March 25, 2024

UN security council passes resolution calling for Gaza ceasefire

US abstained from the vote, but called for the release of hostages held in Gaza since October 7 massacre

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/un-demands-immediate-gaza-ceasefire-th78gwnd6

https://archive.is/77JfV



The UN security council today passed its first ceasefire resolution on Gaza, demanding a halt to the fighting for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The US abstained from the vote, but called for the release of hostages held in Gaza since October 7, without specifying a timeline. The breakthrough resolution was voted in with 14 votes in favour and America’s abstention, with the chamber breaking into applause after the vote. “It is our obligation to put an end to this bloodbath before it is too late. The security council is … finally responding to the calls of the international community,” Amar Bendjama, Algeria’s ambassador to the UN, said.

The resolution comes after a US-led resolution calling for an “immediate and sustained ceasefire” was rejected by the permanent members Russia and China on Friday, who exercised their veto against the resolution with Moscow accusing Washington of a “hypocritical spectacle” given America’s record of voting against similar proposals. “Still certain key edits were ignored, including our requests to add a condemnation of Hamas,” the ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the 15-member council in New York, explaining why the US did not vote yes. “However, we fully support some of the critical objectives in this non-binding resolution.”

The new wording, returning the word “permanent” to the original submission, was put forward by the ten elected council members and backed by Russia and China and the 22-nation Arab Group at the United Nations. It demands an “immediate ceasefire for the month of Ramadan respected by all parties, leading to a permanent, sustainable ceasefire, and also demands the immediate and unconditional release of hostages,” adding a call for humanitarian aid to enter the Gaza Strip. The US criticised Russia and China for not condemning the October 7 Hamas attack that sparked the months-long war, and blamed Hamas for not accepting a ceasefire months ago.

“We’re getting closer to a deal for an immediate ceasefire with the release of our hostages, but we’re not there yet. A ceasefire could have come about months ago, if Hamas had been willing to release hostages,” Thomas-Greenfield told the council. “A ceasefire of any duration must come with the release of hostages, this is the only path.” As Ramadan ends next month, the ceasefire as demanded by the security council would last for the next two weeks. While security council resolutions are legally binding by international law, the UN has no way to enforce the resolution other than imposing punitive measures on Israel if they continue the war during this period.

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March 25, 2024

British homes 'smaller, older and less affordable' than those abroad

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/british-homes-smaller-older-and-less-affordable-than-those-abroad-l6b0ngrcl

https://archive.is/OYHwf



Britain’s “expensive, cramped and ageing” housing offers the worst value for money of any advanced economy, a report warns. An analysis by the Resolution Foundation think tank found that people in England, on average, lived in smaller homes than those in France, Germany and Japan. Yet the cost of housing in the UK was nearly 40 per cent higher than comparable countries. The foundation described the situation as a “crisis” and warned the main political parties that policies to tackle the problem needed to be “centre-stage” at the next election.

The report compared British housing with the 37 other industrialised nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). It said that homes in the UK were smaller, older and less affordable than those in the vast majority of other comparable countries. For example, it found that homes in England had an average floor space per person of 38 sq m compared with 66 sq m in the US, 46 sq m in Germany and 40 sq m in Japan. London, meanwhile, had no more floor space than Tokyo at 33 sq m and less than New York at 44 sq m.



Housing in the UK is also the oldest in Europe, with 38 per cent of homes built before 1946 compared with 21 per cent in Italy and 11 per cent in Spain. The foundation pointed out that such homes tended to be poorly insulated, which leads to higher energy bills and a greater risk of dampness. “Given that older properties were constructed when environmental standards were either nonexistent or far weaker than today, it is unsurprising that UK homes perform very badly compared to our European peers when it comes to energy efficiency,” it said. The report also said that the amount of housing “consumed” by people in the UK as a proportion of income was lower than almost any other country. It said this was the result of the overall cost of housing, where again the UK lagged behind in terms of affordability.



