US needs more pipeline capacity for reliable gas supply -trade group

Reuters
Mon, November 13, 2023 

A warning sign for a natural gas pipeline is seen as natural gas flares at an oil pump site outside of Williston

(Reuters) - The U.S. needs more natural gas pipeline capacity to maintain reliable gas supply during extreme cold weather, a trade group representing pipeline companies said on Monday in support of regulators who last week urged sought new rules to prevent a repetition of last winter's power outages.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the North American Electric Reliability Corp (NERC) urged lawmakers to fill a regulatory blind spot to maintain reliable supply of natural gas that was highlighted by an inquiry into power outages during Winter Storm Elliott in December 2022.

Elliott delivered sub-freezing temperatures and extreme weather warnings to almost two-thirds of the U.S., resulting in unforeseen energy generation supply losses.

Speaking for operators of around 200,000 miles (322,000 km) of pipelines, the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America (INGAA) said the regulators' report confirmed that its members "used all possible flexibility and storage withdrawals to deliver as much natural gas through the system as possible."

Declining production reduced flows of gas into pipelines during Elliott, while demand for the fuel for heating and power generation increased, dramatically lowering line pressures.

Falling pressure levels put the pipeline system at risk of collapse, the INGAA said, forcing operators to implement scheduling restrictions and reduce previously confirmed nominations for transporting the fuel.

The report had found that in New York City, Consolidated Edison declared an emergency because it faced a system collapse that would have taken "many months" to restore service in the middle of the winter.

"The United States needs more natural gas pipeline capacity to maintain a resilient system that affords homes and the power grid access to multiple sources of this critical fuel," the INGAA said.

In its 2023-24 winter outlook, the NERC said last week that prolonged, wide-area cold snaps threaten the availability of fuel supplies for natural gas-fired generation, warning there is not enough natural gas pipeline and infrastructure for the U.S. Midwest, Mid-Atlantic, and Northeast regions.

(Reporting by Deep Vakil in Bengaluru; Editing by Marguerita Choy)

US plans to buy 1.2 million barrels of oil for Strategic Petroleum Reserve

Reuters
Updated Mon, November 13, 2023 

Department of Energy officials lead reporters on a tour of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in Freeport

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. plans to buy 1.2 million barrels of oil to help replenish the Strategic Petroleum Reserve after it sold off the largest amount ever last year, the Energy Department said on Monday.

The department said the planned purchase for the oil is at an average price of $77.57 a barrel from two companies after 18 bids were submitted.

The administration of President Joe Biden last year conducted the largest ever sale from the SPR of 180 million barrels, part of a strategy to stabilize soaring oil markets and combat high pump prices in the aftermath of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. If the purchase is finalized it will have bought back about 6 million barrels.


As oil prices have risen on production cutbacks by Saudi Arabia and Russia, it has been difficult for the administration to buy back oil for the reserve. Last month it raised the price at which it hopes to buy back oil to $79 or less a barrel, up from an earlier price range of about $68 to $72.

Last month the Energy Department said it hopes to buy 3 million barrels for December delivery and another 3 million for January at the higher price. It said it expects to issue additional oil purchase solicitations for the reserve on a monthly basis through at least May 2024.

"President (Joe) Biden and the Energy Department remain committed to refilling the SPR at fair prices, safeguarding this critical energy security asset while getting a good deal for American taxpayers," a department spokesperson said.

The department has said oil in last year's emergency sales sold for an average of $95 per barrel.

(Reporting by Timothy Gardner; Editing by Sandra Maler and Chris Reese)

Here’s one energy win Biden probably won't brag about
Yahoo Finance
Sun, November 12, 2023 at 9:00 AM MST·5 min read
30




Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance.

U.S. oil production recently hit a new record high. There’s a good chance you’ll never hear President Biden mention it.

Domestic oil production has crept up to 13.2 million barrels per day, slightly above the prior record high of 13.1 million barrels in 2020, right before the COVID pandemic hit. It’s likely to drift higher still in 2024. You might think you’re hearing this wrong. So to reiterate: Yes, the United States is producing more oil under President Biden than it did under President Trump.

That wasn’t supposed to happen. Biden campaigned for the White House by vowing to “end fossil fuel." One of his first acts as president was to cancel the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline that would have carried Canadian oil to refineries on America’s Gulf Coast. Biden is a champion of renewable energy who proved it by signing into law the biggest set of green energy incentives in American history last year.

So Biden would suddenly sound like a fossil fuel cheerleader if he boasted about record levels of oil production under his watch. He’d also upset liberal Democrats who pushed for the “green new deal,” which would have gone a lot further than Biden has gone in forcing the U.S. economy off of fossil fuels. The best Biden can probably do is remind Americans when energy prices fall, while continuing to tout his green energy agenda, which may not be a resounding sell to the moderate swing voters likely to determine whether Biden gets a second presidential term next year.

