Dear Progressive Reader,

This week as the war in Gaza intensifies—with more bombing and the introduction of Israeli ground troops into Gaza City—one of the questions becomes how will reliable news and information get out. The repeated Internet and cellphone outages over past weekend and earlier this week contributed not only to limits on news coverage, but also access for rescue workers and medical teams to be able to respond quickly to injuries. As Samer Badawi reports, “Although some residents could still connect to Israeli cell phone towers, nearly all of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents were suddenly cut off from the outside world and from each other, leaving dispersed family members unable to communicate—or call for an ambulance—during a night of unprecedented air, land, and sea bombardment.”

Badawi, who also reported on the 2014 war on Gaza says, “For those of us who have reported first-hand on the plight of Gaza’s children, the scenes now emerging from the besieged enclave have defied description.” But many of those scenes are not able to emerge due to press restrictions and lack of resources. “With fewer journalists able to report on Israel’s bombing campaign,” he writes, “evidence of the massive civilian death toll will be lost in the rubble.” Meanwhile, as Sam Stein explains, “After the October 7 attack by Hamas, and Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza, there has been a crackdown on freedom of speech and political dissent that can only be described as McCarthyite. This is happening in the United States, Germany, and elsewhere, but it’s particularly pronounced in Israel, where I’ve lived since 2019.”

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies analyze the recent votes in the United Nations and describe how the United States is becoming more and more isolated as other nations call for a ceasefire for humanitarian reasons. And cartoonist Mark Fiore uses his pen to illustrate some of the questions we should and must be asking. Unfortunately, like the small amounts of humanitarian aid being trucked in through the Rafah border crossing, the soft urgings by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken for a “humanitarian pause” may feel like too-little-too-late for the more than 1.4 million displaced civilians in Gaza.

Elsewhere on our website this week, Jeff Abbott reports on anti-mining protests in Panama which are really about corruption. Glenn Daigon looks at a vote in Ohio next Tuesday that could privatize a public railway line. Mike Ervin calls out the Social Security Administration for overpaying people and then demanding the money back—often on very short notice. And Julie Marsh, Miguel Casar Rodriguez, and Pedro Noguera pen an oped on the importance of local school boards to our democracy. “This month, communities in seventeen states will hold school board elections. Typically, these off-cycle elections rarely see turnouts of more than 10 percent of eligible voters. But this time, these elections will be massively consequential. Those who participate—along with the powerful interests backing candidates—will have a disproportionately large amount of power over the lives of American children, as well as the future of public schools and our democracy,” they explain.

The century-old tradition of “daylight saving time” comes around this Sunday morning. While many countries and some U.S. states will not be rolling back their clocks this weekend, maybe we should be glad to “gain” the hour since we will need all the time we have to deal with the climate crisis and many other issues confronting our world.

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

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