Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd opened her column yesterday with “David Axelrod is not a prick” and then proceeded to call out Joe Biden that he should seriously consider passing the Democrat presidential nomination to someone younger.  It is a candid analysis that Biden should take to heart for his and the country’s sake.

Her concluding advice is:

“For Biden, this is about his identity. It’s what he has fought all his life for, even battling his way through “friendly fire,” as Hunter Biden told me, in the Obama White House, when some Obama aides undermined him. It must have been awful when Obama took his vice president to lunch and nudged him aside for Hillary to run in 2016. Biden craves the affirmation of being re-elected. He doesn’t want to look like a guy who’s been driven from office.

But he should not indulge the Irish chip on his shoulder. He needs to gather the sharpest minds in his party and hear what they have to say, not engage in petty feuds.”

Below is her entire column.

Tony

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The New York Times

The Axe Is Sharp

By Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist

David Axelrod is not a prick.

Truly.

I’ve known him since 2007 and if I had to pick a noun to describe him, it would be mensch.

So when President Biden privately employs that epithet for Axelrod, according to Politico’s Jonathan Martin, it’s bad for a few reasons.

The ordinarily gracious president is punching down at the strategist who helped elevate him onto the ticket with Barack Obama in 2008 and who thinks he was “a great vice president” and has done a lot of wonderful things as president.

When some in the Obama camp chattered in 2011 about switching Biden out for Hillary Clinton, Axelrod said, he protested: “That would be an incredible act of disloyalty to a guy who has done a great job for us.”

Surely, Mr. Biden does not want to lower himself to the vulgarity of the growling, brawling, thieving Republicans in the Hieronymus Bosch hellscape of our Congress.

(As Seth Meyers noted, George Santos — who spent campaign money on Hermès, Ferragamo, Botox, Sephora and OnlyFans — had “the shopping list of a 98-year-old oil tycoon’s 20-year-old wife.”)

Axelrod drew Biden’s ire because he urged the president to consider stopping at one term, throwing open the race to younger Democrats while there’s still time, and leaving as a hero. He said that, despite Biden’s insult, he got a slew of messages agreeing with him.

“I don’t care about them thinking I’m a prick — that’s fine,” the strategist told me. “I hope they don’t think the polls are wrong because they’re not.”

According to a New York Times/Siena College poll, Donald Trump is ahead in five battleground states and, as some other surveys have found, is even making inroads among Black voters and young voters. There’s a generational fracture in the Democratic Party over the Israeli-Hamas horror and Biden’s age. Third-party spoilers are circling.

The president turns 81 on Monday; the Oval hollows out its occupants quickly, and Biden is dealing with two world-shattering wars, chaos at the border, a riven party and a roiling country.

“I think he has a 50-50 shot here, but no better than that, maybe a little worse,” Axelrod said. “He thinks he can cheat nature here and it’s really risky. They’ve got a real problem if they’re counting on Trump to win it for them. I remember Hillary doing that, too.”

The president’s flash of anger indicates that he may be in denial, surrounded by enablers who are sugarcoating a grim political forecast.

Like other pols, Biden has a healthy ego and like all presidents, he’s truculent about not getting the credit he thinks he deserves for his accomplishments. And it must be infuriating that most of the age qualms are about him, when Trump is only a few years younger.

No doubt the president is having a hard time wrapping his mind around the idea that the 77-year-old Mar-a-Lago Dracula has risen from his gilded coffin even though he’s albatrossed with legal woes and seems more deranged than ever, referring to Democrats with the fascist-favored term “vermin” and plotting a second-term revengefest. Trump’s campaign slogan should be, “There will be blood.”

For Biden, this is about his identity. It’s what he has fought all his life for, even battling his way through “friendly fire,” as Hunter Biden told me, in the Obama White House, when some Obama aides undermined him. It must have been awful when Obama took his vice president to lunch and nudged him aside for Hillary to run in 2016. Biden craves the affirmation of being re-elected. He doesn’t want to look like a guy who’s been driven from office.

