Day: October 12, 2023

Dozens of relatives of prisoners jailed in El Salvador during a state of emergency called on Thursday on the Supreme Court to rule unconstitutional upcoming “mass trials” of suspected gang members.

El Salvador’s Congress, controlled by President Nayib Bukele’s ruling party, approved special emergency provisions in July that allow people with established links to various gang structures to be tried in a group.

This means that the Attorney General’s office can use the same evidence to try people linked by factors such as the area where crimes were committed within a two-year period.

But some critics fear that innocent people captured during a crackdown on El Salvador’s gangs – or maras – launched in March last year could be convicted along with guilty gang members.

“This law is perverse and arbitrary, what it wants is to condemn many innocent people,” Samuel Ramirez of the Movement of Victims of the Regime (MOVIR), which is helping the relatives of suspects, told journalists.

“If a person lived in a community controlled by a gang and that gang committed a crime, he will be blamed for that crime.”

In July, Justice Minister Gustavo Villatoro said up to 900 defendants from the same criminal cell could be tried together. Provisions came into force in August but a date for the trials has yet to be set.

The Ministry of Justice and courts did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Bukele, who is standing for re-election in February even though the constitution prohibits consecutive presidential terms, is pushing on with the popular anti-gang crackdown that has brought more than 73,000 arrested.

An important element of the campaign is a “mega-prison”, 45 miles (73 km) southeast of the capital, that holds about 12,000 suspected members of the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and rival Barrio 18 gangs.

Authorities say it is the largest prison in the Americas and can hold about 40,000 prisoners.

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Israel’s military chief said “Now is the time for war” as his country amassed tanks near the Gaza Strip ahead of a planned ground invasion to annihilate the Palestinian militant Hamas group that rules the enclave and was behind deadly weekend attacks.

Israel has pounded Gaza from the air since the weekend incursions, the deadliest by Palestinian militants in its history, and has been preparing for a ground invasion.

The United Nations said early on Friday it had been told by the Israeli military that some 1.1 million Palestinians in Gaza should relocate to the enclave’s south within the next 24 hours.

“The United Nations considers it impossible for such a movement to take place without devastating humanitarian consequences,” U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said in a statement.

“The United Nations strongly appeals for any such order, if confirmed, to be rescinded avoiding what could transform what is already a tragedy into a calamitous situation,” he said.

Seeking to build support for its response, Israel’s government showed U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and NATO defence ministers graphic images of children and civilians they said Hamas had killed in a weekend rampage in Israel.

Blinken said they showed a baby “riddled with bullets,” soldiers beheaded and young people burned in their cars. “It’s simply depravity in the worst imaginable way,” he said. “It’s really beyond anything that we can comprehend.”

Like others across the globe, Blinken urged Israel to show restraint, but he also reiterated America’s support, saying: “We will always be there by your side.”

On Friday he was due to meet Jordan’s King Abdullah and Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, as part of a Middle East tour aimed at stopping spillover from the war.

America’s top diplomat, Blinken planned to visit key U.S. allies Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates – some with influence on Hamas, an Islamist group backed by Iran.

Israel’s military chief, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, said lessons would be drawn from the security failures around Gaza that enabled the attack. “We will learn, investigate, but now is the time for war,” he said.

The U.S. military is placing no conditions on its security assistance to Israel, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said, adding Washington expected Israel’s military to “do the right things” in prosecuting its war against Hamas.

Austin was due in Israel on Friday and planned to meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Hamas called on Palestinians to rise up on Friday in protest at Israel’s bombardment of the enclave, urging Palestinians to march to East Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque and clash with Israeli troops in the occupied West Bank.

Israel’s parliament approved Netanyahu’s emergency unity government late on Thursday, including a number of centrist opposition lawmakers, to display the country’s united determination to fight Hamas.

Public broadcaster Kan said the Israeli death toll had risen to more than 1,300. Scores of Israeli and foreign hostages were taken back to Gaza; Israel said it had identified 97 of them.

