Israel thought that the strike had killed him. Although he survived — and subsequently fell into depression, according to the intelligence official — the attack fanned rumors of a security leak among Hamas’s leadership.

Security experts believe that Mr. Deif avoids detection by eschewing digital devices, using notes and couriers, and limiting his contacts to a tight, secret inner circle.

The commander, born in the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza, rose quickly through the ranks after joining the Islamist organization that became Hamas in the late 1980s. He has orchestrated numerous attacks against Israel, including a series of deadly bus bombings that derailed the peace process in the mid-1990s.

He is also credited with building Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades, into a fighting machine that can lob rockets against Israel, deploy commandos for naval missions and outmaneuver Israel in the warren of Gaza’s underground tunnels.

Credit…Hosam Salem for The New York Times

Most of the bombing and rocket fire have taken place at night, but violence between Israel and Palestinians continued to flare through the day on Wednesday, despite negotiations for a cease-fire.

In Deir al-Balah, a city in central Gaza, an Israeli airstrike on a residential building on Wednesday evening killed a married couple and their 2-year-old daughter, and wounded others, according to Palestinian health authorities. They said the woman was pregnant and her husband had a disability.
Near the West Bank city of Hebron, Israeli soldiers killed a Palestinian woman who had opened fire with an automatic rifle near the entrance to a Jewish settlement, according to the Israeli military. No one else was injured.
Four rockets were fired into northern Israel from Lebanon, and the Israeli military returned fire with artillery, but there were no reported casualties. It was the third such small-scale attack from Lebanese territory since the conflict in Gaza began. It was not clear who was responsible, but Hezbollah has said it did not fire the rockets.
Since May 10, the bombardment in Gaza has killed 227 people, including 64 children, and injured 1,620 people, in addition to leaving thousands homeless, Palestinian authorities said. In addition, they said Israelis had killed 27 Palestinians on the West Bank in unrest that began on May 7.
In Israel, 12 people have been killed by rockets fired from Gaza.

Credit…Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters

Rocks thrown at doors of a synagogue in Bonn, Germany. Israeli flags burned outside a synagogue in Münster. A convoy of cars in North London from which a man chanted anti-Jewish slurs.

As the conflict in Israel and Gaza extended into a 10th day on Wednesday, recent episodes like these are fanning concerns among Jewish groups and European leaders that the latest strife in the Middle East is spilling over into anti-Semitic words and actions in Europe.

Thousands of demonstrators have gathered on the streets of Paris, Berlin, Vienna and other European cities in mostly peaceful protests over the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, which has killed at least 212 Palestinians, including 61 children.

Pro-Palestinian activists and organizers say that solidarity with Palestinians should not be confused with anti-Semitism, and they denounce what they say are attempts to use accusations of anti-Semitism to try to shield Israel from criticism. They say they aim to hold Israel accountable for what they characterize as atrocities against Palestinians.

But Moshe Kantor, the president of the European Jewish Congress, warned on Tuesday against “geopolitical events 3,000 miles away” being used as a pretext to attack Jews.

“By attacking Jewish targets, they demonstrate they don’t hate Jews because of Israel,” he said, “but rather hate Israel because it is the Jewish homeland.”

In Germany, where historical memory runs especially deep because of the Holocaust, pro-Palestinian rallies have been held in cities across the west of the country and in the capital, Berlin. Several have descended into violence, including anti-Semitic chants, calls for violence against Israel, desecration of memorials to Holocaust victims and attacks on at least two synagogues.

The Central Council of Jews in Germany tweeted a video last Thursday showing protesters in Gelsenkirchen, in western Germany, waving Palestinian and Turkish flags and shouting anti-Jewish slurs. “The times in which Jews were cursed in the middle of the street should have long been over,” the group wrote. “This is pure anti-Semitism, nothing else!”

The United States on Tuesday criticized President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey over remarks he made about Israel at a news conference this week. They are “murderers, to the point that they kill children who are 5 or 6 years old,” he said, and are “only are satisfied by sucking blood.”

Fears that the latest Middle East conflict will aggravate anti-Semitism have also been pronounced in France, which has Europe’s largest Jewish and Muslim populations, and where the situation in the Middle East has previously boiled over into violence on the country’s streets.

In 2014, during Israel’s invasion of Gaza, protesters in Paris and its suburbs targeted synagogues and Jewish shops, lit smoke bombs, and threw stones and bottles at riot police officers. Some chanted “Death to Jews.”

In London over the weekend, thousands of mostly peaceful demonstrators marched from Hyde Park to the Israeli Embassy in West London. But in an area of North London with a large Jewish population, members of a convoy of cars honked horns and shouted anti-Jewish sentiments. One man chanted that Jewish “daughters” should be raped. London’s Metropolitan Police said in a statement that four men had been arrested.

Owen Jones, a prominent British columnist who has been a vocal supporter of Palestinian rights, warned against conflating Israel’s actions with Jews as a whole.

“If you’re holding British Jews responsible for the crimes committed by the Israeli state, and trying to terrorize Jews because of what is happening in Palestine,” he wrote on Twitter, “you’re not a Palestinian solidarity activist, you’re a nauseating anti-Semite who needs to be comprehensively defeated.”

Credit…Maya Alleruzzo/Associated Press

Foreign workers have long faced precarious living conditions in Israel, especially during military conflict. And on Tuesday, a Hamas rocket attack killed two Thai workers and wounded at least seven others in a packaging house in southern Israel, Thai and Israeli officials said.

Businesses near the border with Gaza are allowed to operate if they have access to a bomb shelter or a safety room, but a local official said the agricultural community where the Thai workers died did not have such a space.

That is often the case with such setups, an expert on foreign labor in Israel said.

“Thai workers come to Israel on temporary programs and live in caravans and containers that are often overcrowded and in poor sanitary conditions,” said Yahel Kurlander, a researcher at Tel-Hai College who specializes in Thai workers in Israel.

“These housings don’t have the safety rooms required by law or outlined in the contracts of these workers, who don’t have anywhere to hide,” she added.

Thais make up most of Israel’s agriculture work force, and tens of thousands live in the country as part of an agreement between the two nations. Investigations by news outlets and rights groups have highlighted their squalid living conditions, low pay and dangerous working situations including the spraying of chemicals.

The two workers killed on Tuesday were part of a group of 25 foreigners working at the plant and living in caravans nearby, according to Kan, the Israeli public broadcaster.

Thai workers usually do not speak Hebrew and English, Dr. Kurlander said, and “are among the most vulnerable populations in Israel.”

The workers’ deaths came a week after a Hamas strike killed an Indian woman who worked as a caregiver in Ashkelon. Previous Hamas rocket attacks killed a Thai agricultural worker in Israel in 2014 and injured another in 2018.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a briefing on Wednesday that the recent deaths of the foreign workers were “one more manifestation of the fact that Hamas indiscriminately targets everyone.”

Israel has likewise been criticized for the killing of civilians in Gaza in military airstrikes. Those strikes in the past 10 days have killed over 200 Palestinians and wounded more than 1,500 others.

VideoA funeral was held for Yusef Abu Hussein, a Palestinian reporter working in Gaza overnight who was killed in an Israeli airstrike. He was the first journalist to be killed in the latest Israeli bombardment of the territory.CreditCredit…Mohammed Abed/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

An Israeli airstrike killed a Palestinian reporter working in Gaza overnight Tuesday, the first journalist to be killed in the latest Israeli bombardment of the territory.

Throughout the 10-day conflict, journalists working in Gaza have faced increasingly perilous conditions and the Israeli government has faced international criticism for endangering their safety.

After an Israeli airstrike destroyed a 12-story building that housed the offices of news organizations including The Associated Press and Al Jazeera on Saturday, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said the United States had raised the issue with the Israeli government.

“We have communicated directly to the Israelis that ensuring the safety and security of journalists and independent media is a paramount responsibility,” Ms. Psaki wrote.

Although the building was evacuated, the A.P. said that it had “narrowly avoided a terrible loss of life.”

The journalist killed overnight Tuesday, Yusef Abu Hussein, was a Gaza City resident who worked as a radio journalist at the Hamas-run Aqsa Voice station. The assault also killed three other Palestinians, according to the local news media.

On Monday, Israeli warplanes bombed a building that housed the offices of Nawa Online Women Media Network, a news platform affiliated with a women’s rights and youth organization, according to a Facebook post from the outlet.

“In less than a week, Israel has bombed the offices of at least 18 media outlets,” Ignacio Miguel Delgado, the Middle East and North Africa representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists, said in a statement on Tuesday. “It’s difficult to reach any conclusion other than that the Israeli military wants to shut down news coverage of the suffering in Gaza.”

On Tuesday, Israeli forces assaulted a Palestinian reporter while she was filming an arrest in East Jerusalem, according to her employer, the website Middle East Eye.

In a video shared on social media, the reporter, Latifeh Abdellatif, appears in a heated interaction with two Israeli officers before one of them pushes her. Middle East Eye said the officers had then pulled down Ms. Abdellatif’s hijab and struck her knee with a baton.

Several reporters were also injured in separate incidents last week, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. That included at least seven injured by rubber bullets fired by Israeli soldiers trying to remove demonstrators from the Temple Mount on May 7, according to Reporters Without Borders.

Ramallah, West BankNasser Nasser/Associated Press
Jaffa, IsraelCorinna Kern for The New York Times
Hawara checkpoint, near NablusJaafar Ashtiyeh/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Nablus, West BankMajdi Mohammed/Associated Press
Jerusalem’s Old CityMahmoud Illean/Associated Press
Hebron, West BankHazem Bader/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Bethlehem, West BankAgence France-Presse — Getty Images

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Palestinians across Israel and the occupied territories rallied together in solidarity on Tuesday. A general strike was followed by street demonstrations.

Credit…Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times

The Israeli Embassy in Beijing criticized the Chinese state news media on Wednesday for spreading what it called “lies and racism” in a segment that said successful Jewish businesspeople had too much influence on American foreign policy.

In a video posted to its official Twitter account on Tuesday, the overseas arm of China’s state-owned China Central Television asked why the United States has defended Israel. “Jews dominate finance, media and the internet,” said a reporter for CGTN, the state broadcaster. “So do they have the powerful lobby that some say? Possible.”

In a response posted on Twitter on Wednesday, the Israeli Embassy in Beijing said that it was “disappointed to see these types of messages,” and that it hoped CGTN would “take down this insulting video that spreads lies and racism.”

During Israel’s bombing campaign in the Gaza Strip this month, China has spoken out against the Biden administration’s support for Israel. President Biden has not publicly called on Israeli forces to halt their attacks, which Israel says are aimed at Hamas militants and their infrastructure in Gaza, although on he took a tougher stance in a phone call with President Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Monday, according to two people familiar with the conversation.

Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, led a meeting on Sunday to discuss the conflict at the United Nations Security Council, where China holds the rotating presidency this month. Mr Wang called on Israel to lift its blockade of Gaza, a crowded coastal territory where more than two million Palestinians live.

The Chinese state news media has condemned the United States for its support of Israel, accusing it of hypocrisy in going after the Chinese government for human rights abuses in Xinjiang while not coming to the aid of Palestinians in the Gaza conflict. In an editorial this week, the Global Times, a Chinese government mouthpiece, wrote that the Biden administration was “slapping its own face as it shows indifference to the human rights of Palestinians.”

“It holds the banner of ‘human rights’ high as the core of this administration’s foreign policy,” the editorial continued, but “turns a blind eye when the human rights of Palestinians are trampled on.”

Since May 10, fighting has left more than 200 people dead in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Most are Palestinians killed by Israeli airstrikes in the Gaza Strip, a densely packed coastal enclave of about two million people, while deadly unrest has also flared in the West Bank and Israel. Explore the toll of the violence in this multimedia report.

Credit…Amir Levy/Getty Images

Since violence between Israelis and Palestinians began escalating last week, at least 100 new WhatsApp groups have been formed for the express purpose of committing violence against Palestinians, according to an analysis by The New York Times and FakeReporter, an Israeli watchdog group that studies misinformation.

The groups on WhatsApp, the encrypted messaging service owned by Facebook, have names like “The Jewish Guard” and “The Revenge Troops” and have added hundreds of new members a day, according to The Times’s analysis.

The groups, which are in Hebrew, have also been featured on email lists and online message boards used by far-right extremists in Israel.

While social media and messaging apps have been used elsewhere to fuel hate speech and violence, these WhatsApp groups go further, researchers said. They explicitly plan and execute violent acts against Arab Israelis.

That is far more specific than past WhatsApp-fueled mob attacks in India, where calls for violence were vague and generally not targeted at individuals or businesses, the researchers said. Even the Stop the Steal groups in the United States that organized the Jan. 6 protests in Washington did not openly direct attacks using social media or messaging apps, they said.

Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

Representative Rashida Tlaib, Democrat of Michigan, confronted President Biden on Tuesday over his support for Israel amid its bombing campaign against Hamas in Gaza, urging him to stop enabling a government that she said was committing crimes against Palestinians, according to a Democratic aide familiar with the exchange.

During a conversation on a tarmac in Detroit, where Mr. Biden had arrived to visit a Ford factory near her congressional district, Ms. Tlaib echoed a scathing speech she delivered last week on the House floor, telling the president that he must do more to protect Palestinian lives and human rights, said the aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe her remarks.

Her comments came as Israel has scaled up its bombing campaign in the past week. Among Democrats in Congress, attitudes toward Israel have grown more skeptical as the party base expresses concern about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Several high-profile progressive lawmakers including Ms. Tlaib have become increasingly vocal in criticizing Mr. Biden for his stance.

There was no immediate comment on the exchange from the White House.

Mr. Biden has expressed support for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas militants in Gaza, but he has not demanded one, and he has continued to assert that Israel has a right to defend itself.

Ms. Tlaib told the president that the status quo was enabling more killing, and that his policy of unconditional support for the Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not working, the aide said.

Representative Debbie Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, whose district is home to the Ford F-150 factory that Mr. Biden was visiting and who also greeted him on his arrival, later said that the exchange on the tarmac was part of “an important dialogue.”

“It was a very compassionate, honest discussion,” she said in a brief interview. “But the president doesn’t deal with these kinds of issues in public, and he doesn’t negotiate in public.”

Mr. Biden shook Ms. Tlaib’s hand after the conversation, and later praised the congresswoman during his public remarks at the factory in Dearborn.

“I admire your intellect, I admire your passion and I admire your concern for so many other people,” Mr. Biden said before referring to Ms. Tlaib’s grandmother Muftia Tlaib, who lives in the West Bank. “From my heart, I pray that your grandmom and family are well. I promise you, I’ll do everything to see that they are.”

Credit…Ahmad Gharabli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Our Jerusalem bureau chief, Patrick Kingsley, examined the events that have led to the past week’s violence, the worst between Israelis and Palestinians in years. A little-noticed police action in Jerusalem was among them. He writes:

Twenty-seven days before the first rocket was fired from Gaza this week, a squad of Israeli police officers entered the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, brushed the Palestinian attendants aside and strode across its vast limestone courtyard. Then they cut the cables to the loudspeakers that broadcast prayers to the faithful from four medieval minarets.

It was the night of April 13, the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. It was also Memorial Day in Israel, which honors those who died fighting for the country. The Israeli president was delivering a speech at the Western Wall, a sacred Jewish site that lies below the mosque, and Israeli officials were concerned that the prayers would drown it out.

Here is his full account of that night and the events that later unfolded.

