By FARNOUSH AMIRI, Associated Press

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The U.N. Security Council is set to vote on a resolution Thursday that would once again demand an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza and the release of hostages, while expressing alarm about a recent famine report and Israel’s expanding offensive in Gaza City.

Diplomats at the United Nations said the United States will likely veto the effort, as it has done for similar resolutions in the past year, including the last one in June.

All 14 other members of the council are expected to vote in favor of the resolution, which described the humanitarian situation in Gaza as “catastrophic” and called on Israel to lift all restrictions on the delivery of aid to the 2.1 million Palestinians in the territory.

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The expected outcome further highlights U.S. and Israeli isolation on the world stage regarding the nearly two-year war in Gaza. The vote comes just days ahead of the annual gathering of world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly, where Gaza will be a major topic and where major U.S. allies are expected to recognize an independent Palestinian state. It is a largely symbolic move that is vehemently opposed by Israel and the U.S., dividing the Trump administration from close allies including the U.K. and France.

The resolution, drafted by the council’s 10 elected members who serve two-year terms, goes further than previous drafts to highlight what it calls the “ deepening of suffering ” of Palestinian civilians.

It also reiterates demands from previous resolutions, including for the release of all hostages held by Hamas and other groups following their Oct. 7, 2023, surprise attack in southern Israel that launched the war in Gaza.

In opposing similar resolutions since November, the U.S. has complained that the demands, including a ceasefire, were not directly linked to the unconditional release of hostages and would only embolden Hamas.

Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., blasted the new resolution, saying that it would “not release the hostages and will not bring security to the region.”

“Israel will continue to fight Hamas and protect its citizens, even if the Security Council prefers to turn a blind eye to terrorism,” he said in a statement Thursday.

The resolution also expressed “deep alarm” after a report released last month by the world’s leading authority on food crises said Gaza City has become gripped by famine, and that it’s likely to spread across the territory without a ceasefire and an end to restrictions on humanitarian aid.

Israeli forces have pressed on with a new ground offensive in Gaza City. The latest Israeli operation, which started Tuesday, further escalates a conflict that has roiled the Middle East and likely pushes any ceasefire further out of reach.

The Israeli military, which says it wants to “destroy Hamas’ military infrastructure,” hasn’t given a timeline for the offensive, but there were indications it could take months.

That same day, a team of independent experts commissioned by the U.N. Human Rights Council concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, issuing a report that called on the international community to end it and take steps to punish those responsible for it.

Last week, the U.N. General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to support a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict and urged Israel to commit to a Palestinian state.

Expectations for a U.S. veto of the resolution Thursday comes as about half of Americans say the Israeli military response in the Gaza Strip has “gone too far,” according to the survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. That’s up from November 2023, when 40% said Israel’s military action had gone too far.

But at the same time, Americans overall, particularly Republicans, are less likely to say that negotiating a ceasefire should be a high priority for the U.S. government than they were just a few months ago when the U.S. was holding ceasefire talks with Hamas.

By Alex Halverson, The Seattle Times

It’s a sunny, September day in SeaTac, Washington, and three kids are playing in the courtyard of Connection Angle Lake, a new 130-unit affordable housing project roughly 50 feet from the last stop on Sound Transit’s 1 Line.

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Inside, the studios, one-bedroom and multi-bedroom apartments look fresh with stainless steel appliances and views that give a peek of Mount Rainier.

The proximity to the light rail is no coincidence. The site was acquired by Sound Transit in 2013 and purchased at a discount by affordable housing organization Mercy Housing in 2022. The transit-oriented housing project made a perfect candidate for Amazon’s Housing Equity Fund, which contributed a $17 million low-interest rate loan and a $2 million grant.

The 130 units, about 40% of which have been scooped up in the past few months, are part of the now 10,000 units Amazon’s cash has helped build in the Puget Sound region, most of which are required to be affordable for 99 years.

Acknowledging its role in making the Seattle area considerably less affordable, Amazon launched its fund in 2021 with an initial commitment of $2 billion in the form of loans and grants to create and preserve 20,000 affordable housing units across three metro areas where Amazon’s presence is acutely felt: Seattle, Arlington, Virginia, and Nashville, Tennessee.

The fund was supposed to stretch out over five years, but last year the company said it already exceeded the goal. The projects it funded had completed 21,000 units, 8,600 of which were in the Seattle area.

The company then committed another $1.4 billion to create an additional 14,000 homes across the three cities.

Now, it has hit 10,000 units in the Seattle area.

“Here at home, 10,000 units is a big milestone,” said Alice Shobe, global director of Amazon Community Impact. “We set out early to move quickly and we did. I think the payoff of those 10,000 units is going to show especially in decades to come when those 99 years of affordability are required and we’re not flipping over housing as quickly.”

