It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, October 13, 2023
Births in China slide 10% to hit their lowest on record
Reuters Thu, October 12, 2023 A parents pushes a stroller with a baby in a park in Shanghai
BEIJING (Reuters) - The number of births in China tumbled 10% last year to hit their lowest level on record - a drop that comes despite a slew of government efforts to support parents and amid increasing alarm that the country become demographically imbalanced.
China had just 9.56 million births in 2022, according to a report published by the National Health Commission. It was the lowest figure since records began in 1949.
The high costs of childcare and education, growing unemployment and job insecurity as well as gender discrimination have all helped to deter many young couples from having more than one child or even having children at all.
Last year, the country's population also fell for the first time in six decades, dropping to 1.41 billion people.
That's caused domestic demographers to lament that China will get old before it gets rich, slowing the economy as revenues drop and government debt increases due to soaring health and welfare costs.
Much of the demographic downturn is the result of China's one-child policy imposed between 1980 and 2015, though the abandonment of that policy is having some effect.
Nearly 40% of Chinese newborns last year were the second child of a married couple, while 15% were from families with three or more children, health authorities said.
To spur the country's flagging birth rate, Beijing has been rolling out a raft of measures, such as efforts to increase childcare as well as financial incentives, and President Xi Jinping in May presided over a meeting to study the topic.
(Reporting by Ethan Wang, Albee Zhang and Bernard Orr; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)
U$A
A rift over Israel threatens the left’s fragile gains David Weigel Fri, October 13, 2023
The News
NEW YORK – Six days after Hamas launched attacks on Israel that killed over 1,300 people, the country’s critics inside the Democratic Party are back on their heels.
Politicians known for almost never “punching left” made clear they needed to do so this time or lose all future credibility. In Manhattan, a rally endorsed by the local Democratic Socialists of America that featured hateful displays was sharply condemned by two of the group’s most closely associated members in Congress — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Jamaal Bowman, who’d let his own membership lapse over a prior dispute over Israel.
In Michigan, Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s Democratic colleagues attacked her statement that Israel’s “apartheid” system created “conditions that can lead to resistance.” In California, DSA-backed politicians who’d denounced Hamas were called anti-semites by Democratic opponents for not quitting the socialist organization.
As President Biden promised to stand with Israel in response to the “sheer evil” of Hamas and likened the war to U.S. operations against ISIS, some leftists bristled at the criticism from within as an unnecessary distraction, arguing the priority should be taking on the right and preventing a massive unfolding military campaign by Israel.
“Why is there is such a focus on settling local political scores when innocent people are being killed and elected officials are going on national television calling for genocide?” New York state Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, a DSA member, told Semafor. “There is a battle right now between war fervor and the truth, [that] the only way to end this violence is to end the occupation and an apartheid system of government.”
But advocates for a new approach to Israel — aid based on humanitarian conditions, boycotts to stop the country from building further settlements in the West Bank — fear they just watched years of political gains get reversed. And prominent progressive and leftist allies, even as they continued to express opposition to Israel’s policies and its military response in Gaza, unleashed a rare outpouring of disgust and rage at voices in their camp who endorsed mass slaughter and kidnapping as a valid uprising or minimized the human toll.
Past defenses — that it was just a distraction pushed by reactionaries, that it was making too much of a fringe campus voice here or there — proved ineffective this time.
“It is not hyperbole to say that many left-wing supporters of Palestine celebrated Hamas’s atrocities,” the left-wing writer Eric Levitz wrote in a widely shared New York magazine column excoriating activists for a “betrayal of the left’s most fundamental values” on ethical grounds that also did untold damage to their practical goals of ending Israeli occupation.
Some, like New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, went so far as to liken the split to schisms on the Marxist left over communism, in which revelations of Stalin’s purges and the 1956 invasion of Hungary left only a hardine rump of pro-Soviet activists. “It’s too early to know how the left’s widespread failure of solidarity will change our politics, but I suspect some sort of fracture is coming,” she wrote. A prominent economics policy expert on the left, Larry Mishel, announced he was quitting the DSA after nearly 50 years of membership. He had named his son after one of its founders.
The nature of the Hamas attack — a massacre of civilians — and its location — inside Israel proper, not a settlement — drew out and exacerbated fundamental rifts among Israel’s critics: Between those who view its existence as fundamentally illegitimate, and those who want a negotiated two-state solution that respects its Jewish identity; between those who imagine a one-state democracy that moves past nationalism on all sides, and those who envision a Palestinian takeover “from the river to the sea.”
American Jews traditionally lean left and many have direct ties to friends, family, and institutions affected by the attacks, sharply raising the emotional stakes within progressive circles. At the pro-Palestinian Jewish publication Jewish Currents, editor-in-chief Arielle Angel wrote about struggling to publicly grieve those losses “without these feelings being politically metabolized against Palestinians.” But others felt those same feelings were being callously dismissed by their purported allies — with uncertain consequences for the movement moving forward. David’s view
The comments that led to a wave of condemnation — a Time Square rally attendee mocking the murder of “hipsters” when Hamas attacked a music festival, a Black Lives Matter offshoot justifying a “desperate act of self-defense,” a Yale professor who scoffed that “settlers are not civilians” — had no support in mainstream Democratic politics.
But before Saturday, opponents of unrestricted aid to Israel were making significant headway in a long, trudging effort to drag the party toward a more confrontational approach to Israel’s policies. The movement faces its biggest challenge yet from the Hamas attacks; that pressure alone is likely to create further divisions over how to respond.
