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Netanyahu Plans To "Evacuate" 1.4 Million People In Rafah

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has ordered the Israeli military to come up with a plan for civilians sheltering in the southern city of Rafah to evacuate, his office said on Friday, as Israeli leaders have increasingly indicated they intend to ultimately send ground troops into the crowded city.

“Any forceful action in Rafah would require the evacuation of the civilian population from combat zones,” the prime minister’s office said, without saying what area those zones would cover or when such an operation would begin.

Roughly 1.4 million Palestinians are now sheltering in Rafah, according to the United Nations. Lying on the border with Egypt, the city is one of the last areas of the Gaza Strip in which Israeli ground troops have yet to deploy in force.

Many of the people who have squeezed into the city have been displaced multiple times since the beginning of the war, and finding food, water and medicine has become a daily struggle.But it is not clear where those people could go and Israeli officials have yet to provide any clear answers.

Many displaced Gazans sheltering in Rafah have fled from towns and cities farther north in the enclave, devastated by war, where fighting continues and basic supplies are critically short, and Israel has said they cannot yet return.

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 @ISIDEWITH submitted…3wks3W

Defense Bill Blocks Transgender Care To Minors

The Senate on Wednesday gave final approval to a defense policy bill directing $895 billion toward the Pentagon and other military activities, moving over the objections of some Democrats who opposed a provision added late in the negotiations that would deny coverage for transgender health procedures for minors.The 85-to-14 vote, coming a week after a divided House passed the same measure, cleared the bill for President Biden’s signature.Most Republicans and many Democrats supported the measure, which provides a 14.5 percent pay raise to junior enlisted service members and a 4.5 percent pay raise for all other service members. It also expands access to meal assistance, housing and child care programs that benefit those in uniform.But several Democrats withheld their backing in protest of a provision preventing TRICARE, the military’s health care plan for service members, from covering “medical interventions for the treatment of gender dysphoria that could result in sterilization” for children under 18.The language, which would affect the gender-transitioning children of service members, was recently added to the measure at the insistence of Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, who refused to bring a defense bill to the House floor without it, according to aides familiar with the negotiations.Twenty-one Democrats, led by Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, proposed an amendment to strip the provision from the bill, but the matter was never brought to a vote. Several of them took to the floor on Tuesday to lodge their objections.“It’s flat-out wrong to put this provision in this bill and take away a service member’s freedom to make that decision for their families,” Ms. Baldwin said, estimating that the provision could negatively affect as many as 6,000 to 7,000 military families.

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 @ISIDEWITH submitted…1 day1D

Unemployment Crisis Hits Office Workers

The U.S. economy has added more than two million jobs over the past year. But more people who are out of work are having a hard time getting back in. As of November, more than seven million Americans were unemployed, meaning they didn’t have work and were trying to find it. More than 1.6 million of those jobless workers had been job hunting for at least six months, according to the Labor Department. The number of people searching for that long is up more than 50% since the end of 2022. On average, it now takes people about six months to find a job, roughly a month longer than it did during the postpandemic hiring boom in early 2023, according to the Labor Department. The pain is largely in high-paying white-collar jobs, including in tech, law and media, where businesses grew fast when the economy reopened from the pandemic but now have less need for new hires. A labor market that looks healthy in the headlines is, under the surface, weaker than it seems. The unemployment rate, at 4.2%, remains well below the average during the decade before the pandemic. But there is now just about one job posting per unemployed worker, down from two in early 2022. Strong hiring has narrowed to a thin set of industries. The government’s monthly jobs report on Friday will provide another snapshot of the market’s health. More people getting unemployment benefits are drawing on public aid longer. New data released last week from the Labor Department show that 1.8 million people continued to file for previously granted unemployment benefits as of late December, near the postpandemic high.Year-over-year wage growth has fallen to 4%, down from about 6% at the height of the early 2020s hiring spree. That’s a sign that many employers don’t have to jostle so hard to attract workers. To date, the labor market has been weakening primarily due to less hiring—not widespread layoffs. But once companies decide to reduce payrolls, job cuts often snowball quickly, which could spark a much faster jump in the unemployment rate, said Veronica Clark, a Citigroup economist.

