La Información Directa a tu Celular 📲 de HOY *Martes 12 de Diciembre 2023* *En El Plano Nacional e Internacional*:
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*U.S. and Ukraine Search for a New Strategy After Failed Counteroffensive*
President Volodymyr Zelensky arrived in Washington at a critical moment, both on the battlefield and on Capitol Hill.
American and Ukrainian military leaders are searching for a new strategy that they can begin executing early next year to revive Kyiv’s fortunes and flagging support for the country’s war against Russia, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials.
The push for a fresh approach comes after Ukraine’s monthslong counteroffensive failed in its goal of retaking territory lost to the invading Russian army and after weeks of often tense encounters between top American officials and their Ukrainian counterparts.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine arrived in Washington on Monday for hastily arranged meetings this week with President Biden and Congress to discuss the way forward. The two presidents will attempt to demonstrate solidarity and bolster support for Ukraine at a critical moment, both on the battlefield and on Capitol Hill.
Ukraine’s setbacks have come as Republican support for continuing American financial assistance for Kyiv has eroded. Even some senior U.S. officials have expressed worries that if the war falls into a long stalemate next year, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia will gain the advantage.
“We can’t let Putin win,” Mr. Biden said last week as he pressed Congress for a new round of funding for Ukraine. “It’s in our overwhelming national interest and international interest of all our friends. Any disruption in our ability to supply Ukraine clearly strengthens Putin’s position.”
The Russian military, after its own failed drive to Kyiv in 2022, has begun to reverse its fortunes and is rebuilding its might. Moscow now has more troops, ammunition and missiles, and has increased its firepower advantage with a fleet of battlefield drones, many of them supplied by Iran, according to American officials.
The United States is stepping up the face-to-face military advice it provides to Ukraine, dispatching a three-star general to Kyiv to spend considerable time on the ground. U.S. and Ukrainian military officers say they hope to work out the details of a new strategy next month in a series of war games scheduled to be held in Wiesbaden, Germany.
The Americans are pushing for a conservative strategy that focuses on holding the territory Ukraine has, digging in and building up supplies and forces over the course of the year. The Ukrainians want to go on the attack, either on the ground or with long-range strikes, with the hopes of seizing the world’s attention.
The stakes are huge. Without both a new strategy and additional funding, American officials say Ukraine could lose the war. Administration officials argue that Mr. Putin is betting on diminished American support, pointing to his recent statements that if Ukraine runs out of NATO-provided ammunition, Russia would prevail in days.
The United States has given vast military and economic support to Ukraine, more than $111 billion over the past two years. But a significant number of Republicans now say they oppose further spending, and others are demanding to see a new strategy before they vote for any additional funds.
Many Ukrainian leaders do not realize how precarious continued U.S. funding for the war is, American officials said. These Ukrainian generals and senior civilian officials have unrealistic expectations about what the United States will supply, they said. They are asking for millions of rounds of artillery, for example, from Western stockpiles that do not exist.
*Gaza After Nine Weeks of War*
After Israel’s invasion and thousands of strikes, many neighborhoods lie in ruins.
Nine weeks ago, the Gaza Strip was a bustling home to more than two million people. Today, neighborhoods have been flattened by Israeli airstrikes and farming communities have been bulldozed by invading Israeli tanks.
Video and satellite imagery captured in late November and early December reveals a devastating transformation in much of northern Gaza.
The Port of Gaza used to be a lifeline for the Gazan fishing industry, with a fish market next to the shore.
Satellite imagery shows that the fighting has resulted in heavy damage to almost every corner of Gaza City, far beyond the port area. A U.N. assessment in early November found that at least 6,000 buildings had been damaged with about a third of them destroyed.
Israeli officials vowed to destroy Hamas in the wake of the group’s surprise Oct. 7 attack and have since subjected Gaza to one of the most intense bombing campaigns of the 21st century.
Before the war, Omar Mukhtar Street was the main road through Gaza City, with restaurants, banks and shops on either side of Aljondy Almajhool Park.
Now the road is filled with rubble from destroyed buildings. Those still standing are heavily damaged.
Destruction along the coast
Gaza’s seashore was once an escape for Palestinian families during hot summers with frequent blackouts.
Destruction along the coast
Gaza’s seashore was once an escape for Palestinian families during hot summers with frequent blackouts.
The beaches are now deserted, apart from Israeli tanks and bulldozers. Many of the high-rise hotels that once offered tourists sea-view rooms are scorched, their windows blown out.
The damage to Gaza’s coastline stretches all the way to the northern border, where Israeli forces invaded on Oct. 27.
The next phase
These images capture only a fraction of the destruction across the Gaza Strip. Recent assessments indicate that more than half of the buildings in northern Gaza show signs of damage.
Frequent aerial bombardments have hit the south, too, since the war began on Oct. 7, including at Al Amin Mohamed mosque, shown here.
*WHAT IS THE PATH TO PEACE IN GAZA?*
After Hamas’s depraved attack and the unfathomable destruction of Palestinian life, infrastructure and society in Gaza by the Israeli military offensive, any hope for the territory feels far away. But once the guns fall silent and Gazans are allowed to contemplate the reconstruction of their shattered home, the time will come when Israelis, Palestinians and the rest of the world must wrestle with the future of Gaza and its people.
Times Opinion reached out to thinkers, political leaders and experts for their vision of what might meet the moment. Because in the end, two neighboring groups of millions of people must find a way to live their lives. Here are 10 ideas for a path forward.
Today, most Jewish Israelis support the invasion of Gaza. They think it is crucial to restoring their country’s reputation for military competence and strength. But while Israel can depose Hamas, its leaders have not explained how it can rule Gaza — either directly or by proxy — without inviting a future insurgency. That insurgency will be powered by Palestinians seeking revenge, since, as Israeli experts have noted, Hamas recruits fighters from the families of people Israel kills. As that quagmire deepens, Israel would look about as strong and competent as the United States did when it could not quash insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Militarily, Israel should instead conduct the kind of narrowly targeted response the United States eschewed after Sept. 11. It should pursue the people who masterminded the Oct. 7 slaughter to the ends of the earth and the end of their days. But it should halt its invasion of Gaza and negotiate a long-term cease-fire that leads to freedom for all the remaining Israeli hostages. At the same time, Israel should allow Palestinians to create a legitimate political leadership — which can take charge in the West Bank and Gaza — and empower Palestinians who pursue their freedom in ethical ways.
To negotiate seriously with Israel, Palestinians need legitimate leaders — not the discredited Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, who hasn’t stood for election since 2005. As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has advised in the past, Israel should release the imprisoned Palestinian nationalist Marwan Barghouti, who is more popular than the leaders of Hamas. Mr. Barghouti was convicted of murder and membership in a terrorist organization during a trial at which he declined to offer a defense and refused to recognize the Israeli court’s jurisdiction. But despite defending Palestinians’ right to violently resist Israeli oppression, he has also lauded Nelson Mandela’s willingness to “defy hatred and to choose justice over vengeance.”
Israel should then empower Mr. Barghouti and other credible, non-Hamas Palestinian leaders by showing that they can improve Palestinian lives and give Palestinians hope that they will gain their freedom. It should begin dismantling the West Bank settlements whose inhabitants terrorize their Palestinian neighbors and help Palestinians forced from their villages by settler violence to return. It should prevent Jewish ultranationalists from undermining the status quo on the Temple Mount, known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, and promise not to establish diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia until Palestinians are free.
According to Israeli media, influential Palestinians have proposed allowing Hamas to join the Palestine Liberation Organization, the umbrella group that includes different Palestinian parties, if it disarms. Mr. Barghouti could oversee such a process, which would pave the way for a revived, internally democratic P.L.O., which could set a new political direction for the Palestinian people.
Will Benjamin Netanyahu’s government do any of this? Not a chance. But polls suggest that his Likud party may suffer a historic collapse when Israelis next vote. The Biden administration should make it clear that America’s relationship with Israel will depend on its next government pursuing a different path. Israel’s current one will succeed only in devastating Gaza. It won’t give Palestinians hope, and it won’t keep Israelis safe.
ISRAEL’S MILITARY CAMPAIGN will continue until Hamas’s military capabilities are eliminated and it is removed from power. It’s hard to guess how long it will take, but if we are to be honest, it will take longer than Western societies are prepared to accept and longer than what their leaders — above all, President Joe Biden, a close friend of Israel — are willing to tolerate.
It is imperative for this reason that Israel provide the world with a clear picture of what it intends to do next, after the army has completed its work. The current Israeli government has no answer. It hasn’t had time to prepare a long-term strategy. But even if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition partners are unwilling and unable to propose the necessary next steps, the rest of Israel — and anyone who cares about its stability and security — can no longer avoid the question.
Here’s what I think should be part of that plan:
After the military campaign to remove Hamas from power and destroy its ability to fight, Israeli forces must withdraw all the way to the border of Gaza.
As that campaign now continues, Israel, the United States and other allies in parallel must agree on the deployment of an international force drawn from NATO countries, with their deployment agreed on by Israel and the United States and operating under the auspices of the U.N. Security Council.
The international force would take the place of the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza. Arab nations will probably not be willing to send in troops. While Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia desire nothing more than the destruction of Hamas, which is a destabilizing force for their own governments, none will want to be seen as lending a hand to Israel’s military campaign.
The international force would help create a different governmental administration and would start to rebuild the civilian authorities and governing systems in the Gaza Strip for approximately 18 months.
Israel must announce that with the cessation of its military campaign, talks will immediately begin with the Palestinian Authority based on a two-state solution — which is the only political horizon that can offer stability and cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians and diplomatic, military and economic cooperation between Israel and the moderate Arab states.
There is no doubt that the Netanyahu government is unwilling, unable and unprepared to make such moves. Before any of these steps may be taken, therefore, there is no choice but to get rid of this government. Once it is gone and as soon as the military campaign in Gaza is over, the first steps toward what comes next may be taken.
*As Frogs Disappear Worldwide, ‘There Is No Way to Stop That Killer’*
Mysterious deaths have occurred all over
the planet and followed a similar pattern.
Why have so many species vanished?
And what does it all have to do with us?
We met the ecologist Karen Lips in Washington, D.C. One morning, she picked us up from a Metro station and took us to Shenandoah National Park, keen to show us a species of salamander.
Ms. Lips describes herself as an amphibian forensic scientist. For decades, she has been researching the disappearance of amphibian species, and what she told us that day was shocking.
As filmmakers, we’ve covered the extinction of species and other ecological issues in our work for years. Mammals, reptiles, insects, fish — much of the planet’s wild fauna is threatened with extinction. But no other vertebrate class is as threatened as amphibians. Herpetologists like Ms. Lips don’t just fear for individual species; they fear for the class Amphibia as a whole.
No one else we had met and interviewed on this subject seemed to be as affected by it as Ms. Lips. To put it simply: Frogs, salamanders and all amphibians are her life. For her, their increasing disappearance from our planet is a personal drama.
We finally found a few of the salamanders toward the end of our day up in the mountains. We were delighted at seeing them but also disheartened. Ms. Lips had no doubt that they, too, could soon vanish. That night, full of emotion, we interviewed Ms. Lips, who is the voice of this documentary.
This is about much more than frogs and salamanders. It is about all life on our planet.
*Biden’s New Friendship With Modi Is Already Under Threat*
The indictment unsealed in New York on Nov. 29 accusing an unnamed Indian government official of plotting the assassination of a Sikh separatist in America raises many grave questions. Chief among them: Is the partnership between the United States and India in peril?
On the face of things, it would appear not. Washington has so far adopted a measured tone, urging cooperation and forgoing any outright condemnation of the Indian government for its potential role in the foiled plot. India, which in September angrily rejected what Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, called “credible allegations” linking Indian agents to the killing of a Sikh secessionist in British Columbia, has responded temperately this time; it asserted that extraterritorial killings are “contrary to government policy” and set up a panel to investigate the charges.
Nevertheless, these allegations, and they way they are playing out in India, expose the brittle underpinnings of what the Biden White House views as one of America’s “most important relationships.”