To ensure accurate comparisons between countries the researchers used the rental value of each home. In monetary terms, only Australia and Switzerland had costlier housing but those countries’ gross domestic product per head was greater, and drove higher price levels for all goods and services. When an adjustment was made for that, house prices in the UK were the most expensive. The report said: “If all households in the UK were fully exposed to our housing market, they would have to devote 22 per cent of their spending to housing services, far higher than the OECD average (17 per cent) and the highest level across the developed economies with the solitary exception of Finland.” Adam Corlett, principal economist at the Resolution Foundation, said that while housing was a major political issue in many countries the data suggested the problem was worst in the UK.



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March 25, 2024

Appeals court reduces Trump bond to $175m and extends deadline ten days

Federal appeals court reduces bond Trump must put up in response civil fraud judgment and gives him 10 more days to get the money together

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2024/mar/25/trump-hush-money-trial-fraud-bond-deadline-latest-updates



A key plank of Donald Trump’s pitch to presidential election voters has been a return to what he characterizes as the good old days of his first term in the White House. The Guardian’s David Smith reports that the former president appears to mean what he says, as he gets together his old team of problematic campaign advisors: Donald Trump’s getting the band back together. But this time they come with political baggage, conspiracy theories and, in some instances, criminal convictions.

The former US president’s old acolytes are returning to the fold, eager to exert influence on his bid for the White House and have their say in a potential second administration. That poses a headache for his election campaign team, whose efforts to run a disciplined operation can be upended at any moment by the mercurial Trump. “Trump always wants to feel comfortable about the people who surround him and what better way to do that than to get the band back together?” said Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington DC. “We could look forward to the greatest hits ad nauseam.”

If a man is judged by the company he keeps, Trump’s speaks volumes. There was uproar in 2022 when when the rapper Kanye West brought the white supremacist Nick Fuentes to dinner at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. Trump’s inner circle includes the far-right representatives Matt Gaetz of Florida and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia; Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democrat turned rightwing media personality and outspoken critic of aid to Ukraine; and Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur who has pushed the “great replacement” theory and claimed that the 6 January 2021 insurrection was an inside job.

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March 25, 2024

This Cauliflower Shawarma Reaches for Spring

March 25, 2024

Hungary's unedifying political wordplays

The opposition, Eszter Kováts writes, should not succumb to Orbán’s friend versus foe politics in the European elections.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/hungarys-unedifying-political-wordplays



A clemency scandal recently stirred the stagnant waters of Hungarian politics. In the biggest crisis for the Fidesz party in its 14 years of continuous rule, the Hungarian president, Katalin Novák, and the former justice minister, Judit Varga—who was to head the Fidesz list in the European Parliament elections in June—had to resign last month, amid growing pressure from not only the opposition but also the party’s own supporters. Their sin? Novák had signed and Varga counter-signed a pardon for a man jailed for forcing children to retract sexual-abuse claims, since upheld, against a director of a state-run children’s home. By this pardon—discovered by a lawyer and reported by one of Hungary’s remaining independent media—the party’s two most prominent female politicians became complicit in covering up paedophilia. The act of clemency was signed as one among 25 before Pope Francis’ visit to Hungary in April last year. As also subsequently uncovered by journalists, it followed the advice of Zoltán Balog, a former minister and Novák’s mentor—who had to resign too from his role as leader of the Hungarian Reformed Church.

The interest in politics stimulated by the affair and its public resonance were evidenced by viewing data for the (leftist) video channel Partizán. It secured more than 300,000 views for each commentary or interview produced in the days following the resignations—an interview with Varga’s whistle-blowing ex-husband drew over 2.4 million. And a demonstration in mid-February, organised by nine ‘influencers’, attracted more than 150,000 protesters to Heroes’ Square in Budapest. As a leading Hungarian journalist observed, it was not that Hungarians had turned away from politics—just that, for years, nothing interesting had happened. ‘Let’s imagine how interesting it would be if we had a coalition government, full of debates and intrigues, or we had government changes,’ he wrote. ‘Mourning about general apathy would disappear overnight.’



