Israeli forces battle Hamas around Gaza City, as military says 800,000 have fled south
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israeli ground forces attacked Hamas militants and infrastructure on Tuesday in northern Gaza, which the military said some 800,000 people have fled since the war began more than three weeks ago, even as warplanes continued to strike from end to end of the sealed-off territory.
Buoyed by the first successful rescue of a captive held by Hamas, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected calls for a cease-fire and again vowed to crush the militant group’s ability to govern Gaza or threaten Israel following its bloody Oct. 7 rampage, which ignited the war.
More than half the territory’s 2.3 million Palestinians have fled their homes, with hundreds of thousands sheltering in packed U.N.-run schools-turned-shelters or in hospitals alongside thousands of wounded patients. Israeli strikes have hit closer to several northern hospitals in recent days, alarming medics.
The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, says nearly 672,000 Palestinians are sheltering in its schools and other facilities — four times their capacity. Thousands of people broke into its aid warehouses over the weekend to take food, as supplies of basic goods have dwindled.
There has been no central electricity in Gaza for weeks, and Israel has barred the entry of fuel needed to power emergency generators for hospitals and homes.
UN agency in Gaza says urgent cease-fire is a matter of life and death for millions of Palestinians
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees told a U.N. emergency meeting Monday “an immediate humanitarian cease-fire has become a matter of life and death for millions,” accusing Israel of “collective punishment” of Palestinians and the forced displacement of civilians.
Philippe Lazzarini warned that a further breakdown of civil order after the agency’s warehouses were broken into by Palestinians searching for food and other aid “will make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the largest U.N. agency in Gaza to continue operating.”
Briefings to the Security Council by Lazzarini, the head of the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF and a senior U.N. humanitarian official painted a dire picture of the humanitarian situation in Gaza 23 days after Hamas’ surprise Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, and its ongoing retaliatory military action aimed at “obliterating” the militant group, which controls Gaza.
According to the latest figures from Gaza’s Ministry of Health, more than 8,300 people have been killed — 66% of them women and children — and tens of thousands injured, the U.N. humanitarian office said.
UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell that toll includes over 3,400 children killed and more than 6,300 injured. “This means that more than 420 children are being killed or injured in Gaza each day — a number which should shake each of us to our core,” she said.
Maine mass shooter’s family reached out to sheriff 5 months before rampage, sheriff’s office says
LEWISTON, Maine (AP) — Five months before the deadliest mass shooting in Maine’s history, the gunman’s family alerted the local sheriff that they were becoming concerned about his deteriorating mental health while he had access to firearms, authorities said Monday.
After the alert, the Sagadohoc County Sheriff’s Office reached out to officials of Robert Card’s Army Reserve unit, which assured deputies that they would speak to Card and make sure he got medical attention, Sheriff Joel Merry said.
The family’s concern about Card’s mental health dated back to early this year before the sheriff’s office was contacted in May, marking the earliest in a string of interactions that police had with the 40-year-old firearms instructor before he marched a Lewiston bowling alley and a bar last Wednesday, killing 18 people and wounding 13 others.
After an intensive two-day search that put residents on edge, he was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot.
Card underwent a mental health evaluation last summer after accusing soldiers of calling him a pedophile, shoving one and locking himself in his room during training in New York, officials said. A bulletin sent to police shortly after last week’s attack said Card had been committed to a mental health facility for two weeks after “hearing voices and threats to shoot up” a military base.
Maui police release 16 minutes of body camera footage from day of Lahaina wildfire
HONOLULU (AP) — Maui police held a news conference on Monday to show 16 minutes of body camera footage taken the day a wildfire tore through Lahaina town in August, including video of officers rescuing 15 people from a coffee shop and taking a severely burned man to a hospital.
Chief John Pelletier said his department faced a deadline to release 20 hours of body camera footage in response to an open records request and wanted to provide some context for what people would see before the video came out.
Earlier this month, Maui County provided the AP with 911 call recordings in response to an open records request.
The 16 minutes of video released at the news conference in Wailuku showed officers evacuating a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf shop at a supermarket on Front Street, a neighborhood that largely burned in the blaze. Officers ushered out 15 people from the coffee shop as smoke swirled in the sky around them, loaded the group into police SUVs and took them to the Lahaina Civic Center.