But he should not indulge the Irish chip on his shoulder. He needs to gather the sharpest minds in his party and hear what they have to say, not engage in petty feuds.

If Trump manages to escape conviction in Jack Smith’s Washington case, which may be the only criminal trial that ends before the election, that’s going to turbocharge his campaign. Of course, if he’s convicted, that could turbocharge his campaign even more.

It’s a perfect playing field for the maleficent Trump: He learned in the 2016 race that physical and rhetorical violence could rev up his base. He told me at the time it helped get him to No. 1 and he said he found violence at his rallies exciting.

He has no idea why making fun of Paul Pelosi’s injuries at the hands of one of his acolytes is subhuman, any more than he understood how repellent it was in 2015 when he mocked a disabled Times reporter. He gets barbaric laughs somehow, and that’s all he cares about. In an interview with Jonathan Karl, Trump gloated about how his audience on Jan. 6 was “the biggest crowd I’ve ever spoken in front of by far.”

Never mind that it was one of the most dangerous, shameful days in our history. To Trump, it was glorious.

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, The New York Times columnist, Ross Douthat, had a piece on whether Nikki Haley can beat Donald Trump for the Republican nomination for president.  He admits it is a long shot but not impossible. Here is a summary of  his analysis.

“First, assume that ideological analysis of party politics is overrated, and that a candidate’s contingent success can yield irresistible momentum, stampeding voters in a way that polls alone cannot anticipate.

For Haley, the stampede scenario requires winning outright in New Hampshire. The difficulty is that even on the upswing, she still trails Trump 46-19 in the current RealClearPolitics Average. But assume that Christie drops out and his support swings her way, assume that the current polling underestimates how many independents vote in the G.O.P. primary, assume a slight sag for Trump and a little last-moment Nikkimentum, and you can imagine your way to a screaming upset — Haley 42, Trump 40.

Then assume that defeat forces Trump to actually debate in the long February lull (broken only by the Nevada caucus) between New Hampshire and the primary in Haley’s own South Carolina. Assume that the front-runner comes across as some combination of rusty and insane, Haley handles him coolly and then wins her home state primary. Assume that polls still show her beating Biden, Fox News has rallied to her fully, endorsements flood in — and finally, finally, enough voters who like Trump because he’s a winner swing her way to clear a path to the nomination.

You’ll notice, though, that this story skips over Iowa. That’s because I’m not sure what Haley needs there. Victory seems implausible, but does she want to surge so impressively that it knocks DeSantis out of the race? Or, as the Dispatch’s Nick Catoggio has suggested, does the fact that DeSantis’s voters mostly have Trump as a second choice mean that Haley actually needs DeSantis to stay in the race through the early states, so that Trump can’t consolidate his own potential support? In which case maybe Haley needs an Iowa result where both she and DeSantis overperform their current polling, setting her up for New Hampshire but also giving the Florida governor a reason to hang around.

This dilemma connects to my earlier argument that beating Trump requires a joining of the Haley and DeSantis factions, an alliance of the kind contemplated by Trump’s opponents in 2016 but never operationalized. But I doubt Haley is interested in such an alliance at the moment; after all, people are talking about her path to victory — and here I am, doing it myself!

Fundamentally, though, I still believe that Haley’s destiny is anticipated by the biting, “congrats, Nikki,” quote from a DeSantis ally in New York Magazine: “You won the Never Trump primary. Your prize is nothing.”

I wish Douthat’s analysis comes true but not likely!

Tony

Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times; photograph by WestLight/Getty Images

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times Editorial Board has a stark piece today sounding the alarm regarding learning loss as a result of the pandemic. It will take Herculean action on the part of federal, state and local education policymakers to make up for a generation of children who will struggle for years to come as they continue their educations and pursue work and careers.

The affects of COVID just keep giving!

