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Obama says any Israeli military strategy that ignores human costs ‘could ultimately backfire’
Former President Obama is warning that any strategy the Israeli military takes in its war against Hamas that ignores the danger to civilians “could ultimately backfire.”
Obama made the remark in a lengthy statement posted on Medium, where he said “Israel has a right to defend its citizens against such wanton violence” perpetrated by the Palestinian terrorist group and that he fully supports “President Biden’s call for the United States to support our long-time ally in going after Hamas, dismantling its military capabilities, and facilitating the safe return of hundreds of hostages to their families.”
“Still, the world is watching closely as events in the region unfold, and any Israeli military strategy that ignores the human costs could ultimately backfire,” Obama said. “Already, thousands of Palestinians have been killed in the bombing of Gaza, many of them children. Hundreds of thousands have been forced from their homes.
“The Israeli government’s decision to cut off food, water and electricity to a captive civilian population threatens not only to worsen a growing humanitarian crisis; it could further harden Palestinian attitudes for generations, erode global support for Israel, play into the hands of Israel’s enemies, and undermine long term efforts to achieve peace and stability in the region,” he added.
LIVE UPDATES: ISRAEL AT WAR WITH HAMAS
The comments come as Israel has built up its military presence along the Gaza border ahead of a possible ground invasion into the territory.
Obama said in his statement that “Hamas’ military operations are deeply embedded within Gaza – and its leadership seems to intentionally hide among civilians, thereby endangering the very people they claim to represent.”
SEN. PETER WELCH SAYS ISRAEL GROUND INVASION WOULD ‘EXACERBATE’ CONDITIONS IN GAZA: ‘GRAVE CONCERNS’
“But even as we support Israel, we should also be clear that how Israel prosecutes this fight against Hamas matters. In particular, it matters – as President Biden has repeatedly emphasized – that Israel’s military strategy abides by international law, including those laws that seek to avoid, to every extent possible, the death or suffering of civilian populations,” Obama also said.
White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby had said Monday that the U.S. is asking Israel “tough questions that any military ought to be asking” ahead of a possible ground incursion into the Gaza Strip.
“I can tell you we have, since the beginning of the conflict in the early hours, maintained a level of communication with our Israeli counterparts to ascertain their intentions, their strategy, their aims to see what their answers are to the kinds of tough questions that any military ought to be asking before you launch any kind of a major operation,” Kirby told reporters gathered at the White House.
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Biden administration looks to ban menthol cigarettes: ‘There’s no going back’
The Biden administration is taking aim at the tobacco industry with a potential new rule that would ban menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last week sent the rule to the White House for review, the last regulatory step before it gets issued.
A menthol ban has been more than a decade in the making and would be one of the most consequential policies from the FDA since it began regulating tobacco in 2009. Health officials and tobacco control advocates have said such a move could save hundreds of thousands of lives, particularly among Black smokers.
Public health and civil rights groups have long argued Black Americans have been disproportionately harmed by menthol cigarettes, as the tobacco industry deliberately targeted Black communities for decades.
An estimated 85 percent of Black smokers use menthols, according to the FDA, compared with 30 percent of white smokers. It is estimated that approximately 40 percent of excess deaths due to menthol cigarette smoking in the U.S. between 1980 and 2018 were those of African Americans
“These rules represent truly historic action to drive down tobacco use,” Yolonda Richardson, president and CEO of Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, said in a statement. “Once implemented, they will protect kids from tobacco addiction, advance health equity and save hundreds of thousands of lives, especially Black lives.”
Multiple administrations have considered such a ban, but advocates and health experts are praising the White House for being the only one to move forward amid intense industry pressure. They want the administration to quickly issue the final rules before the end of the year.
“We’ve literally been waiting for 12 years for FDA to move forward with the product standard that would remove both menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars from the marketplace,” said Erika Sward, assistant vice president of national advocacy with the American Lung Association.
“I really cannot understate how significant these rules will be in improving public health and by reducing the number of deaths caused by cigarettes in the years to come,” Sward added.
Menthol-flavored cigarettes accounted for more than a third of all cigarette sales in the U.S. in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This is the highest proportion since major tobacco companies were first required to report that information to the federal government in 1963.
Scientists have long known that menthol in cigarettes can make them more addictive. Menthol creates a cooling sensation in the throat and airways, making the smoke feel less harsh and easier to inhale.
Congress banned flavored cigarettes as part of the 2009 law giving the FDA authority to regulate tobacco products, but a loophole exempted menthol.
