❧ A ceasefire agreement to halt Israel’s onslaught against Gaza is “closer than it’s ever been before,” according to Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Reuters reported on Monday that there had been a “breakthrough” in talks attended by both sides, which were mediated by the Qatari government and attended by envoys of both outgoing President Biden and incoming President Trump. It’s not entirely clear at the moment what that breakthrough was, but reporting from Haaretz suggests that Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff has essentially forced the hand of Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has been dragging his heels on a hostage exchange deal for months. The Israeli outlet reports that:
Witkoff has forced Israel to accept a plan that Netanyahu had repeatedly rejected over the past half year. Hamas has not budged from its position that the hostages' freedom must be conditioned on the release of Palestinian prisoners (the easy part) and a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza (the hard one). Netanyahu rejected this condition and thus was born the partial deal proposed by Egypt.
Initially, the talk was of a limited humanitarian deal. More and more conditions were slowly appended until it grew into a much bigger proposal with clear outlines – a hostage release, new regional arrangements and full withdrawal. The Philadelphi Corridor, which Netanyahu last summer termed the bedrock of Israel's existence, is part of the deal. At Egypt's request, Israel will fully withdraw from it in the first phase.
It's hard to know how Netanyahu feels about this aggressive behavior. While it provides an excuse he can give to his base, he may resent being dragged into an unwanted deal that will end the war and possibly lead to political upheaval at home.
If it is actually true that one of Trump’s emissaries told Netanyahu he had to wrap up the bombardment and he immediately made such significant concessions, then it lays to waste the narrative we have been subjected to since this conflict began: That Biden and his deputies were “working tirelessly” for a ceasefire but were simply helpless in the face of Israel’s obstinance. It would mean that Biden could have put this same pressure on Netanyahu at any point over the past 15 months and ended the destruction. How many senseless deaths could have been prevented?
We shouldn’t mistake this pressure from the incoming Trump administration for some sort of principled humanitarian act. Trump is very clearly motivated to get this conflict over with to score an early political win, and it’s very likely that Netanyahu intended all along to wait to compromise until after the election specifically to help Trump. It’s also unclear how serious Trump would be about enforcing the ceasefire. According to the Israeli outlet Ynet, Trump has promised Netanyahu “he will support Israel retroactively if it decides to return to fighting and violate the ceasefire,” which would essentially render any agreement meaningless. There is also no indication that Trump will do anything to halt Israel’s accelerating land grabs in the West Bank, which it has made no secret of its plans to fully annex. The ceasefire deal could still go awry—The hard right of Netanyahu’s cabinet is enraged about the possibility of any agreement and has announced their goal of tanking it as they have previous deals.
Nevertheless, if Trump truly does bring some respite to the people of Gaza after more than a year of ceaseless horror, it would be a greater gesture of goodwill toward them than anything Biden did during his four years in office. This is not a credit to Trump as much as it is a resounding indictment of Biden.
Art by Tyler Rosebush from Current Affairs Magazine, Issue 4, September-October 2016.
❧ Donald Trump Jr. is reportedly harassing homeless people in Greenland. The presidential scion has been touring the frozen North in an attempt to drum up support for his father’s plan to purchase—or possibly invade—Greenland and add it to the territorial United States, which Trump claims is necessary for “national security purposes.” He’s been holding rallies up there, complete with MAGA supporters in red caps—but as Danish-language journalists report, many of the “supporters” are actually just poor and homeless people Trump Jr. found standing outside a Brugsen supermarket and offered a free hotel meal in exchange for their appearance in photo ops and social media videos. After the scandal from last October where several “Auto Workers for Trump” turned out not to be auto workers at all, this kind of fraud and exploitation probably shouldn’t be surprising, but it’s still gross. (Arctic Today)
This is like a scheme Mr. Burns would run on the Simpsons.
— Donald Trump, circa 1977, on naming Don Jr. after himself
❧ Hunt saboteurs in Sweden have saved several wolves from being killed. The Swedish government had authorized its annual wolf hunt for January 2 and allowed 30 of the country’s estimated 375 wolves to be killed—roughly 10 percent of the population. The decision was widely criticized by conservation and animal rights groups, especially since wolves still have a “red list” endangered status in Sweden, but only one organization went beyond criticism and actually tried to stop the hunt: the Hunt Saboteurs Sweden (HSS).
