Crooked Media - Tunnel tensions

- Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), on the GOP's incredible shrinking House majority. 

The expanding Israeli offensive in southern Gaza is intensifying the enclave’s humanitarian disaster. United Nations officials say there are no safe places left—not even UN shelters.  

• Israeli troops remain locked in combat in Khan Younis, Gaza’s second-largest city. Overnight, Israel struck the southern city of Rafah, whose population has nearly doubled since the war began with people seeking refuge. Israeli warplanes dropped pamphlets in Khan Younis instructing civilians to “stay in the shelters or hospitals that you are currently in.” Designated humanitarian zones like Al-Mawasi in southern Gaza are in desperate need of humanitarian aid, but civilians fleeing to the barren area often find no provisions or shelter, and hardly any infrastructure. Israel officials claim that Hamas is firing rockets from humanitarian zones like Al-Mawasi, and offered up satellite photos and a video as evidence; but The New York Times reported that it still could not verify that assertion. Meanwhile, the head of the World Health Organization said that “the very intense fighting is making it increasingly difficult to run any health operations.”  Martin Griffiths, the chief humanitarian official at the United Nations said: “We do not have a humanitarian operation in southern Gaza that can be called by that name any more.”
   

• In Khan Younis, Israeli troops continue to surround the home of Yahwa Sinwar, the alleged mastermind behind Hamas' October 7th attacks on Israel. The Israeli military claims that Sinwar is hiding underground in the vast network of tunnels beneath Gaza. Israel is reportedly considering flooding the tunnels with seawater, according to U.S. officials who spoke to NBC News. The outlet reported that satellite imagery appears to show pipes being connected to the sea. “They could certainly [flood the tunnels], the question is whether there are hostages in the tunnels,” Michael Clarke of the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank, told NBC.
   

• Flooding the tunnels could have a devastating effect on Gaza’s freshwater supply. Should the IDF decide to pump several million cubic meters of saltwater into the tunnels, “the negative impact on groundwater quality would last for several generations, depending on the amount that infiltrates into the subsurface,” Professor Emeritus Eilon Adar of the Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev told the Times of Israel. Gaza’s water quality is already abysmal, due to sewage and agricultural chemical runoff. Israel’s assault has also reduced the number of functioning water pipes, leaving just 5% of the population with access to clean water as of early November.

President Biden’s handling of the conflict remains controversial. But Democratic support for his role is increasing.

• An Associated Press poll shows that Democratic approval of Biden’s handling of the Israel Hamas war rose to 59% from 50% in the last month. The uptick coincided with Biden’s shift from fully backing Israeli war efforts to expressing concerns over the staggering civilian death toll in Gaza, which now exceeds over 17,000 people, according to Gaza Health Ministry figures. Not all Democrats are impressed, of course, especially on the party’s left. A group of 40 White House and executive branch interns signed a letter demanding Biden call for a permanent ceasefire. It reads: “We are not the decision makers of today, but we aspire to be the leaders of tomorrow, and we will never forget how the pleas of the American people have been heard and thus far, ignored.” 

• Independent investigations by both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch concluded that Israeli forces were responsible for the October 13th death of Reuters’ journalist Issam Abbdallah in Lebanon. “The evidence we now have, and have published today, shows that an Israeli tank crew killed our colleague Issam Abdallah,” said Reuters Editor-in-Chief Alessandra Galloni. The strikes “were likely a direct attack on civilians that must be investigated as a war crime,” Amnesty International concluded. Israel’s UN envoy Gilad Erdan told The Guardian, “Obviously, we would never want to hit or kill or shoot any journalist that is doing [his or her] job. But you know, we’re in a state of war, things might happen.”  

"There does remain a gap between... the intent to protect civilians and the actual results that we’re seeing on the ground,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Thursday. 

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A Texas judge granted a woman’s request for an abortion in a landmark ruling for a state with some of the strictest abortion bans in the country. Kate Cox, a 31-year-old mother of two, made history as the first woman to receive permission from a Texas court for an abortion since the (now-defunct) Roe vs Wade was handed down by the Supreme Court in 1973.  