Israel has responded so far by putting Gaza, home to 2.3 million people, under siege and launching a bombing campaign that destroyed whole neighbourhoods. Gaza authorities said more than 1,500 Palestinians had been killed.

Sirens warning of incoming rocket fire blared in Israeli communities near the Gaza border early on Friday.

Israel carried out air strikes across the Gaza Strip overnight, Palestinian media reported. One attack on a house in the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza killed at least 17 people, the reports said.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said fuel powering emergency generators at hospitals in Gaza could run out within hours and the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) warned food and fresh water were running dangerously low.

“The human misery caused by this escalation is abhorrent, and I implore the sides to reduce the suffering of civilians,” ICRC regional director Fabrizio Carboni said.

Human Rights Watch on Thursday accused Israel of using white phosphorus munitions in its military operations in Gaza and Lebanon, saying the use of such weapons puts civilians at risk of serious and long-term injury.

Israel’s military said it was “currently not aware of the use of weapons containing white phosphorus in Gaza.”

North Korea denied on Friday its weapons were used by Hamas in the attack against Israel, saying the claim made in some media reports was a bid by Washington to divert the blame for the conflict from itself to a third country.

The U.S. State Department will begin offering charter flights to Europe to help Americans leave Israel if they want starting Friday, the White House said.

Japan has arranged for a charter flight to depart Tel Aviv on Saturday for its citizens wishing to leave Israel, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno told reporters on Friday.

The conflict spurred some civil unrest in Europe, with police in Paris using tear gas and water cannon to break up a banned rally in support of the Palestinian people. Some Jewish schools in Amsterdam and London were set to close temporarily due to safety concerns.

U.S. law enforcement officials in New York and Los Angeles said they had a stepped up police presence for Friday, especially around synagogues and Jewish community centers, but some officials sought to play down the threat.

The Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee, an Arab advocacy group, said on Thursday that FBI agents had visited mosques in different states and individual U.S. residents with Palestinian roots, calling it a “troubling trend.”
In Jerusalem, scores of Israelis gathered at the Mount Herzl military cemetery on Thursday to bury their dead.

“When you didn’t take my call, I knew you were fighting with all your power. When I realised you were missing, I could not imagine this is how it would end,” one mourner said.

In Gaza’s main southern city Khan Younis, where cemeteries were already full, dead were being buried in empty lots, like the Samour family, killed on Wednesday night in a strike that hit their house.

Palestinian rescue worker Ibrahim Hamdan drove from one bomb site to another as his team tried to pull survivors from houses destroyed by the Israeli air strikes.

“This war is harsh beyond imagining,” said Hamdan, who has worked through repeated wars since becoming a rescuer in 2007. “They knock down high-rise buildings on top of their residents.”

Gazans, mainly descendants of refugees who fled or were expelled from homes in Israel at its founding in 1948, have suffered economic collapse and repeated Israeli bombardment under a blockade since Hamas seized power there 16 years ago.

Palestinian anger has mounted in recent months, with Israel carrying out the deadliest crackdown for years in the West Bank and its right-wing government talking of seizing more land. A peace process meant to create a Palestinian state collapsed a decade ago, which Palestinian leaders say left the population with no hope, strengthening extremists.

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Thick smoke has enveloped extensive areas of the Brazilian Amazon on Thursday as the region grapples with a surge in wildfires and a historic drought.

In Manaus, a city of 2 million, air quality ranked among the worst globally, leading to the suspension of college classes and the cancellation of various activities, including an international marathon.

In the first 11 days of October, Amazonas state recorded over 2,700 fires. This is already the highest number for the month since official monitoring began in 1998. Virtually all fire is human-caused, primarily for deforestation or pasture clearance.

Over the past six weeks, Manaus and other cities of Amazonas state have intermittently been blanketed by thick smoke, making it difficult to breathe. The city’s air quality index fluctuated between unhealthy and hazardous levels during the last two days, resembling the conditions in some major Asian metropolitan areas.

On Wednesday, the city’s major universities canceled all activities, while the city’s marathon, initially scheduled for Sunday, was postponed for two months.