Like fox hunt saboteurs in the U.K, these more radical activists go out into the field to thwart and harass big-game hunters using a range of direct action tactics, most commonly driving around making noise to scare the animals off. As a result of their action in the Salungen area, they report that “the hunters neither could find the remaining five wolves [there], nor hide their frustration at not being able to vent their bloodlust.” In the end, the hunt was called off with only 23 of the targeted 30 wolves dead, meaning the saboteurs were able to save seven—a definite win. (Unoffensive Animal)
❧ Labor unions in Belgium called a nationwide general strike on Monday to protest the incoming government’s plans to cut pensions. Strikers ground much of the transportation in Belgium to a halt, with bag handlers, security, and other airport personnel walking off the job. Around 30,000 took to the streets of Brussels. Pierre Lejeune, the president of the National Railway Workers Union, says he hopes that the strike would be a “wake up call to the government negotiators” who are considering raising the pension age for public sector workers as they struggle to form a coalition. (Global News)
❧ More than 100 illegal miners have been found dead inside an abandoned gold mine in South Africa and more than 500 others remain trapped. They have been trapped underground for months and have suffered from severe dehydration and malnutrition, made worse by the authorities’ decision in November to deprive them of food and water in an effort to force them out. According to the Associated Press:
Illegal mining is common in parts of gold-rich South Africa where companies close down mines that are no longer profitable, leaving informal miners to illegally enter them to try and find leftover deposits. Large groups often go underground for months to maximize their profits, taking food, water, generators and other equipment with them, but also relying on others on the surface to send down more supplies.
The government is now undertaking rescue efforts. Thirty of the men have been freed and 20 bodies have been recovered, but it will likely take weeks to get everyone out.
❧ Booker Ngesa Omole, the leader of the Communist Party of Kenya, says there was an assassination attempt against him on Saturday. Omole reports that eight armed men “dressed in police combat gear” broke into his home around 3 a.m., causing him to fire three gunshots in self-defense until the attackers fled. Officially, police in the city of Mlolongo are investigating the incident as a robbery, but Omole and the Communist Party describe it as an assassination attempt and blame “rogue state militias and counter-revolutionary elements.” Given the Kenyan government’s recent violent crackdown against protesters and dissidents of all kinds, and the wave of suspicious disappearances of its critics, that doesn’t sound implausible. (TV 47)
Omole in December 2024. (Image: @BookerBiro via Twitter)
CURRENT-EST AFFAIRS
Author and podcaster Daniel Bessner has reviewed The Myth of American Idealism—Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson’s book with Noam Chomsky—in the Nation. In addition to a thoughtful critique of the book, the review includes this amusing portrait of the two authors, which Nathan said fulfilled his “life goal of being caricatured in The Nation.”
“While my nose is indeed bulbous it is not Rudolph-red. But otherwise I can't really say this is inaccurate,” Nathan said.
❧ Wildfires across the Los Angeles area have killed at least 24 people since they broke out last week. The largest, in Palisades and Eaton, continue to burn and more than 88,000 people are currently under evacuation orders. Debate has raged over who exactly is at fault for the LA fire department’s inability, despite their heroic efforts, to contain the fires.In Jacobin, our friend Ben Burgis points to decades of austerity, not just for fire services, but for climate projects that could have stopped the fires from getting this bad in the first place.
❧ Also in California, Twitch streamer Hasan Piker has done what the corporate media should be doing: he interviewed the incarcerated firefighters who have been risking their lives for as little as $1 an hour. Check the video out below:
❧ In a rare good decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that a lawsuit by Honolulu officials against Big Oil for promoting “misinformation” about climate change can proceed. In 2020, the city and county of Honolulu and the city’s board of water supply sued Sunoco, Shell, and 15 other energy companies for creating a public nuisance and failing to disclose the dangers their products pose to the climate. It’s widely documented that fossil fuel companies have spent decades covering up evidence that carbon emissions from oil are causing global temperatures to rise. However, no company has ever been brought to trial in a U.S. court for its role in the climate crisis. (The Guardian)
CURRENT-EST AFFAIRS
Last week, as wildfires swept across Southern California, Nathan J. Robinson wrote about how “We Need To Call Out The Climate Criminals Right Now”:
In response to these calamities, we need clarity. We need to help people understand what is happening to them and why. They’re going to be victimized by many more extreme weather events in the years to come, and there are no signs so far that as the effects worsen, we’re going to see our political leaders show any leadership. We have to show people how the interests of the fossil fuel industry have been put above the interests of the population at large, so that they understand the crisis is something being done to them by the powerful, not just something happening to them because life’s rough and God is capricious.
