Palestinians Are Struggling to Flee South in Gaza After Israeli Evacuation Order

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — Palestinians struggled Saturday to flee from areas of Gaza targeted by the Israeli military while grappling with a growing water crisis after Israel stopped the flow of resources to the region ahead of an expected land offensive a week after Hamas’ bloody, wide-ranging attack into Israel.

Israel renewed calls on social media and in leaflets dropped from the air for Gaza residents to move south, while Hamas urged people to stay in their homes. The U.N. and aid groups have said such a rapid exodus would cause untold human suffering for hospitalized patients, older adults and others unable to relocate.

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The evacuation directive covers an area of 1.1 million residents, or about half of the territory’s population. The Israeli military said “hundreds of thousands” of Palestinians had already heeded the warning and headed south. It said Palestinians could travel within Gaza without being harmed along two main routes from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. local time.

It was not clear how many Palestinians remained in north Gaza by Saturday afternoon, said Juliette Touma, a spokesperson for the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees. “What we know is that hundreds of thousands of people have fled. And that 1 million people have been displaced in total in one week,” she said.

Families in cars, trucks and donkey carts packed with possessions crowded a main road heading away from Gaza City as Israeli airstrikes continued to hammer the 40-kilometer (25-mile) long territory, where supplies of food, fuel and drinking water were running low because of a complete Israeli siege.

Water has stopped coming out of taps across the territory. Amal Abu Yahia, a 25-year-old pregnant mother in the Jabaliya refugee camp, said she waits anxiously for the few minutes each day or every other day when contaminated water trickles from the pipes in her basement. She then rations it, prioritizing her 5-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter. She said she is drinking so little herself, she only urinates every other day.

Near the coast, the only tap water is contaminated with Mediterranean Sea water because of the lack of sanitation facilities. Mohammed Ibrahim, 28, said his neighbors in Gaza City have taken to drinking the salt water.

The Israeli military’s evacuation would force the territory’s entire population to cram into the southern half of the Gaza Strip as Israel continues strikes across the territory, including in the south.

Rami Swailem said he and at least five families in his building decided to stay put in his apartment near Gaza City. “We are rooted in our lands,” he said. “We prefer to die in dignity and face our destiny.”

Others were looking desperately for ways to evacuate. “We need a number for drivers from Gaza to the south, it is necessary #help,” read a post on social media. Another person wrote: “We need a bus number, office, or any means of transport,” posted another.

The U.N. refugee agency for Palestinians expressed concern for those who could not leave their current locations, “particularly pregnant women, children, older persons and persons with disabilities,” saying they must be protected. The agency also called for Israel to not target civilians, hospitals, schools, clinics and U.N. locations.

An Israeli military spokesperson, Jonathan Conricus, said the evacuation was aimed at keeping civilians safe and preventing Hamas from using them as human shields. He urged people in the targeted areas to leave immediately and to return “only when we tell them that it is safe to do so.”

“The Palestinian civilians in Gaza are not our enemies. We don’t assess them as such, and we don’t target them as such,” Conricus said. “We are trying to do the right thing.”

Thousands of people crammed into a U.N.-run school-turned-shelter in Deir al-Balah, a farming town south of the evacuation zone. Many slept outside on the ground without mattresses, or in chairs pulled from classrooms.

“I came here with my children. We slept on the ground. We don’t have a mattress, or clothes,” Howeida al-Zaaneen, 63, who is from the northern town of Beit Hanoun, said. “I want to go back to my home, even if it is destroyed.”

The Israeli military said its troops conducted temporary raids into Gaza on Friday to battle militants and hunted for traces of some 150 people — including men, women and children — who were abducted during Hamas’ shocking Oct. 7 assault on southern Israel.

The Gaza Health Ministry said Saturday that over 2,200 people have been killed in the territory, including 724 children and 458 women. The Hamas assault killed more than 1,300 people on the Israeli side, most of them civilians, and roughly 1,500 Hamas militants died were killed during the fighting, the Israeli government said.

Egyptian officials said the southern Rafah crossing would open later Saturday for the first time in days to allow foreigners out. One official said both Israel and Palestinian militant groups had agreed to facilitate the departures and that talks were still underway about getting aid into Gaza through the same crossing. The officials were not authorized to brief journalists and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Fearing a mass exodus of Palestinians, Egyptian authorities erected “temporary” blast walls on Egypt’s side of the crossing, which has been closed for days because of Israeli airstrikes, two Egyptian officials said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the media.

Israel’s raids into Gaza on Friday were the first acknowledgment that Israeli troops had entered the territory since the military began its round-the-clock bombardment in retaliation for the Hamas massacre. Palestinian militants have fired more than 5,500 rockets into Israel since the fighting erupted, the Israeli military said.

Israel has called up some 360,000 military reserves and massed troops and tanks along the border with Gaza. A ground assault in densely populated Gaza would likely bring even higher casualties on both sides in brutal house-to-house fighting.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan in Riyadh on Saturday, and both called for Israel to protect civilians in Gaza.