Normally, October marks the start of the rainy season. However, the warming of the northern Atlantic Ocean’s waters has disrupted the flow of rain clouds. Another contributing factor is El Niño, a warming of the surface waters in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, which is expected to peak in December.

Many of the Amazon’s major rivers are currently at historically low levels, disrupting navigation and isolating hundreds of riverine communities. In Tefe Lake, the heated and shallow waters likely caused the deaths of dozens of river dolphins. Most were pink dolphins, an endangered species.

“It has been very painful both physically and emotionally to wake up with the city covered in smoke, experience extreme temperatures exceeding 40 degrees Celsius, and follow the news that the river waters are disappearing,” Mônica Vasconcelos, a climate perception researcher at Amazonas State University, told The Associated Press.

She linked the crisis to climate change and said it has left her as pessimistic as ever about the future of the Amazon. “Today, October 12, is Children’s Day in Brazil, and I wonder whether they can still spend the day playing in the backyard.”

Steve Scalise has dropped out of the race for Speaker. It doesn’t appear Jim Jordan currently has the votes either. Now we’re getting to the fun part.

Likely next steps: Jim Jordan will attempt to rally enough votes. If Jordan fails, Kevin McCarthy would likely make another run at it. If Republicans can’t find anyone, the Republicans in toss up districts would eventually consider negotiating with House Democrats on something.

But for now the story is that House Republicans are in complete disarray. They ousted their own Speaker of the House for no reason, and now their nominee to replace him has just dropped out. This gets more humiliating for the Republicans by the hour.

The post Steve Scalise just cut and ran appeared first on Palmer Report.

(NewsNation) — The conflict between Israel and Hamas could spread to cities worldwide as a former Hamas chief called for a “Day of Jihad” by Muslim communities.

Khaled Meshaal designated Friday, Oct. 13, as the “Day of Jihad,” asking Muslims to take to the streets and deliver a message of anger in support of Palestinians.

Congressman Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., is among those who have responded, saying Americans will be armed and will not be intimidated.

NewsNation has also learned New York City police on duty tomorrow have all been ordered to show up in uniform and be ready to deploy. This comes as Columbia University closed its campus to the public in preparation for protests there.

Michael Balboni, former New York state homeland security adviser, joined “Elizabeth Vargas Reports” to discuss the potential threat, saying, “The thing people are most concerned about is the call for bloodshed.”

“They are not calling for peaceful protests,” he said.

Balboni stressed that there have been calls for a “Day of Jihad” before, but he said this is a different set of circumstances.

“It is an incredibly emotional time,” he said. “And so what you’re going to see is that people are very, very skittish about this. And they’re nervous.”

Balboni also stressed the importance of maintaining calm.

“New York City has been the place of protests for decades,” he said. “And the New York City Police Department is probably one of the most experienced police forces in the world.”

Furthermore, Balboni said, “If you study, in the past, types of terrorist attacks, what you realize is that it just doesn’t happen overnight.”

Balboni said typically these calls for violence don’t resonate and “doesn’t result in a concerted attack anywhere in the world itself.”

“That takes planning, that takes preparation,” he said. “And you don’t really have that.”

However, Balboni said “there’s no way” that any police force around the world is going to step back and not pay attention to a threat.

But Balboni said there are infrastructure protection strategies currently in place right now.

“They’re going to try to make sure that they have the ability, the incredible show of force, and then use the assets that they have: undercover police officers, informants. And of course, what you have in major cities, especially in New York City, is surveillance, which has been dramatically increased over the years.”

Nonetheless, Balboni said people need to pay attention.

“Be aware and take certain steps,” he said, “Know who’s coming into your building and do other things to make sure that you can limit the ability of people to perpetrate an attack.”

Rabbi Samuel Stern is expecting a bigger Friday night crowd than usual at his Reform synagogue in Topeka, Kansas. His congregants want to pray for Israel.