The two Sikh men the United States and Canada say were targeted by agents of the Indian government were drum beaters for an independent state of Khalistan. For most Indians, the memory of the Khalistan movement, a bloody ethno-religious agitation to establish a Sikh state in the Punjab region, is harrowing. Its campaign of terror, peaking in the 1980s, claimed thousands of lives. It took years for its traumas — from the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her own Sikh bodyguards to the killings of thousands of Sikhs in riots that followed — to heal. In 2005, Manmohan Singh, India’s first Sikh prime minister, made a public apology to the Sikh community.
Yet for all the violence, including the 1985 bombing of an Air India flight from Canada by Khalistani militants that killed more than 300 people on board, the idea of Khalistan was fated to fail for a simple reason: Most Indian Sikhs rejected it. Khalistan was and is a cause pursued, financed and overseen by a vocal minority in the diaspora that aimed to incinerate Punjab’s historic pluralism.
North America, home to the largest Sikh population outside India, has emerged as the headquarters for Khalistan’s champions, while some of its fiercest foes, including the military officers who led operations against militant separatists, have been Sikhs in India. According to a Pew Research Center report on India from 2021, 95 percent of Sikhs surveyed said they were “very proud” to be Indian; 70 percent believed that those who disrespect India cannot be considered Sikh; more than half said they had a lot in common with Hindus; and most did not see evidence of widespread discrimination against their community.
Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, the dual American and Canadian citizen whom Washington says was targeted by an Indian official, was designated a terrorist by India in 2020. Last month, Mr. Pannun posted a vitriolic video in which he made a veiled threat against Air India and warned Sikhs to avoid flying the airline (he later specified he was calling for a boycott of the carrier), and pledged to rename the airport in Punjab after the killers of Indira Gandhi. He has recently warned Hindus to leave Canada and declared that his group, Sikhs for Justice, was going to “Balkanize” India.
Mr. Pannun and his fellow travelers, though unsavory, do not constitute an existential threat to India. For all their ranting and raving, they simply are no match for the might of the Indian state. This doesn’t, however, mean that Mr. Modi doesn’t stand to benefit from the fallout of the allegations, regardless of whether his government had any involvement in either incident. To Mr. Modi, all enemies of the Indian state are a political gift.
*The Magical Solutions Floating Out of Dubai Won’t Fix the Climate Crisis*
I live at the base of Basalt Mountain, an ancient volcano that tops out at nearly 11,000 feet in the Roaring Fork Valley of western Colorado. An eruption 10 million years ago contributed to the contours of the landscape. In the mornings I drink strong coffee from a U.S. Forest Service mug, and I look out the window at the light on the peaks, at the wild turkeys pecking in the yard, at the deer so tame that I could touch them.
I have spent my career working on climate change — not theoretically but in the trenches, crawling under trailers to insulate them under a federal government program to help low-income families conserve energy, building solar farms, capturing methane from coal mines, bolstering the climate movement through various nonprofit boards and crafting policy at the state and municipal levels. I served as a state regulator and an elected town councilman.
I have also spent 25 years in the field of corporate sustainability, trying to figure out how business might become a meaningful part of the climate solution. Over time, I came to understand that the ethic being applied — the idea that free markets can solve societal problems and that even a monstrosity like climate change can be fixed without regulation — was a ruse that I had bought into, realizing that fraud only late in the game.
This year, Earth’s average temperature bumped, briefly but ominously, to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above the preindustrial average. Climate scientists have been telling us that 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming is the threshold we should not exceed, but at this point, more and more experts are saying it is all but inevitable.
As the global climate summit in Dubai has unspooled, I’ve read inexplicably cheerful social media posts from colleagues and friends, climate leaders I admire and total unknowns at COP28, the Conference of the Parties — which I’ve come to call the party at the end of the world. These “Look, Ma!” posts strike me as forced, naïve at best, trending toward willful blindness and delusion.
One “breakthrough” being lauded includes a purely voluntary commitment by fossil fuel companies to better capture methane, a potent greenhouse gas we absolutely must contain.