Below is the entire editorial

Tony

—————————————————————————-

The New York Times

The Startling Evidence on Learning Loss Is In

By The Editorial Board

November 18, 2023

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

In the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic, Congress sent $190 billion in aid to schools, stipulating that 20 percent of the funds had to be used for reversing learning setbacks. At the time, educators knew that the impact on how children learn would be significant, but the extent was not yet known.

The evidence is now in, and it is startling. The school closures that took 50 million children out of classrooms at the start of the pandemic may prove to be the most damaging disruption in the history of American education. It also set student progress in math and reading back by two decades and widened the achievement gap that separates poor and wealthy children.

These learning losses will remain unaddressed when the federal money runs out in 2024. Economists are predicting that this generation, with such a significant educational gap, will experience diminished lifetime earnings and become a significant drag on the economy. But education administrators and elected officials who should be mobilizing the country against this threat are not.

It will take a multidisciplinary approach, and at this point, all the solutions that will be needed long term can’t be known; the work of getting kids back on solid ground is just beginning. But that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be immediate action.

As a first step, elected officials at every level — federal, state and local — will need to devote substantial resources to replace the federal aid that is set to expire and must begin making up lost ground. This is a bipartisan issue, and parents, teachers and leaders in education have a role to play as well, in making sure that addressing learning loss and other persistent challenges facing children receives urgent attention.

The challenges have been compounded by an epidemic of absenteeism, as students who grew accustomed to missing school during the pandemic continue to do so after the resumption of in-person classes. Millions of young people have joined the ranks of the chronically absent — those who miss 10 percent or more of the days in the school year — and for whom absenteeism will translate into gaps in learning.

In the early grades, these missing children are at greater risk of never mastering the comprehension skills that make education possible. The more absences these students accumulate, the more they miss out on the process of socialization through which young people learn to live and work with others. The more they lag academically, the more likely they are to drop out.

This fall, The Associated Press illustrated how school attendance has cratered across the United States, using data compiled in partnership with the Stanford University education professor Thomas Dee. More than a quarter of students were chronically absent in the 2021-22 school year, up from 15 percent before the pandemic. That means an additional 6.5 million students joined the ranks of the chronically absent.

The problem is pronounced in poorer districts like Oakland, Calif., where the chronic absenteeism rate exceeded 61 percent. But as the policy analyst Tim Daly wrote recently, absenteeism is rampant in wealthy schools, too. Consider New Trier Township High School in Illinois, a revered and highly competitive school that serves some of the country’s most affluent communities. Last spring, The Chicago Tribune reported that New Trier’s rate of chronic absenteeism got worse by class, reaching nearly 38 percent among its seniors.

The Times reported on Friday that preliminary data for 2022-23 showed a slight improvement in attendance. However, in some states, like California and New Mexico, “the rate of chronic absenteeism was still double what it was before the pandemic.” The solutions are not simple. There is extensive evidence that punitive measures don’t work, so educators may need a combination of incentives and measures to address the economic and family issues that can keep children away from school.

Researchers have long known that American students grow more alienated from school the longer they attend — and that they often fall off the school engagement cliff, at which point they no longer care. This sense of disconnection stems from a feeling among high school students in particular that no one at school cares about them and that the courses they study bear no relationship to the challenges they face in the real world.

These young people are also vulnerable to mental health difficulties that worsened during the pandemic. Based on survey data collected in 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported this year that more than 40 percent of high school students had persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness; 22 percent had seriously considered suicide; 10 percent reported that they had attempted suicide.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, many parents and educators have been raising the alarm about the effects of grief, isolation and other disruptions on the mental health of their children. In addition to reconnecting these young people to school, states and localities need to create a more supportive school environment and provide the counseling services these students need to succeed.

The State of Virginia took a big swing at the problem of learning loss when it announced what is being described as a statewide tutoring program. But high-impact tutoring is labor intensive and depends on high-quality instruction. It is most likely to succeed when sessions are held at least three times a week — during school hours — with well-trained, well-managed tutors working with four or fewer students at a time. Such an effort would require a massive recruitment effort, at a time when many schools are still struggling to find enough teachers.