Yet Biden has clearly learned how important fossil fuels are to his standing with voters, and to his political future. Biden’s approval rating sank as inflation begin to rise in late 2021 and 2022. The high point for inflation was a low point for Biden. The overall inflation rate hit 9% in June 2022, the same month U.S. gasoline prices hit $5 per gallon, the highest level ever. Pump prices have since come down — the current national average for a gallon of regular is $3.40 — but Biden’s approval rating has never recovered.

Biden has spent much of his presidency trying to manage gasoline prices. His administration sold 180 million gallons of oil from the nation’s strategic reserve, to boost global supplies and bring prices down. That brought the reserve to the lowest level since 1984. He and his deputies tried to jawbone US drillers into producing more, but private-sector energy companies aren’t answerable to the president. They’re answerable to investors and shareholders eager to lock in profits instead of putting more money into production, risking oversupply.

Biden has also tried to get foreign drillers, such as Saudi Arabia, to produce more oil, without much luck. The Saudis and other member nations of the oil-exporting group OPEC have been cutting production, not boosting it. In October, the Biden administration even eased sanctions on dictatorial Venezuela, hoping to squeeze a few more barrels out of the oil-rich nation, even though its energy infrastructure is in shambles.

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The market is now accomplishing what Biden couldn’t. U.S. drillers are producing more energy because they can make more money doing it. Oil prices crashed during the COVID pandemic, even turning negative for a brief time as there was more oil in storage than anybody knew what to do with. But they’ve since recovered to a range of $75 to $95 per barrel. U.S. drillers can make healthy profits at those levels. The OPEC production cuts are actually benefiting US energy firms by keeping prices high enough to make more drilling profitable.

Another happy fact Biden will probably never tout: The United States is the world’s top oil producer. That has been the case since 2018, due to new horizontal fracking technology that made vast amounts of energy, much of it in Texas, newly accessible. As OPEC nations produce less, U.S. barrels become more important to the global market.

Is the boom in U.S. oil production bad news for efforts to wean the world off fossil fuel and address global warming?

There are two ways to look at it. Some environmentalists want to speed the transition to renewables by forcing cuts in the supply of fossil fuels, so that renewables are the only option for some consumers. That’s imprudent, because there’s a good chance it will raise prices for end users if renewables aren’t cost-competitive with fossil fuels, which they aren’t in many places, such as areas where wind and solar aren’t yet wired into the grid.

Biden has discovered the political peril that can come with imposing limits on fossil fuels. Canceling the Keystone XL pipeline in 2021 had no effect on oil or gasoline prices, since the pipeline wasn’t even built and no oil was moving through it. But Biden took a public stance in opposition to fossil fuels, and when gas prices spiked in 2022, consumers blamed him. Biden asked for it.

A better approach to accelerating the green energy transition is doing everything feasible to bring more renewables to market, so that scaling up production helps lower costs and makes renewables cost-competitive with fossil fuels. This is exactly what Biden’s green energy incentives are doing, by effectively lowering the break-even point for green energy production and drawing more investors into the business, to boost supply.

To some extent, this is already working. Biden’s green energy incentives are generating far more investment than drafters of the legislation estimated in 2022. The Energy Dept. recently forecast a decline in US gasoline consumption in 2024, partly because so many electric vehicles are now on the road.

But there are potholes, too. Electric vehicle sales seem to be flatlining, for instance, perhaps revealing a ceiling on the portion of car buyers willing to accept the higher prices and practical limits of electrics.

The bottom line? Green energy adoption will continue, but abundant fossil fuels will be necessary for the rest of Biden’s political career, and well beyond, whether he wants to admit it or not.

Follow Rick Newman on Twitter at @rickjnewman.

TotalEnergies to Buy Texas Gas Power Plants for $635 Million
IMPERIALI$M THE HIGHEST STAGE OF CAPITALI$M

Francois de Beaupuy and Naureen S. Malik
Mon, November 13, 2023 


(Bloomberg) -- TotalEnergies SE agreed to buy three natural gas-fired power plants in Texas from TexGen Power LLC for $635 million as it looks to expand in the US market.

The three plants will serve the “fast-growing energy demand” of Dallas and Houston, offsetting the intermittency of renewable power production, the French energy giant said in a statement Monday, confirming an earlier Bloomberg News report. They have a joint capacity of 1.5 gigawatts.

TotalEnergies has pursued gas plants to complement its growing fleet of wind and solar farms that provide more sporadic generation. Chief Executive Officer Patrick Pouyanne said last month that the company might make such an acquisition in Texas. In the Lone Star State, the French oil major currently has 2 gigawatts of gross installed renewable capacity, another 2 gigawatts under construction and more than 3 gigawatts under development.

“These plants will enable us to complement our renewable assets, intermittent by nature, provide our customers with firm power, and take advantage of the volatility of electricity prices,” said Stephane Michel, president of gas renewables & power at TotalEnergies, said in the statement.

Gas plants have become more valuable in the last couple of years amid supply issues, the rise of intermittent wind and solar generation and higher power prices in key markets like Texas.

Total, which has been acquiring gas-fired plants in France, Belgium and Spain, plans to invest about $4 billion a year in power generation on top of expanding oil and gas production. It’s aiming to reach 100 gigawatts of renewable power capacity globally by 2030, up from 20.2 gigawatts at the end of the third quarter.