❧ In Tennessee, the bosses at a plastics factorywhere six workers died during Hurricane Helene are adding insult to injury. Impact Plastics is still claiming in court that it never told anyone they couldn’t leave work during the hurricane, which directly contradicts the testimony of workers who were on the scene. But don’t worry, the company has come up with a way of making it all right: give the mourning family members fast-food gift cards with their dead parents and spouses’ last paychecks!
It was like, “Your mom died, but go get a burger,” Guillermo Mendoza said. “It happened, so here is a little snack.” Employees who survived the flooding, including Robert Jarvis, said they also received gift cards from the company. “I was shocked, and it bothered me,” Jarvis said. “That is how they treated us and what they thought about us.”
And they wonder why people hate corporations! (WSMV 4)
❧ Oklahoma Republicans are trying to ban all but two cities in the state from having homeless shelters. A new bill introduced in the state legislature by Senator Lisa Standridge would make it illegal for any city with less than 300,000 citizens to use public resources for homeless shelters or services, and force them to “immediately terminate” any existing programs. The thing is, only Tulsa and Oklahoma City have that many citizens, so government help for the homeless would be forbidden in the entire rest of the state. Housing advocates in the state call the bill "unnecessarily cruel,” but that’s an understatement. It’s outright class war, and would likely cause completely preventable deaths from starvation and exposure to extreme heat if the legislation passes. It has to be fought. (KFOR)
Senator Standridge describes herself as a “conservative warrior for children and families,” but apparently only the ones with paid-up mortgages. (Image: Oklahoma Senate)
❧ Zohran Mamdani, the socialist candidate for New York City mayor, has raised an impressive amount of campaign funds. Since announcing his candidacy, Mamdani has amassed $642,339 from 6,502 unique donors, meaning the average donation is slightly less than $100. That’s more than any other candidate, including incumbent Mayor Eric Adams—and more than $300,000 of it is eligible for New York’s 8-to-1 public matching program, meaning his campaign should get “a minimum of $2.4 million in public money” to add to its war chest. Mamdani currently trails several other candidates in the polls, but this influx of cash may change that. (Hellgate NYC)
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What are our politicians and oligarchs up to?”)
❧ There’s a big lobbying effort to prevent RFK Jr. from being confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Given the narrow Republican majority in the Senate, Kennedy can only afford to lose three Republican votes before his cabinet appointment fails—and a few Republicans, like Louisiana’s Senator Bill Cassidy, have already expressed concern about his anti-vaccine views.
So a Democratic lobbying group called Protect Our Care has started a “Stop RFK War Room” to try and pick off a few more votes through “lobbying, grassroots advocacy urging Americans to contact their senators, paid advertising in Washington and in the states of key senators and a report on Kennedy’s anti-vaccine rhetoric that was hand delivered to Senate offices,” spending more than $1 million on the whole campaign. As we’ve written before, Kennedy’s ideas about healthcare would be a total disaster for the country if they’re put into practice—especially as a worrying bird flu situation continues to develop—so if Protect Our Care can keep him out of office, a lot of people would probably breathe a sigh of relief. (Politico)
With any luck, we won’t be seeing this seal of approval on any tinctures or elixirs any time soon. (Art byEllen Burchfrom Current Affairs Magazine,Issue 51, November-December 2024.)
❧ [CONTENT WARNING: Numerous forms of hate speech] Amid a wave of CEOs attempting to appease the incoming Trump administration, Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of changes to Meta’s content moderation policies last week. In addition to abandoning its “fact checking” program, the platform says it will “allow more speech by lifting restrictions.”Meta has said that they hope to foster wider ideological diversity on the platform by “getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate.”