I know this issue intimately. The one man in America who fully understood the obscure problem of methane leaking from coal mines — Tom Vessels, a former oil and gas executive — partnered with me and others a decade ago to capture the gas to generate electricity. The project was a first in the nation, and while it was worthy of and received praise, it was also the only such project — because no federal policy existed to ensure the capture or mitigation of this super-warming agent.
For fossil fuel companies, committing to containing methane leaking from their pipelines and wellheads is a way for those businesses to appear beneficent while continuing to traffic in oil and gas. It is that very trafficking that causes the leakage that must be regulated, even as scientists tell us the essential action required to control warming is to stop burning coal, oil and gas.
A few years ago, I visited Tom in Denver as he was dying from mesothelioma, the result of home remodels done in his youth, when no regulations existed around asbestos. He was rail thin and ghost white. We sat on the couch drinking cans of seltzer. I told him: “You lived a good life. You did a good thing, and you were ahead of your time.” He died a few weeks later. Future generations won’t suffer his fate, thanks to strict asbestos laws. On methane, so far, future generations are mostly unprotected from its pernicious warming power.
In the missives I’ve seen from COP28, there are bad ideas pitched as magical solutions, such as the Rube Goldberg-like plan that John Kerry, the U.S. climate envoy, doubled down on. According to the investigative outlet The Lever, which reported on a leaked memo outlining discussion issues for the conference, the U.S. plan was to build “on existing voluntary carbon market standards for the international carbon market, as opposed to establishing a new robust framework with stringent standards.” This approach is undermining the United Nations’ effort to solidify an internationally regulated carbon market.
If we’re going to use these markets to reduce emissions, governments must administer and enforce them to make sure the reductions for which one polluter is paying another in the carbon market — the so-called offsets — are real.
At the same time, there were glimmers of hope. As the climate conference began, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced comprehensive new rules to regulate methane in the United States, at least. There are also plans to create a fund to help vulnerable nations hit by climate disasters, and to set a goal of tripling the amount of renewable power worldwide by 2030 (if high interest rates don’t derail that objective). There were also calls for a full fossil fuel phaseout.
But that proposed phaseout rattled the conference hosts in Dubai, the most populous city in the United Arab Emirates, one of the world’s leading oil producers. It is ramping up oil production. The idea was quickly scuttled. The head of the OPEC cartel called on its members to reject any plan that would threaten the production and sale of oil, gas and coal. And it was no idle threat: All 198 participating nations must consent to any agreement. So much for what the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, said would be a major benchmark of success for the summit.
Let’s be real, though. The summit’s proposals for voluntary commitments — on methane, on renewables, on phasing out fossil fuels — were theater. Imagine if in the 1960s Americans had responded to the civil rights movement not with legislation but with calls to please treat one another nicely.
That is one of the reasons that when I read optimistically pithy social media posts from colleagues visiting a petrostate hosting a climate conference led by an oil executive, I begin to feel the creeping tendrils of despair. The climate problem is complex and enormous, and the progress to rein it in has been slow. Meanwhile, carbon emissions continue to rise in what is expected to be the hottest year in recorded history.
And still, I make my coffee, holding it in my hands as I look out into my yard, thinking how good I have it. I am reminded of the biologist E.O. Wilson’s defining idea, “biophilia,” our innate love of life and nature.
I see even in Dubai, as the conference comes to a close, the outlines of a human inclination to protect, to hold on and to persevere.
These are mostly good people, after all, who convened to reduce carbon emissions worldwide, with the focus on this issue alone, for two weeks. Many are driven by the idea that we can’t let this unique and beautiful existence, on a spinning globe in the big empty, go down in literal flames. Sure, the event has been co-opted. At least 1,300 oil, gas and coal lobbyists were granted access to the conference. But there are also powerful forces pushing for success.
Thomas Keating, a Catholic priest who helped start St. Benedict’s, a now-closed monastic community near my house, lived among turkeys and deer like the ones I see from my windows. “Whether we walk down the street or drink a cup of soup,” he wrote, “divine life is pouring into the world.”
*ATENTAMENTE*
*MAESTRO FEDERICO LA MONT*
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