In Texas, many generators are reaping record revenues, or close to it, after the state grid operator pushed through reforms to help avoid a repeat of widespread blackouts in a deadly 2021 winter storm.

The purchase of the TexGen plants, which remains subject to regulatory approvals, will complement TotalEnergies’ recent foray in the US clean power market. The French company had a gross installed capacity of 6.2 gigawatts of solar and wind power in North America and a further 3 gigawatts in construction on the continent at the end of the third quarter, thanks to recent acquisitions such as Austin-based Core Solar LLC and a 50% stake in Clearway Energy Group.

Last month, the French energy giant started commercial operations at a 380-megawatt solar farm located south of Houston, which the company said produces enough green electricity to cover the equivalent consumption of 70,000 homes.

Developing countries owe China at least $1.1 trillion – and the debts are due


Simone McCarthy, CNN
Mon, November 13, 2023 

Developing countries owe Chinese lenders at least $1.1 trillion, according to a new data analysis published Monday, which says more than half of the thousands of loans China has doled out over two decades are due as many borrowers struggle financially.

Overdue loan repayments to Chinese lenders are soaring, according to AidData, a university research lab at William & Mary in Virginia, which found that nearly 80% of China’s lending portfolio in the developing world is currently supporting countries in financial distress.

For years, Beijing marshalled its finances toward funding infrastructure across poorer countries – including under an effort that Chinese leader Xi Jinping branded as his flagship “Belt and Road Initiative,” which launched a decade ago this fall.

That funding flowed liberally into roads, airports, railways and power plants from Latin America to Southeast Asia and helped power economic growth among borrowing countries. Along the way, it drew many governments closer to Beijing and made China the world’s largest creditor, while also sparking accusations of irresponsible lending.

Now, 55% of China’s official sector loans to developing countries have entered their repayment periods, according to the analysis of more than two decades of China’s overseas funding across 165 countries released by AidData.

Those debts are coming due during a new and challenging financial climate of high interest rates, struggling local currencies and slowing global growth.

“A lot of these loans were issued during [the Belt and Road period starting in 2013] and they came with five- or six- or seven-year grace periods … and then [international debt suspension efforts during the pandemic] tacked on two additional years of grace where borrowers didn’t have to repay,” AidData executive director and report author Brad Parks told CNN.

“Now the story is changing … for the last decade or so China was the world’s largest official creditor, and now we’re at this pivot point where it’s really about (China) as the world’s largest official debt collector,” he said.

AidData’s figures are based on its database tracking what amounts to $1.34 trillion in loan and grant commitments from China’s government and state-owned creditors to public and private sector borrowers in low- and middle-income countries between 2000 and 2021.

That dataset, built through collecting official and public source information about the individual loans and grants, provides one of the widest windows available into what are notoriously opaque Chinese funding activities.

The researchers also cited data reported by lenders to the Switzerland-headquartered Bank of International Settlements, which they said indicates developing country borrowers owe Chinese lenders at least $1.1 trillion and up to $1.5 trillion as of 2021.

The China-backed Karuma dam at the Karuma Hydropower Plant in Kiryandongo, Uganda. - Hajarah Nalwadda/Xinhua/Getty Images

‘International crisis manager’

AidData says Beijing never had to deal with more than 10 financially-distressed countries with unpaid debts until 2008. But, by 2021, there were at least 57 countries with outstanding debt to Chinese state-owned creditors that were in financial distress, its data shows.

This appears to be a factor changing how China is lending.

Funding for the big-ticket infrastructure projects that had earned Beijing goodwill across the developing world are in sharp retreat. Instead, China is providing substantial numbers of emergency rescue loans, according to AidData.

Chinese lending isn’t bottoming out though. China remains the world’s single largest official source of development finance and continues to out-fund any single Group of Seven (G7) developed economy as well as multilateral lenders, the researchers say.

That’s even as the United States and its G7 partners have ramped up their rival efforts. Together, they outspent China by some $84 billion in 2021.

Overall funding commitments from China to the developing world declined at the start of the pandemic, according to AidData. They fell from a peak that was approaching $150 billion in 2016 and dipped below $100 billion in 2020 for the first time since 2014.

But financing is still in the tens of billions, according to the most recent data from AidData, which documented $79 billion in commitments for 2021, including grants and loans, up $5 billion from the previous year.

By comparable measures, the World Bank reported $72 billion in international development financing commitments in 2021, AidData said.

Chinese infrastructure project lending as a share of total commitments to low- and middle-income country borrowers, however, fell from 65% in 2014 to 50% in 2017, and again from 49% in 2018 to 31% in 2021.

That year, 58% of lending was emergency rescue loans, which help distressed countries stay afloat by shoring up foreign reserves and credit ratings or helping them make debt payments to other international lenders.

This means China is increasingly acting as an “international crisis manager,” according to AidData, which pointed out that which borrowers get bailed out depends on their risks to the Chinese banking sector.

