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Happy Friday! If you enjoyed last week’s arrival at our tech newsletter, Techne, be sure to post yesterday’s full inaugural issue.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Thursday called for the democratic overthrow of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a speech to the Senate. “I believe that new elections are the only way to allow for a sound decision-making procedure that is open to Israel’s long-term management,” Schumer said yesterday, adding that Netanyahu “has gone astray by allowing his political survival to take precedence over Israel’s long-term. “The comments drew swift condemnation from Republican leaders, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. House Speaker Mike Johnson said yesterday, “Not only is this highly inappropriate, but it is simply wrong for an American leader to play such a divisive role in Israeli politics. “. »
The European Union on Wednesday passed a landmark law on synthetic intelligence, creating a regulatory regime for the EU’s 27 countries. The measure bans certain uses of AI, such as the creation of facial popularity databases, and takes a “threat-based approach” to regulating AI, applying a proportionate review to what lawmakers consider the threat degrees of various AI applications.
Thousands of farmers protested in the Indian capital, New Delhi, on Thursday to demand more from the government. The demonstrators are demanding, among other demands, protection against market fluctuations through promises of minimum value for crops and increases in sources of income. The 2021 protests led to the repeal of questionable agricultural reform laws; National and national elections are expected to be held in the coming weeks.
The State Department on Thursday imposed sanctions on three Israeli settlers and two outposts “implicated in undermining stability in the West Bank. “The move represents the timing of sanctions imposed through the State Department since President Joe Biden signed an executive order giving his administration new authority. to target Americans in the West Bank accused of committing acts of violence against Palestinians.
The Commerce Department reported Thursday that retail sales (spending on goods, adding food and fuel) rose 0. 6% month-over-month in February, below expectations. Revised figures for January, which showed sales fell 1. 1% last month instead of the initial estimate of 0. 8%, showed a decline in spending. (The Commerce Department’s retail industry data is not adjusted for inflation. )
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the Manufacturers Value Index (PPI), a measure of how suppliers and wholesalers rate their customers, rose 0. 6% month-over-month in February, double what economists expected. Producer values increased by 1. 6% year-on-year in February. Thursday’s knowledge and last month’s slightly higher-than-expected customer value index will likely prompt the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates at their current levels.
U. S. District Judge Aileen Cannon on Thursday denied one of former President Trump’s two motions to dismiss the classified documents case filed through a special suggestion that Jack Smith opposed him. Trump’s legal team had argued that the parts of the Espionage Act at the center of the indictment were “unconstitutionally vague” and that the fees therefore deserve to be dismissed. In a brief written order, Cannon explained that while Trump’s lawyers have complex “several arguments that deserve serious consideration,” it would be ill-timed to address those issues at this level of the trial.
On Tuesday morning, Mitch Albom (of Tuesdays with Morrie Fame) and nine other volunteers left Haiti in helicopters chartered through Rep. Cory Mills of Florida at the request of Albom Congresswoman Rep. Lisa McClain of Michigan.
The story is incredibly far-fetched, as Mills, an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran who once participated in personal efforts to rescue stranded Americans, is even said to have been aboard one of the helicopters. Government mission?” [Mills] is targeting an audience other than you and me,” McClain told the Washington Post.
This satisfying ending in Hollywood is rare in Haiti, where recent years have seen violence, hunger and unspeakable disease. This week, gangs continued their rampage in the capital, Port-au-Prince. Haiti’s unpopular exiled prime minister, Ariel Henry, has said he will resign after regional leaders pushed for the creation of a transitional government, a move that prompted Kenya’s government to suspend plans to send police officers to control the chaos. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has promised more investments. But that investment is blocked in Congress even as the Senate confirms a new U. S. ambassador to the country after more than two years without one.