“As Israel pursues its legitimate right to defend its people and to trying to ensure that this never happens again, it is vitally important that all of us look out for for civilians, and we’re working together to do exactly that,” Blinken said.

Hamas said Israel’s airstrikes killed 22 hostages, including foreigners. It did not provide their nationalities. The Israeli military denied the claim. Hamas and other Palestinian militants hope to trade the hostages for thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.

In the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Health Ministry says 53 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the war, including 16 on Friday. The U.N. says attacks by Israeli settlers have surged there since the Hamas assault.

The U.S. and Israel’s other allies have pledged ironclad support for the war on Hamas. The European Union’s foreign policy chief, however, said Saturday that the Israeli military needed to give people more time to leave northern Gaza.

Josep Borrell welcomed the evacuation order but said, “You cannot move such a volume of people in (a) short period of time,” noting a lack of shelters and transportation.

Gaza’s Health Ministry said it was impossible to safely transport the wounded from hospitals already dealing with high numbers of dead and injured.

Patients and personnel from the Al Awda Hospital in Gaza’s far north spent part of their night in the street “with bombs landing in close proximity,” the medical aid group Doctors Without Borders said.

Scott Hamilton, a spokesperson for the aid group, said some of the medical staff and all patients were moved to another location, “but the situation remains extremely complicated and chaotic.”

Hamas’ media office said airstrikes hit cars in three locations as they headed south from Gaza City, killing 70 people. There was no comment from the Israeli military.

More than half of the Palestinians in Gaza are descendants of refugees from the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation, when hundreds of thousands fled or were expelled from what is now Israel. Many feared a second expulsion, this time to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

source https://time.com/6323807/palestinians-flee-gaza-israeli-evacuation-order/

NASA Launches First of Its Kind Mission to a Mysterious and Rare Metal Asteroid

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(CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.) — NASA’s Psyche spacecraft rocketed away Friday on a six-year journey to a rare metal-covered asteroid.

Most asteroids tend to be rocky or icy, and this is the first exploration of a metal world. Scientists believe it may be the battered remains of an early planet’s core, and could shed light on the inaccessible centers of Earth and other rocky planets.

SpaceX launched the spacecraft into an overcast midmorning sky from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Named for the asteroid it’s chasing, Psyche should reach the huge, potato-shaped object in 2029.

“It’s so thrilling,” said Laurie Leshin, director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Added Arizona State University’s Jim Bell, part of the Psyche team: “What a great ride so far.”

Read more: How NASA Captured a Piece of the Solar System’s Past From an Ancient Asteroid

After decades of visiting faraway worlds of rock, ice and gas, NASA is psyched to pursue one coated in metal. Of the nine or so metal-rich asteroids discovered so far, Psyche is the biggest, orbiting the sun in the outer portion of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter alongside millions of other space rocks. It was discovered in 1852 and named after Greek mythology’s captivating goddess of the soul.

“It’s long been humans’ dream to go to the metal core of our Earth. I mean, ask Jules Verne,” lead scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton of Arizona State University said ahead of the launch.

“The pressure is too high. The temperature is too high. The technology is impossible,” she said. “But there’s one way in our solar system that we can look at a metal core and that is by going to this asteroid.”

Astronomers know from radar and other observations that the asteroid is big — about 144 miles (232 kilometers) across at its widest and 173 miles (280 kilometers) long. They believe it’s brimming with iron, nickel and other metals, and quite possibly silicates, with a dull, predominantly gray surface likely covered with fine metal grains from cosmic impacts.

Otherwise, it’s a speck of light in the night sky, full of mystery until the spacecraft reaches it after traveling more than 2 billion miles (3.6 billion kilometers).

Scientists envision spiky metal craters, huge metal cliffs and metal-encrusted eroded lava flows greenish-yellow from sulfur — “almost certain to be completely wrong,” according to Elkins-Tanton. It’s also possible that trace amounts of gold, silver, platinum or iridium — iron-loving elements — could be dissolved in the asteroid’s iron and nickel, she said.

“There’s a very good chance that it’s going to be outside of our imaginings, and that is my fondest hope,” she said.

Read more: Scientists Solve the Mystery Behind the Oumuamua ‘Alien Spacecraft’ Comet

Believed to be a planetary building block from the solar system’s formation 4.5 billion years ago, the asteroid can help answer such fundamental questions as how did life arise on Earth and what makes our planet habitable, according to Elkins-Tanton.

On Earth, the planet’s iron core is responsible for the magnetic field that shields our atmosphere and enables life.

Led by Arizona State University on NASA’s behalf, the $1.2 billion mission will use a roundabout route to get to the asteroid. The van-size spacecraft with solar panels big enough to fill a tennis court will swoop past Mars for a gravity boost in 2026. Three years later, it will reach the asteroid and attempt to go into orbit around it, circling as high as 440 miles (700 kilometers) and as close as 47 miles (75 kilometers) until at least 2031.

