As part of the Biden-Harris administration’s effort to ensure more than 150 million people with private health coverage have greater access to mental health and substance use disorder care, the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services and the Treasury took significant action today by issuing final rules to clarify and strengthen protections to expand equitable access to these benefits as compared to medical and surgical benefits and reduce barriers to accessing these services. 

“Like medical care, mental health care is vital to the well-being of America’s workers,” said Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su. “The final rules issued today make it easier for people living with mental health conditions and substance use disorders to get the life-saving care they often need.”

The rules build on the departments’ commitment to achieving the full promise of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008. The act requires group health plans and health insurance issuers offering group and individual health insurance coverage that offer mental health or substance use disorder benefits to cover those benefits in parity with medical and surgical benefits, without imposing greater restrictions on mental health or substance use disorder benefits as compared to medical and surgical benefits. More than 15 years after the law’s enactment, the departments’ enforcement efforts have shown that many still encounter barriers to accessing mental health and substance use disorder care as compared to medical and surgical care under their health plan or coverage. 

“The final rules are critical steps forward to making sure that people in need of services can get the care they need without jumping through hoops that they don’t face when trying to get medical or surgical care,” said Assistant Secretary for Employee Benefits Security, Lisa M. Gomez. “Ending the stigma around mental health conditions and substance use disorders calls for a unified effort, and we appreciate the valuable feedback we received from stakeholders – plans, care providers and participants – in shaping these final rules.”

The new rules add additional protections against more restrictive, nonquantitative treatment limitations for mental health and substance use disorder benefits as compared to medical or surgical benefits. Nonquantitative treatment limitations are requirements that limit the scope or duration of benefits, such as prior authorization requirements, step therapy and standards for provider admission to participate in a network. 

“Simply put, getting care for anxiety should be as easy as getting medical help for an injured shoulder, and getting medication to treat depression should be as simple as getting medication to treat high cholesterol,” said Gomez. 

The final rules also prohibit plans from using biased or non-objective information and sources that might negatively impact access to mental health and substance use disorder care when designing and applying a nonquantitative treatment limitation.

“Health care, whether for physical or behavioral conditions, is health care. No one should receive lesser care for one or the other. That’s the law. The rules we issue today make that clear,” said HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra.

The final rules make clear that health plans and insurers must evaluate the impact of their nonquantitative treatment limitations on access to mental health and substance use disorder benefits as compared to medical/surgical benefits and provide additional clarity regarding documentation requirements added to MHPAEA by the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021. The newly issued rules also require plans and issuers to collect and evaluate data related to the nonquantitative treatment limitations they place on mental health and substance use disorder care and make changes if the data shows they are providing insufficient access. This change will help pinpoint harmful limitations in individuals’ health coverage and remove barriers to access. In addition, the rules give special emphasis to the careful design and management of provider networks to strengthen access to mental health and substance use disorder care.

Strengthening mental health and substance use disorder parity protections has been a priority of the Biden-Harris administration and the departments, and it is a critical component of President Biden’s Unity Agenda. The final rules support the aim of improving health equity so that Americans get the care they need and deserve. 

Most provisions of the final rules apply generally to group health plans and health insurance issuers that offer group health insurance coverage starting on the first day of the first plan year beginning on or after Jan. 1, 2025, but certain requirements that may take more time to implement apply on the first day of the first plan year beginning on or after Jan. 1, 2026. The new rules also apply to grandfathered and non-grandfathered individual health insurance coverage for policy years beginning on or after Jan. 1, 2026. 

On Sept. 19, 2024, the Department of Labor will hold a compliance assistance webinar and join Treasury and HHS in providing future guidance on the rules.

Source

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“Israel has a right and obligation to defend themselves against the threat of Hamas, while abiding by international humanitarian law and protecting civilian lives, and we remain committed to support Israel in its fight against Hamas,” a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council said. “We have done so since Oct. 7, and will continue to. There has not been a change in our policy.”

NBC News reported earlier on Sunday that at the direction of the White House, the Pentagon has been reviewing what weaponry Israel has requested that could be used as leverage. The report cited sources and said no final decisions were made.

The report added that the U.S. is considering slowing or pausing the deliveries in hopes that doing so will make the Israelis take actions such as opening humanitarian corridors to provide more aid to Palestinian civilians.

“There has been no request from the White House for DoD (Department of Defense) to slow down weapons deliveries to Israel,” a White House official said when asked about the NBC News report. “And not aware of any request to review weapons to potentially slow walk deliveries either.”

