Weekend Reading
Long reads for a late winter weekend
“Well, I think it’s clear from following the situation that the Netanyahu government could allow many more trucks to cross into Gaza, both through Kerem Shalom and through Rafah. If you look at any graph over time of the number of trucks going through, you can see big drops to under a hundred trucks as recently as February, and at the same time, you have people like [Minister of Finance] Bezalel Smotrich holding up flour at the Port of Ashdod for at least five weeks, despite the fact that Prime Minister Netanyahu promised President Biden that that flour would go to hungry, starving people. That’s just one example. You also have [Minister of National Security] Itamar Ben-Gvir indicating that he would not allow police to clear protesters who were blocking trucks at the Kerem Shalom crossing … There’s also the issue of continued arbitrary denial of things like maternity kits from being able to cross into Gaza on the claim that somehow a maternity kit is a dual-use item, and that also holds true with other items like water purifiers and things that clearly are not dual use. [Dual-use items are items which could potentially be used for military purposes, aside from their intended purposes.] When there’s one of those items on the truck, the whole truck has to be turned around and go back to the start, which is now taking up to several weeks in some cases … So, this was a shipment of flour from Turkey that was at the port of Ashdod, and had enough flour to feed hundreds of thousands of people for weeks. Smotrich intervened and refused to allow the flour to be transferred because he didn’t want the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (unrwa) to be able to distribute it, even though we know that unrwa has been the primary distribution system for aid in Gaza. I should point out that Ambassador David Satterfield, our humanitarian envoy, has said repeatedly that he has received zero evidence from the Netanyahu government that U.N.-distributed aid has been diverted to Hamas.” (Senator Chris van Hollen/TNY)
“Rupert Murdoch, the 92-year-old conservative media mogul, is engaged for the sixth time, sources familiar with the matter tell ABC News. News of his engagement to Elena Zhukova comes just months after the Fox boss effectively handed over the reins of his conservative media empire to his son, Lachlan Murdoch. The wedding is set for June at his California estate and vineyard, called Moraga. Multiple recent media reports describe Zhukova as a 66-year-old retired scientist. Reports also say her daughter was married to Roman Abramovich -- who the U.S. government has described as a Russian oligarch, seizing his yacht.” (Olivia Rubin /ABCNews)
“Trump himself understood that Murdoch has not wanted him to serve as the Republican nominee. Over the past few years, he has repeatedly raged at the media mogul on his Truth Social platform, blasting him for perceived slights and for having worked to elevate DeSantis. Some of this criticism has been unfair, as we've noted, given Fox News' general refusal to throw actual elbows at Trump and still echo much of his dishonest rhetoric, repeatedly shielding him as he was hit with 91 criminal counts and civil fraud judgments worth hundreds of millions of dollars after exiting office. But Trump was not wrong in his assessment that Murdoch's network certainly would have preferred to have had another candidate at the helm of the Republican Party. Now that Trump has secured command over the GOP, it is déjà vu for Murdoch. Eight years after Trump beat Fox News into submission during the 2016 race (remember when the network sparred openly with him over his trashing of then-anchor Megyn Kelly, among other things?), he has done the same again. That means that as the presumptive GOP nominee, Trump will once again have Fox News at his full disposal, able to wield the network like he did during his time in the White House as an effective political weapon, which he will harness in the weeks and months ahead against President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.” (Oliver Darcy/Reliable Sources)
“Katie Britt, the junior Republican senator from Alabama, delivered the GOP’s rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s address on Thursday. Her impassioned, breathless speech — delivered at times in an ASMR-esque whisper from what appeared to be her kitchen — ended up feeling more like a rejected audition tape for a supporting role on ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ than the hard-hitting political sparring favored by Biden’s Republican critics. Into the late hours of the night, Rolling Stone was inundated, sometimes completely unprompted, with messages from longtime GOP operatives, right-leaning pollsters, conservative Capitol Hill staff, MAGA lawyers, and even some senior members of Trump’s own 2024 campaign absolutely torching Britt’s absurdly over-dramatic rebuttal.” (Nikki McCann Ramirez, Aswain Suebaseng/Rolling Stone)
“Meanwhile, vice presidential wannabes like Noem, New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, and Sens. Scott and J.D. Vance of Ohio, among others, have raced to campaign for Trump in Iowa, New Hampshire, or elsewhere, presumably to ingratiate themselves to him. Noem criticized Haley in unusually personal terms as someone who goes ‘whichever way the political winds blow’ and does ‘whatever works for her political agenda.’ Stefanik’s target was Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, whom she criticized for his Jan. 6 actions when he followed the Constitution and Electoral Count Act of 1887 in performing the limited role of the Senate president during that ceremony. Stefanik herself voted against accepting the Pennsylvania electoral votes but voted to certify Joe Biden’s Arizona slate. Vance, who has morphed from an outspoken Trump critic to an enthusiastic surrogate, recently went even further than Stefanik on the Jan. 6 question, not only saying Pence was wrong but that Vance ‘would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors,’ a position that would have exceeded the Senate president’s ministerial role in unprecedented ways.” (Joel K Goldstein/Center for Politics)