“It’s very telling that not everybody who’s in debt distress gets an emergency rescue loan from China – what we find is that they really only channel these loans to the biggest Belt and Road borrowers where Chinese banks have the most balance sheet exposure,” Parks said.

“At a superficial level, China is bailing out the borrowers, but at a deeper level it’s bailing out its own banks.”

‘Muscling in’

The impact these troubled loans could have on China’s own banking sector, which is burdened by mounting issues with domestic debt, is not clear.

China has joined other lenders in joint negotiations on debt relief for troubled borrowers such as Zambia and Ghana, but AidData researchers suggest it may have also undermined efforts for coordinated relief by “muscling its way to the front of the repayment line by demanding that borrowers provide recourse to cash collateral that others lack.”

It has also been issuing stronger penalties for late repayments, they said.

China has consistently defended its debt relief record, saying it has played a “positive” and “constructive” role in multilateral efforts, noting last month that “debt sustainability has continued to improve” for the Belt and Road program.

Looking ahead, it has also moved toward syndicated loan arrangements, in which China works with Western commercial banks and multilateral institutions to vet projects and reduce future risk, according to AidData findings.

Half of China’s non-emergency lending portfolio to developing countries is now provided via syndicated loan arrangements, with more than 80% of these arrangements involving those Western or multilateral partners, they said.

In recent years China has also moved to recalibrate the Belt and Road Initiative with an eye to bolstering oversight and reducing risk, amid backlash over environmental, social and labor concerns about projects.

Chinese officials have defended the initiative’s impact. At a forum in Beijing last month focused on its Belt and Road drive, they hailed what they said was a new phase of the project focusing on “high-quality” development.

Meanwhile, for those countries already in debt and seeking to refinance with Beijing’s emergency rescue loans, the AidData researchers warned that they “must be mindful of the danger of swapping less expensive debt for more expensive debt.”

BOERS

South Africa’s ‘Too White’ Farms May Lose EU, UK Access

Adelaide Changole
Sun, November 12, 2023 



(Bloomberg) -- South African farms deemed “too white” will no longer be able to export their produce to the UK and the EU, according to postings in the Government Gazette, the Johannesburg-based City Press newspaper reported.

Under the rules, farmers must meet specific Black economic empowerment targets to continuing obtaining export permits.

The guidelines will apply to agricultural businesses with a minimum annual turnover of 10 million rand ($534,000) or more. Milk, cream, butter, fruit, nuts, sugar, jam, fruit purée, fruit juices, yeast, table grapes and wine are among the products affected, according to the notice.

Southern African Agri Initiative (Saai), a farmers’ lobbying group, told City Press that the rules will undermine investor security, job creation and growth in the nation’s agricultural sector.

Further, the measures fall “far outside the framework of internationally acceptable protocols, and the lobby will fight against it in every local and international forum, in courts and multilateral agencies of the UN and the African Union,” City Press reported, citing Theo de Jager, head of Saai.

Democratic Alliance, the biggest opposition party in South Africa, lodged a complaint with the trade offices of the EU and the UK, arguing that the regulations violate the rules of fair trade. South Africa’s agreements with the EU and the UK are explicitly premised upon protecting human rights, democratic principles and the rule of law, the alliance said.

South African agricultural exports were about 240 billion rand ($12.8 billion) in 2022, with 20% headed to the EU and 4% to the UK.

South African companies have been encouraged to adopt Black-empowerment plans to comply with government policies aimed at redressing financial inequality stemming from the apartheid era.

Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek

The Occupied West Bank: Divided by Faith, United by Fear

Jeffrey Gettleman
Sun, November 12, 2023 

Palestinian residents of the West Bank area of Huwara watch as Israeli soldiers close off the entrance to their neighborhood, on Oct. 25, 2022. (Samar Hazboun/The New York Times)

TEKOA, West Bank — As Moish Feiglin pulls up to his settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, he points to an 8-foot-tall concrete slab blocking the middle of the road.

“That’s new,” he says.

He slowly drives around it and nods his head to more security barriers and heavily armed soldiers peering from behind the entrance gate. “And so is that and that and that.”

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In the past month, his settlement, Tekoa, has turned into “an army base,” he says, which goes against his personal code.

“I don’t have rock-proof glass on my car windows,” he says. “I don’t want rock-proof glass.”

“But you have to understand what people are preparing for,” he adds. “They are preparing for 200 terrorists to come in.”

The West Bank, an area many times the size of the Gaza Strip and complicated in its own way, is once again a flashpoint, and all sides are clearly on edge.

While the world is increasingly critical of Israel for its bombardment of Gaza, deep concern is also rising about the actions of the Israeli military and Jewish settlers in the West Bank, a contested patchwork of Palestinian areas and Israeli settlements like Tekoa that most of the world considers illegal.

Jewish settlers of all political stripes are arming themselves, and extremists among them have attacked Palestinians and driven hundreds off their land.

At the same time, there have been more Israeli military raids, more violent protests, more arrests and more Palestinian attacks on Israelis this past month than there have been in any similar period in years.

The result is an increasingly combustible atmosphere where people are divided by faith and united by fear, and just about everyone’s humanity is being tested.