The spacecraft relies on solar electric propulsion, using xenon gas-fed thrusters and their gentle blue-glowing pulses. An experimental communication system is also along for the ride, using lasers instead of radio waves in an attempt to expand the flow of data from deep space to Earth. NASA expects the test to yield more than 10 times the amount of data, enough to transmit videos from the moon or Mars one day.

The spacecraft should have soared a year ago, but was held up by delays in flight software testing attributed to poor management and other issues. The revised schedule added extra travel time. So instead of arriving at the asteroid in 2026 as originally planned, the spacecraft won’t get there until 2029.

That’s the same year that another NASA spacecraft — the one that just returned asteroid samples to the Utah desert — will arrive at a different space rock as it buzzes Earth.

source https://time.com/6323434/nasa-launches-mission-to-rare-metal-asteroid/

U.S. Is Not Ready for Growing Nuclear Threat From Russia and China, Report Says

As Russia and China continue to expand their nuclear arsenals, the U.S. is unprepared for the prospect of facing two nuclear equals for the first time, a new bipartisan Congressional report warns. The report describes the growing threat from Russia and China, and calls for a dramatic overhaul of America’s nuclear arsenal and strategic posture.

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“It is an existential challenge for which the United States is ill-prepared, unless its leaders make decisions now,” the report says.

“It is apparent from the report that there is much more that we should be doing to ensure our military, and particularly our nuclear forces, are capable of deterring two near-peer nuclear adversaries at the same time,” Roger Wicker, a top Republican on the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, said in a statement following the report’s release.

The 145-page assessment, laid out in a report released on Thursday by the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States, was led by a group of leading bipartisan nuclear experts and is the result of a year-long effort.

More From TIME

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For Republicans, the report is likely to be used as political ammunition against President Joe Biden. “The Administration’s stated and preferred policies really have not measured up to the really dangerous times that we’re living in,” one Republican aide tells TIME, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the contents of the report prior to its release.

Read More: Inside the $100 Billion Mission to Modernize America’s Aging Nuclear Missiles

China will reach parity with the U.S. in deployed nuclear warheads by the mid-2030s if it continues expanding its nuclear arsenal at current rates, the report warns. On top of that, Russia will likely continue to be the largest nuclear force in the world. The U.S. has an estimated stockpile of 3,708 nuclear warheads, while Russia has more than 4,000, according to reports by the Federation of American Scientists, a U.S.-based think-tank. China’s estimated stockpile includes about 410 nuclear warheads, according to FAS.

While the report focuses heavily on a worst-case scenario of coordinated Russian and Chinese aggression, Ankit Panda, a nuclear expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says that the commission has focused too singularly on this threat. This should “be better borne out by the evidence we’ve seen of how Moscow and Beijing cooperate in crises,” he says, adding: “the other thing here is if the prescriptions are followed, the United States, I think, is very likely to find itself in a new arms race.”

The Biden Administration has sought to tamp down on fears of facing two major nuclear adversaries. “The United States does not need to increase our nuclear forces to outnumber the combined total of our competitors in order to successfully deter them,” Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said in June. Sullivan also said that the U.S.’s advanced non-nuclear weaponry will likely remain far more capable than its rivals’.

Some experts tell TIME that the existing initiatives to upgrade the U.S.’s nuclear arsenal—at an estimated cost of over $1 trillion over the next three decades—are already sufficient for national security purposes. “My priority would not be on going beyond the current modernization plan,” says Lynn Rusten, vice president for the Nuclear Threat Initiative think-tank’s Global Nuclear Policy Program.

Rusten says her priority “would be just having a sensible deterrent, pursuing diplomacy to keep Russia under limits, have a dialogue with China to understand what they’re doing, and seeing if we can stop what could become a nuclear arms race in the Asia-Pacific.”

Securing funds for the modernization program has at times been a challenge. “Now, you know, funds get authorized but they don’t get appropriated,” says Rose Gottemoeller, one of the commissioners of the report and former Deputy Secretary General of NATO. “It’s very important that Congress stay focused on the funding that’s required.”

In addition to speeding up the modernization program, the report calls for increasing weapons production including B-21 stealth bombers and intercontinental missiles, and expanding the country’s nuclear weapons industrial base to upgrade 1940s-era Manhattan Project facilities.

“While it requires significant investment to maintain a strategic posture sufficient to prevent war with a major power, it will be far more expensive, in lives and resources, to fight such a war,” the report says.

source https://time.com/6323059/us-china-russia-nuclear-threat/

SAG-AFTRA Slams ‘Bullying Tactics’ As Strike Talks Break Down With Studios

Talks bitterly broke off between Hollywood actors and studios late Wednesday, killing any hopes that the three-month strike by performers would come to an end anytime soon.

The studios announced that they had suspended contract negotiations, saying the gap between the two sides was too great to make continuing worth it, despite an offer as good as the one that recently ended the writers strike. The actors union decried their opponents’ “bullying tactics” and said they were wildly mischaracterizing their offers.

