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Israeli strikes across Gaza kill dozens of Palestinians, even in largely emptied north
Israeli forces bombarded cities, towns and refugee camps across Gaza on Thursday, killing dozens of people in a widening air and ground offensive against Hamas that has forced thousands more to flee from homes and shelters in recent days.
The war has already killed over 20,000 Palestinians and driven around 85% of the population of 2.3 million from their homes. Much of northern Gaza has been leveled, and it has been largely depopulated and isolated from the rest of the territory for weeks. Many fear a similar fate awaits the south as Israel expands its offensive to most of the tiny enclave.
Israel has vowed to dismantle Hamas — which is still putting up stiff resistance, even in the north — and bring back more than 100 hostages still held by the militants after their Oct. 7 attack into southern Israel. The assault killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians.
Also read: Israel launches heavy strikes across central and southern Gaza after widening its offensive
Israeli officials have brushed off international calls for a cease-fire, saying it would amount to a victory for Hamas.
The United States — while providing crucial support for the offensive — has urged Israel to take greater measures to spare civilians and allow in more aid. But humanitarian workers say the amount of food, fuel and medical supplies entering is still far below what is needed, and 1 in 4 Palestinians in Gaza is starving, according to U.N. officials.
STRIKES FROM NORTH TO SOUTH
An Israeli airstrike on a home in the northern town of Beit Lahiyeh — one of the first targets of the ground invasion that began in October — buried at least 21 people, including women and children, according to a family member.
Bassel Kheir al-Din, a journalist with a local TV station, said the strike flattened his family house and severely damaged three neighboring homes. He said 12 members of his family — including three children ages 2, 7 and 8 — were buried and presumed dead, and that nine neighbors were missing.
In central Gaza, Israeli warplanes and artillery pounded the built-up Bureij and Nuseirat refugee camps, leveling buildings, residents said. Israel said this week it would expand its ground offensive into central Gaza. The Israeli military typically launches waves of airstrikes and shelling before troops and tanks move in.
Also read: Lose a limb or risk death? Growing numbers among Gaza's thousands of war-wounded face hard decisions
A hospital in the nearby town of Deir al-Balah received the bodies of 25 people killed overnight, including five children and seven women, hospital records showed Thursday. Nonstop explosions could be heard throughout the night in the town where hundreds of thousands of people have sought shelter, with many spending cold nights sleeping on sidewalks.
“It was another night of killing and massacres,” said Saeed Moustafa, a resident of the Nuseirat camp. He said people were still crying out from the rubble of a house hit Wednesday by an airstrike.
“We are unable to get them out. We hear their screams, but we don’t have equipment," he said.
Farther south, in Khan Younis, the Palestinian Red Crescent said a strike near its Al-Amal Hospital killed at least 10 people and wounded another 12. Much of the city’s population has left, but many are sheltering near Al-Amal and another hospital, hoping they will be spared from the bombardment.
A strike Thursday evening destroyed a residential building in the town of Rafah, at the southernmost end of Gaza, killing at least 23 people, according to the media office of the nearby Al-Kuwaiti Hospital said.
Outside of Gaza, Israeli security forces shot and killed a Palestinian man who they say got out of his car and stabbed two security workers at a checkpoint between the West Bank and east Jerusalem.
The security workers were in moderate condition, according to the Magen David Adom rescue service.
The occupied West Bank has experienced a surge in violence since Oct. 7, with more than 300 Palestinians killed in unrest and clashes with Israeli forces.
ANOTHER WAVE OF DISPLACEMENT
Rami Abu Mosab, who lives in the Bureij refugee camp, said thousands of people have fled their homes in recent days because of the intense bombardment. He plans to remain there because nowhere in Gaza is safe.
“Here is death and there is death,” he said, “To die in your home is better.”
Bureij and Nuseirat are among several camps across the region that were built to house hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war surrounding Israel's creation. They have since grown into crowded residential neighborhoods.
Some 700,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes during that conflict, an exodus the Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, or catastrophe. Some 1.9 million have been displaced within Gaza since Oct. 7.
As Israel has broadened its offensive, fleeing Palestinians have packed into areas along the Egyptian border and the southern Mediterranean coastline, where shelters and tent camps are overflowing. Even in those areas, Israel continues to strike what it says are militant targets.
Also read: Egypt floats ambitious plan to end Israel-Hamas war and create transitional Palestinian government
The U.N. humanitarian office said the scale and intensity of the fighting impedes its aid deliveries. The office, known as OCHA, cited blocked roads, a scarcity of fuel and telecommunications blackouts as some of the obstacles hampering the humanitarian response.
Still, it said the U.N. World Food Program provided food parcels to about a half-million people in U.N. shelters in southern and central Gaza since Saturday.
The Israeli military blames the high civilian death toll on Hamas, which positions fighters, tunnels and rocket launchers in dense residential areas. But the military rarely comments on individual strikes.
Israel's offensive in Gaza has already been one of the most devastating military campaigns in recent history. More than 21,300 Palestinians, most of them women and children, have been killed, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-ruled Gaza. Another 55,600 have been wounded, it says. Those counts do not differentiate between civilians and combatants.
The military says it has killed thousands of militants, without presenting evidence, and that 167 of its soldiers have been killed and hundreds wounded in the ground offensive.