“Just days ago, Biden was holding Netanyahu at arm’s length because he was capitulating to the fascists in his cabinet,” said Eva Borgwardt, the national spokeswoman for IfNotNow, a left-wing group that supports “an end to the occupation and Israel’s system of apartheid” in Gaza and the West Bank. “Now we are seeing those same political leaders falling in line to send offensive weaponry to that same Israeli government, whose intentions are to wipe Palestine off the map.”
At the start of Donald Trump’s presidency, Democrats told Gallup pollsters that they were more sympathetic to Israelis than Palestinians “in the Middle East situation” by an 18-point margin. When Gallup asked that question again in March, Democrats had become more sympathetic to Palestinians by an 11-point margin.
That may have changed overnight. A Fox News poll taken after the Hamas attack found a 17-point shift in support for Israel among Democratic voters. And voices within the party who have been trying to counter the rising tide of support for Palestinian causes and increased antagonism towards Israel’s government, especially among younger Democrats, thought the left’s response would further marginalize them.
“The center of gravity has moved pretty dramatically, as Hamas has revealed itself for what it is — the worst kind of terrorist organization,” said Mark Mellman, the founder of Democratic Majority for Israel, which spent millions of dollars to defeat left-wing candidates in last year’s primaries. “Groups like DSA have done themselves a tremendous disservice by putting themselves outside reasonable and responsible discourse.”
Israel’s advocates and lobbyists watched with dismay, for years, as young progressives challenged the Democratic Party’s unconditional support for Israel. They watched Bibi Netanyahu undermine Barack Obama when he called for a settlement freeze, then watched him ally with Republicans to sabotage the 2015 Iran deal, then watched him work hand-in-glove with Donald Trump.
After the election of Israel’s most right-wing government ever last year — and even though calling Israel an “apartheid” state was a taboo enforced by a congressional supermajority — the country’s American critics were bolder than they’d ever been. Their opponents see a chance now to isolate and divide them, highlighting the most offensive statements from fringe groups and making their associations toxic. That would have implications beyond Israel policy, punishing and limiting left-wing Democrats who’ve made headway inside the party while advocating for a variety of domestic causes as well, like Medicare For All.
“The DSA’s hate rally, glorifying the terrorism of Hamas, represents the beginning of the end for the DSA as a political force in New York,” Bronx Rep. Ritchie Torres told Semafor. (DSA endorsed the rally, but didn’t plan it, and later walked back its support.) “Its institutional influence will recede into the fringe where it belongs.”
DSA’s post-2016 relevance in electoral politics after decades on the fringe has made it the biggest target. Michigan Rep. Shri Thanedar, who’d joined DSA to build his populist bona fides, denounced and quit it over the Times Square rally. (The metro Detroit DSA chapter pointed out that he’d already been ousted over his support for India’s nationalist prime minister.)
But to the dismay of many pro-peace progressives, less politically relevant groups — college student chapters, local Black Lives Matter offshoots — are getting nearly as much attention, for actions that they argue have next to zero support on the left. Social media users, especially on the right, have become exceedingly efficient at quickly identifying and publicizing offending examples as soon as they arise, forcing people to respond and often drawing out a new wave of incendiary responses to highlight next.
Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, said that the media was telling a too-easy story of infighting, focusing on fringe activists or parsing the words used by Israel’s critics in Congress “who had the temerity to say ‘ceasefire.’”
“There is wall to wall condemnation of what happened, and we’re still in the phase where that’s the appropriate place to be,” said Ben-Ami, who spoke with Semafor shortly after learning that a friend’s daughter had been killed with her boyfriend in the Hamas attacks. “There will come another chapter — a more nuanced discussion, at the appropriate time. But we’re still in a phase where you’re finding, except for a very small number of outliers, nearly unanimous condemnation of Hamas and support for the people of Israel.”
For the students who make up a disproportionate share of activists, though, the campus politics have not been as easy to dismiss. J Street U, the same group’s student wing, issued a lengthy statement saying it was “deeply saddened and angered by attempts to justify, excuse, or ignore Hamas’s horrific crimes against Israeli civilians” by pro-Palestinian student groups.
Nor were these threats treated as merely intellectual in the aftermath of the most deadly attack on Jews since the Holocaust: Around the world, there were concerns about dangers to Hillels, synagogues, and Jewish schools ahead of a planned “Day of Rage” called for by Hamas on Friday. At Columbia University, a longtime incubator of pro-Isrel and pro-Palestinian activism, the school was closed to the public after a Jewish student was physically attacked putting up flyers supportive of Israel.
Florida Rep. Maxwell Frost,who has been critical of Israel’s Gaza response, noted that his Central Florida district had already struggled with a rise in neo-Nazi activity: “Seems like week after week we’ve had Nazis march our streets and now this massacre and terrorist attack by Hamas.”
The 26-year old Frost and other progressives have tried to model a fine line approach of mourning losses in Israel and Gaza; calling out examples of antisemitism at home and abroad while also defending Muslims and Arabs from signs of backlash; and expressing outrage at Hamas’ attacks while challenging the administration to protect Palestinians caught in the crossfire.
On Wednesday evening, IfNotNow co-organized a vigil in Washington Square Park, where its allies commemorated the thousands of lives lost in Israel and Gaza. City comptroller Brad Lander, who had called the Times Square rally “abominable,” led the crowd in a call-and-response prayer.
“If I am for myself only, what am I?” said Lander. “If I can only see my peoples’ pain, how will we ever find those divine sparks, commanded by our tradition?” Room for Disagreement
Activists whose response to the Hamas attacks have divided the left aren’t walking it back. At the Times Square rally, Eugene Puryear, a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation — not DSA — became infamous for joking about a Hamas attack on a music festival that killed at least 260 people. “The resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters,” he said. Asked if he’d say the same thing again today, Puryear said he would.