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On Oct. 2, for the first time since the strike began July 14, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists had resumed negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents studios, streaming services and production companies in strike talks.

When negotiations resumed with writers last month, their strike ended five days later, but similar progress was not made with the actors union.

The studios walked away from talks after seeing the actors’ most recent proposal on Wednesday.

“It is clear that the gap between the AMPTP and SAG-AFTRA is too great, and conversations are no longer moving us in a productive direction,” the AMPTP said in a statement.

The SAG-AFTRA proposal would cost companies an additional $800 million a year and create “an untenable economic burden,” the statement said.

In a letter to members sent early Thursday, SAG AFTRA said that figure was overestimated by 60%. The union said its negotiators were “profoundly disappointed” the studios had broken off talks.

“We have negotiated with them in good faith,” the letter read, “despite the fact that last week they presented an offer that was, shockingly, worth less than they proposed before the strike began.”

Actors have been on strike over issues including increases in pay for streaming programming and control of the use of their images generated by artificial intelligence.

The AMPTP insisted its offers had been as generous as the deals that brought an end to the writers strike and brought a new contract to the directors guild earlier this year.

But the union letter to actors said the companies “refuse to protect performers from being replaced by AI, they refuse to increase your wages to keep up with inflation, and they refuse to share a tiny portion of the immense revenue YOUR work generates for them.”

From the start, the actors talks had nothing like the momentum that spurred marathon night-and-weekend sessions in the writers strike and brought that work stoppage to an end. Actors and studios had taken several days off after resuming, and there were no reports of meaningful progress despite direct involvement from the heads of studios including Disney and Netflix as there had been in the writers strike.

The writers did have their own false start in negotiations, however. A month before the successful talks, the initial attempt to restart ended after just a few days.

Members of the Writers Guild of America voted almost unanimously to ratify their new contract on Monday.

Their leaders touted their deal as achieving most of what they had sought when they went on strike nearly five months earlier.

They declared their strike over, and sent writers back to work, on Sept. 26.

Late night talk shows returned to the air within a week, and other shows including “Saturday Night Live” will soon follow.

But with no actors, production on scripted shows and movies will stay on pause indefinitely.

source https://time.com/6323071/actors-strike-talks-suspended/

U.S. Inflation Eased Slightly Last Month as Price Increases Extend Slow Descent

WASHINGTON — Measures of U.S. inflation in September showed that the pace of price increases is still grinding lower, though at a slow and uneven pace.

Consumer prices in the United States increased 0.4% from August to September, below the previous month’s 0.6% pace. Thursday’s report from the Labor Department also showed that year-over-year inflation in September was unchanged from a 3.7% rise in August.

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And underlying inflation declined a bit last month: So-called core prices, which exclude volatile food and energy costs, climbed 4.1% in September from 12 months earlier, down from a 4.3% annual pace in August. That is the smallest such increase in the core measure in two years.

Still, on a month-to-month basis, prices are continuing to rise faster than is consistent with the Fed’s 2% target. Core prices increased 0.3% from August to September, the same as in the previous month.

The main driver of last month’s inflation was an uptick in housing costs. Rental prices and a measure that the government computes of the cost of home ownership, which together make up about a third of the total inflation index, accounted for most of overall inflation from August to September. Those costs also accounted for more than two-thirds of the increase in core prices.

Rental prices rose 0.5% on a monthly basis for a second straight month. Measured year over year, rental costs are up 7.4%, down from a 7.8% rise in August.

Higher gas prices also helped drive inflation for a second straight month. Those prices rose 2.1% just from August to September, after a 10.6% surge the previous month.

Consumers did receive some relief from clothing prices. They dropped 0.8% last month and are up 2.3% compared with a year earlier. Used car prices dropped for a fourth straight month, declining 2.5%. They’re now down 8% from a year ago.

Grocery prices, after soaring last year, have cooled. They ticked up just 0.1% from August to September and are 2.4% higher than they were a year ago.

Economists and Fed officials have long cautioned that inflation would likely ease in a bumpy and uneven way, though it is still expected to keep slowing into 2024. Thursday’s inflation data follows several speeches this week by Fed officials suggesting that they are inclined to leave their benchmark interest rate unchanged at their next meeting Oct. 31- Nov. 1.

Longer-term interest rates have spiked since the Fed’s policymakers last raised their key rate in July. Those higher long-term bond rates have led to more expensive mortgages, auto loans and business borrowing, a trend that could help cool inflation pressures without further Fed rate hikes.

Several factors have combined to force up longer-term rates. They include the belated acceptance by financial markets of the likelihood that the economy will remain on firm footing and avoid a recession.

The government’s budget deficit is also worsening, requiring more Treasury debt to fund it. The result has been an increased supply of Treasuries, which means a higher yield is needed to attract enough buyers.

A larger reason, though, is that investors regard the future path of inflation and interest rates as increasingly uncertain and demand a higher long-term Treasury yield to compensate for that risk.