Maine bars Trump from ballot as US Supreme Court weighs states' authority to block former president
Maine's Democratic secretary of state on Thursday removed former President Donald Trump from the state's presidential primary ballot under the Constitution's insurrection clause, becoming the first election official to take action unilaterally as the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to decide whether Trump remains eligible to return to the White House.
The decision by Secretary of State Shenna Bellows follows a ruling earlier this month by the Colorado Supreme Court that booted Trump from the ballot there under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. That decision has been stayed until the U.S. Supreme Court decides whether Trump is barred by the Civil War-era provision, which prohibits those who "engaged in insurrection" from holding office.
The Trump campaign said it would appeal Bellows' decision to Maine's state courts, and Bellows suspended her ruling until that court system rules on the case. In the end, it is likely that the nation's highest court will have the final say on whether Trump appears on the ballot in Maine and in the other states.
Bellows found that Trump could no longer run for his prior job because his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol violated Section 3, which bans from office those who "engaged in insurrection." Bellows made the ruling after some state residents, including a bipartisan group of former lawmakers, challenged Trump's position on the ballot.
"I do not reach this conclusion lightly," Bellows wrote in her 34-page decision. "I am mindful that no Secretary of State has ever deprived a presidential candidate of ballot access based on Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. I am also mindful, however, that no presidential candidate has ever before engaged in insurrection."
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The Trump campaign immediately slammed the ruling. "We are witnessing, in real-time, the attempted theft of an election and the disenfranchisement of the American voter," campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement.
Legal experts said that Thursday's ruling demonstrates the need for the nation's highest court, which has never ruled on Section 3, to clarify what states can do.
"It is clear that these decisions are going to keep popping up, and inconsistent decisions reached (like the many states keeping Trump on the ballot over challenges) until there is final and decisive guidance from the U.S. Supreme Court," Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California-Los Angeles, wrote in response to the Maine decision. "It seems a certainty that SCOTUS will have to address the merits sooner or later."
While Maine has just four electoral votes, it's one of two states to split them. Trump won one of Maine's electors in 2020, so having him off the ballot there, should he emerge as the Republican general election candidate, could have outsized implications in a race that is expected to be narrowly decided.
That's in contrast to Colorado, which Trump lost by 13 percentage points in 2020 and where he wasn't expected to compete in November if he wins the Republican presidential nomination.
In her decision, Bellows acknowledged that the U.S. Supreme Court will probably have the final word but said it was important she did her official duty.
That won her praise from the former state lawmakers who filed one of the petitions forcing her to consider the case.
"Secretary Bellows showed great courage in her ruling, and we look forward to helping her defend her judicious and correct decision in court. No elected official is above the law or our constitution, and today's ruling reaffirms this most important of American principles," Republican Kimberly Rosen, independent Thomas Saviello and Democrat Ethan Strimling said in a statement.
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But other Republicans in the state were outraged.
"This is a sham decision that mimics Third World dictatorships," Maine's House Republican leader, Billy Bob Faulkingham, said in a statement. "It will not stand legal scrutiny. People have a right to choose their leaders devoid of mindless decisions by partisan hacks."
The Trump campaign on Tuesday requested that Bellows disqualify herself from the case because she'd previously tweeted that Jan. 6 was an "insurrection" and bemoaned that Trump was acquitted in his impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate after the capitol attack. She refused to step aside.
"My decision was based exclusively on the record presented to me at the hearing and was in no way influenced by my political affiliation or personal views about the events of Jan. 6, 2021," Bellows told the Associated Press Thursday night.
Bellows is a former head of the Maine chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. All seven of the justices of the Colorado Supreme Court, which split 4-3 on whether to become the first court in history to declare a presidential candidate ineligible under Section 3, were appointed by Democrats. Two Washington, D.C.-based liberal groups have launched the most serious prior challenges to Trump, in Colorado and a handful of other states.
That's led Trump to contend the dozens of lawsuits nationwide seeking to remove him from the ballot under Section 3 are a Democratic plot to end his campaign. But some of the most prominent advocates have been conservative legal theorists who argue that the text of the Constitution makes the former president ineligible to run again, just as if he failed to clear the document's age threshold — 35 years old — for the office.
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Likewise, until Bellows' decision, every top state election official, whether Democrat or Republican, had rejected requests to bar Trump from the ballot, saying they didn't have the power to remove him unless ordered to do so by a court.
The timing on the U.S. Supreme Court's decision is unclear, but both sides want it fast. Colorado's Republican Party appealed the Colorado high court decision on Wednesday, urging an expedited schedule, and Trump is also expected to file an appeal within the week. The petitioners in the Colorado case on Thursday urged the nation's highest court to adopt an even faster schedule so it could rule before March 5, known as Super Tuesday, when 16 states, including Colorado and Maine, are scheduled to vote in the Republican presidential nominating process.
The high court needs to formally accept the case first, but legal experts consider that a certainty. The Section 3 cases seem tailor-made for the Supreme Court, addressing an area of U.S. governance where there's scant judicial guidance.
The clause was added in 1868 to keep defeated Confederates from returning to their former positions of power in local and federal government. It prohibits anyone who broke an oath to "support" the Constitution from holding office. The provision was used to bar a wide range of ex-Confederates from positions ranging from local sheriff to Congress, but fell into disuse after an 1872 congressional amnesty for most former Confederates.
Legal historians believe the only time the provision was used in the 20th Century was in 1919, when it was cited to deny a House seat to a socialist who had opposed U.S. involvement in World War I. But since the Jan. 6 attack, it has been revived.