While tutoring is a step in the right direction, other measures to increase the time that students spend in school — such as after-school programs and summer school — will be required to help the students who have fallen furthest behind. In some communities, children have fallen behind by more than a year and a half in math. “It is magical thinking to expect they will make this happen without a major increase in instructional time,” as the researchers Tom Kane and Sean Reardon recently argued.

A study of data from 16 states by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University shows that the most effective way to reverse learning loss is to increase the pace at which students learn. One way is by exposing them to teachers who have had an extraordinary impact on their students. The center proposes offering these excellent teachers extra compensation in exchange for taking extra students into their classes. Highly trained, dedicated teachers have long been known to be the most reliable path to better educational outcomes, but finding them at any scale has always been difficult. If creative solutions can be found, it will help reverse learning gaps from the pandemic and improve American education overall.

The learning loss crisis is more consequential than many elected officials have yet acknowledged. A collective sense of urgency by all Americans will be required to avert its most devastating effects on the nation’s children.

Photo: Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu via Getty Images.

Dear Commons Community,

The Washington Post and other media are reporting that  a deal is in the works in Gaza that would call for Israel and Hamas to freeze their combat operations for five days while a small group of hostages are released each day.

Under this U.S.-brokered agreement, Israel and Hamas will be expected to freeze all combat operations for five days while about 50 hostages are released every 24 hours. There is believed to be a total of about 239 hostages being held in Gaza, according to the Post. The pause, which would be monitored by overhead surveillance, would also assist in allowing humanitarian aid to enter.

An outline of the deal was drafted in Doha, Qatar, in recent weeks by Qatari mediators representing the three involved parties in conflict.

The hostages could start being released in the next several days, pending the closing of the agreement. The possibility of Israel agreeing to the pause remained unclear in recent weeks.

A White House spokesperson said a deal has not yet been reached, but is still working toward one.

“We have not reached a deal yet, but we continue to work hard to get to a deal,” Adrienne Watson, spokesperson for the White House’s National Security Council, posted on X.

On Oct. 7, the Gaza-based militant group launched a surprise attack on Israel. In retaliation, Israel launched air strike attacks on the territory and declared war. For over a month, Israel has continued to strike at Gaza with the hopes of eliminating Hamas, which has since taken several Israeli hostages.

Last week, an estimated 20,000 people, including families of Israeli hostages and their supporters, marched for five days to Jerusalem to put pressure on the Israeli government to take action to bring the hostages back, Reuters reported.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pushed back on the increasing pressure — including from the U.S. — to pause the fighting, affirming that Israel would continue “going with full steam ahead” unless their hostages were released.

A U.S. official said earlier this month that a “fairly significant pause” would be needed to retrieve hostages, similar to the small-scale pause that was done in October that allowed for the release of two American hostages held by Hamas.

President Joe Biden has not called for a ceasefire to the war, but said earlier this month that a “humanitarian pause” was needed to get hostages and to address the crisis in Gaza, especially as the Palestinian death toll surpasses 11,000 and is continuing to rise, CNN reported.

If completed, this deal would be incredibly good news!

Tony

Former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman

Dear Commons Community,

In a shock firing yesterday, OpenAI’s board of directors announced that longtime CEO Sam Altman has departed the company.  As reported by The Associated Press and the Huffington Post.

The board hinted at some unspecified transgressions in a statement confirming the news, stating that a review found Altman was “not consistently candid in his communications with the board,” which “no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.”

“OpenAI was deliberately structured to advance our mission: to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all humanity,” the board said in its statement. “The board remains fully committed to serving this mission. We are grateful for Sam’s many contributions to the founding and growth of OpenAI. At the same time, we believe new leadership is necessary as we move forward.”

The company’s chief technology officer, Mira Murati, will serve as interim CEO.

Altman confirmed the news in a social media post Friday afternoon, without addressing the specifics of his departure.