“The focus on my comments is just to distract from what’s really happening — nearly 80 years of brutality meted out on Palestinians,” Puryear said. “If I rephrased it, people would be equally as mad about it; the core of my point is that the Palestinians are right to resist.”
BLM Chicago, not affiliated with the national Black Lives Matter organization (but conflated with it in media reports), put out a meme mocking the attack on the festival — a cartoon of a paraglider. “For everyone withdrawing support, saying they stood with us & now they’re removing signs, bye, toodles,” it posted on Thursday morning. “We’ve always been for Palestinian freedom.” Notable
In N+1, David Klion writes that “emotion and bloodlust” have “overwhelmed” reason, with a clear impact on the left: “The upshot of all the denunciations and condemnations is the right’s unchallenged hold over the discourse, and, more importantly, the ultimate facts on the ground.”
In Politico, Emily Ngo and Nick Reisman see an “internal reckoning” unfolding for DSA, “shining a brighter spotlight on tensions between the often younger, left-leaning DSA-backed politicians and their mainstream Democratic colleagues.”
Progressives face backlash over response to Israel attacks
Hanna Trudo Thu, October 12, 2023 Progressives face backlash over response to Israel attacks
Progressives are facing backlash over their initial responses to the attacks on Israel by Hamas militants, revealing the degree to which they’re at odds with others in the Democratic caucus over the issue.
Members of the Squad such as Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Cori Bush (D-Mo.) took heat from fellow Democrats this week over statements criticized for being too tepid in the wake of the violent attacks against Israeli civilians.
Meanwhile, after mounting pressure, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) condemned the “bigotry and callousness” at a pro-Palestinian rally aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in New York City.
The condemnation directed at certain segments of the left underscores the fissures within the Democratic Party when it comes to Israel. It also suggests progressives will have to navigate an increasingly difficult political environment in which they will be expected to unequivocally support Israel’s right to exist while also advocating for Palestinian rights.
“The challenge is to continue to respond, as I think a lot of progressive members have already done … to acknowledge the common humanity of all of us, of both people,” Matt Duss, a former senior foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), told The Hill.
“We’re going to be getting to a moment where some people are going to be required to show real courage and take a page from Congresswoman Barbara Lee in the wake of 9/11,” said Duss, referring to the California progressive’s vote against the invasion of Afghanistan.
“To say, let’s think about this a little bit. We could be starting something that we’re not quite ready for, quite sure about,” he said.
Bush and Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, were among the most harshly criticized in the immediate aftermath of the initial wave of attacks in Israel. Tlaib suggested withholding United States support to fund Israel’s “apartheid government,” a comment that infuriated fellow lawmakers who found it offensive as the death toll continued to rise. She also categorized the terrorist attack as part of a “resistance” effort.
Bush, an equally outspoken House progressive, echoed Tlaib’s sentiments.
Some voices on the left saw their public remarks as appropriate calls for de-escalation that recognized the plight of both sides. They argued for an acknowledgment of suffering among civilians in both camps and denounced Hamas as a terrorist organization.
“Rep. Tlaib and Rep. Bush both issued statements that mourned the loss of Israeli and Palestinian civilian lives, and then said we need to address the root causes of violence to get to peace, and they are now being attacked,” said Beth Miller, the political director of Jewish Voice for Peace Action, a progressive Jewish group.
But others in the party were enraged by the statements. Some of the Democratic caucus’s most pro-Israel members, including Reps. Ritchie Torres (N.Y.) and Josh Gottheimer (N.J.), expressed their full disapproval.
“Shame on anyone who glorifies as ‘resistance’ the largest single-day mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust,” Torres said, calling the statement “reprehensible and repulsive.”
The mounting pushback came as Israelis publicly mourned the severity of the ambush as videos showing the atrocities — many of them inflicted on women and children — spread across social media.
As of Wednesday afternoon, the attack by Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, had left more than 1,200 Israelis dead, starting a war in which more than 2,300 people have been killed in total. The U.S. government said that 22 U.S. citizens had been killed in the conflict, and 17 were still unaccounted for.
In a sign of the growing pressure on progressives, Ocasio-Cortez earlier this week criticized the DSA-aligned rally in New York City’s Times Square, a stance that came after she was chided for supporting a ceasefire.
The rally, which was held in support of Palestinians, drew swift rebukes from leaders across the political spectrum. Ocasio-Cortez, whose district is not far from where the protests were held, eventually released a statement condemning it.
“The bigotry and callousness expressed in Times Square on Sunday were unacceptable and harmful in this devastating moment,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a statement reported by Politico. “It also did not speak for the thousands of New Yorkers who are capable of rejecting both Hamas’ horrifying attacks against innocent civilians as well as the grave injustices and violence Palestinians face under occupation.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) speaks during a House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing for the basis of the impeachment inquiry of President Biden on Thursday, September 28, 2023.
The clash between DSA affiliates and its usual allies such as Ocasio-Cortez highlights the delicate nature of the issue and its evolution on the left. While Democrats are reliable allies of Israel, the party has seen cracks in its support, as many on the progressive left have also pushed for Palestinian rights.
Duss said conversations are already happening between progressive lawmakers and outside advocates about addressing the conflict in a constructive and nuanced way — a potential uphill battle given the severity of the situation on the ground.
“This horror is very fresh. We’re still learning more about this hour by hour. It keeps getting more awful,” he said. “I do think people are thinking about ways to talk about this in the most constructive way possible.”