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 @ISIDEWITH submitted…1 day1D

American Hostage Families Back Tulsi Gabbard For DNI Post

The parents of former ISIS and al Qaeda hostages, and a former al Qaeda hostage, are backing President Donald Trump’s selection of Tulsi Gabbard to be his next Director of National Intelligence (DNI), writing in a letter first obtained by the Washington Reporter that “American hostage families know that Tulsi Gabbard has always been on our side.”The letter’s signatories are Carl and Marsha Mueller, the parents of Kayla Mueller, an aid worker who was taken hostage by ISIS and who was murdered by terrorists almost ten years ago, and Theo Padnos and his parents, Nancy Curtis and Michael Padnos. Theo was held hostage by al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate for almost two years.The group, which knows all too well the barbarism of ISIS and al Qaeda, wants the Senate to quickly confirm Gabbard. “Given the threat that has lately surfaced in New Orleans, we feel that the sooner the senate confirms Tulsi Gabbard the better, as the nation needs leadership that will keep Americans safe,” they wrote.The letter from the Mueller and Pados families is a boon to Gabbard, who has rolled out major backing — including a recent open letter of support signed by over 1,100 veterans. Gabbard, herself an Iraq War veteran who has spent over two decades in the Army and Army Reserves, has also been rolling out support from the senators she will need to confirm her.Gabbard’s time in the Middle East, the Mullers and Padnoses believe, “has given her an understanding of this phenomenon which other policy makers simply do not have. She has been compassionate towards terrorism’s victims. She has been a fierce advocate for bringing its practitioners to justice.”

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 @ISIDEWITH submitted…1 day1D

Biden bans new offshore oil drilling along most of US coastline

President Joe Biden announced a ban on new offshore oil and gas drilling along most of the US coastline on Monday in a move designed to bolster his environmental and climate legacy as he prepares to leave office.The order will protect 625mn acres of ocean on the US east coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific coasts of Washington, Oregon and California, as well as portions of the Northern Bering Sea in Alaska, the White House said on Monday.“My decision reflects what the coastal communities, business and beachgoers have known for a long time: that drilling off these coasts could cause irreversible damage to places we hold dear and is unnecessary to meet our nation’s energy needs,” Biden said.The executive action will not prevent oil and gas companies obtaining leases in the central and western parts of the Gulf of Mexico, areas that produce almost 15 per cent of the nation’s oil supplies. Nevertheless, the move is expected to complicate the policy agenda of incoming president Donald Trump, who has vowed to “drill, baby, drill” and boost US oil production, even though it is already at a record level.The Trump transition team said it was a disgraceful decision designed to exact “political revenge on the American people” and the incoming president said he would immediately “unban” Biden’s prohibition on new offshore drilling.“I have the right to unban it immediately . . . we can’t let that happen to our country. It’s our greatest, it’s really our greatest economic asset,” Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt in an interview on Monday.Biden’s action will probably be challenged by the oil industry in court and face pushback from Republicans in Congress. But overturning the order could prove challenging and may require an act of Congress, according to legal experts.Biden is using his authority under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, to protect the areas from drilling — the same mechanism which former president Barack Obama used previously to ban offshore drilling in some Arctic and Atlantic waters in 2016.In 2019, a federal judge ruled that an executive order by former president Donald Trump that lifted an Obama-era ban on oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean was unlawful.

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 @ISIDEWITH submitted…3hrs3H

Trump plans to invite entire GOP Senate to Mar-a-Lago bash

President-elect Trump is preparing to invite the entire Senate Republican conference to Mar-a-Lago for a mega-MAGA party in the coming weeks, people familiar with the matter tell Axios.Trump is keen to celebrate a victory he sees as historic and fete the senators who helped him achieve it. He also wants to build trust with the lawmakers he needs to pass his sweeping legislative agenda."Mar-a-Lago is special to the president. He's at ease there. Everyone is," a Trump adviser told Axios."So it's a good place to get everyone together outside of Washington. It's team bonding. Trump is very much the player-coach."Final details have not been locked down, but the big bash could come before Trump's inauguration.It will serve as an informal and more fun follow-up to his meeting Wednesday evening with GOP senators at their weekly policy get-together.Trump is also hosting governors at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday night, Politico reported.Also this week, Trump will welcome three House groups to his Florida club. There'll be separate meetings scheduled for the Freedom Caucus, committee chairs and the so-called SALT lawmakers from high-tax blue states.Zoom out: Trump likes to play the role of DJ at his Palm Beach club, but the background music will likely be dominated by the same talk that has consumed D.C. these last few weeks.Republicans are in a heated internal conversation on whether to use one — or two — legislative vehicles to implement Trump's immigration and tax reform policies.Trump isn't entirely indifferent, but he's indicated he can live with either approach."I like one, big, beautiful bill," Trump said at a press conference on Tuesday. "But if two is more certain, it does go a little bit quicker because you can do the immigration stuff early.""I can live either way," he added.Zoom in: This winter, Mar-a-Lago has been the warm-weather retreat for Trump's court — once in exile, but now preparing to return to power. (Mar-a-Lago was dubbed the "Winter White House" long before Trump bought it).Government leaders and high-profile executives have all visited Trump in Palm Beach, both to pay their respects, but also to understand Trump's intentions and shape his views.

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