Instead, lawmakers at the time directed the FDA to determine whether continued sale of menthol cigarettes was “appropriate for public health.”
The Obama administration solicited comments for potential regulation of menthol cigarettes in 2013, but it never proposed a rule. Then in 2018, the Trump administration revisited the issue under former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb.
“I believe these menthol-flavored products represent one of the most common and pernicious routes by which kids initiate on combustible cigarettes,” Gottlieb said in a statement at the time.
But Trump’s FDA also failed to issue a formal rule. So when the Biden administration’s April 2022 proposals for a ban on menthol and flavored cigars were released, they represented a significant step forward.
“The authority to adopt tobacco product standards is one of the most powerful tools Congress gave the FDA, and the actions we are proposing can help significantly reduce youth initiation and increase the chances that current smokers quit. It is clear that these efforts will help save lives,” FDA Commissioner Robert Califf said at the time.
Mitch Zeller, who served as the head of the FDA’s tobacco center from 2013 until 2022 and helped draft the proposal, said he thinks it’s inevitable that the policy will be introduced.
“We’ve never gotten it to this stage before. And as far as I’m concerned, there’s no going back,” Zeller said.
Still, he acknowledged it should have happened earlier.
“It’s a fair question as to why it didn’t happen in earlier administrations, and I’m not going to try to defend the failure of prior administrations to move menthol forward. There’s no reason why this could not have happened years ago,” Zeller said.
Tobacco industry and retail groups argue that a federal menthol ban will not help smokers quit, because there’s no proven relationship between menthol and either increases in dependence on cigarettes or smoking initiation.
They also argue a ban would expand an illicit, unregulated marketplace of menthol cigarettes and will lead to more overpolicing in communities of color, similar to the war on drugs campaign of the 1980s and 1990s.
The ban would only apply to companies that manufacture, distribute or sell menthol cigarettes, not individuals who possess or use them. Still, critics of the ban often invoke civil rights arguments.
“I think there is an Eric Garner concern here,” Rev. Al Sharpton told The New York Times in 2019, referring to the Black man killed in 2014 after police stopped him on suspicion of illegally selling loose cigarettes. Tobacco giant Reynolds American reportedly enlisted Sharpton to lobby against a New York City ban on menthol tobacco products.
But tobacco control advocates and criminal justice experts said that while there is always a concern about overpolicing, they are skeptical that a menthol ban would compound the problem.
In California and Massachusetts, the two states that have already banned menthol, there’s been no direct correlation.
“There’s going to be more police interaction? There’s been no police interaction. This isn’t about stopping someone and asking them, ‘Are you smoking a menthol cigarette?'” said Philip Gardiner, co-chair of the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council.
“There has not been one person arrested in any place in the United States for the possession of a menthol cigarette. That’s the distortion being put out by the tobacco industry and the mouthpieces that are speaking for them,” Gardiner said.
Keith Taylor, a former New York Police Department officer and an adjunct assistant professor at the John Jay College of the City University of New York, said the idea of an illicit market is “overblown.”
“When you look at this idea of an illicit market, who is being robbed of profits from the sale of menthol cigarettes? It’s not the general public, it’s not the communities that they’re sold in. It’s the cigarette producers,” Taylor said.
Taylor said he understands there could be tension between a federal rule and local law enforcement implementation. But he said it should be handled as a public health issue, not a public safety one.
“Is there potential to misuse the ban to generate arrest of young people for selling it? There’s always a potential, but the hope is that … banning this product will have the long-term benefit of saving lives and costing municipalities less,” he said.
Go to Source: Administration News | The Hill
Meet the woman behind US equipment transfers to Ukraine and Israel
As the head of a major State Department office that oversees some $40 billion annually in global arms transfers, the crises in Ukraine and Israel have Mira Resnick up to her knees in work.
The days may be long, but Resnick, deputy assistant secretary for the Regional Security Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, knows how important the job is for the country and to help manage the dual conflicts.
“We are going to handle both because we will have to handle both,” she told The Hill in a recent interview. “And the secretary has said before that we have to walk and chew gum at the same time … so that is what we will do. Our partners rely on us, and we will be there for them.”
Resnick oversees the bureau’s Office of Regional Security and Arms Transfers, making her the person on the State Department side behind all the defense equipment and weapons headed to embattled countries, such as Ukraine. She works closely with other officials in the federal government, including the Pentagon, in a key partnership that ensures the transfers get to where they need to go.
Resnick is also managing peacetime security aid to countries, including Egypt, and is overseeing critical work ensuring nations have military grant assistance and the financing to purchase U.S. equipment.