So, Stern is changing Temple Beth Sholom’s Kabbalat Shabbat service to deepen the connection between prayer and patriotism.

“It’s kind of a reestablishment of not just an Israeli identity for some people but a Jewish identity for them as well,” Stern, 35, said Thursday in a phone interview. “There’s a greater sense than ever that these things are inherently linked.”

He’s adding in music from Israeli composers and liturgical poems by Hannah Senesh, who immigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1941 but returned to Europe to save Jewish lives, and the Zionist writer Natan Alterman. He’ll move the prayers for the state of Israel and the IDF, typically recited on Saturday, to the night before.

Beth Sholom is one of many congregations across the country that are trying to help their members grapple with the tragedy that unfolded over the weekend, when Hamas killed at least 1,200 Israelis, and the war that ensued, which has already claimed 1,400 Palestinian lives. Owing to Hamas’ call for a global day of jihad on Friday, Stern said, “we’ve had to hire extra security.”

(The Secure Communities Network, which protects Jewish communities, said in a briefing Thursday afternoon that it was not at the moment aware of any credible threats against Jewish institutions in the U.S.)

Many of the 110 member families at Beth Sholom are just a degree or two of separation away from people killed or missing in the Hamas attacks. Only one member of the community is Israeli, Stern says, and that congregant called him earlier this week.

“He was hoping we were going to do something like this,” Stern said. “He said, ‘You know, I really feel it’s important for me to be there.’”

Less alone

Topeka’s Jewish community dates back to the mid-19th century, but today it is largely confined to Stern’s synagogue, and is only a few hundred people. For that reason, Stern said they sometimes feel like an island in a Christian sea. 

Since the attacks on Israel on Saturday, however, churches in the area have sent messages of solidarity.

“Every bit of support we get helps us feel less alone,” said Stern.

He’s planning on using his sermon time to hold an open discussion for congregants to talk about how they’re feeling about and processing current events.

And while he wants to use his pulpit to “get facts out there” about the situation in Israel, he said he would not make any statements to his congregation about casualties in Gaza.

“While I deplore the loss of any civilian life, including Palestinians living in Gaza, Hamas, because of the nature of their warfare, their terrorism — because of how they hide themselves under hospitals and schools — any way that Israel needs to respond to wipe out Hamas will inevitably, sadly cause civilian casualties,” Stern said.

“I’m sorry that any civilian has to lose their lives, but we believe morally that any death in this conflict on the Palestinian side is attributable to Hamas.” 

The post How a heartland rabbi is helping congregants connect to Israel this Shabbat appeared first on The Forward.

Amid a heavy retaliatory air and artillery assault by Israel against the Gaza Strip on October 10, Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Avichay Adraee posted a message on Facebook to residents of the al-Daraj neighborhood, urging them to leave their homes in advance of impending airstrikes.

It’s not clear how most people in al-Daraj were supposed to see the warning: Intense fighting and electrical shortages have strangled Palestinian access to the internet, putting besieged civilians at even greater risk.

Following Hamas’s grisly surprise attack across the Gaza border on October 7, the Israeli counterattack — a widespread and indiscriminate bombardment of the besieged Gaza Strip — left the two million Palestinians who call the area home struggling to connect to the internet at a time when access to current information is crucial and potentially lifesaving.

“Shutting down the internet in armed conflict is putting civilians at risk.”

“Shutting down the internet in armed conflict is putting civilians at risk,” Deborah Brown, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, told The Intercept. “It could help contribute to injury or death because people communicate around what are safe places and conditions.”

According to companies and research organizations that monitor the global flow of internet traffic, Gazan access to the internet has dramatically dropped since Israeli strikes began, with data service cut entirely for some customers.

“My sense is that very few people in Gaza have internet service,” Doug Madory of the internet monitoring firm Kentik told The Intercept. Madory said he spoke to a contact working with an internet service provider, or ISP, in Gaza who told him that internet access has been reduced by 80 to 90 percent because of a lack of fuel and power, and airstrikes.