“I’m very confused inside,” says Abu Adam, a Palestinian tour guide who asked to be identified by his patronymic, afraid he could be “socially isolated” — or hurt — for expressing moderate views. “We’re suffering, they’re suffering. Everything has stopped.”

“And it’s only going to get worse,” he adds.

The story of Moish Feiglin and Abu Adam, two professionals whose lives have been upended by the violence, reveals how deeply both sides are afraid even if the power dynamic between them is vastly unequal.

As an Israeli, Feiglin can’t pry his mind away from the Oct. 7 attacks. The scale and horror in which Hamas terrorists slaughtered an estimated 1,200 people in Israel, mostly civilians, and some brutally, has led him, by his own admission, to “close off” part of his heart.

He doesn’t like carrying a Glock. But he is allowed to, and so he does. The Israeli army has been assigned to protect his community. Still, he warily scans the open hills separating his settlement from Arab areas and begins to question many of the fundamental things he once believed in.

“I’m struggling,” he says. “Six weeks ago, I was arguing for peace, I was sending my kids to an Israeli-Palestinian summer camp, I was shopping in the village at Arab stores and embracing the ideology that went with that. And now I’m like: ‘What’s next? Can we really go back to that? Was I, in the past, too naive?’”

Abu Adam used to participate in grassroots peace efforts and also wonders if his old attitude is now out of date. He embodies the day-to-day difficulties of a Palestinian living under an Israeli occupation that leaves him stateless, curtails his movements and makes it illegal for him or any other Palestinian civilian to carry a firearm. The Israeli bombing of Gaza, 60 miles away, has killed more than 11,000 people, according to the enclave’s Health Ministry, which is run by Hamas. The images he sees on television of fellow Palestinians, bleeding and dying, mourning and overwhelmed with sorrow, he says, have hardened him.

“We’ve lost everything,” he says. “And sometimes, you just want to escape. But there’s nowhere to go.”

The two men live within sight of each other, share similar thoughts, even do some of the same kind of work.

But they’ve never met and in the occupied West Bank, they inhabit different worlds.

On the morning of Oct. 7, Feiglin was praying in a synagogue in Tekoa, and Abu Adam was leading a tour in Jericho. He was guiding an American family around what may be the world’s oldest city when his phone started buzzing in his pocket.

“I looked down at my messages,” Abu Adam says. “All I saw was: Cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel.”

His upcoming clients were backing out of trips booked for this fall, and the ones with him were so terrified by the news that they insisted on leaving Jericho immediately.

When he got home that night and collapsed on the sofa, he was horrified by what he saw on television.

“It was terrible to see people killed like that,” he said. “Hamas made a mistake.”

But, he was quick to add, “too much pressure causes an explosion.”

Up the hill, Feiglin watched his community transform before his eyes. Anyone who had a gun grabbed it, and a civilian guard force instantly formed.

Tekoa is one of the 130 or so West Bank settlements, built on land Israel seized in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Many are like islands, plunked down in the middle of Arab areas. They are often criticized, even among many Israelis, as the biggest obstacle to peace. Roughly 500,000 Jewish settlers live in the West Bank, alongside an estimated 2.7 million Palestinians. The settlements reflect a wide range of politics and lifestyles, from ultranationalist communities to more moderate ones focused on agriculture.

A half-hour south of Jerusalem and with 4,300 residents, Tekoa is somewhere in the middle of the settler political spectrum. Known by some as “the hippie settlement” for its sizable contingent of artists and peace activists, it’s also home to right-wing supporters who advocate taking more Palestinian land.

So far there’s been little violence around here, and Feiglin calls the recent settler attacks in other areas “reprehensible,” “against Jewish values” and “very, very fringe.” And such aggression, he says, clearly contrasts with the modicum of interdependence that Tekoa and neighboring Arab villages had maintained, out of necessity more than anything else.

Before Oct. 7, scores of Palestinian men worked on construction sites in the settlement, which, with its tract housing and squiggly streets, looks like an American subdivision. Some settlers, like Feiglin, ventured into Arab areas to buy hardware or get their cars fixed.

Sometimes Jews and Arabs shared meals, played music together or gathered with their families at a campground near Bethlehem. None of this is happening now.

Feiglin is a therapist, musician and desert guide. He specializes in breath work and music therapy. But with tourists fleeing Israel, his tourism business, like Abu Adam’s, has dried up.

Both are running short on cash. Both are worried about their children. Feiglin’s 10-year-old daughter was riding to school this spring, he says, when a group of Palestinians attacked her bus with rocks. She’s still shaken by it. As for Abu Adam, he worries that his kids will be the ones throwing rocks.

It was for his children’s sake, Abu Adam says, that he had joined local peace efforts in which Palestinians met with Israelis and discussed ways to live together. As a young man, he had been jailed for participating in violent protests against the expansion of Tekoa, which he and other Palestinians said was built illegally on their land.

“But the problem I faced in my life,” he says, “I didn’t want my kids to face.”

Feiglin, 39, is a bit of a contradiction. Australian-born, he moved to the West Bank eight years ago. He says he enjoys spending time with ordinary Palestinians and promoting peace and coexistence.