Among the weaponry the U.S. discussed using as leverage, the NBC News report added, were 155 mm artillery rounds and joint direct attack munitions (JDAMs), which are guidance kits that convert dumb bombs into precision-guided munitions.

The heavy death toll from Israel’s war in Gaza has led to much international alarm. President Joe Biden has previously referred to Israeli bombing as “indiscriminate, opens new tab” but Washington has not called for a ceasefire, saying such a measure would benefit Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, which governs Gaza.

Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel killed 1,200 people, according to Israeli tallies. Israel’s subsequent assault on Gaza has killed more than 26,000 Palestinians, over 1% of the 2.3 million population there, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Many are feared buried in rubble.

Source: Reuters

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“BUY land,” American wit Mark Twain famously quipped, “they’re not making it anymore.”

That investment advice would have proven wise in Scotland in 2020, according to a report published earlier this week.

Compiled by the Scottish Land Commission (SLC), the report found that prices for farmland in north east Scotland had risen by 58% between 2020 and 2022, 42% in the south west, and 25% in the Highlands and Islands.

Asked if investors in Scottish land could expect to continue to see such returns, SLC chief executive Hamish Trench said: “We don’t know. That’s the short answer.”

He said the skyrocketing prices were a result of “a match of very high demand and low supply”, but added that the incomplete picture we have of land transactions in Scotland makes analysing patterns very difficult.

“Getting a fuller picture of how the rural land market is working in Scotland is important, vital, to informing some of the changes in law and policy that we’re looking at in terms of land reform,” Trench said.

“What we’re trying to do here is to bring more information, a better picture, better transparency to the way the rural land market is working.”

The SLC chief said there had “long been a challenge in relation to Scotland’s land in terms of the openness and transparency of information”, raising concerns that sometimes communities were not even made aware that local land was on the market until it had already been sold.

“We know that there’s quite a number of transactions that actually have off-market, where they aren’t brought to public sale,” Trench (below) said.

“Over the last two years, we’ve started to develop new reporting approaches for the rural land market precisely because there’s been very little information giving an overview of this.

“What we see regularly, of course, are sector reports from agents operating in the market, for example, companies like Savills or Strutt & Parker.

“Inevitably, agents’ reports will focus on the parts of the market that they’re operating in. So you get different reports that focus on different sectors, for example, forestry, farmland or estates, and different sizes of transactions.

“Our report is really trying to capture all of that in a single approach that gives a better picture of what’s happening across the market.”

The SLC report published earlier in the week covered the years 2020-2022. Moving forward, the publication is set to become an annual date on the land commission’s calendar.

“We’re trying to do this work regularly, year on year, so that we can actually track a pattern of what is happening,” Trench said.

The SLC chief explained that one “significant driver” of rising prices had been an increase in demand for commercial forestry land, while one of the “newer factors” was companies looking to buy land for carbon investment and offsetting.

“This new report shows that although it may not be adding up to a large percentage of sales, it’s certainly significant,” Trench said. “Particularly in upland Scotland and in the estates market, where we’re seeing a new motivation of nature- and climate-driven acquisition.

“We’re seeing some corporate buyers, for example, wanting to buy land essentially to offset their own emissions within a business, examples like Brewdog or [investment firm] Abrdn.”

Trench said that data in SLC reporting could help inform work on “stronger regulation to manage those markets”.

The Scottish Government has previously said it will introduce a land reform bill “by the end of 2023”.

Asked in Holyrood in September about the bill’s progress, Rural Affairs Secretary Mairi Gougeon said the Government was “committed to introducing a land reform bill to further improve transparency of land ownership [and] to help ensure that large-scale land holdings deliver in the public interest.”

The Scottish Government has proposed a limit of 3000 hectares, above which land sales will trigger a public interest test.

Campaigners have called this “timid” and called for a 500-hectare trigger, while the SLC and others have suggested the trigger could be linked to “whether the holding controls key local infrastructure”.

This is one of the areas where the SLC’s work could inform policy. Trench said: “What’s helpful is understanding from this report that 93% of sales are under 500 hectares, and there are relatively few sales over 3000 hectares [some 1.1%]. So it helps provide some context to think about how that kind of measure would work.”

Source : Yahoo

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A coalition of civil society organisations (CSOs) has called on both the Federal and state governments to prioritise accountability in the implementation of policies affecting citizens.

This call was made during the inaugural Nigeria Accountability Summit held in Abuja, with the theme ‘Institutionalising Accountability for Effective Public Administration in Nigeria.’