Last year, it was cited by a court to remove a rural New Mexico County Commissioner who had entered the Capitol on Jan. 6. One liberal group tried to remove Republican Reps. Madison Cawthorn and Marjorie Taylor Greene from the 2022 ballot under the provision, but Cawthorn lost his primary so his case was thrown out, and a judge ruled for Greene.
Some critics of the movement to bar Trump warn that the provision could be weaponized in unexpected ways.
They note that conservatives could argue, for example, that Vice President Kamala Harris is likewise barred from office because she raised bail funds for people arrested during the unrest following George Floyd's 2020 murder at the hands of Minneapolis police.
The plaintiffs in Colorado presented historical evidence that even the donation of small sums to money to those seeking to join the Confederacy was grounds for being barred by Section 3. Why, critics have asked, wouldn't that apply to Democrats like Harris today?
US tensions with China are fraying long-cultivated academic ties. Will the chill hurt US interests?
In the 1980s, Fu Xiangdong was a young Chinese virology student who came to the United States to study biochemistry. More than three decades later, he had a prestigious professorship in California and was conducting promising research on Parkinson’s disease.
But now Fu is doing his research at a Chinese university. His American career was derailed as U.S.-China relations unraveled, putting his collaborations with a Chinese university under scrutiny. He ended up resigning.
Fu’s story mirrors the rise and fall of U.S.-China academic engagement.
Beginning in 1978, such cooperation expanded for decades, largely insulated from the fluctuations in relations between the two countries. Today, it's in decline, with Washington viewing Beijing as a strategic rival and there are growing fears about Chinese spying. The number of Chinese students in the United States is down, and U.S.-Chinese research collaboration is shrinking. Academics are shying away from potential China projects over fears that seemingly minor missteps could end their careers.
This decline isn’t hurting just students and researchers. Analysts say it will undercut American competitiveness and weaken global efforts to address health issues. Previous collaborations have led to significant advances, including in influenza surveillance and vaccine development.
“That’s been really harmful to U.S. science," said Deborah Seligsohn, a former U.S. diplomat in Beijing and now a political scientist at Villanova University. “We are producing less science because of this falloff."
For some, given the heightened U.S.-China tensions, the prospect for scientific advances needs to take a back seat to security concerns. In their view, such cooperation aids China by giving it access to sensitive commercial, defense and technological information. They also fear the Chinese government is using its presence in American universities to monitor and harass dissidents.
Those concerns were at the core of the China Initiative, a program begun in 2018 by the Justice Department under the Trump administration to uncover acts of economic espionage. While it failed to catch any spies, the effort did have an impact on researchers in American schools.
Under the initiative, Gang Chen, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was charged in 2021 with hiding links with the Chinese government. Prosecutors eventually dropped all charges, but Chen lost his research group. He said his family went through a hard time and has yet to recover.
Chen said investigations and wrongful prosecutions like his “are pushing out talents.”
“That’s going to hurt U.S. scientific enterprise, hurt U.S. competitiveness,” he said.
The Biden administration ended the China Initiative in 2022, but there are other efforts targeting scholars with Chinese connections.
In Florida, a state law aimed at curbing influences from foreign countries has raised concerns that students from China could effectively be banned from labs at the state’s public universities.
This month, a group of Republican senators expressed concerns about Beijing’s influence on American campuses through student groups and urged the Justice Department to determine whether such groups should be registered as foreign agents.
Miles Yu, director of the China Center at Hudson Institute, said Beijing has exploited U.S. higher education and research institutes to modernize its economy and military.
“For some time, out of cultural, self-interest reasons, many people have double loyalty, erroneously thinking it’s OK to serve the interests of both the U.S. and China,” Yu said.
The U.S.-China Science and Technology Cooperation Agreement — the first major pact between the two countries, signed in 1979 — was set to lapse this year. In August, Congress extended the agreement by six months, but its future also hangs in the balance.
If there is a new agreement, it should take into account new advances in science and technology, Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to China, said recently.
There were only 700 American students studying in China, Burns said, compared with nearly 300,000 Chinese students in the U.S., which is down from a peak of about 372,000 in 2019-2020.
By October, nearly all Confucius Institutes, a Beijing-backed Chinese language and culture program, had closed on American university campuses. Their number fell from about 100 in 2019 to fewer than five now, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
The National Institute of Health in 2018 began an investigation into foreign ties by asking dozens of American institutions to look into whether their faculty members might have violated policies regarding use of federal money, usually in cases involving partnerships with Chinese institutions.
In the case of Fu, then a professor at the University of California, San Diego, his links with Wuhan University were the focus of the NIH investigation. Fu insisted that federal money was never used toward work there, according to the local news outlet La Jolla Light, but the university ruled against him.
In a China Initiative case, Charles Lieber, a former chair of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University, was found guilty in December 2021 of lying to the federal government about his affiliations with a Chinese university and a Chinese government talent-recruitment program.
Chen, the MIT professor, said once-encouraged collaborations suddenly became problematic. Disclosure rules had been unclear, and in many cases such collaborations had been commended, he said.
“Very few people in the general public understand that most U.S. universities, including MIT, don't take on any secret research projects on campus,” Chen said. “We aim to publish our research findings.”
The investigations have had negative effects on university campuses. “People are so fearful that, if you check the wrong box, you could be accused of lying to the government,” Chen said.