But doesn’t the very existence of his settlement only complicate peace and coexistence?

“It’s a question I’ve asked myself,” he says. “My presence in the settlement won’t change facts on the ground.”

He chose to live in Tekoa, he says, for its sense of community and the intoxicating effects of living on the edge of a spectacular desert. He finds himself thinking about his Palestinian acquaintances like Ismail, a hardware store owner whom he used to see all the time and now hasn’t seen for weeks.

“All these micro-interactions,” he says, his voice trailing off during a conversation in his kitchen. “I don’t know how far this is going to rewind us.”

“But trusting would be a risk, right?” says his wife, Adena Firstman, sitting next to him. “We’re, like, in survival mode.”

Feiglin cracks an almond between his teeth and answers, “We’re in Rambo mode.”

No place may better demonstrate “Rambo mode” than a hilltop near Tekoa that Jewish settlers recently seized in clear violation of Israeli law.

Feiglin drives there along a bumpy road, past yawning canyons dotted with scrub brush and white stones. The Dead Sea shimmers in the distance. Beyond stand the red rock mountains of Jordan.

The landscape feels ancient, but the road itself is freshly bulldozed. “At any other time,” Feiglin says, “the settlers who made this wouldn’t be able to get away with it.”

The hilltop is guarded by four young men with matted hair, filthy jeans and the sidelocks of the ultra-Orthodox.

Their gear: a few radios, an ammo box, pistol clips, a prayer book, long knives and hunks of half-eaten challah. A belt-fed machine gun sits on sandbags, trained on the craggy hills.

“We should just shoot them in the head,” says Meir Kinarty, one of the young men, speaking of Palestinian protesters. “Only a bullet in their brains will make them learn.”

A reservist soldier, Andrew Silberman, who grew up in suburban Chicago, is also stationed on the hilltop. “This is totally illegal,” he says of the outpost, but he also says it’s his duty to help protect the area.

Like those of many others, Silberman’s feelings are complicated. He seems turned off by the bloodthirsty bravado of the young men strutting around with their knives. He says he understands how all the violence coursing through the West Bank, which has been rocked by major uprisings before, can radicalize people on both sides.

“But I don’t agree that hate should be the response,” he says.

When his shift ends, Silberman takes the belt-fed machine gun with him, uneasy about leaving it with the young men.

Abu Adam, from the rooftop of the home he built with his tour guide earnings, can see, with a squint, this same hilltop.

He laughs when asked what’s the way forward.

“It’s not clear,” he says. “But we have to keep looking.”

c.2023 The New York Times Company

NAKBA 2.0

Israeli minister calls for voluntary emigration of Gazans

Reuters
Tue, November 14, 2023 

Palestinians fleeing north Gaza move southward, in the central Gaza Strip

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A senior far-right member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government said on Tuesday Gaza could not survive as an independent entity and it would be better for Palestinians there to leave for other countries.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who heads one of the religious nationalist parties in Netanyahu's coalition, said he supported a call by two members of the Israeli parliament who wrote in a Wall Street Journal editorial that Western countries should accept Gazan families who expressed a desire to relocate.

The comments underscore fears in much of the Arab world that Israel wants to drive Palestinians out of land where they want to build a future state, repeating the mass dispossession of Palestinians when Israel was created in 1948.

"I welcome the initiative of the voluntary emigration of Gaza Arabs to countries around the world," Smotrich said in a statement. "This is the right humanitarian solution for the residents of Gaza and the entire region after 75 years of refugees, poverty and danger."

He said an area as small as the Gaza Strip without natural resources could not survive alone, and added: "The State of Israel will no longer be able to accept the existence of an independent entity in Gaza".

Smotrich spoke during Israel's invasion of the Gaza Strip, a blockaded coastal enclave ruled by the Islamist movement Hamas that is home to some 2.3 million people, most of them refugees after earlier wars.

Palestinians and leaders of Arab countries have accused Israel of seeking a new "Nakba" (catastrophe), the name given to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled or were driven from their homes in the wake of the 1948 war that accompanied the founding of the state of Israel.

Most ended up in neighbouring Arab states, and Arab leaders have said any latter-day move to displace Palestinians would be unacceptable.

Israel launched the Gaza operation in retaliation for the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas gunmen who burst out of the enclave and stormed across a string of communities in southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people and taking around 240 as hostages back into Gaza, according to Israeli official figures. Israeli leaders have vowed to destroy Hamas and rescue the hostages.

More than 11,000 Palestinians have been killed during the weeks-long Israeli bombardment of Gaza, according to Palestinian health authorities, and whole stretches of the enclave have been levelled or turned to rubble.

The Israeli military has told residents of northern Gaza to leave their homes and head to the southern end of the Strip, where it said they would be safer, and said they would be able to return once the situation is stabilised.

Israel withdrew its military and settlers from Gaza in 2005 after a 38-year occupation, and Netanyahu has said it does not intend to maintain a permanent presence again, but that Israel would maintain security control for an indefinite period.