“Even in ‘normal’ times, this is a difficult discussion to have. It is far more difficult now for obvious reasons,” Duss added.
Sanders, who is Jewish and has sometimes clashed with pro-Israel Democrats, released a statement Wednesday addressing the conflict. He said Hamas committed a “terrorist assault on Israel” that could have “horrific short- and long-term consequences.”
His position — which included a reference to “justice for the Palestinian people” and called Israel’s tactics in response to the attack “a serious violation of international law” — went further than others in the Senate.
“Longer term, this attack is a major setback for any hope of peace and reconciliation in the region — and justice for the Palestinian people. For years, people of good will throughout the world, including some brave Israelis, have struggled against the blockade of Gaza, the daily humiliations of occupation in the West Bank, and the horrendous living conditions faced by so many Palestinians,” the Vermont senator wrote.
Some progressive Jewish activists say Capitol Hill Democrats should formally emphasize de-escalation and are looking to members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the top body of elected liberals in the House, to lead the way.
“It has never been so important that we fight harder, because it just got a lot steeper,” said Miller, whose group is in regular communication with lawmakers. “And that means we need to be louder.”
Blurring the lines further among the left flank, other progressive officeholders offered staunch support for Israel.
Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and John Fetterman (D-Pa.) went further than other Senate progressives for Israel, with Warren tearing up while discussing the devastating losses and Fetterman making it clear that he is in support of Israel “neutralizing the terrorists responsible for this barbarism.”
Meanwhile, many Democrats applauded President Biden’s speech Tuesday, in which he called the Hamas terrorist attack “pure, unadulterated evil” and reconfirmed his administration’s unwavering support for Israel.
In progressive circles, there is also hope that he and the administration will also acknowledge the struggles of Palestinians and are pushing for a conversation around de-escalation both in Congress and on Pennsylvania Ave. It’s their goal for that discussion to happen sooner than later.
“I understand you want to show complete support and sympathy for the Israelis,” said Duss, who added that the severity of the moment means the president should speak to the full depth of his country’s diversity.
“This is a president who has taken important steps to address issues of racial injustice and equality. I think a lot of progressives just want him to extend that to foreign policy,” he said.
Capitol Police Brief Progressives On Security Measures Amid Rise In Threats Against Them
Marita Vlachou Fri, October 13, 2023
The U.S. Capitol Police on Thursday briefed several progressive House members about security measures in place following an increase in violent threats against them in the days after Saturday’s surprise attack on Israel, according to a new report.
A Capitol Police spokesperson told the outlet the department provided “several briefings” to lawmakers regarding enhanced protections in place.
The lawmakers have become targets over expressing positions critical of Israel as the country has continued bombarding Gaza in retribution for Hamas’ attack over the weekend.
Rep. (Wash.), who heads the Congressional Progressive Caucus, asked her fellow members during a closed-door meeting to defend their fellow Democratic lawmakers, according to Politico.
Meanwhile, the war in Israel continues to rage with more than 2,800 people confirmed dead on both sides.
The Israeli military on Friday ordered the evacuation of northern Gaza, which includes the densely populated Gaza City, within 24 hours ahead of what some presume will be a ground offensive.
The U.N. has warned the order would be “impossible” without “devastating humanitarian consequences.”
Ocasio-Cortez called the directive “unacceptable” in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
“Humanity is at stake,” she said. “Nearly half are children. We must halt this.”
U.S. Capitol Police are beefing up security measures throughout the Capitol complex after Hamas called for Friday to be a global “day of rage.”
In a statement shared with HuffPost, the department said while “there are not specific threats toward the Congress at this time, we are not taking any chances.”
“Some of what we are doing will be visible, but for safety reasons we cannot provide the public details about all of the resources that we are putting into protecting the Congress,” a spokesperson said. “Our dedicated teams are working around the clock to coordinate with our law enforcement and intelligence partners across the country to keep everyone safe.”
Rep. Rashida Tlaib calls on President Biden to show more 'empathy' toward Palestinians
Todd Spangler, Detroit Free Press Updated Fri, October 13, 2023
With Israel signaling a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip in response to last weekend's deadly attacks by Hamas, U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Detroit, on Friday criticized President Joe Biden and his administration for not doing more to restrain Israel or show concern for ordinary Palestinians living in the war-torn region.
"Millions of people in Gaza — half of them children — have been given an impossible 24-hour evacuation order, but they have nowhere to go," Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, said, referring to Israel's order to evacuate the northern section of the strip of land between that country and Egypt. "The collective punishment of Palestinian civilians is a war crime ... (but) President Biden has not expressed one bit of empathy for the millions of Palestinian civilians facing brutal airstrikes and the threat of a ground invasion of Gaza."
Tlaib's statement on Friday reiterated one she gave exclusively to the Free Press earlier this week that she considers both the deadly, surprise attack on Israeli civilians orchestrated by Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip and which the U.S. has labeled a terrorist organization, and Israel's overwhelming response to be "war crimes" in that civilians, including children, are being killed.
"I am calling for immediate de-escalation and cease-fire to save countless civilian lives, no matter their faith or ethnicity," she said Friday. "Our government must lead with compassion for all civilians. I believe in my heart that the majority of Americans want the killing and violence to stop. War crimes cannot be answered with war crimes."
After the attacks last weekend that led to some 1,200 deaths, Tlaib, long a critic of Israel's treatment of Palestinians, including a blockade of Gaza in place since 2007, put out an equivocal statement in part blaming Israel and American support for that ally for the attack. She said she has received numerous death threats since then and one Michigan colleague, U.S. Rep. Jack Bergman, R-Watersmeet, introduced a resolution to censure her.