On Wednesday, Christopher Waller, a member of the Fed’s governing board who has previously backed sharply higher rates to fight inflation, suggested that price increases are steadily cooling, potentially allowing the Fed to leave interest rates unchanged. Optimism has been growing that the Fed can tame inflation through the series of 11 interest rate hikes it imposed beginning in March 2022 without causing a recession.

“We’re in this position where we can kind of watch and see what happens,” Waller said. If core inflation stays as low as it has in recent months, “we’re pretty much back to our target.”

Hiring surged unexpectedly in September, the government reported last week, and job gains in July and August were also revised higher. More people earning paychecks should help fuel consumer spending, the principal driver of the economy. Yet the report also showed that wage growth slowed — a trend that, if it continues, should help ease inflationary pressures.

Inflation soared in 2021 as the economy roared out of the pandemic recession. Consumers were ramping up their spending on furniture, exercise equipment and appliances even while supply chain bottlenecks contributed to widespread shortages. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine then sent food and gas prices spiking. Inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2002.

Since then, supply chains have unraveled, and food and energy prices have risen much more slowly. In the meantime, the economy has remained largely healthy, and the unemployment rate has barely risen. The steady decline in inflation, without a spike in layoffs or a recession, has confounded economists’ expectations that widespread job losses would be needed to slow price increases.

source https://time.com/6322977/u-s-inflation-eased-slightly/

The History of Nazi Immigration to the U.S. Has Been Forgotten

In late September, members of the Canadian House of Commons were thrust into the international spotlight for something seemingly mundane—offering a standing ovation to 98-year-old Ukrainian Canadian Yaroslav Hunka, touted by the assembly’s speaker as a war hero who fought against invading Russian forces in World War II. But as commentators soon pointed out, Hunka’s fight against the Russians during the war was as a Nazi collaborator and member of the Waffen-SS 1st Galician Division.

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The moment was intended to honor Ukrainian resistance, linking past and present. Instead, it highlighted the deep and enduring shame of postwar North American Nazi immigration and our tendency toward selective historical amnesia in confronting it. And it isn’t only Canada where this has been an issue.

Canada and the United States allowed and even encouraged the immigration of Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators in the years following the war. If the public remembers this history, it is likely through the frame of fictional “Nazi hunting” narratives, like those featured in the Indiana Jones movies or the Amazon Prime show Hunters. Or perhaps we take note when a former Nazi makes the news, as in the case of former Cleveland resident and concentration camp guard Ivan “John” Demjanjuk.

Read More: Amazon’s Nazi-Killer Epic Hunters Can’t Tell the Difference Between Vigilante Justice and Equal-Opportunity Sadism

But these narratives obscure the more typical stories of Nazis in North America, especially in the U.S. Our popular memory has downplayed the welcome offered to Nazi immigrants after the war, which is how Americans, like Canadians, have repeatedly blithely celebrated men from units accused of contributing to atrocities.

The most well-known instance of Nazi collaborators immigrating to the U.S. was through Operation Paperclip, in which some 1,600 Nazi scientists and engineers were employed by the U.S. government and given residence and citizenship in the ensuing years. German scientist and pioneer of space flight Wernher Von Braun was notably recruited through this program. His contributions to the U.S. space program have been celebrated; Huntsville, Ala., has both a day (Feb. 24) and a 9,000-seat arena named after him. Yet the work that earned him the reputation that enabled his immigration to the U.S. was indefensible. Von Braun contributed to the use of brutal and enslaved labor in the Mittelwerk rocket engineering complex during his time as a Nazi.

Read More: How Historians Are Reckoning With the Former Nazi Who Launched America’s Space Program

Various CIA operations also made use of former collaborators from the Soviet bloc, some of whom the CIA actively assisted throughout the immigration process to bypass screening restrictions. These policies were undertaken explicitly for the purpose of Cold War technological competition and intelligence gathering. Defeating the Soviet Union—a U.S. ally during the war—now involved embracing those who had recently fought for their most abhorrent enemy.

Such high profile and geopolitically strategic instances were not the most common method of immigration for Nazi collaborators, however. Near the end of the war, as Allied armies regained ground and began camp liberations, collaborators fled their posts in droves to avoid the violent reprisal that awaited them upon capture. This was particularly true for Eastern European collaborators, whose roles spanned from pogrom participation to auxiliary policing and SS membership. They could blend in among those displaced by the war more easily than Germans and Austrians, and then concoct plausible back stories that did not implicate them for their contributions to the Nazi cause. Those who made it to U.S. and British-administered Allied zones found that if they voiced fear of political retribution for anti-Soviet views, they could become eligible for emigration.

Although the U.S. had restrictive immigration policies in this era, new postwar exceptions were made to help address the refugee crisis in Europe. These policies were influenced by deepening Cold War political tensions and national security concerns around communist infiltration.

For displaced people (“DPs”) originally from Soviet-bloc countries, it was beneficial to play up anti-communist political views. Postwar immigration laws like the 1948 DP Act and its 1952 amendment included provisions that favored DPs from Soviet-annexed countries, such as the Baltic states. This served a Cold War purpose—showing that the US was offering freedom to people fleeing communist oppression. Yet many came from regions where violent Nazi collaboration was common.