“i loved my time at openai,” he wrote. “it was transformative for me personally, and hopefully the world a little bit. most of all i loved working with such talented people. will have more to say about what’s next later. ”

A few hours after Altman’s announcement, board chair Greg Brockman confirmed that he, too, is stepping down from his position.

“I’m super proud of what we’ve all built together since starting in my apartment 8 years ago,” Brockman wrote in a social media post on Friday evening. “We’ve been through tough and great times together, accomplishing so much despite all the reasons it should have been impossible.”

“But based on today’s news: I quit,” he continued.

Altman co-founded the nonprofit artificial intelligence research company in 2015. It has since accepted billions of dollars from Microsoft amid soaring interest in ChatGPT, a chatbot powered by a large language model.

Incredible development!

Tony

Retired Army Col. Yevgeny ‘Eugene’ Vindman is running for Congress in 2024.

Dear Commons Community,

Retired Army Col. Eugene Vindman, a key figure in former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment, is running for an open seat in the House of Representatives for a seat in Virginia.

Vindman had been a senior ethics lawyer on the National Security Council (NSC) in July 2019 when his brother, fellow NSC official and retired Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, reported Trump’s now-infamous phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. As reporte by Fox News.

Eugene Vindman alluded to his role in the controversy in a Thursday campaign announcement: “Soldiers are trained to run towards fire, no matter the personal cost. That’s why I’m running for Congress – to defend our nation against the clear and present danger of Donald Trump and the 147 Members of Congress who voted to overthrow the will of the American people.”

“I want America to remain the land of opportunity, a refuge for families like mine, where hard work makes a difference, truth prevails, rights are protected, and we are all free to be who we are and pursue our dreams,” he said in the statement.

Eugene Vindman is running for Virginia’s 7th Congressional District, which is being vacated by Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., as she prepares to run for governor.

“Abigail Spanberger served our district with integrity and passion, and I hope to follow her example,” he said. “Families are struggling to pay for gas, groceries and housing, while Republicans in Congress fight among themselves. They have no interest in governing. America’s enemies relish in their dysfunction and the divisions they sow.”

He’s the first Democrat to jump into the race, which is expected to be among the most closely watched House elections of the 2024 cycle. The district went to President Biden in 2020, but before that, Spanberger clinched it by unseating a Republican incumbent.

Eugene Vindman launched his bid just as the former president is seeking to reclaim the White House for a second term.

He said that he and his twin brother were key to kicking off Trump’s impeachment over accusations of trying to get a foreign power to influence the 2020 election and obstructing Congress’ subsequent probe into the matter.

Alexander Vindman had testified during a 2019 congressional hearing about Trump’s phone call with Zelenskyy, in which Trump pressed Zelenskyy to launch investigations into the Biden family’s actions and business dealings in Ukraine.

Both brothers were dismissed from the NSC shortly after Trump was acquitted.

A May 2022 report by the Pentagon’s inspector general found that Eugene Vindman likely faced retaliation from his superiors after raising alarms about Trump with his brother.

He and his brother are American heroes!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

This morning, The Associated Press provided the following recap of the situation in Gaza.

Israeli troops for a second day searched Shifa Hospital in the north for traces of Hamas. They displayed what they said were a tunnel entrance and weapons found in a truck inside the compound. But the military has yet to release evidence of a central Hamas command center that Israel has said is concealed beneath the complex. Hamas and staff at the hospital, Gaza’s largest, deny the allegations.

The military said it found the body of one of the hostages abducted by Hamas, 65-year-old Yehudit Weiss, in a building adjacent to Shifa, where it said it also found assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. It did not give the cause of her death.

The communications breakdown largely cuts off Gaza’s 2.3 million people from each other and the outside world, worsening the severe humanitarian crisis in southern Gaza, even as Israeli airstrikes continue there. The UN’s World Food Program warned of “the immediate possibility of starvation” in Gaza as the food supply has broken down under Israel’s seal and too little is coming from Egypt.