In June, an academic study published in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal said the China Initiative likely has caused widespread fear and anxiety among scientists of Chinese descent.
The study, which surveyed 1,304 scientists of Chinese descent employed by American universities, showed many considered leaving the U.S. or no longer applying for federal grants, the researchers wrote.
An analysis of research papers in the PubMed database showed that, as of 2021, U.S. scientists still co-wrote more papers with scientists from China than from any other country, but those with a history of collaborating with China experienced a decline in research productivity after 2019, soon after the NIH investigation started.
The study, to be published in the PNAS journal by the year’s end, found the impact of U.S.-based scholars in collaboration with China, as measured by citations, fell by 10%.
“It has a chilling effect on science” said Ruixue Jia, the study’s leading researcher, of the NIH investigation. “While researchers tried to finish existing cooperative projects, they were unwilling to start new ones, and the results could become worse. Both countries have been hurt.”
Three months after Fu resigned from the California school, his name appeared on the website of Westlake University, a private research university in the Chinese city of Hangzhou. At Westlake, Fu leads a lab to tackle issues in RNA biology and regenerative medicine.
In August, Fu was joined by Guan Kunliang, a fellow scientist in San Diego, who also was investigated. Guan was banned from applying for NIH grants for two years. Guan didn’t lose his job, but his lab had shrunk. Now, he’s rebuilding a molecular cell biology lab at Westlake.
Li Chenjian, a former vice provost of Peking University, said the talent loss to China is a complicated question and the worry might be overblown because the U.S. remains the go-to place for the world’s best brains and has an excess of talent.
More than 87% of Chinese students who received their doctorates in the U.S. had planned to stay in the U.S. from 2005 to 2015, according to the National Science Foundation. The percentage fell to 73.9 in 2021 but rose to 76.7 in 2022, above the average of 74.3% for all foreign students who had earned research doctorate degrees in the U.S.
Rao Yi, a prominent neurobiologist who returned to China from the U.S. in 2007, said American policies related to the China Initiative were “morally wrong.”
“We will see how long it will take for the U.S. government and its morally upright scientists to correct such mistakes and come around to see the bigger picture of human development, beyond petty-mindedness and shortsightedness,” he said. “Throughout history, it is always the morally corrupt governments which advocate the blocking of scientific communication and persecution of scientists."
Hunter Biden defies congressional subpoena, says will only testify in public
Hunter Biden on Wednesday defied a congressional subpoena to appear privately for a deposition before Republican investigators who have been digging into his business dealings, insisting outside the U.S. Capitol that he will only testify in public.
In a rare public statement, the Democratic president’s son slammed a GOP subpoena requesting closed-door testimony, saying it could be manipulated.
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“Republicans do not want an open process where Americans can see their tactics, expose their baseless inquiry, or hear what I have to say,” Biden said outside the Capitol. “What are they afraid of? I am here.”
Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, has said Republicans expect “full cooperation” with the private deposition. Comer and Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, told reporters later Wednesday that they will begin looking at contempt of Congress proceedings in response to Hunter Biden's lack of cooperation.
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"He just got into more trouble today,” Comer said.
For months, Republicans have been pursuing an impeachment inquiry seeking to tie President Joe Biden to his son Hunter's business dealings. So far, they have failed to uncover evidence directly implicating President Biden in any wrongdoing.
Democrats have been united against the Republican impeachment push, saying it's “an illegitimate exercise” merely meant to distract from GOP chaos and dysfunction.
“We are at a remarkable juncture for the U.S. House of Representatives,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee. “Because this is an impeachment inquiry where no one has been able to define what criminal or constitutional offense they’re looking for.”
But questions have arisen about the ethics surrounding the Biden family’s international business, and lawmakers insist their evidence paints a troubling picture of “influence peddling” in their business dealings, particularly with clients overseas.
“There is no evidence to support the allegations that my father was financially involved in my business because it did not happen," Hunter Biden said.
Separately, Hunter Biden is facing criminal charges in two states from a special counsel overseeing a long-running investigation. He’s charged with firearm counts in Delaware, alleging he broke laws against drug users having guns in 2018, a period when he has acknowledged struggling with addiction. Special counsel David Weiss also filed new charges and nine new tax counts last week, alleging he schemed to avoid paying about $1.4 million in taxes over a three-year period.
Later Wednesday, the House is expected to authorize the impeachment inquiry into the president. House Republicans are hoping a vote to formalize their investigation will help their legal standing when enforcing subpoenas to Hunter Biden and other Biden family members.
“Mr. Biden’s counsel and the White House have both argued that the reason he couldn’t come for a deposition was because there wasn’t a formal vote for an impeachment inquiry,” Jordan told reporters. “Well, that’s going to happen in a few hours.”
He added, “And when that happens, we’ll see what their excuse is then.”
The White House has chalked the whole process up as a “partisan smear campaign” that Republicans are pushing ahead with “despite the fact that members of their own party have admitted there is no evidence to support impeaching President Biden.”
“If they press onwards with this baseless fishing expedition, it only proves how divorced from reality this sham investigation is, and will come at the expense of meaningful work to actually address the issues the American people care about, like lowering costs, creating jobs, and strengthening our health care,” White House spokesperson Ian Sams said in a recent statement.