Strategy of polarisation

The scandal was embarrassing for Fidesz precisely because it has made ‘traditional values’ and child protection a Leitmotif of its politics. A ‘pro-family’ policy has not only been positively promoted but also linked to a strategy of polarisation. Families and children need to be protected, according to the party, from all sorts of dark dangers: LGBT+ individuals, same-sex parenting, ‘gender insanity’—all linked and connected with paedophilia. All sorts of projections, causes and constituencies are brought together too by the claim that these horrors are foisted upon Hungarians by ‘the west’ and ‘Brussels’, aided and abetted by the opposition parties. Only Fidesz—with its charismatic leader and prime minister, Viktor Orbán—has stood resolute to stop them. These accusations have been repeated ad nauseam for years, encapsulated in a so-called ‘child protection’ law passed in 2021. The governing parties added to the initial—and consensual—draft some points, mingling homosexuality with paedophilia, thereby reviving the hoary old stereotype that gays would be more of a danger to children than heterosexual adults. It having been made impossible for the opposition parties to vote for the bill, the latter have since been accused by the governing propaganda machine of not only not protecting children but standing up for paedophilia.

Orbán reiterated these claims in his speech on March 15th, the national holiday commemorating the 1848 revolution and the fight for freedom. He complained that ‘in the west everyone can choose his or her sex’, contending that ‘they want to indoctrinate our children and we will not allow that’—while condemning the opposition, which supposedly ‘would sell our children for 30 pieces of silver to crazy gender activists’. Previously state secretary, then family minister and from 2022 Hungary’s first female president, Novák was not only the face of Fidesz’ most popular policy pitch (according to successive polls) but also its fight against everything it connects with ‘gender ideology’: gender studies, the Istanbul Convention on domestic violence, the claims of members of sexual and gender minorities, and reproductive rights. Internationally too she embodied these stances, expanding Fidesz’ room for manoeuvre in foreign policy and presenting Orbán’s Hungary as a role model for radical-right, traditionalist parties and movements Europe-wide. Take, for instance, this comment by the German Christian social movement Demo für alle in 2020. In a text entitled ‘Let’s dare more Hungary’, it said: ‘Hungary is proof that giving in to pressure from gender ideologues and the LGBT lobby is not without alternatives. A constructive family policy is possible.’

Discourse debilitated...........

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March 24, 2024

The Sadness of Women Who Still Vote Republican

Why are so many women complicit in their own marginalization?

https://johnpavlovitz.substack.com/p/the-sad-misogyny-of-women-who-still



None of this makes sense.

I think I’ve been misled somewhere. Growing up, I learned from the men and women around me what it meant to be a gentleman; how decent, good-hearted, honorable young men lived in the world, the way they treated other human beings, how they carried and conducted themselves. And from as early as I can remember, I was taught that women deserved to be treated by such men of character, with respect and compassion, as equals. I grew-up believing that in matters of intelligence, creativity, vision, leadership, and value, women were fully my peers and that I should learn from them and listen to them.

I learned what consent was and why I never had the right to decide for another woman what she wanted or approved of. I learned that real men showed restraint and self-control. I was taught that a woman’s body belonged to her alone. Implied in all of this, was the idea that not only was this the right way to treat the women I loved or met or knew from a distance—but it would be the way women would want to be treated; that they would appreciate being seen in this highest regard.

This made sense to me: that every woman would treasure and demand being treated with dignity and would not abide anything less. I must have been grossly misinformed somewhere along the way because I've met many women lately who I just can't seem to make sense of: women who adore and applaud and worship a court-established rapist in Donald Trump, women who somehow, with all they’ve lost because of them—still vote Republican. With every horrible thing Trump has said about women, with his boasts of uninvited physicality, his history of unrepentant infidelity, his multiple marriages with ever-younger wives.