It’s a big task: Resnick usually travels twice per month, has daily intelligence readings, frequent meetings with leadership and even calls her work partners on the way home and before bed.
“We are in constant motion here,” she said.
“I’ve been interested in foreign policy for as long as I can remember,” says Resnick, who grew up in California. “The U.S.-Israel relationship was a private focus in my household because of my Jewish background, but also because we were just a politically aware family.”
She studied political science at Columbia University, where she graduated in 2005, and later earned a master’s degree in security studies from the Pentagon-funded National Defense University.
She jumped into foreign policy work with Congress not long after leaving the school, working for multiple Democratic lawmakers, including Rep. Bill Keating (Mass.) and former Reps. Henry Waxman (Calif.), Ron Klein (Fla.) and Steve Israel (N.Y.).
This lengthy experience on Capitol Hill has proved invaluable, says Resnick, who works closely with Congress to make sure everyone is “on the same page.”
Resnick’s first foray in the State Department was from 2011 to 2013, when she worked as a congressional liaison in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs.
But she transitioned back to work for the House Foreign Affairs Committee before assuming her current position in January 2021, when President Biden came into office.
Resnick says she rejoined the State Department out of interest in advancing peace and security, primarily in the Middle East, and restoring ties with alliance members.
This month’s conflict in Israel with the Palestinian militant group Hamas has shocked her deeply.
“I think it’s been hard for everyone on a human level,” Resnick says.
She has helped speed up emergency air defense munitions to Israel in the wake of the war, working with the Israeli government to allow private citizens to donate equipment, such as body armor, and is also pushing an effort to potentially get Israel more assistance through foreign military financing.
The frenzy in responding to Israel’s needs reminds Resnick of the first days of the war in Ukraine in February 2022.
“The early days were full of urgent requirements, making sure that our partners were communicating with us, and that we were communicating with our partners as they sought to send U.S. origin equipment to Ukraine,” she says.
Congress quickly passed legislation that awarded billions of dollars to Ukraine, which led to an immediate and ongoing effort to ensure weapons and equipment are being used properly.
“We knew [it was] going to be a tremendous challenge to keep track of,” Resnick says. “We knew that there was going to be a lot of oversight, and there should be a lot of oversight on this money, and so we took that opportunity to develop standard operating procedures to develop training for our Ukrainian colleagues and to work with them to really press on the importance of making sure that they are using the equipment and that they are not diverting it to other sources.”
The U.S. has provided $43.9 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since Russia first invaded.
Washington gets military equipment to Ukraine through presidential drawdown authority, which takes from existing military stocks; third-party transfers, which involve working with allied nations to move U.S. defense articles; and purchasing from the defense industry directly.
Resnick’s office works “very closely” with the Pentagon, she says, but State has the authority on third-party transfers.
She also emphasizes a key part of her job is “to work on ways that we can help partners diversify away from Russia” by meeting their security needs instead.
And it’s not just Ukraine and Israel. Countries around the globe are relying on Resnick and the U.S., including the independent island nation of Taiwan, which is increasingly being threatened by China.
There has been a major backlog of weapons to Taiwan, but Resnick said the U.S. is drawing lessons from the challenges, particularly in cooperating with the defense industry.
“We want to make sure items are getting on an island quickly, we want industry to take that very seriously,” she says, noting it can take up to four years to build an F-16. “We all need to do better.”
But the most important work for Resnick is actually something much simpler and core to the function of government: protecting human rights.
She was a major force behind the Biden administration overhauling its guidelines on conventional weapons transfers earlier this year.
The revised code requires a stricter review of whether any arms transfer is likely to violate human rights or international war laws.
Resnick says the Biden administration “set a new standard for when we would not conduct a transfer.”
“This was my goal in the beginning of my administration,” she says. “To make sure that we could have a conventional arms transfer policy that reflected this administration’s commitment to putting human rights at the center of our foreign policy.”
Go to Source: Administration News | The Hill
Sen. Peter Welch says Israel ground invasion would ‘exacerbate’ conditions in Gaza: ‘Grave concerns’
Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., said Monday he has “grave concerns” about Israel’s potential ground invasion into Gaza amid an ongoing war prompted by Hamas’ terror attack on the Jewish State.
In a statement released Monday, Welch said he has “grave concerns about the wisdom and military efficacy” of an Israeli ground invasion in Gaza and that there is “no doubt” an imminent ground invasion would be “catastrophic for innocent Palestinians in Gaza and jeopardize urgent efforts to save hostages.”