Biden calls 'surge' in antisemitism 'sickening' during White House Hanukkah reception
President Joe Biden hosted a Hanukkah reception at the White House on Monday night, vowing to continue to stand with Israel in its war with Hamas while saying that a “surge of antisemitism" around the globe "is sickening.”
Nearly 800 guests filled the East Room to almost overflowing. The crowd included Holocaust survivors, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and around two dozen members of Congress. Also present were Jewish community leaders and second gentleman Doug Emhoff, who was among those who lit a menorah partially made from the original timbers of the White House.
The husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, Emhoff is the first Jewish person to be the spouse of one of the country’s nationally elected leaders. Last week he presided over the lighting ceremony of a massive menorah in front of the White House.
A menorah is lit nightly during the eight-day Jewish festival, which this year is being celebrated from Dec. 7 until Friday. Rabbi Angela Buchdahl of Central Synagogue in New York City led Monday's ceremony, telling the president: “You've been a steadfast supporter of Israel's right to defend itself. A trusted and true friend to the Jewish people.”
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Buchdahl talked about the darkness of the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which triggered war with Israel. But she said that since, “Its only gotten darker, with many around the world justifying terrorism, normalizing antisemitism, with the pain of so many lives lost — Israeli and Palestinian — in this just but tragic war.”
She also drew sustained applause when she called Biden “a beacon of strength.”
The president told the crowd, “You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist.” He said that while he doesn't always agree with Israel's leaders and governmental policies, “Were there no Israel, there would not be a Jew in the world who is safe.”
“We continue to provide military assistance until they get rid of Hamas but we have to be careful," Biden said of U.S. support for the war. He added: "The whole world, public opinion can shift overnight. We can't let that happen."
The Biden administration in May announced what it called the first-ever national strategy to counter antisemitism. Still, antisemitism has only intensified in some quarters as criticism rises over the mounting Palestinian death toll. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned of an impending “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza.
Biden said of hostages being held by Hamas, which U.S. authorities have been working for months to help free, “We’re not going to stop until we get every one of them home.” The crowd also cheered when he talked of his administration’s efforts to increase humanitarian aid flowing to civilians in Gaza caught in the fighting.
Read: Palestinians hope a vote in the UN General Assembly will show wide support for a Gaza cease-fire
Others, though, have decried Biden's stance on the war. Earlier Monday, protesters gathered outside the White House as nearly 20 women describing themselves as “Jewish elders” chained themselves to the fence around the grounds. Wearing black T-shirts reading “Not In Our Name,” they chanted: “Biden, Biden, pick a side! Cease-fire not genocide!” while reading the names of those killed in Gaza.
Authorities took the women away after using a bolt cutter to cut the chains that had encircled the protesters' waists. Organizers said they deliberately picked the day of the White House's Hanukkah celebration to protest.
“We, as elder Jews, we know what genocide looks like. We know what genocide feels like. It’s in our bodies, in our bones,” said Esther Farmer of Jewish Voice for Peace, which organized the demonstration. “It's horrifying, it's devastating. Sometimes, it's hard to get up in the morning to see this, and it's being done in the name of Jews. So we are here — as elderly Jews — to say, not in our name.”
The U.S. Park Police said they issued 18 citations to the protesters and released them from custody.
Biden at the reception said he recognized American Jews “hurt” and “fear for your safety” because “the surge of antisemitism in the United States and around the world is sickening.”
“We see it in our communities and in schools and colleges and social media,” the president said, adding that such instances “surface painful scars.”
On Saturday, Liz Magill, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, resigned following pressure from donors and criticism over testimony at a congressional hearing where she was unable to say under repeated questioning that calls on campus for the genocide of Jews would violate the school’s conduct policy. Universities across the U.S. have been accused of failing to protect Jewish students amid the fallout from the war in Gaza.
White House spokesman Andrew Bates declined to comment Monday on Magill’s decision to resign. Presidents Claudine Gay of Harvard and Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who appeared alongside Magill, have also faced criticism. Gay has apologized for her remarks.
Bates noted that Magill issued a statement withdrawing her remarks.
“That was the right thing to do,” he said.
6 dead, nearly 2 dozen injured after severe storms tear through central Tennessee
Severe storms that tore through central Tennessee killed six people Saturday and sent about two dozen to the hospital as homes and businesses were damaged in multiple cities.
Three people, including a child, were killed after an apparent tornado struck Montgomery County north of Nashville near the Kentucky state line, county officials said in a news release. And the Nashville Emergency Operation Center said in a post on a social media account that three people were killed by severe storms in a neighborhood just north of downtown. Meanwhile, another 23 people were treated for injuries at hospitals in Montgomery County.
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Photos posted by the Clarksville fire department on social media showed damaged houses with debris strewn in the lawns, a tractor trailer flipped on its side on a highway and insulation ripped out of building walls.
“This is devastating news and our hearts are broken for the families of those who lost loved ones,” said Clarksville Mayor Joe Pitts in a statement. “The city stands ready to help them in their time of grief.”
No other information about the victims was immediately available Saturday.
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The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement that a tornado touched down around 2 p.m. A shelter was set up at a local high school.
Residents were asked to stay at home while first responders evaluated the situation. In a briefing shared on social media, Pitts said there was extensive damage.
“So please, if you need help, call 911 and help will be on the way immediately. But if you can, please stay home. Do not get out on the roads. Our first responders need time and space,” he said.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee said he and his wife, Maria, were praying for all Tennesseans who had been affected by the storms.