With his relentless vile and vicious attacks on the physical appearance, sexual lives, and even the menstrual cycles of female political opponents and critics, Donald Trump is the very definition of the kind of man I was taught that women would want no part of—let alone brag about and defend on social media. More unthinkable still, that they would joyfully give power over themselves and their daughters and granddaughters to such a man. As the GOP crusades openly and unrelentingly against the rights of women to determine their fates and decide what happens within their bodies, they inexplicably have these women as willing allies. This is a confounding and tragic reality.

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March 24, 2024

What the Data Says About Pandemic School Closures, Four Years Later

The more time students spent in remote instruction, the further they fell behind. And, experts say, extended closures did little to stop the spread of Covid.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/upshot/pandemic-school-closures-data.html

https://archive.is/TsmZI

Four years ago this month, schools nationwide began to shut down, igniting one of the most polarizing and partisan debates of the pandemic. Some schools, often in Republican-led states and rural areas, reopened by fall 2020. Others, typically in large cities and states led by Democrats, would not fully reopen for another year. A variety of data — about children’s academic outcomes and about the spread of Covid-19 — has accumulated in the time since. Today, there is broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting. While poverty and other factors also played a role, remote learning was a key driver of academic declines during the pandemic, research shows — a finding that held true across income levels.



“There’s fairly good consensus that, in general, as a society, we probably kept kids out of school longer than we should have,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, a pediatric infectious disease specialist who helped write guidance for the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recommended in June 2020 that schools reopen with safety measures in place. There were no easy decisions at the time. Officials had to weigh the risks of an emerging virus against the academic and mental health consequences of closing schools. And even schools that reopened quickly, by the fall of 2020, have seen lasting effects. But as experts plan for the next public health emergency, whatever it may be, a growing body of research shows that pandemic school closures came at a steep cost to students.

The longer schools were closed, the more students fell behind.

At the state level, more time spent in remote or hybrid instruction in the 2020-21 school year was associated with larger drops in test scores, according to a New York Times analysis of school closure data and results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, an authoritative exam administered to a national sample of fourth- and eighth-grade students. At the school district level, that finding also holds, according to an analysis of test scores from third through eighth grade in thousands of U.S. districts, led by researchers at Stanford and Harvard. In districts where students spent most of the 2020-21 school year learning remotely, they fell more than half a grade behind in math on average, while in districts that spent most of the year in person they lost just over a third of a grade. (A separate study of nearly 10,000 schools found similar results.)

Such losses can be hard to overcome, without significant interventions. The most recent test scores, from spring 2023, show that students, overall, are not caught up from their pandemic losses, with larger gaps remaining among students that lost the most ground to begin with. Students in districts that were remote or hybrid the longest — at least 90 percent of the 2020-21 school year — still had almost double the ground to make up compared with students in districts that allowed students back for most of the year. Some time in person was better than no time. As districts shifted toward in-person learning as the year went on, students that were offered a hybrid schedule (a few hours or days a week in person, with the rest online) did better, on average, than those in places where school was fully remote, but worse than those in places that had school fully in person.



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March 24, 2024

Are We in the Midst of a Political Realignment?

Assessing the level of change in partisan allegiance in recent years, as well as the president’s numbers since the State of the Union.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/23/upshot/trump-biden-political-realignment.html

https://archive.is/Y1iPw



Racial realignment?

“Realignment” is the holy grail of American politics — the fantasy of every political consultant who wants to usher in a new era of Democratic or Republican dominance. What’s a realignment? It’s a lasting shift in the partisan allegiance of the country, or at least a large demographic group. Think, for instance, of the rise of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition, or the realignment of the South from Democrats to Republicans after the enactment of the Civil Rights Act. These are epochal, defining moments in American history. With that in mind, try to imagine how wide my eyes got when I read an article in The Financial Times arguing that America is undergoing a “racial realignment,” seemingly based on the results of our last New York Times/Siena College poll, which found President Biden leading by a slim 10 points among nonwhite voters, a group that usually backs Democrats by 50-plus points.