But many people who have been critical of Israel have said it is possible both to denounce Hamas' actions, as Tlaib has done, while also urging Israel show restraint in its response. Since the attacks, Israel has been firing rockets into the Gaza Strip and cutting fuel, electricity and other services to the region, as well as massing troops on the border, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promising to exact an "unprecedented price" on Hamas.
The United Nations, meanwhile, is bracing for a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, saying that Israel's evacuation order is "impossible," given that there is no way out of the region. Israel has imposed a blockade of Gaza since 2007, after Hamas — which was founded on a desire to end Israel's existence — took political control there, tightly controlling the flow of goods, services and people to such a degree that it has impacted Palestinians' access to food, jobs and health care. The country has been entirely locked down since last weekend.
Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, as well as most western leaders, have expressed unequivocal support for Israel to defend itself, though Blinken has said he has urged Israel to take all possible steps to avoid loss of civilian lives. Hamas had told people living in Gaza to disregard the order but on Friday it appeared massive numbers of Palestinians were heading south.
Tlaib said the Biden administration must do more.
“American Muslims and Arab Americans do not feel represented by our government right now," she said. "Many families in the U.S. seeking help to get their loved ones out of Gaza feel that Secretary Blinken is not making their safety a priority. The Biden administration is failing in its duty to protect all civilian and American lives in Gaza. I cannot believe I have to beg our country to value every human life, no matter their faith or ethnicity. We cannot lose sight of the humanity in each other.”
Contact Todd Spangler: tspangler@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter@tsspangler.
Rashida Tlaib, the Only Palestinian Member of Congress, Says Critics Distorted Her Israel Statement
Kylie Cheung Thu, October 12, 2023
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), the lone Palestinian American member of Congress, on Wednesday spoke to the Detroit Free Press about her colleagues’ motion to censure her, following a statement she made over the weekend mourning lives lost in the conflict between Israel and Palestine and calling for an end to “apartheid” in the region. A fellow member from Michigan, Rep. Jack Bergman (R), filed the motion against her on Wednesday.
After the Hamas attacks on Saturday—which left more than 1,200 dead and included the kidnapping of roughly 150 people—Tlaib said that Israel’s “apartheid system” is what “creates the suffocating, dehumanizing conditions that can lead to resistance” in Palestine. She continued: “The failure to recognize the violent reality of living under siege, occupation, and apartheid makes no one safer. ... As long as our country provides billions in unconditional funding to support the apartheid government, this heartbreaking cycle of violence will continue.”
Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) said on CNN that “it shouldn’t be hard to condemn terrorists and terrorism.”
But Tlaib’s comments “should not have been remotely controversial,” Beth Miller, political director of the Jewish Voice for Peace Action, told The Intercept. She continued, “There have been almost no members of Congress who have so much as acknowledged... there have been Palestinian civilians who have been killed by the Israeli military and by Israeli settlers.”
In her interview with the Free Press, Tlaib cautioned that it’s “dangerous” to call criticism of the Israeli government antisemitic, and said she’ll continue to call for it “to be held accountable for some of its atrocities,” even as she recognizes that’s “going to be incredibly difficult.”
“I’m going to remind them that a Palestinian life is just as important as an Israeli life,” Tlaib said.
Ilhan Omar condemns Israel’s military response to Hamas, says ‘solution’ is ‘negotiated peace’
Anders Hagstrom
FAUX NEWS Updated Tue, October 10, 2023
Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., attacked Israel's response to an unprecedented assault by Hamas in an extensive thread on social media Monday.
Omar, a longtime critic of Israel and advocate for Palestinians, seemed to equate the Israeli victims killed by Hamas terrorists this weekend and Palestinians killed in the ongoing Israeli response.
"Just as we honor the humanity of the hundreds of innocent Israeli civilians and 9 Americans who were killed this weekend, we must honor the humanity of the innocent Palestinian civilians who have been killed and whose lives are upended," she wrote.
Omar went on to highlight the hardships of living in Gaza, accusing Israel of operating an "apartheid" state in an attempt to explain violence by Hamas.
"Palestinian residents of the West Bank have scarcely better lives than Gazans — with the routine destruction of their ancestral homes, destruction of their crops, and violent attacks by Israeli settlers," Omar wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., attacked Israel's response to an unprecedented assault by Hamas in an extensive thread on social media Monday.
"Palestinians have few recourses for justice and accountability. Attacks by the IDF and settlers against Palestinians are regularly met with impunity. Efforts to seek justice in international courts are stonewalled by the Israeli government, with U.S. support," she added. "As the world is condemning Hamas’s attacks, we must also oppose an Israeli military response that has already taken the lives of hundreds of Palestinians, including nearly two dozen children."
Omar's office did not respond to questions from Fox News Digital asking her to elaborate on the thread.
The congresswoman did not clarify how she believed Israel should have responded to Saturday's attack, which has since left at least 1,000 Israelis dead and 2,700 more wounded. The Minnesota Democrat's only suggestion for a "solution to this horror" was "a negotiated peace — with Israelis and Palestinians enjoying equal rights and security guarantees."
Later in the thread, Omar said that Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant had called all Palestinians "human animals" in comments earlier this week, though his full statement made clear that he was referring only to Hamas terrorists.
"We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed," Gallant said. "We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly."
Israeli forces have deployed tens of thousands of troops to the area around Gaza City, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has suggested a ground invasion may be imminent.
Other statements from Omar have sparked controversy in the past.