The war, now in its sixth week, was triggered by Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack into southern Israel in which the militants killed over 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and captured some 240 men, women and children. Weiss, the woman whose body was found Thursday, is the third hostage confirmed dead, while four others have been freed and one rescued.

Israel responded to the attack with a weekslong air campaign and a ground invasion of northern Gaza, vowing to remove Hamas from power and crush its military capabilities.

More than 11,470 Palestinians have been killed, two-thirds of them women and minors, according to Palestinian health authorities. Another 2,700 have been reported missing, believed buried under rubble. The official count does not differentiate between civilian and militant deaths, and Israel says it has killed thousands of militants.

The war has inflamed tensions elsewhere. In the occupied West Bank, Palestinian gunmen opened fire at a checkpoint on the main road linking Jerusalem to Israeli settlements, killing a soldier and wounding three people.

The three attackers were killed, according to police, who said the assailants had assault rifles, handguns and hatchets, and were preparing an attack in Jerusalem. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack.

SOME GUNS, BUT SO FAR NO TUNNELS

A day after storming into Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital, Israeli troops continued searching the complex. Gaza’s Health Ministry said the troops searched underground levels of the hospital Thursday and detained technicians who run its equipment.

The hospital has not had electricity for nearly a week, and staff say they have been struggling to keep alive 36 premature babies and 45 dialysis patients without functional equipment.

One dialysis patient died Thursday, Shifa’s director, Mohamed Abu Selmia, told Al Jazeera, adding that 650 wounded patients and 5,000 displaced people are in the hospital.

Israel said its soldiers brought medical teams with incubators and other supplies, though Shifa staff said incubators were useless without fuel. Gaza’s Health Ministry said 40 patients, including three babies, died before the raid after the emergency generator ran out of fuel Saturday.

During previous days of fighting in the nearby streets, there was no report of Hamas fighters firing from inside Shifa, and no fighting when Israeli troops entered Wednesday.

Israel faces pressure to prove its claim that Hamas set up its main command center in and under the hospital, which has multiple buildings over an area of several city blocks. So far, it has mainly shown several caches of weapons.

On Thursday, the military released video of a hole in the hospital courtyard it said was a tunnel entrance. It also showed several assault rifles and RPGs, grenades, ammunition clips and utility vests laid out on a blanket that it said were found in a pickup truck in the courtyard. The Associated Press could not independently verify the Israeli claims.

In recent weeks, Israel depicted the hospital as the site of a major Hamas headquarters. It released satellite maps that specified particular buildings as a command center or as housing underground complexes. It released a computer animation portraying a subterranean network of passageways and rooms filled with weapons and fuel barrels. The U.S. said it has intelligence to support Israeli claims.

The allegations are part of Israel’s broader accusation that Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields across the Gaza Strip — which Israeli officials say is the reason for the large numbers of civilian casualties during weeks of bombardment.

LOOKING SOUTH

The military says it has largely consolidated its control of the north, though fighting continues there. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Wednesday the ground operation will eventually “include both the north and south. We will strike Hamas wherever it is.” He did not give a time frame.

Israeli forces dropped leaflets Thursday telling Palestinians in areas east of the southern town of Khan Younis to evacuate. Similar leaflets were dropped over northern Gaza for weeks ahead of the ground invasion.

Strikes continued in the south Thursday. In the city of Deir al-Balah, a funeral was held for 28 people killed in an overnight bomb that leveled several buildings.

Most of Gaza’s population is crowded into southern Gaza, including hundreds of thousands who heeded Israel’s calls to evacuate to the north to get out of the way of its ground offensive. Some 1.5 million people driven from their homes have packed into U.N. shelters or houses with other families.

If the assault moves into the south, it is not clear where they would go, as Egypt refuses to allow a mass transfer onto its soil. The Israeli military has called on people to move to a “safe zone” in Mawasi, a town on the Mediterranean coast a few square kilometers (square miles) in size, where humanitarian aid could be delivered.