Organised by prominent entities such as the Paradigm Leadership Support Initiative (PLSI), BudgIT Foundation, Connected Development (CODE), Dataphyte, Agora Policy, Accountability Lab Nigeria, Public and Private Development Centre (PPDC), Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP), Step Up Nigeria, Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID), and Shehu Musa Yar’Adua Foundation, the summit aimed to address concerns surrounding policy implementation.

At the event, Olusegun Elemo, the Executive Director at PLSI, emphasized the necessity of holding public administrators accountable for the successful execution of policies.

Elemo highlighted that following the election of the 7th consecutive civilian government in February 2023, both national and subnational governments have initiated policy implementations across various sectors, causing hardships for citizens.

“Therefore, it is important to make sure that policy actors are held accountable to ensure objectives of their policies are achieved to improve citizens’ welfare,” Elemo stressed

In its official communique, the summit called upon the government to empower oversight mechanisms by strengthening regulators and oversight bodies.

Additionally, it urged the enhancement of the legal framework through action plans to improve the justice system’s capacity, including court efficiency, legal procedures, and timely dispute resolution.

The CSOs further advocated for the government to embrace tech-enabled civic engagement and digitize government processes, emphasizing that this would enhance accessibility and transparency.

They also pressed for the creation of sound policies addressing specific challenges, focusing on transparent tax classifications and the removal of small, burdensome taxes. The summit suggested establishing a clear threshold for taxpayers to enhance fiscal transparency.

As citizens grapple with the impact of implemented policies, the call for accountability resonates as a crucial factor in ensuring the well-being and satisfaction of the Nigerian populace.

Source : Business Day

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BEIJING – Since March 2023, when China started to issue tourist visas again, business has picked up for Beijing tour guide Vivie Pan, who organises small group tours for English-speaking visitors.

But the numbers are nowhere near the levels of 2018 and 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic. Back then, she received up to three or four bookings a day, and had to rope in other guides to help.

“For this year, I have enough bookings only for myself. I was quite busy from June until November almost every day, with three or four rest days per month, but still there’s no comparison to 2019,” said Ms Pan, who drove part-time for private car-hire company Didi to make ends meet during the pandemic.

“The overseas tourists are coming back, but their main purpose is not sightseeing or leisure – it’s usually business or visiting friends.”

In the first half of 2023, travel agencies received 477,800 inbound tourists, compared with more than 8.56 million for the same period in 2019, according to statistics released by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

The sluggish recovery has been on the government’s radar – it has implemented a series of measures to ease potential pain points of visitors. For instance, in August, the authorities did away with the need for travellers to have a negative Covid-19 test to enter the country.

The latest move came on Nov 24, when China unilaterally announced a year-long visa-free policy for visitors from France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Malaysia from Dec 1.

This saves them the hassle of filling up pages of forms that include planned itinerary and travel history.

On Dec 1, more than 2,000 people from these six countries entered China – an increase of 12.5 per cent over the previous day, said China’s immigration authorities.

Industry players have welcomed the move, but noted that difficulties remain in persuading tourists to come back. These include limited availability of flights and tightened purse strings, as well as geopolitical tensions that affect perceptions of China.

Veteran industry observer Oliver Sedlinger, who is chief executive of tourism consultancy Sedlinger & Associates, said a short-term challenge is flight availability, noting that China’s international flights have recovered to only about 57 per cent since the start of 2023.

“The recent new visa policies introduced by China are a very smart move and will make travelling there easier,” he said, adding that this would likely provide a strong boost to visitor numbers from these markets.

Dr Liu Simin, vice-president of the tourism branch of the China Society for Futures Studies research institute, likewise said the move would spur growth.

But he pointed out that the major source countries before the pandemic, such as the United States, Japan and South Korea, were not included in the visa-free policy.

“Although the pandemic is over, the negative effects of pandemic controls have yet to completely disappear. Foreigners may not yet be fully aware of the situation in China today,” he said.

Western countries have also, in general, experienced inflation after the pandemic and consequently a decrease in disposable incomes, with less to spend on travelling, he added.

Geopolitics is yet another factor.

Associate Professor Chong Ja Ian of the National University of Singapore said the squabbles China has with other countries are a dampener on tourist visits from there.

For one thing, China-Japan relations hit a rough patch after Beijing strongly criticised Tokyo for releasing treated radioactive water from the Fukushima nuclear plant, starting from August 2023.

Adding to the problem are China’s exit bans and detentions of individuals associated with particular states, as well as raids on business, said Prof Chong, who specialises in Chinese foreign policy.

For example, Chinese investigations into US-related firms earlier in 2023 spooked the business community.