This claim strikes me as, at best, premature. The general election campaign is barely underway, and poll results in February do not constitute a realignment. As we have written several times: No one should be remotely surprised if Mr. Biden ultimately reassembles his support among Black and Latino voters. Alternately, many of the dissenting voters may simply stay home, as they did in the midterms. This would be bad for Mr. Biden, but it would be no realignment. Perhaps a more interesting question is whether the current polling would count as a realignment if it held in the final results. Clearly, it would be a significant shift with hugely important electoral consequences, both now and beyond. In the final account, it might clearly demarcate a post-Civil Rights era, when Democrats could count on overwhelming support from nonwhite voters, from a new era when they cannot. But even in the worst case for Democrats, Mr. Biden would probably still win among Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters.

This would arguably fall short of counting as a wholesale realignment in political preferences. For good measure, realignments usually require a subsequent election to confirm the shift. In the old political science textbooks, this is sometimes called a “confirming election.” That’s because unique candidates and circumstances can produce major electoral shifts that don’t last. It’s hard enough to predict whether Donald J. Trump’s gains in the polls among nonwhite voters will last until November, let alone whether they’ll fuel Republicans through 2028. His resilience will probably depend on the source of his strength, which is still up for debate. Last fall, I worked through five hypotheses, and some might be likelier to yield a lasting shift than others. Even beyond this cycle, if Mr. Trump won, how he governed in the White House would be an important variable. Mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, for instance, may not be the way to cement an incipient realignment of young, nonwhite and Latino voters.

All that said, there is a case to think of Trump gains among Black and Latino voters as part of a broader realignment: the realignment of American politics along the lines of Mr. Trump’s conservative populism. It may not have happened in one realigning election, but if you take 2016, 2020 and a hypothetical 2024 result that mirrors today’s polling together, you have a pretty fundamental change in the dimensions of partisan conflict compared with the elections from 1980 to 2012. If Mr. Trump’s gains among working-class white voters ultimately extended to working-class Black and Latino voters as well, it would represent the culmination of a decadelong shift in American politics, whether you call it a realignment or not.

Did the State of the Union lift Biden’s numbers?...............

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March 24, 2024

Millions of Low-Income Families Set to Lose Internet Subsidies

The Affordable Connectivity Program, a $14.2 billion federal effort to make internet service more affordable, is expected to run out of funding this spring.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/23/us/politics/internet-subsidies-affordable-connecticity-program.html

https://archive.is/g4qGw



Phyllis Jackson, a retired administrative assistant in Monroeville, Pa., signed up for home internet service for the first time in about two decades early last year. She now regularly uses the internet to pay her bills online, buy clothes, find new recipes and learn about her medication. Ms. Jackson said she signed up for internet service after enrolling in a federal program that provided a monthly discount for low-income households. That program is set to run out of funding this spring, however, which will make it harder for Ms. Jackson and millions of other households to afford to stay connected to the internet. “I really can’t do without it,” said Ms. Jackson, 79. “The way things are today, everyone needs to be able to use the computer.”

The $14.2 billion Affordable Connectivity Program provides low-income households up to $30 off their internet bill each month, and households living on eligible tribal lands can receive a discount of up to $75 a month. More than 23 million households receive either reduced bills or effectively free internet service through the program. But federal officials began winding down the program early last month, when they stopped accepting new applications and enrollments. The program was tucked into the 2021 infrastructure law as a replacement for a pandemic-era program that provided certain households discounts on their internet bills. Although there is some bipartisan support to continue the subsidies, lawmakers have not passed an extension.