When she took office in 2019, she soon had to answer for a now-deleted 2012 tweet in which she wrote, "Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel." She later expressed regret, saying the "unfortunate words were the only words" she could "think about expressing at that moment" in reference to Israel's 2012 operation against Hamas in Gaza.
Also in 2019, speaking at a Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) fundraiser, Omar said: "CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something, and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties." Critics accused her of trying to downplay the actions of terrorists by describing it as "some people did something." She later clarified, "Many Americans found themselves now having their civil rights stripped from them, and so what I was speaking to was the fact that as a Muslim, not only was I suffering as an American who was attacked on that day, but the next day I woke up as my fellow Americans were now treating me as a suspect."
Also, in January 2023, Omar responded to the outrage over a 2019 tweet in which she described America's relationship with Israel as "all about the Benjamins," a tweet for which she later apologized.
"I certainly did not or was not aware that the word ‘hypnotized’ was a trope. I wasn’t aware of the fact that there are tropes about Jews and money. That has been very enlightening part of this journey," she told CNN.
Fox News' Yael Halon and Houston Keene contributed to this report.
Why India supports Israel
THEY ARE BOTH ISLAMOPHOBIC
Diego Mendoza
SEMAFOR Wed, October 11, 2023
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi issued a strong statement expressing solidarity with Israel in a significant diplomatic moment for a country that has historically taken a more neutral position in international conflicts, including the ongoing Ukraine war.
The brutal assault by Hamas on Israeli civilians and Israel’s intense retaliation on Gazans is being exploited by online rightwing factions in India to perpetuate their own nationalist anti-Muslim propaganda.
Modi and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s close bond has often been described as a ”bromance,” writes Kavita Chowdhury for The Diplomat. India historically did not consider itself an ally of Israel, and diplomatic relations were not established until 1992 because many anti-colonial Indian leaders sympathized with the Palestinian cause, viewing their struggles as a consequence of British imperialism. But that resistance changed in 2014 with the election of Modi, whose Bharatiya Janata Party and its Hindu nationalist followers champion “Israel’s exclusionist policies toward Palestinian Muslims. They also want India to mirror the Israeli model of a muscular military state, Chowdhary argues.
Hindu nationalists sympathize with the religious significance of Israeli sovereignty, but many proponents of Hindutva have also historically admired Nazis, Siddharth Kapila writes for left-leaning Indian outlet The Wire. Some Hindu nationalist leaders have proposed using Nazi exclusionary policies against Jews as a way to purge India of Muslims, Kapila writes, with some of those ideas being subtly enshrined in national policies. India’s 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act, which accelerated the naturalization process for millions of non-Muslim refugees, was “deeply reminiscent of the Nuremberg Laws whereby the Nazis revoked Reich citizenship for Jews,” Kapila argues.
Rightwing Hindu groups and trolls are flooding social media with misinformation about the fighting in Israel and Gaza, branding themselves as the ”digital champions" of Israel, according to regional Indian newspaper Siasat Daily. Several posts showing old footage of ISIS attacks and beheadings were purported as Hamas’s attacks on Israel and used to inflame anti-Muslim sentiment in India. “It’s a concerning development that amplifies the polarizing tactics employed by these groups, which can have severe implications for communal harmony and national unity,” a former sociology professor told the paper.
A deep-space image of the galaxy where the supernova occurred. Credit: Legacy Surveys / D. Lang (Perimeter Institute) for Legacy Surveys layers and unWISE / NASA/JPL-Caltech / D. Lang (Perimeter Institute)
A fully automated process, including a brand-new artificial intelligence (AI) tool, has successfully detected, identified and classified its first supernova.
Developed by an international collaboration led by Northwestern University, the new system automates the entire search for new supernovae across the night sky—effectively removing humans from the process. Not only does this rapidly accelerate the process of analyzing and classifying new supernova candidates, it also bypasses human error.
The team alerted the astronomical community to the launch and success of the new tool, called the Bright Transient Survey Bot (BTSbot), this week. In the past six years, humans have spent an estimated total of 2,200 hours visually inspecting and classifying supernova candidates. With the new tool now officially online, researchers can redirect this precious time toward other responsibilities in order to accelerate the pace of discovery.
"For the first time ever, a series of robots and AI algorithms has observed, then identified, then communicated with another telescope to finally confirm the discovery of a supernova," said Northwestern's Adam Miller, who led the work. "This represents an important step forward as further refinement of models will allow the robots to isolate specific subtypes of stellar explosions. Ultimately, removing humans from the loop provides more time for the research team to analyze their observations and develop new hypotheses to explain the origin of the cosmic explosions that we observe."
"We achieved the world's first fully automatic detection, identification and classification of a supernova," added Northwestern's Nabeel Rehemtulla, who co-led the technology development with Miller. "This significantly streamlines large studies of supernovae, helping us better understand the life cycles of stars and the origin of elements supernovae create, like carbon, iron and gold."
Miller is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA). Rehemtulla is an astronomy graduate student in Miller's research group.
Cutting out the middleman
To detect and analyze supernovae, humans currently work hand in hand with robotic systems. First, robotic telescopes repeatedly image the same sections of the night sky, searching for new sources that were not present in previous images. Then, when these telescopes detect something new, humans take over.
"Automated software presents a list of candidate explosions to humans, who spend time verifying the candidates and executing spectroscopic observations," Miller said. "We can only definitively know that a candidate is truly a supernova by collecting its spectrum—the source's dispersed light, which reveals elements present in the explosion. There are existing robotic telescopes that can collect spectra, but this is also often done by humans operating telescopes with spectrographs."