State District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble ruled that Cox, who is 20 weeks pregnant with a fetus that has been diagnosed with a fatal condition, should be able to have an abortion to avoid a potentially dangerous birth and to preserve her fertility. State Attorney General Ken Paxton argued that Cox’s situation did not meet the criteria for a medical exception, which in Texas is practically limited to the pregnant person’s life being imminently at risk. (Folks: The bar is in hell. Coincidentally, where Paxton belongs, too!) While Cox is (luckily) not knocking on death’s door, as the Texas legislature would seemingly want her to be, the fetus’ diagnosis (trisomy 18) and Cox’s two prior c-sections increase the likelihood of her uterus rupturing. Should she avoid that horrific fate and go into labor with the fetus, the baby would almost certainly die soon after birth. Cox, who was represented by lawyers from the Center for Reproductive Rights, wrote in an op-ed, “I do not want my baby to arrive in this world only to watch her suffer. I need to end my pregnancy now so that I have the best chance for my health and a future pregnancy.” 

Let’s face it. The sentence, “a 31-year-old woman was able to get an abortion,” really shouldn’t be news. But, thanks to the GOP’s single-minded dedication to destroying reproductive autonomy, what just happened in Texas really is an exceptional situation—literally. And the fact that the Texas anti-abortion laws could turn out to be what prohibit Cox from actually having another child one day just highlights the cruel absurdity of highly restrictive bans in the first place.

• The third GOP primary took place Wednesday night, and the four people still attempting to catch the frontrunner, disgraced former President Donald Trump, further debased themselves. The event featured so much sophomoric drama, it could have been aired on The CW. If you missed it, don’t worry. We’ve been cursed with two more next month.
   

• The House of Representatives voted to censure Rep. Jamaal Bowman today for pulling a fire alarm in the Cannon House Office building in September. Disgraced former Congressman George Santos had argued Bowman should be expelled for the mostly innocuous incident. But, of course, Santos was the one who got the boot. Perhaps there is a little bit of justice in this messed up universe.  
   

• All four victims of yesterday’s mass shooting in Las Vegas were faculty members at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Three were killed and a fourth was wounded by a gunman who later died in a shootout with police.
   

• NYU accounting professor Eli Bartov, who is being paid to testify in Trump’s civil fraud trial in New York City as an expert witness on behalf of the defense, claimed that Trump doubling the value of his apartment complex on financial documents wasn’t fraud, but just a mistake. A lawyer for New York State, which is suing Trump, responded in open court: “Oh, come on!”  
   

• In other Trump court news, the former president is trying to pause his election interference case in Washington D.C. while he appeals his earlier failed motion to have the whole thing tossed out.. If he gets his way, the case could be put on ice long enough for his team to have it dismissed, or just postponed until after the 2024 election.
   

• Turns out that organized retail crime is not as dire a situation as some people thought. The National Retail Federation is rescinding their claim that shoplifting was responsible for nearly half of loss in inventory. The error was due to a data miscalculation. Okay, can we remove deodorants from behind locked doors, now?

Violent threats against public officials have surged in recent years. They’ve deluged lawmakers, prosecutors, judges… you name it. They have spiked around events like Trump’s criminal indictments, and Rep. Jim Jordan’s attempts to make himself Speaker of the House. But only a fraction of the people making those threats are ever criminally charged, according to a new analysis by CNN. The network compared the number of threats investigated by U.S. Capitol Police with the number of indictments brought by federal prosecutors for every year since 2017. And the results aren’t heartening. The number of investigations into violent threats surged from 3,939 in 2017, up to a recent peak of 9,625 in 2021 (aka, the year when the Jan. 6 Capitol riot went down). After that, the number declined a bit, to 7,501 in 2022. But consider this: the number of actual prosecutions for each of those years, compared with thousands of threats, is only in the dozens. There were just 51 prosecutions in 2017, another 72 prosecutions in 2021, and only 46 in 2022. The upshot is that a lot of folks out there, apparently have been phoning in gross threats without facing any consequences. No wonder they keep on pouring in.  

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In geopolitical news that doesn’t fill you with dread, Greece and Turkey’s leaders signed a “declaration on friendly relations and good neighborliness” today. The adjacent countries have historically clashed over issues like migration and energy resources, almost erupting in a war in the mid 90’s. Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said:  “We owe it to the next generations to build a tomorrow with calm waters where a tailwind blows.”