Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Israel advances plan for new settlements, a first in Bennett era
JERUSALEM — The Israeli government advanced plans Wednesday to build more than 3,000 new settlement units in the occupied West Bank, in the first move of its kind since Prime Minister Naftali Bennett succeeded Benjamin Netanyahu in June.
A defense ministry planning committee approved the construction of 3,130 new homes that would be spread across 25 existing settlements, most of them deep inside the West Bank, the territory that Palestinians hope will form part of a future Palestinian state.
The decision is considered the most important stage of the planning process, but some administrative steps, including the selection of construction companies, would still need to be taken before building begins.
The construction would further consolidate the Israeli presence in the West Bank and the barriers to the creation of a geographically contiguous Palestinian state.
The announcement has raised tensions between the Bennett government and the Biden administration, which opposes activity that makes it harder to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by establishing a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The move has also heightened disagreements within the Israeli government, a diverse coalition of ideologically opposed parties that put aside differences to remove Netanyahu from office. The move also promises to prolong the coalition’s fragile alliance by avoiding unilateral decisions in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan during the
Arab-Israeli war in 1967. It has since permitted the construction of more than 130 Jewish settlements there, a process that most of the international community considers a breach of international law.
Merek COVID-19 drug: Merck has granted a royalty-free license for its promising COVID-19 pill to a United Nations-backed nonprofit in a deal that would allow the drug to be manufactured and sold cheaply in the poorest nations, where vaccines for the coronavirus are in devastatingly short supply.
The agreement with the Medicines Patent Pool, an organization that works to make medical treatment and technologies globally accessible, will allow companies in 105 countries, mostly in Africa and Asia, to sublicense the formulation for the antiviral pill, called molnupiravir, and begin making it.
Merck reported this month that the drug halved the rate of hospitalizations and deaths in high-risk COVID-19 patients in a large clinical trial.
Treatment-access advocates welcomed the new deal, which was announced Wednesday morning, calling it an unusual step for a major Western pharmaceutical company.
Charles Gore, director of the Medicines Patent Pool, said: “This is the first transparent public health license for a COVID medicine, and really importantly, it is for something that could be used outside of hospitals, and which is potentially going to be very cheap.”
Merck has submitted its clinical trial data to the Food and Drug Administration seeking emergency-use authorization; a decision could come in early December.
Attorney general directive: Attorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday defended a memo aimed at combating threats against school officials nationwide while Republicans insisted he rescind the directive.
He signaled he had no plans to do so despite their criticism.
The memo took center stage as Garland appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee and said it was meant to respond to violence and threats of violence directed against local school board officials.
The memo came out Oct. 4, less than a week after the National School Board Association wrote the Biden administration about the threats to school officials and asked for help.
Some school board meetings have devolved into shouting contests over issues such as how racial issues are taught, masks in schools, and COVID-19 vaccines and testing requirements.
Republicans say Garland went too far in instructing Justice Department divisions to coordinate with local law enforcement.
Medical debt: The political organization led by prominent Democrat Stacey Abrams is branching out into paying off medical debts.
The Fair Fight Political Action Committee on Wednesday told The Associated Press it has donated $1.34 million from its political action committee to the nonprofit organization RIP Medical Debt to wipe out debt with a face value of $212 million that is owed by 108,000 people in Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi.
Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of allied group Fair Fight Action and senior adviser to the PAC, said paying off medical debt is another facet of the group’s advocacy seeking expansion of Medicaid coverage in the 12 states that have refused to expand the health insurance to all poorer adults.
Northeast storm: A nor’easter that battered the Atlantic coast with hurricane-force wind gusts left more than a half-million homes and businesses without power in New England and forced the closure of bridges, ferries and schools in the region Wednesday.
Utility workers labored to restore power as the storm’s winds and rain, which were felt as far north as Nova Scotia, diminished throughout the day. Restoring power in the hardest-hit areas in southeastern Massachusetts will take days, the utility Eversource told the Cape Cod Times.
The Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency reported about 425,000 power outages after powerful winds blew tree branches laden with wet, heavy leaves onto power lines.
EU, Poland standoff: The European Union raised the stakes Wednesday in a standoff with Poland over judicial independence and the primacy of EU law, with the bloc’s top court fining Poland $1.2 million a day to prevent what it called “serious and irreparable harm” to the EU’s legal order and values.
The European Court of Justice imposed the penalty after a weeklong war of words in which Poland told the EU to stay out of its judicial affairs while other EU nations insisted that Warsaw could not continue to get EU subsidies while disregarding the bloc’s democratic principles at will.
“You cannot pocket all the money but refuse the values,” Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said, warning Poland not to treat the EU like “a cash machine.”
The Court of Justice decided to syphon off some of that money, saying the daily fine was “necessary in order to avoid serious and irreparable harm to the legal order of the European Union and to the values on which that Union is founded, in particular that of the rule of law.”