The authorities had visited the offices of Capvision, Bain & Company and Mintz Group, in what was seen as a crackdown on consulting and due diligence firms.

Memories of the sudden closure of borders and the zero-Covid policy are also relatively fresh, said Prof Chong, and this is reinforced by recent reports of an outbreak of an unidentified disease with flu-like symptoms in China.

“For leisure travellers, the world is a big place with many attractive sites, many of which offer better value and comfort than the PRC,” he said, referring to China’s official name, the People’s Republic of China.

Still, some industry players are already looking forward to 2024.

A spokeswoman for Trip.com Group, a major travel service conglomerate headquartered in Shanghai, said demand for travel to China is expected to rise in the near future. She said Trip.com data showed that global search results for inbound travel to China increased in the third quarter by nearly 40 per cent compared with the previous quarter. 

Some believe that more publicity could be the answer to raising tourist numbers.

Mr Tang Gang, president of Chongqing-based Century Cruises, said “vigorous promotion and publicity” is needed to further stimulate demand, adding that his Yangtze river cruise firm served tourists mainly from Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand in 2023.

Ms Pan, the tour guide, believes the outlook for 2024 will be better.

“I’ve already received a handful of clients for March, as well as a few inquiries. There are also a few coming from Malaysia and Singapore in December,” she said.

“But I’m sure it will not be as buoyant as before the end of 2019.” 

Source : The Straits Times

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Some McGill students say their right to express support for Palestinians is being suppressed, after a Quebec court temporarily put a stop to a student plan to adopt a pro-Palestinian policy at the university.

Quebec Superior Court issued a safeguard order Tuesday, preventing the student union from moving forward until the court can hear arguments from both sides on March 25, 2024.

A McGill student — who remains anonymous and is represented by a lawyer working for Jewish advocacy group B’nai Brith Canada — filed an injunction to stop the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) from adopting a “policy against genocide in Palestine” that was approved in a referendum this week.

The policy calls on McGill University to cut ties with people, corporations and institutions that are “complicit in genocide, settler-colonialism, apartheid, or ethnic cleansing against Palestinians.”  

About 35 per cent of eligible students voted in the referendum Monday. Of the 8,401 students who voted, 78.7 per cent (5,974 students) were in favour of the policy, 1,620 voted against it and 807 abstained.

Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights McGill (SPHR), a student group, said in a statement to CBC News that the court order sets a “dangerous precedent for student democracy and undermines the supposedly democratic structure of Canadian institutions.”

In a response for a request for comment, a member of the SSMU executive committee forwarded an email to CBC alleging that B’nai Brith and the Israeli consulate have publicly identified some McGill students involved in the pro-Palestinian movement, putting them in danger.

The member asked not to be named because they were concerned about their personal safety.

B’nai Brith’s Quebec regional director, Henry Topas, denies the accusation and says that it has never intimidated or harassed a member of the SSMU or another student group such as the SPHR.

“We are here only simply to protect the rights and ensure the safety of the Jewish students at McGill University who we believe are being constantly harassed and intimidated, physically and verbally,” said Topas.

The organization has an app where people can self-report hate incidents which are then tabulated into its annual audit of antisemitic incidents. Topas says the information gathered is not shared with third parties. 

The email said that exposing students is unfair since they “do not have the same resources for legal representation.”

The move, states the email, has caused “great and unnecessary distress” to students and the union.

Human rights lawyer Pearl Eliadis says that in court cases, power imbalances are often disproportionate, but there is a mechanism in place to prevent parties from abusing their status.

She also says the court order is just a way of pressing pause.

“This is simply a safeguard order where the parties have both agreed and particularly the Students’ Society of McGill University has agreed to hold off on the ratification of the vote until the court hears the injunction,” she said. “There has been no decision on the merits of the case.”

Still, SPHR cited the use of the court as a strategy for intimidating Palestinian organizers and anti-Zionist Jews and suppressing the Palestinian movement.

B’nai Brith Canada pleased

Topas says B’nai Brith Canada welcomed the court order and he described the student referendum question as “continuity of singling out the state of Israel.”  

“Year after year, there is some form of referendum or question that they [SSMU] have people vote on to basically condemn Israel where they would not condemn other countries,” said Topas. 

Topas added that while B’nai Brith acknowledges “collateral civilian suffering” in Gaza, Israel must defend itself following the murders of 1,200 Jews. 

“To turn it around and say there is genocide being committed in Gaza is nonsense,” he said. 

Gaza’s Hamas-run government has said at least 13,300 Palestinians have been killed, including at least 5,500 children, by unrelenting Israeli bombardment. 