Participants will continue receiving full benefits through April, according to the Federal Communications Commission. In May, internet companies will have the option to provide them with partial discounts using the remaining federal funding. Based on provider claims data as of Feb. 15, the program had about $2.5 billion left, which is meant to cover the subsidies and other program expenses. The program is part of the Biden administration’s broader initiative to connect every American to affordable, high-speed internet, which officials hope will stimulate economic growth and widen access to health care and education. The administration is spending an additional $42.5 billion to expand access to broadband to every corner of the country.

The administration is funneling billions of dollars into the expansion of internet access largely because officials see it as a critical way to strengthen the economy. Across U.S. metros, prime-age workers who have access to high-speed internet on home computers participate in the labor force at a much higher rate than those without access, according to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. Other research has found that internet connectivity can bolster economic growth in rural areas, helping to create jobs and attract workers. Some Democratic and Republican lawmakers have coalesced around a bill that would provide $7 billion to fund the program for about another year. Senator Peter Welch of Vermont, a Democrat who has sponsored the bill, said that he was encouraged by the bipartisan support, but that it was “tough to be optimistic.”

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March 24, 2024

The Supreme Court and Young Voter Turnout

A 2013 ruling triggered a slew of laws that attached restrictions to voting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/22/us/politics/the-supreme-court-and-young-voter-turnout.html

https://archive.is/UlPK6



Georgia, with its long history of the suppression of Black voters, has been ground zero for fights about voting rights laws for decades. The state has often seen stark differences in turnout between white and nonwhite communities, with the latter typically voting at a much lower rate. But not always: In the 2012 election, when Barack Obama won a second term in the White House, the turnout rate for Black voters under 38 in Lowndes County — a Republican-leaning county in southern Georgia — was actually four percentage points higher than the rate for white voters of a similar age. It proved to be temporary. According to new research by Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., by 2020, turnout for younger white voters in Lowndes was 14 percentage points higher than for Black voters of the same age.

What happened in between? It is impossible to tell for certain, with many variables, such as Obama no longer being on the ballot. But a growing body of evidence points to a pivotal 2013 Supreme Court decision, Shelby County v. Holder, that knocked down a core section of the Voting Rights Act. The court effectively ended a provision requiring counties and states with a history of racial discrimination at the polls — including all of Georgia — to obtain permission from the Justice Department before changing voting laws or procedures. The result has been a slew of laws that included restrictions to voting, like limiting voting by mail and adding voter ID requirements. (One new Georgia provision, which restricts most people from providing food and water to voters waiting in line within 150 feet of a polling place, was featured in a recent episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”)

Connecting the dots

For years, political scientists and civil rights leaders argued that the high court’s decision would lead to a resurgence in suppression of historically marginalized voters because local and state governments, many in the South, no longer needed federal permission to change voting laws and regulations. Two new studies bolster that theory. This month, research from the Brennan Center found that the gap in turnout rates between white and nonwhite voters “grew almost twice as quickly in formerly covered jurisdictions as in other parts of the country with similar demographic and socioeconomic profiles.” In other words, the turnout gap tended to grow most quickly in the areas that lost federal oversight after 2013. The study by Podhorzer analyzed turnout at the county level. He found that the growing racial turnout gap since the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby had been felt most acutely by younger voters across the country.

These are trends that worry Democrats when it comes to areas like Lowndes, which is home to Valdosta State University, with more than 12,000 students. Podhorzer found that older voters are more resilient to voting changes because they have established voting habits. But younger or first-time voters are far more likely to be dissuaded or prevented from voting. It is “a sort of generational replacement, where older and established voters keep up their voting habits, while new restrictions stymie younger voters,” Podhorzer said in his report, which will be released this weekend. In Bulloch County, Ga., Winston County, Miss., and Newberry County, S.C., the racial turnout gap among young voters grew by 20 percentage points or more between the 2012 and 2020 elections. In each of those counties, the gap for both Gen X and even older voters never grew by more than 11 percentage points.

Turnout in 2024............

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