A before (left) and after image of the galaxy where SN2023tyk occurred. The upper left region of the galaxy (right) appears bulbous and misshapen, where the star exploded. Credit: Legacy Surveys / D. Lang (Perimeter Institute) for Legacy Surveys layers and unWISE / NASA/JPL-Caltech / D. Lang (Perimeter Institute)
The researchers developed the BTSbot to cut out this human middleman. To develop the AI tool, Rehemtulla trained a machine-learning algorithm with more than 1.4 million historical images from nearly 16,000 sources, including confirmed supernovae, temporarily flaring stars, periodically variable stars and flaring galaxies.
"The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) has been operating for the past six years, and, during that time, I and others have spent more than 2,000 hours visually inspecting candidates and determining which to observe with spectroscopy," said Christoffer Fremling, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) who developed another AI tool called SNIascore and contributed to the development of BTSbot. "Adding BTSbot to our workflow will eliminate the need for us to spend time inspecting these candidates."
Early success, and a wave of relief
To test the BTSbot, the researchers looked to a newly discovered supernova candidate dubbed SN2023tyk. The ZTF, a robotic observatory that images the night sky in a search for supernovae, first detected the source on Oct. 3. Sifting through ZTF's data in real time, BTSbot found SN2023tyk on Oct. 5.
From there, BTSbot automatically requested the potential supernova's spectrum from Palomar Observatory, where another robotic telescope (SED Machine) performed in-depth observations to obtain the source's spectrum. The SED Machine then sent this spectrum to Caltech's SNIascore to determine the supernova's type: Either a thermonuclear explosion of a white dwarf or the collapse of a massive star's core.
After determining that the candidate was a Type Ia supernova (a stellar explosion in which a white dwarf in a binary star system fully explodes), the automated system publicly shared the discovery with the astronomical community on Oct. 7.
In the first days of running BTSbot, Rehemtulla felt a mix of nerves and excitement.
"The simulated performance was excellent, but you never really know how that translates to the real-world until you actually try it," he said. "Once the observations from SEDM and the automated classification came in from SNIascore, we felt a huge wave of relief. The beauty of it is that, once everything is turned on and working properly, we don't actually do anything. We go to sleep at night, and, in the morning, we see that BTSbot, and these other AIs unwaveringly do their jobs."
Led by Northwestern, the collaboration included astronomers from Caltech, University of Minnesota, Liverpool John Moores University in England and Stockholm University in Sweden.
NASA Alarmed to See Flakes Drifting Past Space Station Window
Victor Tangermann Tue, October 10, 2023
Flake Haste
The International Space Station's Russian segment has sprung yet another leak — the third in less than a year — raising urgent questions about the reliability of the country's space program.
The leak was traced back to an 11-year-old backup radiator circuit installed on Russia's Nauka module, according to a Telegram update by Russia's space agency Roscosmos.
As the drama unfolded, NASA ground control in Houston had a troubling question for crew members on board the orbital outpost.
"Hi, we’re seeing flakes outside, we need a crew to go to the cupola, we think windows five or six, and confirm any visual flakes," mission control told astronauts on the US segment on Monday, as quoted by Agence France-Presse.
"There's a leak coming from the radiator on [the Nauka module]," NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli replied.
Radiator Hospital
Fortunately, none of the station's crew members were ever in any danger, NASA later confirmed in a statement.
The damage also appears to be minimal.
"The primary radiator on Nauka is working normally, providing full cooling to the module with no impacts to the crew or to space station operations," the space agency said, though it conceded that astronauts had to close the shutters of the US segment's windows as a "precaution against contamination."
Most striking is that it's the third coolant leak to hit the Russian segment in a matter of less than a year. In December of last year, Russian cosmonauts spotted a Soyuz spacecraft docked to the station spewing coolant into space uncontrollably. Then in February, another spacecraft docked to the station started leaking, causing the cargo spacecraft to depressurize.
"One is whatever, two is a coincidence, three is something systematic," Harvard astronomer and space expert Jonathan McDowell told AFP.
More broadly, the latest leak should give anybody pause about Russia's continued presence on the Space Station, since everybody needs to cooperate up there to keep things operational.
"It really just emphasizes the degrading reliability of Russian space systems," McDowell added. "When you add it to the context of their failed Moon probe in August, they're not looking great."
Gaia telescope's new data reveals 'goldmine' of over 500,000 undiscovered stars and more
Robert Lea
SPACE Tue, October 10, 2023 A cylindrical telescope in deep space.
The Gaia mission has revealed a "goldmine" of new information on cosmic objects as it continues to create the most comprehensive stellar catalog ever compiled.
The new release, known as Gaia's focused product release (FPR), contains over half a million new faint stars, more than 380 new gravitationally lensed quasars and the positions of over 150,000 solar system asteroids.
Containing data on 1.8 billion stars, the comprehensive map of the Milky Way galaxy and its cosmic backyard being created by Gaia will allow scientists to continue to dig deep into our cosmic history. The new release fills in some important gaps in that map as it forms.
According to Gaia's operators, the European Space Agency (ESA), the new data provides exciting and unexpected science and findings that go far beyond what the space telescope was initially designed to discover.
The new trove of research builds upon the third Data Release (DR3) from Gaia published in June 2022. Though comprehensive, DR3 contained gaps in the sky not yet mapped by the space telescope and overlooked some faint stars that didn't shine as bright as their surrounding stellar companions.