As causes of the outages, Marwa Fatafta, a policy analyst with the digital rights group Access Now, cited Israeli strikes against office buildings housing Gazan telecommunications firms, such as the now-demolished Al-Watan Tower, as a major factor, in addition to damage to the electrical grid.

Fatafta told The Intercept, “There is a near complete information blackout from Gaza.”

Most Gaza ISPs Are Gone

With communications infrastructure left in rubble, Gazans now increasingly find themselves in a digital void at a time when data access is most crucial.

“People in Gaza need access to the internet and telecommunications to check on their family and loved ones, seek life-saving information amidst the ongoing Israeli barrage on the strip; it’s crucial to document the war crimes and human rights abuses committed by Israeli forces at a time when disinformation is going haywire on social media,” Fatafta said.

“There is some slight connectivity,” Alp Toker of the internet outage monitoring firm NetBlocks told The Intercept, but “most of the ISPs based inside of Gaza are gone.”

Though it’s difficult to be certain whether these outages are due to electrical shortages, Israeli ordnance, or both, Toker said that, based on reports he has received from Gazan internet providers, the root cause is the Israeli destruction of fiber optic cables connecting Gaza. The ISPs are generally aware of where their infrastructure is damaged or destroyed, Toker said, but ongoing Israeli airstrikes will make sending a crew to patch them too dangerous to attempt. Still, one popular Gazan internet provider, Fusion, wrote in a Facebook post to its customers that efforts to repair damaged infrastructure were ongoing.

That Gazan internet access remains in place at all, Toker said, is probably due to the use of backup generators that could soon run out of fuel in the face of an intensified Israeli military blockade. (Toker also said that, while it’s unclear if it was due to damage from Hamas rockets or a manual blackout, NetBlocks detected an internet service disruption inside Israel at the start of the attack, but that it quickly subsided.)

Amanda Meng, a research scientist at Georgia Tech who works on the university’s Internet Outage Detection and Analysis project, or IODA, estimated Gazan internet connectivity has dropped by around 55 percent in the recent days, meaning over half the networks inside Gaza have gone dark and no longer respond to the outside internet. Meng compared this level of access disruption to what’s been previously observed in Ukraine and Sudan during recent warfare in those countries. In Gaza, Border Gateway Protocol activity, an obscure system that routes data from one computer to another and undergirds the entire internet, has also seen disruptions.

“On the ground, this looks like people not being able to use networked communication devices that rely on the Internet,” Meng explained.

Organizations like NetBlocks and IODA all used varying techniques to measure internet traffic, and their results tend to vary. It’s also nearly impossible to tell from the other side of the world whether a sudden dip in service is due to an explosion or something else. In addition to methodological differences and the fog of war, however, is an added wrinkle: Like almost everything else in Gaza, ISPs connect to the broader internet through Israeli infrastructure.

“By law, Gaza internet connectivity must go through Israeli infrastructure to connect to the outside world, so there is a possibility that the Israelis could leave it up because they are able to intercept communications,” said Madory of Kentik.

Fatafta, the policy analyst, also cited Israel’s power to keep Gaza offline — but both in this war and in general. “Israel’s full control of Palestinian telecommunications infrastructure and long-standing ban on technology upgrades” is an immense impediment, she said. With the wider internet blockaded, she said, “people in Gaza can only access slow and unreliable 2G services” — a cellular standard from 1991.

The post Israel Warns Palestinians on Facebook — But Bombings Decimated Gaza Internet Access appeared first on The Intercept.

Some students at a few U.S. universities blamed Israel this week for the Hamas militants’ attack on the Jewish state, drawing a sharp rebuke from academic leaders at the schools as well as from prominent alumni and potential employers.

The debate touched off at Harvard University, the alma mater of eight former U.S. presidents and perhaps the most politically influential school in the country.

A coalition of 34 Harvard student organizations said they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” following decades of occupation of Gaza. They called Israel an “apartheid regime” and said it was “the only one to blame” for the war.

The statement drew the ire of prominent Harvard alumni, university President Claudine Gay, and 15 deans at the school.