“India is likely to send 10,000 more troops to its disputed border with China in a move that would potentially exacerbate tensions between the two Asian giants amid a years-long border standoff. India and China which share a poorly demarcated 3,440km-long border, the source of a bitter dispute.. Tensions reached a peak in June 2020 when 20 Indian soldiers and an unspecified number of Chinese forces were killed following a brutal skirmish on the Himalayan border. Since then, military leaders from the two countries have held many rounds of talks to resolve tensions but have yet to resolve core disagreements on key points of friction.” (Shweta Sharma/Independent)
“Reporting that Trump is a racist fanatic who would turn a democratic government into his personal fiefdom is not crusading, it’s journalism. Reporting (endlessly) that Biden is old without noting that Trump is deranged is not ‘independent’ journalism, it’s just bad journalism. Sulzberger also defended the Times’s unremittingly hostile coverage of gender-affirming care for young people by saying critics don’t want the topic covered at all, which is not remotely true. They want it covered fairly, in a way that respects trans existence. And he defended the Times’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by saying it’s impossible to please everybody. ‘There’s no story that is more fiercely contested, more mired in competing zero-sum narratives,’ he said. But he didn’t address one common concern, which is that Times coverage is generally more respectful of Jewish lives than it is of Palestinians’.” (Dan Froomkin/Presswatchers)
“Reaching this point has been spectacularly easy for Trump, who has not had to do most of what Presidential candidates normally do, nor even what he did in the lead-up to the 2016 and 2020 elections. He chose to not participate in any of the Republican Presidential-primary debates, denying his opponents the ability to attack him, and he has held far fewer events; there has been nothing like the stadium-and-airport-barnstorming tour of 2016. Trump has barely advertised, has not courted the mainstream media, and, instead of seeking the broad audience that he used to command on Twitter (now X), he has so far confined himself to Truth Social, the right-wing platform he owns, whose audience is niche enough that he might as well be communicating in invisible ink. Trump has said in speeches that he plans to replace much of the federal bureaucracy with loyalists, and has reportedly privately expressed support for a sixteen-week national abortion ban; beyond that, there has been little anyone would call a platform. Presidential campaigns are often said to succeed only if they are about the future, but Trump 2024 has largely been about comeuppance for the past. ‘I will be your retribution,’ Trump promised, early on. On the evening of Super Tuesday, as winning results rolled in, his campaign issued a triumphant statement to its supporters: ‘Victory is our ultimate revenge!’ Has Trump been lucky? In some ways, of course.” (The New Yorker/ Benjamin Wallace-Wells)
“The war in Sudan is ‘triggering the world’s largest hunger crisis,’ with more than 25 million people ‘trapped in a spiral’ of food insecurity, a United Nations agency has warned. Nine in 10 people across the country face ‘emergency levels of hunger’ and are ‘stuck’ in areas ‘largely inaccessible’ due to ‘relentless violence and interference by the warring parties,’ the UN’s World Food Program (WFP) said Wednesday. The war, which has also created the world’s largest displacement crisis, according to the UN, has left 18 million people ‘acutely food insecure’ in Sudan and millions more in neighboring South Sudan and Chad. ‘Twenty years ago, Darfur was the world’s largest hunger crisis, and the world rallied to respond. But today, the people of Sudan have been forgotten. Millions of lives and the peace and stability of an entire region are at stake,’ said Cindy McCain, Executive Director of the WFP. Thousands of people have been killed and eight million displaced since fighting broke out in April between forces loyal to two rival generals – army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who leads Sudan’s Armed Forces (SAF), and the head of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.” (CNN)
“Apple, the company that makes iPhones and computers, also makes movies. Three of them came to theaters in recent months, and … they did not do well. ‘Napoleon,’ ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ and ‘Argylle’ collectively generated $466 million at theaters around the world. But those movies cost Apple at least $700 million to create, Variety reports.That's not totally surprising. The fact that ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ — a 3 ½-hour historical drama — was going to struggle at the box office was conventional wisdom before it ever debuted. And the fact that ‘Argylle’ was a big-budget James Bond kinda-spoof with no audience interest was confirmed when the movie was scheduled for an early-February release. That's the calendar slot studios use to release movies they know will be duds. Much more surprising from Variety: An Apple source insists that both ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ and ‘Napoleon’ are actually profitable, ‘buoyed by ancillary revenue streams.’ How's that? Napoleon made $221 million at theaters and cost an estimated $200 million to make. ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ cost about the same — $215 million — and made less — $157 million. Since movie theaters keep roughly half of ticket sales, that means both movies would have needed to make a lot more somewhere else to close that gap. There are no ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ or ‘Napoleon’ action figures or fast-food tie-ins. And since the Apple-made movies are expressly built to be shown on its Apple TV+ streaming service, Apple can't make money selling them to a different streamer.” (Peter Kafka/BI via MSN)
“For the first time in history, an actor spoke to MPs in the French upper house of parliament about sexual violence and gender-based abuse in the film industry last week. Addressing the Senate’s women’s rights committee, actor Judith Godrèche called for the establishment of a commission of inquiry into gender-based violence and reprehended the ‘incestuous family’ that is French cinema. The actor-turned-filmmaker has become a bellwether for France’s #MeToo movement. She recently accused two filmmakers, Benoît Jacquot and Jacques Doillon, of sexually assaulting her as a teenager. Both men have denied the allegations. In her speech, Godrèche also urged for a ‘more effective system of control’ that would include a ‘neutral advisor’ in shoots involving minors and an intimacy coordinator for sex scenes.” (Lara Bullens/France24)