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Government officials issued a quarantine for part of a city in Florida on Tuesday in a hurry to eradicate a giant African snail, a species that carries parasites.

This 3.5-mile area of Miramar in Broward County, located near Hollywood, will be covered with a molluscicide containing metaldehyde to exterminate any of these snails. Residents can leave the quarantine zone but are not allowed to take any plant-related materials that may have the snail’s eggs. The Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services mentioned that it is against the law to transfer any giant African land snails or related products, such as soil, plants, compost, or building materials, within or out of the quarantine area without a compliance agreement.

It was confirmed that a giant African snail, which can be up to 8 inches long, was found in the region in June, causing the survey to be amplified.

These snails have been labeled as one of the most destructive species in the world due to their ability to damage agriculture and to harm human life. They carry the rat lungworm parasite which can induce meningitis, and they consume over 500 types of plants. In addition, these mollusks are able to produce up to 1,200 eggs per year.

Florida has already successfully destroyed the snail twice since its initial discovery in 2010, with the most recent effort taking place in Miami-Dade County for 10 years and costing 23 million dollars. This Broward County quarantine is the third one to be imposed in the past year. Lee County on the west coast of Florida had a quarantine due to the detection of these snails in December, whereas Pasco County was quarantined six months prior.

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Whatever the economic and military capacity of the United States, even the walk-and-chew-gum advocates—those who insist we can pursue a strategy capable of deterring and, if necessary, defeating both China and Russia at the same time—know there’s little chance we can do so alone. The U.S. must actively lead its allies—in Europe and the Indo-Pacific most specifically—to leverage their strengths and increase their own capacities, even as the U.S. leads the alliance. The strength of the wolf is the pack.

Alliances—and the allies that go with them—have perhaps fallen out of favor of late. Fingers will be quick to point to President Trump as taking the lead in putting American treaty allies in the crosshairs. He famously—infamously even—declared NATO obsolete, he hinted that certain allies—South Korea and Japan among them—ought to perhaps be encouraged to develop nuclear weapons of their own so that the U.S. could begin to collapse its umbrella protections, he chastised allies for not spending more on defense—and, not incidentally, thereby failing in their own treaty obligations, and he refused to explicitly affirm America’s Article 5 commitment while attending his first NATO summit. To certain degrees he walked much of this back over time, but the hesitance to be entangled by obligations that might be harmful to his strident “America First!” assertions remained.

But while Trump might have dressed down U.S. allies in a more Trumpian manner than most, he was by no means the first U.S. political leader to express skepticism over U.S. relationships with our allies. President Obama complained about allies not pulling a sufficiently amount of their own weight, as did Robert Gates as well as President Eisenhower before them. No one likes to be played for a sucker and Americans have never been eager to be entrapped in one-sided relationships in which a guileless America bears all the costs while free-riding allies derive all the unearned benefits. Owing at least in part, therefore, to this disdain for being taken advantage of, it’s probably true that to many American observers the risks and costs associated with military alliances are simply more visible and obvious than the benefits—it’s easier to notice what you’re sensitive to.

To be fair, it’s not as if there’s nothing to all this. As Elbridge Colby rightly warns, “U.S. alliances should exist not primarily as expressions of national altruism and largesse, but as ways of advancing America’s own interests.” Certain alliances, Colby observes, can cease to make sense. When they do, then in all likelihood they should simply cease altogether. That said, Colby continues:

But the truth is that sustaining alliances in North America, Europe and maritime Asia does advance U.S. interests—even when looked at from a hard-nosed businessman’s point of view. The reality is that U.S. alliances have served and continue to serve as an enduring source of strategic advantage and leverage—and ultimately, added security—for America. Indeed, Washington’s network of pacts is the envy of America’s rivals. Its main strategic competitors would trade places with us because they recognize and value what many alliance naysayers increasingly discount: America’s web of foreign security relationships is a source of power and influence in the world. And in particular, America’s rivals understand that U.S. alliances have foreclosed their expansion or reassertion of spheres of influence through the use of military force.