The heads of 18 U.N. agencies and international charitieson Thursday rejected the creation of a safe zone, saying that concentrating civilians in one area while hostilities continue was too dangerous. They called for a cease-fire and unimpeded entry of humanitarian aid and fuel for Gaza’s population.

Israel has sealed off Gaza since the start of the war, allowing only a trickle of aid from Egypt. It also bars delivery of fuel, saying it will be diverted to Hamas — though it allowed a small amount this week for U.N. trucks to use in delivering aid.

The World Food Program said the 447 trucks that have brought food into Gaza from Egypt — out of 1,129 relief trucks total since Oct. 21 — provide less than 7% of the population’s daily caloric needs. Bread is “scarce or non-existent” after fuel shortages shut down most bakeries, and food supply chains have collapsed, it said.

“With winter fast approaching, unsafe and overcrowded shelters and the lack of clean water, civilians are facing the immediate possibility of starvation,” said WFP Executive Director Cindy McCain.

Lack of fuel also brought down the internet and phone network, and it can’t be restarted unless Israel lets in fuel, said Palnet, the main Palestinian telecoms provider. That raises the potential for a long-term communications blackout, after three earlier shutdowns that Gaza authorities were able to repair.

The previous blackouts traumatized Palestinians, leaving them unable to call ambulances or reach family members to ensure they are alive. Aid workers say the shutdowns wreak havoc on humanitarian operations and hospitals. Some Palestinians manage to keep up communications using satellite phones or SIM cards that reach Israeli or Egyptian networks.

May God please help this situation!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

After an eleven-hour plane ride from Athens yesterday, I am back home here in New York.

I am catching up on the news and am happy to read:

.The House of Representatives passed a short-term bill to keep the Federal government functioning that was passed by the Senate and signed by President Biden.  Thank you House Speaker Mike Johnson and Congressional Democrats for joining with the Republicans to pass this measure.

.President Biden met with Chinese President Xi.  I don’t know what was accomplished but the optics were encouraging.

.Disgraced Representative George Santos won’t seek reelection after a scathing House Ethics Committee report.  Good riddance to this sleazeball.

Hooray for our government!

Tony

Metropolitan Cathedral

Dear Commons Community,

After an all-day tour of Delphi, Elaine and I stayed local today and visited Metropolitan Square (Plateia Mitropoleos) that  lies a short distance from our hotel. The Square is home to the magnificent Metropolitan Cathedral and the tiny 12th-century Church of Agios (Saint) Eleftherios.  In the center of the square stands a statue of Archbishop Damaskinos Papandreou, the World War II hero who saved thousands of lives by fighting against the deportation of Greek Jews by the country’s Nazi occupiers. There is also a statue of  Saint Constantine XI, the last emperor of the Byzantine Empire.

We finished our day with dinner at the same restaurant at The Old Tavern of Psarras (Η Παλιά Ταβέρνα του Ψαρρά) where we dined on our first evening in Athens.

Tomorrow is a travel-day back to New York.

Aντιο σας, Αθήνα!

Tony

Church of Agios (Saint) Eleftherios

Archbishop Damaskinos Papandreou

Saint Constantine XI

View from our table at The Old Tavern of Psarras

Sphinx of Naxos.

Dear Commons Community,

During our visit to the Oracle of Delphi, Elaine and I went to the Delphi Archaeological Museum (Αρχαιολογικό Μουσείο Δελφών), founded in 1903.  Its collection is made up of artifacts from the Oracle site.  Organized in fourteen rooms on two levels, the museum mainly displays statues, including the famous Sphinx of Naxos and the Charioteer of Delphi.

Below are images from the Museum’s collection.

Tony

The Charioteer

Upper Torso of a Caryatid

The Dancers of Delphi (Acanthus Column)

Statue of Antinoos

Aged Man – The Philosopher

Archova is a beautiful town near Delphi and on the slopes of Mt. Parnassos

The sun was setting as we left Delphi and Archova