Screening policies should have excluded former Nazis and collaborators, along with anyone else they believed had committed acts of “moral turpitude.” However, as long as the U.S. did not have what Senator Pat McCarran called “positive proof” of a person’s moral failings, they could not confirm that an applicant was unfit for immigration. Because of deteriorating relations with the Soviet Union, immigration officials lacked access to Soviet-held documentation (the “positive proof”) that would have allowed them to root out former collaborators. Officials also lacked necessary training to determine past Nazi collaboration and were often more concerned with detecting potential communist sympathies than they were with potential ties to Nazism.

Read More: How America Educated the Children of Nazis after World War II

The U.S. ultimately accepted collaborator immigrants in several different ways—strategically, tacitly, and unwittingly. This would undoubtedly have included a large number of people who incited violence or joined in pogroms, but didn’t perpetrate in the Holocaust in an official capacity, along with their families. Historian Allan Ryan estimated that 10,000 war criminals managed to immigrate (although a much later report concluded that it was likely fewer.) Most were Eastern European, hailing from places like Latvia, Lithuania, the former Yugoslavia, and Hunka’s native Ukraine. Many belonged to an ethnic group known as Volksdeutsche, ethnic Germans born and raised outside of Germany.

In the 70 years since, the U.S. government has recognized the harms of its approach, and sought to right some of its wrongs. Under mounting political pressure by Jewish American groups and their allies in the 1970s, including New York Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, the Department of Justice opened an Office of Special Investigations (OSI) in 1979 with the express purpose of tracking down and prosecuting Nazi collaborators.

But the most the U.S. was ever able to charge perpetrators with was immigration fraud via participation in war crimes—not the war crimes themselves. This could lead to deportation, though it often did not. Only 21 were forcibly removed from the U.S. while another 40 left voluntarily to the country of their choice, and few faced any form of criminal prosecution abroad. Most of those prosecuted by the OSI had their naturalization revoked, but simply lived out the rest of their lives in the U.S., where most are now buried.

In her 2006 DOJ-produced history of the OSI, historian Judith Feigin wrote that the government’s work served as a “permanent and irrefutable response to those who would deny the Holocaust and its horrors.”

The OSI brought attention to the history of Nazi immigration and attempted to ameliorate some of its effects. But decades later we must ask: was this effort to address the sins of the past sufficient, if collaborators are still routinely celebrated—accidentally or otherwise?

The recent incident in the Canadian House of Commons is a reminder that the past is still very much alive—even if it is aging—and we must come to terms with the events that caused it, not simply move on. Poland is now considering the extradition of Yaroslav Hunka from Canada for his unit’s collaboration with various WWII anti-partisan efforts and pogroms, and a $30,000 endowment at the University of Alberta in his name has been closed. Canadian House of Commons speaker Anthony Rota, who praised Hunka in his remarks, has resigned.

But this incident begs us across North America to recognize how a tendency to score geopolitical points without consideration of context can cause ongoing harms.

Claire E. Aubin is an incoming lecturer in history at the University of California – Davis, and faculty member in holocaust and genocide studies at Gratz College. She is completing a book titled The Homeland: Holocaust Perpetrators as Immigrants to Post-WWII America. Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here.

source https://time.com/6322156/history-of-nazi-immigration/

Bed Bugs Aren’t Just a Problem In Paris. Here’s Why

The news reports are alarming to say the least. Paris, the city known for its style, cuisine, and amour, has a bed bug problem. Video of the insects crawling over Metro seats, in hotels, and swarming buses and movie theaters swept the internet, and bed bug anxiety reached a new high.

But what’s behind the Parisian invasion? How did bed bugs launch such a widespread infestation of the city? With Paris hosting the first Olympics in the post-COVID-19 era next summer, those questions aren’t just matters for idle conversation.

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The reality is that the infestation didn’t happen overnight. It’s likely that Paris, as well as other cities and even less-densely populated areas around the world, harbor a consistent, and persistent bed bug problem. And with the boom in travel since the pandemic, people in Paris are noticing them.

A number of factors keep bed bugs surviving and thriving, say entomologists, many of which are directly related to human behavior. Part of the problem may be the way we manage the pests. Unlike mosquitos and ticks, which government groups address with wide-scale, community-wide spraying and eradication efforts, bed bugs are seen more as an individual, rather than a societal, problem. And not everyone has the time or money to take the proper steps to get rid of them, so the insects continue feeding, breeding, and spreading to find new hosts.

Contrary to anecdotal reports, bed bugs aren’t the result of poor hygiene and aren’t limited to lower income communities. It’s just that less advantaged people don’t have the resources to eradicate them. “I’ve dealt with reports from five star hotels, first class airline seats, and high end apartments,” says Zachary DeVries, assistant professor of entomology at the University of Kentucky. “Anybody can get bed bugs, but only those with resources can get rid of them.”