In the 2022 winter semester, the SPHR submitted the “Palestine solidarity policy,” which also called on the university to boycott and divest from “all corporations complicit in settler-colonial apartheid against Palestinians.” It passed with 71.1 per cent approval from students but was not ratified. 

At the time, McGill administration said the “Palestine solidarity policy” was inconsistent with the students’ society’s constitution. Ultimately, the SSMU board of governors agreed, saying the policy did not follow the SSMU constitution and could not be adopted. 

Last year, McGill warned the SSMU off adopting “contentious” policies about Palestinians and threatened to cut funding and even ban it from using the school name.

A spokesperson for the university said in a statement Wednesday that McGill administration maintains that the latest policy, if adopted, will “sharpen divisions in our community at a time when many students are already distressed.”

Source : CBC

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From the European Union’s Green Deal Industrial Plan and the United States’ Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to Japan’s Green Growth Strategy and the Korean New Deal, industrial policies aimed at accelerating the energy transition are proliferating in wealthy, technologically advanced economies.

Many developing economies are also designing and deploying state-led projects to foster green industrialisation, as competition intensifies for electric vehicles (EVs), so-called transition minerals, and clean energy.

For example, several African countries, including South Africa, Kenya, Mauritania, Egypt, Djibouti, Tunisia, Morocco, and Namibia, have enacted state-led initiatives to support the development of green hydrogen. Others, including Indonesia, Bolivia, and Chile, are implementing national strategies to stimulate industrialization based on the extraction and processing of nickel, cobalt, copper, lithium, and other transition minerals and metals.

These policies use a broad range of instruments – including subsidies, regulations, incentives, and diverse state-business arrangements – and differ widely in terms of the public and private resources at their disposal. But they all seek to tackle three crises simultaneously: economic stagnation, polarised and precarious employment, and intensifying climate change.

The revival of industrial policy is based on the logic that addressing all three crises will create a virtuous cycle: targeted investment in green manufacturing and energy will boost economic activity, create well-paying jobs, and usher in a low-carbon economy. The Biden administration’s “modern American industrial strategy,” comprising the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the IRA, exemplifies this approach. What has been called the “Biden three-fer” is designed to boost US competitiveness in key industries vis-à-vis China, provide better economic opportunities for American workers, and accelerate decarbonization.

But the win-win narrative undergirding these new industrial strategies tends to obfuscate the risk that solving one problem may exacerbate another. In fact, the tensions between these policy objectives are already visible. For example, the decarbonisation of the economy may not create as many decent jobs as initially expected. In the US, both car companies and the United Auto Workers union have warned that the shift to manufacturing EVs, which require fewer parts, could lead to job losses. Some of these jobs will be redistributed to battery production, but this may be cold comfort for American and European auto workers, given China’s dominance over the global battery supply chain.

At the same time, the growth of green industries can result in other environmental harms. Despite aiming to generate employment and value through the production of transition minerals, the industrialisation strategies of several Global South countries tend to entrench extractive practices. For example, Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile – South America’s “lithium triangle” – are seeking to capture various stages of the lithium supply chain, from mineral extraction to processing to battery assembly. But the growth of this industry threatens to deplete water supplies, degrade soil, and disrupt habitats, often in zones inhabited by indigenous Andean peoples. Similarly, the production of semiconductors, which are at the heart of clean tech, is energy-, water-, and land-intensive and releases perfluorocarbons and other potent greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Finally, economic stagnation can have a destabilising impact on domestic politics, impelling governments to aim for a higher growth rate regardless of the environmental costs. For example, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak recently announced a series of U-turns on the government’s net-zero pledges. Shedding burdensome climate commitments may seem like a politically attractive strategy to boost immediate growth prospects. But – and herein lies the contradiction – longer-term growth will at least partly depend on governments ensuring that their economies are competitive in the green industries of the future.

As these examples show, industrial policy is not a silver bullet for the intersecting crises of our times. The policy objectives of environmental sustainability, industrial dynamism, and full employment are difficult to reconcile and require hard political choices about resource allocation, strategic priorities, and, crucially, the distribution of economic and social costs. Moreover, the trade-offs will grow more complex and challenging as global warming worsens and growth continues to sputter. What we call the “wicked trinity” of contemporary governance – climate catastrophe, economic stagnation, and surplus humanity – will not go away anytime soon. In fact, it will likely shape the trajectories of public policymaking long into the future.