Tags Conflict, IsraelPalestinian, Live, Updates, Video

Business

Companies Search to Assist Feminine Caregivers Return to Workforce: Stay Updates

Post author By
Post date May 19, 2021

A homebound resident in the Bronx receives a dose of coronavirus vaccine. A new initiative is pushing for federally funded family and medical leave, and affordable child care and elder care.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…James Estrin/The New York Times

JPMorgan Chase, Spotify, Uber, McDonald’s and almost 200 other businesses have formed a coalition focused on ensuring that women are not held back in the labor force because they bear the brunt of caregiving in the United States.

The new Care Economy Business Council, the creation of which was announced on Wednesday, portrays the effort in stark economic terms, arguing that fixing the crumbling child and elder care systems is essential to the economic recovery.

Led by Time’s Up, the advocacy organization founded by powerful women in Hollywood, the council aims to bring executives together to share ways to improve workplace policies and to pressure Congress to pass policy changes that would help people — particularly women — get back to work. The council will push for federally funded family and medical leave, affordable child care and elder care, and elevated wages for caregiving workers.

“What I’m seeing now that I have not seen in the many years I’ve been working on this constellation of issues is a realization by employers that they have a stake in this,” Tina Tchen, the chief executive of Time’s Up, said.

The pandemic laid bare the faults in caregiving in the United States, particularly the problems with child care. Many child-care centers either shuttered or cut back on hours to save on costs, leaving parents without reliable and safe places for their children while they worked. The lack of child care support was a major reason that hundreds of thousands of women left the work force in the past year, bringing female labor participation rate to its lowest level since 1986.

Companies scrambled to cobble together solutions, from flexible work hours to additional child care stipends. But for many executives, the crisis made it clear that the entire system needed an overhaul.

The issue is “bigger than something we can solve on our own,” said Christy M. Pambianchi, the chief human resources officer at Verizon, which is part of the council.

President Biden’s two-part infrastructure plan proposes pumping $425 billion into expanding and strengthening child-care services and an additional $400 billion to help expand access for in-home care for older adults and those with disabilities. His plan also offers businesses a tax credit for building child-care centers in their workplaces.

Members of Congress have also introduced three separate but similar child-care bills.

Credit…Anushree Fadnavis/Reuters

Charities have an inherent interest in cryptocurrencies because, increasingly, their fates are intertwined. Nonprofit groups benefit from financial windfalls and people have recently been getting rich with crypto, the DealBook newsletter reports.

“There’s no question” that the price of cryptocurrency is linked to the volume of giving, said Joe Huston, the managing director of GiveDirectly, a global aid group. Crypto is volatile, especially in the past few days, but philanthropies have seen consistent growth in digital asset donations over time. (Bitcoin is still up 30 percent for the year, even after a torrid few trading sessions). Donations in crypto to Fidelity Charitable went from $13 million in 2019 to $28 million in 2020.

GiveDirectly has seen a “big uptick,” Mr. Huston said. The Twitter founder Jack Dorsey gave the group $12.8 million, the co-founder of the Ethereum platform Vitalik Buterin donated $4.8 million and Elon Musk of Tesla gave “some.” The cryptocurrency exchange FTX donates 1 percent of its fees and encourages traders to channel returns to charity.

But newfound riches donated in novel ways also raise questions. Mr. Buterin recently gave $1.2 billion to fund pandemic relief efforts in India. The gift was in SHIB, a crypto token named after a Shiba Inu dog that’s a derivative of the onetime joke crypto Dogecoin. These tokens were sent unbidden to Mr. Buterin to bolster their value. (To stop promoters from sending him free crypto with uncertain motives, he “burned” $6 billion worth of the tokens, taking them out of circulation permanently.)

His approach in donating tokens was “impressively lightweight and fast,” Mr. Huston said, showing how frictionless crypto-based philanthropy can be. Previously, it was unimaginable to transfer such an enormous sum without an institutional intermediary. This lack of friction also makes crypto giving prime territory for fraudsters.

“There are a lot of young people with stupid amounts of money,” said Austin Detwiler, a consultant at American Philanthropic, a consulting firm. Fund-raisers should make giving from this new generation easier, mindful that “it’s easy to start accepting crypto, but it’s volatile, so have a policy,” he said. Some donors place conditions on token gifts and some charities simply can’t tolerate the risk of holding assets that rise and fall so rapidly.

Credit…Modern Fertility

Ro, the parent company of Roman, the brand that is best known for delivering erectile dysfunction and hair loss medication to consumers, announced on Wednesday that it would acquire Modern Fertility, a start-up that offers at-home fertility tests for women.

The deal is priced at more than $225 million, according to people with knowledge of the acquisition who spoke on condition of anonymity because the information was not public. It is one of the largest investments in the women’s health care technology space, known as femtech, which attracted $592 million in venture capital in 2019, according to an analysis by PitchBook.

Modern Fertility was founded in 2017 with its flagship product: a $159 finger prick test that can estimate how many eggs a woman may have left, which can help determine which fertility method might be best.

“We essentially took the same laboratory tests that women would take in an infertility clinic and made them available to women at a fraction of the cost,” said Afton Vechery, a founder and chief executive of Modern Fertility, noting that her own test at a clinic set her back $1,500.

The company now also sells an at-home test, available at Walmart, to help track ovulation, as well as standard pregnancy tests and prenatal vitamins.

Ro, which was founded in 2017 with a focus on men’s health and was valued in March at about $5 billion, has in recent years expanded into telehealth, including delivering generic drugs by mail. In December, Ro acquired Workpath, which connects patients with in-home care providers, like nurses.

The global digital health market, which includes telemedicine, online pharmacies and wearable devices, could reach $600 billion by 2024, according to the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. And yet, by one estimate, only 1.4 percent of the money that flows into health care goes to the femtech industry, mirroring a pattern in the medical industry, which has historically overlooked women’s health research.

“Gender bias in health care research methods and funding has really contributed to sexism in medicine and health care,” said Sonya Borrero, director of the Center for Women’s Health Research and Innovation at the University of Pittsburgh. “I think we’re seeing again — gender bias in the venture capital sector is going to exactly shape what gets developed.”

That underinvestment was part of the reasoning behind the acquisition, said Zachariah Reitano, Ro’s chief executive. The company developed a female-focused online service in 2019 called Rory.

“We’re going to continue to invest hundreds of millions of dollars over the next five years into women’s health,” Mr. Reitano said, “because ultimately I think women’s health has the potential to be much larger than men’s health.”

Credit…Mike Segar/Reuters

The major management shuffle announced Tuesday by JPMorgan Chase renewed chatter about who will succeed Jamie Dimon as chief executive.

Marianne Lake, the bank’s head of consumer lending, and Jennifer Piepszak, its chief financial officer, were made joint heads of the consumer and community bank. The promotions solidify both women’s positions as contenders for chief executive.

The new setup also creates an unusual situation in which two executives competing for the top job are sharing a leadership role. That may be tricky to navigate, management experts say, and whether it’s a good test of leadership skills is debatable.

In a 2012 paper, Ryan Krause of the Neeley School of Business at Texas Christian University, examined how sharing power affected the performance of public companies. Estimating the relative power of co-chief executives using proxies such as tenure and stock ownership, he and his co-authors concluded that executives who had more equal levels of power performed worse than those with disproportionate power.

“We interpret this as being evidence that, basically, having co-C.E.O.s really only works if they’re not really co-C.E.O.s,” Mr. Krause said. Co-leaders of a division, he said, may be more successful because they can more easily divide responsibilities instead of sharing authority. Such setups are not uncommon at JPMorgan.

It could highlight the ability to work collaboratively, said Steve Odland, the head of the Conference Board and the former chief executive of Office Depot and AutoZone.

“Whenever you’re in a C.E.O. successor position, it’s difficult because there are a lot of things that have to go right and you’re under the microscope,” Mr. Odland said. “But to do so with your competitor, and have to compete with your co-head, at the same time you’re making it work is especially stressful. Which is why it’s an interesting test, because the person who succeeds at this should be amply able to succeed in the C.E.O. role.”

But is it a good idea? Dan Ciampa, an adviser to chief executives and directors during leadership transitions, said that he generally would not recommend such a test.

“It may make sense to have co-division leaders or co-unit leaders and maybe even co-C.E.O.s,” Mr. Ciampa said. “But to use that as a way to determine who the next person should be to run the entire organization, to me it says that the board and the sitting C.E.O. and the head of H.R. have probably not done their homework.”

Credit…Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

The Biden administration’s efforts to provide $4 billion in debt relief to minority farmers is encountering stiff resistance from banks, which are complaining that the government initiative to pay off the loans of borrowers who have faced decades of financial discrimination will cut into their profits and hurt investors.

The debt relief was approved as part of the stimulus package that Congress passed in March and was intended to make amends for the discrimination that Black and other nonwhite farmers have faced from lenders and the Department of Agriculture over the years.

But no money has yet gone out the door.

Instead, the program has become mired in controversy and lawsuits. In April, white farmers who claim that they are victims of discrimination sued the U.S.D.A. over the initiative, writes The New York Times’s Alan Rappeport.

Now, three of the biggest banking groups are waging their own fight and complaining about the cost of being repaid early. Their argument stems from the way banks make money from loans and how they decide where to extend credit.

By allowing borrowers to repay their debts early, the lenders are being denied income they have long expected, they argue. The banks want the federal government to pay money beyond the outstanding loan amount so that banks and investors will not miss out on interest income that they were expecting or money that they would have made reselling the loans to other investors.

Bank lobbyists have been asking the Agriculture Department to make changes to the repayment program, a U.S.D.A. official said. They are pressing the U.S.D.A. to simply make the loan payments, rather than wipe out the debt all at once. And they are warning of other repercussions.

In a letter sent last month to the agriculture secretary, the banks suggested that they might be more reluctant to extend credit if the loans were quickly repaid, leaving minority farmers worse off in the long run. The intimation was viewed as a threat by some organizations that represent Black farmers.

The U.S.D.A. has shown no inclination to reverse course.

Stocks on Wall Street extended the week’s losses on Wednesday, following a slump in Europe, as traders weighed fresh data on inflation and concerns from central banks about the recovery.

The S&P 500 fell 1.2 percent in early trading, after dropping 0.9 percent on Tuesday. Technology stocks led the declines, with the Nasdaq composite falling more than 1.5 percent in early trading.

The Stoxx Europe 600 index was 1.8 percent lower, while the FTSE 100 in Britain lost 1.5 percent. Stock markets in Asia ended the day mainly lower, with the Nikkei in Japan down by 1.3 percent.

Volatility in stock markets lately has been driven by sentiment about inflation. Investors are nervous that a jump in prices — coming as global economies reopen and while the government continues to pump stimulus funds to spur growth — could push the Federal Reserve and other central banks to raise interest rates or take other measures to cool growth. That would be bad news for riskier investments like stocks.

The Fed and other central banks have said they see the recent increases as transitory caused partly by supply chain issues as economies revive from lockdowns, and that they have no plans to remove emergency support for the economy.

Bitcoin’s slump

Bitcoin has dropped more than 22 percent in 24 hours, to about $34,000, according to CoinDesk. The cryptocurrency was above $63,000 about a month ago.
One factor behind the decline was China’s announcement that it would ban banks and payment companies from providing services related to cryptocurrency transactions.
The drop has hit shares of companies in the cryptocurrency industry hard. Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange, fell 10 percent in early trading Wednesday, and Riot Blockchain slid more than 12 percent.
Tesla, the electric vehicle maker that recently invested $1.5 billion on bitcoin, was down 4 percent. But Tesla also recently reversed a decision to accept payment for its cars in Bitcoin, a decision that has helped fuel the cryptocurrency’s recent decline.

Inflation data

On Wednesday, Britain said its inflation rate more than doubled to an annual rate of 1.5 percent in April. Still the jump was in line with expectations, and reflects an adjustment from slumping prices a year ago.

The eurozone is also seeing higher prices. The annualized inflation rate in April was 1.6 percent among countries using the euro, up from a 1.3 percent rate the month before, Eurostat reported. Fuel costs were cited as the main driver.

The word from central banks

But the European Central Bank issued a warning on Wednesday that, although eurozone economies were improving, “the pandemic will leave a legacy of higher debt and weaker balance sheets, which — if unaddressed — could prompt sharp market corrections and financial stress or lead to a prolonged period of weak economic recovery.”
The bank, in its latest Financial Stability Review, also pointed to the “remarkable exuberance” in the stock markets as U.S. Treasury yields have risen amid inflation concerns. “The buoyancy of financial markets has stood in contrast to weaker economic fundamentals,” the report said. The bank called for continued support for hard-hit sectors that remain vulnerable, like hospitality, arts and entertainment.
Federal Reserve policymakers will release the minutes from their April meeting on Wednesday.

Amazon said Tuesday that it would indefinitely prohibit police departments from using its facial recognition tool, extending a moratorium the company announced last year during nationwide protests over racism and biased policing. When Amazon announced the pause in June, it did not cite a specific reason for the change. The company said it hoped a year was enough time for Congress to create legislation regulating the ethical use of facial recognition technology. Congress has not banned the technology, or issued any significant regulations on it, but some cities have.
Google held its I/O developer conference on Tuesday. And, as usual, it was a dizzying two-hour procession of new features, products and services across the company’s vast array of businesses, from its smartphone software to its artificial intelligence systems. Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google’s parent company Alphabet, revealed the company’s next so-called moonshot: Google aims to power the entire company using carbon-free energy by 2030. It will require using artificially intelligent software systems to allocate energy wisely as well as investments to tap into geothermal energy in addition to wind and solar.

Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Fox News Media, the Rupert Murdoch-controlled cable group, filed a motion on Tuesday to dismiss a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit brought against it in March by Dominion Voting Systems, an election technology company that accused Fox News of propagating lies that ruined its reputation after the 2020 presidential election.

The Dominion lawsuit and a similar defamation claim brought in February by another election company, Smartmatic, have been widely viewed as test cases in a growing legal effort to battle disinformation in the news media. And it is another byproduct of former President Donald J. Trump’s baseless attempts to undermine President Biden’s clear victory.

In a 61-page response filed in Delaware Superior Court, the Fox legal team argues that Dominion’s suit threatened the First Amendment powers of a news organization to chronicle and assess newsworthy claims in a high-stakes political contest.

“A free press must be able to report both sides of a story involving claims striking at the core of our democracy,” Fox says in the motion, “especially when those claims prompt numerous lawsuits, government investigations and election recounts.” The motion adds: “The American people deserved to know why President Trump refused to concede despite his apparent loss.”

Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox News presented the circumstances in a different light.

Dominion is among the largest manufacturers of voting machine equipment and its technology was used by more than two dozen states last year. Its lawsuit described the Fox News and Fox Business cable networks as active participants in spreading a false claim, pushed by Mr. Trump’s allies, that the company had covertly modified vote counts to manipulate results in favor of Mr. Biden. Lawyers for Mr. Trump shared those claims during televised interviews on Fox programs.

“Lies have consequences,” Dominion’s lawyers wrote in their initial complaint. “Fox sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process.” The lawsuit cites instances where Fox hosts, including Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo, uncritically repeated false claims about Dominion made by Mr. Trump’s lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell.

A representative for Dominion, whose founder and employees received threatening messages after the negative coverage, did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday night.

Fox News Media has retained two prominent lawyers to lead its defense: Charles Babcock, who has a background in media law, and Scott Keller, a former chief counsel to Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas. Fox has also filed to dismiss the Smartmatic suit; that defense is being led by Paul D. Clement, a former solicitor general under President George W. Bush.

“There are two sides to every story,” Mr. Babcock and Mr. Keller wrote in a statement on Tuesday. “The press must remain free to cover both sides, or there will be a free press no more.”