That’s why, particularly in densely populated cities like Paris, there may be reservoirs of bed bug populations in more disadvantaged communities, which then spread as the insects hitch rides on public transportation, into restaurants, movie theaters, retail stores—essentially anywhere people go.

But there are other reasons why the bugs  are so difficult to eradicate.

Humans and bed bugs—a long, and close, history

Bed bugs are unique in that they depend almost exclusively on humans to survive. They only need blood—while they feed on livestock and chicken blood they preferentially suck on people—to keep them going. If they have a human host, they don’t even need water. And they established this parasitic relationship centuries ago. Cave drawings depict bed bugs, while wood prints captured their flat, tiny bodies and when cameras were developed, the first pictures of them emerged in the 1800s.

Culturally, bed bugs have also shaped human history. Some historians suggest that the annual practice of spring cleaning may have begun as an attempt to flush out bed bugs, which tend to be less active during the colder winter months, before they were reinvigorated in the spring and summer.

“They are reclusive and extremely shy,” says Gail Ridge, an associate scientist at The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, a state and federally funded research facility. “They are dependent on human beings to live, so they live a conflicted life of terror, since we are the prime predator on the planet. So they can only survive by having a series of mechanisms to elude our efforts to kill them.”

One of them may be a remarkable ability to inbreed. For most living things, finding new, and distantly related, mates is key to passing on genes and keeping their kind going. Inbreeding is normally a species-killer, since mating with genetically related members can introduce dangerous, and potentially lethal, mutations. But bed bugs aren’t saddled with such limitations; in fact, a single female carrying eggs can seed a new colony of bugs in a location as the future generations breed among themselves. “We have seen brother-sister matings for 20 to 30 generations and nothing happens,” says DeVries. “The later generations are just as happy and healthy as the first.”

How pesticides solved the bed bug problem—before making it worse

The most aggressive human efforts to eradicate the bugs  involve pesticides such as DDT and organophosphates. They were so effective that from the 1950s to the 2000s, these chemicals largely eliminated bed bugs from the developed world. But bans on them after their toxic effects on human health were discovered gave the bugs a break, along with broader international trade rules that opened the exchange of goods across the world. “Bed bugs became a problem after we went through the ban on organophosphates indoors,” says Jody Gangloff-Kaufmann, an entomologist at the New York State Integrated Pest Management program at Cornell University. The bugs came back in the early 2000s, spread primarily along trade routes from developing nations to industrialized countries, and flourished in a new world with less aggressive chemical attacks. In 2010, cities like New York experienced massive bed bug infestations, with alarming sightings closing retail stores in Soho and South Street Seaport. Even workplaces weren’t immune, as the insects infiltrated Time Warner’s headquarters near Central Park as well.

Worse, the new generations of bugs were highly resistant to any chemicals used to treat them. “The bugs we have today are not the same as their grandparents,” says Dini Miller, professor of entomology and urban pest management specialist at Virginia Tech University. “We have thick-skinned, hard-drinking, mutant bed bugs.”

Exposure to the pesticides has pushed the bugs to develop harder exoskeletons, which prevents the chemicals from penetrating into their bodies for two reasons. One,, “bed bugs walk on hooked claws and lift their bodies off the ground,” says Nina Jenkins, an affiliate professor of entomology at Penn State University. “So the amount of bed bug that contacts a surface when they are walking is a very small proportion of their body—so if they walk over a toxin-treated surface, they don’t absorb enough to kill them.”

And even if the bugs do absorb some of the chemicals, they have developed enzymes that can break apart toxins and neutralize them. “We may knock them down and they look dead, but four hours later, they get up and shake it off because the enzymes in their bodies are breaking down the insecticide and they can recover,” says Miller. “We have basically killed off all the bugs that are susceptible to insecticides, and selected for the resistant ones. We’ve done it to ourselves.”

Not only have people introduced pesticides that have generated new super breeds of resistant bugs, but humans have also removed one of the bed bug’s primary predators: cockroaches. “Cockroaches, like bed bugs, can get into cracks and crevices and they hunt bed bug eggs,” says Ridge. “But now that cockroaches are being knocked out in many cities, bed bugs have no predator.”

Read more: Why Bed Bugs Are Becoming So Much Harder to Kill

They never went away

These resistant bugs are getting hardier and hardier. Cross breeding with different populations makes them even more fertile, says Ridge. She has crossed two different lab populations of bed bugs and found that the fecundity of the females doubled. “I can only assume that’s happening in the wild as well,” she says, especially since bugs from different parts of the world are likely mixing and matching thanks to widespread human travel.

And thanks to the fact that simply spraying with a can of insecticide doesn’t get rid of them, these bugs are finding hospitable habitats in certain populations. “One of the things I’m seeing is a huge increase in the demographic of elderly disabled living with thousands upon thousands [of bed bugs] in their home,” says Miller. “These are individuals with 17 other problems, including physical, mental ,and financial [problems], and bed bugs are just one of them. Those are the sources that we are now seeing.”

