Biden is campaigning against the Lost Cause and the ‘poison’ of white supremacy in South Carolina

Joseph Patrick Kelly, College of Charleston
Fri, 2 February 2024 


President Joe Biden at Mother Emanuel AME Church in South Carolina on Jan. 8, 2024. Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

In the blur of breaking news, one of President Joe Biden’s first speeches of the 2024 campaign was given in South Carolina and has already been mostly forgotten in the ongoing coverage of the state’s democratic primary on Feb. 3, 2024.

We should pay it more attention.

The site of the speech on Jan. 8, 2024, was Charleston, South Carolina’s Mother Emanuel AME Church, where, on a summer evening in 2015, an avowed white supremacist murdered nine Black worshipers, including Rev. Clementa Pinckney, the church’s pastor and a state representative. At Pinckney’s funeral, then-President Barack Obama sang a heart-felt version of the Christian hymn Amazing Grace.

From the pulpit, Biden sounded like a preacher.

“The word of God was pierced by bullets in hate and rage, propelled by not just gunpowder but by a poison,” Biden said. “A poison that’s for too long haunted this nation. What is that poison? White supremacy. … Throughout our history, it’s ripped this nation apart.”

As a historian who studies democracy in the American South, I am doing research for a book on free speech, lying and fascism in America during the 1920s and 1930s. What I have learned is that Biden’s Mother Emanuel speech should rank with some of the most important speeches in our history.

The original big lie

In 1820, 44 years after the nation’s birth, U.S. Sen. William Smith of South Carolina was the first to claim in Congress that men were not created equal. Boldly rejecting the Declaration of Independence as effusive “enthusiasm,” Smith injected white supremacy into public discourse.

It spread like wildfire, and there’s little wonder. Smith, who owned several plantations and at least 71 enslaved people, was among more than 1,800 U.S. legislators who enslaved Black people.

Southern propagandists rewrote history, arguing the founders never really believed in equality. If you disagreed, vigilante thugs would beat you up or chase you into exile. They killed more than a few people who spoke up against slavery.
‘A house divided against itself cannot stand’

The Supreme Court’s infamous 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford extended Southern racist ideology into the North. Black people, the court held, are “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and … the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery.”

The following year, in his campaign for the U. S. Senate, Abraham Lincoln sounded the alarm. He addressed the consequences of slavery on America’s democracy and warned that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”

“This government cannot endure,” he said, “permanently half slave and half free. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it … or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South.”

An 1860 portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

The Civil War was supposed to end slavery and the white supremacist ideology that underpinned it. The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, known as the Reconstruction amendments, made equality explicit in the Constitution, extending civil and political rights to newly freed African Americans.

That upended the Southern social order.

The South then invented what Biden called the “self-serving lie” of the “Lost Cause,” the rewritten version of the Civil War that claims slavery had nothing to do with the war. The white supremacist group Ku Klux Klan was the violent hammer of this “Lost Cause,” and its emergence coincided with Jim Crow laws that established racial segregation across the South and disenfranchised Black voters until the 1960s.
Democracies in peril

In his State of the Union address on Jan. 6, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sounded a new alarm. His “Four Freedoms” speech was an updated version of Lincoln’s and further defined freedom within a democracy.

The immediate issue was whether the U.S. should help England and other European allies defend against the fascist regimes of German Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.

This was no academic question of foreign policy. In helping Britain, President Roosevelt stated, the United States was fighting for the universal freedoms that all people possessed: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear.

Biden has rung a similiar alarm. During his speech at Mother Emanuel church – and again during other campaign stops before the Feb. 3 Democratic Party primary in South Carolina – Biden acknowledged that he is not only running against the GOP front-runner Donald Trump but also against a “second lost cause” myth.

Biden called out Trump for his “big lie” about the 2020 election that Trump has repeatedly claim was “rigged” against him. He criticized those who he said are attempting to “steal history” again and spin the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection as “a peaceful protest.”

At its core, Biden warned, Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” is a resurrection of southern-style white nationalism and the age-old disregard for equal rights.

“We all know who Donald Trump is,” Biden said during his speech and in his ads, calling on Americans to work to make up for centuries of racism and discrimination “The question we have to answer is who are we?”

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and analysis to help you make sense of our complex world.

It was written by: Joseph Patrick Kelly, College of Charleston.

Read more:

Trump tapped into white victimhood – leaving fertile ground for white supremacists

How the quest for significance and respect underlies the white supremacist movement, conspiracy theories and a range of other problems

Joseph Patrick Kelly volunteers for the Charleston County (SC) Democratic Party.

The United Nations' top court said Friday it had jurisdiction to rule in most parts of a case brought by Ukraine 

NEWS WIRES
Fri, 2 February 2024 



The United Nations' top court said Friday it had jurisdiction to rule in most parts of a case brought by Ukraine over Russia's brutal 2022 invasion, with Kyiv urging reparations.

Ukraine dragged Russia before the International Court of Justice only a few days after the invasion, seeking to battle its neighbour on all fronts, legal as well as diplomatic and military.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion on February 24, 2022, part of his argument was that pro-Russian people in eastern Ukraine had been "subjected to bullying and genocide by the Kyiv regime".

Ukraine filed a suit at the ICJ, "emphatically denying" this and arguing that Russia's use of "genocide" as a pretext for invasion went against the 1948 UN Genocide Convention.

In a preliminary ruling in March 2022, the ICJ sided with Ukraine and ordered Russia to halt its invasion immediately.

But Russia objected to this judgement, saying the ICJ, which decides on disputes between states, had no legal right to decide in this case.

The ICJ on Friday tossed out Moscow's argument, saying it did have jurisdiction to rule on this.

However, Ukraine had also said in its submission that Russia's use of force during the invasion was itself in contravention of the Genocide Convention.

The ICJ said it did not have competence to decide on this part of the case.

The ICJ's rulings are binding and cannot be appealed but it has no means to enforce its decisions.

The ICJ is under heightened scrutiny at the moment with a high-profile case about the war in Gaza.

World Court Rules Ukraine Can Go Ahead With Genocide Case Against Russia

But the case is not a straight-forward accusation of genocide.


Kate Nicholson
Fri, 2 February 2024 

Russia tried to get Ukraine's genocide case thrown out

Russia tried to get Ukraine's genocide case thrown out

The International Court of Justice just rejected most of Russia’s objections to Ukraine’s genocide case against Moscow, meaning it will still go ahead.

Ukraine brought this case to the ICJ, the United Nations’ highest court which is also known as the World Court, days after Russia invaded its neighbour on February 24, 2022.

But the case is not a straight-forward accusation of genocide.

Kyiv has accused Russia of violating the international genocide treaty, not by committing genocide, but by justifying Russia’s own invasion of Ukraine through the treaty itself.

This is part of the landmark 1948 UN convention which both Russia and Ukraine ratified.

In its case, Ukraine alleges Moscow justified its invasion two years ago – known in Russia as the “special military operation” – by claiming it needed to stop an alleged genocide of Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine, Luhansk and Donetsk.

Ukraine also accuses Moscow of “planning acts of genocide”.

Russian-backed separatists have been fighting Kyiv since 2014, and Putin signed a decree recognising the independence of two Ukrainian regions three days before initiating war.

But, Kyiv says it did not pose any risk of genocide to those in eastern Ukraine – and by making such a claim to justify its war, Russia was in breach of international law.

Russia’s lawyers have argued since September 2023 that the case should be thrown out, that the arguments were flawed and the court had no jurisdiction.

It said Ukraine’s argument was a way to combat Russia’s supposed legal military action.

But today, out of Russia’s six preliminary objections to the case, the ICJ rejected five.

Europe has repeatedly expressed its backing for Kyiv ahead of this case, with more than 24 countries offering formal statements to the court supporting Ukraine.

Although the case has passed this stage, it may be months until the World Court hears the full arguments, and years away from making a full legally binding decision.

Russia has prompted several responses from the UN’s highest court since the war in Ukraine began.

The ICJ issued emergency measures in March 2022, a month after the invasion, calling for Moscow to stop its military actions.

While the court is legally binding, it has no way to force countries to take its orders – so Russia ignored this plea.

And, only earlier this week, the world court ruled Russia had violated parts of UN treaties against the financing of terrorism and discriminated minorities in occupied Crimea in 2014 in a separate case.

However, it was not a strong victory for Ukraine, as the ICJ rejected Kyiv’s call for compensation and just ordered Russia to comply with the treaties.

Still Ukraine’s representative Anton Korynevych said it was significant because “this is the first time that officially, legally, Russia is called a violator of international law.”

Opinion

When Mark Zuckerberg can face US senators and claim the moral high ground, we’re through the looking glass


Marina Hyde
Fri, 2 February 2024

Mark Zuckerberg arrives to testify before a senate judiciary committee hearing on online child safety, Capitol Hill, Washington DC, 31 January 2024.Photograph: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

Did you catch a clip of the tech CEOs in Washington this week? The Senate judiciary committee had summoned five CEOs to a hearing titled Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis. There was Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew, Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel, Discord’s Jason Citron and X’s Linda Yaccarino – and a predictable vibe of “Senator, I’m a parent myself …” Listen, these moguls simply want to provide the tools to help families and friends connect with each other. Why must human misery and untold, tax-avoidant billions attend them at every turn?

If you did see footage from the hearing, it was probably one of two moments of deliberately clippable news content. Ranking committee member Lindsey Graham addressed Zuckerberg with the words: “I know you don’t mean it to be so, but you have blood on your hands.” Well, ditto, Senator. “You have a product that is killing people,” continued Graham, who strangely has yet to make the same point to the makers of whichever brand of AR-15 he proudly owns, or indeed to the makers of the assault rifles responsible for another record high of US school shootings last year. Firearms fatalities are the number one cause of death among US children and teenagers, a fact the tech CEOs at this hearing politely declined to mention, because no one likes a whatabouterist. And after all, the point of these things is to just get through the posturing of politicians infinitely less powerful than you, then scoot back to behaving precisely as you were before. Zuckerberg was out of there in time to report bumper results and announce Meta’s first ever dividend on Thursday. At time of writing, its shares were soaring.

Anyhow, if it wasn’t that clip, maybe it was the one of Zuckerberg being goaded by sedition fist-pumper Josh Hawley into apologising to those in the committee room audience who had lost children to suicide following exploitation on his platform. Thanks to some stagey prodding by Senator Hawley, who famously encouraged the mob on 6 January 2020 (before later being filmed running away from them after they stormed the Capitol), Zuckerberg turned round, stood up, and faced his audience of the bereaved. “I’m sorry for everything you’ve all gone through,” he began. Helpfully, a transcribed version of this off-the-cuff moment found its way into a Meta press release minutes after the event.


So I guess that was the hearing. “Tense”, “heated”, “stunning” – listen, if adjectival cliches were legislation, this exercise would have been something more than pointless. And yet, they’re not and it wasn’t. There really ought to be a genre name for this kind of performative busywork – the theatre of failure, perhaps.

Other outcomes were once available. Back in 1994, the CEOs of seven big tobacco firms took their oaths before a Senate committee, then spouted a communal line that nicotine wasn’t addictive. Within two years, all seven had quit the tobacco industry – a development not unrelated to the fact that all seven were under investigation by the justice department for perjury. Those were different times, and not just because we probably wouldn’t slap them with the “seven dwarfs” moniker now. These days, you can’t escape the sense that old guys were shouting at Zuckerberg at a hearing six years ago, while he offered 2018’s variation on his favourite blandishment: “We know we have more work to do”. And you suspect they’ll be shouting at him again in five years’ time, when he will still know they have more work to do. “If you’re waiting on these guys to solve the problem,” sniffed Graham of the tech CEOs, “we’re gonna die waiting.” Again, the senator speaks of what he knows. There is always talk of legislation, but there is never really much legislation.

There’s a line near the start of the movie version of Ready Player One, the cult dystopian book about a VR world that weirdly feels like the lodestar for Zuckerberg’s pivot towards the metaverse: “I was born in 2027,” explains the teenage protagonist, “after the corn syrup droughts, after the bandwidth riots … after people stopped trying to fix problems, and just tried to outlive them.” It was hard to watch any amount of Wednesday’s hearing – it’s hard to watch a lot of news about the intersection of politics and mega-business these days, in fact – and not feel we are in a very similar place. Few of the politicians giving it the hero act could be said to have left the world in a better place than the one in which they found it when they took office. A necrotic form of politics has gripped the Republican party in particular, and this is the vacuum in which they have been downgraded by corporations they don’t even understand, let alone have the will, foresight, or political skill to control.

“Companies over countries,” as Mark Zuckerberg said a long time ago. This once-unformed thought becomes more realised all the time, with the Meta boss last year explaining that, “Increasingly, the real world is a combination of the physical world we inhabit and the digital world we are building.” The added irony is that the more the Lindsey Grahams fail the real world, the more people retreat further into the unregulated embrace of the worlds that the Mark Zuckerbergs run. It’s going to take so much more than the theatre of failure to solve it – but bad actors currently dominate the bill.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

Laurie Anderson ends German professorship after criticism of Palestine support

Ashifa Kassam
Thu, February 1, 2024 

Laurie Anderson performs at the Royal Festival Hall on 18 May 2017 in London, England.Photograph: Imelda Michalczyk/Redferns

The artist, musician and film director Laurie Anderson has withdrawn from a guest professorship at a university in Germany after officials took issue with her support for a 2021 statement by Palestinian artists titled Letter Against Apartheid.

Related: Award ceremony suspended after writer compares Gaza to Nazi-era Jewish ghettos

The decision, announced days before Anderson is due to receive a lifetime achievement award at this year’s Grammys, adds to the wave of cultural events that have been scrapped in Germany after artists expressed views deemed by officials to be anti-Israel.

Late last week the Folkwang University of Arts in Essen said it had “engaged in talks” with Anderson – whose works include the 1981 single O Superman and the 2015 film Heart of a Dog, dedicated to her late husband, Lou Reed – after her name surfaced among the thousands of artists who had backed the open letter, which called for “an immediate and unconditional cessation of Israeli violence against Palestinians”.

The university said it believed that art, culture and science are places “where contentious issues are kept in check”.

Its statement continued: “It has now become apparent that, in 2021, Laurie Anderson publicly supported the Palestinian artists’ ‘Letter Against Apartheid’ appeal, which, among other things, takes up calls for boycotts by the anti-Israel BDS movement,” it said. “In light of the now public question regarding her political stance, Laurie Anderson has decided to withdraw from the professorship.”

While the open letter in question does not directly make reference to the boycott, divest and sanctions movement, which was labelled by the German parliament as antisemitic in 2019, it calls on governments to apply sanctions and to “cut trade, economic and cultural relations”.

The statement also included remarks from Anderson. “For me the question isn’t whether my political opinions have shifted. The real question is this: Why is this question being asked in the first place?” she said. “Based on this situation I withdraw from the project.”

The decision came weeks after it was announced that Anderson would follow in Marina Abramović’s footsteps as the second artist to take up the university’s Pina Bausch guest professorship. “Throughout her eventful artistic career, Laurie Anderson has created groundbreaking works – in visual arts, theatre, experimental music and technology alike,” the university said in a statement at the time. “Laurie Anderson is celebrated for her innovative work, fusing music, performance art, and technology that push the boundaries of artistic expression.”

The crisis in the Middle East has plunged Germany into a far-reaching debate over the limits of freedom of expression when it comes to art and the personal views of artists, prompting a divisive call for an all-out boycott of German cultural institutions over the government’s pro-Israel stance.

Several high-profile artists and intellectuals have been affected: in December, a German foundation said it would no longer be awarding a prize for political thinking to the US-Russian journalist Masha Gessen after the writer drew parallels between Gaza and a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe, while in mid-October the Frankfurt book fair called off an awards ceremony due to honour a novel by the Palestinian author Adania Shibli.

German officials have defended their stance, which comes amid a spike in antisemitism in the country. In a statement sent to AFP in December, the country’s culture minister, Claudia Roth, said that “Israel’s security is a fundamental principle” for Germany, but stressed it was important to try to keep cultural spaces “open and safe for everybody”.

She noted that the cancellation of events and prize ceremonies should be “the last step”, adding: “I would hope that we can move away from fear and move towards dialogue and discourse.”

‘We are dying slowly:’ Palestinians are eating grass and drinking polluted water as famine looms across Gaza

LIKE UKRAINE'S HOLODOMOR

Sana Noor Haq and Rosa Rahimi, CNN
Thu, February 1, 2024 

Hanadi Gamal Saed El Jamara, 38, says sleep is all that can distract her children from the aching hunger gnawing at their bellies.

These days, the mother-of-seven finds herself begging for food on the mud-caked streets of Rafah, in southern Gaza.

She tries to feed her kids at least once a day, she says, while tending to her husband, a cancer and diabetes patient.

“They are weak now, they always have diarrhea, their faces are yellow,” El Jamara, whose family was displaced from northern Gaza, told CNN on January 9. “My 17-year-old daughter tells me she feels dizziness, my husband is not eating.”

As Gaza spirals toward full-scale famine, displaced civilians and health workers told CNN they go hungry so their children can eat what little is available. If Palestinians find water, it is likely undrinkable. When relief trucks trickle into the strip, people clamber over each other to grab aid. Children living on the streets, after being forced from their homes by Israel’s bombardment, cry and fight over stale bread. Others reportedly walk for hours in the cold searching for food, risking exposure to Israeli strikes.

Even before the war, two out of three people in Gaza relied on food support, Arif Husain, the chief economist at the World Food Programme (WFP), told CNN. Palestinians have lived through 17 years of partial blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt.

Israel’s bombardment and siege since October 7 has drastically diminished vital supplies in Gaza, leaving the entire population of some 2.2 million exposed to high levels of acute food insecurity or worse, according to the Integrated Food Security and Nutrition Phase Classification (IPC), which assesses global food insecurity and malnutrition. Martin Griffiths, the UN’s emergency relief chief, told CNN the “great majority” of 400,000 Gazans characterized by UN agencies as at risk of starving “are actually in famine.” UN human rights experts have warned “Israel is destroying Gaza’s food system and using food as a weapon against the Palestinian people.”

Over more than 100 days, Palestinians in Gaza have seen mass displacement, neighborhoods turned to ash and rubble, entire families erased by war, a surge in deadly disease and the medical system wrecked by bombardment. Now starvation and dehydration are major threats to their survival.

“We are dying slowly,” reflected El Jamara, the mother in Rafah. “I think it’s even better to die from the bombs, at least we will be martyrs. But now we are dying out of hunger and thirst.”

Israel’s strikes on Gaza since the October 7 Hamas attacks have killed at least 26,637 people and injured 65,387 others, according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health. The Israeli military launched its campaign after the militant group killed more than 1,200 people in unprecedented attacks on Israel and says it is targeting Hamas.
People in northern Gaza ‘eat grass’ to survive

Mohammed Hamouda, a physical therapist displaced to Rafah, remembers the day his colleague, Odeh Al-Haw, was killed trying to get water for his family.

Al-Haw was queueing at a water station in Jabalya refugee camp, in northern Gaza, when he and dozens of others were struck by Israeli bombardment, Hamouda said.

“Unfortunately, many relatives and friends are still in the northern Gaza Strip, suffering a lot,” Hamouda, a father-of-three, told CNN. “They eat grass and drink polluted water.”

Israeli air strikes on Gaza have decimated swathes of Palestinian territory, including the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza City, pictured on October 11. A displaced health worker told CNN his colleague was killed by Israeli bombardment in the region, while trying to get water for his family. - Yahya Hassouna/AFP/Getty Images

Israel’s blockade and restrictions on aid deliveries mean stocks are desperately low, driving up prices and making food inaccessible to people across Gaza. Shortages are even worse in the northern parts of the strip, according to the UN, where Israel concentrated its military offensive in the early days of the war. Communication blackouts stifle efforts to report on starvation and dehydration in the region.

“People butchered a donkey to eat its meat,” Hamouda says friends in Jabalya told him earlier this month as shortages worsened.

In what could be a serious blow to humanitarian efforts, several Western countries have suspended funding to the main UN agency in Gaza, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in recent days over explosive allegations by Israel that several of its staffers participated in the October 7 attacks. The UN fired several employees in the wake of the allegations.

Jordan’s foreign minister urged those countries suspending funding to reconsider, saying UNRWA was a “lifeline” for more than 2 million Palestinians in Gaza and that the agency shouldn’t be “collectively punished” over allegations against a dozen of its 13,000 staff.
‘No clean water’

Gihan El Baz cradles a toddler on her knee while comforting her children and grandchildren, who she says wake each day “screaming” for food.

“In the shelters, there is not enough food, the sun sets on us, and we haven’t even had any lunch,” El Baz, who lives with 10 relatives inside a weather-worn tent in Rafah, told CNN. She nurses her husband, who she says fell and broke his arm while dizzy from exhaustion.

“There are no drinks, no clean water, no clean bathrooms, the kid cries for a biscuit and we can’t even find any to give her.”

Infant orphans Hoor (left) and Kanan (right) shelter inside a tent in a displacement camp in Rafah, in southern Gaza, on January 25. Palestinian caregivers say the stress of being unable to protect children from strikes is exacerbated by their inability to provide enough food. - Courtesy Hazem Saeed Al-Naizi

Displaced parents in Rafah, where OCHA reported more than 1.3 million residents of Gaza have been forced to flee, say the stress of being unable to protect their children from bombardment is compounded by their inability to provide enough food. Limited access to electricity makes perishable goods impossible to refrigerate. Living conditions are overcrowded and unsanitary.

“People are forced to cut down trees to get firewood for heating and preparing food. Smoke is everywhere and flies spread widely and transmit diseases,” said Hazem Saeed Al-Naizi, the director of an orphanage in Gaza City who fled south with the 40 people under his care – most of whom are children and infants living with disabilities.

A displaced man makes bread next to a tent he set up on a sidewalk in Rafah, in southern Gaza, on January 22. - Courtesy Mohammed Hamouda

Hamouda, the displaced health worker, used to feed his children – aged six, four and two – a mixture of fruits and vegetables, biscuits, fresh juices, meat and seafood. This year, he said, the family has barely eaten one meal a day, living on dried bread and canned meat or legumes.

“Children are being violent towards each other to get food and water,” said Hamouda, who works at Abu Youssef Al-Najjar Hospital and volunteers at a nearby shelter. “I can’t stop my tears from falling when I talk about these things, because it’s very hurtful seeing your kids and other kids hungry.”

All 350,000 children under the age of five in Gaza are especially vulnerable to severe malnutrition, UNICEF reported last month.
Increased risk of dying

The “scale and speed” of potential famine in Gaza will consign child survivors to a lifetime of health risks, said Rebecca Inglis, an intensive care doctor in Britain who regularly visits Gaza to teach medical students.

The first 1,000 days of a child’s life are “absolutely critical” for physical growth and cognitive development, Inglis told CNN. Malnourished children have an 11-fold increased risk of dying compared to well-nourished children, she said. Vitamin and mineral deficiencies force the body into an “emergency shut-down state” where it loses the ability to make energy, put on weight, or maintain kidney and liver functions, she added.

Malnourished children, especially those with severe acute malnutrition, are at greater risk of dying from illnesses like diarrhea and pneumonia, according to the World Health Organization. Cases of diarrhea in children under age five have increased about 2,000% since October 7, UNICEF said.

Hamouda said his own children have diarrhea, cold and flu symptoms. “The children’s bodies are dehydrated … their skin is dehydrated.”

In times of severe stress, pregnant women are more likely to miscarry or give birth prematurely, health workers previously told CNN. Gaza is home to 50,000 pregnant women, according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Babies who do survive in utero are more likely to be born underweight and are therefore at higher risk of dying, Inglis said. Starving and dehydrated mothers cannot provide enough breast milk for their babies.
Challenges to food distribution, blocked aid

Shadi Bleha, 20, is trying to feed a family of six. Twice a week, they receive two water bottles, three biscuits and “sometimes” two cans of food from UNRWA, he said.

“It is not enough to meet my family’s needs at all,” the student, who is sheltering in a tent in Rafah, told CNN.

Palestinians in southern Gaza also told CNN that poorly regulated humanitarian distribution means some civilians get no aid at all, while those who do may sell for profit.

In other cases, vendors purchase aid from merchants and trade at markets for inflated costs. Some people with cars travel further afield to get water, returning to displacement camps to resell water for hiked prices. Intensified strikes also raise prices. Three weeks ago, a 25-kilogram bag of flour cost $20 in Khan Younis, according to Al-Naizi, but after the IDF intensified attacks on the southern city, it became $34.

Others say they receive humanitarian parcels that have been opened, with items missing. Dates, olive oil and cooking oil found in aid packages are reportedly sold on the black market for more than double their value.

On January 21, Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), said 260 humanitarian trucks were “inspected and transferred to Gaza,” marking the highest number since the start of the war.

But aid agencies say it is not enough. The Israeli military in January only granted access to a quarter of aid missions planned by humanitarian agencies to Gaza, OCHA said on January 21. CNN reached out to COGAT for comment on OCHA’s statistics and did not get a reply.

The WFP has called for new aid entry routes, more trucks to pass through daily border checks, fewer impediments to the movement of humanitarian workers, and guarantees for their safety. On January 5, the agency reported six bakeries in Deir al-Balah and Rafah had restarted operations, but three remained out of use. “Bread is the most requested food item, particularly as many families lack the basic means for cooking,” it said.

Meanwhile, Israel’s military offensive has razed at least 22% of Gaza’s agricultural land, according to OCHA. Livestock are starving and fresh produce is hard to come by.

Displaced civilians queue for aid distributed by the World Food Programme in Rafah, in southern Gaza, on January 21, 2024. - Courtesy Mohammed Hamouda

Juliette Touma, director of communications for UNRWA, said the needs of displaced civilians in Gaza outweigh the amount of aid allowed into the strip by authorities. “We simply don’t have enough, and we cannot keep up with the overwhelming needs of people on the ground,” she told CNN. “That makes the delivery of humanitarian assistance extremely challenging.”

Both UNRWA and WFP told CNN while they could not verify reports of individuals reselling aid for higher prices, it is entirely possible given the scale of desperation and hunger in Gaza.

“It’s absolute chaos and people are absolutely desperate, people are absolutely hungry,” added Touma. “The clock is indeed ticking for famine.”

WFP told CNN that aid distributions are based on verified beneficiary lists and observed by food monitors, who “report back that the food is delivered to its intended recipients.”

“Sometimes families make a personal decision to sell WFP food in exchange for other household items that they might need. To be clear, any food distributed by the WFP is not for sale,” the agency said in a statement.

The war has also caused widescale loss of employment in Gaza, further draining residents’ purchasing power as prices rocket.

Hamouda now spends $250 per week to buy food and supplies for his family – compared with $50 to $70 before the war. In an invoice seen by CNN, monthly supplies for orphans under Al-Naizi’s care were purchased from a procurement company for $6,814 – including $2,160 for infant formula alone. Before the war, the same quantity of formula would have cost $1,680.

“We live almost in a jungle where war, murder, the greed of merchants, the injustice of institutions in distributing aid, and the absence of government lead to this deadly chaos,” al-Naizi said.

Correction: This story has been corrected to reflect that CNN reached out to COGAT about OCHA’s figures on aid missions, not the IDF.

CNN’s Nourhan Mohamed, Christiane Amanpour, Eyad Kourdi, Celine Alkhaldi and Hira Humayun contributed reporting.

World's 1st fault-tolerant quantum computer launching this year ahead of a 10,000-qubit machine in 2026

Keumars Afifi-Sabet
Thu, February 1, 2024 

A futuristic glowing quantum computer unit, 3d render.

The world's first commercial fault-tolerant quantum computer with "logical qubits" may be running before the year's end.

Logical qubits — physical quantum bits, or qubits, connected through quantum entanglement — reduce errors in quantum computers by storing the same data in different places. This diversifies the points of failure when running calculations.

The new machine, which has 256 physical and 10 logical qubits, will launch in late 2024, representatives from QuEra, the startup that is building it, said in a statement.

The announcement follows a new study, published Dec. 6, 2023 in the journal Nature, in which researchers from Harvard, QuEra and several other institutions demonstrated a functioning quantum computer that contained 48 logical qubits — the largest number of logical qubits tested to date.

Related: Scientists just built a massive 1,000-qubit quantum chip, but why are they more excited about one 10 times smaller?

"It is the first machine with quantum error correction," study co-author Harry Zhou, a physicist at QuEra and Harvard University, told Live Science in an email.

While this computer doesn't have enough power to be useful on its own, it provides a platform on which software programmers can start testing code for future quantum computers, Zhou said.