The Fox motion on Tuesday argues that its networks “had a free-speech right to interview the president’s lawyers and surrogates even if their claims eventually turned out to be unsubstantiated.” It argues that the security of Dominion’s technology had been debated in prior legal claims and media coverage, and that the lawsuit did not meet the high legal standard of “actual malice,” a reckless disregard for the truth, on the part of Fox News and its hosts.

Media organizations, in general, enjoy strong protections under the First Amendment. Defamation suits are a novel tactic in the battle over disinformation, but proponents say the strategy has shown some early results. The conservative news outlet Newsmax apologized last month after a Dominion employee, in a separate legal case, accused the network of spreading baseless rumors about his role in the election. Fox Business canceled “Lou Dobbs Tonight” a day after Smartmatic sued Fox in February and named Mr. Dobbs as a co-defendant.

Jonah E. Bromwich contributed reporting.

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World News

Israel-Palestinian Battle: Stay Updates – The New York Instances

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Post date May 18, 2021

In 2016, then Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in Jerusalem.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Pool photo by Debbie Hill

President Biden on Monday delivered a firmer message in private to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel than he has done in public, warning that he could put off growing pressure from the international community and from Congress to call on Israel to change its approach to Hamas for only so long, according to two people familiar with the call.

The private message hinted at a time limit on Mr. Biden’s ability to provide diplomatic cover for the actions of the Israeli government, as well as a new dynamic in American politics: the president presenting himself as a closer friend to Israel than it might find in Congress.

“We have a new dynamic with Congress playing the bad cop with Israel and asking the president to put a hold on an arms sales while the president plays the good cop,” said Ilan Goldenberg, a former Obama administration official and the director of the Middle East Security program at the Center for a New American Security. “It may give President Biden more flexibility and leverage down the line with the Israelis.”

The tactic — private pressure, combined with the president’s public support for Israel’s right to defend itself — has come under fire from Democratic members of Congress and progressive Jewish groups. But administration officials defended it on Tuesday as a product of Mr. Biden’s decades of foreign policy experience.

“He’s been doing this long enough to know that the best way to end an international conflict is typically not to debate it in public,” the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, told reporters aboard Air Force One on Tuesday.

She added: “Sometimes diplomacy needs to happen behind the scenes, it needs to be quiet and we don’t read out every component.”

Mr. Biden and Mr. Netanyahu on Monday discussed Israel’s right to defend itself against “indiscriminate rocket attacks,” according to the White House’s public readout of the call. In the brief summary, the White House said that Mr. Biden “expressed his support for a cease-fire,” while stopping short of calling for one.

The statement, released Monday, earned Mr. Biden criticism for failing to call on Israel to change its approach despite rising international condemnation.

“While a large number of congressional Democrats and at least one senior Senate Republican have called on both Israelis and Palestinians to reach an immediate cease-fire, the Biden administration has still not publicly done so,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J-Street, a liberal pro-Israel advocacy group that has worked for years to shift the debate as a counterweight to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

“This combination of inadequate ‘quiet’ appeals for de-escalation,” he added, “and otherwise nearly unquestioning public support for and tolerance of the Netanyahu government’s actions, is unhelpful.”

VideoPalestinian citizens, activists, workers and business owners shuttered stores and downed their tools in an organized strike, and took to the streets protesting Israel’s air campaign in Gaza and other measures targeting Palestinians.CreditCredit…Jalaa Marey/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

RAMALLAH, West Bank — Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian citizens of Israel downed tools for the day on Tuesday, as did workers across the occupied West Bank and in Gaza, protesting violence against Arab Israelis, the unfolding Israeli military campaign targeting Hamas militants in Gaza and the looming eviction of several families from their homes in East Jerusalem.

Streets were deserted in Arab areas across both Israel and the occupied territories, as shopkeepers shuttered stores along the waterfront in Jaffa, central Israel; the steep roads of Umm el-Fahm, an Arab town in northern Israel; and West Bank cities such as Hebron, Jenin, Nablus and Ramallah.

Demonstrators gathered instead in central squares, waving Palestinian flags, listening to speeches and chanting against Israeli policies. Outside Ramallah, a group of Palestinians who had gathered separately from the protesters set fires on a major thoroughfare and later exchanged gunfire with Israeli soldiers, officials said.

Since hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes in 1948, they have been divided not only by geography, but also by lived experience.

They were scattered across Gaza, the West Bank, and the wider Middle East, as well as the state of Israel itself. Some struggled under differing forms of military occupation, while others were given Israeli citizenship — diluting their common identity.

But on Tuesday, millions of them came together in a general strike to protest their shared treatment by Israel, in what many Palestinians described as a rare show of political unity.

Credit…Nasser Nasser/Associated Press

Mustafa Barghouti, an independent politician who attended a rally in central Ramallah on Tuesday morning, said the protests constituted “a very significant day.”

“It reflects how Palestinians now have a unified struggle against the same system of apartheid,” he added.

Israel fiercely rejects longstanding accusations of apartheid by Palestinians, a claim now taken up by a small but growing number of rights watchdogs, including Human Rights Watch last month.

Israeli officials say that the occupation of the West Bank is a temporary measure until a peace agreement is achieved. And the blockade of Gaza, they say, is a security measure to prevent Hamas, the Islamist militant group that controls Gaza and opposes Israel’s existence, from acquiring weapons. They also highlight how Arab citizens of Israel have the right to vote and elect lawmakers, have representation in Israel’s Parliament, and often rise to become judges and senior civil servants.

Mark Regev, a senior adviser to the prime minister, told The Times last month: “To allege that Israeli policies are motivated by racism is both baseless and outrageous, and belittles the very real security threats posed by Palestinian terrorists to Israeli civilians.”

But many Palestinians on either side of the boundary between Israel and the occupied territories say that they are the victims of the same system of oppression — one that operates with varying degrees of intensity, and offers Arabs varying degrees of freedom, but ultimately seeks to assert Jewish supremacy wherever that system is in force.

“We’re one big family,” said Enass Tinah, a 46-year-old researcher at the Ramallah protest. “It’s the same suffering.”

Some did not participate in the strike — including health workers in northern Israel, who felt they had a moral need to keep on working, and the Arab residents of Abu Ghosh, a town west of Jerusalem known for its good relations between Arabs and Jews.

Other Palestinians simply saw the strike as an attempt to show solidarity with Gaza, and to strengthen calls for an independent Palestinian state.

But for some, the strike, and the unity it implied, was a sign of a new era for the Palestinian cause.

For Ms. Tinah, the old hope of an independent Palestine now seemed unlikely.

A single state for Palestinians and Jews, with equal rights for both, now felt a better goal to Ms. Tinah. “That’s where we’re moving,” she said. “One state with equal rights for all citizens.”

“I don’t know what that looks like,” she said. But, she added, “I think this is the new path.”

Credit…Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times

Fighting between Israel and Hamas extended into a ninth day on Tuesday but subtle signs emerged that the sides were privately edging toward a cease-fire, according to three people involved in the negotiations.

The indications came as a growing chorus of international parties called on Israel, Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza to lay down their weapons.

For the first time, President Biden expressed support for a cease-fire on Monday, but he also reiterated that Israel had a right to defend itself, stopping short of publicly calling on Israel to change its approach.

A person working on the cease-fire talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the negotiations are politically delicate, said Egypt and the United Nations were working together to “restore calm.”

A senior Hamas official based in Qatar, Moussa Abu Marzouk, said Qatar was also involved in the effort.

A senior Israeli government official, who is privy to cease-fire talks and also spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Israel was not ready for a cease-fire yet, but acknowledged that it might be soon.

Mr. Abu Marzouk said Hamas was ready for a cease-fire with Israel. But he said the Israeli government was demanding Hamas unilaterally halt its fire for two to three hours before Israel decides whether it will do the same — a position he described as “stubborn.”

“We agreed to an end to the war in a simultaneous and mutual way,” he said.

But he hinted that a new escalation was possible if Israel moved forward with the evictions of several Palestinian families in East Jerusalem or acted violently against Palestinians at the Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, two issues that played a role in the buildup to the current fighting.

The Israeli official cautioned against what he called a premature cease-fire, contending that Hamas would take advantage of such an arrangement by regrouping and attacking Israel anew. The official said Israel was seeking what he described as a sustained period of peace and calm.

Credit…Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

BRUSSELS — European Union foreign ministers overwhelmingly called for an immediate cease-fire to stop fighting between Israel and the Palestinians in an emergency meeting on Tuesday.

All of the member states except Hungary backed a statement that also condemns Hamas’s rocket attacks on Israel, supports Israel’s right to self-defense but cautions that it “has to be done in a proportional manner and respecting international humanitarian law,” said the E.U.’s top foreign policy official, Josep Borrell Fontelles.

He said that the number of civilian casualties in Gaza, “including a high number of women and children,” was “unacceptable.” And he said that the European Union, as part of the quartet with the United States, Russia and the United Nations that seeks peace in the Middle East, would push to relaunch a serious diplomatic process.

“The priority is the immediate cessation of all violence and the implementation of a cease-fire,” Mr. Borrell said.

Foreign policy in the European Union works by unanimity, so Mr. Borrell’s comments were an effort, he said, “to reflect the overall agreement.”

In terms of impact, a few individual European nations tend to carry more weight with Israel. In general, European governments have been supportive of Israel and its right to self-defense against barrages of rockets aimed at Israeli civilians.

Still, as the fighting has gone on, key European countries are pressing for a quick cease-fire, including Germany, which is traditionally a strong backer of Israel.

On Monday, after speaking with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany “again sharply condemned the continued rocket attacks from Gaza on Israel and assured the prime minister of the German government’s solidarity,” said her spokesman, Steffen Seibert. “She reaffirmed Israel’s right to defend itself against the attacks,” he said.

But given the many civilian lives lost “on both sides,” Mr. Seibert said, “the chancellor expressed her hope that the fighting will end as soon as possible.”

On Tuesday, after Ms. Merkel had spoken with Jordan’s King Abdullah, “Both agreed that initiatives for a speedy cease-fire should be supported in order to create the conditions for the resumption of political negotiations,” Mr. Seibert said.

Before the E.U. meeting, the German foreign minister, Heiko Maas, said that “right now, ending the violence in the Middle East is the first priority. But we also need to talk about how to avoid such an escalation in the future.”

Mr. Maas added that the European Union “has a role to play here,” both in terms of political and humanitarian action. Germany has pledged 40 million euros for humanitarian aid for Gazans.

The Germans, like the British, have also seen a number of demonstrations against Israel’s military actions, a few of them openly anti-Semitic. France, the only E.U. member of the United Nations Security Council, has also pressed for a quick cease-fire.

On Monday, President Emmanuel Macron of France told a news conference that “there needs to be a process for a cease-fire as quickly as possible and construction of a possible path to discussions between the different protagonists.”

Mr. Macron said he was having discussions with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt and the king of Jordan “to be able together to see how we make a concrete proposal.” It is “absolutely necessary” to end hostilities, he said.

Credit…Said Khatib/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Until Monday evening, the Al-Rimal health clinic in central Gaza City was a key cog in the Palestinian health system. Its eight doctors and 200 nurses administered hundreds of vaccinations, prescriptions, and screenings a day. And Al-Rimal housed the only laboratory in Gaza that could process coronavirus tests.

But then, on Monday night, an Israeli airstrike hit the street outside, sending shrapnel into the clinic, shattering windows, shredding doors, furniture and computers — and wrecking Gaza’s only coronavirus test laboratory.

“During times of war people need more treatment than usual,” Mohammed Abu Samaan, a senior administrator at the clinic, said Tuesday. “Now we can’t give people medicine.”

The wreckage at Al-Rimal is one of the most striking examples of devastation wrought by the nine-day-old battle between Hamas militants and the Israeli military — creating a humanitarian catastrophe that is touching nearly every civilian living in Gaza, a coastal territory of about two million people.

Sewage systems have been destroyed, sending fetid wastewater into the streets of Gaza City. A critical desalination plant that helped provide fresh water to 250,000 people is offline, and water pipes serving at least 800,000 people have been damaged. Landfills are closed, with trash piling up. And dozens of schools have been either damaged or ordered to close, forcing some 600,000 students to miss classes on Monday.

The level of destruction and loss of human life have underlined the challenge in the Gaza Strip, already overpacked with people and suffering under the weight of an indefinite blockade by Israel and Egypt even before the latest conflict.

President Biden added his voice to the growing chorus of international leaders calling for a cease-fire on Monday night, but there was little indication that an end to the hostilities was near on Tuesday morning.

Militants in Gaza aimed a barrage of around 100 rockets at southern Israel overnight, adding to the more than 3,300 fired in just over a week. And the Israeli bombardment showed no signs of letting up, with the sound of explosions once again rocking Gaza before dawn.

General Hidai Zilberman, a military spokesman, who spoke to the Israeli network Army Radio, said there was no plan to suspend operations.

“We have a bank of targets that is full, and we want to continue and to create pressure on Hamas,” he said. “This morning, the chief of staff gave us the plans for the next 24 hours, the targets. We will hit anyone who belongs to Hamas, from the first to the last.”

Credit…Dan Balilty for The New York Times

Hamas said it would not stop its assault, accusing “the criminal Zionist enemy” of “bombing of homes and residential apartments.”

“We warn the enemy that if it did not stop that immediately, we would resume rocketing Tel Aviv,” the militant group’s spokesman Abu Ubaida said, according to Reuters.

While Hamas fighters move through an extensive series of tunnels under Gaza, and as Israeli warplanes drop bombs aimed at destroying that network, it is the people caught between who suffer the most calamitous losses.

Schools in southern Israel within range of the rocket fire have been closed and many families have left the border areas. The constant wailing of sirens warning of incoming rocket fire punctuate daily life, particularly in the south, sending Israelis repeatedly running to shelters.

At least 10 people in Israel have been killed in rocket attacks, the Israeli authorities said.

The death toll in Gaza itself has surpassed 200, including at least 61 children, according to the health authorities in the territory.

And the sprawling humanitarian crisis in Gaza — documented by both United Nations agencies and the local authorities — is growing by the day, adding to pressure on political leaders to pause the hostilities so that relief can reach those in desperate need.

Palestinian activists across Israel took part in a general strike on Tuesday to protest Israel’s air campaign in Gaza and other measures targeting Palestinians.

Even before the current conflict, Gaza was facing an economic crisis and political crisis.

Hamas won elections in the territory in 2006 and took full control in 2007, after which Israel put a blockade on the region, citing the need to curb weapons smuggling. Egypt, which shares a border with Gaza, also put in restrictions that tightly control the movement of people and goods in and out of the territory.

Since 2007, Hamas has engaged in three major conflicts with Israel and several smaller skirmishes. After each eruption of violence, Gaza’s infrastructure was left in shambles.

The result, according to a report last year by the United Nations, is that Gaza has “the world’s highest unemployment rate, and more than half of its population lives below the poverty line.”

The latest round of fighting has crippled that fragile infrastructure.

Six hospitals and eight clinics have suffered bomb damage, according to the United Nations’ humanitarian affairs office, limiting medical treatment available for many people living in the region.

By Monday, Israeli bombs had destroyed 132 residential buildings and damaged 316 housing units so badly that they were uninhabitable, according to Gaza’s housing ministry.

More than 40,000 people have been forced into shelters and thousands more have sought refuge with friends or relatives, according to the U.N. humanitarian affairs office.

“Until a cease-fire is reached, all parties must agree to a ‘humanitarian pause,’” the office said in a statement. “These measures would allow humanitarian agencies to carry out relief operations, and people to purchase food and water and seek medical care.”