As we wrote earlier this month, Haiti has descended into near-total anarchy, with more than 80% of Port-au-Prince under gang control, a terrible scenario even through protection standards. and security of the country. In January alone, more than 800 people were killed, kidnapped or injured in the escalating gang violence, not counting the estimated three hundred gang members who have died in the ongoing conflict. More than a portion of the country’s population is asking for humanitarian aid, which is increasingly difficult to provide with a dysfunctional government, a weak and dwindling foreign humanitarian presence, and a target on the backs of many humanitarian personnel who are abducted and detained on humanitarian grounds. rescue. ” Please find a way to bring food, water and medical supplies into the country,” Pamela White, the U. S. ambassador to Haiti from 2012 to 2015, told TMD. addressing Biden’s direction and referencing plans for a transit dock in the Middle East. “There are tactics to do it, so locate it: [the leadership] figured out how to do it in Gaza. »
Violence erupted when Henry left the country last month to attend several overseas meetings aimed at controlling the crisis. Several gangs banded together to call for Henry’s departure and focused their place on public infrastructure: they provoked a major jailbreak, attacked Port-au-Prince, forcing them to close, and taking over government buildings and police headquarters. One of the men who coordinated the attacks is gang leader Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, a former police officer. “We will not lie to others by saying we have a nonviolent revolution,” he said Tuesday. “We don’t have a nonviolent revolution. We are starting a bloody revolution in the country.
The coordinated violence forced the country into a state of emergency, and on Sunday, in a further sign of the unsustainable security situation, the United States airlifted all remaining non-essential embassy staff out of the country, despite that the project was led by grassroots officials. -SO staff. staff file for months. On Wednesday, the US Southern Command announced that it had sent a Fleet Maritime Counterterrorism Security Team (FAST) to bolster security at the embassy. “Sending Marines is not normal,” White, who was a career foreign service officer at the U. S. Agency for International Development, told TMD. Such military groups exist to augment existing security forces at embassies and naval installations, and were deployed to evacuate the United States embassy in Liberia in 1991 and protect naval installations in Bahrain’s Operation Desert Storm. At the time of this publication, a spokesperson for the US Marines had not responded to a request for comment on the prevalence of such operations or the last time they were deployed to reinforce an embassy.
While the Americans were leaving by all means, Henry tried to return to his country, but succeeded. With the capital’s airports virtually occupied by gangs, he has been in Puerto Rico for more than a week, after the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, refused to allow him to disembark within its borders.
Henry was never elected to national office but was appointed by then-President Jovenel Moïse in 2021, just days before Moïse was assassinated in a still-obscure plot involving Colombian mercenaries. Thus, Henry’s legitimacy depends heavily on foreign support. The last link in a democratically elected government that no longer exists: no workplace in the country is run by an elected official.
Earlier this month, however, that aid faltered, with reports that Biden’s leadership had explicitly asked Henry to resign to make way for a transitional council that could govern until elections could elect a new government. On Monday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to Jamaica to meet with regional leaders of the Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM) bloc to discuss tactics for the existing crisis. On Monday night, they agreed to a seven-member council, with participants from across the political spectrum in Haiti, that would elect an interim prime minister and eventually hold the first elections in Haiti since 2016. A few hours later, Henry announced that he would resign. “My government will leave without delay after the inauguration of the council,” he said in a video recorded in Puerto Rico. “We will be an interim government until they appoint a prime minister and a new government. “
The CARICOM plan, which is said to be an amalgamation of seven plans submitted through Haitian civil society leaders, set a 24-hour deadline for Haitian stakeholders to present their potential options to the presidential council. Gang representatives did not participate in the discussion. And the panel did not include leaders of criminal groups. On Thursday, CARICOM said it had obtained the names of all but one of the political parties it had contacted. Jean-Charles Moïse, a former senator and presidential candidate who leads an opposition party and is not similar to the slain president, rejected CARICOM’s plan, saying he and former coup leader Guy Phillippe had created their own council. He has refused to appoint a CARICOM council member, and it is unclear how his party’s seat on the council will be redeployed. How the gangs will react – having achieved one of their demands with Henry’s resignation – to the transition of force is also an open question.
That’s not the council’s only problem: Henry’s resignation, while mandatory for the transition, has slowed efforts to send 1,000 members of the Kenyan National Police to Haiti. Several other countries have joined this multinational security aid project, which only seemed imaginable after Henry signed a bilateral agreement with Kenyan President William Ruto earlier this month. With Henry absent, the Kenyan government said it would suspend the project until a new prime minister was appointed. On Tuesday, State Decomponent spokesman Matthew Miller downplayed the concerns and suggested a new government would be formed soon. “Of course, we would be concerned about any delay [in deployment], but we don’t think there’s a need to wait,” he said. “If you take a look at what the Kenyan government said in their statement, it’s that they want to have a government to work with, which was a vital component of their agreement. This is an absolutely natural thing to expect.