So even while free riding has hazardous implications—for it means our allies are less capable of contributing to collective defense operations or other interventions—the alliance that enables it can still be worthwhile. Indeed, free riding can in certain cases be a feature, rather than a mere bug, of American alliances. While the need for our allies to be able to contribute appropriately to operations is critical, a world in which our allies practice restraint in their military spending is one in which the U.S. has a greater degree of influence over those allies. Defense spending in general, therefore, can be seen in the same way as nuclear non-proliferation. The spread of nuclear weapons—even among our friends—dilutes American influence. To say nothing of adding to the dangers of a potentially less stable world.

There are limits to this, of course. But the point remains that the U.S. is better positioned to shape global affairs when allied with like-minded friends that at once both depend on us and can help support our interests in key regions than we would be without those alliances. One of the basic geopolitical lessons of both the War to End All Wars and of the one that came right after it is that the U.S. ought not to allow any adversarial power to dominate a critical geopolitical region—or, well, possibly any. This might mean that the U.S. is compelled to fight in order to protect regions such as Europe, East Asia, or the Middle East. When we are, it is clearly better to have powerful friends than not. To defer to Colby again:

Alliances allow the United States to agglomerate the power and wealth of affinitive states (or at least those sharing similar fears) for common, broadly liberal purposes, while locking out rivals which could otherwise leverage that same power and wealth, probably for illiberal ends.

Alliances, properly managed, also significantly increase the military power that the U.S. can bring to bear on a battlefield. This has proved true throughout the Cold War and in the years after 9/11. While the value of alliances post 9/11 might seem less significant, this is largely due to the power asymmetries between the U.S. and those we’ve been fighting. But we mustn’t overstate the case. During the Persian Gulf War, France and the United Kingdom provided major contributions to the primarily U.S. effort. NATO allies also contributed nearly half of the American-led Implementation Force mission that patrolled Bosnia in the mid ‘90s. Just so, U.S. allies played significant roles in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and against ISIS. While it might not have been mission critical had such assistance not shown up, clearly America’s military burden—and the costs of carrying that burden—would have been significantly higher without allied contributions.

As Mathew Kroenig insists, this ability to punch above even our own robust weight will prove crucial in designing a defense strategy capable of deterring and, if needed, defeating both Russia and China in overlapping time frames. This punching power is backed by the fact that the U.S. and its formal treaty allies alone account for nearly 60% of global GDP. This economic might, Kroenig asserts, provides the resources to maintain a favorable balance of military power over China and Russia combined.

Taken together, the U.S. and her allies have the resources to design the needed strategy. Political theorists Hal Brands and Peter Feaver argue that this ought to include leveraging and even creating specialized capabilities among our allies. Sometimes, this specialized capability is material, taking the form of the particular capabilities of allied nations’ special operations forces, or of specialized platform capabilities—such as the Japanese’ particularly fine antisubmarine capability. More often, as Brand and Feaver observe:

More often US allies contribute geographical capability in the form of proximity to the theater of interest. This proximity allows forward staging of the strike and intelligence assets, particularly air assets, on which the American way of war depends. It also allows for specialized technical intelligence collection that would be nearly impossible to conduct without local partners. The counter-ISIS campaign, for instance, would have been vastly more difficult had the United States not had access to key facilities controlled by either treaty allies (Turkey) or long-standing military partners (Qatar or Bahrain).

This specialization—both material and geographical—allows critical points of focus. For example, European allies, Kroenig suggests, should invest in armor and artillery while Asian allies ought to buy naval mines, harpoon missiles, submarines, and the like. Following these mission-specific emphases, the US Army should focus on cooperation with its European allies while the Navy and Marine Corps would concentrate in the Asia-Pacific. The Air Force, meanwhile, would cover both theatres.