“We mourn the lives lost and ask that everyone continue to follow guidance from local and state officials,” Lee said in a statement.
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Shanika Washington said that as soon as she heard the storm sirens going off in her Clarksville neighborhood, she took her children, ages 5 and 10, to a windowless bathroom in the basement of her townhouse.
“The lights were flickering, so I knew it was somewhere close in the vicinity,” she said. “I just kept praying to God as it was going on. It was very terrifying and scary.”
During their 20 harrowing minutes in the bathroom, Washington hovered over her children as a protective shield.
“The back door absolutely did fly open, and you just heard a bunch of wind,” she said. “The blinds and stuff were like shaking really bad. I could tell that we were dead smack in the middle of a storm.”
When she came out of the bathroom, she looked out of a window and saw the destruction: Debris swept onto cars that had their windows broken out. Shutters ripped from homes. Some roofs were ripped off townhouses. Air conditioning units and backyard grills were tossed like toys, and wooden dividers between townhouses were missing.
Because the power in the area was out, Washington took her children to a hotel for the night.
“I’m still shaken up a little bit, so I probably won’t get much sleep tonight,” Washington said. “I’m still trying to just kind of like process it all."
Allie Phillips, who lives in Clarksville, said she was grabbing lunch when she began receiving notifications that a tornado was quickly approaching her neighborhood.
“It was excruciating watching the live stream and not knowing if my house was still there,” she said. “When we finally decided to leave, the road to my home was shut down because so many power lines were on the road and we had to take a detour.”
Phillips said her home survived with minimal damage – noting that her daughter’s toys were banged up and that a neighbor’s dog kennel hit the back of her home – but she was saddened to see that her neighbor’s house was missing a roof and a home up the block had all but completely disappeared.
The National Weather Service issued multiple tornado warnings in Tennessee, and said it planned to survey an area where an apparent tornado hit in Kentucky.
More than 80,000 electricity customers were without power in Tennessee on Saturday night, according to PowerOutage.us.
The storm came nearly two years to the day after the National Weather Service recorded 41 tornadoes through a handful of states, including 16 in Tennessee and eight in Kentucky. A total of 81 people died in Kentucky alone.
Trump calls Biden the ‘destroyer’ of democracy
Former President Donald Trump on Saturday attempted to turn the tables on his likely rival in November, President Joe Biden, arguing that the man whose election victory Trump tried to overturn is “the destroyer of American democracy.”
Trump's allegations about Biden, a Democrat, echo the ones that Biden has been making for years against his predecessor. As Trump has dominated the Republican presidential primary and talked about targeting his rivals and the news media if he wins the White House again, Biden has stepped up his own warnings, contending Trump is “ determined to destroy American democracy.”
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On Saturday, Trump made his most explicit argument to date on why voters should instead see his rival as the bigger democratic threat. Trump repeated his longstanding contention that the four criminal indictments against him show Biden is misusing the federal justice system against his rival.
“He’s been weaponizing government against his political opponents like a Third World political tyrant,” Trump said to a crowd in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “Biden and his radical left allies like to pose as standing up as allies of democracy,” Trump continued, arguing: “Joe Biden is not the defender of American democracy, Joe Biden is the destroyer of American democracy.”
Ammar Moussa, a Biden campaign spokesman, responded: “Donald Trump’s America in 2025 is one where the government is his personal weapon to lock up his political enemies. You don’t have to take our word for it — Trump has admitted it himself."
Trump has long promised to prosecute Biden in retaliation should he return to the White House. On Saturday, though, the former president extended his arguments about Biden's threat to democracy to lawsuits filed by two liberal organizations seeking to rule him ineligible for office under a rarely used Civil War-era constitutional provision that prohibits those who “engaged in insurrection” from returning to office.
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All of the suits to date have failed. Biden has no involvement in them, but Democratic donors who back him also help fund the liberal groups filing the claims. That's led Trump to blame them on the president, whom he contended had “defaced the Constitution” in trying to block him.
And the former president, who has a long history of speaking warmly about authoritarian leaders and sometimes echoing their rhetoric, seemed aware of criticisms against him. “Americans don’t like fascists,” Trump said. He praised Chinese President Xi Jinping and China's criminal justice system for swiftly executing drug dealers, and boasted that North Korean President Kim Jong Un likes him.
But Trump noted he was often attacked for these relationships and tried to defend them. “It’s good to have a good relationship with people who have nuclear weapons,” he said.
Throughout the speech, Trump repeated his arguments the 2020 presidential election that he lost was “stolen” and that U.S. elections in general are “rigged.” There is no evidence that the 2020 election was stolen. Dozens of lawsuits were dismissed by courts and government and independent reviews have not found enough alleged fraud to throw the outcome into question.
Trump supporters would attack the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to try to stop the certification of Trump's loss to Biden. On Saturday, Trump continued his practice of referring to some of those arrested in connection with the riot as “political prisoners.”
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Earlier in the day, at a rally in Ankeny, Iowa, Trump returned to allegations of Democratic election fraud, one of his favorite themes on the campaign trail. He told the crowd to “guard the vote" in 2024, and focused on diverse cities he has often denigrated as examples of places where fraud would happen.
"You should go into Detroit and you should go into Philadelphia and you should go into some of these places, Atlanta, and you should go into some of these places and we've got to watch those votes when they come in,” Trump told his supporters.