In another clip, an officer finds a badly burned man at a shopping center and put him in the back seat of his patrol car. “I’ll just take you straight to the hospital. That sound good?” the officer can be heard asking the man, who responds: “Yeah.”
Two hours of terror and now years of devastation for Acapulco’s poor in Hurricane Otis aftermath
ACAPULCO, Mexico (AP) — Estela Sandoval Díaz was huddled in her tiny concrete bathroom, sure these were the final moments of her life, when Hurricane Otis ripped off her tin roof.
With it went clothing, savings, furniture, photos and 33 years of the life Sandoval built piece-by-piece on the forgotten fringes of Acapulco, Mexico.
Sandoval was among hundreds of thousands of people whose lives were torn apart when the fastest intensifying hurricane on record in the Eastern Pacific shredded the coastal city of 1 million, leaving at least 45 dead. The Category 5 hurricane damaged nearly all of Acapulco’s homes, left bodies bobbing along the coastline and much of the city foraging for food.
While authorities were hard at work restoring order in Acapulco’s tourist center — cutting through trees in front of high-rise hotels and restoring power — the city’s poorest, like Sandoval, said they felt abandoned. She and hundreds of thousands others lived two hours of terror last week, and now face years of work to repair their already precarious lives.
“The government doesn’t even know we exist,” Sandoval said. “They’ve only ever taken care of the resort areas, the pretty places of Acapulco. They’ve always forgotten us.”
Does Jan. 6 constitutionally block Trump from 2024 ballot? Lawyers to make case on day 2 of hearing
DENVER (AP) — The videos playing in a Colorado courtroom were both chilling and, by now, familiar — a violent mob, with some wearing tactical gear, smashing through the U.S. Capitol, attacking police officers and chanting “Hang Mike Pence!”
Now, lawyers on day two of the weeklong hearing are arguing whether the infamous events of Jan. 6, 2021 constituted an insurrection under a rarely used clause of the U.S. Constitution that they are trying to use to disqualify former President Donald Trump from the 2024 ballot. The hearing in Colorado is one of two this week — with the second before the Minnesota Supreme Court on Thursday — that could end up before the U.S. Supreme Court, which has never before ruled on the Civil War-era provision in the 14th Amendment.
Tuesday’s witnesses are expected to include an expert in right-wing violence and an expert on Section Three of the 14th Amendment, which has only been used a handful of times since it was adopted in 1868. The testimony will get to the heart of the thorny legal issues the case raises — what constitutes an “insurrection” and how can the extreme political penalty of being barred from office be applied?
The plaintiff’s lawyers contend the provision is straightforward and that Trump is clearly disqualified from the presidency, just as if he were under the Constitution’s minimum age for the office of 35.
Trump’s lawyers argue that there remains a host of questions — did the authors even mean for the provision to apply to the presidency, which is not mentioned in the amendment although “presidential and vice presidential electors” are, along with senators and members of the House of Representatives? Did it target those who simply exercised free speech to support unpopular causes or only those who took up arms?
Biden’s Cabinet secretaries will push a divided Congress to send aid to Israel and Ukraine
WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken will make the case Tuesday that the United States should immediately send aid to Israel and Ukraine, testifying at a Senate hearing as the administration’s massive $105 billion emergency aid request for conflicts in those countries and others has already hit roadblocks in the divided Congress.
President Joe Biden’s Cabinet secretaries will be advocating for the foreign aid to a mostly friendly audience in the Senate, where majority Democrats and many Republicans support tying aid for the two countries together. But it faces much deeper problems in the Republican-led House, where new Speaker Mike Johnson has proposed cutting out the Ukraine aid and focusing on Israel alone, and cutting money for the Internal Revenue Service to pay for it.
The drastically narrowed House proposal, which would cost more than $14 billion, faced immediate resistance among Senate Democrats — and put pressure on Senate Republicans who support the Ukraine aid but are conscious of growing concerns about it within their party. The differing approaches signal problems ahead for the aid as both countries engage in long-simmering, defining conflicts that Biden and many U.S. lawmakers say could have fundamental ramifications for the rest of the world.