However there has been little clarity about Israel's longer term intentions, and countries including the United States have said that Gaza should be governed by Palestinians.

(Reporting by James Mackenzie; editing by Mark Heinrich

Israeli Minister Admits Military Is Carrying Out ‘Nakba’ Against Gaza’s Palestinians

Sanjana Karanth
Sun, November 12, 2023

An Israeli cabinet official has publicly admitted to the government’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, saying on television over the weekend that the country is “rolling out the Gaza Nakba.”

On Saturday, security cabinet member and Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter sat for a television interview with an Israeli news network. Dichter is part of the right-wing nationalist Likud party, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chairs.

“We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” Dichter said when asked if the recent images of northern Gaza residents evacuating south are comparable to images of the 1948 Nakba.

“From an operational point of view, there is no way to wage a war ― as the IDF seeks to do in Gaza ― with masses between the tanks and the soldiers,” he continued, according to a translation of the interview by Haaretz.

The Nakba, which in Arabic means “catastrophe,” refers to the mass displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Palestine was considered a multi-ethnic society until the tension between Arab and Jewish people rose as a result of both Jews migrating to flee persecution in Europe, as well as the Zionist movement attempting to establish a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine.

The tension escalated to war in 1948 after the UN General Assembly’s resolution trying to partition Palestine into two states was rejected a year earlier. The war resulted in the permanent displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians by the newly formed Israeli forces.

Despite the UN calling for Palestinian refugee return and property restitution, Israel has continued to deny the rights of Palestinians and carry out an apartheid for 75 years. The anniversary of the Nakba serves as a painful acknowledgment of the generational and ongoing trauma that Palestinians face both on their occupied land and outside the region.

“Gaza Nakba 2023,” Dichter said. “That’s how it’ll end.”

When later asked if labeling the current forced evacuation a Nakba means Palestinians won’t be able to return to Gaza City, Dichter said: “I don’t know how it’ll end up happening since Gaza City is one-third of the Strip ― half the land’s population but a third of the territory.”

Israel’s monthlong siege on Gaza has killed more than 11,000 people and displaced millions. Israeli forces told Palestinians to evacuate northern Gaza to avoid being killed, though several areas in the southern region have also been bombed.

On Friday, Netanyahu said that he wants “full security control” of Gaza with the power to “enter whenever we want” to kill who Israel perceives to be enemies.

Netanyahu Calls Palestinians ‘Collateral Damage’ As Israel Destroys Gaza

Sanjana Karanth
Updated Mon, November 13, 2023

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that Palestinian civilians being killed en masse are simply “collateral damage” in his military’s destruction of Gaza.

The right-wing leader appeared on multiple cable news shows to speak on the current state Israel’s monthlong siege on Gaza, which human rights experts have warned amount to ethnic cleansing and war crimes. For much of his appearances, Netanyahu attempted to downplay both his responsibility in the deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israelis as well as his military’s role in killing Palestinians.

More than 11,100 Palestinians, most of them women and children, have been killed since Israel’s violence escalated on Oct. 7, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Thousands are still trapped under the rubble of destroyed buildings and homes, and millions are displaced and being forced to reside in Gaza refugee camps that are also being bombed by Israel. Many of the dead also include aid workers, journalists and doctors.

In Israel, the death toll stands at more than 1,200, most of whom were killed in the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas. The U.S. believes that the number of hostages taken by Hamas militants during the attack is in the hundreds.

On Friday, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk accused both Israel and Hamas of war crimes, and said that the only solution to the violence is to end the Israeli occupation and allow Palestinians the right to self-determination.

“The extensive Israeli bombardment of Gaza, including the use of high impact explosive weapons in densely populated areas, razing tens of thousands of buildings to the ground, is clearly having a devastating humanitarian and human rights impact,” he said. “After four weeks of bombardment and shelling by Israeli forces in Gaza, the indiscriminate effects of such weapons in a densely populated area is clear. Israel must immediately end the use of such methods and means of warfare, and the attacks must be investigated.”

“Considering the predictable high level of civilian casualty and the wide scale of destruction of civilian objects we have very serious concerns that these amount to disproportionate attacks in breach of international humanitarian law.”

Netanyahu called Türk’s accusation “hogwash,” claiming that Israeli forces are not deliberately targeting civilians despite the skyrocketing Palestinian death toll. The prime minister also repeated his claim that Hamas is responsible for Gaza’s civilian casualties, when it is Israel launching the attacks from air, sea and land.

“We’re deliberately doing everything in our power to target the terrorists,” Netanyahu told NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “And the civilians, as happens in every legitimate war, are sometimes what are called ‘collateral damage.’ That’s a longer way of saying unintended casualties.”

Israel’s ground forces battled Hamas militants near Gaza’s largest hospital, Al Shifa, where health officials say thousands of medics, patients and displaced families seeking shelter are trapped with no electricity and lack of medical supplies. Israel has accused Hamas of hiding in the hospital without providing evidence, but Hamas and hospital staff have both denied the allegations.