Because the bugs aren’t being eliminated from these populations, they may continue to hitch rides to other locations where they find new hosts. “Bed bugs settle in with people who can’t deal with them effectively,” she says. So despite media reports about infestations in hotels, they are rarely the source of widespread problems, since hotels can afford effective, and often expensive, pest control measures. Individual home owners, and owners of apartment buildings, halfway houses, and nursing homes, however, often cannot.

The best ways to get rid of bed bugs

There is no single approach that effectively controls bed bugs. It takes a series of painstaking steps, performed correctly—usually with professional training—to truly get an infestation under control. “There is very little the homeowner can do to get rid of the problem,” says DeVries. Sprays that claim to eliminate bed bugs won’t truly get the job done since the bugs are resistant to most of them, and, if they are effective, they only push the bugs from one place to another. And online advice about using heat or steam by directing hair dryers or steam irons at mattresses is wrong—doing so also just drives the bugs from one place to another. Even some professional pest control services that perform heat or steam methods aren’t all effective, since they may not achieve high enough temperatures—bed bugs only die at around 125°F—or may not run the devices long enough. “I’ve heard of multi-family apartment complexes where they start at the top and work their way down, and by the time they get to the first floor, there are already reports of problems back on the top floor,” says DeVries.

As contrary as it seems, one of the most effective strategies is to not disturb the bugs as much as possible. Bed bugs don’t like to stray far from their blood meal, which means they remain in areas where people sleep and sit—hidden in cracks and crevices in mattresses and sofas. “They won’t be in the bathroom where they have to walk half a mile to feed,” says DeVries. “If you don’t disturb them, you can keep the problem concentrated to a sofa, chair or bed.” After determining where the bed bugs are, vacuuming them is the first step. Miller recommends attaching a long stocking to the outside of the vacuum hose to ensure no bugs can escape, and once the vacuuming is done, tying off the stocking and either soaking it in water to drown the bugs or disposing of them in a sealed container.

If bed bugs are crawling on clothing, putting the clothes in a hot dryer will desiccate them. Sealing the clothes once they come out of the dryer in a tight plastic bag and leaving them undisturbed for a few weeks ensures that no eggs and new generations of bugs remain.

Read more: Bed Bugs Are Most Drawn to This Color

There are also newer insecticides that don’t rely on the harmful chemicals of the past. One increasingly popular one that Miller and her team are testing is Aprehend, a fungus-based treatment that can only be applied by licensed pest control specialists. The treatment is a spore in a liquid form that is sprayed on affected areas; the contact with the fungus gives the bugs a dermal infection that kills them. The reason it’s so effective, says Jenkins, who co-developed the product at Penn State and founded a company to commercialize it, is that it’s designed to remain active for up to three months. Millions of fungal spores are spread in a thin band around the areas where bed bugs travel, and just a few steps on the treated area will bind those spores to their claws. They then bring those spores back to their nests, which may be in hidden areas no human treatment could ever reach, and spread them to other bugs, and ultimately any exposed bug dies of the fungal infection. “To be completely honest, it shocked us how successful this product has been,” says Jenkins.

Sealing infested articles or clothing can also dry them out, but bed bugs can live for months without feeding, so starving them out could take a while and it’s not always practical—nor is it guaranteed to work. Gangloff-Kaufmann had a colleague who put some bugs in a freezer for five years and once thawed, one survived.

Dust-based treatments such as silica dust can also be effective in killing bugs by suffocating them, but requires precise application since breathing in the dust can also be harmful to people, leading to cancer and lung disease.

“No one strategy is going to be effective but if you start stacking them up you could eventually catch everything,” says DeVries. “Vacuuming doesn’t get everything, but steaming could get the bugs that vacuuming misses. And if steaming doesn’t get them, then insecticides like Aprehend could. Then, setting up physical barriers could help too. We don’t know if one is working better than the other, but we know that if you incorporate them all, it could be an effective management plan.”

Even more important, entomologists agree, is recognizing that bed bugs aren’t just an individual’s problem. They should be treated as a societal problem with a societal solution. But that’s been challenging, since bed bugs don’t transmit diseases like mosquitos and ticks do. While they feed on human blood, they don’t pass on whatever they pick up, since they have a unique ability to fracture the DNA of pathogens they ingest so they are no longer capable of causing disease. “If you imagine the DNA of a virus like polio or HIV or influenza as a glass vase, once it is ingested by a bed bug, it shatters,” says Ridge. That makes controlling bed bugs a hard sell for government intervention, since they don’t technically cause public harm other than a general sense of anxiety and discomfort. Yet, says Gangloff-Kaufmann, “I like to call bed bugs a communicable insect.” DeVries agrees, noting that “everybody uses public transportation, everybody uses airlines, and everybody goes to the movies. Everybody ventures into society, and the bugs have constant opportunity to reinfest and reinvade everywhere. We let them persist. Ultimately unless they are dealt with on a broader, community-wide scale, the problem will not go away.”

source https://time.com/6322485/bed-bugs-paris-other-cities/