Amazon announced an additional $1.4 billion investment to help create affordable housing units in the Puget Sound region, Arlington, Virginia, and Nashville, Tennessee. (Ivy Ceballo/The Seattle Times/TNS)

Amazon isn’t the only tech giant to commit funds to public housing. Apple, Meta, Google and Microsoft have all launched funds, most of them doing so before Amazon. But the results have been mixed. The Wall Street Journal reported in August that while some projects funded by Meta and Google in 2019 have moved forward, others have been mired by local regulation and other slowdowns in development.

Some companies have committed their own land, others have issued loans.

Amazon’s approach is to pick out local developers and housing authorities and supplement existing funding with loans and grants.

Most of the affordable housing Amazon supports has area median income ranges between 50% and 80%. Plainly, that means a tenant can’t make more than 80% of the given area’s median income to be eligible. In Seattle, the AMI is about $110,000 for an individual.

Shobe said that focus is intentional, as existing resources from the federal government historically tend to funnel toward the low end of affordable housing, below the 50% AMI mark.

“If you look at the workforce in the community, you have a lot of teacher assistant and security guards and other folks that aren’t able to meet the rents that our region has reached,” Shobe said. “So what we did is we really focused on that middle area.”

In Seattle, the tech and e-commerce giant has also funneled money toward projects in neighborhoods where residents are at risk of displacement. Beacon Pacific Village, a 160-unit apartment complex requiring 50% to 60% AMI in front of Amazon’s former headquarters in the Pacific Tower, opened last year and has been fully leased since April, mostly with community members, according to the Seattle Chinatown International District Preservation and Development Authority, which helped develop the units.

“Having housing led by community development organizations provides more culturally entrenched affordable housing for the community,” said Jade Yan, SCIDpda’s resident services manager. “It’s just so crucial. Housing means stability and security.”

The complex is an ideal project for Amazon’s housing fund, ticking off all of the boxes of Shobe’s vision. It’s near transit, it has units with as many as four bedrooms to support multigenerational families and it has a community preference program to push against the tide of gentrification.

The company has funded projects as far north as Everett and as far south as Tacoma, but the most development has occurred in Seattle and Bellevue, with 5,216 units and 1,486 units built so far.

Shobe said Amazon’s housing investments have resulted in a 31% increase in affordable housing stock in Bellevue.

But Amazon is pumping more units into an affordable housing market that’s in a much more awkward spot than it was when Amazon announced the fund. Flattened rents in Seattle are undercutting affordable housing rents, leaving publicly funded housing with higher vacancy rates.

The Seattle Times reported last month that while more affordable housing for the low- to middle-income tenants is built, there’s a dwindling supply for extremely low-income.

Shobe said Amazon is aware of the need for lower-income housing and manages the tension its own supply of 50% to 80% AMI housing it’s putting on the market.

“If you look at our portfolio, it’s concentrated in that 50 to 80% range, but we do have very much a mixed portfolio,” she said. “We do have a significant number of units that are helping families under that 50% median income.”

©2025 The Seattle Times. Visit seattletimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Acting U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson announced initial charges on Thursday, Sept. 18, for what he said is a “massive” fraud scheme coming out of the state’s housing stabilization program.

On July 16, the FBI raided companies suspected of providing fraudulent services under the 2020-established Housing Stabilization Services program, designed to help seniors and people with disabilities, including mental illness and substance use disorders, find and maintain housing. On Aug. 1, the Minnesota Department of Human Services announced it was moving to terminate the program altogether.

Initially, HSS was expected to cost $2.6 million annually. The program has ballooned in cost to $310 million in total since 2020, according to reports from DHS as of Aug. 22. Thompson said Thursday that of the hundreds of millions of dollars, “most of it’s fraud, as far as I can tell.”

“Minnesota is drowning in fraud. Many of the owners of housing stabilization services companies had one or more other companies through which they billed other Medicaid programs,” he said. “The level of fraud in these programs is staggering. Unfortunately, our system of ‘trust but verify’ no longer works. These programs have been abused over and over to the point where the fraud has overtaken the legitimate services.”

The charges, which Thompson said would be filed Thursday, are against Moktar Hassan Aden, 30; Mustafa Dayib Ali, 29; Khalid Ahmed Dayib, 26; and Abdifitah Mohamud Mohamed, 27. All four are allegedly affiliated with Brilliant Minds LLC.

Also charged are Christopher Adesoji Falade, 62; Emmanuel Oluwademilade Falade, 32, with Faladcare Inc.; Asad Ahmed Adow, 26, with Leo Human Services LLC; and Anwar Ahmed Adow, 25, with Liberty Plus LLC.