What does getting rid of these restrictions mean in practice? According to an internal document uncovered by the Intercept, it seems to mostly mean that you’ll no longer get in trouble for saying blatantly racist, homophobic, transphobic, or otherwise hateful things. The document provides a frighteningly detailed guide for content moderators on what speech is now permitted. It lists specific examples, including: “Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit,” “Gays are freaks,” and “Look at that tranny (beneath photo of 17-year-old girl).” The memo makes a very odd distinction regarding “generalizations” about certain groups. For some reason, they deem it permissible to compare immigrants to “filth or feces,” but not to animals or pathogens. The policy even clarifies that it’s fine to say that “Migrants are no better than vomit,” but not OK to compare Syrian refugees to “rodents.”
At any rate, it appears that when Facebook says it wants to enhance “discourse and debate,” what it really means is that any asshole should get to berate minority groups with slurs and insults, including against minors. (It also begs the question: Is there a specific guy at Facebook whose job it was to come up with this list of slurs? Some sort of Chief Racism Officer, perhaps? Or was there a session where Facebook employees sat around the table bouncing ideas for slurs off one another?)
❧ In the waning days of his presidency, Joe Biden has extended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to more than 800,000 Venezuelan and Salvadoran immigrants to protect them from deportation by the Trump administration for another 18 months. Biden has cited “environmental conditions” in El Salvador and the recent re-election of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro to justify extending protections to immigrants from those two countries specifically. However, immigration advocates point out that he could have extended the protections to people from more countries, like Guatemala, Ecuador, or Haiti, or extended TPS for groups that already receive it for longer. Still, it’s a small obstacle that will hopefully make Trump’s “mass deportation” pledge a bit more difficult to carry out. (Associated Press)
❧ The Supreme Court is also set to rule on whether insurance companies will be required to cover HIV-prevention drugs including pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). Right now, the Affordable Care Act requires insurers to cover preventative medications like PrEP without cost sharing. However, a conservative attorney, Jonathan Mitchell, is pushing the court to overturn that requirement on behalf of a Texas-based business, claiming that it violates their religious rights because treatment for HIV promotes “homosexual behavior.” The extremely conservative Fifth Circuit court sided with the homophobic plaintiffs, and the Justice Department immediately swooped in to challenge the case before the Supreme Court. If the Court, which is stacked with zealots who tend to love granting religious exemptions to laws, sides with the plaintiffs, it could have disastrous effects. It could imperil not just coverage of PrEP, but other cost-free preventative treatments, including heart statins and screenings for cancers and other diseases. (The Advocate)
RODENT FACT OF THE WEEK
Rats can drive little cars… and they seem to really enjoy it!
In 2019, a team of researchers in Virginia, seeking to better understand how to lower stress, put together an intriguing experiment. They created miniature cars out of cereal containers to see if driving would lower rats’ stress levels. Enticed with a delicious Froot Loop, rats were trained to hit the gas by pulling on a wire inside the vehicle and drive to the cereal’s location. Soon, they were driving and steering with “surprising precision.” The researchers noted that the rats who grew up in more comforting natural environments—given more space, toys, and other rat friends to mingle with—learned more quickly than rats raised in a sparser lab setting.
Since then, the research has only gotten more advanced, as have the rats’ sweet rides. Researcher Kelly Lambert wrote in the Conversation that the new “rat operated vehicles” (ROVs), which now feature “rat-proof wiring, indestructible tires and ergonomic driving levers – are akin to a rodent version of Tesla’s Cybertruck.” They appear to be better designed because the rodents have been found to enjoy driving them. Lambert says, “Unexpectedly, we found that the rats had an intense motivation for their driving training, often jumping into the car and revving the ‘lever engine’ before their vehicle hit the road.” They found that even when they had the option to obtain a Fruit Loop in more efficient ways, the rats would more often take the longer route, choosing to drive in the car.
It seems that even rodents cannot resist the thrall of car culture that has captured so many of us humans. Hopefully nobody will tell New York’s millions of rats about the joys of driving, or the city’s congestion pricing scheme may suddenly go up in flames!
Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Header graphic by Cali Traina Blume. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.
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