Inside components of the computer.

Why quantum computing needs error-correction

While conventional computers store information in bits with a value of either 0 or 1, quantum computers use qubits — which are a superposition between 0 and 1, thanks to the laws of quantum mechanics.

Qubits can also be stitched together using quantum entanglement to exist in multiple states simultaneously. This enables them to perform many calculations much faster than classical computers — assuming you can build a quantum computer with enough of them. But qubits can easily be disturbed, making them notoriously error-prone. Roughly 1 in 1,000 fail, versus 1 in 1 billion billion bits in conventional computers.

Quantum computers could outpace the best supercomputers if they incorporate millions of qubits, but the largest quantum computer built so far only has around 1,000 qubits, and qubits' high failure rate limits potential scale-up. Error correction could counteract qubits' tendency to fail, and building logical qubits is one way of doing it.
Logical qubits: turning down the quantum noise

The new error-correction system relies on data redundancy, where the same piece of data is stored in multiple places, Zhou said. Logical qubits perform the same calculations across several physical qubits — vastly reducing error rates if one or more physical qubits fail, because the data is available elsewhere so calculations can continue.

To make the logical qubit, researchers applied error-correcting computer code to regular qubits. They then set up logical gates, or circuits, between the qubits to entangle them. The quantum computer then calculates the 'syndrome' — a measure of whether it's likely an error has occurred or not. Using this information, the quantum computer corrects the errors and proceeds to the next step.

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The new qubits represent a significant advance over past efforts. In 2023, the Google Quantum AI Lab demonstrated a 2.9% error rate using three logical qubits; Quera's error rate is 0.5% with 48 logical qubits. The world leader is the University of Oxford, which has achieved error rates of less than 0.01% — but only between two-qubit gates.

Last year, IBM also demonstrated error-correction technology in its 127-qubit Heron chip which reduced error rates fivefold compared with its other chips. But its first commercial fault-tolerant machine isn't expected until 2029.

QuEra plans to launch several quantum computers in the coming years, starting with a 30-logical-qubit, 3,000 physical qubit machine coming out in 2025. Its monster, a machine with more than 10,000 physical qubits and 100 logical qubits, is scheduled for 2026. "At 100 logical qubits, the [2026] machine can perform correct calculations that exceed the capability of today’s supercomputers," Zhou said.

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2.7 million student-loan borrowers' accounts will be switched to a company that the Education Department previously punished for poor customer service

Ayelet Sheffey
Updated Thu, February 1, 2024 

A college graduation.Rattanakun Thonbun/EyeEm

• Navient announced plans to outsource servicing of its private and FFEL student loans to MOHELA.

• Navient will still hold ownership over the loans, and the change affects 2.7 million borrowers.

• The Education Department punished MOHELA for failing to send timely billing statements.

A major servicer of private student loans announced plans to leave the servicing industry — and outsource the job to a controversial company that works with the government.

On Tuesday, Navient said it would outsource servicing of its private-student-loan portfolio and commercially held loans in the Federal Family Education Loan program to MOHELA, one of the largest servicers of federal student loans.

According to the press release, the outsourcing process will begin this year and take 18 to 24 months. Navient is set to retain ownership over the loans.

"After a thorough review, we are announcing targeted actions intended to simplify our business, reduce our expense base, and increase our financial and operating flexibility," David Yowan, the president and CEO of Navient, said in a statement. "Over the longer-term, we believe these actions will increase the value shareholders derive from our loan portfolios and the returns we can achieve on business-building investments."

A Navient spokesperson told Business Insider this change would affect 2.7 million student-loan borrowers with loans owned and serviced by Navient. The company added in its announcement that the two companies would "work toward ensuring a seamless transition in the coming months and providing customers with uninterrupted servicing of their loans."

Outsourcing servicing responsibility to MOHELA could spark concern for some borrowers, given how the company has fared since federal student-loan payments resumed in the fall. While borrowers encountered challenges across all federal servicers when it came to long hold times with customer service and confusing billing statements, MOHELA in October was the first company to be punished by the Education Department for falling short of its contractual obligations.

Specifically, the department found that MOHELA failed to send on-time billing statements to 2.5 million borrowers. As a result, it withheld over $7 million in October pay from the company. In January, the department withheld varying amounts of pay from the remaining federal servicers for the same reason.

Navient hasn't escaped scrutiny in the past years. Before it ended its contract to service federal student loans in 2021, Democratic lawmakers, particularly Sen. Elizabeth Warren, accused the company of predatory behavior with its borrowers, including improper marketing of the loans that steered borrowers toward unaffordable products.

"These allegations are not true," then-Navient CEO John Remondi told Warren during a 2021 hearing. "They're accusations and not necessarily based on facts."

It's unclear how soon Navient borrowers will begin communications with MOHELA. In the meantime, though, the Education Department has vowed to bolster oversight of federal servicers through an accountability framework that includes withholding pay from servicers, transferring borrowers to higher-performing servicers, and requiring servicers to fix any errors they make if they don't meet their obligations.