On Monday, Blinken pledged increased investments for the multinational security aid mission, bringing the total U. S. commitment to $300 million, but that dispersal faces resistance from Congress. Jim Risch, the Senate Foreign Relations Member, and Mike McCaul, the chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, said Monday that the State Department’s investment plan had just won. “After years of discussions, repeated requests for information, and partial investments to help you plan, management sent us this afternoon only a rough plan to deal with this crisis,” the two men said in a joint Tuesday. It remains to be seen whether it is ‘credible and achievable’. Given the long history of U. S. involvement in Haiti, with few positive results, the leadership owes Congress much more detail and more speed before securing more investment.
Meanwhile, the Senate on Thursday passed President Joe Biden’s nomination for ambassador to Haiti, career diplomat Dennis Hankins, with a bipartisan majority. The position has been vacant since October 2021; Biden nominated Hankins, who spent most of his career in Africa and is fluent in French, last May.
As the political machinations continue, there is little hope for any early alleviation of the suffering of fellow Haitians, even with Blinken’s recent pledge of $33 million in more humanitarian aid. “In my opinion, we’re not actually talking about elections,” White said. told TMD about the foreign community’s attention to the CARICOM plan. ” You are crazy?You can’t even feed other people.
Writing for Public Discourse, Jamie Boulding set out a vision of intellectual friendship that she believes has been lost in public life. “Two of the most important figures in the history of science, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, were introverts and obviously linked loneliness with thinking,” Boulding wrote. “The symbol of the educator locked in his ivory tower, or the scientist sequestered in his laboratory, occupies a vital position in our cultural imagination. With COVID-19 forced isolation, the expansion of remote work, and the emergence of resilient AI teams like ChatGPT, we are increasingly reducing intellectual pursuits to mere personal projects. It was not so. Intellectual friendship – the concept that the most productive way to think is obviously to think in combination – has been basic throughout philosophical history. Plato’s works are presented in the form of dialogue, suggesting that the search for facts is communal, cooperative, and most productively practiced within relationships of friendship and love. …How many people today think that intellectual life is based primarily on companionship, friendship, and love? Somehow it has come to be perceived in terms of what we know rather than who or what we are – or, as a philosopher would say, in terms of epistemology rather than ontology.
Yesterday The Atlantic published its list of the 136 most productive “wonderful American novels. ” In 1868, a little-known man named John William DeForest proposed a new kind of literature, a collective artistic endeavor for a country that had just emerged from existential conflict: “A fictional portrait that accomplished ‘the task of portraying the soul of America,'” the directory’s description notes. “It would be called the wonderful American novel and no one had written it yet,” DeForest admitted. Maybe soon. A century and a part later, the concept has endured, though it has become more complicated. In 2024, our definition of literary wonder is broader, deeper, and stranger than DeForest probably would have imagined. . . The U. S. weapon is perhaps bigger, smoother, and more fragile than ever. But what exactly does it contain? What follows is our attempt to discover just that.
CBS News: South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem Faces Lawsuit After Texas Dentists Go Viral
Fox Business: U. S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen: ‘I’m sorry’ I said inflation is transitory
Politico: [Former Treasury Secretary] Steven Mnuchin Forms Investor Group to Buy TikTok
In the newsletters: Mike and Sarah analyzed the partisan reactions to Robert Hur’s report, Nick explored ? the curious congressional politics around TikTok, and Will argued the catastrophic rhetoric infecting cultural and technological thinking.
In podcasts: Sarah, Steve, and Jonah talk about TikTok’s influence on American youth, reactions to Robert Hur’s testimony, the Oscars, and more on The Dispatch podcast.
On site: John is investigating whether Alabama Sen. Katie Britt can capitalize on the debacle of her reaction to the State of the Union address, and Mary interviews several wounded Ukrainian infantrymen who traveled to Washington to solicit more U. S. support.
What wonderful American novel are you missing from The Atlantic’s list?
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