Ex-officer Derek Chauvin, convicted in George Floyd's killing, stabbed in prison, AP source says
Nov 25 (UNB) - Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd, was stabbed by another inmate and seriously injured Friday at a federal prison in Arizona, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press.
The attack happened at the Federal Correctional Institution, Tucson, a medium-security prison that has been plagued by security lapses and staffing shortages. The person was not authorized to publicly discuss details of the attack and spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity.
The Bureau of Prisons confirmed that an incarcerated person was assaulted at FCI Tucson at around 12:30 p.m. local time Friday. In a statement, the agency said responding employees contained the incident and performed "life-saving measures" before the inmate, who it did not name, was taken to a hospital for further treatment and evaluation.
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No employees were injured and the FBI was notified, the Bureau of Prisons said. Visiting at the facility, which has about 380 inmates, has been suspended.
Messages seeking comment were left with Chauvin's lawyers and the FBI.
Chauvin's stabbing is the second high-profile attack on a federal prisoner in the last five months. In July, disgraced sports doctor Larry Nassar was stabbed by a fellow inmate at a federal penitentiary in Florida.
It is also the second major incident at the Tucson federal prison in a little over a year. In November 2022, an inmate at the facility's low-security prison camp pulled out a gun and attempted to shoot a visitor in the head. The weapon, which the inmate shouldn't have had, misfired and no one was hurt.
Chauvin, 47, was sent to FCI Tucson from a maximum-security Minnesota state prison in August 2022 to simultaneously serve a 21-year federal sentence for violating Floyd's civil rights and a 22½-year state sentence for second-degree murder.
Chauvin's lawyer, Eric Nelson, had advocated for keeping him out of general population and away from other inmates, anticipating he'd be a target. In Minnesota, Chauvin was mainly kept in solitary confinement "largely for his own protection," Nelson wrote in court papers last year.
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Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Chauvin's appeal of his murder conviction. Separately, Chauvin is making a longshot bid to overturn his federal guilty plea, claiming new evidence shows he didn't cause Floyd's death.
Floyd, who was Black, died on May 25, 2020, after Chauvin, who is white, pressed a knee on his neck for 9½ minutes on the street outside a convenience store where Floyd was suspected of trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill.
Bystander video captured Floyd's fading cries of "I can't breathe." His death touched off protests worldwide, some of which turned violent, and forced a national reckoning with police brutality and racism.
Three other former officers who were at the scene received lesser state and federal sentences for their roles in Floyd's death.
Chauvin's stabbing comes as the federal Bureau of Prisons has faced increased scrutiny in recent years following wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein's jail suicide in 2019. It's another example of the agency's inability to keep even its highest profile prisoners safe after Nassar's stabbing and "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski's suicide at a federal medical center in June.
An ongoing AP investigation has uncovered deep, previously unreported flaws within the Bureau of Prisons, the Justice Department's largest law enforcement agency with more than 30,000 employees, 158,000 inmates and an annual budget of about $8 billion.
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AP reporting has revealed rampant sexual abuse and other criminal conduct by staff, dozens of escapes, chronic violence, deaths and severe staffing shortages that have hampered responses to emergencies, including inmate assaults and suicides.
Bureau of Prisons Director Colette Peters was brought in last year to reform the crisis-plagued agency. She vowed to change archaic hiring practices and bring new transparency, while emphasizing that the agency's mission is "to make good neighbors, not good inmates."
Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in September, Peters touted steps she'd taken to overhaul problematic prisons and beef up internal affairs investigations. This month, she told a House Judiciary subcommittee that hiring had improved and that new hires were outpacing retirements and other departures.
But Peters has also irritated lawmakers who said she reneged on her promise to be candid and open with them. In September, senators scolded her for forcing them to wait more than a year for answers to written questions and for claiming that she couldn't answer basic questions about agency operations, like how many correctional officers are on staff.
At Black Lives Matter house, families are welcomed into space of freedom and healing
Some of the mystery and controversy shrouding a sprawling Los Angeles-area property owned by a national Black Lives Matter nonprofit have dissipated for dozens of families grieving a loved one killed by police.
The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation Inc., which was widely criticized last year for purchasing a $6 million compound with donations that followed racial justice protests in 2020, hosted the families for a dinner at the home this fall. The event coincided with an annual conference in southern California, where hundreds who are affected by police violence meet to find support in their journeys to healing, accountability and justice.
More than 150 dinner guests, including some who previously accused the foundation of using their loved ones’ names to raise tens of millions of dollars over the last decade, were not just fed and sent on their way. They were given tours of the gated property that has six bedrooms and bathrooms, a swimming pool, a soundstage and office space.
“It was laid out, it was beautiful, it was welcoming,” said Beatrice X Johnson, co-founder of Families United 4 Justice Network, the grassroots social justice group that convened the Sept. 28 to Oct. 1 conference.
She is an aunt to Oscar Grant, the young Black man fatally shot while restrained on an Oakland, California, transit station platform in 2009, and is married to fellow Justice Network founder Cephus X Johnson. The two are affectionately known as Uncle Bobby and Auntie Bee within the community of families — and they once counted themselves among the skeptics of the BLM foundation’s decision to purchase the property.
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“There’s been a lot of controversy around this spot, even with families,” Auntie Bee said in an interview after the dinner. “The families wanted to see this place. That’s a no brainer. And who else would be invited to dinner there, if not the families impacted by police?”