‘Make money by denying care’: new US rules aim to curb use of approval by private health insurances

Jessica Glenza
Fri, February 2, 2024 

A pharmacy technician reaches for a bottle of medication in Miami, Florida, in 2020.Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

A new set of rules from the Biden administration seeks to rein in private health insurance companies’ use of prior authorization – a byzantine practice that requires people to seek insurance company permission before obtaining medication or having a procedure.

The cost-containment strategy often delays care and forces patients, or their doctors, to navigate opaque and labyrinthine appeals.

The administration’s newly finalized rules will require insurance companies who work in federal programs to speed up the approval process and make decisions within 72 hours for urgent requests. The regulations will also require companies to give a specific reason as to why a request was denied and publicly report denial metrics. The regulations will primarily go into effect in 2026.

Related: US surgeon general Vivek Murthy: ‘Loneliness is like hunger, a signal we’re lacking something for survival’

Patients, advocates and researchers welcomed the new regulations but also noted their limitations and argued the rules do not go nearly far enough to tackle the scale of the problem.

“First of all, we’re glad the Biden administration is doing something about this issue,” said Aija Nemer-Aanerud, a healthcare campaign director for People’s Action Institute, a grassroots organization that advocates for people who have been denied care by insurance companies.

“The private insurance industry has figured out a lot of ways to set up the processes – regarding prior authorizations and claim denials – in such a way that they can make a profit,” said Nemer-Aanerud. But without going further, the rules will still allow insurance companies to, in Nemer-Aanerud’s words, “make money through denying people care”.

The Biden administration’s new rules will cover companies who work with Medicare, Medicaid and individual insurance exchanges – that means the rules will impact about 105 million people. That still leaves out the largest pool of privately insured Americans – the 158 million who rely on insurance from their employer.

The new rules also exclude prior authorizations for medications, though the federal government has said it intends to work on a rule for medications in the future.

In a statement, America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade organization, said that it supports the new rule: “It’s crucial that we all work towards ensuring patients have access to the information they need to make informed healthcare decisions. CMS took a step in the right direction by finalizing the Interoperability and Prior Authorization rule.”

Often, insurance companies argue prior authorization saves patients’ money by reducing unnecessary care. Notably, Americans see doctors less often than counterparts in other developed democracies (though Americans still spend more per person). And patients, providers and advocates argue insurance companies often use the process to delay and discourage patients from getting care, even when it’s needed.

“Do I think that that’s enough? No,” said Carly Morton, 30, of Beaver, Pennsylvania. “I think that’s a great step in the right direction because, yes, we need answers. Our medical issues are serious and seriously painful.”

Morton has a Medicare Advantage plan through United Healthcare. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation analysis found private companies who work with Medicare, in plans like Morton’s, denied 2m requests for prior authorization in 2021 or 6% of all claims. Only 11% were appealed.

Those that were appealed overwhelmingly succeeded (82%), leading researchers to question, “whether a larger share of the initial prior authorization requests should have been approved”, and pointing out that care was delayed by the requirement either way.

Morton was forced to mount a full blown public pressure campaign with People’s Action Institute to get her insurance to cover surgery for a rare vascular condition, called neurogenic median arcuate ligament syndrome. Her condition caused her near constant vomiting and “excruciating” pain that she likened to end-stage cancer. She felt stuck after she attempted to navigate appeals on her own – she estimates that she called her insurance company 50 times – before she went public with her story.

“It was very overwhelming,” said Morton, whose surgery was eventually approved, though only after multiple press releases, videos and even coaching by a health insurance attorney.

United Healthcare did not provide a comment on prior authorization and said it could not legally comment on Morton’s case.

Plans like Morton’s will be covered. But people like 34-year-old Megan Shirk of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, will not. Shirk relies on private insurance connected to an employer, in this case Blue Cross Blue Shield. She suffers from complex regional pain syndrome, an excruciating condition sometimes called the “suicide disease”, because of the high rate of sufferers who end their lives.

“I feel like someone is kicking me while setting me on fire at the same time,” Shirk said, describing her symptoms.

Shirk and her doctors are seeking to treat her condition with ketamine infusions, but to date have had prior authorization requests denied. On two occasions, the denial came the day before she was scheduled to travel 200 miles to Pittsburgh for treatment.

“We had the appointment scheduled and ready to go,” said Shirk. “I was excited to start this new life where I wasn’t necessarily not in pain, but in manageable pain.” Shirk has been navigating the appeals process since October 2023.

Morton, reflecting on the lengths she went to to get a procedure covered, called the process, “taxing in a way that I could never put into words”. She added: “Someone who is sick like that should never, ever, ever have to be going through that, ever.”

• In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In the UK, the youth suicide charity Papyrus can be contacted on 0800 068 4141 or email pat@papyrus-uk.org, and in the UK and Ireland Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org