This is not to say that policymakers should give up on designing ambitious strategies to address these crises. On the contrary, swift and effective action is an absolute necessity. Yet packaging these plans in win-win narratives that paper over the difficult trade-offs they involve significantly raises the risk that governments will lose popular support. The complex and conflicting nature of these policy objectives means that even the best-designed strategies will fall short, at least in some respects. This is unavoidable and an important component of learning-by-doing.

To avoid being seen as breaking promises, policymakers must embrace, rather than dismiss, the tensions and trade-offs at the heart of green industrial policies and subject them to public deliberation. This is essential to securing broad support for state-led decarbonisation projects. Such an approach would help build robust, transparent governance structures rooted in the principles of democratic deliberation and public oversight and control. As matters stand now, many industrial strategies are the product of top-down, technocratic policymaking processes, despite all the talk of “leaving no community behind” and a “just green transition.”

Subjecting the economy to democratic decision-making in this way would, admittedly, constitute a radical challenge to the current system of private ownership and market coordination. But it is essential to secure and maintain popular legitimacy for green industrial policies, as well as to facilitate collective and efficient decision-making and minimise mismanagement. Otherwise, we risk a public backlash that impedes the collective action needed to safeguard our future on this planet.

Source : The Independent

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His pathway to the presidency looks more forbidding than ever, but tanking poll numbers and a stalled campaign have not dissuaded Ron DeSantis from running foreign policy as if he was the incumbent in the White House.

Florida’s Republican governor has raised eyebrows and hackles by using state resources for a series of actions and operations since the Israel-Hamas war began that come under the purview of the federal government.

They include “evacuating” hundreds of US citizens from Israel on charter flights; exporting humanitarian aid and claiming to have procured weapons; as well as activating Florida’s militarized state guard “as needed, to respond” to an overseas conflict.

Additionally, he has summoned Florida’s legislature for an emergency session next week that will, among other issues, seek to impose more state sanctions on Iran, a key ally of Hamas, replicating measures already in place at federal level for decades.

Democrats in Florida, who have become used to their absentee governor campaigning in other states as he pursues his flailing White House run, say DeSantis has crossed a line.

“President Biden is the commander in chief of our military, not Ron DeSantis,” Nikki Fried, chair of the state’s Democratic party, said in a statement to the Miami Herald, commenting on the governor’s claim that he helped source weapons, ammunition and other military equipment for Israel, an assertion that later unraveled.

“This is a gross breach of norms and a potential violation of federal laws governing the shipment of weapons.”

In a statement to the Guardian, a state department spokesperson confirmed it “did not collaborate with the state of Florida on humanitarian and evacuation flights to and from Israel [and] the department was not notified in advance of these flights”.

Independent analysts see the behavior of DeSantis, a staunch supporter of Israel, as troublesome.

“Any time a governor tries to push a foreign policy agenda, or an agenda related to international affairs, including immigration policy, on their own, it typically infringes on the powers of the executive of the federal government,” said Matthew Dallek, professor of political management at George Washington University.

“We’ve seen this with [Governor Greg] Abbott in Texas. If the DeSantis flights to Israel were coordinated with the state department and US military, that’s one thing. If they were not, that’s much more problematic, much more of a line crossing.

“He’s a guy who gets off on crossing boundaries, being pugnacious and in your face, and in that sense there’s kind of an ugly streak to him and Trump. They both enjoy, and their political identities are wrapped up in crossing boundaries.”

DeSantis employed a familiar argument to justify Florida wading into the Middle East conflict, insisting that the administration of Joe Biden was “not doing what it takes to stand by Israel”. It echoed his citing of the president’s perceived “failures” over immigration to rationalize his sending of state law enforcement personnel to the US southern border, the preserve of the Department of Homeland Security.

Contrary to DeSantis’s statement, the federal government has been heavily involved in humanitarian operations in Israel and has run a continuous charter flight operation to repatriate US citizens since the conflict began.

The state department spokesperson said more than 6,700 seats on US government chartered transportation were made available to augment commercial flight capacity, and more than 13,500 US citizens had safely departed Israel and the West Bank.

The state department flights, which ended on Tuesday through decreased demand, have also run more smoothly than the DeSantis operation, which left 23 Americans stranded in Cyprus for several days at the start of the war.

Dallek sees some rationale for DeSantis’s stance.

“By virtue of his position as governor he has been involved in some pretty weighty issues, issues that matter to a lot of voters and a lot of Republican primary voters, in particular immigration and the Middle East,” he said.

“But this doesn’t seem like an argument that has legs for DeSantis. The many months of his campaign flailing is going to outweigh whatever he says on Israel, and most of the other GOP candidates are vying for that same space of being tough on terrorism, anti-Hamas, pro-Israel. I just don’t think there’s all that much oxygen left for him to take up on this issue.”