As many of these families gather nationwide for another holiday season with empty chairs at their dinner tables, the BLM foundation says the Studio City home will continue to be a refuge for those grieving loved ones killed in incidents of police violence. It’ll also continue to serve as a campus for the foundation’s Black artists fellowship.
They officially call it the “Creators House.”
“I personally call it a home for freedom, because it is where Black people’s gifts and talents can be nurtured in order to flourish,” said Shalomyah Bowers, a BLM foundation board member.
“It’s where we’ve kept our activists and organizers safe. It’s where we plan and organize outside of the confines of white supremacy. And it’s where healing happens,” he added.
For nearly two years, Bowers and other board members have faced intense scrutiny over the foundation’s finances — a scrutiny accentuated by revelations that the $6 million property had been purchased with little input from the movement’s grassroots organizers or families of police brutality victims, whose names rallied the larger movement. After revealing in 2021 that more than $90 million in donations poured into the foundation following worldwide protests over the murder of George Floyd, the latest nonprofit tax filings showed the foundation with $30 million in assets.
In recent interviews with The Associated Press, the foundation continued to defend itself against accusations of mismanagement of its funds.
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“I was telling the families that were here, when foundations purchase property, folks laud it as an achievement and a safe investment that builds wealth for the sake of the mission, which is pushing out money to the community,” Bowers said. “But when a Black foundation does it, when we do it, it’s unwise and ill-informed.”
That’s not the crux of the criticism that had come from families, movement supporters and staunch opponents. In 2022, grassroots racial justice activists from all over the U.S. filed a civil lawsuit against the foundation in a California court, alleging leaders had engaged in fraud and broke an agreement to turn over the donated funds to local organizers. In June, a judge dismissed the complaint filed by Black Lives Matter Grassroots Inc., after finding the plaintiffs failed to prove their allegations.
As the dust settled, the foundation sought to reframe the property as part of a larger history of Black activists and artists creating spaces of safety and liberty that are harder to find in white-owned or white-run spaces. Houses of worship and restaurants have featured prominently in historical narratives of Black civil rights leadership and artists movements.
But other kinds of real property, too, served as hubs for organizing resistance and creating art, music, literature and political thought. During the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s, overlapping with iterations of the Black struggle for civil rights, the Harlem YMCA was considered a living room for the Black artists movement. Renowned Black novelists Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison often stayed or worked from the Y. The Black Panther Party purchased buildings and homes that served as safehouses and centers for their community survival programs.
That legacy is not lost on Osayi Endolyn, the inaugural artist-in-residence for the BLM foundation’s Black Joy Creators Fellowship. She curated the families’ dinner at the Studio City house, with the help of Shenarri Freeman, a Black chef and restaurateur known for her vegetarian and vegan cuisine, and Brittney Williams, an accomplished private chef who cooked the protein dishes.
“There have always been, you could call them, third spaces, where folks could gather to plan to organize, to rest, to retreat,” said Endolyn, a James Beard Award-winning writer, editor and producer widely known for her work in Black food traditions.
“When we look at so many different symbols of Black resistance, of civil rights, of liberation movements, there’s always some kind of art story being told,” she said.
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And that’s the story Endolyn wanted to tell at dinner. The menu included jerk pork, scotch bonnet roasted chicken and grilled suya steak, a dish from West Africa. They also provided baked beans, collard greens, mac ’n cheese, potato salad, maple buttermilk cornbread and hibiscus lemonade.
It was all a hit with dinner guests.
“Being here, knowing that someone cares about these families and that the families are not left behind, is a really, really good feeling,” said Yolanda Price, whose stepson Jeffrey Price Jr. was killed in a 2018 crash involving a Metropolitan Police Department vehicle in the nation’s capital.
“It lets people know that they are not left behind,” she added.
By the end of the dinner, guests young and old danced to music curated by DJ Francesca Harding. And a sense of trust was bridged between the movement’s directly impacted families and the foundation that has stewardship over BLM’s multimillion dollar endowment.
“Black Lives Matter was a mystery,” said Uncle Bobby, who helped convene the dinner under the banner of the Justice Network’s “Love Not Blood Campaign.” In 2021, the campaign received a five-year, multimillion dollar grant from the foundation.
“Many said, ‘We deserve this.’ We were able to break bread together with the foundation, to claim it as ours.”
US to implement key actions from Presidential memorandum on advancing worker empowerment, rights, high labor standards globally
The US Department of State will begin implementing key actions from President Biden’s Presidential Memorandum on "Advancing Worker Empowerment, Rights, and High Labor Standards Globally."
"Labor rights are integral to building democracy, achieving economic growth, strengthening supply chain resilience, and leveling the playing field for American workers and companies," said US Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken on Thursday.
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This new whole-of-government approach will advance worker empowerment and unions, in line with President Biden’s policies here at home, according to an announcement made by the US Department of State.
The Presidential Memorandum for the first time directs Chiefs of Mission and Department officials to directly engage in labor diplomacy and enhancing programming and public messaging on workers and labor rights.
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The Department’s efforts to advance internationally recognized workers’ rights will be carried out alongside interagency partners, including U.S. Department of Labor.
"This Memorandum is intended to raise global labor standards, building on the full range of existing authorities and tools in diplomacy, foreign assistance and programming, law enforcement, and global trade and economic cooperation, consistent with relevant international obligations and commitments," the announcement reads.
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