Credit…Hosam Salem for The New York Times

The worst Israeli-Palestinian fighting in years spilled into a ninth day on Tuesday as the Israeli military bombarded Gaza and southern Lebanon and Hamas militants fired rockets into southern Israeli towns, hours after President Biden expressed support for a cease-fire during a call with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

Mr. Biden’s carefully worded statement fell short of an immediate demand for an end to Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza, which showed little sign of ending after Mr. Netanyahu said on Monday that his country’s armed forces would “continue striking at the terrorist targets.”

Despite growing concern in foreign capitals over the violence — and among some of Israel’s staunchest defenders in Washington — the region’s heaviest clashes since a 2014 war threatened to escalate. Late Monday, the Israeli military fired artillery shells into Lebanon for the first time since the hostilities began, striking what it said were Palestinian militants who had attempted to fire rockets into Israel.

The Israeli Army said it believed that a small Palestinian faction in Lebanon — and not the militant group Hezbollah — had fired the rockets, most of which failed to reach Israeli territory. The United Nations peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon tweeted that it had intensified patrols in the area and that the situation on Tuesday morning was calm.

But the toll on civilians continued to grow. By late Monday, the Israeli bombardment had killed 212 people in Gaza, including dozens of children, and Hamas rockets had killed at least 10 in Israel.

The Israeli Army said that Hamas had fired almost as many rockets in eight days — 3,350 — as it did in the 50-day war the two sides fought in 2014. About 90 percent of them were destroyed in midair by the Iron Dome, an antimissile defense system partly financed by the United States, the Israeli Army said.

The fighting has been focused on the Gaza Strip, the crowded coastal enclave ruled by Hamas, as the Israeli Army bombards infrastructure and underground tunnels that it says Hamas uses to support its military operations. But protests and violence have also erupted in the West Bank and Israel, where Arabs have clashed with the Israeli police and Jewish residents.

The Biden administration has stepped up its diplomatic engagement, dispatching an envoy to the region last week. In a readout of Mr. Biden’s call with Mr. Netanyahu, White House officials said the president had “expressed his support for a cease-fire and discussed U.S. engagement with Egypt and other partners towards that end.” But Mr. Biden had “reiterated his firm support for Israel’s right to defend itself against indiscriminate rocket attacks,” the statement added.

The Biden administration previously avoided the use of the term “cease-fire,” with top officials like Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken talking instead about the need for a “sustainable calm” and others referring to the need for “restraint.”

Credit…Hosam Salem for The New York Times

Since Covid-19 first emerged in the blockaded Gaza Strip, a shortage of medical supplies has allowed authorities to administer only a relatively tiny number of coronavirus tests.

Now, the sole laboratory in Gaza that processes test results has become temporarily inoperable after an Israeli airstrike nearby on Monday, officials in Gaza said.

The strike, which targeted a separate building in Gaza City, sent shrapnel and debris flying across the street, damaging the lab and the administrative offices of the Hamas-run Health Ministry, said Dr. Majdi Dhair, director of the ministry’s preventive medicine department.

One ministry employee was hospitalized and in serious condition after shrapnel struck him in the head, Dr. Dhair said in a phone interview on Tuesday.

“This attack was barbaric,” he said. “There’s no way to justify it.”

The Israeli Army did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the strike. Since Israel began its bombing campaign in Gaza on May 10, the army has said that its airstrikes aim solely at militants and their infrastructure.

Dr. Dhair said that he believed the equipment inside the lab was unharmed but emphasized that it would take at least a day to clean up the damage and prepare it to process coronavirus tests again. In the meantime, he said, medical teams would stop administering tests.

Rami Abadla, the director of the Gaza ministry’s infection control department, said that the lab would also be temporarily unable to process results for other tests related to H.I.V., hepatitis C and other conditions.

Over the past week, the authorities in Gaza have tested an average of 515 Palestinians daily for the virus. Only 1.9 percent of Gaza’s two million people were fully vaccinated as of Monday, according to official data, compared with 56 percent in Israel.

After a surge in cases in April, blamed mostly on the highly transmissible coronavirus variant first identified in Britain, new infections in Gaza had recently fallen to a manageable level, health experts said. But with Israeli airstrikes destroying buildings, causing widespread damage and leaving more than 200 people dead as of Monday, United Nations officials have warned that coronavirus cases could rise again.

Unvaccinated Palestinians were crowding into schools run by the United Nations relief agency in Gaza, turning them into de facto bomb shelters. Matthias Schmale, the U.N. agency’s director of operations, said last week that those schools “could turn into mass spreaders.”

Mr. Schmale and the top World Health Organization official in Gaza, Sacha Bootsma, also said that all vaccinations had stopped when hostilities broke out, and that any vaccine supplies headed to the territory had been delayed by the closure of Gaza’s border crossings.

Credit…Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times

The United Nations Security Council held its fourth meeting in a week on Tuesday over efforts to devise a common statement condemning the deadly force used by Israel and Hamas militants in Gaza.

It was not immediately clear whether the council’s 15 members, who were meeting privately, would be able to overcome objections to any common statement from the United States, Israel’s most powerful ally.

Top United Nations officials have said the absence of a singular message from the Security Council demanding a halt to the fighting has not been helpful. “A strong unified voice, we believe, will carry weight,” the United Nations spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric, told reporters on Tuesday.

Frustrated by what they see as U.S. intransigence even as the deaths and devastation — overwhelmingly Palestinian — extended into a second week, the representatives of China, Norway and Tunisia put the subject on the agenda for the Tuesday meeting.

Any statement from the Security Council requires all members to approve it. The United States has been the only holdout, irritating even some of America’s closest allies on the council.

“Conflict is raging, resulting in utterly devastating humanitarian impact,” the ambassador of Ireland, Geraldine Byrne Nason, told the council, according to a statement released by Ireland’s U.N. mission. “The Security Council has yet to utter a single word publicly.”

She said “it is high time the Council steps up, breaks its silence and speaks out.”

European Union foreign ministers, who also met on Tuesday to discuss the conflict, overwhelmingly called for a cease-fire. All 27 members except Hungary backed the demand. At the Security Council’s third meeting, on Sunday, the E.U. representative’s statement could not be made on behalf of member states because Hungary, strongly pro-Israel, objected.

Other European member states, such as Austria, Bulgaria and Romania, are similarly steadfast in supporting Israel, while countries like Belgium, Luxembourg and Sweden are more critical of Israeli military responses and expansion of settlements in occupied territory.

But President Biden’s call on Monday for a cease-fire, even without using the word “immediate,” is likely to be followed by other Western nations.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken has previously defended American reluctance to join other Security Council members in a statement, arguing that it would not be helpful while intense but private diplomatic efforts are underway to persuade Israel and Hamas to stop fighting.

Diplomats from the United States, Egypt and Qatar, as well as the special U.N. coordinator for Middle East peace, have all been enmeshed in the efforts. The United States is prohibited from talking directly to Hamas, which is listed as a terrorist organization under American law, so Egypt and Qatar are acting as intermediaries for both Israel and the United States.

But neither Israel nor Hamas has shown any indication that they are ready for an immediate truce. At the same time, the Israeli military’s continual bombings and shelling in Gaza, which have killed at least 212 Palestinians there, according to the health authorities in the territory, have stunned much of the world, threatening to further isolate the Israelis and their American defenders.

The president of the United Nations General Assembly, Volkan Bozkir of Turkey, scheduled that body’s own meeting over the Israel-Hamas conflict on Thursday. While that meeting may have no practical impact on events on the ground, a majority of the 193 members of the United Nations are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and highly critical of Israel’s occupation of lands seized in the 1967 war. That gathering could therefore be the biggest stage yet for international condemnation of Israel’s actions.

In another sign of growing exasperation with Israel, King Abdullah of Jordan blamed the escalating violence on what he described as Israeli provocations. In a Twitter post on Monday from the royal Jordanian court, the king said that he had conveyed his view in a phone call with António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general.

King Abdullah’s statements carry weight because his country signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, and Jordan is the custodian of the religious site in Jerusalem that houses Al Aqsa, the mosque where tensions between Palestinians and Israelis played an early role in the latest upsurge of violence.

Credit…Jalaa Marey/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

As the seeming intractability of the latest Israel-Gaza conflict provoked concern around the world on Tuesday, the ninth day of fighting was marked by a worrying development: It spilled over into Southern Lebanon for the first time.

The Israeli military said it had launched artillery shells into Lebanon in response to Palestinian militants’ trying to fire rockets into Israel. Fears of the conflict spreading were offset by the fact that the Israeli Army said that it believed the rockets had come from a small Palestinian faction in Lebanon — and not from Hezbollah, the militant group sponsored by Iran.

Amid growing concern in foreign capitals over the violence — and among some of Israel’s staunchest defenders in Washington — the region’s heaviest clashes since a 2014 war threatened to escalate. The death toll in Gaza has already surpassed 200, including dozens of children. In Israel, at least 10 people have been killed in rocket attacks.

As the casualties mount, along with the suffering of those Palestinians and Israelis left behind, several attacks stand out as seminal moments in a conflict that has transformed with surprising velocity, polarizing Israeli society and spurring mob violence on both sides.

Here is what is driving the conflict, and its arc so far:

In the bombardment before dawn on Monday, the Israeli Army said that 54 warplanes used 110 rockets and bombs as they attacked around 35 targets for a period of 20 minutes. Much of the assault was aimed at a network of underground tunnels used by Hamas to move people and equipment. Israeli strategists refer to this strategy of targeting the tunnels as “mowing the grass.” Airstrikes also targeted the homes of Hamas’s military leaders, the Israeli military said.
An Israeli airstrike over the weekend at a refugee camp killed at least 10 Palestinians, including eight children. Mohammed al-Hadidi said that his wife and their sons Suhaib, 14; Yahya, 11; Abdelrahman, 8; and Wissam, 5, were killed, as were his wife’s brother’s four children and her sister-in-law. Only a 5-month-old baby boy, Omar, was pulled from the rubble alive. The attack magnified growing criticism against Israel’s military for the number of children killed in airstrikes on Gaza. Outrage has been fanned on social media where images of children’s bodies have circulated.
On Saturday, an Israeli airstrike destroyed the 12-story Jalaa tower in Gaza City that housed some of the world’s leading media organizations, including The Associated Press and Al Jazeera. The destruction of the building drew global criticism that Israel was undermining press freedom. On Sunday, the Israel Defense Forces tweeted that the building was “an important base of operations” for Hamas military intelligence. But The A.P. said it had operated from the building for 15 years and had no indication that Hamas was installed there. There were no casualties.

Credit…Hosam Salem for The New York Times

A 5-year-old Israeli boy, Ido Avigal, was killed on Wednesday when a rocket fired from Gaza made a direct hit on the building next door to his aunt’s apartment, where he was visiting with his mother and older sister. He had been sheltering in a fortified safe room. More than 3,300 rockets have been fired at Israel from Gaza this week, the Israeli authorities have said.
The conflict began last Monday when weeks of simmering tensions in Jerusalem between Palestinian protesters, the police and right-wing Israelis escalated, against the backdrop of a longstanding local battle for control of a city sacred to Jews, Arabs and Christians. Among the main catalysts was a raid by the Israeli police on the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, one of Islam’s holiest sites, in which hundreds of Palestinians and a score of police officers were wounded. Militants in Gaza responded by lobbing rockets at Jerusalem, spurring Israel to respond with airstrikes.
The root of the latest escalation was intense disputes over East Jerusalem. The Israeli police prevented Palestinians from gathering near one of the city’s ancient gates during the holy month of Ramadan, as they had customarily. At the same time, Palestinians faced eviction by Jewish landlords from homes in East Jerusalem. Many Arabs called it part of a wider Israeli campaign to force Palestinians out of the city, describing it as ethnic cleansing.
Intense political struggles for leadership of Israel and the Palestinians are part of the backdrop for the fighting. After four inconclusive elections in Israel in two years, no one has been able to form a governing coalition. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on trial on corruption charges, has been able to remain in office, and hopes Israelis will rally around him in the crisis. In Palestinian elections that were recently postponed, Hamas hoped to take control of the Palestinian Authority, and has positioned itself as the defender of Jerusalem.

Israel’s Iron Dome system intercepting rockets launched from GazaAnas Baba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Streaks through the sky left by the Iron Dome systemFatima Shbair/Getty Images
Ashkelon, IsraelNir Elias/Reuters
Ashdod, IsraelMenahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Sderot, IsraelJack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Ashkelon, IsraelJack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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As the worst violence in years rages between the Israeli military and Hamas, each night the sky is lit up by a barrage of missiles and the projectiles designed to counter them.

It is a display of fire and thunder that has been described as both remarkable and horrifying.

The images of Israel’s Iron Dome defense system attempting to shoot down missiles fired by militants in Gaza have been among the most widely shared online, even as the toll wrought by the violence only becomes clear in the light of the next day’s dawn.

“The number of Israelis killed and wounded would be far higher if it had not been for the Iron Dome system, which has been a lifesaver as it always is,” Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, an Israeli military spokesman, said this week.

The Iron Dome became operational in 2011 and got its biggest first test over eight days in November 2014, when Gaza militants fired some 1,500 rockets aimed at Israel.

While Israeli officials claimed a success rate of up to 90 percent during that conflict, outside experts were skeptical.

The system’s interceptors — just 6 inches wide and 10 feet long — rely on miniature sensors and computerized brains to zero in on short-range rockets. Israel’s larger interceptors — the Patriot and Arrow systems — can fly longer distances to go after bigger threats.

The Iron Dome was recently upgraded, but the details of the changes were not made public.

It is being tested like never before, according to the Israeli military.

“I think it will not be a big mistake to say that even last night there were more missiles than all the missiles fired on Tel Aviv in 2014,” Major General Ori Gordin, commander of Israel’s home front, said during a news conference on Sunday. “Hamas’s attack is very intense in terms of pace of firing.”

Militants in the Gaza Strip have about 3,100 missiles, the Israeli Air Force said on Sunday, noting that about 1,150 of them had been intercepted.

“Despite the layers of defense, there is never 100 percent defense,” Gen. Gordin said. “Sometimes the aerial defense will miss or not be able to intercept, and sometimes people will not get into shelters or lay on the ground and sometimes a whole building will collapse.”

Credit…Patrick T. Fallon/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

It used to be that when Palestinians were under fire, protests would follow in the streets of Arab cities. But solidarity with the Palestinians has shifted online and gone global, creating a virtual Arab street that has the potential to have a wider impact than the physical ones in the Middle East.

A profusion of pro-Palestinian voices, memes and videos on social media has bypassed traditional media and helped accomplish what decades of Arab protest, boycotts of Israel and regular spurts of violence had not: yanking the Palestinian cause, all but left for dead a few months ago, toward the mainstream.

As Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza stretches into a second week, the online protesters have linked arms with popular movements for minority rights such as Black Lives Matter, seeking to reclaim the narrative from the mainstream media and picking up support in Western countries that have reflexively supported Israel during past conflicts with Palestinians.

“It feels different this time, it definitely does,” said Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, 29, the Palestinian-Jordanian-American founder of MuslimGirl.com, whose posts on the topic have been ubiquitous over the past week. “I wasn’t expecting this to happen so quickly, and for the wave to shift this fast. You don’t see many people out on the streets in protest these days, but I would say that social media is the mass protest.”

Palestinian activists say that they aim to seize control of the narrative from media outlets that have suppressed their point of view and falsely equated Israel’s suffering with that of its occupied territories.

They refer to Israeli policies as “the colonization of Palestine,” describe its discrimination against Palestinians as apartheid and characterize the proposed eviction of Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem, which helped set off the current conflict, as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing

As images of Sheikh Jarrah, destruction in Gaza and police raids on Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem have barreled from Palestinian online platforms — including PaliRoots and Eye on Palestine — across Instagram, Twitter and TikTok, they have united a new generation of Arab activists with progressive allies who might not have known where Gaza was two weeks ago.

Credit…Pool photo by Ken Cedeno

President Biden’s urging of a halt to Israeli-Palestinian fighting followed calls from Democratic lawmakers for his administration to speak out firmly against the escalation of violence. But unlike during past clashes in the region — when most Democrats have called for peace without openly criticizing Israel’s actions — skepticism around Israel’s current campaign in Gaza has spread to even some of its strongest defenders in Congress.

They include Representative Gregory W. Meeks, Democrat of New York and the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, who told Democrats on the panel on Monday that he would ask the Biden administration to delay a $735 million tranche of precision-guided weapons to Israel that had been approved before tensions in the Middle East boiled over.

Mr. Meeks is a fixture at the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, the most powerful pro-Israel lobbying group. His call to delay the arms package came after a number of Democrats raised concerns about sending American-made weapons to Israel at a time when it has bombed civilians, as well as a building that housed press outlets.

A day earlier, 28 Democratic senators put out a letter publicly calling for a cease-fire. The effort was led by Senator Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia and, at 34, the face of a younger generation of American Jews in Congress.

On Saturday, Senator Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey and the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, who is known as one of Israel’s most unshakable allies in the Democratic Party, issued a statement saying he was “deeply troubled” by Israeli strikes that had killed Palestinian civilians and the tower housing media outlets. He demanded that both sides “uphold the rules and laws of war” and find a peaceful end to fighting that has killed more than 200 Palestinians and 10 Israelis.

Though they have no intention of ending the United States’ close alliance with Israel, a growing number of Democrats in Washington say they are no longer willing to give the country a pass for its harsh treatment of the Palestinians. Those most vocal in their criticism of the Israeli government said they meant to send a message to Mr. Biden: that the old playbook he used as a senator and as vice president would no longer find the same support in his party.

“That hasn’t worked,” Representative Mark Pocan, a progressive Democrat from Wisconsin, told a top adviser to Mr. Biden late last week, he said in an interview on Monday. “We’re going to be advocating for peace in a way that maybe they haven’t traditionally heard.”

The strongest push is coming from the energized progressive wing of the party, whose representatives in the House, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, have in recent days accused Israel of gross human rights violations against Palestinians.

Republicans and AIPAC have been swift to warn against any perceived weakening of the U.S. commitment to Israel. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader and a vocal supporter of Israel, condemned Ms. Ocasio-Cortez on Monday for her description of Israel as an “apartheid state” and urged the president to “leave no doubt where America stands.”

Credit…Ahmad Gharabli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Here is his full account of that night and the events that later unfolded.

Tags Conflict, IsraelPalestinian, Live, Times, Updates, York

Business

How AT&T Obtained Right here, and What’s Subsequent: Dwell Updates

Post author By
Post date May 18, 2021

John Stankey, the chief executive of AT&T.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Mike Segar/Reuters

AT&T is painting a rosy picture for the future of its media business, which it will spin off and merge with Discovery. That new streaming giant is a formidable stand-alone competitor to Netflix and Disney. The move leaves AT&T to focus on its telecom business, which looks less bright after being overshadowed by its expensive — and ultimately futile — deal-making binge in media and entertainment under its previous chief, Randall Stephenson.

The DealBook newsletter explains how AT&T got here, in three key deals:

A $39 billion bid to buy T-Mobile. After regulatory pushback, in 2011 AT&T walked away from an effort to become the country’s largest wireless company. T-Mobile paired up instead with Sprint, and the two went on to buy huge amounts of spectrum in the high-stakes battle for 5G, leaving AT&T behind as it lobbies regulators to step in. The failed deal hit AT&T with a $3 billion dollar breakup fee, at the time the largest ever.

The $67 billion acquisition of DirectTV. In 2015, AT&T bet on cable TV as a way to amass customers whom it could eventually convert to streaming. But DirectTV bled subscribers as customers cut the cord, and AT&T unloaded a stake in the company last year to TPG that valued DirectTV at about a third of its acquisition price. The deal also cost AT&T about $50 million in advisory fees, according to Refinitiv.
The $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner. In 2018, Stephenson called the deal a “perfect match,” but the combined group struggled to invest in its telecom business while also spending enough to compete with the entertainment specialists at Netflix and Disney. Three years later, AT&T is now spinning off the company so it can (re)focus on its quest for 5G market share. AT&T paid $94 million in advisory fees to put the two companies together and an estimated $61 million to split them apart.

After all of that deal-making, AT&T is sitting on more than $170 billion in debt. As part of the deal with Discovery, AT&T will get $43 billion to help reduce its debt load. (The spun-off media business will begin its independent life with $58 billion in debt.)

AT&T also said it would reduce its dividend payout ratio — effectively cutting the amount it pays in half, according to Morgan Stanley. “You can call it a cut, or you can call it a re-sizing of the business,” said John Stankey, AT&T’s chief executive, in an interview. “It’s still a very, very generous dividend.” AT&T’s shares closed down 2.7 percent on Monday.

Market watchers expect the deal to kick off more consolidation among content providers as they race for scale to compete against another giant. Candidates include what John Malone, Discovery’s chairman, calls the “free radicals” — like Lionsgate, ViacomCBS and AMC, as well as NBCUniversal and Fox. Meanwhile, Amazon is in talks to buy another independent studio, MGM.

In a sign of the pressure that players face to spend big to bulk up, shares in Comcast, the telecom company that owns NBCUniversal, fell 5.5 percent on Monday.

Credit…Marie Eriel Hobro for The New York Times

Walmart reported a strong first quarter on Tuesday, as its e-commerce business continued to drive sales and customers were helped by stimulus checks.

The retail giant said its sales in the United States in the first quarter increased 6 percent to $93.2 billion, while operating profit grew about 27 percent to $5.5 billion.

“Our optimism is higher than it was at the beginning of the year,” Walmart’s chief executive, Doug McMillon, said in a statement. “In the U.S., customers clearly want to get out and shop.”

Walmart is among a group of larger retailers that have experienced blockbuster sales during the pandemic, particularly for online groceries. The company’s e-commerce sales increased 37 percent in the first quarter.

The question now is whether Walmart can continue its pace of growth as shopping habits start to normalize.

Mr. McMillon said although the second half of the year “has more uncertainty than a typical year, we anticipate continued pent-up demand throughout 2021.”

Sales in the company’s international division declined 8.3 percent in the first quarter, as Walmart divested from some of its subsidiaries in places like Japan and Argentina. The company’s total revenue increased 2.7 percent to $138.3 billion.

Walmart raised its financial guidance for the rest of the year, projecting “high single digit” growth in operating income in its United States operation, with sales up in the single digits.

Credit…Benjamin Norman for The New York Times

Macy’s said on Tuesday that its first-quarter sales jumped more than 50 percent from last year, when the start of the pandemic pulverized the retailer’s revenue, and it raised its forecast for sales and profit this year.

The company, which also owns Bloomingdale’s, reported $4.7 billion in sales for the three months that ended May 1, and a profit of $103 million. That compares with about $3 billion in sales and a net loss of $3.6 billion in the same period last year. Macy’s said it anticipated sales in the range of $21.7 billion to $22.2 billion this year, up from a previous forecast of somewhere between $19.8 billion and $20.8 billion.

Macy’s executives said on an earnings call that customers, buoyed by government stimulus were shopping again as the weather warmed up and vaccines have become more readily available. They are beginning to attend events after a year of isolation, and snapping up dresses for proms, casual get-togethers and weddings. Men’s tailored clothing is also seeing increases. Traffic is improving at Macy’s flagship stores, which lost visitors in the past year, though the company said it did not expect international tourism to recover until next year.

Department stores, which have already been under pressure in recent years, were battered by the pandemic as consumers postponed gatherings and avoided enclosed spaces. The news out of Macy’s was a positive for the retail sector, but the company’s first-quarter sales were still down about 15 percent from $5.5 billion in the same period of 2019. Macy’s made headlines recently after proposing the construction of a commercial office tower on top of its flagship Herald Square store in New York. The company said on the call on Tuesday that it expected the project would produce a “significant” amount of cash to support future plans.

Credit…Timothy A. Clary/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Long working hours are leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths per year, according to a new study by the World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization.

Working more than 55 hours a week in a paid job resulted in 745,000 deaths in 2016, the study estimated, up from 590,000 in 2000. About 398,000 of the deaths in 2016 were because of stroke and 347,000 because of heart disease. Both physiological stress responses and changes in behavior (such as an unhealthy diet, poor sleep and reduced physical activity) are “conceivable” reasons that long hours have a negative impact on health, the authors suggest. Other takeaways from the study:

Working more than 55 hours per week is dangerous. It is associated with an estimated 35 percent higher risk of stroke and 17 percent higher risk of heart disease compared with working 35 to 40 hours per week.
About 9 percent of the global population works long hours. In 2016, an estimated 488 million people worked more than 55 hours per week. Though the study did not examine data after 2016, “past experience has shown that working hours increased after previous economic recessions; such increases may also be associated with the Covid-19 pandemic,” the authors wrote.
Long hours are more dangerous than other occupational hazards. In all three years that the study examined (2000, 2010 and 2016), working long hours led to more disease than any other occupational risk factor, including exposure to carcinogens and the non-use of seatbelts at work. And the health toll of overwork worsened over time: From 2000 to 2016, the number of deaths from heart disease because of working long hours increased 42 percent, and from stroke 19 percent.

Dr. Maria Neira, a director at the W.H.O., put the conclusion bluntly: “It’s time that we all, governments, employers and employees wake up to the fact that long working hours can lead to premature death.”

Credit…Alec Jacobson for The New York Times

Investment in new oil and natural gas projects must stop from today, and sales of new gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles must halt from 2035. These are some of the milestones that the International Energy Agency said Tuesday must be achieved for the global energy industry to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

These conclusions seem surprisingly stark for the agency, a multilateral group whose main mandate is helping ensure energy security and stability. But it has increasingly embraced a role in combating climate change under its executive director, Fatih Birol.

In a news conference, Mr. Birol said he wanted to address the gap between the ambitious commitments on climate change that government and chief executives have been making and the reality that global emissions are continuing to rise strongly.

Just a year ago, the agency was deeply concerned about the disruptive implications of the collapse of the oil market from the effects of the pandemic. At the time, Mr. Birol referred to April 2020 as “Black April.”

Now Mr. Birol’s analysts are outlining in a report what looks like decades of disruption for the global energy industry. Oil production, for instance, will need to fall from nearly 100 million barrels a day to around 24 million a day by 2050, the report says.

The agency acknowledges that the disruption for the global energy sector, which produces three-quarters of greenhouse gas emissions, could threaten five million jobs. “The contraction of oil and natural gas production will have far-reaching implications for all the countries and companies that produce these fuels,” the Paris-based group said in a news release.

Oil-producing countries may see different affects. This report, for instance, is likely to lead to further calls from environmental groups for the British government, which heads the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), to end new oil and gas drilling to set a global example. A halt would threaten jobs in Britain’s declining but still large oil and gas industry.

On the other hand, members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries are likely to see their share of a much-reduced market rise from about a third to more than 50 percent, the agency said, as nations with less efficient, higher-cost oil industries cut back.

At the same time, Mr. Birol said, there would be major economic benefits from the trillions of dollars in investment in wind, solar and other sources of renewable energy. Doing so could create 30 million jobs,and add 0.4 percent year to world economic growth, he said.

Credit…Erin Scott for The New York Times

Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen called on American business leaders on Tuesday to support the Biden administration’s proposals for making robust infrastructure investments that would be paid for by raising taxes on corporations, arguing that the plan would ultimately strengthen U.S. firms.

The comments, made at an event sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, came as the Biden administration is pressing ahead with negotiations with lawmakers over the scope of an infrastructure and jobs package. The White House has been exchanging proposals with Republicans in Congress and is under pressure from Democrats not to scale back its ambitions.

“We are confident that the investments and tax proposals in the jobs plan, taken as a package, will enhance the net profitability of our corporations and improve their global competitiveness,” Ms. Yellen said. “We hope that business leaders will see it this way and support the jobs plan.”

Business leaders have been supportive of government investment in infrastructure but are wary of paying for it with higher taxes. The Biden administration wants to raise the corporate tax rate to 28 percent from 21 percent. It has been working on an agreement with other countries to raise their corporate tax rates, believing that a global minimum tax will help countries raise revenue and allow the United States to raise its rate without making its companies less competitive.

“With corporate taxes at a historical low of 1 percent of G.D.P., we believe the corporate sector can contribute to this effort by bearing its fair share: We propose simply to return the corporate tax toward historical norms,” Ms. Yellen said. “At the same time, we want to eliminate incentives that reward corporations for moving their operations overseas and shifting profits to low-tax countries.”

Ms. Yellen’s pitch was met with wariness from the nation’s largest business lobbying group. The Chamber has been arguing against the corporate tax increase and making the case that raising the rate would be bad for small businesses.

Immediately after Ms. Yellen’s remarks, Suzanne Clark, chief executive of the Chamber of Commerce, offered a rebuttal.

“It’s always an honor to hear from the Treasury secretary, including and maybe even especially when we disagree, as we do on taxes,” Ms. Clark said. “The data and the evidence are clear: The proposed tax increases would greatly disadvantage U.S. businesses and harm American workers. And now is certainly not the time to erect new barriers to economic recovery.”

Credit…Yimou Lee/Reuters

Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics heavyweight best known for making Apple’s iPhones, has found a big new partner for its auto-industry ambitions: the European-American car giant Stellantis.

The two companies on Tuesday announced a joint venture for building in-car digital systems and software, which automakers believe will be an increasingly important selling point for consumers in the coming decades.

“This is core to the future of Stellantis,” the automaker’s chief executive, Carlos Tavares, said during a conference call with reporters. The new partnership, he said, “is about putting software at the core of the company.”

Stellantis was created in January from the merger of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and PSA, the French maker of Peugeot, Citroën and Opel cars. The tie-up was motivated in part to put the companies in a stronger position to develop electric cars as fossil fuel-burning vehicles become history.

The 50-50 venture with Foxconn, which is called Mobile Drive, will supply so-called digital cockpits not only to Stellantis brands like Jeep and Maserati, but to other automakers as well, the two companies said on Tuesday. Mobile Drive will make digital systems for gas-powered cars in addition to electric ones.

Foxconn is moving rapidly to claim a bigger role in the car business, betting that its expertise in gadgets will give it a leg up as auto making fuses with electronics.

In October, the company unveiled a kit of technology and tools aimed at helping automakers develop electric vehicles. Last week, it finalized an agreement with the California-based automaker Fisker to develop a new electric car that the companies aim to begin manufacturing in the United States in 2023.

During Tuesday’s call, Stellantis and Foxconn executives declined to say whether the two companies would also explore contract car manufacturing as part of their cooperation.

The S&P 500 was unchanged on Tuesday, after the benchmark index slumped 0.3 percent on Monday. European indexes were higher, with FTSE 100 in Britain gaining 0.2 percent and the Stoxx Europe 600 up 0.3 percent.
In Asia, the Nikkei in Japan gained 2.1 percent the same day the government reported the economy contracted in the first quarter, after two consecutive quarters of growth.
In Taiwan, the stock market jumped more than 5 percent following a slump after the government recently imposed restrictions to control an outbreak of Covid infections. Reuters reported that Taipei’s top official in Washington was in talks with President Biden about securing doses of vaccine from the United States.
Shares in AT&T, which fell 2.6 percent Monday after it announced it was spinning off its WarnerMedia division and becoming more of a strictly telecommunication company, continued their slide, down a further 5.5 percent.
In Britain, the latest reading on unemployment showed “some early signs of recovery,” the Office for National Statistics said. The jobless rate for January through March was 4.8 percent, 0.3 percentage points lower than the previous quarter. At the same time, the number of payroll employees increased in April for the fifth consecutive month, but remains 772,000 less than it was prepandemic.

Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

President Biden will fly to Michigan on Tuesday to visit the factory where Ford will produce the first electric version of its signature F-150 pickup truck, seeking to harness the horsepower of an American icon as he continues to make the case for his $4 trillion economic agenda.

Mr. Biden’s remarks at the Ford Rouge Electric Vehicle Center are expected to center on the hundreds of billions of dollars for domestic manufacturing, electric vehicle deployment and research into emerging technologies like advanced batteries that are included in the first half of his two-part economic agenda.

In a state that helped deliver the White House to Mr. Biden last year, after going for former President Donald J. Trump in 2016, the president will pitch the idea that a transition to electric vehicles can position the United States to beat out China in the global automotive market, while creating high-paying union jobs. He will do so flanked by trucks from the best-selling vehicle line in the country.

The $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan, as Mr. Biden calls it, focuses heavily on physical infrastructure and federal spending meant to drive the transition to an economy that relies less on fossil fuels, in order to combat climate change. The plan includes tax incentives to purchase low-emission vehicles, an effort to convert one-fifth of the nation’s school bus fleet to electric power, money to build 500,000 electric charging stations across the country and a wide range of other spending meant to encourage research, production and deployment of electric vehicles and their component parts.

The arrival of an electric F-150 is an important milestone in the auto industry’s transition to EVs. So far, only Tesla has sold electric models in high volume, but Ford’s F-Series trucks make up the top-selling vehicle line in the United States. Ford typically sells about 900,000 F-Series vehicles a year.

Earlier this year, Ford began selling the Mustang Mach E, a battery-powered sport-utility vehicle styled to resemble the company’s famous sports car.

“We’re not just electrifying fringe vehicles,” the company’s chairman, William C. Ford Jr., said. “The Mustang and the F-150 are the heart of what Ford is, so this is a signal about how serious we are about electrification. This really showcases where the industry can go and should go.”

Details about the full capability, battery range and price of the F-150 Lightning will be released Wednesday evening.

Autoworkers have expressed concerns over the electric transition, which American automakers are increasingly embracing, because the production of an electric vehicle requires about one-third less human labor than the making of a vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine.

Mike Ramsey, a Gartner analyst, said electrifying the top-selling vehicle in the U.S. market could help accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles. “If this truck is successful, it means you can sell an electric version of any vehicle,” he said. “It could be the domino that tumbles over the rest of the market for E.V.s.”

Even if the F-150 Lightning accounts for only a small percentage of total F-Series sales, it would likely become one of the top-selling electric vehicles in the United States. Last year, for example, sales of the Chevrolet Bolt, made by General Motors, totaled just over 20,000 cars.

Credit…Joe Buglewicz for The New York Times

Turn on the news, scroll through Facebook, or listen to a White House briefing these days and there’s a good chance you’ll catch the Federal Reserve’s least-favorite word: Inflation. If that bubbling popular concern about prices gets too ingrained in America’s psyche, it could spell trouble for the nation’s central bank.

Interest in inflation has jumped this year for both political and practical reasons. Republicans, and even some Democrats, have been warning that the government’s hefty pandemic spending could push inflation higher. And as the economy gains steam, demand is coming back faster than supply, The New York Times’s Jeanna Smialek reports.

The Fed has big reasons to avoid overreacting: Inflation been a feature of the economic landscape since the 1980s.

But prices have stayed in control for so long partly because of muted inflation expectations. After decades of Consumers and businesses have learned to expect slow, steady gains year after year. Shoppers who don’t anticipate price increases may be reluctant to accept them, curbing a business’s power to raise them.

If consumers begin to anticipate faster gains, companies could regain their ability to charge more, locking in today’s temporary price bumps and calling into question the Fed’s plan to support the economy for months and even years to come.

Already, there are early signs that expectations could move higher as the economic backdrop changes dramatically. Were they to shoot up more than the Fed finds acceptable, it could force the Fed to react by dialing back support sooner rather than later.

Japan’s economy shrank in the first three months of 2021, continuing a swing between growth and contraction as its plodding vaccination campaign threatened to stall its recovery from the pandemic even as other major economies appeared primed for rapid growth. Japan is suffering a resurgence in virus cases, with much of the country under a state of emergency and deaths climbing, especially in Osaka. The yo-yoing economic pattern, analysts said, is unlikely to stop until the country has vaccinated a significant portion of its population, an effort that has just begun and seems unlikely to speed up significantly in the coming months.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer has been in talks to sell itself to Amazon, according to three people briefed on the matter. It was unclear how much Amazon might be willing to spend, and a timeline for a potential deal was unclear, according to the people briefed on the talks who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the sale process is private. If completed, a deal would turbocharge Amazon’s streaming ambitions by bringing James Bond, Rocky, RoboCop and other film and television properties into the e-commerce giant’s fold. In total, MGM has about 4,000 films in its library.
Bob Garfield, a longtime co-host of WNYC’s popular program “On the Media,” has been fired after two separate investigations found he had violated an anti-bullying policy, New York Public Radio, which owns WNYC, said on Monday. Mr. Garfield’s employment was terminated “as a result of a pattern of behavior that violated N.Y.P.R.’s anti-bullying policy,” a spokeswoman said in a statement. In an email on Monday, Mr. Garfield said he was not yet able to speak fully about the circumstances surrounding his firing but defended his behavior as yelling.

Credit…Till Lauer

Homes are selling quickly. About half sell in less than a week, usually after multiple offers, said Daryl Fairweather, the chief economist for the Redfin online brokerage.

The usual tips — like getting preapproved for a mortgage — apply more than ever, Ann Carrns reports for The New York Times. But competition in many cities is leading potential buyers to take steps they may not have considered even a few months ago, including offering tens of thousands of dollars above the asking price; agreeing to let the seller live, rent-free, in the house for several months after the closing; and waiving certain contingencies, like the right to inspect the house before buying.

Here are other measures buyers are going to to close the deal:

Buyers will sometimes send personal notes to sellers to distinguish themselves. “It never hurts,” said Mark Strüb, a real estate agent in Austin, Texas, though some Realtors discourage the practice. Mr. Strüb once had a seller with a strong sentimental attachment to the house pass over the highest offer because the potential buyer failed to write a letter, while the others vying for the home had all done so.
In some states, buyers may offer direct incentives to sellers outside of the purchase price, sometimes called “option” money, said Maura Neill, an agent with Re/Max Around Atlanta. “It works like a bonus,” she said. She cautioned that buyers and their agents should clarify their state’s laws, but “if you can make it work,” she said, “it’s a very strong tactic.”
Shoppers need patience, plus a willingness to move fast. To snag a condo near Piedmont Park, Ga., one client Ms. Neill worked with offered a quick closing, which was important to the sellers, and agreed to waive the appraisal — also an increasingly common practice in competitive markets. That means that if a buyer is financing the purchase with a mortgage and offers more than the property appraises for, the buyer agrees to pay the difference in cash at closing.

Credit…Benoit Tessier/Reuters

Eurostar, the high-speed train service between London and cities on the continent that has been financially crippled by the pandemic, said on Tuesday it had received a refinancing package of 250 million pounds, or $355 million, from a group of banks and its shareholders.

The package includes £150 million in loans guaranteed by its shareholders, including SNCF, the French national rail service, which owns 55 percent. The financing notably did not include the British government, which in 2015 sold its stake in the rail company and last month declined to back a bailout package.

“Everyone at Eurostar is encouraged by this strong show of support from our shareholders and banks,” said Jacques Damas, chief executive of Eurostar International. The company said the backing would help it meet its financial obligations “in the short to mid term.”

The Eurostar once ran at least 17 trains a day linking Britain and France. The pandemic and lockdowns forced it down to one train a day between London and Paris, and one a day between London and Brussels and Amsterdam. But next week, it is scheduled to expand to two daily trains between Paris and London, and then three a day beginning the end of June.

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Israel-Palestinian Battle: Stay Updates – The New York Instances

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Post date May 17, 2021

Israeli warplanes targeted Gaza City on Monday morning.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Mahmud Hams/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Israeli warplanes unleashed a fierce air bombardment on Gaza City before dawn on Monday as Hamas militants in the coastal enclave continued to target towns in southern Israel with barrages of rockets, bringing the conflict into a second, grinding week of bloodshed and destruction.

Stepped-up diplomatic efforts led by the United States and a meeting of the United Nations Security Council over the weekend showed little sign of progress. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, speaking on Sunday, said the operation would “take time.”

“We’ll do whatever it takes to restore order and quiet,” Mr. Netanyahu said during a television appearance.

The overnight bombardment came after the deadliest day of the conflict, which included a strike in Gaza City that left three buildings flattened and killed at least 42 people.

The Israeli military said it had been targeting the warren of tunnels used by militants that runs beneath the city and that when the tunnels collapsed, the buildings came tumbling down as well.

Among the dead, yet again, were children. At least 10 in this location. In the past week, of the nearly 200 Palestinians who have died, nearly half have been women and children, sparking condemnation across the world and helping to fan protests, which have taken place in recent days from London to Baghdad to Berlin.

Regional conflicts between Israel and the Palestinians have periodically become conflated with tensions among Europe’s sometimes polarized communities, particularly in countries like France with large Muslim and Jewish communities. Concerns were growing that anger against Israel was boiling over into anti-Semitic violence.

But even under sustained military bombardment, Hamas militants based in Gaza continued to unleash a barrage of missiles into southern Israel — more than 3,100 since the start of the conflict a week ago, according to the Israeli military.

Many of the rockets were intercepted yet again by the Israeli defense system known as the Iron Dome.

Overnight Monday — like every night for the past week — two battles were waged: one in the skies above and another in the tunnels below Gaza.

Israeli experts often describe periodic campaigns as “mowing the grass,” with the aim of curbing rocket fire, destroying as much of the militant groups’ infrastructure as possible and restoring deterrence. Critics say the use of such terminology is dehumanizing to Palestinians and tends to minimize the toll on civilians as well as militants.

The Israeli army said 54 Israeli warplanes took part in the attack using 110 rockets and bombs as they attacked around 35 targets for a period of 20 minutes.

Much of the assault was directed at a network of underground tunnels used by Hamas to move people and equipment — a subterranean transit system that the Israel military refers to as “the metro.”

During the operation, the army said, a tunnel route around 50 feet long was destroyed. Warplanes also targeted the homes of Hamas’s military leaders, the Israeli military said. At least some of those strikes landed near a row of hotels in a built-up area of Gaza City, forcing some guests into a bomb shelter.

On Sunday evening, the general in charge of Israel’s Southern Command, Eliezer Toledano, told the public broadcaster Kan, “It is important we continue to exhaust the campaign that we have entered and deepen the damage being caused to Hamas.”

At least 11 Israeli residents had been killed by some of the thousands of rockets fired from Gaza, the region controlled by Hamas.

Representatives of the United States, Qatar, Egypt and other countries have been trying to broker a cease-fire. In comments to France 24, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt urged “a return to calm” and an end to the “violence” and “killing.”

So far, their efforts have not succeeded. “If it doesn’t want to stop, we won’t stop,” Moussa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas official, told Al Jazeera.

Some American officials are urging Israel to halt its operations soon or risk losing ground in the international court of public opinion. Late on Sunday, Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat from Georgia, and 27 other senators called for an immediate cease-fire “to prevent further loss of life.”

Short of a lasting cease-fire, the Biden administration is trying to negotiate a humanitarian pause in the fighting to help Palestinians who have been forced from their homes in Gaza. Similar efforts in the past have been a key first step toward winding down hostilities.

VideoIsraeli warplanes unleashed an air bombardment on Gaza City before dawn on Monday, bringing the conflict into the second week of bloodshed and destruction.CreditCredit…Hosam Salem for The New York Times

As Israelis and Palestinians hunkered down for the second week of an increasingly stubborn conflict, a series of deadly flash points have galvanized both sides in a region where the human cost of war is all too familiar.

Before dawn on Monday, Israeli warplanes bombarded Gaza City, compounding the civilian suffering in the coastal enclave. At the same time, the rocket barrage by Hamas militants continued to take its toll on Israeli cities, including in Tel Aviv, the commercial center of the country, where the bubble of peacetime has been radically punctured.

Here are a few of the major flash points:

In the bombardment before dawn on Monday, the Israeli army said 54 Israeli warplanes used 110 rockets and bombs as they attacked around 35 targets for a period of 20 minutes. Much of the assault was aimed at a network of underground tunnels used by Hamas to move people and equipment — a subterranean transit system that the Israel military refers to as “the metro.” Israeli strategists refer to this strategy of targeting the tunnels as “mowing the grass.” Warplanes also targeted the homes of Hamas’s military leaders, the Israeli military said.
An Israeli airstrike over the weekend at a refugee camp killed at least 10 Palestinians, including eight children. Mohammed al-Hadidi said his wife and their sons Suhaib, 14, Yahya, 11, Abdelrahman, 8, and Wissam, 5, were killed, as were her brother’s four children and her sister-in-law. Only a 5-month-old baby boy, Omar, was pulled from the rubble alive. The attack magnified growing criticism against Israel’s military for the number of children that have been killed in airstrikes on Gaza. Outrage has been fanned on social media where images of children’s bodies have circulated, along with the video of a wailing infant being comforted by his father.
On Saturday, an Israeli airstrike destroyed a well-known 12-story building in Gaza City that housed some of the world’s leading media organizations including The Associated Press and Al Jazeera. The destruction of the al-Jalaa tower drew global criticism that Israel was undermining press freedom. On Sunday, the Israel Defense Forces tweeted that the building was “an important base of operations” for Hamas military intelligence. But The A.P. said it had operated from the building for 15 years and had no indication that Hamas was operating there. There were no casualties.

Credit…Hosam Salem for The New York Times

A 5-year-old Israeli boy, Ido Avigal, was killed on Wednesday when a rocket fired from Gaza made a direct hit on the building next door to his aunt’s apartment, where he was visiting with his mother and older sister. He had been sheltering in a fortified safe room. Nearly 3,000 rockets have been fired at Israel from Gaza this week.
The conflict began last Monday when weeks of simmering tensions in Jerusalem between Palestinian protesters, the police and right-wing Israelis escalated, against the backdrop of a longstanding local battle for control of a city sacred to Jews, Arabs and Christians. Among the main catalysts was a raid by the Israeli police on the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, one of Islam’s holiest sites, in which hundreds of Palestinians and a score of police officers were wounded. Militants in Gaza responded by lobbing rockets at Jerusalem, spurring Israel to respond with airstrikes.
The root of the latest escalation was intense disputes over East Jerusalem. Israeli police prevented Palestinians from gathering near one of the city’s ancient gates during the holy month of Ramadan, as they had customarily. At the same time, Palestinians faced eviction by Jewish landlords from homes in East Jerusalem. Many Arabs called it part of a wider Israeli campaign to force Palestinians out of the city, describing it as ethnic cleansing.
Intense political struggles for leadership of Israel and the Palestinians are part of the backdrop for the fighting. After four inconclusive elections in Israel in two years, no one has been able to form a governing coalition. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on trial on corruption charges, has been able to remain in office, and hopes Israelis will rally around him in the crisis. In Palestinian elections that were recently postponed, Hamas hoped to take control of the Palestinian Authority, and has positioned itself as the defender of Jerusalem.

Credit…Mahmud Hams/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

When it comes it Hamas’s military capabilities, much of the focus has been on the labyrinthine tunnels it uses to launch attacks against Israel or the arsenal of missiles it aims at Israeli cities.

But Israeli military experts and officials say there is another lesser discussed and murky threat: clandestine naval commandoes entering or hitting Israel by sea.

It sounds like a scene from a Cold War thriller: An undercover commando unit infiltrating a country with underwater shuttles in order to target an energy facility or a populated settlement.

But that was precisely the goal, according to the Israeli military, of a naval unit being directed by Hamas.

“Over the last days, Israeli naval troops spotted suspicious activity in the Northern Gaza Strip, nearby assets of the Hamas naval forces, and tracked the movements of a number of suspect enemy combatants,” the Israeli defense forces said in a statement.

They military said that the suspects were moving a “Hamas submergible naval weapon” that “appeared to be on its way to carry out a terror attack in Israeli waters.”

The military released a video showing Israeli defense forces destroying the vessel early Monday.

Shaul Chorev, a retired Israeli admiral who is Head of Haifa University’s Maritime Policy and Strategy Research Center, said Israel in recent years has been increasingly concerned about Hamas’s naval commando units. He said that undercover and surprise sea attacks were one way the militant group had sought to overcome Israel’s asymmetric military capability, including its mighty air force and Golden Dome defense system used to shoot down rockets fired by militants in Gaza.

“The fear is that these commando units can be used to target infrastructure like power stations or to try and infiltrate Israel by sea,” he said.

He said Israelis still shuddered at the memory of an episode in July 2014, during Israel’s invasion of Gaza, when four Hamas operatives armed with automatic weapons, explosives and grenades, surreptitiously swam ashore near Kibbutz Zikim, on Israel’s southern coast, and tried to target an Israeli tank before being killed.

Hosam Salem for The New York Times
Hosam Salem for The New York Times
Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times
Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times
Hosam Salem for The New York Times
Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times
Hosam Salem for The New York Times
Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times
Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times
Hosam Salem for The New York Times

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In the deadliest attack of the current conflict so far, Israeli airstrikes on buildings in Gaza City on Sunday killed at least 42 people, including 10 children, Palestinian officials said.

In a statement, the Israeli military said it had “struck an underground military structure belonging to the Hamas terrorist organization which was located under the road.” It added: “Hamas intentionally locates its terrorist infrastructure under civilian houses, exposing them to danger. The underground foundations collapsed, causing the civilian housing above them to collapse, causing unintended casualties.”

Israeli airstrikes and artillery barrages on Gaza, an impoverished and densely packed enclave of two million people, have killed at least 198 Palestinians, including 35 women and 58 children, between last Monday and Sunday evening, producing stark images of destruction that have reverberated around the world.

Credit…Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times

Civilians are paying an especially high price in the latest bout of violence between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, raising urgent questions about how the laws of war apply to the conflagration: which military actions are legal, what war crimes are being committed and who, if anyone, will ever be held to account.

Both sides appear to be violating those laws, experts said: Hamas has fired nearly 3,000 rockets toward Israeli cities and towns, a clear war crime. And Israel, although it says it takes measures to avoid civilian casualties, has subjected Gaza to such an intense bombardment, killing families and flattening buildings, that it probably constitutes a disproportionate use of force — also a crime.

No legal adjudication is possible in the heat of battle. But Israeli airstrikes and artillery barrages on Gaza, an impoverished and densely packed enclave of two million people, killed at least 198 Palestinians, including 93 women and children, between last Monday and Sunday evening, according to Palestinian authorities, producing stark images of destruction that have reverberated around the world.

In the other direction, Hamas missiles have rained over Israeli towns and cities, sowing fear and killing at least ten people, including two children — a greater toll than during the last war, in 2014, which lasted more than seven weeks. The latest victim, a 55-year-old man, died on Saturday after missile shrapnel slammed through the door of his home in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan.

With neither side apparently capable of outright victory, the conflict seems locked in an endless loop of bloodshed. So the focus on civilian casualties has become more intense than ever as a proxy for the moral high ground in a seemingly unwinnable war.

In one of the deadliest episodes of the week, an Israeli missile slammed into an apartment on Friday, killing eight children and two women as they celebrated a major Muslim holiday. Israel said a senior Hamas commander was the target.

Graphic video footage showed Palestinian medics stepping over rubble that included children’s toys and a Monopoly board game as they evacuated the bloodied victims from the pulverized building. The only survivor was an infant boy.

“They weren’t holding weapons, they weren’t firing rockets and they weren’t harming anyone,” said the boy’s father, Mohammed al-Hadidi, who was later seen on television holding his son’s small hand in a hospital.

Although Hamas fires unguided missiles at Israeli cities at a blistering rate, sometimes over 100 at once, the vast majority are either intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome defense system or miss their targets, resulting in a relatively low death toll.

Israel sometimes warns Gaza residents to evacuate before an airstrike, and it says it has called off strikes to avoid civilian casualties. But its use of artillery and airstrikes to pound such a confined area, packed with poorly protected people, has led to a death toll 20 times as high as that caused by Hamas, and wounded 1,235 more.

Under international treaties and unwritten rules, combatants are supposed to take all reasonable precautions to limit any civilian damage. But applying those principles in a place like Gaza is a highly contentious affair.

Credit…Uriel Sinai for The New York Times

As the Israel Defense Forces strike Gaza with jets, drones and artillery, a key target has been a network of tunnels beneath the Palestinian-controlled territory that the militant Islamic group Hamas is known to use for deploying militants and smuggling weapons.

A spokesman for the Israeli military described the complex network as a “city beneath a city.”

The tunnels were also the main rationale that Israel gave for its ground invasion of Gaza in 2014. Israel’s leaders said afterward that they had destroyed 32 tunnels during that operation, including 14 that penetrated into Israeli territory.

At the time of that fighting, the Israel Defense Forces took reporters into a 6-foot-by-2-foot underground passage running almost two miles under the border to show the threat posed by the tunnels, and the difficulty that Israel has in finding and destroying them.

Here is an excerpt from what The New York Times reported then:

Tunnels from Gaza to Israel have had a powerful hold on the Israeli psyche since 2006, when Hamas militants used one to capture an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who was held for five years before being released in a prisoner exchange.

The tunnels can be quite elaborate. The tunnel toured by journalists was reinforced with concrete and had a rack on the wall for electrical wiring. It also featured a metal track along the floor, used by carts that removed dirt during the tunnel’s construction, that could be used to ferry equipment and weapons, the Israeli military said.

Israeli officials acknowledge that it is a difficult technological and operational challenge to destroy all of the subterranean passageways and neutralize the threat they pose. The tunnels are well hidden, said the officer who conducted the tour, and some tunnels are booby-trapped.

Israel’s Iron Dome system intercepting rockets launched from GazaAnas Baba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Streaks through the sky left by the Iron Dome systemFatima Shbair/Getty Images
Ashkelon, IsraelNir Elias/Reuters
Ashdod, IsraelMenahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Sderot, IsraelJack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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As the worst violence in years rages between the Israeli military and Hamas, each night the sky is lit up by a barrage of missiles and the projectiles designed to counter them.

It is a display of fire and thunder that has been described as both remarkable and horrifying.

The Iron Dome became operational in 2011 and got its biggest first test over eight days in November 2014, when Gaza militants fired some 1,500 rockets aimed at Israel.

While Israeli officials claimed a success rate of up to 90 percent during that conflict, outside experts were skeptical.

The Iron Dome was recently upgraded, but the details of the changes were not made public.

It is being tested like never before, according to the Israeli military.

Militants in the Gaza Strip have about 3,100 missiles, the Israeli Air Force said on Sunday, noting that about 1,150 of them had been intercepted.

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‘Fighting Must Stop’: U.N. Holds First Public Meeting on Gaza Conflict

The United Nations Security Council met to discuss the crisis in Gaza and Israel on Sunday but took no action, even as members decried the violence. Palestinian and Israeli diplomats spoke at the meeting.

We meet today amid the most serious escalation in Gaza and Israel in years. The current hostilities are utterly appalling. This latest round of violence only perpetuates the cycles of death, destruction and despair and pushes farther to the horizon any hopes of coexistence and peace. Fighting must stop. Remember that each time Israel hears a foreign leader speak of its right to defend itself, it is further emboldened to continue murdering entire families in their sleep. Israel is killing Palestinians in Gaza, one family at a time. Israel is trying to uproot Palestinians from Jerusalem, expelling families, one home, one neighborhood at a time. Israel is persecuting our people, committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. Some may not want to use these words — war crimes and crimes against humanity — but they know they are true. You can create false moral equivalence, immoral equivalence, between the actions of a democracy that sanctifies life and those of a terrorist organization that glorifies death, by calling for restraint, restraint on all sides, and failing to unequivocally condemn Hamas. If you make this choice, it will lead to the success of Hamas’s insidious strategy of firing at Israeli civilians while hiding behind Palestinian civilians. It will lead to the deaths of more innocent Israelis and Palestinians. It will lead to the strengthening of Hamas, the weakening of the Palestinian Authority, and the undermining of the chances for a dialogue.

The United Nations Security Council met to discuss the crisis in Gaza and Israel on Sunday but took no action, even as members decried the violence. Palestinian and Israeli diplomats spoke at the meeting.CreditCredit…Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times

International pressure to bring an end to the raging conflict between Israel and Hamas militants has intensified, with the United States stepping up its diplomatic engagement and the United Nations Security Council meeting to discuss the conflict in public for the first time. But the council took no action even as member after member decried the death and devastation.

Secretary-General António Guterres was the first of nearly two dozen speakers on the agenda of the meeting on Sunday, led by China, which holds the council’s rotating presidency for the month of May.

“This latest round of violence only perpetuates the cycles of death, destruction and despair, and pushes farther to the horizon any hopes of coexistence and peace,” Mr. Guterres said. “Fighting must stop. It must stop immediately.”

Palestinian and Israeli diplomats, who were also invited to speak, used the meeting as a high-profile forum to vent longstanding grievances, in effect talking past each other with no sign of any softening in an intractable conflict nearly as old as the United Nations itself.

Riyad al-Maliki, the foreign minister of the Palestinian Authority, implicitly rebuked the United States and other powers that have defended Israel’s right to protect itself from Hamas rocket attacks, asserting that such arguments makes Israel “further emboldened to continue to murder entire families in their sleep.”

Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, who spoke after Mr. Maliki, rejected any attempt to portray the actions of Israel and Hamas as moral equivalents. “Israel uses missiles to protect its children,” Mr. Erdan said. “Hamas uses children to protect its missiles.”

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, said President Biden had spoken with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, while U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had also been engaging with his counterparts in the region.

She called on Hamas to stop its rockets barrage against Israel, expressed concerns about inter-communal violence, warned against incitement on both sides and said the United States was “prepared to lend our support and good offices should the parties seek a cease-fire.”

While envoys from all of the council’s 15 members urged an immediate de-escalation, there was no indication of what next steps the council was prepared to take. Zhang Jun, China’s ambassador, told reporters after the meeting had adjourned that he was continuing to work with other members “to take prompt action and speak in one voice.”

Mr. Netanyahu of Israel vowed late Saturday to continue striking Gaza “until we reach our targets,” suggesting a prolonged assault on the coastal territory even as casualties rose on both sides.

Credit…Dan Balilty for The New York Times

In separate calls on Saturday, Mr. Biden conferred with Mr. Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, about efforts to broker a cease-fire. While supporting Israel’s right to defend itself from rocket attacks by Hamas militants, Mr. Biden urged Mr. Netanyahu to protect civilians and journalists.

Over the past week, the 15-member U.N. Security Council met privately at least twice to discuss ways of reducing tensions. But efforts to agree a statement or to hold an open meeting had faced resistance from the United States, Israel’s biggest defender on the council.

American officials said they wanted to give mediators sent to the region from the United States, Egypt and Qatar an opportunity to defuse the crisis.

But with violence worsening, a compromise was reached for a meeting on Sunday.

Security Council meetings on the Israeli-Palestinian issue have often ended inconclusively. But they have also demonstrated the widespread view among United Nations members that Israel’s actions as an occupying power are illegal and that its use of deadly force is disproportionately harsh.

Credit…Ahmad Gharabli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Here is his full account of that night and the events that later unfolded.

Credit…Dan Balilty for The New York Times

There is no simple answer to the question “What set off the current violence in Israel?”

But in a recent episode of The Daily, Isabel Kershner, The New York Times’s Jerusalem correspondent, explained the series of recent events that reignited violence in the region.

In Jerusalem, nearly every square foot of land is contested — its ownership and tenancy symbolic of larger abiding questions about who has rightful claim to a city considered holy by three major world religions.

As Isabel explained, a longstanding legal battle over attempts to forcibly evict six Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem heightened tensions in the weeks leading up to the outbreak of violence.

The always tenuous peace was further tested by the overlap of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan with a month of politically charged days in Israel.

A series of provocative events followed: Israeli forces barred people from gathering to celebrate Ramadan outside Damascus Gate, an Old City entrance that is usually a festive meeting place for young people after the breaking of the daily fast during the holy month.

Then young Palestinians filmed themselves slapping an ultra-Orthodox Jew, videos that went viral on TikTok.

And on Jerusalem Day, an annual event marking the capture of East Jerusalem during the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, groups of young Israelis marched through the Old City’s Muslim Quarter to reach the Western Wall, chanting “Death to Arabs” along the way.

Stability in the city collapsed after a police raid on the Aqsa Mosque complex, an overture that Palestinians saw as an invasion on holy territory. Muslim worshipers threw rocks, and officers met them with tear gas, rubber-tipped bullets and stun grenades. At least 21 police officers and more than 330 Palestinians were wounded in that fighting.

Listen to the episode to hear how these clashes spiraled into an exchange of airstrikes that has brought Israeli forces to the edge of Gaza — and the brink of war.

Listen to ‘The Daily’: The Israeli-Palestinian Crisis, Reignited

Rockets, airstrikes and mob violence: Why is this happening now, and how much worse could it get?

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Back to The Daily

transcript

Listen to ‘The Daily’: The Israeli-Palestinian Crisis, Reignited

Hosted by Michael Barbaro; produced by Austin Mitchell, Soraya Shockley, Robert Jimison, Annie Brown and Daniel Guillemette; edited by M.J. Davis Lin, with help from Phyllis Fletcher; music by Rachelle Bonja and Dan Powell; and engineered by Chris Wood.

Rockets, airstrikes and mob violence: Why is this happening now, and how much worse could it get?

michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

[music]

Over the past few days, the deadliest violence in years has erupted between Israel and Palestinians—

speaker

Intense rocket fire from Gaza answered by Israeli air strikes, showing no sign of easing and—

michael barbaro

—punctuated by hundreds of missiles streaking back and forth between Gaza and cities across Israel.

speaker

Increasingly large numbers of casualties, including children, from Israeli airstrikes in Gaza—

michael barbaro

And now, on the streets of Israel, by shocking scenes of mob violence against both Arabs and Jews.

Today, I spoke with my colleague in Jerusalem, Isabel Kershner, about why it’s all happening and just how much worse it may get.

It’s Thursday, May 13th.

Isabel, I know there may not be a simple answer to this question. But what was the trigger for this eruption of violence in Jerusalem over the past few weeks?

isabel kershner

Well, one of the triggers for sure is actually a case of six Palestinian families who are facing a looming eviction by Jewish landlords from their houses that they’ve been living in since the 1950s in a very small quiet leafy neighborhood of East Jerusalem, not far from the old city.

speaker

In the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, the tension has been growing for weeks. Several Palestinian families face eviction from their homes. [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] We are in the right. We are still resisting. We are staying here even if they don’t want us.

isabel kershner

This is a case that’s been bubbling on for years and years.

speaker

We don’t understand why Arabs are here. I don’t want any problems. But this land is Jewish and belongs to us. We don’t believe anyone, not the courts or anyone else.

isabel kershner

The Israeli government has cast it as a small private real estate dispute. But it’s far from that.

So you’re talking about families who were displaced and made refugees during 1948, the war surrounding the creation of Israel. And they lost their homes in what became Israel. And they moved to that area of East Jerusalem when the Jordanians were in control. And the Jordanian government actually offered them an option in conjunction with the United Nations Refugee Agency at the time. They said, we’ll build some houses in this neighborhood, a few dozen houses. And you can come live in them. And we will register them for you. And in return, you should give up your refugee status. And the families actually agreed to that and moved into the houses. But at the end of the day, somehow the Jordanian government never actually finally registered them in their names.

So then, in 1967, the Middle East war breaks out. And Jordan loses control of the land of East Jerusalem and Israel takes control of it. Israel after the ‘67 war annexed that territory. But that move was never internationally recognized. And most of the world still considers it occupied territory. And although there was an agreement between the Jordanians and these Palestinian families over these homes, the land they sit on now gets to be controlled by Israel. And on top of that, although this is now a Palestinian populated area predominantly, the land was bought by a Jewish trust in the 19th Century. And then in the meantime, religious trusts have sold the rights to a real estate agency, people who want to move Jews back into that neighborhood. And there is nothing more in the Palestinian mindset, nothing more upsetting than the refugee issue. So it just took on much bigger proportions. It’s not just about renting or an eviction order or a few houses. It suddenly becomes a national issue.

michael barbaro

So this is pretty complicated. But to summarize, these refugee Palestinian families were given these homes in the 1950s and told that it would be their home for good. But that didn’t happen. It’s still the case that legally these homes belong to Jewish landlords. And now those Jewish landlords are saying to these Palestinian families, we want you out. And in part, they want them out because they want Jewish people to control these properties in East Jerusalem.

isabel kershner

That’s correct. And they’re able to do that based on a 1970s law which allows Jewish property owners to reclaim property in the East side of the city. But then, on the other side, the Palestinians do not have the same recourse to reclaim properties they left on the West side of the city or elsewhere in Israel. So this has created a huge imbalance. And the dispute has gone from the District Court all the way up to the Supreme Court. And we were waiting for a final verdict in the case of whether the evictions would go ahead or not on Monday.

michael barbaro

So Isabel, about how does this legal conflict over these evictions spiral into what we are seeing now? How does that happen?

isabel kershner

OK, good question, because there are many, many other strands to this story. And I think one thing we have to look at is the calendar. We have been in a month that has been extraordinary in many ways. So on the one hand, we’ve had the month of Ramadan in the Islamic lunar calendar. And Ramadan, the lunar calendar, it moves. So this year, Ramadan fell from mid-April to now. So it also coincided with a month in the Hebrew calendar. And you also have quite a lot of emotive dates. You have the Memorial Day for fallen soldiers, you have the Independence Day, you get towards the end of the month and you get Jerusalem Day, which is the day when some Israelis, not all, are celebrating what they call the reunification of Jerusalem in the 1967 war. I mean, this is a day where the Israelis are marking conquering the eastern part of the city, placing the Palestinians in the city generally on the other side of the line in what became occupied East Jerusalem.

michael barbaro

Got it.

isabel kershner

And that can be a very provocative day as well because a central feature of it is what they call the flag parade, which is usually thousands of young right wing mostly Jewish youths who March traditionally on a very contentious route— right through the Muslim quarter of the old city to get to the Wailing Wall. And of course, that was supposed to happen also on— yes, you guessed it— Monday.

michael barbaro

So Monday of this past week becomes, through the eviction case and through the calendar, a kind of swirling collision of Palestinian grief and Israeli celebration and just a kind of powder keg, it sounds like.

isabel kershner

And we also had a lot else going on in the city building up to this day. Ramadan is a time when the city is very much on edge. It’s a time of religious and nationalist fervor for many people. And it started with several other potential points of ignition. So you had the police, for example, barring Palestinians from gathering at Damascus Gate. Damascus Gate is one of the most beautiful and historic entrances to the old city from the East side. And it has these steps and going down to a Plaza— a bit like a kind of amphitheater. And every night during Ramadan, traditionally every year, Palestinians come. They gather there. They break their fast. There are cultural events. And it’s a general kind of party, a festival atmosphere. But for some reason this year, the police banned anyone from gathering and sitting on the steps. They put up barricades and said it was for public order to allow people to safely enter and exit the old city. And this created huge tension.

[siren wailing]

So it actually turned into a battlefield. Every night, you would have the police trying to disperse the crowds there. Young Palestinians would protest. And it would end in clashes.

We also had what became known as the TikTok attacks.

michael barbaro

What are those?

isabel kershner

So there were a couple of Palestinian 17-year-old youths who filmed themselves for a TikTok video slapping an ultra Orthodox Jew while he was sitting on the light rail train. And it kind of went viral. And there were one or two other similar attacks. And people just took great affront.

And it ended up with hundreds of young Israeli Jews marching to Damascus Gate, chanting things, including death to Arabs. And in the end, you had the police acting as a buffer between them and the Palestinian protesters at Damascus Gate and pitched battles on both sides with the police. So that was one of the strands of great tension building up towards this Monday.

michael barbaro

So a very unstable situation is very much ignited by actions taken by multiple groups of people on the ground in Jerusalem, including the Israeli police.

isabel kershner

Right. So we come to Monday morning after all this buildup, of all these different tensions in the city in this very tense month. And we get to the point where we’ve had Laylatul Qadr, which is a very holy day for Muslims at the end of Ramadan when thousands of worshippers spend the night traditionally in the compound of the Aqsa Mosque, which is the third holiest site in Islam. And it’s also probably one of the most hotly contested sites in the world because it’s also the holiest place for Jews. They know it as Temple Mount. And it’s the location of two ancient temples. So on Monday morning, which is Jerusalem Day as well, there were Jewish groups who were planning, as they traditionally do, to go up to the Temple Mount on a visit. And the Muslim worshipers, many of whom, as I say, had been there overnight were expecting them, ready for what they would see as a kind of invasion on their holy territory on a very holy time of year. The police stopped the Jewish groups from going up. But what we did see was the police in large numbers raid the compound.

[interposing voices][explosion]

There are many different takes on whether they went in just to disperse crowds or they went in to stop stone throwing by protesters at the site that had already started or whether the stones only started after the police arrived. But whatever the exact circumstances, you ended up with a large police raid on the Aqsa Mosque compound.

And it ended in stone throwing clashes with police responding with tear gas, rubber tip bullets, stun grenades. And by the end of the main part of this confrontation, you have, on the one side, 330 Palestinians who’ve been injured, 250 who were actually treated in the hospitals. And on the other side, 21 police officers injured.

michael barbaro

So Isabel, what happens after this police raid on the mosque? How do Palestinians respond?

isabel kershner

So by the afternoon, we get an ultimatum from Hamas, the Islamic group that holds Sway in Gaza, saying, if the Israelis do not remove all their forces from the mosque compound and from the area of East Jerusalem, the Palestinian area where the evictions were about to take place, something would happen.

michael barbaro

And they don’t specify what that something is. But it will be serious.

isabel kershner

Israel will be paying the price.

michael barbaro

We’ll be right back.

So Isabel, about what happens on Monday with this 6:00 PM deadline from Hamas for Israeli security forces to withdraw from East Jerusalem and from the mosque?

isabel kershner

Well, clearly the Israelis were not going to comply. So we waited till 6 o’clock. And lo and behold, 3 minutes past 6:00, we’re sitting here in our office in Jerusalem. And suddenly, we hear sirens wailing, incoming rocket warnings. And within maybe a minute—

[explosion]

—we suddenly hear a series of booms. There’s a feeling that Jerusalem is under attack.

michael barbaro

So once this deadline passes, Hamas sends missiles over into Jerusalem?

isabel kershner

Yeah. They’re aiming towards Jerusalem. One was intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome, the anti-missile defense system. Others actually fell in communities and empty ground in the hills West of Jerusalem. And nobody was killed or hurt, but there was some property damage. And this was highly unusual and clearly was not going to go without an Israeli response.

michael barbaro

And what is that response?

isabel kershner

Well, Israel had clearly been anticipating some kind of action from Gaza and always has what it calls a bank of targets that its built up. And Israel immediately began with airstrikes in Gaza. And now Gaza is a very small and crowded territory. So even if Israel says it’s targeting military targets with very precise weapons and taking all the precautions it can to avoid civilian casualties, inevitably there are civilian casualties as well. So from the beginning, the air strikes were deadly. There were two children killed very early on that night. And each side just kept stepping it up.

Israel taking down tower blocks in Gaza, multi-storey buildings that housed Hamas offices or headquarters of various types of Hamas. And Hamas again issued another ultimatum and said to Israel, if you hit any more civilian buildings, we’re going to hit Tel Aviv. And a huge, huge Salvo barrages of rockets began streaming out of Gaza and slamming into suburbs around Tel Aviv. Things have just been escalating all the way. So by Wednesday afternoon, two days into the conflict, we have at least 53 Palestinians killed, according to the Gaza health officials, 14 of them children, and more than 300 wounded. And on the Israeli side, you have at least six people who’ve been killed and scores injured.

michael barbaro

Isabel, it is often felt in moments like this that Hamas’s missile attacks, as terrifying as they are to Israelis, often fail to inflict significant damage on Israel based on the technology that Hamas is using and that the Israeli counterattacks tend to be much better targeted and more destructive. And the death toll seems to suggest that that has been the case so far here— a kind of disproportionate impact.

isabel kershner

Look, disproportionate is a term that is often used. I think there’s certainly— the circumstances that Israel has total air superiority in terms of its Air Force. The Hamas rockets are rather inaccurate. Israel does have the Iron Dome system which manages to intercept the authorities, say, about 90 percent of rockets that are headed to population centers in Israel. But the Gaza Strip is just first of all very crowded, very densely populated. The Israelis will tell you that Hamas operates from civilian areas within Gaza, making it very, very, very difficult to avoid collateral damage.

michael barbaro

At this point, is it fair to describe what’s happening here as a war, as war like? What is this?

isabel kershner

It feels pretty war like. If we end up with a ground campaign on the Israeli forces side, it will definitely be a war.

michael barbaro

And is there talk of a ground operation?

isabel kershner

Well, no confirmation of one. But some preparations seem to be being made. There are some call ups of reserves, there are some troops and vehicles moving down towards the border. So it’s not being ruled out. But it’s hard to tell. I think Israel won’t rush into a ground invasion because they are usually very costly. But sometimes, it’s part of the tactical war to signal that you’re ready for one, which could also be what’s going on.

michael barbaro

What are the leaders on all sides of this saying about this moment and how it might come to an end? I realize that’s a tricky question because both the Israeli and Palestinian leadership is very much in flux. But what are they saying about it?

isabel kershner

So we heard on Wednesday night a very strong statement from President Mahmoud Abbas— he leads the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and is a main rival of Hamas. And he was basically telling Israel, end your occupation. And we’ve been hearing more from Hamas. So Ismail Haniyeh, a senior Hamas political leader, sends a recorded address to a Hamas affiliated television station—

ismail haniyeh

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

isabel kershner

He spoke about being contacted by Egypt, Qatar, the United Nations with some kind of talk of maybe working towards the ceasefire.

ismail haniyeh

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

isabel kershner

But he said, since in his view, Israel had started this, it was Israel’s responsibility to be the ones to begin to end it.

ismail haniyeh

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

isabel kershner

On the Israeli side, we’re hearing that we’re not done yet. The defense minister said on Wednesday, there’s no end date. And the night before, the Prime Minister also said, this could take some time.

[music]michael barbaro

So it sounds like from leadership, there’s not an eagerness to quickly bring this to an end.

isabel kershner

Right, it does seem that on both sides— they’re not rushing to end this. And it might actually be helping them.

michael barbaro

How so?

isabel kershner

On the Palestinian side, you have Hamas operating really in a vacuum with Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, who’s aging and weak, and Hamas really trying to reinstate itself using its currency of leading the resistance and defending Jerusalem, which is always a rallying cry on the Palestinian side. And on the Israeli side, you have a very confused situation because Prime Minister Netanyahu is currently standing trial on corruption charges. He has been unable to form a government after four elections in two years. And his rivals were working on trying to form an alternative coalition which would have seen him removed from office for the first time in 12 years. And I think we’re not sure how this is going to play out. But somehow, he might well be able to capitalize on this time as being not the right time to have a change in government.

michael barbaro

Isabel, we started this conversation by talking about the eviction case in East Jerusalem that, in many people’s eyes, lit the fuse that has now turned into this war like conflict. What has happened with that ruling?

isabel kershner

So the ruling was supposed to come on Monday. On Sunday, after the government had spent weeks saying, this is just a private real estate dispute, the attorney general finally stepped in and asked for a delay in the case so that he could study the materials, get involved, state an opinion. And the judges gave him a month, suspending the verdict for at least 30 days. This is one case where the Israelis stepped in to try and diffuse a situation. But of course, it was too little too late.

michael barbaro

So this ruling has been delayed, but not for all that long. And eventually when it comes out, it will no doubt influence the course of this conflict that has erupted over the past few weeks. But it strikes me as odd and maybe a bit ironic that the Israeli government has called this eviction case a real estate dispute when you could argue that the entire history of the Israeli-Palestanian conflict is ultimately a dispute over real estate— over land and over the idea of home.

isabel kershner

You certainly could see it that way. I mean, with all the security and national and religious aspects to this conflict that’s been going on for a century, at the end of the day, it’s about who rules territory where and who gets to call a place home. Yeah.

[music]michael barbaro

Isabel, as always, thank you very much.

isabel kershner

Thank you.

michael barbaro

The Times reports that as the conflict expands, rival mobs of Jews and Arabs are carrying out violent attacks in several Israeli cities and towns. One occurred in a suburb of Tel Aviv where dozens of Jewish extremists took turns beating and kicking an Arab motorcycle driver even as his body lay motionless on the ground. Another occurred in northern Israel where an Arab mob beat a Jewish man with sticks and rocks, leaving him in critical condition.

On Wednesday night, the United Nations warned that the conflict could soon intensify into, quote, “all out war“. And the Biden administration dispatched a senior American diplomat to the Middle East to meet with Israeli and Palestinian leaders and to urge both sides to de-escalate.

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today. On Wednesday, during a closed door vote, House Republicans ousted Representative, Liz Cheney, as their party’s third highest ranking leader over her decision to speak out against former President Trump— his role in the January 6 riot at the Capitol and his lies about fraud in the 2020 election.

liz cheney

I will do everything I can to ensure that the former president never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office.

michael barbaro

After the vote, Cheney said she had no regrets and vowed that she would continue to speak out against Trump and seek to break his hold over the Republican Party.

liz cheney

We have seen the danger that he continues to provoke with his language. We have seen his lack of commitment and dedication to the Constitution. And I think it’s fair—

michael barbaro

And the company that operates the major fuel pipeline shut down by a cyber attack said that the pipeline’s operations had begun to resume. The shutdown of the pipeline had raised fears of gas shortages and triggered panicked buying in several states, including Florida, Georgia, and Alabama.

Today’s episode was produced by Austin Mitchell, Soraya Shockley, Robert Jimison, Annie Brown, and Daniel Guillemette. It was edited by M.J. Davis Lin with help from Phyllis Fletcher. It was engineered by Chris Wood and contains original music by Rachelle Bonja and Dan Powell.

[music]

That’s it for The Daily. I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

Tags Conflict, IsraelPalestinian, Live, Times, Updates, York