Transparency advocates in Florida are also critical of DeSantis over the Israel flights, questioning how $50m of taxpayers’ money reportedly handed to a contractor for open-ended charter flights has been used.

The recipient is the same contractor that ran the governor’s infamous migrant flights of mostly Venezuelan asylum seekers around the US last year, which led to a criminal investigation in Texas and was criticized by opponents as an inhumane political stunt.

The DeSantis administration withheld public records about the migrant flights for months before a judge ordered it to hand them over. The state budgeted more than $1.5m in attorneys’ fees to defend the lawsuit and Bobby Block, executive director of the Florida First Amendment Foundation, fears a similar lack of transparency will cloak the Israel flights.

“They talked about $50m, it’s not based on actual records from the state where we know exactly what’s playing out. It’s based on a budget item in emergency management,” he said.

“We don’t have absolute clarity on it because of the secrecy of the DeSantis administration. There’s a lot of people, not just journalists, who want to know what it is costing taxpayers in Florida.”

DeSantis’s press team and the Florida emergency management department point to a press release issued last week that said more than 700 Americans arrived in Florida on four flights from Israel and received resources from “several state agencies and volunteer organizations”.

Block said there seemed to be little interest is ensuring value for taxpayer dollars, noting that uncoordinated state and federal government entities competing for the same limited resources, including chartered flights, tended to push up prices.

“The way it’s being managed and promoted, it seems more political and geared towards the governor’s political aspirations than it does to a real emergency response with a state and governor working with the federal government,” he said.

Source : The Guardian

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The United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority targeted 146 crypto companies in a new warning, following the rollout of the new promotional rules which require companies to register with the FCA.

The warning, which is the first since the rules went into effect, is the latest in a series from the FCA to attempt curbing illegal financial promotions targeting UK customers. 

As part of the warning, the FCA published a warning list of those who have not registered with the FCA. The list includes KuCoin and Huobi, among others.

“We take a risk-based approach, so not all firms of potential concern will be added straight away. This list will be continually updated as we identify firms which may be illegally communicating crypto asset promotions and are failing to engage with us constructively,” the FCA said in its warning.

Some companies, including OKX and Binance, announced that they’re working to comply with the FCA’s promotional rules. 

Komainu joined the ranks of FCA-registered companies on Friday, Oct. 6. Under the new rules, Komainu is registered as a custodian wallet provider. 

“This is a key regulatory milestone as the UK remains one of the most important hubs for financial technology and innovation that will spur the convergence of traditional and decentralized finance,” CEO Nicolas Bertrand said.

PayPal announced in August that it was “temporarily” pausing the ability of UK customers to buy crypto on its platform so that it could ensure it followed the new regulations. PayPal is aiming to offer the services again in 2024, according to reports. 

ByBit also announced that it would be suspending services in late September. 

“Bybit has made a choice to embrace the regulation proactively and pause our services in this market,” it said in a blog post at the time. 

Source : Block Works

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The State of Israel has occupied the Palestinian territory of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem since the 1967 war. The Palestinians living in those territories quite simply do not have the same rights as Israeli settlers there. For instance, it’s rare for the Israeli state to grant Palestinians building permits even as settlements expand.

Israeli leaders rarely articulate in clear terms that separate legal systems rule over Israeli settlers and Palestinians in the same area. To do so would be to recognize the split realities, which Palestinian, Israeli, and international human rights groups have documented as apartheid. But Israeli politicians have preferred to obscure this reality.

That is, until an incendiary settler-politician serving in the extreme-right Israel government caused a stir in Israel last week when he described the situation almost exactly as human rights groups have — not accidentally, as a slip of the tongue, but very much on purpose.

“My right, the right of my wife and my children to move around Judea and Samaria” — the biblical names for the West Bank — “is more important than freedom of movement for the Arabs,” National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir told Israel’s version of Meet the Press. “My right to life comes before freedom of movement.”

“Sorry, Mohammad, but that’s the reality,” Ben-Gvir paused to say, turning to a member of the TV panel, journalist Mohammad Magadli, who is a Palestinian citizen of Israel.

It was a brash encapsulation of the policies underpinning Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current far-right coalition, and even its softer and more PR-friendly predecessors.

Ben-Gvir justified the intensive security regime at a time of a growing grassroots Palestinian movement willing to violently resist the Israeli state, and as settler violence against Palestinians has spiked.

Diapers, food, rent– around the world, prices are rising. So, what can we do about it?