“They identified vulnerable individuals, Medicaid-eligible individuals, many of whom were being released from drug or alcohol rehab facilities, they signed them up to receive housing stabilization services … purportedly to help them find stable housing, and then they … billed Medicaid for services they did not actually provide,” Thompson said.

Of those who have received services from HSS between July 2020 and June 2024, DHS reports 85% lived in the seven-county Twin Cities metro area, 37% or 12,242 individuals identified as Black, with 35% or 11,564 individuals identifying as white.

Thompson said the eight charges announced Thursday are just the beginning, and that his office and other partners are investigating “hundreds” of companies. He added that the overlap in this investigation with Feeding Our Future is “significant.”

“I think it’s fair to say that most of these health care fraud investigations, including the autism one and this one, essentially grew out of the Feeding Our Future investigations, through which we saw bank records routinely where people were purporting to serve meals to 1000s of kids a day, and they’re also purporting to run an autism clinic,” he said.

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By NAA ADORKOR CUDJOE and OPE ADETAYO

TSOKOMEY, Ghana (AP) — Beatrice Nutekpor weaves through the mangroves in Tsokomey community, just outside of Ghana’s capital of Accra, every day to harvest oysters for sale. It’s a family tradition she’s been doing since she was 15. Now 45, she is struggling to sustain the practice and pass it to her daughter. —

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In Ghana’s coastal mangroves, oyster farming has been a key source of livelihood dominated for ages by women. Hundreds of women were trained in eco-friendly farming methods for oysters, including mangrove planting and preservation, and selective oyster harvesting, to lessen the impact of climate change.

Mangroves, trees or shrubs that grow along coastlines serve a critical multifunctional purpose in the aquatic ecosystem, ranging from being a home to fish to providing a buffer for coastal erosion from rising sea levels, and protection to land during storms and cyclones.

However, training by the Development Action Association nonprofit has ended after it lost its U.S. aid as a result of U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to cut foreign aid contracts. It left the women to try what they can to keep their generational practice and sustain their families as Ghana emerges from its worst economic crisis in a decades.

Their efforts to protect the mangroves from encroachment and preserve them for a longer period of up to six months are gradually paying off. “The oysters have started attaching themselves to the mangroves we have planted,” Nutekpor says.

A key source of living challenged by climate change

Oyster farming involves breeding oysters in a controlled aquatic environment for commercial purposes.

Much like the rest of coastal West African nations, Ghana has lost a significant portion of its mangroves to climate change and development. There is no available data on recent depletion, but over 80% of the original mangroves have been lost since the last century.

Mangroves are also increasingly threatened by climate change as global temperatures and sea levels rise.

A single basin of oysters sells for roughly 47 Ghanaian cedis ($4), and Nutekpor sells just enough to feed her family and put her daughters through school.

As mangroves are depleted by people in search of firewood, development has crept into the coastal areas and authorities release water from overflowing dams, endangering the forests. Nutekpor’s worst nightmare is already manifesting: This year saw less oysters compared to last year, according to Lydia Sasu, the executive director of the Development Action Association.

For farmers like Nutekpor, the loss of mangroves means risking drowning by free diving 30 feet (9 meters) or deeper for hours, in search of oysters that migrate to deeper water in the absence of mangrove roots.

“When you have a situation where the water body, which is already dynamic, becomes more dynamic than before, the oysters cannot grow,” said Francis Nunoo, a professor of fisheries science at the University of Ghana.

Doing it all for family, and future generations

Although replanting the mangroves have paid off for the women, it is a back-breaking job that keeps them in the harsh sun for hours.

For the sake of family, it is worth it, they say.

“We keep doing it for the sake of our children and generations to come,” said Bernice Bebli, 39, another oyster farmer. “The water is our livelihood.”

In a group called the Densu Oyster Pickers Association, they have set out guidelines, including punitive measures for those who cut the mangroves outside of the allowed timeline.

According to Bebli, first-time offenders will lose their oysters, while repeated offenders are reported to the police.

“The reliance of the coastal people on these ecosystems is heavy. … The rate of destruction is always higher than the rate of repopulation, so we are going to lose some species and we are going to lose some lives,” said Nunoo.

For Nutekpor, keeping her family’s heritage is key.

“Just as my mother taught me this business, I also want to teach my daughter so she can teach her child. Then oyster farming will remain our family business,” Nutekpor said.

Adetayo reported from Lagos, Nigeria.

For more on Africa and development: https://apnews.com/hub/africa-pulse

The Associated Press receives financial support for global health and development coverage in Africa from the Gates Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.