IndustryStandard

After catastrophic floods engulfed Valencia last month, killing more than 200 people, it might seem counterintuitive to think about water shortages. But as the torrents of filthy water swept through towns and villages, people were left without electricity, food supplies – and drinking water. “It was brutal: cars, chunks of machinery, big stones, even dead bodies were swept along in the water. It gushed into the ground floor of buildings, into little shops, bakeries, hairdressers, the English school, bars: all were destroyed. This was climate change for real, climate change in capital letters,” says Josep de la Rubia of Valencia’s Ecologists in Action, describing the scene in the satellite towns south of the Valencian capital.

In the aftermath, hundreds of thousands of people were reliant on emergency tankers of water or donations of bottled water from citizen volunteers. Within a fortnight, the authorities had reconnected the tap water of 90% of the 850,000 people in affected areas, but all were advised to boil it before drinking it or to use bottled water. Across the region, 100 sewage treatment plants were damaged; in some areas, human waste seeped into flood waters, dead animals were swept into rivers and sodden rubbish and debris piled up. Valencia is on the brink of a sanitation crisis.

But while Garriga and other Catalans have been suffering water shortages in recent years, there’s one group of people that appears to be immune, and even profits from them: the multinational companies extracting millions of litres of water from the very same land. This isn’t just a Spanish issue – across the world, from Uruguay to Mexico, Canada to the UK, many have begun to question whether private corporations should be allowed to siphon off a vital public resource, then sell it back to citizens as bottled water.

The White House issued a brief but definitive response to the International Criminal Court’s warrants for Israeli officials, saying it “fundamentally rejects” the decision but ignored addressing the substance of the warrants.

“The United States has been clear that the ICC does not have jurisdiction over this matter. In coordination with partners, including Israel, we are discussing next steps.”

The administration of President Joe Biden has long warned against any such moves by the court after its chief prosecutor Karim Khan announced in May that he would, in fact, be seeking the arrest warrants.

In a statement at the time, Biden called the notion “outrageous”.

Zelensky said that when Russia invaded in 2022, he “asked Israel’s leaders to help us and support, but they have been afraid of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin.”

“I think that Israel made a mistake” on a political level, the Ukrainian leader told Fox News, noting that Ukraine’s connection with Israeli society had always been strong.

Did the Democrats really lose because they were too “woke”, too obsessed with minorities, too radical? After defeat, there always comes the battle for the narrative about why the party lost. As the US left is rediscovering, the most influential voices tend to be those platformed by corporate media outlets whose siren cry is always to march rightwards. And yet even the New York Times concluded that one of the main problems was in fact Kamala Harris’s “Wall Street-approved economic pitch”, which her brother-in-law – chief legal officer at Uber – reportedly helped craft, and which “fell flat”.

The liberal order, always riddled with hypocrisies and illusions, is collapsing, partly because mainstream liberals cannot be trusted to defend liberalism: they are set to conclude that Trumpism must be defeated through imitation. But here’s a polling fact that cannot be ignored. In the past 50 years, the number of Americans who believe the Democrats “represent the working class” has plummeted, while the numbers who believe they “stand up for marginalised groups” has dramatically risen, now exceeding the former.

This is what happens if you lack a convincing economic vision to uplift the working class – in all its diversity – as a whole. Even if your commitment to minority rights is superficial and rhetorical, your rightwing opponents will tell Americans that your interest is reserved for “marginalised groups” rather than “the average Joe”. Or as one Republican attack ad put it: “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.”

This is a feature, not a bug, with the Democrats. Since the civil rights era, they have been a coalition including a chunk of corporate America, a shrinking labour movement and minorities. This cross-class alliance stopped them offering European-style social democracy, which would mean hiking taxes on their wealthy backers. In fact, under the Democratic administrations of John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson in the 60s, hefty tax cuts benefited big businesses and affluent Americans the most. While the tax burden of the average US family nearly doubled between the 1950s and the election of Ronald Reagan, corporate taxes as a share of gross federal receipts fell by a third.

This means that the big government spending projects of those eras, like the anti-poverty measures of the Great Society, were largely paid for by middle-income Americans. This encouraged a backlash against the beneficiaries of the programmes, demonised as the undeserving Black poor.

A group of around 50 activists were arrested on Capitol Hill on Tuesday while calling for an arms embargo on Israel and urging US senators to vote for a bill that would block a $20 billion weapons package to Israel.

The demonstration of more than 100 activists from a broad coalition of different groups, including Palestinians, Jews, climate advocates, veterans and indigenous people, took place in the atrium of the Senate Hart Office Building one day before senators vote on the bill.