That clip quickly traveled around the internet. Ben-Gvir’s disparaging aside — “Sorry, Mohammad” — became a meme. One Israeli editor wrote that “Sorry, Mohammad,” would be a “fitting name for the Israeli national anthem.” The prominent Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem started posting violent videos and photos of the Israeli occupation captioned with the words “Sorry, Mohammad.” Some accounts began posting historical photos of racism and discrimination — from the Jim Crow years, apartheid-era South Africa and Nazi Germany — with those words. (Some posts appear to have been removed or deleted for violating social media terms of service.)

Because Ben-Gvir’s tone may have seemed provocative, but what he stated on TV is actually just the policy of the State of Israel.

The controversy over Ben-Gvir’s remarks, briefly explained

Ben-Gvir’s statement caused a backlash. The US State Department spokesperson condemned his remarks. And two days later, Netanyahu’s office weighed in on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, to undo the damage.

“Israel allows maximum freedom of movement in Judea and Samaria for both Israelis and Palestinians,” the statement said. “Unfortunately, Palestinian terrorists take advantage of this freedom of movement to murder Israeli women, children and families by ambushing them at certain points on different routes.”

“This is what Minister Ben-Gvir meant when he said ‘the right to life precedes freedom of movement’,” the prime minister’s office went on to explain.

New grassroots Palestinian militant groups and individual acts of terrorism have increased this year. But it has also been an exceedingly deadly year for Palestinians in the West Bank. Under Netanyahu’s government, settlers have been emboldened, leading to more settler violence, the further annexation of Palestinian land, and settlement expansion. That encroachment has in turn fueled violent Palestinian resistance. This dynamic creates situations like one earlier this summer, when an Israeli military raid in Jenin killed 12 Palestinians, seemingly leading to a retaliatory Palestinian shooting of four Israelis near a settlement, which then led to more settler violence against Palestinians, all within three days.

Netanyahu, then, was not so much condemning Ben-Gvir’s policy stance as his tone.

Israeli attorney Daniel Seidemann pointed out that Netanyahu’s team posted on X on Friday evening after sunset, that is during the Jewish sabbath when Ben-Gvir and his colleagues from the Jewish Power Party would likely be offline. “He posted it only in English, not in Hebrew, so as not to anger his base,” Seidemann explained.

And when Ben-Gvir got online after sunset on Saturday, he stood by his comments. “Not only do I not regret my words, I am saying them yet again,” he said, with an Israeli flag behind him and Netanyahu’s official portrait sitting on the bookshelf.

Amichai Eliyahu, Israel’s minister of heritage and a member of Ben-Gvir’s party, added another example to the genre on Sunday.

“As soon as someone threatens my rights to live, I slightly reduce his civil rights,” he said in a TV segment.

“Limit just a tiny bit?” TV anchor Attila Somfalvi responded. “It’s called apartheid, I think, in the dictionary.”

What Ben-Gvir’s comments really reveal

Ben-Gvir is not only any ordinary provocateur shaped by the racist ideology of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane. He is not just a lawyer who has represented Jewish terrorists who have killed Palestinians. He is a powerful minister in Israel’s far-right government.

Now he has laid plain what Palestinians endure every day. They lack rights so that settlers like Ben-Gvir can move freely through the occupied West Bank. Palestinians and Israeli settlers travel on separate roads in the territory; they are subject to different legal systems. “The elevation of Jewish rights to move (and most civil and human rights) over Palestinian freedom of movement (and other rights) is as old as the state itself,” Dahlia Scheindlin notes in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Netanyahu has advanced a controversial overhaul of the Israeli judiciary that, among other issues, would enable policies of further annexation of Palestinian land. The ethno-nationalist partners in the governing coalition support such bureaucratic measures. In particular, the government’s recent moves of “transferring many powers overseeing the West Bank from military to civilian leaders—in contravention of international law,” as Israeli lawyer Michael Sfard notes, openly advance “a policy of unilateral annexation.”

In 2017, Bezalel Smotrich, now Netanyahu’s finance minister, published a radical manifesto entitled “Israel’s Decisive Plan” that advocates the expulsion of Palestinians who seek an independent state. His self-described “pragmatic document” also detailed how to further advance the settlements and illegal outposts, what he calls “Victory Through Settlement.”

For Palestinians, none of these comments come as a surprise. This is the reality of the occupied territories. But it’s somehow clarifying for Ben-Gvir to say them aloud — and shows that Netanyahu’s most extreme coalition partners are operating from a place of comfort.

Source: VOX

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