A final point. Many observers have cautioned that the war in Ukraine has revealed deficiencies in the U.S. defense industrial base that will prevent the American military from maintaining sufficient levels of munitions and platforms for an extended fight. Alliances are not worth much if they do not have the materiel for the fight. Now is the time for the defense industry to step up and revitalize its ability to keep America well equipped the necessary fight—with large numbers of munitions, platforms, hardware, and emerging capabilities suited to both the traditional and new domains of warfare. Kroenig argues that Washington should signal to the defense industry that the country will increase procurement of key munitions and emerging technologies needed to fight adversaries like China and Russia so that the industry can make the long-term investments—now—that will be needed to boost production capacity for a for a wartime footing. Kroenig helpfully points to The Atlantic Council’s Commission on Innovation Adoption, which has released an interim report outlining ten recommendations that would enable the U.S. defense industrial ecosystem to better respond to the mission critical demands of strategic competition. One of the key  recommendations is simply to successfully incentivize tech companies to do business with the Department of Defense. Internal allies across the private sector will prove just as critical as external allies. America must be one.

This vision of a unified America is essential. Yes, U.S. allies do need to properly fund and maintain their own defense and to project and deploy power in meeting shared interests across the globe. But they won’t do it if the U.S. doesn’t take the clear and unequivocal lead. The two-front fight that threatens on the horizon will overwhelm the free world if the U.S. is not united in its willingness to continue to shoulder the burden of leading that free world. No other like-minded nation is strong enough to replace the U.S. in this. Against hegemonic aspirants like China and Russia, who are not like-minded, only the U.S. can overmatch them, thwart those aspirations, and encourage allies to balance against them. Without American alliance leadership, Colby warns, “the calculations of states under the shadow of Chinese and Russian power would be considerably different…bandwagoning and accommodation become more compelling.”

For all of this to work, the U.S. must continue to build its own capacities—including by increasing intelligent defense spending—to deter and defeat both Russia and China. America must be credible both so that our would-be allies believe allying with us is wise and beneficial and so that our would-be adversaries believe that challenging us is unwise and harmful. Both Providence and ambition have allowed the US to gather to itself vast stores of power and security. This is not simply the result of having friendly neighbors above and below and two vast oceans to either side. It has been a choice. And it is a choice, too, that we have not simply horded this power to our own good. America, for all her ills, has chosen to be a force for good in the world. We must continue to make those same choices in order to continue to be that same force.

The strength of the pack is the wolf.

The post Russia and China at Once – Part III: The Importance of Alliances (Including Internal) appeared first on Providence.

A Texas teen, who had gotten into trouble with the law at least three times since 2022 and had agreed two weeks prior not to threaten his grandmother, is now accused of murdering her with a vehicle hook.

Houston Police Department stated that the victim was found dead on Monday morning after her family contacted them for a welfare check. According to the criminal complaint, Mylon Louis Colquitt, aged 18, allegedly used a “tow hook” to kill his 66-year-old grandmother, identified as Sheila Lewis, on June 18th.

The grieving son of the victim, Christopher, told ABC 13 that his mother had given Colquitt chances despite knowing of his issues with drugs and violence. Furthermore, court records indicated that a burglary of habitation case against Colquitt was dismissed on March 10th, while a criminal mischief case was dismissed on April 18th, after he completed a pretrial diversion program.

On June 5th, an order of deferred adjudication was filed in a third-degree felony case (to which Colquitt pleaded guilty) for evading arrest/detention with a vehicle, thus placing him under community supervision for 3 years. The offense dates back to July 31, 2022.

Now that Joe Biden and Congress have ended COVID-19 protections, millions of people are being kicked off Medicaid for procedural reasons like failing to respond to mail quickly. Many more are set to lose their health care coverage.

President Joe Biden speaks at the White House in Washington DC, on June 22, 2023. (Celal Gunes / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

As states have begun clearing out their Medicaid rolls for the first time since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly three quarters of the Americans who’ve lost coverage have been terminated not because they’re ineligible for the low-income health insurance program, but due to administrative reasons, such as failing to quickly respond to a piece of mail.

In February, President Joe Biden bragged in his State of the Union speech that “more Americans have health insurance now than ever in history.” Biden made that comment six weeks after he set the stage to massively increase the United States’ uninsured population, when he signed legislation from Congress ending the pandemic-era requirement that states maintain Medicaid beneficiaries’ coverage in exchange for extra federal funding.

The measure, passed as part of a year-end spending bill, allowed states to begin mass disenrollments starting in April — a policy decision that is naturally a boon for government contractors that states pay to identify beneficiaries they could potentially remove from the program.

Now that states have resumed annual Medicaid eligibility reviews, an estimated 17 million people, and potentially up to 24 million, could lose Medicaid coverage. According to early data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, more than 1.3 million Americans have already lost coverage, and nearly one million have lost their health insurance for arbitrary reasons, not because they aren’t eligible.

The Biden Health and Human Services Department (HHS) estimated last year that roughly 45 percent of people who would lose Medicaid coverage once states could begin disenrollments would have their insurance canceled for procedural reasons despite being eligible for the program. The actual proportion of Americans being terminated for such procedural reasons appears to be far higher — 71 percent — according to the latest Kaiser data.

At a health insurance industry conference last week, one lobbyist admitted that the country is witnessing “distressing levels of administrative procedural disenrollments.” A top official from an organization representing state Medicaid directors downplayed those numbers, arguing that it’s too soon to jump to any conclusions.

“In terms of the data we’re starting to see, I think we need to proceed with caution,” Dianne Hasselman, deputy executive director of the National Association of Medicaid Directors, said at a health insurance industry conference last week. “It is very early. We can’t make huge assumptions about the data.”

“Administrative Churning”

Medicaid, the national health insurance program for low-income Americans, offers better, more comprehensive coverage for patients than most health insurance offerings in the United States, but the program is aggressively means tested with strict income limits.

States are required to perform annual “redeterminations,” in which they review Medicaid enrollees’ eligibility to make sure they are still earning little enough money to qualify for the program. Enrollees who miss or fail to respond to mail, sometimes within ten days, can quickly lose coverage.

Medicaid redeterminations and disenrollments were paused for three years during the pandemic, after Congress passed COVID relief legislation that required states to provide continuous coverage for Medicaid recipients in exchange for more funding. That change temporarily made Medicaid a much more generous program, one in which adult enrollees grew by 13.5 million beneficiaries, or 39 percent.

Late last year, Congress started phasing out the enhanced Medicaid funding and allowed states to begin the process of removing recipients from their rolls this April. The measure was part of the $1.7 trillion annual government funding bill that Democrats passed in the final days of their legislative trifecta, before they turned over control of the House of Representatives to Republicans.

Medicaid redeterminations often result in states cutting off coverage to adults and children who are still technically eligible for the program. The government calls this “administrative churning.”

As HHS explained in a brief last summer, “Administrative churning refers to the loss of Medicaid coverage despite ongoing eligibility, which can occur if enrollees have difficulty navigating the renewal process, states are unable to contact enrollees due to a change of address, or other administrative hurdles.”

The agency predicted at the time: “Approximately 9.5 percent of Medicaid enrollees (8.2 million) will leave Medicaid due to loss of eligibility and will need to transition to another source of coverage. Based on historical patterns, 7.9 percent (6.8 million) will lose Medicaid coverage despite still being eligible (‘administrative churning’), although HHS is taking steps to reduce this outcome.”

Kaiser’s Medicaid enrollment tracker, which is based on data from state websites and the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), reports a much higher administrative churn rate: “Overall, 71 percent of disenrollments are due to procedural reasons, among states reporting as of June 20, 2023.”

Some of these people may be able to reenroll or qualify for subsidized private insurance plans on the individual market, but those plans generally offer worse coverage and higher costs.

“Most of the people who are losing coverage for procedural reasons are going to be eligible for something else,” said Arielle Kane, director of Medicaid initiatives at the consumer advocacy group Families USA:

Whether they’re still eligible for Medicaid, or they’re eligible for subsidized coverage on the exchanges, or they now have employer-sponsored coverage, we want them to be either successfully reenrolled or transferred to another source of coverage. And we worry that when they just get procedurally disenrolled, they won’t know they don’t have coverage until something bad happens.

Kane added that “in an ideal world, the vast majority of these redeterminations would happen in a passive manner — the state would have the data to confirm their income, confirm their eligibility status, and just re-enroll them without the consumer having to do anything.” If that doesn’t work, states can “reach out and then the beneficiary could confirm their information and add any details that were missing,” she said. “We know this is possible.”

Last week, HHS secretary Xavier Becerra wrote to governors urging them to work to limit procedural disenrollments and ensure that cancellations are actually based on eligibility.

“I am deeply concerned with the number of people unnecessarily losing coverage, especially those who appear to have lost coverage for avoidable reasons that state Medicaid offices have the power to prevent or mitigate,” wrote Becerra:

Given the high number of people losing coverage due to administrative processes, I urge you to review your state’s currently elected flexibilities and consider going further to take up existing and new policy options that we have offered to protect eligible individuals and families from procedural termination.

Kane noted that under the year-end spending legislation, CMS secretary Chiquita Brooks-LaSure can put a state on a “corrective action plan” if it fails to comply with redetermination reporting requirements, and potentially halt the state’s Medicaid disenrollments due to procedural reasons.

“At least publicly, we don’t know of any corrective action plans,” she said.

A CMS spokesperson said the agency “is deeply concerned with the numbers of eligible individuals losing coverage due to red tape,” and added that “CMS will not hesitate to use the compliance authority provided by Congress, including requesting that states pause procedural terminations.”

Bad Incentives and Distressing Data

At a conference last week held by the health insurance lobbying group America’s Health Insurance Plans, or AHIP, the organization’s vice president of Medicaid advocacy, Rhys Jones, noted that Kaiser’s Medicaid tracker is showing “distressing levels of administrative procedural disenrollments where people lose coverage for process reasons, not because they actually lost eligibility.”

Hasselman, deputy executive director at the National Association of Medicaid Directors, which represents state Medicaid officials, encouraged the audience not to worry about these numbers — yet.

“The thing that is keeping Medicaid directors up at night is the thought that they will remove someone from Medicaid coverage who should not be removed,” she said, before explaining that there “are a lot of different reasons” why someone might not have their coverage renewed — including earlier eligibility reviews by states.

“We can’t just assume that it’s because [beneficiaries] didn’t get a mailing, or they . . . started to go through the application and didn’t complete all the information that was needed to verify eligibility,” Hasselman continued. “I would urge everyone to proceed with caution, and assure you that Medicaid directors and their teams are looking at the data and trying to understand and make sense of it.”

Since the enhanced federal funding for an expanded Medicaid population is winding down, states have a financial interest in quickly trimming their rolls as much as they can — as do the contractors helping states find beneficiaries to terminate.

The country’s largest Medicaid eligibility and enrollment service provider, Maximus, is usually paid by states based on “volume flow and beneficiary interaction.” Modern Healthcare, a major health care industry news publication, recently wrote that Maximus has “a financial incentive to find as many people ineligible for Medicaid as possible.”

Maximus regularly sponsors conferences held by the National Association of Medicaid Directors.

Asked by The Lever about outside contractors like Maximus having a potential financial incentive to speed up procedural disenrollments, Hasselman said:

I think that Medicaid directors are very independent in the decisions that they make. They are concerned about Medicaid beneficiaries, first and foremost, making sure that people who are eligible for Medicaid will stay on Medicaid. The last thing that they would do would ever be to be pressured into making a decision by a contractor.

You can subscribe to David Sirota’s investigative journalism project, the Lever, here.

Hope is running out that anyone on board the vessel would be found alive.

By Associated Press 

The search for a missing submersible with five people aboard took a bleak turn Thursday when the U.S. Coast Guard said a debris field was found at the bottom of the ocean near the Titanic, an announcement that came after the critical 96-hour mark when breathable air could have run out.

The Coast Guard’s post on Twitter gave no details, such as whether officials believe the debris is connected to the Titan, which was on an expedition to view the wreckage of the Titanic. It said the debris was discovered within the search area by a remotely operated underwater robot, and was being evaluated.

The Titan was estimated to have about a four-day supply of breathable air when it launched Sunday morning in the North Atlantic — but experts have emphasized that was an imprecise approximation to begin with and could be extended if passengers have taken measures to conserve breathable air. And it’s not known if they survived since the sub’s disappearance.

Rescuers have rushed ships, planes and other equipment to the site of the disappearance. On Thursday, the U.S. Coast Guard said an undersea robot sent by a Canadian ship had reached the sea floor, while a French research institute said a deep-diving robot with cameras, lights and arms also joined the operation.

Authorities are hoping underwater sounds might help narrow their search, whose coverage area has been expanded to thousands of miles — twice the size of Connecticut and in waters 2 1/2 miles (4 kilometers) deep. Coast Guard officials said underwater noises were detected in the search area Tuesday and Wednesday.

Jamie Pringle, an expert in Forensic Geosciences at Keele University, in England, said even if the noises came from the submersible, “The lack of oxygen is key now; even if they find it, they still need to get to the surface and unbolt it.”

The Titan was reported overdue Sunday afternoon about 435 miles (700 kilometers) south of St. John’s, Newfoundland, as it was on its way to where the iconic ocean liner sank more than a century ago. OceanGate Expeditions, which is leading the trip, has been chronicling the Titanic’s decay and the underwater ecosystem around it via yearly voyages since 2021.

By Thursday morning, hope was running out that anyone on board the vessel would be found alive.

Many obstacles still remain: from pinpointing the vessel’s location, to reaching it with rescue equipment, to bringing it to the surface — assuming it’s still intact. And all that has to happen before the passengers’ oxygen supply runs out.

Dr. Rob Larter, a marine geophysicist with the British Antarctic Survey, emphasized the difficulty of even finding something the size of the sub — which is about 22 feet (6.5 meters) long and 9 feet (nearly 3 meters) high.

“You’re talking about totally dark environments,” in which an object several dozen feet away can be missed, he said. “It’s just a needle in a haystack situation unless you’ve got a pretty precise location.”

Newly uncovered allegations suggest there had been significant warnings made about vessel safety during the submersible’s development.

Broadcasters around the world started newscasts at the critical hour Thursday with news of the submersible. The Saudi-owned satellite channel Al Arabiya showed a clock on air counting down to their estimate of when the air could potentially run out.

Captain Jamie Frederick of the First Coast Guard District said a day earlier that authorities were still holding out hope of saving the five passengers onboard.

“This is a search-and-rescue mission, 100%,” he said Wednesday.

Frederick said while the sounds that have been detected offered a chance to narrow the search, their exact location and source hadn’t yet been determined.

“We don’t know what they are, to be frank,” he said.

Retired Navy Capt. Carl Hartsfield, now the director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Systems Laboratory, said the sounds have been described as “banging noises,” but he warned that search crews “have to put the whole picture together in context and they have to eliminate potential manmade sources other than the Titan.”

The report was encouraging to some experts because submarine crews unable to communicate with the surface are taught to bang on their submersible’s hull to be detected by sonar.

The U.S. Navy said in a statement Wednesday that it was sending a specialized salvage system that’s capable of hoisting “large, bulky and heavy undersea objects such as aircraft or small vessels.”

The Titan weighs 20,000 pounds (9,000 kilograms). The U.S. Navy’s Flyaway Deep Ocean Salvage System is designed to lift up to 60,000 pounds (27,200 kilograms), the Navy said on its website.

Lost aboard the vessel is pilot Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate. His passengers are: British adventurer Hamish Harding; Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman; and French explorer and Titanic expert Paul-Henry Nargeolet.

In the first comments from Pakistan since the Titan vanished, Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch said Thursday that officials have confidence in the search efforts.

“We would not like to speculate on the circumstances of this incident and we would also like to respect the wishes of the Dawood family that their privacy may be respected,” she said.

At least 46 people successfully traveled on OceanGate’s submersible to the Titanic wreck site in 2021 and 2022, according to letters the company filed with a U.S. District Court in Norfolk, Virginia, that oversees matters involving the Titanic shipwreck.

One of the company’s first customers characterized a dive he made to the site two years ago as a “kamikaze operation.”

“Imagine a metal tube a few meters long with a sheet of metal for a floor. You can’t stand. You can’t kneel. Everyone is sitting close to or on top of each other,” said Arthur Loibl, a retired businessman and adventurer from Germany. “You can’t be claustrophobic.”

During the 2.5-hour descent and ascent, the lights were turned off to conserve energy, he said, with the only illumination coming from a fluorescent glow stick.

The dive was repeatedly delayed to fix a problem with the battery and the balancing weights. In total, the voyage took 10.5 hours.

The submersible had seven backup systems to return to the surface, including sandbags and lead pipes that drop off and an inflatable balloon.

Nicolai Roterman, a deep-sea ecologist and lecturer in marine biology at the University of Portsmouth, England, said the disappearance of the Titan highlights the dangers and unknowns of deep-sea tourism.

“I think it is important to remember that to us humans, the deep sea is a very inhospitable place,” he said.

“Even the most reliable technology can fail, and therefore accidents will happen. With the growth in deep-sea tourism, we must expect more incidents like this.”

The post Debris field found in search for missing Titan submersible, Coast Guard says appeared first on World Israel News.

Wendy Rush is a great-great-granddaughter of Isidor and Ida Straus, who perished on the Titanic.

By JNS

The wife of Stockton Rush, the OceanGate CEO whose submersible, Titan, vanished on June 18 during a dive to the wreckage of the Titanic, is a direct descendant of two famous Jewish passengers who perished when the ocean liner sank in 1912.

Wendy Rush is a great-great-granddaughter of Isidor and Ida Straus. Isidor was co-owner of Macy’s department store.

She is descended from one of their daughters, Minnie, who married Dr. Richard Weil in 1905. Their grandson, Dr. Richard Weil III, is Rush’s father, said Joan Adler, executive director of the Straus Historical Society.

She married Stockton Rush in 1986, according to The New York Times. She serves as OceanGate’s communications director.

Wendy Rush’s famous ancestors were remembered for their chivalric behavior aboard the Titanic; Isidor refused a seat on a lifeboat as women and children still remained aboard the doomed liner.

Ida was equally heroic, refusing to leave her husband of 40 years. They were last seen sitting arm in arm on a pair of deck chairs as the ship went down.

Hollywood director James Cameron, in his 1997 film about the Titanic, borrowed from the Strauss story, featuring an elderly couple embracing in bed as the boat sank.

Isidor’s body was found at sea about two weeks after the ship went down. Ida’s remains were never recovered.

Search-and-rescue efforts continue for the Titan, the exact location of which has not been pinpointed. The Titanic‘s remains rest at a depth of 12,500 feet.

The post Oceangate CEO’s wife descended from famous Jewish Titanic passengers appeared first on World Israel News.

“The US seems to be bucking the global trend in increasing its funding to UNRWA while the organization does nothing to stop the hate teaching.”

By Dion J. Pierre, Algemeiner

The U.S. Department of State has increased its 2023-24 contribution to the UN agency assisting Palestinian refugees despite widespread concern that antisemitism and jihadi violence is openly taught in schools it administers in the Palestinian territories.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), founded in 1949 to provide humanitarian and social services to Palestinian refugees, will receive an additional $16.2 million this year, the State Department announced on Wednesday, bringing the total dollar amount it will rake in from the US under a framework agreement finalized in April to $223 million. Since 2021, the US has provided UNRWA $940 million.

On Thursday, Israeli education watchdog Impact-se, citing numerous reports it has authored about antisemitic teachers and curricular materials in UNRWA administered schools, criticized the funding boost.

“UNRWA not only teaches the hate filled Palestinian curriculum but produces its own extremist teaching materials,” Impact-se CEO Marcus Sheff said on Thursday in a press release. “The US seems to be bucking the global trend in increasing its funding to UNRWA while the organization does nothing to stop the hate teaching.”

The announcement of additional funding for UNRWA comes amid repeated calls for defunding the agency from US lawmakers.

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“3,000 Israelis and 10,000 Palestinians will lose their lives in a third uprising.”

The post WATCH – Former Palestinian minister: Third Intifada will be more violent than the last appeared first on World Israel News.