“Israel has the absolute right to attack Hamas for the brutal, heinous slaughter of more than 1,400 Israelis and the taking of more than 200 hostages,” Welch wrote. “But, Israel also has a responsibility to protect Palestinian civilians living in Gaza, including one million children. Already, more than 5,000 Palestinians have died.”
More than 5,700 people have been killed and thousands more wounded in Gaza and Israel since Hamas launched its largest attack against Israel in decades on Oct. 7, leading Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to declare war on the terrorist group.
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Israel has indicated it will be conducting a ground invasion into Gaza to attack Hamas, although there is no definitive timetable on when such an attack would begin.
Hamas has taken more than 220 people hostage, but at least four have been released thus far, including two Americans who were freed last week. The Israeli military told The Times of Israel that it is concerned additional hostage releases by Hamas could lead the political leadership to delay a ground invasion or stop it midway.
U.S. and international officials, lawmakers and humanitarian aid groups have expressed concerns about the conditions in Gaza after Israel cut off water and fuel supply to the region following Hamas’ initial attack.
“The humanitarian conditions in Gaza are terrible and getting worse every day,” Welch said in his statement. “One million Palestinians, including women and children, have been displaced. Most are living in the open—without food, without shelter, fuel, water, or access to medicine. United Nations relief efforts have begun but are unable to meet the extreme needs of the moment.”
“A ground invasion would further exacerbate the dire conditions in Gaza,” Welch concluded.
Last week, Welch and fellow Democrat Sens. Brian Schatz, of Hawaii, and Chris Van Hollen, of Maryland, wrote a letter to Biden urging that “every effort be made to avoid civilian harm and to allow access to humanitarian aid for those in need,” including restoring access to food, electricity, water, fuel and medicine to civilians in Gaza and establishing a humanitarian corridor to allow aid into Gaza and safe passage for U.S. citizens who wish to evacuate the region.
The international community has been working to supply civilians of Gaza with humanitarian aid in the wake of the violence in the region. Egypt, Israel and the United Nations facilitated a 20-truck convoy carrying humanitarian assistance that was delivered to Gaza through the Rafah border crossing last week.
President Biden and five other Western leaders said in a joint statement Sunday that they “welcomed the announcement of the first humanitarian convoys to reach Palestinians in need in Gaza and committed to continue coordinating with partners in the region to ensure sustained and safe access to food, water, medical care, and other assistance required to meet humanitarian needs.”
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House Republicans to hold 3rd internal vote to find speaker candidate 3 weeks after McCarthy ouster
House Republicans are getting ready to vote for a speaker candidate for a third time after their past two nominees to lead the chamber dropped out of the race.
GOP lawmakers are gathering behind closed doors at 9 a.m. on Tuesday for an election via anonymous secret ballot.
There are nine Republicans jostling for the speakership right now: Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn.; GOP Conference Vice Chair Mike Johnson, R-La.; GOP Policy Committee Chair Gary Palmer, R-Ala.; Republican Study Committee Chair Kevin Hern, R-Okla.; Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla.; Rep. Jack Bergman, R-Mich.; Rep. Austin Scott, R-Ga.; Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas; and Rep. Dan Meuser, R-Pa.
HOUSE SPEAKER ‘CHAOS’ COULD BENEFIT DEMS AS RACE STRETCHES INTO NEW WEEK
The vote comes after the candidates made their pitch to the GOP conference on Monday night at a candidate forum.
The front-runner right now appears to be Emmer, who has been endorsed by ex-Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. Other candidates going into the election with several endorsements under their belt are Donalds and Bergman.
It’s likely to take several rounds of voting – a candidate must win a conference majority to be named speaker-designate under current House GOP Conference rules.
MEET TOM EMMER, THE GOP MAJORITY WHIP RUNNING FOR HOUSE SPEAKER WITH MCCARTHY’S ENDORSEMENT
If no candidate manages to win a majority during a given round, the person with the least amount of votes is withdrawn from the race and another round is held.
The election comes three weeks after McCarthy’s ouster from the top job, the first time in history the House of Representatives removed their leader in the middle of a congressional term.
HOUSE REPUBLICANS VOTE TO REMOVE JIM JORDAN AS SPEAKER NOMINEE
Last week, House Republicans selected Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, but he pulled out of the race after he was unable to secure 217 Republican votes – the number needed for a House-wide majority.
Before that, Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., was the original pick of the conference to replace McCarthy. He dropped out of the race just a day after winning the nomination – opposition from Jordan allies made it clear he would not reach 217 votes.
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