In a statement, Gay and the Harvard academics said they were “heartbroken by the death and destruction unleashed by the attack by Hamas that targeted citizens in Israel this weekend.”

She added, “While our students have the right to speak for themselves, no student group — not even 30 student groups — speaks for Harvard University or its leadership group.”

A Harvard graduate, billionaire hedge fund chief executive Bill Ackman, and several other business leaders demanded that Harvard release the names of students whose organizations signed on to the letter supporting Hamas, although some students subsequently distanced themselves from the anti-Israel statement.

“One should not be able to hide behind a corporate shield when issuing statements supporting the actions of terrorists,” Ackman said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

“I would like to know so I know never to hire these people,” Jonathan Neman, CEO of the restaurant chain Sweetgreen, said on X.

One prominent New York law firm rescinded a lucrative job offer to Ryna Workman, president of New York University’s Student Bar Association, who wrote in the group’s newsletter that “Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life.”

Columbia University in New York City closed its campus to the public on Thursday ahead of a planned protest against the Israeli bombing attacks on Hamas-controlled Gaza. A 24-year-old Israeli student who was hanging flyers was beaten on Wednesday in front of a library on campus, one of several attacks in New York this week related to the Israel-Hamas war that police were treating as possible bias incidents.

At The George Washington University in Washington, a group of about 50 students held a vigil for Palestinian “martyrs.” One organizer contended that the Hamas attacks on Israel were “not unprovoked.”

There have been scattered other pro-Hamas protests in the U.S. this week, but President Joe Biden and a wide range of government officials and corporate leaders have assailed the Hamas attacks and voiced unstinting support for Israel.

Syria has accused Israel of carrying out missile strikes on airports in Damascus and Aleppo Thursday. News of the strikes comes as fears grow that the conflict between Israel and Hamas could spiral into a regional war in the Middle East. Henry Ridgwell reports.

A jury in Colorado on Thursday found police officer Randy Roedema guilty of criminally negligent homicide in the 2019 killing of Elijah McClain, a young Black man who died after being roughly restrained and injected with the sedative ketamine.

The same jury found Jason Rosenblatt, another officer involved in the case and jointly tried with Roedema, not guilty on manslaughter and assault charges.

Roedema, who was also found guilty of second-degree assault, will be sentenced on January 5. He faces up to 19 years in prison.

Aurora officers Roedema and Rosenblatt were tried in the first of three trials in the death of McClain. In all, three police officers and two paramedics have been charged in McClain’s death.

Prosecutors argued throughout the trial that the officers unnecessarily brutalized McClain when they stopped him and that they gave false information to paramedics which contributed to the medical workers administering a large dose of ketamine.

Defense attorneys argued during the trial that it was the ketamine that killed McClain, and that paramedics were solely responsible.

A revised autopsy report in September 2022 concluded McClain died from “complications of ketamine administration following forcible restraint.”

A bystander had called 911 to report that McClain was acting suspiciously as he walked home from a convenience store on Aug. 24, 2019, in the Denver suburb of Aurora. McClain, dressed in a winter coat and face mask on a warm night, was listening to music using ear buds and dancing slightly as he walked, security videos showed.

Rosenblatt, Roedema and a third Aurora police officer arrived and grabbed McClain 9 seconds after confronting him, according to body camera footage showed by prosecutors. A struggle ensued. The footage does not show McClain grabbing for a gun, but Roedema can be heard yelling that McClain tried to get Rosenblatt’s weapon. Prosecutors say McClain did not grab for a gun.

The officers put McClain in a “carotid” choke hold at least twice and held him down for 15 minutes until the arrival of medics.

The episode initially received little attention, but the case gained more notice following the May 2020 killing of George Floyd, a Black man who died at the hands of Minneapolis police. Floyd’s death sparked international outrage and fueled protests against racial injustice and police brutality.

This first trial, for two of the officers, opened on Sept. 20. A manslaughter trial for the third officer is expected to open on Friday. Two paramedics are expected to face trial next month.