The measure, called the Joint Resolutions of Disapproval, a series of resolutions introduced by Bernie Sanders and Peter Welch of Vermon, Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Jeff Merkley of Oregon, would block around $20 billion in weapons sales to Israel that was put forth by President Joe Biden's administration.

Israeli forces are using an AI weapons system in Gaza co-produced by an Indian defence company that turns machine guns and assault rifles into computerised killing machines, Middle East Eye can reveal.

According to documents and news reports seen by MEE, Israeli forces have been using the Arbel weapons system in Gaza following their devastating invasion of the enclave after the 7 October attacks on southern Israel.

Touted as a "revolutionary game changer that improves operator lethality and survivability," the Arbel system enhances machine guns and assault weapons - such as the Israeli-produced Tavor, Carmel and Negev - into a weapon that uses algorithms to boost soldiers chances of hitting targets more accurately and efficiently.

Although defence analysts say the weapon system may not be as cutting-edge or as widely used as the "Lavender" or "The Gospel" AI weapons systems - that are reported to have played a huge role in the tremendous death toll in Gaza - Arbel appears to be the first weapons system to directly tie India to Israel's rapidly expanding AI war in Gaza in what could have wide-ranging implications for other conflicts.

A storm off the coast of the US north-west and western Canada is pummelling the region - bringing high winds, flooding and snow to over seven million residents living in states along the Pacific Ocean.

The storm has caused widespread power outages for hundreds of thousands of Americans, and its strong winds have downed trees.

At least person - a woman near Seattle - has died.

The "bomb cyclone" - as forecasters call it - has been caused by air pressure quickly dropping off the coast, which has rapidly intensified the weather system.

The UN said all its attempts to support the estimated 65,000 to 75,000 people in Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahia and Jabalia this month had been denied or impeded, forcing bakeries and kitchens to shut down.

Earlier this month, a UN-backed assessment said there was a strong likelihood that famine was imminent in areas of northern Gaza.

Hundreds of people have been killed and between 100,000 and 130,000 others have been displaced to Gaza City, where the UN has said essential resources like shelter, water and healthcare are severely limited.

UN agencies had planned 31 missions to the besieged areas of North Gaza governorate between 1 and 18 November, according to the Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Twenty-seven were rejected by Israeli authorities and the other four were severely impeded, meaning they were prevented from accomplishing all the work they set out to do.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday singled out AIPAC as a 'special interest group pushing a wildly unpopular agenda,' starting a new debate about the pro-Israel organization's involvement in the party

The debate has been simmering since AIPAC's United Democracy Project super PAC spent unprecedented sums to unseat two progressive Democrats in their respective primaries over the summer – largely, but not exclusively, bankrolled by donations from Republican megadonors in an election year that was far and away the most expensive in history.

As internal Democratic debate over the party's ills and its future reached fever pitch in recent days, AIPAC was once again catapulted to the center of the matter.

"Weird to have a whole discourse about 'special interest groups' that completely leaves out corporate and industry lobbies – by far the most influential 'groups' in the Democratic Party," Jeremy Slevin, a senior adviser to AIPAC foe Sen. Bernie Sanders, wrote on Sunday.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the most nationally prominent AIPAC critic despite, ironically, being attacked from the left as an apologist for the group earlier this summer, singled out the pro-Israel organization while echoing Slevin's point. "If people want to talk about members of Congress being overly influenced by a special interest group pushing a wildly unpopular agenda that pushes voters away from Democrats then they should be discussing AIPAC," she tweeted in response.

Nov 19 (Reuters) - President Joe Biden has approved provision of anti-personnel land mines to Ukraine, a U.S. official told Reuters, a step that could help slow Russian advances in its east, especially when used along with other munitions from the United States.

The United States expects Ukraine to use the mines in its own territory, though it has committed not to use them in areas populated with its own civilians, the official said. The Washington Post first reported the development.

The office of Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the Ukrainian defence ministry, the Russian defence ministry and the Kremlin did not immediately respond to Reuters' requests to comment.

The United States has provided Ukraine with anti-tank mines throughout its war with Russia, but the addition of anti-personnel mines aims at blunting the advance of Russian ground troops, the official added, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The mayor of Amsterdam has taken back comments describing violence that took place following a football match between Israeli and Dutch teams earlier this month as a "pogrom", and has said Israel "bypassed" Dutch authorities regarding the details of the events.

Mayor Femke Halsema was speaking on Sunday evening on Dutch state broadcaster NPO's News Hour programme.

On 6 and 7 November, travelling Maccabi Tel Aviv fans stirred trouble in different parts of the Dutch capital by chanting racist anti-Arab slogans ahead of their Uefa Europa League match against Amsterdam club Ajax.