Particular examples of this are globular clusters, which are some of the oldest objects in the universe with densely clustered cores of bright stars that can overwhelm telescopes attempting to study them. More than filling in unexplored regions in Gaia's cosmic map
Part of the new release from the star surveyor space telescope focused on the Milky Way's most massive globular star cluster, Omega Centauri, which contains around 10 million stars — making its core the most crowded region of space the telescope has studied thus far.
To patch these gaps, ESA astronomers focused Gaia on Omega Centauri, which, at just around 15,800 light-years away, is relatively close to Earth and can be used as a proxy for the study of other clusters of this type.
"In Omega Centauri, we discovered over half a million new stars Gaia hadn't seen before — from just one cluster!" research lead author and member of the Gaia collaboration Katja Weingrill said in a statement.
Instead of focusing on single stars within the cluster, something Gaia specializes in, the space telescope observed Omega Centauri with a special mode that allows Gaia to look at a wider patch of sky around the core of the globular cluster each time it came into view. Thus, the new observations also helped test this special mode and Gaia's instruments.
"We didn't expect to ever use it for science, which makes this result even more exciting," Weingrill added.
Though the new data has helped fill in some unexplored regions in Gaia's 3D map of the Milky Way, it is of interest to scientists in itself, helping better model the Omega Centauri globular cluster.
"Our data allowed us to detect stars that are too close together to be properly measured in Gaia's regular pipeline," research co-author and Gaia Collaboration member Alexey Mints added. "With the new data, we can study the cluster's structure, how the constituent stars are distributed, how they're moving, and more, creating a complete large-scale map of Omega Centauri. It's using Gaia to its full potential — we've deployed this amazing cosmic tool at maximum power."
In this regard, the new data release of the FPR is just a taster of what is to come in Gaia Data Release 4 (DR4), with the space telescope currently exploring a further eight regions of the Milky Way in a similar fashion to how it investigated Omega Centauri. As a result, by studying cosmic building blocks like Omega Centauri, DR4 could help reveal details about our galaxy, such as its true age, the precise location of its center and if it has collided with other galaxies throughout its history. Gaia as a gravitational lens hunter
Even though it wasn't designed to study the universe on a wider scale, the FPR releases from Gaia show it could be uncovering things that are vital to understanding the cosmos as a whole, such as its evolution and its precise age.
One of the ways Gaia could have an impact on cosmology is by finding what astronomers call gravitational lenses, objects of great density like star clusters that can be used to amplify light from distant background sources like ancient galaxies.
This works thanks to an effect predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity, which suggests that objects of mass "warp" the very fabric of spacetime; the greater the mass, the more extreme the warping is. When a warping object lies between Earth and a distant source, light from that distant source passes the intermediate object and is 'bent' on its way towards us. The amount of deflection depends on how close the light's path comes to the mass source. As a result, light from the same source arrives at Earth at different times and a single object can appear at multiple points in the same image.
This effect can amplify that distant source, allowing objects that would usually be too distant and faint to be seen. The James Webb Space Telescope is currently using this phenomenon to great effect to observe some of the universe's oldest galaxies. Gaia can assist in this by finding more gravitationally lensed objects — particularly quasars, the active hearts of galaxies powered by feeding black holes. Spotting lensed quasars isn't easy because the repeated images caused by gravitational lensing can often cluster together, making a single object appear smeared in images and leading to it being misidentified.
"Gaia is a real lens-seeker. Thanks to Gaia, we've found that some of the objects we see aren't simply stars, even though they look like them," research co-author and Gaia collaboration member Christine Ducourant said. "They're actually really distant lensed quasars — extremely bright, energetic galactic cores powered by black holes.
"We now present 381 solid candidates for lensed quasars, including 50 that we deem highly likely: A goldmine for cosmologists and the largest set of candidates ever released at once."
These candidates were selected from a list of possible quasar candidates, some of which were included in DR3, with five of the lensed objects appearing to be rare formations called "Einstein crosses." These occur when light from a single object appears at multiple places in the same image from the shape of a cross. In 2021, Gaia spotted 12 of these Einstein crosses.
"The great thing about Gaia is that it looks everywhere, so we can find lenses without needing to know where to look," research co-author Gaia collaboration member Laurent Galluccio said. "With this data release, Gaia is the first mission to achieve an all-sky survey of gravitational lenses at high resolution."
This demonstrates how Gaia could team up with the ESA's dark matter and dark energy detective Euclid, launched in July 2023, to help investigate these mysterious aspects of the universe that comprise an estimated 95% of its content. The new releases from Gaia also show the space telescope also has utility much closer to home. Tracking asteroids, red giants, and more with Gaia
Part of the new Gaia releases show details of 156,823 of the asteroids around Earth that were identified in DR3, better pinpointing their locations and constraining their orbits with 20 times more precision than previous observations.
The ESA space telescope did this by observing the space rocks for almost twice as long as it had previously. The ESA predicts that the forthcoming Gaia data dump DR4 will double the number of asteroids seen by the space telescope as well as increasing the number of solar system bodies observed by Gaia by including comets and even satellites around Earth.
The new Gaia releases also include observations of the dynamics of over 10,000 binary red giant stars, making this the largest collection of such stellar objects ever collated, and signals from gas and dust that drift between stars in the disk of the Milky Way.
"Although its key focus is as a star surveyor, Gaia is exploring everything from the rocky bodies of the solar system to multiply imaged quasars lying billions of light-years away, far beyond the edges of the Milky Way," ESA Gaia project scientist Timo Prusti said. "The mission is providing a truly unique insight into the Universe and the objects within it, and we're really making the most of its broad, all-sky perspective on the skies around us."
The FPR from Gaia takes the form of five papers published on Tuesday, Oct. 10:
