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A few hours earlier, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the president has no plans to visit Israel for its 75th anniversary.
By JNS
At a reception in the White House’s East Room celebrating Eid al-Fitr, which concludes Ramadan, on Monday evening, President Joe Biden complimented two female members of Congress known for antisemitic statements on their looks.
“Congresswoman Omar. Where are you, Congresswoman Omar?” Biden asked, per an official White House transcript, although in video footage, he appeared to say “congressman.” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) made her location known.
There you go. God love you,” Biden said, to laughter. “I’m not supposed to—I’ll get in trouble for saying this, but you look beautiful tonight.”
Biden tells Ilhan Omar “I’ll get in trouble for saying this but you look beautiful tonight” and to Rashida Tlaib he says “so do you.”
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) May 1, 2023
After the applause died down, he kept going. “And Congresswoman Tlaib. Where’s—where’s the congresswoman? There you are. Okay. So do you!” he said, with the official transcript again correcting his apparent references to “congressman.”
Omar’s history of antisemitic remarks includes claiming Israel “hypnotized the world” and Jews buy congressional control (“It’s all about the Benjamins”). She has likened Israel, which she calls an “apartheid state,” to terrorist groups Taliban and Hamas.
Just 25 minutes before Biden began his remarks, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) tweeted that “the apartheid state of Israel was born out of violence and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.” She has referred often to Israel as “apartheid” and has ties to an antisemitic activist who has said “Satanic” Jews, who are not truly Jews, control the media.
Speaker McCarthy wants to rewrite history but the apartheid state of Israel was born out of violence and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
75 years later, the Nakba continues to this day. https://t.co/s5P35dgqv0
— Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (@RepRashida) May 1, 2023
Some two-and-a-half hours before Biden complimented the antisemitic House members on their looks, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre fielded a strange question during the White House press briefing about whether a Biden visit to Israel to celebrate the Jewish state’s 75th anniversary would include visiting Palestinian areas.
“I—I don’t have a trip to—to—you mean an upcoming trip?” Jean-Pierre responded, per the White House transcript. The reporter said a future trip.
“Oh, I just don’t have—we don’t have anything to share at this time on a trip to Israel.
“As you know, the president went to Jerusalem over the summer, had a very productive—productive trip when we were there, to talk about the Middle East and stabilizing the Middle East and continuing the—the very strong relationship that we have with Israel—as you just mentioned, decades of partnership that we have there,” she said.
“But I just don’t have anything to read out on a—on a trip to celebrate the 75th anniversary.”
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Argentina’s state oil company YPF is the victim of a new lawsuit funded by investment firm Burford Capital. (Gustavo Garello / Getty Images)
The hottest new trend in law and finance claimed its most high-profile victim yet earlier this month when a New York court ordered Argentina to pay a multibillion-dollar award. The twist: the winner won’t get a significant chunk of the money.
That portion will instead go to a giant investment firm called Burford Capital, a company that wasn’t a party to the case at all but nonetheless bet on the outcome.
The win is a major vindication for a strategy known as litigation finance, where experts scour the world for favorable cases, finance them, and take a massive payout if they win — often without ever having to disclose the fact that they were involved. It’s a strategy that has often targeted some of the world’s most vulnerable nations.
“Many of the well-known funded cases are brought against countries that aren’t well-resourced to defend themselves,” said Lisa Sachs, director of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment in New York, adding that because many of the funding deals are confidential, the industry’s effects are still a black box.
Originally developed to help victims finance expensive cases when they couldn’t afford the legal bills, litigation finance has a long history. Burford began operations in 2009, when law firms had trouble getting financing from traditional banks, and third-party funding in general exploded into the public view in 2016 when billionaire Peter Thiel financed a lawsuit for Hulk Hogan that bankrupted Gawker Media. Over the last decade or so, the industry has moved into an area of law called investor-state dispute settlement, where companies sue countries over perceived contract breaches.
The way it works is simple: a funder finds a case to bet on, either approaching a potential client directly or sorting through requests from law firms. The funder then uses its capital — often acting as a middleman for bigger investors — to pay legal fees, bring in its own lawyers, and sometimes intensively manage the case.
It’s a risky bet. A third-party funder typically only makes money if it wins and getting money from a nation that doesn’t feel like paying can be a whole new legal battle. But in the case of a win, the windfall can be huge.
For Burford’s win against Argentina’s state oil company YPF, the company estimates that the final payout will be between $5 billion and $8.4 billion plus interest. There are two plaintiffs in the case, Petersen Energía Inversora, SA, and Eton Park, both with funding from Burford. On a net basis, of the chunk taken by Petersen, Burford estimates that it will make about 35 percent of the award. For Eton Park, Burford will collect about 73 percent. A spokesperson for Burford declined to comment for this story. Representatives for YPF did not respond to calls and emails requesting comment.
The share of the award claimed by Burford isn’t unusual. Frank Garcia, a law professor at Boston College, says that cases can sometimes snag returns in excess of 600 percent of the initial investment. “The fact that a system can yield 300 percent to 600 percent returns on investment suggests that there’s something skewed about that system,” Garcia said. “There’s something that’s not working.”
Garcia says that the problems underlying third-party funding are supercharged issues with the world’s legal architecture. Resolving disputes between investors and states involves a complicated jumble of investment treaties, national laws, and international courts of arbitration, where such disputes often end up. (Burford’s Argentina claim wasn’t resolved in an arbitration body.)
According to data gathered by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), when arbitration claims are allowed to proceed on the merits and aren’t thrown out for jurisdictional reasons, investors win and are awarded damages 56 percent of the time. Those odds are also skewed to favor the rich. Most claims brought against developing countries and nations in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and South America make up almost half of all respondents. Most claims, meanwhile, are brought by companies from the developed world, led by the United States, Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.
Sachs says that those numbers are probably undercounting reality. For one, many cases stay private between the two parties. For another, the mere threat of a claim can prompt a country to bow to investor demands. “Many of the problems with third-party funding are interwoven with the problems of the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism in general,” she said.
The one-sided nature of global investment has proved attractive to litigation funders. Long regarded as a long shot by both the financial and legal industries, the potential for victories like Burford’s has led to an influx of cash over the last few years. Westfleet Advisors reported that in 2022, litigation funders in the United States committed $3.2 billion to new cases, up 14 percent from the previous year. Market analysis firm CMI estimated that the global investment market was worth over $12 billion as of 2021 and will grow to nearly $26 billion by the end of the decade.
The boom leaves countries in the developing world open to lawsuits backed by extraordinary amounts of capital. Countries including Venezuela, Colombia, Romania, Tanzania, and Argentina have all had to face major cases underpinned by third-party funding over the last decade. Just last month, London-listed Panthera Resources Plc — which has gold and copper mining projects across West Africa and India — secured funding of up to $10.5 million for an arbitration case against India, where the company says it has run into “regulatory issues.”
Yet if litigation finance is expanding in popularity, just how popular remains unknown. Of the world’s major investor-state arbitration bodies, only the World Bank Group’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) requires that third-party funding be disclosed. Most of the time, such arrangements are kept private.
That’s led to the expansion of an industry almost entirely under wraps, one that’s lightly regulated and allowed to dictate its own terms. For most litigation funders, everything from how much can be charged to clients to whether they must act in client interests isn’t subject to regulatory oversight. As funders take on bigger roles in cases, sometimes with the power to act over the objections of the real claimants, critics say the claims can devolve into pure money-making enterprises.
“What everybody has suspected is that a lot of these agreements actually reach into the settlement mechanics of the case,” said Garcia. “In cases where you don’t have disclosure of the terms of the agreement, those same mechanics can be set up behind the scenes and nobody will ever know.”
Until the global investment environment is more favorable, Garcia said, he would back a complete ban on third-party funding for investor-state disputes. Failing that, he recommended disclosure requirements for funders. “There are grounds for guarded optimism,” he said. “More and more states are chafing under the way the system is going, and I think third-party funding is actually intensifying pressures for change.”
Defenders of litigation funding point to the roadblocks nations can throw up in front of investors: everything from going after the company domestically to dragging cases out over the span of a decade or more. Then, there’s the issue of sovereign immunity, a legal doctrine which can be used to shield assets from investors.
“At the end of all that, the state comes back and says well great, you got an award and you managed to survive, we’re still not paying, good luck,” said Viren Mascarenhas, a partner at Milbank LLP, who specializes in international arbitration. “When you think of the cost of the proceeding, and the length of the proceeding, and the sovereign immunity defenses when it comes to collection, those risks make these cases not particularly attractive to fund.”
Mascarenhas added that the issues investors can run into make it so that funders have to be very careful about the types of cases they invest in. For a company to throw money behind a claim, there’s a high threshold.
Still, those very barriers can sometimes leave countries vulnerable to certain types of cases. Sachs says that some of the highest returns with the surest chances are generally found in the management of natural resources.
“These funders have an interest in finding high risk, high reward claims as part of their portfolio,” Sachs said, adding that for raw material industries, things like community opposition, environmental review, and taxation can become problems for investors. “These are highly complex, highly political, highly impactful projects that necessarily involve the rights of other stakeholders. Funders do not seem to care about any of those things. They’re looking at these disputes as a potential multibillion-dollar revenue stream.”
Ever Anderson as Wendy in Peter Pan & Wendy. (Disney+)
These insipid Disney live-action remakes of their own animated films are now a blight on civilization. Especially considering that Walt Disney himself built his empire by taking bloody-minded old European fairy tales and making them blander and more sanitized for a wimpier generation. People used to complain about how defanged they all were — imagine that! Now old Disney animated classics like Pinocchio, Bambi, Dumbo, and Sleeping Beauty seem daring, almost ferocious. Such tragic sorrows! Such scary villains! So much death and evildoing!
But with the new live-action retreads of recent years, where does that put us on the bland-wimp scale? Off the charts, I’d say.
I thought the latest one turning up on Disney+, Peter Pan & Wendy, might be better than the usual run — after all, the much-respected auteur David Lowery (The Green Knight, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints) cowrote and directed this one. And, with Lowery’s touch, it features perhaps a slightly richer color scheme and prettier images overall.
But I should’ve known nobody could take on Disney. (Look out, Ron DeSantis!) Building a monstrous capitalist conglomerate doesn’t make you nice and respectful of individual filmmakers. You work for Disney, so you’ll do it the Disney way.
So Peter Pan & Wendy is a big toothless bore, with gestures toward contemporary mores in the forms of a highly diverse cast plus girls playing Lost Boys. Wendy (Ever Anderson) protests upon meeting them, “But you’re not all boys!” and gets the stroppy answer, “So what?”
And since this is the 2020s, Wendy herself has to be imbued with action-packed girl power and do sword-fighting and rescue the others instead of waiting to be rescued. Tiger Lily (Alyssa Wapanatahk, a member of the Bigstone Cree Nation) is now treated with what is presumably greater respect as a vaguely Native American character who appears to be a member of some unnamed American Plains tribe, which makes no sense — there’s no dodging the way Scottish-born writer J. M. Barrie treated “Indians” as fantasy figures for British children on a continuum with pirates and mermaids and fairies. Why not cut out Barrie’s Tiger Lily and her tribe altogether, but keep the mermaids, instead of the other way around in this mermaid-free adaptation? Who knows?
Yara Shahidi as Tinkerbell. (Disney+)
Anyway, Tiger Lilly also has to be portrayed as assertive and independent, rescuing Peter Pan (Alexander Molony) instead of the other way around. As for the other major female characters of the triumvirate surrounding Peter, Tinkerbell is played by a black actor (Yara Shahidi of Black-ish and Grown-ish), but more importantly, she’s entirely reconceived as a character. The miniature minx of the Barrie original as well as Disney’s first adaptation, who adores Peter and hates Wendy for usurping Peter’s attentions — even doing her best to murder Wendy as soon as she arrives — is now a sweet, helpful, pathetic little simp who befriends Wendy. Why? Because Wendy realizes that Tinkerbell has been denied her voice. Her voice is so tiny no one can hear it, actually. But Peter asserts that he knows what she’s saying and speaks for her, inaccurately. Only Wendy learns to hear Tinkerbell speak.
Okay, so can we now drop forevermore the whole exhausted she’s-been-denied-her-voice narrative trope in films seeking feminist cred?
It would be nice, too, if this were the last ever attempt to revive old material by doing Psych 101 backstories explaining how well-known characters got to be the way they are. Peter Pan and Captain Hook (Jude Law) are given the most lugubrious intertwined histories possible, because how could we possibly understand why they fight all the time, if we don’t know about their past traumas?
Easy. By imagining vivid characters in all their details and contradictions, and not coming up with pat, reductive explanations for everything they do.
Law, the only name actor in the cast, is talented but too contained to play the flamboyant, slashing Captain Hook, who’s also comically self-pitying, needy, and reliant on his motherly first mate, Smee (Jim Gaffigan). If you recall, Smee’s first duty is to protect the terrified Captain from the endless pursuit of the enormous crocodile that hungers for the Captain after eating Hook’s hand (cut off by Peter Pan in one of their many fights). Luckily the crocodile also swallowed an alarm clock, and the ticking sound always announces his approach. Lowery does almost nothing with that lovely plot detail.
But you know how these kinds of movies go. Endless lesson learning, like the worst of Victorian kids’ literature. Peter has to learn he needs his friends to help him and to apologize when he’s hurt someone. Wendy has to learn that she’s actually ready to grow up and go to boarding school or whatever horrible thing her upper-class Brit parents (played by Molly Parker and Alan Tudyk) have in store for her. Hook has to learn why he hates Peter Pan, even if he can’t ever get past it. Everybody’s learning and affirming and casting loving looks at everyone else all over the Neverland map.
Jude Law as Captain Hook. (Disney+)
It’s dreary as hell.
Too bad, because there were real possibilities in imagining a new Peter Pan film. In the versions I’ve seen, nobody’s ever really gone for the weirder, creepier, colder-hearted Pan envisioned by Barrie. Here’s a description from his 1911 novel Peter and Wendy, which was based on his hit 1904 play, Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up:
He was a lovely boy, clad in skeleton leaves and the juices that ooze out of trees but the most entrancing thing about him was that he had all his first teeth. When he saw she was a grownup, he gnashed the little pearls at her.
The famed “androgyny” of the character we know, from the tradition of having slight, diminutive adult female actors such as Maude Adams, Jean Arthur, and Mary Martin play Peter Pan on the stage. But the feral qualities Barrie described, in combination with the physical beauty — the pearly-teeth snarl — never seem to get portrayed. Generally, since the squeaky-clean Disney animated Peter Pan (1953), live-action versions feature an ordinary boy, perhaps with slightly elfin facial features, stuck into a green tunic and green hat with a scarlet feather. The same thing happens in Peter Pan & Wendy.
In these adaptations, Peter is shown to be, at worst, a bit of a jerk. But his real strangeness, the result of his perpetual childhood, living outside of time, is his amnesia and his cold selfishness. Once Wendy leaves Neverland, he forgets her, and of course he repudiates her entirely once she’s a grown-up. When he returns to her house, it’s to take her daughter Jane to Neverland to live with him and the Lost Boys as their temporary “mother.” And then a generation later, he comes to take Jane’s daughter Margaret.
But then, Barrie’s whole attitude toward children was not like ours, and obviously his attitudes toward gender roles are bizarre as hell to us. He wrote, in the final line of the original Peter and Wendy novel describing this cycle:
When Margaret grows up she will have a daughter, who is to be Peter’s mother in turn; and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.
Heartless is a word that really stops you, as one that’s never applied to children now. But portraying it in Peter Pan’s case, as part of the essence of childhood, would at least have made for a bold and interesting change. Instead, we get another pointless remake so Disney can grub up a few more bucks repurposing its vast holdings.
Bill Maher interviews Elon Musk, Saturday, April 29, 2023. (Real Time with Bill Maher / YouTube)
Bill Maher presents himself as someone who courageously offers viewers the unvarnished truth. The “About” page for his YouTube channel describes the host of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher as “irrepressible, opinionated, and of course, politically incorrect.” A sympathetic 2016 profile commended his authoritativeness in challenging the “feast of hypocrisy” that defines contemporary American life, going on to note his fearless willingness to call out “politicians, religious leaders, demagogues, pundits — some of them, notably, his own guests” with a trademark brand of humor “at once engaged and world-weary, and not infrequently infused with snark.”
Needless to say, this posture of searing irreverence seemed entirely absent during Maher’s roughly twenty-minute Saturday night sit-down with Twitter and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Network television isn’t generally where one goes to see grillings of the wealthy and powerful. Almost by definition, the format tends to take it as axiomatic that these are people worth celebrating or at least taking seriously. Even by the servile standards of cable news infotainment, however, Maher’s prolonged drooling over one of the richest men in the world must be seen to be believed.
Having introduced Musk as a “man who made electric cars a thing, and is currently working on perfecting reusable rockets, space travel, connecting the human brain directly to computers, connecting cities with electromagnetic bullet trains,” Maher opened by asking his guest “Did I get [right] the full order of things you do in a [single] day?” Evidently not satisfied that Musk had been sufficiently buttered up, he continued:
We do a show where we talk about what changes happen in the world. But we just talk. There’s a very few people who actually make change happen, [and] you are one of those people. . . . You’re a likable guy, and they attack you a lot, [but] you seem to laugh it off, which I think is fantastic. I love it that you have a sense of humor, because a guy as important as you, who makes changes, could use your powers for evil and not good.
Transcription doesn’t do justice to the sycophantic tone in which Maher conducted the conversation. Three minutes in, Musk had offered little more than a few nods and jocular quips, but his interviewer, somehow, still had some saliva left in the tank:
Let me get back to you being a genius. . . . I was a history major, and when you study history what you realize is that. . . you know there’s the Great Man Theory, and they talk about kings and princes and queens and presidents. [But] it’s really the people in tech who change the world. . . . Would you agree with that assessment?
The whole affair was rendered more absurd by the stilted and utterly conventional nature of Musk’s own answers, as could be seen in his characterization of the role of technology in the development of human societies.
Inevitably, things soon turned to Twitter, wokeness, cancel culture, and free speech, with the Tesla CEO offering up more cookie-cutter wisdom and his credulous interlocutor neglecting to offer even the friendliest challenge.
DNo one remotely familiar with Maher would have expected him to press on Musk’s lengthy record of union busting, brutal downsizing at Twitter, or his impressive roster of wrongheaded predictions and utopian promises that have failed to materialize. A version of Maher actually serious about living up to his own branding, however, might have thought to offer some very basic pushback on the question of free speech.
Just two days earlier, a report drawing on data from Harvard’s Lumen database found that Twitter’s compliance with government demands for censorship and surveillance has sharply risen during Musk’s tenure as CEO. Since purchasing the platform last year, he has regularly suspended accounts on a whim, including those of journalists reporting on his own activities. In January, the Intercept revealed that Twitter was censoring a BBC documentary critical of India’s far-right prime minister Narendra Modi in direct coordination with Indian state officials — a development repeated in the more recent suspension of over a hundred accounts belonging to politicians, activists, and journalists amid a police crackdown in Punjab.
It’s deeply sinister and dystopian stuff, but Real Time’s supposedly fearless host somehow couldn’t muster the skepticism to probe any of it, even gently, ending the interview like this:
Look, I mean, geniuses are going to be a little quirky sometimes. But your heart is always in the right place. You are trying to fix this world and I could talk to you forever. We can’t today. I’d love to get high with you. . . . I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you. I know you have a lot of choices, and places you can go.
From start to finish, the discussion was one giant insult to viewers’ intelligence. Face-to-face with one of the world’s richest and most controversial men, Maher failed to offer a whiff of criticism, ask a single non-deferential question, or even hint at the idea that this might be anything other than a big, sloppy wet kiss. What can you even say? Pathetic.
‘We desperately needed data,’ Fauci said while accepting award from Israeli hospital, lauding Israel’s cooperation with the US during the coronavirus pandemic.
By World Israel News Staff
Former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director and U.S. Chief Medical Advisor to the President Anthony Fauci praised Israel’s work with the United States during the coronavirus pandemic, lauding the Jewish state’s cooperation with the U.S. at an award ceremony over the weekend.
On Sunday, Israel’s Sheba Medical Center presented Fauci with the Sheba Champion of Global Health award at an event in Washington D.C.
“I am proud to present Dr. Fauci with this award recognizing his commitment to global health and significant contributions during the Covid-19 pandemic,” said Prof. Yitshak Kreiss, Director General of Sheba Medical Center.
“It is no exaggeration to say that Dr. Fauci and his team, through their shared information and research, contributed to saving countless Israeli lives and enabled us to rollout our vaccine program.”
In accepting the award, Fauci highlighted his years of collaboration with Israelis.
“This award is particularly meaningful to me due to the respect I have for Israel and my Israeli colleagues who I have enjoyed successful collaborative work with for many years,” said Fauci.
“Our work with Sheba during the Covid-19 pandemic has been of the most productive interactions between our two nations, thanks to Sheba’s real time data, we were able to make key, informed policy decisions.”
The former NIH official lauded Israel’s cooperation generally with the U.S. during the pandemic, saying that “Israel did as much for the US as the US did for Israel during covid.”
“What we desperately needed was data in real time as to the evolution of the virus, the variants that were there, the impact or not of vaccination including of boosters, the impact of immunity and how long it last.”
“And unfortunately because of the fractured healthcare system that we have in this country, unlike what Sheba has allowed for Israel to have, we did not have that capability, and that was very disturbing,” Fauci said.
“And then a series of almost serendipitous circumstances brought us together in what I have to say was one of the most productive interactions of two nations in the entire covid-19 pandemic.”
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