“Right now, America faces an unavoidable moment of truth: democracy and freedom are under attack around the globe in ways we have not seen since the end of the Cold War,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., shortly after House Republicans made their proposal public on Monday. He said Republicans should resist “the false allures of isolationism” as Russian President Vladimir Putin has worked to re-assert Russia as a global power and as Hamas has sought the total annihilation of Israel.
In prepared remarks for Tuesday’s hearing, Senate Appropriations Chairwoman Patty Murray, D-Wash., will say that she and the panel’s top Republican, Maine Sen. Susan Collins, are writing a bill that would include aid for both countries, as Biden has requested. The White House request also includes money for Taiwan as it faces threats from China and added dollars to manage the influx of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Southern California wildfire prompts evacuation order for thousands as Santa Ana winds fuel flames
AGUANGA, Calif. (AP) — A wildfire fueled by gusty Santa Ana winds ripped through rural land southeast of Los Angeles on Monday, forcing about 4,000 people from their homes, fire authorities said.
The so-called Highland Fire erupted at about 12:45 p.m. in dry, brushy hills near the unincorporated Riverside County hamlet of Aguanga.
As of late Monday night, it had spread over about 2 square miles (5 square kilometers) of land, fire spokesman Jeff LaRusso said.
About 1,300 homes and 4,000 residents were under evacuation orders, he said.
The fire had destroyed three buildings and damaged six others but it wasn’t clear whether any were homes. The region is sparsely populated but there are horse ranches and a large mobile home site, LaRusso said.
Cutting-edge AI raises fears about risks to humanity. Are tech and political leaders doing enough?
LONDON (AP) — Chatbots like ChatGPT wowed the world with their ability to write speeches, plan vacations or hold a conversation as good as or arguably even better than humans do, thanks to cutting-edge artificial intelligence systems. Now, frontier AI has become the latest buzzword as concerns grow that the emerging technology has capabilities that could endanger humanity.
Everyone from the British government to top researchers and even major AI companies themselves are raising the alarm about frontier AI’s as-yet-unknown dangers and calling for safeguards to protect people from its existential threats.
The debate comes to a head Wednesday, when British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak hosts a two-day summit focused on frontier AI. It’s reportedly expected to draw a group of about 100 officials from 28 countries, including U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and executives from key U.S. artificial intelligence companies including OpenAI, Google’s Deepmind and Anthropic.
The venue is Bletchley Park, a former top secret base for World War II codebreakers led by Alan Turing. The historic estate is seen as the birthplace of modern computing because it is where Turing’s team famously cracked Nazi Germany’s Enigma code using the world’s first digital programmable computer.
In a speech last week, Sunak said only governments — not AI companies — can keep people safe from the technology’s risks. However, he also noted that the U.K.’s approach “is not to rush to regulate,” even as he outlined a host of scary-sounding threats, such as the use of AI to more easily make chemical or biological weapons.
Last operating US prison ship, a grim vestige of mass incarceration, set to close in NYC
NEW YORK (AP) — Kenneth Williams spent his whole life in Brooklyn, but it wasn’t until a night in 2018 when he crossed a narrow footbridge in shackles, that he learned about New York City’s last floating jail. He remembers the murky East River water below him, the stench of mold, and a sinking feeling that soon turned literal.
“Every once in a while you could feel the boat dropping into the muck,” Williams, 62, said. “It was a stark reminder that this place wasn’t meant for human confinement.”
Docked in the shallows off an industrial edge of the South Bronx, the Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center is a five-story jail barge that stretches the length of two football fields, resembling a container ship stacked with cargo.
It arrived in 1992 as a temporary measure to ease overcrowding on Rikers Island, the city’s main jail complex for detainees awaiting trial. Three decades later, the 800-bed lockup – the last operating prison ship in the United States — is finally closing down.
The ship will be fully vacated by the end of this week, officials said, as part of a broader plan to replace the city’s long-troubled correctional system with a network of smaller jails. For now, most of the roughly 500 people incarcerated on the ship will be transferred to Rikers Island, according to the Department of Correction, though the jails there are eventually supposed to close down, too.