“Some hospitals, including Al Quds and Al Shifa hospitals, have also received specific evacuation orders, in addition to the general evacuation orders to all of northern residents of Gaza. But such evacuation, as the World Health Organization has warned, is a ‘death sentence’ in a context where the entire medical system is collapsing and hospitals in southern Gaza have no capacity to absorb more patients,” Türk said.

“While bombings on Gaza from air, land and sea continue, the complete siege now lasting over one month has made it an agony for residents in Gaza to find basic necessities, and frankly to survive,” he said. “All forms of collective punishment must come to an end.”

According to the Gaza Health Ministry, al-Shifa’s last generator ran out of fuel on Saturday, resulting in the deaths of three premature babies and four other patients. Ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra said that 37 other children may be on the verge of death after the life support machines stopped working in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit.

Netanyahu claimed that Israel would help evacuate patients from the hospital. But in a statement obtained by Palestinian news agency WAFA, Palestinian Minister of Health Mai al-Kaila said that Israeli forces “are not evacuating people from hospitals; instead they are forcibly evicting the wounded onto the streets, leaving them to face inevitable death.”

Medical Aid for Palestinians, a United Kingdom-based humanitarian group, said it is concerned that more babies at al-Shifa Hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit will soon die. The organization also called out news outlets who are failing to verify Israel’s claims about its bombardment.

“We are deeply concerned by uncritical media reporting regarding the Israeli military’s statement that it will help move premature babies trapped at the hospital to a ‘safer hospital,’” MAP CEO Melanie Ward wrote. “The only safe option to save these babies would be for Israel to cease its assault and besiegement of al-Shifa, to allow fuel to reach the hospital, and to ensure the surviving parents of these babies can be reunited with them.”

Head lice DNA discovery reveals new details about first Americans

Katie Hunt, CNN
Mon, November 13, 2023 

Head lice have been constant, if unwanted, human companions for as long as our species has been around.

Evidence of this ancient connection includes a 10,000-year-old louse found on human remains at an archaeological site in Brazil and an inscription on a 3,700-year-old ivory lice comb that might be the oldest known sentence written with an alphabet.

For scientists interested in how humankind evolved and spread around the globe, the blood-sucking parasite — officially called Pediculus humanus — also contains a lode of genetic information that, as new research shows, is illuminating some of the biggest questions in the human story.

“Lice have been with us since the origin of humankind; for millions of years they have evolved with us,” said Marina Ascunce, a research molecular biologist at the US Department of Agriculture who has analyzed and compared the DNA of 274 lice collected with the help of head lice researchers from all over the world. The analysis is part of a new study published Wednesday in Plos One.

“When the first anatomical modern humans left Africa, they carried their lice with them,” she said.


Marina Ascunce, a research molecular biologist, prepares to perform a polymerase chain reaction procedure, which produces millions of copies of a specific DNA sequence in a short amount of time. - Jeff Gage/Florida Museum of Natural History

Ascunce, who did the work as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Florida, and her colleagues found that lice clustered genetically into two distinct groups that rarely interbred.

The team also detected a small number of “hybrid lice” — reflecting a mix of the two clusters — that were mostly found in the Americas, which she said she interpreted as a “signal of contact between Europeans and Native Americans.” The group appeared to be a mixture of lice descended from the earliest Americans and those descended from European lice, which were brought over during the colonization of the Americas. However, it was unclear why the researchers found so few of these lice.

One weakness of the new study was that only one of the lice samples was from Africa. However, another study is underway using the 274 samples from this research and additional samples from other places, including Africa, Ascunce said. New, more efficient sequencing techniques available now may reveal additional information, she added.

Using parasites to understand the past

It’s not the first time that researchers have harnessed the genetic diversity of lice as a tool to better understand the ancient history of the insects’ hosts.

Genetic analysis of clothes or body lice, which are one of three lice to live on humans, revealed that humans likely began wearing some form of clothing at least 83,000 years ago, according to a paper published in 2010.

Some 20 years ago, David Reed, a coauthor of the new study and a researcher and curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History, found that human head lice are composed of two ancient lineages, with origins predating Homo sapiens. That 2004 study controversially suggested that our species had been in direct contact — at least close enough to rub heads — with archaic humans such as Neanderthals.

The groundbreaking hypothesis was later corroborated when the first Neanderthal genome was sequenced in 2010, confirming that Homo sapiens had in the past encountered Neanderthals and had babies with them.

That 2010 study analyzed mitochondrial DNA, which is more easily retrievable than nuclear DNA and gives information about the female line only. The latest study in the journal Plos One tapped both mitochondrial and nuclear DNA, which reflects the genetic lineage of both parents. Doing so allowed researchers to detect the hybrid lice and better capture the genetic diversity of head lice.

Ascunce said she had hoped the information they gleaned might answer whether Neanderthal head lice are still around today, but the 15 genetic markers, known as “microsatellites,” that they studied in the lice nuclear DNA didn’t reveal that information.

“Because very little was known about the louse genome when we started the study, we used markers that have a high mutation rate, so we were not able to answer those questions,” she said.

“New ongoing studies are being done using whole genome sequences from human lice, so stay tuned for more exciting research on that.”